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Alexandra pinkened with embarrassment, but she didn't think Jordan should be blamed if women fell in love with him.

"I loved him like a brother, but that doesn't change the fact that he was a notorious rake with a well-deserved reputation for profligacy." Swearing under his breath at her loyalty and innocence, Tony straightened. "You don't believe me, do you? All right, here's the rest of it: On the night of your first ball, you publicly commented on the beauty of two women—Lady Allison Whitmore and Lady Elizabeth Grangerfield. Both of them were his paramours. Do you understand what that means? Do you?"

The color slowly drained from Alexandra's face. A paramour shared a man's bed while he did the intimate things to her that Jordan had done to Alexandra.

Anthony saw her color fade and forged ahead, determined to get it out in the open. "During that same ball, you asked if Jordan enjoyed the ballet, and everyone nearly laughed their sides off because everyone knew that Elise Grandeaux was his mistress until the day he died. Alex, he stopped in London and was with her here on the way to your ship— after you were married. People saw him leaving her house. And she's told everyone your marriage was one of inconvenience to him."

Alexandra leapt to her feet and wildly shook her head, trying to deny it. "You're wrong. I don't believe you. He said he had 'business' with someone. He would never have—"

"He would and he did, dammit! Furthermore, he intended to take you to Devon and leave you there, then he meant to return to London and continue where he left off with his mistress. He told me so himself! Jordan married you because he felt obliged to, but he had neither the desire nor the intent to live with you as his wife. All he felt for you was pity."

Alexandra's head jerked sideways as if she had been slapped. "He pitied me?" she cried brokenly, drowning in humiliation. Clutching the folds of her skirt, she twisted the fabric until her knuckles turned white. "He thought I was pitiful?" Another realization hit her, and she covered her mouth, thinking she was going to be sick: Jordan had meant to do the same thing to her that her father had done to her mother—marry, leave his wife in some obscure place far away, and then return to his wicked woman.

Reaching for her, Anthony tried to put his arms around her, but she flung them off and stepped back, staring at him as if she thought he was as evil as Hawk. "How could you!" she burst out, her voice shaking with bitterness and pain. "How could you let me go on grieving for him and making a fool of myself over him? How could you have been so unutterably cruel as to let me go on believing he had actually c-cared for me!"

"We believed it was a kindness at the time," the dowager duchess said gruffly from behind her, walking into the room with the slight limp that appeared whenever she was deeply troubled.

Alexandra was too battered to worry about the elderly woman. "I'm going home," she said, fighting to control the wrenching anguish that was strangling her breath in her chest.

"No, you're not!" Anthony snapped. "Your mother's spending a year sailing about the islands. You can't live alone."

"I do not require your permission to go home. Nor do I require your financial support. According to your grandmother, I have money of my own from Hawk," she enunciated bitterly.

"Which I control as your guardian," Anthony reminded her.

"I don't want or need a guardian. I've been managing on my own since I was fourteen years old!"

"Alexandra, listen to me," he said tautly, grasping her by the shoulders and giving her a slight, angry shake. "I know you're angry and disillusioned, but you can't run away from us or slink away from London. If you do, what happened to you here will haunt you forever. You didn't love Jordan—"

"Oh, didn't I?" Alexandra interrupted furiously. "Then tell me why I spent an entire year trying to make myself worthy of him."

"You loved an illusion, not Jordan—an illusion you created out of whole cloth because you were innocent and idealistic—"

"And gullible and blind and stupid!" Alexandra hissed. Humiliation and anguish made her turn away from the sympathy Anthony was trying to offer and, in a desperate voice, she excused herself and ran to her room.

Only when she had gained the privacy of her bedchamber did she succumb to tears. She cried for her stupidity, for her gullibility, and for the year she had worked, driving herself to become worthy of a man who did not deserve to be called a gentleman. She cried until the sound of her own weeping made her despise herself for wasting her tears on him.

Finally, forcing herself to sit up, she dried her eyes while her mind continued to torment her with images of her own folly: She saw herself in the garden the day before they were wed: "Are you going to kiss me?" she had asked, and when he did, she nearly swooned in his arms, then promptly told him she loved him.

Mary Ellen had told her that gentlemen liked to know they are admired and she had certainly taken her friend's advice to heart! I think you are as beautiful as Michelangelo's David, she had told Jordan after his kiss.

Shame surged through Alexandra and she moaned aloud, wrapping her arms around her stomach, but the mortifying recollections wouldn't cease. God! She had given him her grandfather's watch. She had given it to him and told him that her grandfather would have liked him because he was a noble man. Liked him! Why, her grandfather would have barred that treacherous, overbred blueblood from their door!

In the coach she had let Jordan kiss her again and again—she had lain atop him like a stupid, besotted wanton! In bed she had let him do every intimate thing he wanted to do to her, and when he was finished, he had done the same things with his mistress the very next night.

Instead of shooting Jordan's assailant the night she met him, she should have shot Jordan Townsende! How boring her inexperience must have seemed to him, and no wonder he hadn't wanted to hear her naive declarations of love!

"How much longer?" George Morgan whispered to Jordan in the darkness.

"An hour, and then we can make a run for it," he answered tightly as he flexed his cramped muscles, forcing blood into them to strengthen them for their impending flight.

"Are you sure you heard them say your troops are fighting fifty miles south of here? I'd hate for us to walk fifty miles in the wrong direction, me with a game leg and you with a hole in yours."

"It's only a nick," Jordan answered, referring to the wound he'd received from the guard they overpowered yesterday.

The cave they'd been hiding in since yesterday while the French searched the woods for them was so small that they were both nearly doubled in half. Pain shot through Jordan's cramped leg and he stopped moving, his breathing shallow and fast as he automatically called up Alexandra's image and focused on it with every fiber of his being. He tried to imagine how she looked now, but today all he saw was a girl in a wooded glade, looking up at him with a puppy in her arms and all the love in the world shining in her eyes. With his eyes clenched shut, Jordan slowly traced every curve of her face in his mind. The pain in his legs retreated until it was an ache on the perimeters of his mind, still present but bearable now. It was a technique he'd used hundreds of times in the past, and it was as successful now as it had been before.