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Poppy didn’t love hionish e The e had been all his, which laid painfully bare the reasons for their pitiful intimacies She didn’t love him; of course she didn’t desire him

The rain was suddenly hot on his face, a hot drop here, a cold drizzle there

"But I loved her" Fletch said it out loud, into the silence of the gray rain "I was in love with her" That Christo in Paris was emblazoned in his memory "I loved her I--I--" But he stopped before he said that he still loved her

She didn’t want him in the most fundamental way She told him to find a mistress

He walked until his heart was as dreary as the sky, until some sort of truth came to him

He must be cursed, because he still loved her He loved his wife Even so

And that meant that he couldn’t survive alone for five years as Poppy suggested He couldn’t lie awake in the , as she dancing Naturalists, for God’s sake Out of all the things herthe most

Poppy was infatuated with that Dr Loudan, for exa up dead rodents for exa himself into someone he wasn’t, all to catch her eye But she wanted spectacles He pulled off his hat, raised his head and the rain sluiced over his face, over his carefully tuers

He had to do so with his life, make himself into the kind of man whom she would admire She would never desire him; he accepted that The scorn he saw in her eyes as she compared him to the professor…that was a scorn he felt for his would surely ihtly with further practice, but they had little to do with the fierce desire he felt, with the way his body longed to make love to her

Yet he wasn’t the sort of man to be unfaithful He couldn’t take a courtesan, or even a lady, to bed The truth was that he didn’t want athe rain beat into the back of his neck

He could survive without Poppy in his bed

But he couldn’t survive without her in his life She had to come home He would promise that he’d never visit her room until they decided to have children And he would pro

He’d spent the last few years sulking He had to give Lady Flora credit for that observation He’d sulked because life hadn’t turned out the way he thought it should Enough Enough thinking about French woeneral In fact, the hell with desire

Monks did it, didn’t they? He didn’t need sex in order to be a man What he needed--what he needed was Poppy Because for soe, stupid reason, she felt like the coffee he drank in the

He needed her

He turned around and started back for the carriage He would make himself into someone she would be proud of, someone asn’t interested only in the cut of his coat and the sheen of his hair

If he admitted the truth to himself, he wanted to be one of the most important men in the House of Lords He wanted to make a difference to the country, to be a man whose words were feared and welcomed, like his father’s had been

Then he would dispense with Lady Flora, which would be his gift to Poppy

And finally he would lure her back to the house, before Christain

And then so him the way she used to The way she loved him that Christmas in Paris, when she looked at him as if he were the world to her

When she loved him

Chapter 32