Silk Is For Seduction - Loretta Chase [128]
“I am the greatest modiste in the world,” she said.
Dear God how he loved her! Her self-confidence, her unscrupulousness, her determination, her strength, her genius. Her passion.
He allowed himself a smile, and hoped it didn’t look too sickeningly infatuated. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “How could I forget? You are the greatest modiste in the world.”
“But I’m someone else as well,” she said.
She moved away from the table and walked to the window and looked out into the garden.
He waited. Had he any choice?
“I was tired yesterday,” she said, still looking out. “Very tired. It was a shockingly busy day, and we were run off our feet, and I was in a state, trying not to fall apart.” She turned away from the window and met his gaze. “I was trying so hard that I was unkind and unfair to you.”
“On the contrary, you declined my offer quite gently,” he said. “You told me I was kind and generous.” He couldn’t altogether keep the bitterness from his voice. It was the same as telling a man, We can still be friends. He couldn’t be her friend. That wasn’t enough. He understood now, not merely in his mind but with every cell of his being, why Clara had told him it wasn’t enough.
“You were kind and generous enough to deserve the truth,” she said. “About me.”
Then he remembered the stray thought he’d had after he’d seen Lucie for the first time. “Damn it to hell, Noirot, you’re already married. I thought of that, but I forgot. That is, Lucie had to have a father. But he wasn’t in view. You were on your own.”
“He’s dead.”
Relief made him dizzy. He moved to stand at the chimneypiece. He pretended to lean casually against it. His hands were shaking. Again. He was in a very bad way.
“Your grace, you look very ill,” she said. “Please sit down.”
“No, I’m well.”
“No, sit, please, I beg you. I’m a wretched mass of nerves as it is. Waiting for you to swoon isn’t making this easier.”
“I never swoon!” he said indignantly. But he took his wreck of a body to the sofa and sat.
She walked back to the library table and took up a cup from the tray resting there. She brought it to him. “It’s gone cold,” she said, “but you need it.”
He took it from her and drank. It was cold, but it helped.
She sat in the nearest chair. A few, very few feet of carpet lay between them. All the world lay between them.
She folded her hands in her lap. “My husband’s name was Charles Noirot. He was a distant cousin. He died in France in the cholera epidemic a few years ago. Most of my relatives died then. Lucie fell gravely ill.”
Her husband dead. Her relatives dead. Her child on the brink of death.
He tried to imagine what that had been like and his imagination failed. He and Longmore had been on the Continent when the cholera struck. They’d survived, and that, as far as he could make out, had been a miracle. Most victims died within hours.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no idea.”
“Why should you?” she said. “The point of all this is my family, and who I am.”
“Then your name really is Noirot,” he said. “I’d wondered if it was simply a Frenchified name you three had adopted for the shop.”
Her smile was taut. “That was the name my paternal grandfather adopted when he fled France during the Revolution. He got his wife and children out, and some aunts and cousins. Others of his family were not so lucky. His older brother, the Comte de Rivenoir, was caught trying to escape Paris. After he and his family went to the guillotine, my grandfather inherited the title. He saw the folly of trying to make use of it. His family, the Robillon family, had a bad name in France. You know the character, the Vicomte de Valmont, in the book by Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses?”
He nodded. It was one of a number of books Lord Warford had declared unfit for decent people to read. Naturally, when they were boys, Longmore had got hold of a copy and he and Clevedon had read it.
“The Robillon men were that sort of French aristocrat,” she said. “Libertines