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“Fleur—”
“I can go somewhere else.” As if to indicate direction, Fleur flung her arm out in a wide, hysterical circle. She did not notice when Iris was forced to hop back to avoid the tip of the shears. “I can pretend to be a widow. Why won’t Richard let me do that? No one will know. Why would anyone know?”
Iris ducked as the clippers swung toward her once again. “Put down the damned shears!”
Fleur sucked in a breath, staring at the shears with horror. “I’m sorry,” she stuttered. “I’m so—I—I—” With shaking hands she set the shears down on the bench. Her movements were slow and careful, as if she were measuring them out in her head. “I’m going to go away,” she with quiet hysteria. “I shall become a widow. It will be best for everyone.”
“For the love of—” Iris cut herself off, trying to control her temper. She took a breath, and then another, letting the air out in a slow tight stream. “You are not making sense,” she said. “You know as well as anyone that if you wish to be a true mother to this child, you ought to be married.”
Fleur hugged her arms to her body, looking away, through the bower’s opening toward the distant horizon.
Iris finally voiced the question that had to be asked. “Does he even know?”
Fleur grew so stiff she trembled. With the tiniest of motions, she shook her head.
“Don’t you think you should tell him?”
“It would break his heart,” Fleur whispered.
“Because . . . ?” Iris prompted. And if she sounded derisive, well, she hadn’t much patience when she’d entered this conversation. Now it was bloody well gone.
“Because he loves me,” Fleur said simply.
Iris closed her eyes, summoning patience and an even demeanor as she asked, “Do you love him?”
“Of course I do!” Fleur cried. “What sort of woman do you think I am?”
“I don’t know,” Iris said plainly. And when Fleur drew back with an affronted glare, she added, somewhat irritably, “Do you know what sort of woman I am?”
Fleur stood stiff as a board, then finally dipped her chin with a curt, “Fair enough.”
“If you love Mr. Burnham,” Iris said with patience that was more forced than felt, “surely you see that you must tell him about the baby so that he may marry you. I realize that he is not what your family hoped for you—”
“He is a good man!” Fleur interrupted. “I won’t have you denigrating him.”
Lord help me, Iris thought. How could she talk sense when Fleur’s every sentence contradicted the last?
“I would not dream of speaking ill of Mr. Burnham,” Iris said carefully. “I was saying only that—”
“He is a wonderful man.” Fleur crossed her arms belligerently, and Iris wondered if she’d even noticed that no one was arguing with her. “Honorable and true.”
“Yes, of course—”
“Better than any of the so-called”—she sneered the last—“gentlemen I see at local assemblies.”
“Then you should marry him.”
“I can’t!”
Iris took a long, steadying breath through her nose. She was never going to be the sort of woman who cradled distraught friends and sisters in her arms and murmured, “There, there.”
She decided she was at ease with that.
Instead, she was the plainspoken, occasional termagant who yelled, “For the love of God, Fleur, what the devil is wrong with you?”
Fleur blinked. And stepped back. With real concern in her eyes.
Iris forcibly unclenched her teeth. “You already made one mistake. Don’t compound it with another.”
“But—”
“You say you love him, but you don’t respect him enough even to tell him he is to be a father.”
“That is not true!”
“I can only deduce that your refusal has to do with his social status,” Iris said.
Fleur gave a small, bitter nod.
“Well, if that’s the case,” Iris snapped, shaking a finger perilously close to Fleur’s nose, “you should bloody well have taken that into consideration before you gave him your virginity.”
Fleur’s jaw jutted out. “It wasn’t like that.”
“As I was not there, I will not argue with you. However,” Iris said pointedly when she saw Fleur open her mouth to argue, “you did lie with him, and now you’re pregnant.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?”
Iris decided to ignore this utterly superfluous question. “Let me ask you this,” she said instead. “If you are so concerned about your position, why are you fighting Richard about adopting the baby? Surely you see that it’s the only way to protect your reputation.”
“Because it’s my baby,” Fleur cried. “I can’t just give it away.”
“It’s not as if it would go to strangers,” Iris said as callously as she could manage. She had to push Fleur to the edge. She could think of no other way to make her see sense.
“Don’t you see that that is almost worse?” Fleur’s face fell into her hands, and she began to weep. “To have to smile when my child calls me his aunt Fleur? To have to pretend it doesn’t kill me every time he calls you his mama?”
“Then marry Mr. Burnham,” Iris pleaded.
“I can’t.”
“Why the bloody hell not?”
Iris’s foul language seemed to give Fleur a momentary jolt, and she blinked.