But then she’d never had dealings with a person of Lord Deben’s stamp before. In the whole of creation, there could not be a more infuriating male. She’d been on tenterhooks all night, waiting for him, but did he care? No. This was all a game to him. He was enjoying making fools of other members of the ton. He’d only picked her for the game because doing so was guaranteed to put Miss Waverley’s nose out of joint. He had no compunction about using her to prevent people knowing he really was thinking about taking a wife. And the worst of it was she was letting him use her.
Where was her self-respect?
‘For some reason, tonight, your sense of humour seems to be entirely absent. Why is that, Hen? Has something occurred to distress you?’
‘You don’t think sitting there mocking me might have distressed me? Or ignoring my wishes about using that revolting abbreviation of my name?’
She snatched up her fan and got to her feet. ‘I refuse to sit here and let you use me so ill one moment longer.’ She turned and slammed her empty glass down on the window ledge behind their chairs.
When she turned he was startled to see tears of rage and humiliation in her eyes.
He, too, got to his feet. ‘I had intended only to tease, not to mock,’ he said grimly. ‘I forgot that you are not skilled in the arts of flirtation.’
‘Flirtation? You call it flirtation, to say I look like a chicken?’ She was glaring at him, her chest heaving with every breath she took, her fists clenching. ‘And what would you have said next, pray? That it must have been fate to have me so aptly named? To go on to making jokes about ruffling my feathers, or getting broody, or—’
‘None of those things. My word, but you are sensitive about your nose.’
She could have screamed with vexation. He was missing the point entirely. It was not the derogatory name, which she’d borne with fortitude for years. All her brothers’ friends went through phases of using it on her. Most of them with a rough sort of affection.
It was the patronising way he refused to take anything about her seriously.
It was the fact that he was at the very centre of her existence, while she was only on the periphery of his.
The way he was holding her in the palm of his hand, without even noticing.
Because he didn’t really care.
Whereas she...
Her breath hitched in her chest as the awful truth struck her.
‘I can only assume,’ he continued with a measuring look which reinforced her feeling that he regarded her as an experiment in progress, ‘that somebody in your past has teased you about it in such an unkind manner that you now have something of an issue with it. Miss Gibson, I have told you before, your nose is nowhere near large enough to detract from the attraction of your other features. It does preclude you from being described as a beauty, perhaps, but that is all.’
‘That. Is. All?’
How could he be standing there, calmly discussing the shape of her nose, when she’d just had a shattering revelation? She’d fallen in love with him. That was why she spent not just the early stages of a ball, but entire days marking time until she could see and speak to him again. Why she only felt fully alive when she was with him. Why her heart soared when he paid her compliments and plunged when she reminded herself he did not mean them. It was why she was so absurdly sensitive to every nuance of his voice and watched his face avidly, hoping to detect some softening, some sign of genuine emotion in his eyes. Nor could she recall the last time she had slept without waking at some point in the night, reliving those feverish moments on the sofa in the locked room at Lady Susan’s.
Richard’s kiss had not given her a single sleepless night. She’d been surprised when he’d kissed her. Too surprised to react to it physically in any way at all. She had been flattered, more than anything, when she’d worked out exactly what it was that had been pressing into her belly by the time he’d finished. And when he’d returned to London without making a declaration, she rather thought it was pique that had made her decide she wasn’t going to be left behind, for another whole Season, while he went off enjoying himself without her. It hadn’t seemed fair of him to assume she would still be there waiting for him when he’d tired of living the high life.