didn’t seek him out.” He hadn’t. Not initially. “I saw him quite by chance one afternoon in Bond street, not long after I arrived in London.”
Fred had been strolling down the opposite side of the street in company with a fashionable companion. It was impossible to mistake that bulldog gait and copper-colored shock of hair. Impossible to forget that look of smug entitlement.
In that moment, emerging from Weston’s after having just been measured for a half dozen new coats, the long-suppressed reality of St. Clare’s past had rushed upon him with a frightening power. All the slings and arrows of his youth. All that roiling anger. The deep sense of unfairness about it all, and the bone-deep desire to, one day, balance the scales.
He’d thought he had put those feelings behind him. Locked them away and thrown the key into the depths of the Tiber. He’d left them there, buried in Italy—a necessary sacrifice in order to affect the transformation into the gentleman he was today. But in Bond Street, those feelings had been brutally resurrected.
“And later?” Maggie asked. “At the gaming hell?”
“That, I’m afraid, wasn’t as much of a coincidence as it seemed.”
She didn’t appear surprised. “You contrived the whole of it, I gather.”
“I did.”
It had taken little effort to discover where Fred spent his evenings, and even less for St. Clare to arrange to be there himself. The gaming hell had been smoke-filled and dark, and Fred’s powers of recognition none the better for drink. He hadn’t known St. Clare at all.
But St. Clare had known him.
Indeed, there had been little in his life more satisfying than putting a bullet through Fred’s shoulder.
“You could have contrived to meet me,” Maggie said.
“I couldn’t.” St. Clare paused, adding darkly, “And not because of what you said in Hyde Park, about my hate for him outlasting my love for you.”
“Then why?” A glimmer of vulnerability shone in her eyes.
He held her gaze. Lying beside each other on the curtained bed, the two of them face-to-face in the shadows, it felt as if they were children again, sharing secrets.
But not quite children.
He was a man grown—shirtless, injured, and half drunk. And she was a beautiful, alluring woman. His woman.
It was impossible to be anything but honest with her.
“Because…I knew if I saw you again, I’d go all to pieces. Everything I’ve worked for—my title, Allendale’s support, the very life I live now. If I saw you again, I knew I’d risk it all to get you back, even if it meant destroying myself in the process.”
She gave him a reproving look. “What a bleak way you have of viewing the matter. You saw me again that night in Grosvenor Square and your world hasn’t ended.”
His mouth twisted. She didn’t know. Couldn’t comprehend the power she had over him. The way the sight of her had affected him that night. One moment he’d been John Beresford, standing in front of the library fireplace after a night at his club. And the next he’d been Nicholas Seaton again. As if a crack had opened up in the universe and wrenched him back to Somerset. Not to the loose box in Squire Honeywell’s stable, but to the forget-me-not covered grass where he’d lain with his blue-eyed love, his heart full with the promise of tomorrow.
No, his world hadn’t ended, but the landscape of it had changed dramatically. Maggie’s late-night visit had conjured the past for him more vividly than could a dozen encounters with the likes of Frederick Burton-Smythe. Not the anger and the rage of it, but those singular moments of sweetness. Of warmth, and unwavering devotion.
It had been all he could do to keep his countenance. To maintain the coldness of his reserve, and to preserve in his voice the hard-earned accents of a gentleman. The only saving grace had been that she hadn’t seemed to recognize him.
Or so he’d thought, until their drive in Hyde Park.
“Weren’t you at all curious about where I was or what I’d done with my life?” she asked. “Even if you didn’t wish to see me, you might have at least made inquiries.”
“To what end? I assumed you’d be long married. Settled down with a husband and children of your own.” He grimaced. “I’d rather not have known the precise details.”
A faint smile touched her lips. “You did think of me, then?”
“In the beginning, I did nothing but think of you. It was years before I was able to put my dreaming behind me.” He’d been older.