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“Let me go. Please.” She squirmed to escape but it was too late. When she whirled, her brother stared at her from the doorway with what she immediately interpreted as disgusted disbelief.
“Antonia . . .”
Henry sounded as shocked as she. She shot a pleading look at Demarest, although he couldn’t spare her this painful encounter.
Struggling to revive failing courage, she sucked in a deep breath and drew away from Demarest. Yesterday she’d threatened to shoot her lover. Surely today she had the backbone to face her brother, however much the frightened girl cringing inside her longed to disappear. Godfrey Demarest wasn’t the strongest man in Creation, but he wouldn’t allow her brother to condemn her as a slut and toss her onto the street.
“Lord Aveson,” she said faintly, dipping into a curtsy and rising with her chin at a defiant angle.
Henry still didn’t move from the doorway. His face was ashen. “Antonia . . .”
He hadn’t spared a glance for Demarest. Instead his gaze fixed on her face. To her horror, his blue eyes, twins to those she saw in her mirror every day, shone with tears.
Confusion swamped her false bravado. This wasn’t the reaction she expected. “Henry?” she wavered, suddenly unsure whether formality was the best way to greet him.
In spite of her roiling humiliation, she couldn’t help staring at him avidly. How she’d missed him. During what had been in many ways a lonely childhood, she’d always looked up to him.
Even after the long separation, he was heartbreakingly familiar. He’d been a gangly youth, only twenty when she ran away, but the years had filled him out. Like all the Hilliards, he was tall and graceful and as blond as a Viking
. He looked the image of the father who had cast her aside so callously. The ominous comparison sent a shiver down her backbone.
Except her father would never have betrayed such vulnerability, looked so devastated. Even when he banished his daughter from his life forever.
“He . . . he told me you were dead,” Henry said in a hoarse voice. “God forgive me, I believed him.”
“I’m not dead,” she said stupidly.
Her brain felt full of soggy oatmeal. Nothing made sense. She searched Henry’s face for the disdain she deserved. In Vicenza, her father had been so adamant that her mother and brother wanted nothing to do with her.
“What are you doing here?” Demarest asked from behind her. She started at the sound of his voice. She’d forgotten he was in the room.
Henry blinked too as though lost in the fascination of seeing the sister who had disappeared from his life. He didn’t shift his gaze from Antonia. “John Benton wrote to say he’d seen my sister in London. I rode down immediately I got the letter.”
Antonia realized that her brother was covered in a fine coating of dust and he looked exhausted. Dark circles marked his eyes and he was unshaven and windswept. In the shock of his arrival, she hadn’t noticed details.
“But how did you know I was here?”
Had Johnny followed her from the park? Surely he hadn’t, if only because Ranelaw would have stopped him. At best, he’d guessed her general direction but not the specific address.
Again Johnny Benton let her down. She’d begged him to conceal the fact that he’d seen her. She should be furious, but after Ranelaw’s treachery and Henry’s astonishing arrival, this new disappointment from her first lover barely mattered.
“I didn’t.” Henry looked as bewildered as she felt. “I hoped to enlist Godfrey’s help in finding you. I’ve lost touch with most of my London connections and Godfrey has always known everyone. He seemed the right man to ask.”
“She’s been with me the whole time,” Demarest said. “Since your ass of a father threw her out into the world without a penny to bless herself.”
Neither Antonia nor Henry paid him a moment’s attention. Instead they stared fixedly at each other as if gauging their next step in this strange, fraught reunion.
“Why should you want to find me?” She stiffened and bitterness sharpened her tone. “To make me swear Lady Antonia Hilliard will stay dead? Ten years ago I promised Papa I wouldn’t contact you or Mamma again.”
Henry paled under her attack and his face tightened with grief. “I can’t blame you for hating me. I’m so sorry for everything.”
Sorry?
The word shuddered through her like a physical blow. Henry didn’t owe her an apology. It wasn’t his fault that she’d eloped with Johnny.
She was vaguely aware of Godfrey Demarest watching her with a concerned expression. Shock held her speechless as she stared at her brother. She desperately tried to understand what he wanted of her. Once she’d been certain he’d never wish to see her again. Now she wasn’t nearly so sure.
When she didn’t immediately reply, Henry looked troubled. “I hope you’ll find it in your heart to forgive me for accepting Father’s word when he told us you’d died of a fever in Italy. Even then, I should have realized it was all too convenient. I’m a damned scientist. I know to look more closely at the evidence.”
