He flinched. “Proud of me? For what?”

She saw what he meant and blinked. And almost laughed. “Not that! Pride is not the emotion that comes to mind when I think of your prowess!”

“Then you have no right to feel proud of me, as if—as if you were my mother.” He spat it out.

Griselda reminded herself that young men have fierce passions, but she could feel her own temper rising. “I am not your mother, but I might as well be.”

“Stubble it!” he said, his voice slapping her. “How old are you, Griselda Willoughby? What right have you to act as if you were eighteen years my elder?”

“Perhaps not eighteen years,” Griselda said, trying to remain calm.

“Perhaps not ten,” he said, and there was a distinct edge to his voice. “Perhaps not five.”

“Nonsense!” Griselda said.

“Then I ask you again: how old are you?”

He had kissed her body in its most intimate places. Still Griselda stood motionless, her jaw set. She never talked of her age. Never.

“Griselda,” he said, low and clear. And she could see that he was enraged.

Then he turned away, as if tired of waiting for her to answer. “You, Griselda, are thirty-two. You have more than enough years, if you wish, to present me with half a dozen children. And I am twenty-seven, almost twenty-eight. There is, at the moment, five years between us.”

“You knew,” she whispered. And then: “Twenty-seven?”

“You thought I was, what, eighteen? You knew that wasn’t the case.”

“I didn’t look you up.”

“I looked you up. And had you been thirty-nine, my question would be the same. And if you’d been forty-nine. But as it is, Griselda, you can hardly claim to be my mother, given that you were all of four years old when I was born.”

“Five.”

He shrugged. “There are things far more important about me—to me—than my age. In fact, there are many reasons why you may not wish to marry me, and my age is probably the least of it.”

She stared at his back. “Why would I not wish to marry you, Darlington?”

“I am a writer.”

“What?”

She felt disjointed, as if she’d missed part of the conversation.

“I am a writer,” he repeated, turning around. “You asked how I support this house? I write.”

“Novels?”

“No. I write in a lesser genre altogether. I write stories of crimes that have really happened. I have written sensational pamphlets; I have written gallow sheets; I have written accounts that purported to be the confessions of a murderer. I have in fact written down those confessions on occasion.”

“How do you hear the confessions?”

He shrugged. “I have friends among the constabulary. I am generous with guineas when I find a good story. It’s a business that pays remarkably well. I can afford to marry you, if you would even consider such a thing.”

Still she stared at him, until his mouth twisted and he turned away. “I entirely understand that my means of living is not reputable. I am a laborer. In truth, I find it shameful myself, and my family finds it abhorrent. My father literally cannot bring himself to mention my work at all. It’s one of the reasons he is so frantic about my marital prospects. Since I am already prostituting my honor, as he sees it, I might as well engage in a more honorable version of the same.”

Griselda took a deep breath. This was all becoming far too annoying. How dare he act as if she were so shallow as to cavil at the idea of marrying a writer? Was not she the one who confessed to reading those very books? And how dare he consider her such a despicable person as to read and enjoy the genre and not honor its authors?

Meanwhile Darlington was still talking. “I write all that sensationalist prose that we were talking of last night. The murderer’s mother invariably swoons on hearing of his capture; the victim’s mother swoons on hearing of the incident. I turn all my victims into sturdy young men who would have made excellent husbands and fathers, no matter how despicable they were in real life.” He stopped.

She still hadn’t replied. It broke his heart that Griselda had nothing to say to him. He stared down at the polished surface of his dressing table, waiting with tense shoulders for the sound of the door opening and shutting again. But no: Griselda was too well bred for that. Too much a gentlewoman. She would make some excuse, she would—

A faint sound was the only thing that alerted him. He turned around to find that Griselda’s hand was on her forehead and she was swaying back and forth, clearly about to faint.

She swooned into his arms with a faint sigh that went straight to his heart. “Griselda!” he shouted. And then realized that he shouldn’t shout at her.

What the hell was going on? Could he have horrified her so much that she fainted? He looked around desperately. One was supposed to apply smelling salts when women fainted, but he didn’t have anything like that around. Could any strong smelling object work? There were onions in the kitchen.

He laid her on the bed. She was limp and still, lying there with her eyes closed. She looked stark white. It must have been a worse shock than he had imagined.

“Griselda,” he commanded, “open your eyes.”

She lay still as death. Water! That’s what he needed. He should dash water in her face. Lord knows, he’d described that scene enough. Of course there wasn’t any water in his bedchamber, so he ran through the door and down to the kitchen.

When he came back, clutching a pitcher, his guest was still limp. Weren’t women supposed to come out of it after a second or two? He began to hoist the jug in the air.

Griselda judged it was time to wake up and uttered what she considered to be an entirely fetching sound of distress. Darlington put down the pitcher, somewhat to her relief.

“Griselda,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

She allowed a slight moan to pass her lips and threw her hand up to her brow in a dramatic gesture. “Oh, can it be?”

He rubbed her hands and she could hear him swearing under his breath. She had to take a deep breath to prevent a smile from erupting. “Can you have said what I thought I heard? Surely…no! It cannot be!” That was a little repetitive, but for someone who wasn’t a writer, she was doing fairly well.

“Griselda,” Darlington said, “I am truly sorry to have caused you distress, but—”

“My lover,” she said, opening her eyes and looking up at him, “my lover is nothing more than—than a common laborer!”

“Well—”

But she didn’t let him continue. “Oh, slay me now!” she cried. “I have soiled myself. My life is ruined. My reputation, my life, my body, my…” She paused and considered whether to faint again. Instead she peeped up at him.

He was grinning down at her, all the boyish roughness of him that she loved. Because she did love that side of him.

“I gather you think you’re an actress?”

“I can write a scene as well as you can,” she told him.

“Clichéd,” he said contemptuously.

“Pot calling the kettle black!”

“My fainting women never moan,” he said.