his face to capture her frantically wandering eyes with his. The muscles along his jaw tightened, as rigid as carriage springs. His gaze turned brittle with determination.
“Louise, please, tell me. What really happened between you and the queen and your mother’s physician Charles Locock? Did you give birth to a baby out of wedlock?”
She gave her head a violent shake. Lost. Everything is lost now, she thought miserably.
Stephen Byrne had discovered her shame. And now he would force her to return to that fateful night.
Had anyone else found out, she might have borne it. But this was a man she’d come to respect, if only for his dedication to her family and stubborn insistence on the truth.
She closed her eyes on a wave of vertigo that nearly sent her plummeting to the stone terrace at his feet. “It’s the past,” she whispered, clutching his lapels to keep from falling. “For god’s sake, leave it be. Please, don’t make me revisit—”
“Listen to me,” he said between gritted teeth. “If you are ever to find happiness, woman, you must confront the truth. Don’t let it defeat you.”
Why had she let this man into her world? What insanity had gripped her to make her believe she could trust him?
She rallied the little pride still left to her and looked him in the eyes. “Sir, I order you to release me. I absolve you of all commitments to me.” She struggled to pull out of his grip, but he held firm. “I insist you allow me to return to—”
“You killed it, didn’t you?” Any warmth his voice had held a moment earlier dispersed like vapors into the night.
Her eyes widened. She thought she might swoon, except he was holding her up by both arms now, fixing those mesmerizing black eyes on hers, demanding she confess all. Torturing her by ordering her to relive the worst days of her life.
“Louise.” He gave her a shake.
Her throat burned with the salt of unshed tears. “I—didn’t—kill—anyone,” she whimpered. Her tongue felt so heavy in her mouth she could barely form the words.
He released a strained breath. “If you can’t say it, I will.”
Her eyes widened with dread. “Please. No! Don’t.”
He ignored her and continued in a low voice. “This is how I believe it happened, Princess. A few months after you started a love affair with the young artist Donovan Heath, your mother suspected you were sleeping with him. She decided she must find out for certain if she’d guessed right and put an end to the affair. She ordered her gynecologist, Doctor Charles Locock, to examine you. He not only found you were no longer a virgin, a blow to Victoria, who had hoped for a royal match such as she’d already arranged for your older sisters, but you were pregnant. This news may have been as much a shock to you as it was to your mother.”
Byrne watched her face, waiting for a response. Louise could only stare at him, feeling the world slipping away beneath her feet. Her body went mercifully numb.
He continued. “The queen must have been desperate. She had to work fast to avoid scandal. She commanded Locock to get rid of the illegitimate fetus. Is that much right?”
Before she could stop herself, she’d given him a tiny nod.
“Right,” Byrne growled. “The rest is conjecture on my part, but let’s see how close I can come.” She shrank from his condemning glare. “You begged your mother to spare your baby. Whether you wished to give it up for adoption or keep it, I don’t know. But neither option would have satisfied Victoria. So long as you refused the procedure to end the pregnancy, the scandal threatened to tear holes in the royal family. To the queen’s way of seeing things, permanently disposing of the problem was still the only solution.”
His voice gentled at seeing the agony reflected in her eyes. “Louise, I’m not saying you wanted your baby to die. Victoria is a powerful, determined woman. She probably talked you into going off to the family home on the Isle of Wight for your confinement, letting you think it would be only to deliver the baby away from prying eyes.”
Louise wept openly now, no more able to stop her tears than she could have willed away a monsoon. Her breast heaved, wracking her entire body. “How can you be so cruel? I hate you, you monster!” She sobbed. “To speak of such things—”
Inconceivably, Stephen Byrne pulled her into his arms. He cradled