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“She wanted me to marry Cranbrook, and I did it. For her sake, and my father’s.” Shame bowed her head. “And because I didn’t know what else to do. I was frightened by our poverty. I thought, in some ways, the marriage might be agreeable.”

No one had forced her to make those vows. She could have been courageous. Legendary. Spit in Cranbrook’s eye. Dared to pursue a journalistic career.

I won’t be your duchess. I’m off to work for The Queen.

“You faced an impossible choice.”

That one sentence unbalanced her. She looked up. Understanding, not judgment. That was what he offered.

“Your father’s crimes aren’t yours,” he said, and she gave her head a disbelieving shake.

“I benefited from them.”

“You paid for them, too.” His eyes held hers. Funny, to feel cradled by someone’s eyes. She’d always felt safer when she was with him. She realized she felt braver, too, worthier, even now that she’d stopped dissembling.

He knew everything. Or, nearly everything.

“The man I described to you, who I said betrayed me—it wasn’t Cranbrook.”

“No,” he murmured. Of course he’d put certain things together. “I presume . . .” He didn’t want to hurt her. That was why he spoke so delicately. “It was the Duke of Weston.”

He made the obvious mistake. A cloud dimmed the light, darkened his eyes, blued the green hedges. She sighed.

“He would have been. He was the elder son.”

She’d said enough to set up the tragedy. Neal’s face turned grim.

“We did go to France together.” She watched a shadow move over the grass. “But we hadn’t eloped. We’d connived a rendezvous. And he didn’t change. After I . . . After we became lovers, he continued . . .” She folded her arms over her chest. The awkwardness. “He continued philandering. And then he drowned.”

An abrupt end, to his life. To her tale. She delivered it with odd brightness. She looked back at Neal.

“He drowned in the Thames, with a female companion. He’d stolen a yacht. I’m sure you read about it. You couldn’t get away from it if you tried.”

“Lavinia.” He stepped toward her, his voice soft. She lifted her hand, palm out, to stop him, but he took her wrist in his fingers, brushed her palm with his lips. Sensation prickled through her.

“Cranbrook touched me as though he owned me,” she whispered. “Even before I was his wife.”

He leaned forward and pressed his lips to her forehead.

She breathed against his neck. “Today, when I went to his study, to denounce him, I thought, for the first time . . .” Another breath. “If George had lived, this is what he would have become.”

Not a prince, in the end. An old goat.

George had taken pleasure wherever he found it. He’d never checked his appetites.

She’d hoped, ignored, made excuses.

A young, handsome marquess will be a young, handsome marquess.

But if he’d grown old and ugly? How would his behavior have struck her then?

It took Cranbrook to see George properly.

And it took Neal as well. Took a different kind of love for her to realize how thin and brittle that glamour had been.

His lips against her forehead felt so good, so right.

She found her resolve.