“You’d still be the same person underneath it all.”
“Yes, but circumstances would be different. You could start fresh in a new place. Somewhere you would be welcomed and admired. Where you’d feel as if you belonged.”
Captain Blunt appeared skeptical.
“It’s true,” Julia insisted. “For ladies, anyway. Everything with us is based on outward appearances. On rumors and innuendo. Once a lady develops a bad reputation, she may as well retire from London society completely. The only option is to reinvent herself somewhere else. In India or America or some spa town or other. Many ladies have done so.”
He studied her in the gaslight. “You don’t have a bad reputation.”
“I wasn’t talking about myself.” Her silk reticule hung from her wrist. She drew it open, dropping her book back inside. “And anyway,” she muttered, “I have a reputation for being strange. It’s much the same.”
“Strange? How?”
“Different. Odd. I don’t fit in.” She pulled closed the drawstring mouth of her reticule. “That must be abundantly clear.”
“Not to me it isn’t.”
“Perhaps you haven’t noticed it yet.”
His voice deepened to a husky growl. “I’ve noticed everything about you.”
Her eyes widened in vague alarm. “Have you? Goodness. I don’t know why you should. I’m singularly uninteresting.”
“Is that a fact? And yet you interest me very much.” He searched her face. “I wonder why you haven’t married.”
The statement, made so casually, was as insolent as it was unexpected.
Julia drew back from him, her words emerging in an outraged squeak. “I beg your pardon?”
“Forgive my impertinence,” he said. “It’s only that I can’t fathom how it is you remain unattached.”
She was indignant to her marrow. “You’re mocking me, sir.”
“I don’t mock. I speak plainly. You’re free to do the same.”
Her gaze was riveted to his. She’d never spoken plainly to a gentleman in her life. Not a stranger, anyway. Given the choice, she rarely spoke at all.
But what would it hurt?
He appeared interested. And she had nothing to be ashamed of.
She exhaled an unsteady breath. “If you must know, my circumstances are complicated. My parents are in poor health. And my own health is often indifferent.”
“You’re ill?”
“Not ill. I suppose you might say I’m . . . fragile.”
He regarded her steadily. “You didn’t look fragile on that horse of yours this morning.”
“That’s different. Cossack makes me stronger. Without him, I’m generally viewed as inadequate. Except in one respect.” Her pulse throbbed in her ears. A voice in her head warned her to hold her tongue. She didn’t heed it. “I have a sizable dowry.”
Captain Blunt said nothing in reply. He merely looked at her, still holding her gaze, even as the tension crackled palpably between them.
She pressed on against all better judgment. “Perchance you’ve heard of it?”
“I have,” he admitted.
Naturally, he had. Why else would he be paying her any attention? She’d known that from the moment he’d first requested an introduction to her at Lady Arundell’s ball. Even so, his confession left Julia deflated.
So much for thrills and danger.
The infamous Captain Blunt was, when it came down to it, nothing more than a garden-variety fortune hunter.
“I expect you’ve heard a thing or two about me as well,” he said.
She couldn’t deny it. “I have.”
The silence grew between them. It was too painful to endure.
She rose abruptly from the bench. Captain Blunt was immediately on his feet. She took a step back in a futile attempt to put space between them.
He closed the distance. “Miss Wychwood.”
“Captain Blunt,” she uttered at the same time.
He paused, allowing her to proceed.
She made herself continue, despite the anxiety tightening her chest and the scorching blush burning its way up her throat and into her face. “I hope you won’t trouble yourself to pursue me. We’d never suit.”
His gray eyes flickered. “You think not?”
“I-I do. That is, we wouldn’t.” She stumbled a little over her words. “I have a substantial dowry, it’s true, but no amount of money lasts forever. And after you’ve run through it, you’d be stuck with me.”
His expression hardened. “An observation that flatters neither of us.”
“You asked for plain speaking.”
“So I did.” He offered her a rigid bow. “Miss Wychwood.”
“Captain.” She inclined her head to him and, catching up her heavy skirts in her hands, swiftly took her leave. As she exited the room, she sensed him staring after her just as he had that morning in Hyde Park.
She hastened her step, once again reminded of myths and fairy stories. Of dark, brooding villains abducting young maidens who were guilty of doing nothing more than minding their own business.
And Captain Blunt was a villain. Everyone said so.
She would do well to remember it.
Four
Sunlight shone through the tall morning room windows, warming Julia’s bent head and shoulders as she sat at her mother’s dainty Boulle-inlaid writing desk. She dipped her sharpened quill pen into the open inkpot, tapping away the excess before marking a heavy X through yesterday’s date in her diary.
Only three more days until her friends returned to London.
Three more days of society events to get through alone.
She set down her pen. She’d gone riding this morning, half expecting to run into Captain Blunt again. But he seemed to have heeded her request. There had been no sign of him in Rotten Row. None that she could see.
And she’d looked for him.
Looked and looked. As if she was disappointed by his absence.
Which wasn’t the case at all.
She was glad to be free of his interest. She wasn’t some featherheaded heroine in a novel to be lured in by his imposing height and his magnificently broad shoulders. By his raven-black hair, with its faint threads of silver at the temples, and by his piercing eyes as cold and gray as the Thames in winter.