and throw herself into his arms. To kiss him and beg him to never let her go.
She forced herself to think again of the mystery lady who had paid him a call.
“Is that all we are?” he prodded.
She could not shake the impression he was toying with her. Playing a game to which only he knew the rules. There was something he was not saying.
“If we were more than that, you would not have waited all this time to pay a call upon me,” she blurted.
So much for her pride.
This man left her with none.
Her love for him was a physical ache, threatening to lay waste to all her carefully wrought plans of the day before.
“Just as you would not have told me you would join me upstairs and disappear?” he countered, still eerily calm.
He did not seem angry with her for what she had done. He seemed, instead, oddly emotionless. And that was far more frightening than an irate Tom would have been, she suspected.
“I did not trust myself to linger,” she admitted. “Our time together was at an end.”
“And so you lied to me and left me,” Tom said.
She bit her lip. “I mislead you, and I am sorry for that.”
“Are you sorry for leaving me?” he pressed.
Yes. She had lain awake so many nights, wishing she could go back and spend the last few hours she’d had with him in his arms. Pressed against his body. Making love until dawn. But confessing the truth would get her nowhere.
“No,” Hyacinth murmured instead. “It was necessary. I am not cut from a mistress’s cloth, and nor will I ever again be a wife. What is left for us?”
“You are lying to me,” he said, his jaw tightening as he made the accusation. “Come now. Have you nothing to say to me?”
She swallowed. “I have said everything there is.”
But Tom was not finished. “Confess, Hyacinth.”
“There is nothing to confess,” she protested weakly.
“That is hardly what the Countess of Grenfell told me,” Tom growled.
He knew.
Tom knew.
Hyacinth reeled. The plate fell from her suddenly numb fingers, sending biscuits to the carpet.
Tom watched as all the color—what little she had possessed to begin with—rushed from Hyacinth’s beautiful face. She was so heartrendingly lovely. Being so near to her again, breathing in her scent, close enough to touch, to take her in his arms if he wished—and of course, he very much wished—was akin to torture. It was as if the chasm of the last three weeks had ceased to exist.
He had told himself he should cling to his outrage. Demand she marry him at once so their child—the child she would have kept from him—would not be born to the stigma of illegitimacy.
But how could he hate her as he longed to, when he loved her so?
The realization hit him with the same force Lady Grenfell’s abrupt declaration the day before had. He knelt on the carpet and retrieved the fallen plate and biscuits to disguise his sudden discomfit, the shock of discovering he was in love with Hyacinth.
Hopelessly.
Helplessly.
Foolishly.
In love.
Lady, who had been heretofore lolling in canine repose on a nearby settee, leapt from her perch and raced for the biscuits which had been dropped.
“Lady, no!” Hyacinth ordered, her voice ringing out.
The pug skidded to a halt.
“Sit, Lady,” Hyacinth commanded. “Be a good girl now, if you please. No eating biscuits. You know they make you ill.”
The much-pampered canine simply blinked, tilted her head, and offered a bark.
“Stay, Lady,” Tom ordered her for good measure.
Lady sank down on the rug and rested her head on her paws.
“She is my companion,” Hyacinth clipped, giving him a displeased glare. “You cannot give her orders. You shall only confuse her.”
Her dudgeon successfully spent, she sank to her knees at his side, her skirts pooling around her, her gaze carefully trained upon the mess she had made. “You do not need to clean up my mess, Tom.”
He wondered if she knew what she was saying.
“Yes,” he countered wryly, “I do.”
When she continued collecting the biscuits, her face averted, he caught her hands in his, stilling further motion. Forcing her to look at him at last.
Her eyes were wide. “What would you have me say?”
“Admit that you are having my child,” he said, his voice husky at the words, the meaning behind them, which he had scarcely yet absorbed himself. “Tell me the truth, Hyacinth.”
Her expression turned stricken. “I…all those years of my marriage to Southwick and no issue. I believed I was barren.”