St. Clare had never contemplated saying the words aloud, let alone uttering them to Maggie Honeywell herself. Confessing to her that once he’d left Beasley Park—once he’d begun his transformation into John Beresford, Viscount St. Clare—he’d been obliged to think of her as an inextricable part of his unfortunate past. A past that had been better left forgotten.

I had to let you go.

It had been the only way to survive.

“I understand,” she said. That didn’t prevent the hurt from welling in her eyes.

The sight of it made his chest constrict. He touched her cheek. Her skin was soft as warm silk beneath his fingers. “Maggie—”

“I do. I even understand why you sought out Fred.”

The mere mention of his rival’s name was enough to make St. Clare’s muscles tense with anger. “I didn’t seek him out.” He hadn’t. Not initially. “I saw him quite by chance one afternoon in Bond street, not long after I arrived in London.”

Fred had been strolling down the opposite side of the street in company with a fashionable companion. It was impossible to mistake that bulldog gait and copper-colored shock of hair. Impossible to forget that look of smug entitlement.

In that moment, emerging from Weston’s after having just been measured for a half dozen new coats, the long-suppressed reality of St. Clare’s past had rushed upon him with a frightening power. All the slings and arrows of his youth. All that roiling anger. The deep sense of unfairness about it all, and the bone-deep desire to, one day, balance the scales.

He’d thought he had put those feelings behind him. Locked them away and thrown the key into the depths of the Tiber. He’d left them there, buried in Italy—a necessary sacrifice in order to affect the transformation into the gentleman he was today. But in Bond Street, those feelings had been brutally resurrected.

“And later?” Maggie asked. “At the gaming hell?”

“That, I’m afraid, wasn’t as much of a coincidence as it seemed.”

She didn’t appear surprised. “You contrived the whole of it, I gather.”

“I did.”

It had taken little effort to discover where Fred spent his evenings, and even less for St. Clare to arrange to be there himself. The gaming hell had been smoke-filled and dark, and Fred’s powers of recognition none the better for drink. He hadn’t known St. Clare at all.

But St. Clare had known him.

Indeed, there had been little in his life more satisfying than putting a bullet through Fred’s shoulder.

“You could have contrived to meet me,” Maggie said.

“I couldn’t.” St. Clare paused, adding darkly, “And not because of what you said in Hyde Park, about my hate for him outlasting my love for you.”

“Then why?” A glimmer of vulnerability shone in her eyes.