Page 5 of The Trouble with True Love

“I want you to help me stay out of the trap! Though how I ever got snared in the first place escapes me.”

“Haven’t we already established that? You fell into the trap when you fell into her bed.”

The blush in Clara’s cheeks deepened, spreading heat through her entire body. Heavens, who’d ever have thought such nefarious conversation could take place in the respectable confines of a tea shop?

“And everything was going splendidly, too,” Lionel murmured in a gloomy tone while Clara pressed her hands to her hot cheeks. “But barely a month later, she’s making wedding plans.”

“Women,” his friend replied, “can be so unreasonable.”

Clara had to clamp one of her hands over her mouth to stifle an exclamation of outrage before it could escape her lips and give her away.

“Rather,” Lionel agreed and gave a laugh, though he sounded anything but amused. “My family has never met her. Hell, they don’t even know about her. And her family certainly doesn’t know about me. We’ve managed to be very discreet until now. If her people found out, the fat would be in the fire, for it would be a comedown for her, and they’d never approve of it. And yet she doesn’t seem to care. She’s prepared to tell them all to go to blazes—for my sake, she says. My sake? Damn it, man, what am I supposed to do?”

Adonis was silent a moment, considering the problem. “Could you go abroad?” he asked at last. “Take a jaunt to Paris or Rome for a few months? The season’s just beginning, and Dina will surely be caught up in the social whirl. I daresay by the time you come back, she’ll have forgotten all about you.”

“Or she’ll follow me. Dina isn’t a meek and mild little flower, you know. Being so rich, and a widow, she doesn’t have to worry about neither costs nor chaperones.”

“Perhaps, but why should she bother? Other chaps will be lining up soon enough, I daresay, and paying her so much attention that she probably won’t miss you a jot.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

Clara couldn’t help noting that Lionel didn’t sound relieved by the prospect.Isn’t that just like a man?she thought, feeling a stirring of her sister’s suffragist sympathies.Wanting to have the cake and eat it, too.

“And besides,” Lionel went on, “going abroad isn’t possible for me. I’m a hardworking MP. I am,” he insisted as his friend made a sound of derision, “and Parliament is in session. I can’t go trotting off to the Continent.”

“Then your course is clear. You have to break with her.”

“Must I?” Lionel paused and sighed again. “Why can’t we just go on as we are for a bit, see where it leads us?”

“You can’t, I take it?”

“I made the suggestion, but she said she didn’t see the point. Since we love each other, she said, marriage is the only possible way forward.”

“Love?” Adonis’s voice was suddenly so hard and so sharp that Clara was startled. Forgetting caution, she lifted her head and watched as he leaned forward, his perfect countenance suddenly grim. “You told her you love her?”

The palms beside Clara’s shoulder rustled, agitated by Lionel’s restless elbow as he wriggled like a guilty schoolboy. “May have done,” he muttered. “In the... umm... heat of the moment, as it were.”

His friend groaned and fell back again in his seat, impelling Clara to once again duck her head. “Of all the idiotic things to do,” he muttered. “During the twenty years we’ve known each other, has nothing I’ve told you about women penetrated your thick skull? Really, Lionel,” he added, sounding thoroughly exasperated, “you’re a hopeless business.”

“She said she loved me, and I just... I got caught up... oh, what does it matter? It’s too late for recriminations now. It’s not as if I can take the words back. So, what am I to do?”

“If you don’t want to break with her, and you don’t want to marry her, then your only course is to persuade her that what you have now is preferable to the other two alternatives,” he said, a reply that seemed to prove beyond doubt Clara’s earlier conclusion about men and their cake. “You’ll have to do it in a way that doesn’t make her feel you’re being dishonorable.”

But he is being dishonorable,Clara wanted to shout.And so are you for advising him to continue being so!

If Clara was tempted to give voice to her outrage, however, Lionel spoke before she had the chance.

“Just how am I supposed to accomplish that? It’s impossible.”

“Not impossible. It can be done. But to be honest, Lionel, I’m not sure you’re the sort who can carry it off.” He paused, and though she was not looking at him, Clara could just imagine those blue eyes giving his friend a dubious glance across the table. “It’s a tricky business.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“You’ll have to suggest breaking with her.”

“I’ve told you, I don’t want to do that.”

“I said you have to suggest it. You don’t have to actually do it. Knowing Dina, if you’re the one to suggest breaking it off, it won’t seem nearly as appealing to her.”

---