Portrait of a Scandal

And when she next looked up, it was to see Nathan Harcourt making his way across the crowded café to their table.

What was he doing here?

She took in his unkempt clothing, the satchel over his shoulder, and put two and two together. Since this was a fashionable place for people to gather, he was bound to pick up custom here.

Yes, that explained his presence in Tortoni’s. But why was he coming to her table? What could he possibly want?

And then she noted the determined jut to his chin as he stalked towards them.

Well, she’d wondered how he would react to being given the equivalent of a year’s wages for a drawing that had taken him ten minutes, at most. It looked as though she was going to find out.

From the light of battle she could see in his eyes as he drew closer, she’d achieved her aim of humiliating him by highlighting the difference in their stations, just as he’d done to her ten years ago.

Only he wasn’t going to crawl away and weep until there were no more tears left, the way she’d done. He looked as though he was going to attempt to get even for the insult.

Well, let him try. Just see how far he could get, that was all. She was no longer some starry-eyed débutante, ready to believe glib flattery and vague half-promises. She was a hardheaded business woman.

And she never, but never, let any man get the better of her.

* * *

Indignation carried him all the way across the crowded café to her table. How dare she send her lover to his rooms with all that money?

The Frenchman had been every bit as condescending as he’d expected. The only thing that had surprised him was how early he’d called. Nothing would have dragged Nathan out at that ungodly hour if he’d had Miss Dalby in his bed.

Nor would he have stumbled to the door this morning if he’d had any idea he would have come face to face with the sneering Frenchman, rather than one of his neighbours.

And if he hadn’t been so fuddled with sleep he would have refused every last sou. Though it had only been after Monsieur Le Brun had sketched that mocking bow and he’d shut the door on him that he’d opened the purse and seen just how great an insult the man had offered him. Without having to say one word.

Sadly for him, he’d given himself away. The moment he’d bowed, Nathan recalled why his face had looked so familiar. So now he had the ammunition to make his stay in Paris extremely uncomfortable, if he chose.

He was here to deliver a warning of his own.

Get out of his city, or by God he would shout the Frenchman’s secret from the rooftops.

What a pair they were for secrets. Though it didn’t look as though she was trying to keep her secret hidden any more. The proof that she’d lied to him ten years before was sitting openly at table with her. Digging into her bowl of ice cream with a rapt expression, her little feet tucked neatly onto the top rung of her chair. Enjoying the simple pleasure with the total concentration of the truly innocent.

He snatched off his hat and thrust his fingers through his hair. She wasn’t just ‘an illegitimate baby’. She’d grown up, in the years since he’d learned of her existence, into a very real little person.

And no matter how much resentment he bore the mother, only a blackguard would expose a child to danger by telling the world the truth about its mother’s lover.

The child noticed him staring at her and looked straight back at him with unabashed curiosity.

He couldn’t see anything of Miss Dalby in her features. Nor her colouring. She must take after her father, he supposed.

Her father. He sucked in a sharp breath.

Of course the child had a father, it was just that he’d been too angry, before, to think of anything beyond the way Miss Dalby had deceived him. The night Fielding had told him about the rumour he’d heard about Miss Dalby’s having an illegitimate baby, he’d felt as though he’d been robbed at gunpoint. Those words had stolen his whole life from him. The life he’d planned on having with her. The house in the country, the children he’d imagined running about in the orchard where chickens scratched among the windfalls. Gone in the blink of an eye. He’d been incapable of thinking about anything beyond his own loss.

But she hadn’t come by a baby on her own. There had been a man. A man who must have had fair hair and blue eyes.

And no conscience whatsoever.

Damn it all, Miss Dalby had only been seventeen when he’d started to think he was falling in love with her. So she could not have been more than sixteen when...when some rogue had seduced and abandoned her. Nor made any provision for his brat, if she was obliged to hire out her body to men like this one.

He glared at her French lover again, though his anger was veering wildly from one player in the drama to another with confusing rapidity.

Her parents, for instance. They’d brought her up to London for that Season. They must have known. She couldn’t have hidden a baby from them. They must have told her to pretend to be innocent. At that age, and after what she’d already been through, she wouldn’t have dared defy them. Besides, properly brought-up girls did not set up their will in opposition to their parents.

No more than sons of the same age. He’d only been in London himself at the express command of his own father. Forbidden from exploring his talent as an artist, he’d been pretending to think about choosing some other, respectable profession, whilst really trying to work out if there was any honourable way he could break free from family expectations.

For his father wasn’t a man to cross, any more than he guessed the Reverend Dalby had been.

It had only been last night that he’d started to wonder what had become of her all these years. Before that, he’d refused to allow his thoughts to stray in her direction. But...it didn’t look as though her family had stood by her. Why else would she be sitting here with her daughter in plain sight, a lover at her side and no wedding ring on her finger?

Was her father the kind of man who would wash his hands of his erring child, just because she’d brought disgrace to the family? The way his own father had done? Had her attempt to inveigle him into marriage been her last, desperate attempt to appease them? Had he, Nathan, been her last resort?

No wonder she’d wept when he’d become betrothed to Lucasta instead.

Strange how the years brought a new perspective to the tragedies of youth. There was always more than one side to any story. And before this moment—at least, before he’d watched the child enjoying her ice cream—the only side he’d ever considered had been his own.

‘Are you a friend of Monsieur Le Brun?’

He blinked, to find the little girl was smiling up at him, her wide blue eyes full of curiosity.

‘No, Sophie,’ Miss Dalby hastily put in, while her lover was taking an indignant breath to refute the allegation. ‘This is Monsieur Harcourt. He is an artist. He drew a picture of me last night, while we were out at dinner. I expect he is hoping for more custom from us.’

The little girl’s face lit up. ‘Oh, could he do a picture of me? You said we might buy a picture today. I thought from a shop. But this would be even better!’

‘Yes. It would.’ Miss Dalby gave him a smug little smile.

And all his sympathy towards her evaporated. She’d found a man who did not care that she’d already borne a child out of wedlock. And she was going to take great pleasure in obliging him to sit at her feet and draw the child. The child whose existence had driven them apart. The child whose existence she’d tried to conceal, so that she could entrap him into a marriage that would have been...

At that point, his imagination floundered into a wall of mist. He had no idea what marriage to her would have been like, with an illegitimate child hovering on the fringes of it. Could it possibly have been any worse than the one he’d actually had? With a wife he couldn’t even like, never mind desire, once he’d got to know her? A wife who’d broadcast her contempt for him with increasing virulence.

But one thing he knew. He wouldn’t have wanted to stop bedding her. Even now, ten years later, with a gut full of aversion for her lies and scheming, he wanted her. The reason he’d been so slow on the uptake that morning had been because of the sleepless night he’d spent on her account, either brooding on the past, or suffering dreams of the kind that bordered on nightmares, from which he had woken soaked in sweat and painfully aroused.

Just thinking about the things he’d done to her, and with her, during those feverish dreams had a predictable effect.

Hastily he pulled up a chair to her table, in spite of her French lover’s scowl, pulling his satchel on to his lap to cover his embarrassment.

With quick, angry strokes, he began a likeness of the girl he might have been forced into providing for, had Miss Dalby been successful in her attempts to snare him.

Chapter Four

Grimly determined not to reflect on how handsome her father must have been to have produced such a pretty child, he concentrated instead on capturing what he could see of her own nature. With deft sure fingers, he portrayed that eager curiosity and trusting friendliness which had so disarmed him.

‘Oh,’ the child said when he handed her the finished sketch. ‘Do I really look like that?’