Page 111 of A Portrait of Love

His wife.

“Hell,” he muttered, topping up his glass from the almost empty bottle, filling it all the way to the rim.

As addled as Bella had made him, it had taken him almost until the end of their brief visit to shake himself from his fugue and see that she was bent on mischief. She’d all but ignored Honoria, fawning over Simon and Heyworth, remind him suddenly of how she’d always behaved when other women were around: dismissively.

He recalled that she’d claimed to be a victim of feminine jealousy. As beautiful as she was, he suspected there was a grain of truth to her assertion. But he thought she worsened the situation by always seeking to be the center of attention.

By the time Simon had gathered his wits and disengaged his party from her, Honey had become as cool and aloof as she’d been before Brighton, which told him that somebody had informed her about Bella and her place in his past.

Simon suspected his mother. Wyndham would not want Bella’s name mentioned or her existence acknowledged—and Honey wouldn’t speak to him, anyway.

He closed his eyes and thought about his encounter with Bella today. He would need to speak to her again—alone, this time. She could not continue to ambush him—or, God forbid, Honey—the way she’d done today.

While it was true that he’d been stunned to see her after all these years, that had only been his initial reaction. What had truly rattled him was the tangled barrage of memories her face had unleashed. It had been too much, too fast.

He suspected that he’d appeared tongue-tied and besotted, when, in reality, he’d simply been overwhelmed.

She had walked out of his life fourteen years earlier without a word to him. Only that letter, a letter that—remarkably—he’d somehow managed to hold on to all these years, although it had been ages since he’d taken out the short missive and re-read it.

He glanced at it now, where it lay open on his desk. Unlike in the past, reading it no longer incited his anger.

He felt … nothing.

Simon let his drink-addled mind wander, unsurprised when it led him hip-deep into a flood of memories.

Chief among them was an image of Bella at seventeen, rising from his tattered, turbulent memory like Venus emerging from the waves. Only more beautiful.

He’d been eighteen and it was to be a summer of freedom before he went to Oxford. Simon didn’t want to go—he was an indifferent student at best—but Wyndham had insisted he give it at least two years before he would consider Simon’s plans for Everley.

At first, he’d been disgruntled, but then he realized he would enjoy the freedom of university, which he planned to fill with entertainment rather than studies.

He’d come home to find his cousin, Raymond, dogging his every step. Although Raymond was a year older than Simon, he had always behaved like a far younger man.

Raymond had finished school and returned to Whitcomb the year before. Wyndham took his responsibilities as the head of the family seriously and he’d personally set about teaching Raymond estate management. Simon knew that the duke had always given Raymond and Simon the same allowance but wanted Raymond to have a skill that would keep him from being dependent.

Whereas Simon would inherit his own estate and money when he came of age, there was nothing like that waiting for Raymond, who’d been left destitute by his feckless gambler of a father.

While Simon was anticipating university, Raymond had taken up a position as Wyndham’s steward and spent his time traveling between the duke’s six estates.

Simon hadn’t believed Raymond had the brains for such work, but he could see that Wyndham’s faith in his skills made his cousin happy. Because they were so close in age, they had always spent their school breaks riding, carousing, and wenching together.

But, for some reason, Raymond had gotten on his nerves that summer and Simon found himself constantly escaping the other man’s cloying attention.

He’d been out riding the estate when he’d come upon Bella. It had been years since he’d last seen her, not since before he went to Eton, which would have made him eight or nine.

She’d been reading in the small gazebo that overlooked the stream. His brother had built it and allowed everyone in the area to use it.

She’d looked up, surprise in her wide green eyes, her impossibly red lips curving. He still recalled how her beauty had robbed him of his wits and words.

“Simon, I’d heard you were back.”

Even back then he’d wondered if that was why she’d chosen such an improbable place to read—because she knew he rode that way.

But the cynical thought had evaporated, burnt away by her beauty after he’d dismounted and they had chatted.

That was the first of many chats they had that summer. She should have had a Season but her elder sisters had both been out for several years and had not yet formed suitable attachments.

“I will never get my turn,” she’d told him more than once, heaving a sigh that made her plump bosom swell to twice its size.