She froze in front of him, her gaze riveted to an old scar that slanted from the bottom of his neck down over his pectoral muscle. Long faded, but still quite visible, it was the sole reminder of who he was and where’d he come from. The lone memento of a past he’d tried very hard to forget.

Bloody blasted hell.

He hadn’t meant to reveal it to her. Not here, not now. Had he been thinking clearly—

But it was too late.

A strange expression came over her face. She went pale and flushed by turns. And then she touched him. The slightest brush of her fingertips against his exposed flesh. It sent an earthquake through his vitals. A shudder he could neither hide nor suppress.

She inhaled a ragged breath, as though she felt it too. That deep bond of connection, forged so long ago, unbroken by time and distance. “Great God, I knew it.” Her eyes found his, a glimmer of triumph shining in their liquid sapphire depths. “It really is you.”

Chapter Nineteen

Maggie had scarcely touched him before St. Clare was, once again, moving away from her.

He pulled his banyan back over his shoulder, and tying it with a jerk, strode into his bedroom. A table beside the bed held a bottle of brandy and a single glass. He poured out a generous measure and drank it down in one swallow.

She followed after him. Surely he wasn’t going to continue to deny it? Not now. The scar across his chest was definitive proof. She’d recognized it instantly, remembering the bloodied gash left by Fred’s whip as if it were yesterday.

“Look at what he did to me,” Nicholas had said on that fateful night so many years ago. “I ask you, is this the work of a gentleman?”

St. Clare slammed his glass down on the table. “I told you that you shouldn’t have come here.”

Maggie knew she shouldn’t have come. It was reckless and wild. A very real risk to her reputation. Worse than that, it was unfair to Bessie (who Maggie had told), and doubly unfair to Jane (who Maggie hadn’t).

But Maggie hadn’t cared about burdening her servant, or keeping secrets from her friend, not when St. Clare’s well-being hung in the balance.

Nicholas’s well-being.

They regarded each other across the short distance of his bedchamber like two adversaries on the verge of battle. A pulsing heat throbbed between them. A palpable tension that was as much a product of hurt and anger as desire.

“You lied to me,” she said.

His gaze was locked with hers, his heavy-lidded eyes almost sullen. “I know.”

“You made me doubt myself. When all the while—”