He had been trying to accept that particular premise all his life. When she had returned last year from an extended trip to the Continent, he’d already decided he was done with crazy, ungovernable passions, and he’d worked to accept everyone else’s notion that mutual affection and fondness were a better basis for a happy marriage than romantic love could ever be. He thought he had succeeded, but he knew he had not. “Some people say that’s how it is.”
Her hands opened in a gesture of bewilderment. “I don’t know anyone who would say otherwise.”
That premise might be true for most people, but he knew now, as surely as he knew his name, that for him, marriage without romantic love would be as cold and colorless as the North Sea in January.
Georgiana deserved better from matrimony than that. So did he.
“I would,” he said. “I would say otherwise.”
She shook her head, a sudden, violent movement of denial, and jerked to her feet, but when she spoke, her voice was low, controlled. “All my life, I’ve waited for you, Denys, because I’ve always known we would be perfect together. Our families know it, too. We are so well suited. We have many interests in common, we think alike about most things. Why, in the whole of our lives, we’ve never had so much as one disagreement.”
“That’s not love, Georgiana,” he said gently.
She ignored that. “I waited for you, wishing, hoping that one day, when you were ready to settle down, I would be the one you chose. And then, she came along, and ruined everything. All my hopes . . .” Her voice broke, and she stopped.
He pressed his fist to his mouth, and it was a moment before he could reply. “I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you. Having had my heart broken, I always vowed I’d never cause anyone else that kind of pain. That I have done it to you—”
“She broke it.”
Her words cut through his like the lash of a whip.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your heart was broken because she broke it, Denys. I am the one who picked up the pieces.”
The former might be true, but though he could have quibbled about the latter, he chose not to. Let her believe that if it made her feel better.
“And now,” she went on, her voice rising a notch, vibrating with repressed anger, “now, just as I begin to believe that everything I have planned for us could still happen, that the future I have wished for could be mine after all, she comes back, and all my good work is undone.”
Good work, he noted, and plans, and wishes, but no mention of love. He began to wonder if his concern for her broken heart was unfounded.
“And now? Now I have stood by,” she went on, “as a lady must, able to do nothing while that woman waltzes back into your life and chases after you shamelessly. And then, she has the unmitigated gall to show up here? Here, at your own mother’s event, as if she feels she is entitled to arrive anywhere you happen to be.”
“Well, she is entitled to be here,” Denys pointed out reasonably. “She bought a ticket.”
“You took her side,” she said, and the anger formerly in her voice was gone. In its place was disbelief, the same wondering disbelief a child might display upon discovering that wishes are not reality, and life is not always fair. “You took her side instead of mine.”
“It was not a matter of taking sides. Would you have had me ignore her? Give her the cut?”
She stared. “Of course you should have cut her. There was no other proper alternative.”
“Be deliberately cruel, you mean?”
“Oh, please. I know why you didn’t do it. Everyone knows why.”
“Indeed?”
“Oh, Denys, must we pretend again today?” She looked at him, and the pain in her eyes seemed deeper, darker, mixed with anger. “She’s your mistress. Everyone knows that.”
He stiffened though he’d known all along this was bound to be the way people’s minds would run. “Then everyone is misinformed. She is not my mistress. She is my business partner. We discussed this only yesterday, Georgiana.”
“Business partner,” she scoffed, making short shrift of their conversation the day before. “Do you think I didn’t see through that arrangement the moment I heard about it? And no, I’m not talking about our conversation yesterday. I heard about that woman and why she’s here the day before I departed for Kent.”
“Perhaps you did,” he acknowledged, “but you did not hear about any of it from me until yesterday, and what you heard elsewhere is gossip.”
“It is? Do you think I didn’t see how you looked at her today?”
Of the many tumultuous emotions Lola always managed to evoke in him, he had no idea which ones he had displayed moments ago. But there was one thing Georgiana had concluded that he could dispute. “Whatever you saw, or think you saw, in my countenance earlier, you are nonetheless mistaken about the nature of my relationship with Lola Valentine. I can see,” he added, noting the disbelief in her expression, “that I must be blunt about a very indelicate subject. A mistress is a woman that a man pays to sleep with him. Lola has not indicated any desire for such an arrangement with me, and I can assure you that if she were to do so, I would not dream of accommodating her. I have not made her my mistress, and I will not. Not now, nor at any point in the future, and I am astonished that you would think I could come to you, and look into your eyes, and give you false explanations of the situation.”
Her shoulders went back. “I chose to accept those explanations. And live with them.”
“But not believe them.” He paused. “So my supposed mistress is to be tolerated, but not acknowledged?”
“If necessary.” Had he still possessed any doubts about his decision before walking into this room, that answer would have banished them. He took a deep breath. “You may be willing to accept such an arrangement, but I am not. I will always think of you with fondness and affection, Georgiana, and I hope one day, you can once again regard me in that light.” He bowed. “Good-bye, my dear.”
“You’ll regret this, Denys.” There was pain in her voice, and there were tears in her eyes, but he couldn’t help feeling that they weren’t the pain and tears of heartbreak, but rather, the disappointment of thwarted wishes. “You will regret this one day.”
He wouldn’t, but a gentleman could never say such a thing. “That is quite possible,” he said instead, and donned his hat. “Good-bye, Georgiana. I wish you every happiness.”
He left Georgiana in the music room, but he did not rejoin his family in the gardens of St. John’s Lodge. Instead, he left Bute’s house by the front entrance and began walking. It was nearing sunset, and ominous clouds were gathering overhead, but he paid little heed to that. He needed to walk—to move and to think—so he simply started around the park’s Inner Circle and kept going, over both bridges of the boating lake, across Hanover Terrace, and onto the Park Road.
As he walked, he thought of his youth, of how he’d ignored his responsibilities and the expectations of his loved ones. He thought of his cavalier seduction of a dancing girl and his even more cavalier disregard of the consequences. He thought of his heartbreak and his resolve to straighten out the mess he’d made of his life, and though he was proud of what he’d achieved, he knew the changes he’d wrought within himself had somehow sent him ricocheting to the opposite extreme. The callow, careless youth had become a man so fixed on duty and obligation and doing the responsible thing that he’d actually considered marrying a girl he did not love.