“Susanna,” he said softly, “you look as lovely as ever.”
“Is the day warmer and brighter for my presence in it?” she asked him, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice.
He tipped his head slightly to one side as he gazed back into her eyes.
“You are not happy to see me,” he said.
“Ought I to be?” she asked him.
“I thought perhaps you would not be,” he admitted. “But it was a wedding celebration, you see, and involved a number of people whom I know and like. How could I have resisted coming?”
And that was the trouble with him, she thought. He could not resist being blown along by any wind that happened in his direction. She had once told him that he was a kind man. But was it kind of him to come here today only because there was to be a party and congenial company?
“You knew I would be here, then?” she asked him as they twirled about another corner.
“Yes,” he said. “It is why I came.”
And now he was contradicting himself. Was there any firmness of character in him at all?
“Susanna,” he asked even more softly than before, “are you with child?”
If she had been, the child would surely have turned over in her womb. Every other part of her insides seemed to somersault as she drew breath sharply and stumbled slightly. He drew her closer until she had regained her balance and fitted her steps to his again.
“No,” she said.
His eyes found hers and searched them. His smile had slipped, she noticed. So had hers. She donned it once more.
“I am glad,” he said.
“No doubt.”
She lowered her eyes and tried to recapture some of the magic she had felt the last time they waltzed. She deliberately let her attention move to their fellow dancers and could see Anne and Mr. Butler dancing with surprising grace despite the fact that his right arm was missing. Anne was looking a little less slender than usual, especially below the high waistline of her dress. The duchess was laughing up into the austere face of the duke, whom Claudia detested so fiercely. His pale silver eyes looked back at her with a total absorption that spoke of emotions burning just behind the autocratic façade. Frances twirled in the earl’s arms, and it was obvious that they had eyes for no one but each other.
The world was filled with happy couples, it seemed-and her very lone self.
Ridiculous, self-pitying thought!
“You are bitter,” Viscount Whitleaf said.
Was she? She had no reason to be, had she? He had not seduced her. He had given her the opportunity to stop him. He had asked her afterward to go away with him and had promised that he would look after her even when all was over between them. She had said no. They had parted as friends. Ah, that parting-that memory of him riding away across the terrace and down the lane until he was out of sight. It was a memory that had always gone deeper than pain because she had thought she would never see him again.
Now she was waltzing with him once more in the Upper Assembly Rooms in Bath. The reality of it, she felt, had still not quite hit her.
“Silence is my answer,” he said. “And I cannot blame you. It would be trite of me to say I am sorry. But I do not know what else to say.”
“You need not say anything.” She looked back into his eyes. “And you need not feel sorry-any more than I do. It happened. Our friendship had to end anyway. Why not that way?”
“ Did it end?” he asked her.
She gazed back at him and then nodded. Of course it had ended. How could they even pretend to be friends now?
“Then I really am sorry,” he said. “I liked you, Susanna-I like you. And I thought you had come to like me.”
She swallowed.
“I did.”
“Past tense?” he said, and after a short silence between them, “Ah, yes, past tense.”
They stopped dancing for a few moments while the orchestra ended one waltz tune and prepared to play the next one in the set.
Did she not even like him now, then? Because he had come here today to disturb her peace again? He had come because she was to be here. He had come to ask her if she was with child.
What would he have done if the answer had been yes? Would he have gone away again faster than he had come? She knew he would not have.
She looked up at him again as they resumed their dance.
“I do not dislike you,” she said.
“Do you not?”
He was smiling-no doubt for the benefit of those around them. She smiled too. And then, because they were still looking at each other, both their smiles became more rueful-and then more genuine.
“I have told myself,” he said, “that it would have been far better for me-and considerably better for you-if I had left Hareford House two days after your arrival at Barclay Court, as I had originally planned. I would have remembered you, if at all, as a rather straitlaced, disapproving, humorless schoolteacher.”
“Is that how I appeared to you?” she asked him.
“And as someone who made an already glorious summer day seem warmer and brighter.” He whirled her twice about a corner, startling a laugh out of her. “But then another part of myself answers with the assertion that I would hate never to have got to know you better.”
She looked about with leftover laughter on her face. Mr. Huckerby, she could see, was watching her feet-to see if she remembered the steps correctly, no doubt. She caught Claudia’s eye as she danced past and smiled at her.
“Do you wish,” Lord Whitleaf asked her, “that I had left when I intended to do so?”
Did she? She would have been saved from a great deal of heartache-and from a great deal of vividly happy living.
“No,” she said.
“Why not?” He bent his head a little closer.
“You once told me,” she said, “that in your childhood you were surrounded by women. It is what has happened to me since I was twelve. I have had almost no social contact with men. I have been shy with men, unsure how to talk or behave with them. I was terrified when I first met you because you were handsome and self-assured and titled. And then I learned that you were amiable and kind and really rather easy to talk with. And then I came to genuinely like you and look forward to seeing you each day and spending a short while in conversation with you. Knowing you brightened my life for a time and provided me with memories that will give me pleasure in future years-riding in a curricle with you, racing a boat against you, climbing to the waterfall with you, waltzing with you.”
Kissing you.
Making love with you.
“I am not sorry you stayed,” she said.
“Are we friends again, then?” he asked her.
She smiled back at him and then laughed softly.
“Oh, yes, I suppose so,” she said, “for what remains of this afternoon, anyway.”
Though it struck her that the celebration would probably not go on much longer and that then she would go back to school and he would go away somewhere with the Ravensbergs and that that would be the end of it-the real end this time.
And there would be pain all over again.
But pain was something that life inevitably brought with it. If there was no pain, there was no real living and therefore no possibility of happiness. She had been happy-truly, exhilaratingly happy-on a few occasions in her life, almost all of them with Viscount Whitleaf. She must remember that. She must. There were two particularly perfect incidents that had drawn her so completely into happiness that no un happiness had been able to intrude. One had occurred at the assembly rooms when she had waltzed with him. The other had occurred on the hill above the river and the little bridge when they had made love.