e told me it didn’t mean anything,” Clare said, and took a sip of coffee. “As if it was okay because he didn’t love the Sears repairman. It was the same excuse my third boyfriend used when I found him with a stripper.”

“Bastard!” Adele swore, and stirred almond-flavored creamer into her cup.

“Gay or straight,” Maddie added to the conversation, “men are dogs.”

“Worse of all, he took Cindy,” Clare informed them, referring to the Yorkshire terrier she and Lonny had chosen together last year. While he’d packed his things, she’d taken a shower and changed out of her bridesmaid’s dress. Some of the items in the house were solely his or things they’d purchased together. He could have all that; she didn’t care for any reminders, but it hadn’t occurred to her that he’d wait until she was in the shower to abscond with Cindy.

“At the risk of repeating Maddie,” Lucy said as she leaned forward and poured herself more coffee, “bastard.” Lucy had been married for less than twenty-four hours, but left her groom when she’d heard about Clare’s heartache.

“Are you sure Quinn doesn’t mind your being here?” Clare asked, referring to Lucy’s husband. “I hate interrupting your honeymoon.”

“I’m positive.” She sat back and blew a cooling breath into her china cup. “I made him so extremely happy last night, he can’t quit smiling.” The corners of her lips curved up, and she added, “Besides, we don’t leave for Grand Bahama until tomorrow morning.”

Even though Clare had seen Lonny with her own eyes, she still couldn’t believe it had happened. Raw emotion burned in her veins and she vacillated between anger and pain. She shook her head and choked back tears. “I’m still in shock.”

Maddie leaned forward and set her cup and saucer on the marble and mahogany coffee table. “Honey, is it really a complete shock?”

“Of course it’s a shock.” Clare brushed moisture from her left cheek. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, we all thought he was gay.”

Her fingers stopped and she looked at her friends sitting in her living room on her great-grandmother’s sofa and armchair. “What? All of you?”

Their gazes slid away.

“For how long?”

“Since we first met him,” Adele confessed into her coffee.

“And none of you told me?”

Lucy reached for the delicate silver tongs and added a sugar cube to her cup. “None of us wanted to be the one to tell you. We love you and didn’t want to cause you pain.”

Adele added, “And we kind of figured you must already know on some level.”

“I didn’t!”

“You never suspected?” Maddie asked. “He made tables out of glass shards.”

Clare placed her free hand on the front of her white sleeveless blouse. “I thought he was creative.”

“You told us yourself the two of you didn’t have sex all that often.”

“Some men have low sex drives.”

“Not that low,” all three friends said at the same time.

“He hangs out at the Balcony Club.” Maddie frowned. “You knew that right?”

“Yes, but not all men who have a drink at the Balcony Club are gay.”

“Who told you that?”

“Lonny.”

The three friends didn’t say a word. They didn’t have to. Their raised brows spoke for them.

“He wore pink,” Lucy pointed out.

“Men wear pink these days.”

Adele scowled and shook her head. “Well, someone needs to tell them that they shouldn’t.”

“I wouldn’t date a guy in pink.” Maddie took a drink, then added, “I don’t want a man that in touch with his feminine side.”

“Quinn would never wear pink,” Lucy pointed out, and before Clare could argue further, she dropped the irrefutable proof. “Lonny cares way too much about his cuticles.”

That was true. He was obsessive about neat cuticles and perfectly trimmed nails. Clare’s hand fell to the lap of her green peasant skirt. “I just thought he was a metrosexual.”

Maddie shook her head. “Is there really such a thing as a metrosexual?”

“Or,” Adele inquired, “is that just another term for men on the down-low?”

“Men on the what-low?”

“I saw it on Oprah last year. Men on the down-low are homosexual men who pass themselves off as straight.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“I imagine it’s easier to fit into society. Or perhaps they want children. Who knows?” Adele shrugged. “I don’t care about Lonny. I care about you, and you should have told us yesterday instead of holding it all inside.”

“I didn’t want to ruin Lucy’s day.”

“You wouldn’t have ruined it,” Lucy assured her with a shake of her head, her blond ponytail brushing the collar of her blue shirt. “I did wonder if something might be up when you all went missing for a while. Then when Adele and Maddie appeared again, you weren’t with them.”

“I drank a bit too much,” Clare confessed, and was relieved when no one brought up her episode at the karaoke machine belting out “Fat Bottomed Girls” or any other embarrassing moments of the previous evening.

For a second she debated whether to tell her friends about Sebastian, but in the end she didn’t. There were just some humiliating moments a girl should keep to herself. Getting drunk and slutty at her age was one of them. You told me I was the best sex you’d ever had in your life, he’d said, and laughed as he dropped his towel. You couldn’t get enough. Yeah, some things were most definitely best taken to the grave.

“Men are so evil,” she said, thinking of Sebastian’s laughter. If there was one thing Clare hated, it was being laughed at; especially by a man. More specifically, by Sebastian Vaughan. “It’s like they can see when we’re at our lowest, our most vulnerable, then they circle and wait until just the right moment to take advantage of us.”

“That’s true. Serial killers can size up the most vulnerable in a matter of seconds,” Maddie added, causing her friends to groan inwardly. Because Maddie wrote true crime novels, she interviewed sociopaths for a living and had written about some of the most violent crimes throughout history. As a result, she tended to have a warped view of mankind and hadn’t dated in about four years. “It becomes second nature.”

“Did I tell you about my date last week?” Adele asked in an effort to change the subject before Maddie got started. Adele wrote and published science fiction and tended to date very strange men. “He’s a bartender at a little place in Hyde Park.” She laughed. “Get this, he told me that he is William Wallace reincarnated.”

“Uh-huh.” Maddie took a drink of her coffee. “Why is it that everyone who has ever claimed to be reincarnated is the reincarnation of someone famous? It’s always Joan of Arc or Christopher Columbus or Billy the Kid. It’s never some peasant girl with rotted teeth or the sailor who cleaned Chris’s chamberpot.”

“Maybe only famous people get to be reincarnated,” Lucy provided.

Maddie made a rude snorting sound. “More likely it’s all crap.”

Clare suspected the latter, and asked what she thought was the first of two pertinent questions. “Does this bartender look like Mel Gibson?”

Adele shook her head. “Afraid not.”

Now the second question, which was more important than the first. “You don’t believe him, do you?” Because sometimes she had to wonder if Adele believed what she wrote.

“Nah.” Adele shook her head, and her mass of long blond curls brushed her back. “I questioned him and he knew nothing of John Blair.”

“Who?”

“Wallace’s friend and chaplain. I had to research William Wallace for the Scottish time travel I did last year. The bartender was just trying to trick me into bed.”

“Dog.”

“Jerk.”

“Did it work?”

“No. I’m not that easily tricked these days.”

Clare thought of Lonny. She wished she could say the same. “Why do men try and trick us?” Then she answered her own questions. “Because they’re all liars and cheats.” She looked at the faces of her friends and quickly added, “Oh, sorry, Lucy. All men except for Quinn.”

“Hey,” Lucy said, and held up one hand, “Quinn isn’t quite perfect. And believe me, he wasn’t anywhere near perfect when I first met him.” She paused and a smile crept across her lips. “Well, except in the bedroom.”

“All this time,” Clare said with a shake of her head, “I thought Lonny had a really low libido, and he let me think it. I thought I wasn’t attractive enough for him, and he let me think that too. How could I have fallen in love with him? There has to be something wrong with me.”

“No, Clare,” Adele assured her. “You’re perfect just the way you are.”

“Yes.”

“It was him. Not you. And someday,” added Lucy the newlywed, “you’re going to find a great guy. Like one of those heroes you write about.”

But even after hours of reassurance, Clare still couldn’t quite believe that there wasn’t something wrong with her. Something that made her choose men like Lonny who could never love her fully.

After her friends left, she walked through her house and couldn’t recall a time when she’d felt so alone. Lonny certainly hadn’t been the only man in her life, but he had been the only man she’d moved into her home.

She walked into her bedroom and stopped in front of the dresser she’d shared with Lonny. She bit her bottom lip and crossed her arms over her heart. His things were gone, leaving half of the mahogany top bare. His cologne and personal grooming brushes. His photo of her and Cindy, and the shallow bowl he’d kept for Chap Stick and stray buttons. All gone.

Her vision blurred but she refused to cry, fearing that once she started, she would not stop. The house was so utterly quiet, the only sound that of the air-conditioning blowing from the vents. No sound of her little dog as she barked at the neighborhood cats or of her fiancé as he worked on his latest craft.

She opened a drawer that had kept his neatly folded trouser socks. The drawer was empty, and she took a few steps back and sat on the edge of the bed. Overhead, a lacy canopy cut shadowy patterns across her arms and the lap of her green skirt. In the past twenty-four hours she’d experienced every emotion. Hurt. Anger. Sorrow. Confusion and loss. Then panic and horror. At the moment she was numb and so tired she could probably sleep for the coming week. She’d like that. Sleep until the pain went away.

When she’d returned home that morning from the Double Tree, Lonny had been waiting for her. He’d begged her to forgive him.

“It was just that once,” he said. “It won’t happen again. We can’t throw away what we have because I messed up. It didn’t mean anything. It was just sex.”

When it came to relationships, Clare had never understood the whole concept of meaningless sex. If a person wasn’t involved with someone, that was different, but she didn’t understand how a man could be in love with a woman and yet have sex with someone else. Oh, she understood desire and attraction. But she just couldn’t comprehend how a person, gay or straight, could hurt the one they professed to love for sex that meant nothing.

“We can work through this. I swear it just happened that once,” Lonny said, as if he repeated it enough, she’d believe him. “I love our life.”

Yes, he loved their life. He just hadn’t loved her. There had been a time in her life when she actually might have listened. It wouldn’t have changed the outcome, but she would have thought she had to listen. When she might have tried to believe him, or think she needed to understand him, but not today. She was through being the queen of denial. Through investing so much of her life with men who couldn’t thoroughly invest theirs.

“You lied to me, and you used me in order to live that lie,” she’d told him. “I won’t live your lie anymore.”

When he realized he wasn’t going to change her mind, he’d behaved like a typical man and got nasty. “If you’d been more adventurous, I wouldn’t have had to look outside the relationship.”

The more Clare thought about it, the more she was certain it had been the same excuse her third boyfriend had used when she’d caught him with the stripper. Instead of acting ashamed, he had invited her to join them.

Clare didn’t think it was outrageous or selfish for her to want to be enough for the man she loved. No third parties. No whips and chains, and no scary devices.

No, Lonny wasn’t the first man in her life to break her heart. He was just the latest. There had been her first love, Allen. Then Josh, a drummer in a bad band. There’d been Sam, a base jumper and extreme mountain biker, followed by Rod, the lawyer, and Zack the felon. Each subsequent boyfriend had been different from the last, but in the end, whether she broke it off or they had, none of the relationships ever lasted.

She wrote of love. Big, sweeping, larger-than-life love stories. But she was such an utter failure when it came to love in her real life. How could she write about it? Know it and feel it, yet get it so wrong? Time and again?

What was wrong with her?

Were her friends right? Had she known on some subconscious level that Lonny was gay? Had she known even as she’d made excuses for him? Even as she’d accepted his excuse for his lack of sexual interest? Even as she’d blamed herself?

Clare looked into the mirror above the dresser, at the dark circles beneath her eyes. Hollow. Empty. Like Lonny’s sock drawer. Like her life. Everything was gone. She’d lost so much in the past two days. Her fiancé and her dog. Her belief in soul mates and her mother’s two carat diamond earring.

She’d noticed the missing earring shortly after arriving home that morning. It would take some doing, but she could find a matching diamond to replace the one she’d lost. Finding something to replace the emptiness wasn’t going to be as easy.

Despite her exhaustion, an urge to run out and fill the void forced her to her feet. A mental list of all the things she needed flew through her head. She needed a winter coat. It was August, but if she didn’t hurry, the wool coat she’d seen on bebe.com would be sold out. And she needed the new Coach bag she’d had her eye on at Macy’s. In black to match the bebe coat. Or red…or both. Since she’d be at Macy’s, she’d pick up some Estée Lauder mascara and Benefits Browzing for her brows. She was running low on both.

On the way to the mall she’d stop at Wendy’s and order a biggie fry with extra powdered salt. She’d get a gooey cinnamon roll from Mrs. Powell’s, then swing into See’s for a pound of toffee and…

Clare sat back down on the bed and resisted her urge to fill the emptiness with things. Food. Clothes. Men. If she was truly through being the queen of denial, she had to look at her life and admit that stuffing her face, filling her closet, and reaching for a man had never helped fill the terrifying hole in her chest. Not in the long run, and in the end she was left with a few pounds that forced her into the gym, clothes that went out of style, and an empty sock drawer.

Perhaps she needed a psychiatrist. Someone objective to look inside her head and tell her what was wrong with her and how to fix her life.

Maybe all she needed was a long vacation. She most definitely needed a time out from junk food, credit cards, and men. She thought of Sebastian and the white towel wrapped around his hips. She needed a long break from anything with testosterone.

She was physically tired and emotionally bruised, and if she were honest with herself, still a little hung over. She raised a hand to her aching head and took a vow to stay away from alcohol and men, at least until she figured out her life. Until she had a moment of clarity. The ta-da moment when everything made sense again.

Clare stood and wrapped her arms around the bedpost and the swag of Belgian lace. Her heart and pride were in shreds, but those were all things from which she would recover.

There was something else. Something she had to take care of first thing in the morning. Something potentially serious.

Something that scared her more than an uncertain future with no shopping sprees and salty fries. And that was no future at all.

Vashion Elliot, Duke of Rathstone, stood with his hands behind his back as he lowered his gaze from the blue feather in Miss Winters’ bonnet to her serious green eyes.

Clare’s fingers hovered over the keys as she glanced at the time displayed at the bottom right of her computer monitor.

Miss Winters was pretty enough, despite the stubborn tilt of her chin. Pretty he could do without. The last pretty female in his life had displayed an excess of passion, in and out of bed, that he would not soon forget. Of course, that female had been his former mistress. Not a buttoned-up, prim and proper governess.

“I was lately in the employment of Lord and Lady Pomfrey. Governess to their three sons.”

Her pelisse swallowed her slight frame and she looked as if a strong wind might carry her off. He wondered if she were stronger than she appeared. As stubborn as her chin implied. If he decided to hire her, she’d have to be. The fact that she stood in his study showed a certain strength and determination of character that he usually found lacking in the opposite sex.

“Yes. Yes.” He waved an impatient hand over her letters of recommendation before him on his desk. “Since you are here, I assume you read my advertisement.”

“Yes.”

He came around his desk and pulled at the cuffs of his brown frock coat. He knew that he was considered tall and unfashionably built from many long hours of physical labor spent both on his estates in Devon and on his ship, the Louisa. “Then you are aware that if an occasion arises that requires travel, I expect to take my daughter with me.” He wasn’t certain, but he thought he detected a spark in those serious eyes looking back, as if the thought of travel excited her.

“Yes, your grace.”

Clare wrote several more pages before she paused in her writing of The Dangerous Duke, the third book in her governess series. At nine A.M. she reached for the telephone. She’d lain awake most of the night, dreading this call. The thing she dreaded most, more than packing up the few reminders of Lonny, was calling Dr. Linden’s office.

She punched the seven numbers, and when the receptionist picked up, she said, “I need to make an appointment, please.”

“Are you a patient of Dr. Linden?”

“Yes. My name is Clare Wingate.”

“Do you need to see the doctor, or do you need an appointment with Dana, the nurse practitioner?”

She wasn’t sure. She’d never done this before. She opened her mouth to just spit it out. To just say it. Her throat got dry and she swallowed. “I don’t know.”

“I see that you had your yearly exam in April. Do you suspect that you’re pregnant?”

“No…no. I…I recently found something out. I caught my…well, I discovered my boyfriend…I mean my former boyfriend has been unfaithful.” She took a deep breath and placed her free hand on her throat. Beneath her fingers her pulse pounded. This was crazy. Why was she having such a hard time? “So…I need to be tested for…you know. HIV.” Nervous laugher escaped her dry throat. “I mean, I don’t think it’s likely, but I have to know for sure. He said he cheated just the one time and used protection, but can you really trust a cheater?” Good lord. She’d gone from stammering to rambling. “As soon as possible, please.”

“Let me look.” From the other end of the line several taps on a keyboard, and then, “We’ll get you in as soon as possible. I have a cancellation with Dana on Thursday. Is four-thirty okay?”

Thursday. Three days. It was an eternity. “That’s fine.” Silence filled the line, and Clare forced herself to ask, “How long will it take?”

“The test? Not long. You’ll have the results before you leave the office.”

When she hung up the phone, she leaned back in her chair and stared straight ahead at her computer screen. She’d told the receptionist the truth. She really didn’t believe Lonny had exposed her to anything, but she was an adult and had to know for sure one way or the other. Her fiancé had been unfaithful, and if she’d caught him in the closet with a woman, she would have made the call too. Cheating was cheating. And despite what Sebastian had said, the fact that she didn’t have male “equipment” didn’t make it easier.

Her forehead felt tight and she raised her hands and massaged her temples. It wasn’t even ten A.M. and she had a massive headache. Her life was a mess and it was all Lonny’s fault. She had to get tested for something that could take her life, and she wasn’t the one who’d messed around. She was monogamous. Always. She didn’t hop into bed with…

Sebastian.

Her hands fell to her lap. She had to tell Sebastian. The thought made her throbbing temples just about burst. She didn’t know if they’d used a condom, and she had to tell him.

Or not. More than likely the test would be negative. She should wait to say anything until she found out the results herself. She probably wouldn’t have to tell him at all. What were the chances he’d have sex with someone else between now and Thursday? A vison of him dropping his towel entered her head.

Very likely, she concluded, and reached for a bottle of aspirin she kept in her desk drawer.