A Gentleman Never Tells by Juliana Gray Page A

ignorant.”
    She slanted him an enigmatic look. “I knew the essential mechanics. But not everything else.”
    “The best parts, you mean. God knows I imagined them with you.”
    “Did you?”
    Was that a note of flirtation in her tone? Roland’s nerves jumped to attention.
This
he knew how to handle. This was his territory. “My dear Lilibet,” he drawled, “if you’d known the sort of lascivious thoughts in my head as I spun you around those blasted ballrooms, you’d have tossed your lemonade in my face.”
    She didn’t laugh, didn’t arch her eyebrow, didn’t play along. Her eyes made a lightning check on Philip, before returning to Roland. Something in her expression made him lean forward, trying to read the soft blue of her eyes. Nostalgia? Desire?
    “You’d have been surprised,” she said. “I’d have been delighted to know your thoughts. Girls have desires, after all, even if we don’t know exactly what we’re longing for.”
    “You were thinking the same things, then?” He wasn’t flirting now. He could barely mouth the words.
    She didn’t answer at first. She studied him, turning something over in her mind, until finally she said, “Not exactly, I suppose. You were, I’m sure, much less innocent than I was.”
    He hesitated. “True.”
    She sighed, her bosom rising and falling beneath the neat, high-cut violet bodice of her gown. “It isn’t fair, is it? If you
had
spoken first, if we
had
married, I’d have come to you an innocent, as pure as a lily, while you . . .” She let the suggestion hang there and reached for a boiled egg.
    He looked at his hands. “I swear to you, Lilibet, from the moment I met you, I had no thought of any other woman. Only you, all that summer. And if we
had
married, I’d never have . . . there’d have been no ghosts in our bed, no question of others, never.”
    She nibbled at the edge of the egg and set it back down on her napkin. She spoke with dripping sarcasm. “Oh, these things you men say. These promises of eternal fidelity. Somerton said something rather like that, before we married. I recall being surprised it needed to be said. After all, I would never have dishonored him. I simply assumed it would never occur to him, either.”
    “Ah.”
    A flush began to spread over her cheeks, faint and becoming. “I tried very hard. I tried to love him. I allowed him . . . whenever he wanted . . .”
    Roland’s hand fisted in the grass beside him. He picked up another piece of cheese and turned to stare out at the lake. It didn’t help: the image of her body, lithe and naked, entwined in his imagination with Somerton’s broad bulk amid the sun-splashed waters before him. Had she enjoyed it at all? Had Somerton excited her, pleasured her? Had she lain there passively, or had she urged him on, ridden atop him, used her mouth on him?
    Her voice conveyed only facts. “I . . . I became with child straightaway, however, and after that first month he seemed to think . . . I suppose he didn’t want to risk anything, once the doctor had confirmed things. He wanted an heir most acutely.” She was firm, matter-of-fact. A breeze drifted across her forehead, riffling a lock of her hair loose from its pins. She brushed it absently behind her ear. “Fool that I was, I thought he was making a great sacrifice for my sake. After all, he . . . I knew his appetites were . . .” She cleared her throat. “He was discreet, at first. It wasn’t until after Philip was born that I realized the truth. The scale of it.”
    Damn it all. Which was worse: imagining her in bed with Somerton, or imagining her shame at his philandering? “I’m sorry,” he whispered. The gentle words belied the rage billowing inside him. He wanted to fight Somerton: not with guns or swords or anything so gentlemanly, but with his fists. He wanted to feel the man’s jaw pop, feel his nose crush into jelly.
    Lilibet went on. “I threw it in his face. We had a dreadful row.