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Jerard"s betrothal ring. “It has been a difficult season.”
    “At least you had several good years together,” said Richard awkwardly. It did feel a bit bizarre to be belatedly consoling her for the death of the man for whom she had jilted him.
    But he felt, in retrospect, more than a little bit grateful to Baron Jerard. Who knows, he thought generously. Perhaps Deirdre had genuinely loved the man, for all that he had been fifty if he was a day and shaped like the more bulbous sort of beer barrel.
    “Several years, yes.” Deirdre stared down into the depths of her sapphire as though it were an oracle and might speak to her. “Good years?” She shook her head slowly in unspoken condemnation of her late husband.
    Bloody, bloody, bloody blast. This was the last thing he needed, to play father confessor to outworn infatuation.
    “I"m very sorry to hear that,” he said, for lack of anything better.
    His half-hearted words made more of an impression than he had intended. Deirdre roamed idly around the room, her ruffled flounce making a muted swishing sound, like snow shifting in tree branches.
    She braced her hands against the edge of Robert"s father"s desk. Her head bowed, she said,
    “There is something I have wanted to say to you for a very long time, something long overdue.”
    “If it is that overdue,” suggested Richard gently, trying very hard not to glance at the clock on the mantle as he said it, “perhaps, then, it is better not said at all.”
    “How like you,” murmured Deirdre, “to try to spare me pain.”
    Well, no. Once upon a time, he had wished her a good deal of pain. Once upon a time, he had also written a vast quantity of very mawkish poetry, comparing her eyes to pansies sprinkled with morning dew, and her teeth to peerless pearls. Or was it her skin that had been peerless pearl? One forgot, after all these years. Richard tried to imagine how Amy would react were he to address something of the kind to her. Hooting sounds of laughter seemed the most likely response.
    He nearly betrayed himself into a grin, but the somber expression on Deirdre"s face caught him up short just in time.
    Poor woman; they had both suffered from their brief affair. They had both lost the dream of what might have been between them. He, at least, had had the luxury of resenting her for it.

    He had fumed and come to terms and found someone, in the end, who suited him a hundred times better, not in an illusion of romantic love, but in the rough and tumble of the workaday thing. She, on the other hand, had borne the burden of having made the decision, with nothing to show for it in the end but an empty title and an emptier bed. He could find it in himself to feel sorry for her. Now.
    Deirdre looked at him long and earnestly. “I am sorry that it ended… as it did.”
    It was a compliment, of a sort. “Thank you,” said Richard gravely.
    What time was it? Long past time to be getting back to the drawing room. Unfortunately, Deirdre didn"t seem to be done yet. She held out one gloved hand to him.
    “I never meant to hurt you.” Candlelight glinted off her curls as she bowed her head in remembered pain. “I never meant to hurt anyone.”
    Poor consolation for Tony, dead these six years.
    But there was no point in recriminations. Deirdre had been careless, not malicious. In his hurt and resentment, it had been easy to forget that she must suffer Tony on her conscience, just as he did.
    “Of course, you didn"t,” said Richard, all manly solicitude. “Let"s say nothing more about it.”
    “I hope…” she began falteringly, stopped, and tried again. “I hope that I was not the end of your operations abroad. So much good to be stopped for so little.”
    Her mathematical skills never had been much to talk about, had they? His unmasking in the press—and, more importantly, in Bonaparte"s files—had occurred last spring; Deirdre"s role in his life had ended six years ago. There was a slight time lag there.
    “Think