She found him in the dining room, beside the long windows overlooking the wind-savaged garden. He had his back to her and did not turn when she paused in the doorway. He’d stripped off his wet coat and waistcoat, and she could see the tense set of his shoulders through the fine cloth of his shirt. The air was damp and close with the smell of the rain and the tang of blood and an elusive scent she realized suddenly was pealed oranges. And she knew the pain of a woman who has given her heart to a man who lost his own heart long ago to someone else.
But all she said was, “I hope that’s not your blood I smell.”
He turned his head to look at her over his shoulder. “It’s not. Jacques Collot is dead. He was telling me about how he came to know Eisler had the blue diamond in his possession when someone put a bullet in his chest with a rifle.”
“You didn’t see who did it?”
“I was too busy trying not to get shot myself.”
Crossing to the table beside the dying fire, she poured a glass of brandy and went to hold it out to him. “Here.”
He took the glass from her hand, his fingers covering hers for a moment. He said, “There’s something I must tell you.”
“Tell me later. You should come to bed. You’re wet and cold.”
“No.” He set the brandy aside and reached to draw her into his arms. “I’ve put it off too long already.”
She felt his hands slide down her back to rest on her hips, holding her—but not too close.
He said, “I first fell in love with Kat Boleyn when she was sixteen and I was just down from Oxford. Hendon grumbled about it, although if truth be told, I think he expected some such thing. It’s not exactly unusual for a young man to have an opera dancer or an actress in keeping. What he didn’t expect was that I’d want to spend the rest of my life with her.”
“You don’t need to tell me—”
“No, please, hear me out. When I told him I’d asked Kat to marry me, he flew into a rage and swore I wouldn’t see another penny from the estates until he was dead. I told him I didn’t care.” A sad smile touched his lips. “The world well lost for love and all that.”
A flash of lightning lit up the room with a throbbing blue glow chased by a rumble of thunder. She waited.
After a moment, he said, “What I didn’t know was that Hendon went behind my back and saw Kat. He told her that such a marriage would ruin my life and offered her twenty thousand pounds if she would leave me. She threw him out of her rooms. But his words had had their effect. She decided that he was right—that if she truly loved me, then she’d let me go—for my sake. So she told me she had no intention of marrying a pauper, and since my father was standing firm on his threat to cut me off, she wanted nothing more to do with me.”
He sucked in a deep breath that flared his nostrils. “That’s when I bought my commission and left England. I wasn’t exactly trying to get myself killed, but I wouldn’t have minded terribly if it had happened. When I came back to London some six years later, I thought I’d managed to put it all behind me.”
“Until you saw her again,” said Hero softly, although what she really wanted to say was, Why? Why are you telling me this now?
He nodded. “Eventually I found out the truth about what had happened all those years ago—that she had lied to drive me away from her. I asked her again to marry me, but she still refused. She said nothing had really changed, that she loved me too much to allow me to ruin myself by marrying a woman off the stage. In my arrogance, I was convinced I could change her mind, eventually. Only . . .”
“Then you discovered she was Hendon’s daughter.”
She watched him reach for his drink and down half the glass in one long pull. The tension in the air was like an unnatural hum that had nothing to do with the storm.
He said, “I knew that in all fairness, I couldn’t blame Hendon