“Perhaps because I didn’t want to do so,” she suggested, and though her voice was light, he wasn’t fooled.
“I daresay.” He paused, one hand in the basket, watching her, waiting.
The silent scrutiny seemed to goad her. “For a man with such good manners, you’re being terribly nosy,” she grumbled. “Don’t the British consider it bad form to pry into someone’s private life this way?”
“Very bad form,” he agreed, and pulled the corkscrew from the basket. “But in this case,” he went on as he began to open the beer, “I think it’s necessary. Trust is important to any partnership.”
She laughed, but he didn’t think she was amused. “If you think knowing my past is going to help you trust me, you couldn’t be more wrong. The opposite is probably closer to the truth.”
“I disagree. It’s not what you tell me that signifies. It’s the act of doing so.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I think you do,” he said, “but I’m happy to explain. I want you to—what is the American expression?—go out on a limb. Take a risk. Show some vulnerability. If you want this to be a true partnership, you’ll have to earn back my trust.” He paused, watching her as he pulled the cork from the bottle. “Which means you’ll have to offer yours.”
“You want me to tell you something about myself? All right, I will.” She lifted her chin, bristling, rebellious, her gaze meeting his across the table. “I used to take off my clothes in front of men when I danced, for money. Is that far enough out on the limb for you?
“Sailors, mostly,” she went on when he didn’t speak. “In the taverns by the docks in Brooklyn before I moved to Paris. I sang and danced and took off my clothes, and the sailors would toss money at me.” She paused, looking steadily at him across the table. “The more clothes I took off, the more money I made.”
Denys managed to hold her gaze, for he saw the defiance in her eyes, daring him to be repulsed, but repulsion for her was not at all what he felt. Instead, he felt anger, anger at those sailors, at the tavern keeper, at her relations. God, she couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old. Where had her family been, and how could they have allowed her to come to such a pass? Why hadn’t they taken better care of her?
He thought of what it must have been like for her, to be young and alone and desperate, and it hurt, imagining her that way, with lusty men all around her. Still, he wasn’t about to veer off just because what she told him was hard to hear.
“Well?” she demanded when he didn’t say anything.
“Well, what?” He pushed anger aside, knowing the worst thing he could do right now was show it, for she’d surely misunderstand its cause. Instead, he looked steadily back at her. “Am I supposed to be shocked?”
“I don’t know! You’re the one who comes from a world of rectitude and propriety.”
“I’m not shocked, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, Lola.” He held out the bottle to her. “Beer?”
She didn’t move to accept it. Instead, she scowled, seeming almost put out by the fact that he was taking her bald announcement with such equanimity. “All right, perhaps you’re not shocked. But you can’t possibly approve.”
“No, but why should that matter?”
She took the bottle from him. “It doesn’t.”
“But it does,” he said, noting the proud tilt of her head, realizing the truth, startled by his discovery. “Is that why prying answers out of you has been like opening oysters?” he asked. “Because you thought I wouldn’t approve of your past?”
“No,” she said at once, and watched him raise an eyebrow. “All right, yes, a little. Damn it, Denys,” she added, as he began to smile. “I don’t see what’s amusing about this.”
“You care what I think,” he said, and laughed a little in sheer disbelief. “Another turnabout. Life is full of surprises.”
“I don’t know why it’s such a revelation.” She lowered her head, staring at the bottle in her hand. “I always cared what you thought of me. Why do you think I never told you anything?”
He studied her bent head, his momentary amusement fading at her soft confession, and he didn’t know what to say. There had always been a part of her that had seemed out of reach, untouchable. Perhaps that had been the very thing that had always made him so determined to have her and keep her. And yet, in the end, she’d still slipped away from him.
“Anyway,” she said before he could think of a reply, “what I told you ought to have shocked you right out of your proper British sensibilities. Why it didn’t, I can’t think.”
“I suppose . . .” He paused, considering as he unwrapped his sandwich and began to eat. “I suppose in the back of my mind, I suspected you might have had some experience of that sort,” he said at last, licking a bit of tongue paste from his thumb. “But I didn’t dwell on it.”
“You didn’t want to dwell on it, you mean.”
“No,” he admitted. “Either way, I’m sure you had good reasons for the choice you made.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I just liked doing it.”
He heard the defiance in her voice, but he refused to be drawn. “That’s possible,” he said. “But I doubt it.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Simple logic. If you liked it, I assume you’d still be doing it.” He nodded to the bottle in her hand. “Don’t you want that beer after all?”
“Beer?” She turned the bottle in her hand to read the label, and when she did, her expression of distaste made him laugh again.
“Really, Lola, you at least have to taste it before you turn up your nose. It’s from my own brewery.”
“Your family owns a brewery?”
It was another deflection, he knew, but he didn’t press her to return to the subject of her past, not yet. Instead, he decided it was best to give her a bit of room to breathe. “Not the family. Nick and I own it. We started it three years ago. My father put up the initial capital, but we paid him back.”
She looked at the label again and smiled. “Lilyfield’s,” she read, and looked up. “Why that name? Another partner?”
“Not a partner, no. More like a story. A wink and a nod to true love.”
“True love?” She looked at him dubiously. “And beer?”
“It sounds incongruous, doesn’t it? Nick was courting Belinda at the time, and she told him she wouldn’t have him because he was a lily of the field, and that if he wanted to prove his worth to her, he had to find himself an occupation.”
“A lady of the ton demanding a peer work for a living?”
“Belinda’s American. But it wasn’t just that. Nick was rather an irresponsible scapegrace—we all were back then, as you know. Nick was stone broke and thinking his only way out of the mess was to marry an heiress. So he hired Belinda to find him a wife and ended up by marrying her himself. I’m not sure if you know, but Belinda is quite a famous matchmaker.”
“I did know that. As I said, I read the society papers.” She began to laugh. “So now, Nick and Jack are not only friends, but also brothers-in-law. That must make for some rather wild family parties.”