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Marcus went about his daily activities without a great deal of attention.

Amelia’s fall had shaken him to the core, and his thoughts were whirling in sad confusion.

Nobody seemed to think it in the least odd that he should be distracted; his fiancée had suffered a shocking accident, and any man of sensibility must be affected by it.

Several sympathetic people told him as much to his face, and he smiled rather stiffly and thanked them, then tried to turn the subject into less painful channels.

Because it wasn’t true, any of it. Amelia wasn’t his fiancée, they weren’t about to be married, and though obviously it was right that he should be concerned for her, as for anyone who’d suffered an accident, their whole relationship was a fiction, and nothing more than that.

If he cared deeply, he had no right to. If he could not shake off the overwhelming sensations that fizzed in his veins when he’d touched her, he should.

They’d kissed, good God… but that he must banish from his mind. If only he could.

He blamed himself. It must be obvious to the meanest intelligence that Lady Amelia had been assaulted because of him.

She’d been tattled about before, but nobody had tried to put a period to her existence before she’d tangled herself in his life, a life that was more complicated than she could possibly have known.

When she had proposed their arrangement, she had done so in ignorance and, knowing so much more than she did, he never should have agreed to it.

He had been criminally irresponsible, and she had paid the price for it.

She had thought that he was merely troubled by gossip, as she was, and that one of those rumours – which, for all she knew, might have been entirely baseless – tied him to his sister-in-law, and her scheme might serve to free him from it.

But the truth was far beyond anything she could have imagined.

In some respects, her plan had worked perfectly.

But inevitably, his deeper and more discreditable involvement with Lavinia, even though it was long since over, had been unknown to her.

She knew now. He burned with mortification as he remembered his awkward, stumbling words when he’d been obliged to tell her everything.

Her lovely face, as she struggled to suppress the shock she must have been feeling and hear him out.

Her willingness to believe him, when she had no reason to trust him, or any man.

Her bravery, when to set him at his ease, she had attempted to make a joke of it.

She was a remarkable young lady, an angel, and he’d realised it too late.

Perhaps it had always been too late for them, but he had another reason to curse Lavinia now.

It had been her purpose, it was plain, to render him unavailable to any other woman, to mark him as hers forever.

How successfully she had done so. She’d put in him a position where, as few men ever were, he’d been forced to confess all his dirtiest secrets to someone he’d much prefer thought exceedingly well of him.

Amelia might pay him the great compliment of believing him an honest man, for which he must always be profoundly grateful, but that was all.

Her father had been the country’s most notorious libertine, and she had suffered gravely for it, as had her whole family.

Only a blockhead would imagine that she’d want more of the same in her own private life.

Of course she would not. She deserved so much better.

And one might say what one wished about the late Marquess of Wyverne, but he had not brought Bow Street Runners to his family’s door, as Marcus now learned from Sir Humphrey that he had.

Though she was kind enough not to say so, Amelia must be desperate to end this farce of an engagement.

No doubt her brothers, who loved her, were urging her to do so without delay.

While she was still tied to Marcus in the eyes of the world, she could not be safe.

Next time, she could be killed. The thought was unendurable.

He could not end their connection himself – and though he should want to for her sake, he was painfully aware that he didn’t, not in the least – so he could only pull back from an illusion of closeness that could only hurt them both, and hope that after a decent interval had passed, she would speak, and say that it was over.

Then she could be free, and safe. That would have to be enough for him.