He lifted a hand and trailed a finger down her cheek. She didn’t move, didn’t even blink. “Because, as God is my witness, I would have fallen for you either way. The difference, my dear, is that I wouldn’a have been able to marry you, were you poor.”
Still she didn’t move, but he heard her intake of air, saw the darkening of her eyes. He dropped his hand from her cheek, seeking instead her gloved hand. “That doesn’a mean that I would stop loving you.” He tugged on the buttery kid leather, sliding it from her fingers. “It would mean that I would be miserable for the rest of my life because I would have had to sacrifice you in order to marry a woman who could save my family.”
With her hand bared, he lifted it to his lips, turning it over to kiss the soft, sensitive skin of her palm. Her lips parted as his touched her, her eyes riveted on their point of contact. Finally, he was getting through to her. His gaze flitted to the painting, ready to tell her exactly what he had found in Scotland, but the moment their eye contact was broken, she yanked her hand from his grasp, taking a quick step backward.
“No, I know what you are doing,” she said, taking yet another step back, putting more than just distance between them. Her walls were up, their connection of moments ago severed. “You are trained in the art of debate. Who better to convince a person of anything than a barrister? A successful barrister can make any jury believe his client’s innocence—whether it is true or not.”
“Beatrice—”
“No,” she exclaimed, darting around the easel. “You know full well the effect you have on me. You know that you’ve only to touch me and my defenses are weakened. So tell me now. Please look me straight in the eye and without manipulation or exploitation of my weaknesses, tell me: Do you have any real proof of your claims?”
He stared at her, taking in the huge blue eyes that had haunted his dreams, the lips that had always been so quick to smile, and her slender frame that had fit so perfectly in his arms. He had agonized about how to prove his love to her, only now to realize the cold, harsh truth.
He couldn’t.
So long as she was so damn eager to believe the worst of him, he could never truly win her over. And that wasn’t the only truth reverberating around inside his skull, cracking the foundations of their relationship.
The painting had seemed like such a lifesaver—something tangible to point to and prove that he was willing to turn over his family’s single most valuable possession to her. How could she doubt him?
But he knew now that it was all wrong. She would see it as a bribe—as a manipulation of her appreciation of his father. One look at her stricken features and glittering eyes and he just knew that the painting would solve nothing. If she didn’t believe him on the merit of his word, on the fierceness of his passion and the strength of his affection, then no tangible object was going to change things.
And, honestly, perhaps it would have been a manipulation, however unintended. He’d been so damned happy to have something of worth to offer her, it never occurred to him that his gifts to her—the studio time, the gallery tour, the paintbrushes—may have reduced him to little more than her idol’s son. At this point, how could he even know if she had any true affection for him?
His heart ached brutally, his body unable to accept what his mind was coming to realize. He shook his head slowly, breathing in the last hints of lilac. “If you doona already have the proof you need, then nothing I say will change anything.”
It was exactly what she had been expecting.
So why did she feel as though she’d been kicked in the chest by one of Papa’s best stallions? Beatrice clenched her jaw against the disappointment that flooded through her, washing away the last vestiges of hope.
“So . . . that’s it?” The flood receded, and she was left with a huge, yawning emptiness inside her. How could she be so utterly unprepared for an eventuality that she had predicted?
He spread his hands. “The decision is in your hands, Bea. Either you trust what we have between us, or you do not.” The angles of his face had never looked more severe, more harsh. More beautiful.
She closed her eyes, and immediately Godfrey’s face came to mind, his sneering eyes and self-satisfied smirk as clear as if he were standing before her. Had he been so smug because she had been duped by a fortune hunter, or because he could cast doubt on an already-shaky relationship? Wreaking havoc for the point of wreaking havoc?
She pushed Godfrey from her mind only to have him replaced by Diana, the way she had looked the night she had discovered her husband’s betrayal. She was shattered, broken in a way that could never be fixed by a fortune-hunting scumbag.
She opened her eyes and looked to her betrothed, helpless to know what to say. Her traitorous body sang for him, wanting nothing more than to curl up in his arms and be lost in his embrace. Her palm still burned from his kiss, a delicious, tempting heat that proved that she couldn’t trust herself around him. She needed time to think, away from the siren call of his gaze. She wanted to believe him, but if she relented and married him and discovered he had been lying, there was no turning back.
“I don’t know,” she said, raising her shoulders in a helpless shrug. “There is no separating the money and the marriage. I don’t want to make the wrong decision and regret it for the rest of my life.”
A muscle in his cheek jumped as though he were grinding steel with his teeth. “If the answer isn’a yes, then it’s a no. Period. You canna have it both ways.”
“I need more time.”
“What are you going to learn with more time that your heart hasn’a already told you?”
For once in her life the pieces just wouldn’t fall into place for her. All of her normal powers of reason seemed to be completely abandoning her, leaving her vulnerable and unsure—two things she absolutely hated. “You can’t just expect me to choose right here and now. Colin, don’t be unreasonable.”
He crossed his arms, his muscles flexing against the sturdy wool of his jacket. “Of the two of us, I am not the unreasonable one.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“No, you don’t actually. You’ve insulted my integrity, called into question my sincerity, and doubted the depth of my emotion for you. But the one thing you have not done is begged my pardon.” He stalked to the door and pulled it open. “So, I doona see the point of us hashing this out again and again.”
“Colin—”
“No,” he said with a decisive sweep of his hand. “I have put everything on the table for you, and you canna even see your way to accepting the sentiment, let alone returning it.”
She pressed her lips together, frustration and anger boiling up. She had every right to be cautious—they had agreed that he was the one who had to prove himself. “Who are you to judge me—”
“Your betrothed, remember?”
The statement fell flat on the floor between them, stopping the argument dead in its tracks.
“As if could I forget.”
Colin’s flint-colored eyes ignited, and he took a step back as if physically attacked. She hadn’t intended the bitterness burning in her battered heart to so vividly color her words, but she couldn’t take it back now.
“I see.” He scrubbed a weary hand over his face. “Well, I guess we know where you stand now.”
Panic welled up within her, but she refused to speak when she couldn’t be at all sure of what she would say. If only she had employed the tactic before she opened her mouth last time.