even called her mother. Not that she’d deserved the title. She was ignorant and neglectful, notoriously loose with her favors, and prone to unpredictable mood swings that shifted between maudlin bouts of self-pity and shrieking rages during which she often struck her young son with whatever implements were close at hand.
But whereas injuries inflicted by Frederick Burton-Smythe could send Nicholas into a towering fury, injuries inflicted by his mother had affected him in an entirely different way. Maggie remembered one particular afternoon when, after suffering an awful beating from Jenny, Nicholas had come to their meeting place in the woods at Beasley Park, and laying his head in her lap, had wept with painful, racking sobs while she stroked his hair.
The memory provoked a peculiar feeling inside her. She felt for a moment that she might weep herself.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have told him about his mother’s death. Perhaps Jenny Seaton wasn’t worth even a second of his grief. But the Nicholas she’d known had desperately needed something from Jenny. Unconditional love, Maggie had always thought. That bottomless well of emotion that in the absence of feeling from his mother, Maggie had poured into Nicholas herself.
“I’m so sorry,” she said once more. And, undeterred by the coldness she saw in St. Clare’s face, she held out her hand to him, palm up in invitation. Again, she saw that peculiar shadow flicker across his hard features, but whatever feelings he had about her or his mother or the past didn’t prevent him from taking her hand and holding it protectively in his.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” he said huskily. “You might have died.”
Ah. So that was the source of his fury. Not the untimely death of Jenny Seaton, but that Maggie had risked her own life to care for her. “I did it for your sake.”
St. Clare shook his head. “No.”
“Jenny was all that I had left of you. The last link in the whole world. So, I sat with her. Holding her hand just as I’m holding yours now. I held it until she took her very last breath. I did it because of you. Because I loved you so very much.”
“Confound you, Maggie.”
Her heart gave a mad leap. It was far from a pronouncement of his true identity, but to her ears it might as well have been. She lifted his hand and pressed it to her cheek. “Nicholas—”
“No,” St. Clare said in a low, hard voice. He cupped the side of her face. “No more of this.”
“No more of what? The truth?” Her heart skittered wildly as he touched her. She could feel the heat of his hand through his glove, could sense the tightly controlled power lurking behind the tender stroke of his fingers.
Jane had said he was dangerous. Lethal.
And perhaps he was.
But Maggie wasn’t afraid. “Am I to pretend that the past never happened? That you and I first met the night that Bessie and I came to Grosvenor Square?”
“As far as I’m concerned, we did meet for the first time that night,” St. Clare said. “There’s no need to pretend anything.”
As far as he was concerned.
Her breath stopped. It was the closest thing to an admission he’d given her. An admission—and a warning. He didn’t want to talk about the past. Didn’t want to acknowledge who he was, or what they’d been to each other.
She supposed he had his reasons. Indeed, some of them were obvious. He was pretending to a position that he didn’t have. Portraying himself as a wealthy viscount for heaven’s sake. And Lord Allendale, of all people, seemed to be encouraging this deceit!
Was it some kind of swindle? A ploy to gain money or power?
“You’re asking me to forget the past,” she said. “But I haven’t forgotten. Not once during all these years. I could never—”
“Miss Honeywell—”
“Maggie.”
“Maggie.” He drew his hand down the edge of her jaw, catching her cleft chin lightly in his fingers. And then he whispered her name again, his low baritone voice holding a softness that bordered on reverence. “Maggie.”
She looked deeply, searchingly into his eyes. “I don’t even know what to call you.”
“Is St. Clare not to your liking?”
“It’s a title.”
“It’s my title,” he said. “But if you prefer it, when we’re alone together, I give you leave to use my Christian name.”
Maggie brightened. “Do you mean—?”
“John.”
She frowned. Not Nicholas then. It was to be John Beresford, Viscount St. Clare. He would admit to being no one else. “John,” she said.