“No more of what? The truth?” Her heart skittered wildly as he touched her. She could feel the heat of his hand through his glove, could sense the tightly controlled power lurking behind the tender stroke of his fingers.

Jane had said he was dangerous. Lethal.

And perhaps he was.

But Maggie wasn’t afraid. “Am I to pretend that the past never happened? That you and I first met the night that Bessie and I came to Grosvenor Square?”

“As far as I’m concerned, we did meet for the first time that night,” St. Clare said. “There’s no need to pretend anything.”

As far as he was concerned.

Her breath stopped. It was the closest thing to an admission he’d given her. An admission—and a warning. He didn’t want to talk about the past. Didn’t want to acknowledge who he was, or what they’d been to each other.

She supposed he had his reasons. Indeed, some of them were obvious. He was pretending to a position that he didn’t have. Portraying himself as a wealthy viscount for heaven’s sake. And Lord Allendale, of all people, seemed to be encouraging this deceit!

Was it some kind of swindle? A ploy to gain money or power?

“You’re asking me to forget the past,” she said. “But I haven’t forgotten. Not once during all these years. I could never—”

“Miss Honeywell—”

“Maggie.”

“Maggie.” He drew his hand down the edge of her jaw, catching her cleft chin lightly in his fingers. And then he whispered her name again, his low baritone voice holding a softness that bordered on reverence. “Maggie.”

She looked deeply, searchingly into his eyes. “I don’t even know what to call you.”

“Is St. Clare not to your liking?”

“It’s a title.”

“It’s my title,” he said. “But if you prefer it, when we’re alone together, I give you leave to use my Christian name.”

Maggie brightened. “Do you mean—?”

“John.”

She frowned. Not Nicholas then. It was to be John Beresford, Viscount St. Clare. He would admit to being no one else. “John,” she said.

John. St. Clare. My lord. What difference did it make? Whatever he wanted her to call him, he was Nicholas. Her Nicholas. And yet…

And yet, as she said his name, she trembled. She trembled as if he were the stranger he pretended to be. As if he were not Nicholas Seaton at all.

St. Clare’s mouth tugged into a crooked smile. “You needn’t look as if you’d just swallowed poison.” He tipped her face up to his, his thumb caressing the voluptuous edge of her bottom lip. “Here. Say it again.”

A warm blush rose in her cheeks. “John.”

His hand still holding her chin, St. Clare lowered his head to kiss her.