The Devil's Web by Mary Balogh Page B

said. “But instead I left.”
    She laughed. “Then it was doubtless as well you did,” she said. “You might have found my reception of a marriage offer somewhat humiliating. You are the very last man on this earth I would ever consider marrying, Mr. Purnell.”
    â€œAnd yet,” he said coldly, “you told me on that night that you loved me.”
    Her eyes flashed at him, and he knew that was the one detail he should never have confronted her with. He had done so only because her words had inexplicably hurt.
    â€œWell,” she said, “you have called me liar this evening. It seems I was a liar then, too. You at least were honest, I seem to recall. You told me that it was nothing but lust you felt. I was a lady. I would not admit to a purely physical craving. I dressed it up in respectable terms. How could I have loved you? You treated me with as much contempt then as you have shown me since your return.”
    â€œYour problem,” he said, “is that for years you have had nothing but adulation from the gentlemen around you. You have come to expect it as your due. If a man does not fawn on you and sigh over you, you feel insulted.”
    â€œWhat a ridiculous notion,” she said. “Your problem, sir, is that you have never felt it necessary to afford other people the common courtesies. You smile when you wish, and you speak when you wish. And it is not very often that you wish to do either. It is your moroseness and your silence that create awkwardness.”
    â€œAh, the old story,” he said. “I remember your saying as much four years ago. And on one of those occasions I remember undertaking to entertain you for the whole of a walk of two miles or more. And what was the point, pray? I will wager that you cannot now recall a single word I said to you on that occasion.”
    â€œWell, there you are wrong,” she said, her nostrils flared and her eyes still flashing at him. “You told me about your years at school and at university, and I mistakenly thought that after all perhaps you were human.”
    â€œBoth our voices are rising,” he said. “I suppose it was inevitable that we quarrel. We always seem to have done so. I should not have brought you here. I merely thought that perhaps we could behave like civilized beings at last. It seems I was mistaken.”
    â€œAnd if you are,” she said, making no attempt to lower her own voice or accept his veiled suggestion that they hold on to their tempers, “it is entirely your own fault. You need not talk of ‘we’ and ‘us.’ I am perfectly willing to behave in a civilized manner at any time. It is you who have decided that boorishness is an acceptable form of behavior.”
    â€œI might have known,” he said, “that you would not have changed at all, that you would be just as childish now as you ever were.”
    â€œOh!” she said, and her lips clamped together while her bosom heaved. “I don’t believe there can be a more despicable man alive than you, James Purnell. I was prepared to be civil to you, for Alexandra’s sake and Edmund’s. But I find that my dislike of four years ago has turned into a full-blown hatred. I hate you, sir, and I believe it would be in both our interests if we make every effort to avoid each other during what remains of your stay in England. The time cannot go fast enough for me.”
    â€œOr for me, either,” he said, making her a half bow, and standing aside as she swept by him and out through the door. She did not stop to close it behind her.
    James stood where he was and shut his eyes tightly.
    God! Oh, God.
    What had he said to her? What unspeakable atrocities had he said to her to make her so furiously angry? The dreadful thing was that at the moment he could not for the life of him remember.
    He could only recall that in the supper room he had had the impulsive idea to take her aside, to talk