Fleur dampened her mouth. He wanted to run. She sensed it. She felt it in him.
“I know you are likely…uneasy about all of this. Lord Cassian shared with me”—she filled her hands with his—“what your childhood was like.”
“What exactly is it he shared with you, my lady?” he asked, in a silken purr.
My lady.
The sound of her pulse filled her ears.
She realized immediately the mistake she’d made—for her. For Lord Cassian. “He was not disloyal to you, Henry. He wastrying to help and shared with me about your childhood and what life was like for you.”
She recognized her mistake too late. He was too proud to receive those words.
“What was my life like? I was raised in the lap of good fortune,” he said bluntly.
Did he believe that?
She peered for signs he did and found none in his implacable features. Whether he lied to himself or didn’t know, Fleur needed to speak aloud words he should have heard and heard often.
“Having a title and wealth and having the world at your beck and call is not good fortune. It’s just fortune,” she said quietly. “Your childhood was sad and lonely.”
“More pity. Fromyou?”
She winced at that mocking emphasis, one that implied she was the one to be pitied.
He lifted another cool eyebrow. “On what have you based this? On what Lord Kilmartin told you?”
Guilt rooted around her chest.
Things were becoming discombobulated. This wasn’t how this meeting was supposed to go. She was supposed to tell him she loved him and had loved him long before. How she had wanted it to be him whom she gave herself to.
“You asked why I was late—”
“I did no such thing. I chided you for embarrassing me.”
“And it’s because I found out the name of the gentleman I was…with at Lord and Lady Rutland’s.”
That gave him pause.
“Did you?”
She nodded.
A muscle rippled along his powerful jawline. “And?”
Fleur stepped forward and traced that spasm with her fingertips.
That same muscle jumped under her touch.
“That night…” She caressed her palms over his chest. His heart pounded wildly underneath her hands. “At Lord and Lady Rutland’s,youwere the man I gave myself to in the library. It was always you.”
Through the tears, a tender smile played at her lips. “It wasyou, Henry.”
His body stilled. He clenched his eyes tight.
She willed him to see. To believe her.
For a short moment, she thought he might. That’s what she got for hoping.