In the event, he was inwardly cursing Clarissa. All through the interminable lunch he had been picturing the look of shock on Ruby’s face when she had first set eyes on him. She had concealed it almost instantly, but not before he had seen the concern and yes, yes, the pity that had turned her brown eyes liquid. He had always known she had a soft heart. Look how she had tortured herself over her friend, Ellie, and this latest – her providing a home and employment for her sister and the child after the history between them – proved she was a sucker for the underdog. And that’s what he was now, an underdog.

There were a few moments of excruciating silence after they had sat down, and then they both spoke at once, only to stop again.

‘I’m sorry.’ Edward smiled grimly. ‘You were saying . . .?’

‘I was just going to say that – that I’m sorry your engagement didn’t work out.’ It was the only thing she could think of to introduce what she wanted to say.

He shrugged. ‘It was just one of those things.’ Looking at her was causing a physical pain in his chest – she was so beautiful, so damn perfect. ‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’

Ruby inwardly flinched. So he had loved her, this American. ‘I don’t know if that’s quite true.’

‘No? Well, we always did look at things differently, you and I,’ he said, his tone pleasant now. ‘You were right about that. In fact, you were right about a lot of things.’

She shook her head. ‘Not really.’ It took all her strength to look him in the eye and say quietly, ‘I missed you.’

There was an agony inside him as though he had been disembowelled. He knew he was looking at her for the last time because he couldn’t go through this again. As soon as he was able he would leave Foreburn, leave the north altogether, and he wouldn’t come back. Clarissa had said to him that he and Ruby could meet as equals now, but they were far from that. Her star was rising and he was glad for her, he didn’t begrudge her one moment of the success she so deserved, but he was poorer than a church mouse and that had effectively finished anything that might have lingered between them. And the fact remained that she had been able to cast him off and get on with her life perfectly well; she hadn’t written to him or tried to contact him all the months he had been away. There had been nothing. But now, because she saw him as a lame duck, her sympathy was aroused. But sympathy and pity and even affection weren’t a basis for a relationship between a man and a woman. Steeling himself, he smiled coolly.