Fleur’s neck wrenched back. It couldn’t have hurt more had he cut her open and left her there to bleed.
He’d only just begun his assault.
“I have been a fool long enough where you are concerned. It all makes sense. You turning up months ago, wherever I happened to be—”
“I was at Chilton’s that day,” she gritted out, deriving strength from the stirrings of anger.
“Certainly, it would have been easy enough for you to ascertain I would be in attendance.”
“If I had known that, I wouldn’t have gone,” she snapped.
He snorted.
He snorted?
If Fleur weren’t carrying the lout’s child, she would have snatched his portrait square from the wall and brought it down over his stubborn head.
“How many times did you and I find ourselves somehow thrown together?” he flung like a barrister laying out the points that would lead to her execution, and in a way, it would.
Fleur closed her eyes.
Of a certainty, when he laid it out with all that cool, emotionless logic, it sounded damning.
“Henry, that is not what…”
With every point hurled, the damning nature of how it all appeared registered in her own mind. If she could see logic to hissuspicions, how would he believe anything other than that Fleur was a harlot who was trying to pass her bastard onto him?
“And now it makes sense.”
Fleur rubbed at her throat. “Henry?”
He scraped an ugly assessing stare along her body. “How could I have failed to see before now? Your waist isn’t as trim as it once was.”
She flinched. Lower lip trembling, she looked down at her fuller form.
“Oh, no. I meant no slight. You are quite delectable. Even more so.”
How was it possible that a pleasantly spoken avowal hurt so much worse?
“Your breasts are much improved.”
Each unveiling was a blow to the heart.
Chuckling, Henry gave a wry shake of his head.
“What?” she said tersely.
Did she really want to know?
“The two parts of you I took as false, your ridiculous amount of tears and pretty swoons, turned out to be the only true things about you.”
Anguish scissored through her insides. Fleur searched a hand out to keep from falling, but there was nothing.
She swayed and would have hit the floor.
Henry shot a hand out, catching her by the arm, grasping her hard, keeping her on her feet, and punishing her with his cruel, unfeeling touch. He released her like her skin had burned him.
“Is it Kilmartin’s?”