Flirting With Fortune

why I’m asking. How else is one to know?”

“Oh, I don’t know, by not thinking me some sort of conniving scoundrel who would fraternize with a man who tried to force your hand in marrying him?” The joy of only moments earlier faded to black. Was he so bloody untrustworthy in her eyes? “And what sort of bet am I supposed to have made, exactly?”

For the first time, she looked uncomfortable, twisting her hands together. “He said you had a wager to see who could win my hand in marriage. I should point out, by the way, that he knew all about your financial situation. How would he have known that if you didn’t tell him?”

He was speechless, utterly speechless. He stared at her for a good three seconds before gathering his wits enough to respond. “I never hid the truth of my situation—I merely didn’t speak of it. If anyone had made serious inquiries into me, they might have stumbled across it. You did, did you not?”

“I stumbled upon it because I was going to marry you. Why on earth would he be making inquiries into you? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Perhaps because you publicly shamed him, and he set out to find a way to exact revenge.”

“Don’t put this back on my shoulders. If you had been honest with me, I wouldn’t have had reason to doubt anything about you. Now I can’t help but question everything!” Her cheeks were fiercely pink. Good—then he wasn’t the only one fighting against a rising tide of emotions.

“I couldn’t tell you everything.”

Her lip curled in derision. “Of course you could—you chose not to.”

“I would have, but—” He slammed his mouth shut. This wasn’t about her brother, damn it.

“But what?”

“Do you want the truth? Here it is: You wouldn’a have given me half a chance if you had known about the debt. You would have seen me as the enemy, no matter what.”

“So you are admitting that you purposely withheld that information in a bid to secure my affection.”

He growled in frustration, raking both hands through his hair. “You are so blasted blind. You doona see that a man without money can be just as fine a person as a wealthy man—or better, for that matter. You decided fortune hunters were the devil, no matter who he was. Well, you know what? That’s wrong.”

Her eyes became hooded, and she crossed her arms protectively over her chest. “You’ll say anything to —”

“I’ll say the truth.” He stalked closer to her, forcing her to look up at him, to witness the truth of his words. “You cannot judge a man—or his passions—by his coffers. Am I a bad person for not wanting my grandmother, sister, and brother to be tossed on the streets? For wanting to preserve my father’s legacy and give my siblings a future? Does being relieved that I fell in love with a woman whose dowry would save my family make me an evil person?”

He lifted a hand and trailed a finger down her cheek. She didn’t move, didn’t even blink. “Because, as God is my witness, I would have fallen for you either way. The difference, my dear, is that I wouldn’a have been able to marry you, were you poor.”

Still she didn’t move, but he heard her intake of air, saw the darkening of her eyes. He dropped his hand from her cheek, seeking instead her gloved hand. “That doesn’a mean that I would stop loving you.” He tugged on the buttery kid leather, sliding it from her fingers. “It would mean that I would be miserable for the rest of my life because I would have had to sacrifice you in order to marry a woman who could save my family.”

With her hand bared, he lifted it to his lips, turning it over to kiss the soft, sensitive skin of her palm. Her lips parted as his touched her, her eyes riveted on their point of contact. Finally, he was getting through to her. His gaze flitted to the painting, ready to tell her exactly what he had found in Scotland, but the moment their eye contact was broken, she yanked her hand from his grasp, taking a quick step backward.

“No, I know what you are doing,” she said, taking yet another step back, putting more than just distance between them. Her walls were up, their connection of moments ago severed. “You are trained in the art of debate. Who better to convince a person of anything than a barrister? A successful barrister can make any jury believe his client’s innocence—whether it is true or not.”

“Beatrice—”

“No,” she exclaimed, darting around the easel. “You know full well the effect you have on me. You know that you’ve only to touch me and my defenses are weakened. So tell me now. Please look me straight in the eye and without manipulation or exploitation of my weaknesses, tell me: Do you have any real proof of your claims?”

He stared at her, taking in the huge blue eyes that had haunted his dreams, the lips that had always been so quick to smile, and her slender frame that had fit so perfectly in his arms. He had agonized about how to prove his love to her, only now to realize the cold, harsh truth.

He couldn’t.

So long as she was so damn eager to believe the worst of him, he could never truly win her over. And that wasn’t the only truth reverberating around inside his skull, cracking the foundations of their relationship.

The painting had seemed like such a lifesaver—something tangible to point to and prove that he was willing to turn over his family’s single most valuable possession to her. How could she doubt him?

But he knew now that it was all wrong. She would see it as a bribe—as a manipulation of her appreciation of his father. One look at her stricken features and glittering eyes and he just knew that the painting would solve nothing. If she didn’t believe him on the merit of his word, on the fierceness of his passion and the strength of his affection, then no tangible object was going to change things.

And, honestly, perhaps it would have been a manipulation, however unintended. He’d been so damned happy to have something of worth to offer her, it never occurred to him that his gifts to her—the studio time, the gallery tour, the paintbrushes—may have reduced him to little more than her idol’s son. At this point, how could he even know if she had any true affection for him?

His heart ached brutally, his body unable to accept what his mind was coming to realize. He shook his head slowly, breathing in the last hints of lilac. “If you doona already have the proof you need, then nothing I say will change anything.”

* * *

It was exactly what she had been expecting.

So why did she feel as though she’d been kicked in the chest by one of Papa’s best stallions? Beatrice clenched her jaw against the disappointment that flooded through her, washing away the last vestiges of hope.

“So . . . that’s it?” The flood receded, and she was left with a huge, yawning emptiness inside her. How could she be so utterly unprepared for an eventuality that she had predicted?

He spread his hands. “The decision is in your hands, Bea. Either you trust what we have between us, or you do not.” The angles of his face had never looked more severe, more harsh. More beautiful.

She closed her eyes, and immediately Godfrey’s face came to mind, his sneering eyes and self-satisfied smirk as clear as if he were standing before her. Had he been so smug because she had been duped by a fortune hunter, or because he could cast doubt on an already-shaky relationship? Wreaking havoc for the point of wreaking havoc?

She pushed Godfrey from her mind only to have him replaced by Diana, the way she had looked the night she had discovered her husband’s betrayal. She was shattered, broken in a way that could never be fixed by a fortune-hunting scumbag.

She opened her eyes and looked to her betrothed, helpless to know what to say. Her traitorous body sang for him, wanting nothing more than to curl up in his arms and be lost in his embrace. Her palm still burned from his kiss, a delicious, tempting heat that proved that she couldn’t trust herself around him. She needed time to think, away from the siren call of his gaze. She wanted to believe him, but if she relented and married him and discovered he had been lying, there was no turning back.

“I don’t know,” she said, raising her shoulders in a helpless shrug. “There is no separating the money and the marriage. I don’t want to make the wrong decision and regret it for the rest of my life.”

A muscle in his cheek jumped as though he were grinding steel with his teeth. “If the answer isn’a yes, then it’s a no. Period. You canna have it both ways.”

“I need more time.”