Regency
Courtship & Candlelight
One Final Season
Elizabeth Beacon

The Gentleman’s Quest
Deborah Simmons

www.millsandboon.co.uk

One Final Season

About the Author

ELIZABETH BEACON lives in the beautiful English west country and is finally putting her insatiable curiosity about the past to good use. Over the years Elizabeth has worked in her family’s horticultural business, become a mature student, qualified as an English teacher, worked as a secretary and, briefly, tried to be a civil servant. She is now happily ensconced behind her computer, when not trying to exhaust her bouncy rescue dog with as many walks as the inexhaustible lurcher can finagle. Elizabeth can’t bring herself to call researching the wonderfully diverse, scandalous Regency period and creating charismatic heroes and feisty heroines work, and she is waiting for someone to find out how much fun she is having and tell her to stop it.

Chapter One

‘Lord Shuttleworth!’ Eiliane, the Marchioness of Pemberley and formerly Lady Rhys, exclaimed as she recognised with unaffected delight the vigorous young gentleman strolling towards them across Lady Finchley’s ballroom. ‘What a pleasure to see you again; it seems such an age since I saw you that I hardly recognised you.’

‘I would have known you anywhere, my lady, and must offer my belated congratulations on your remarriage,’ the most desirable viscount currently on the marriage mart replied easily, whilst briefly eyeing the lady at Eiliane Pemberley’s side as if trying to place her. ‘Miss Alstone, I trust you are well?’

‘Very well indeed, I thank you, my lord,’ Kate Alstone replied coolly, for if he hoped to fluster her by watching her with frost and mockery in his grey-green eyes he was doomed to disappointment.

‘Nonsense,’ Eiliane swept on, as if she had no idea Kate and Lord Shuttleworth had the least reason to be awkward together and were being over-polite out of sheer perversity. ‘You sent a very proper letter and a handsome present, one I didn’t have to consign to the back parlour for my own peace of mind, either, in case it gave me nightmares. You should see the epergne my new sister-in-law chose, probably for that purpose! Kate saw it—isn’t it a horror, my dear?’

‘Indeed it is, but perhaps we’d better not let her know we said so.’

‘Shuttleworth won’t tell her, and he’s sure to agree with me when he finally sees it anyway; such a pity you couldn’t attend our wedding, my boy, although it was a very quiet affair as Pemberley and I were both married before.’

‘Aye, a very quiet affair for about two hundred of your closest friends,’ Kate muttered darkly, casting her far-too-innocent-looking friend and mentor a sharp look as she realised she’d invited Lord Shuttleworth to her wedding last summer and not told her chief bridesmaid.

Not that he’d condescended to accept, she added to her silent displeasure with both of them, because he doubtless knew she would be included in Eiliane’s vast adoptive family and obviously had no desire to meet or converse with her. That much had become very clear when she’d glimpsed him exiting the first evening party she’d attended this Season very shortly after she had arrived with a group of friends. Then there had been a trip to the theatre when he’d chosen to visit a box no lady could dream of drifting into by design or accident and she wasn’t fool enough to think he hadn’t noticed her sitting in the one opposite. Watching him enjoy the company of one of the highest steppers of the demimonde and her current keeper had, Kate told herself, been almost amusing. If his lordship wanted it to make it perfectly plain he hadn’t been wearing the willow for Kate these last three years, he was quite welcome to do so. At the very least it would provide an antidote to the ennui yet another Season might have held for her without his antics enlivening it.

‘And you know perfectly well that keeping it to even that number took the wisdom of Solomon and the tact of a whole diplomatic corps,’ Eiliane reminded her friend, with a reminiscent shudder at the very thought of arranging her own wedding to her and her new lord’s satisfaction.

‘Oh, I do,’ Kate agreed fervently, since she’d been caught up in trying to defuse far too many arguments once the Marquis’s relatives realised their twenty or thirty closest friends would not be added to the guest list so they could boast of attending the most exclusive and fiercely anticipated society wedding of the year.

‘Still, it’s done now,’ Eiliane said of her triumphant second marriage to a man who adored her as fervently as she did him.

Kate wondered how anyone could begrudge them such happiness and was secretly pleased that Edmund Worth obviously did not, at least if the warmth of his smile as he eyed her rather smug-looking friend was anything to go by.

‘Again, I congratulate you on that fact very sincerely,’ he said as a prelude to moving on, but Eiliane wasn’t going to let him escape so lightly.

‘We will see you later, no doubt, as nobody could describe this affair as a crush and it’ll be impossible to avoid bumping into one’s friends all night, don’t you think?’ she said artlessly.

‘I do my best to avoid anything so unfashionable,’ he returned blandly, but Kate could see the tension about his firm mouth and the hunted expression in those silvery-green eyes even if her most partisan supporter wouldn’t.

Eiliane deployed her most unexpected weapon, an awkward silence she quite failed to fill in her usual easy manner.

‘I think I see Julia Deben over there, Eiliane; perhaps we should join her before someone else annexes the best seats in the room and you’re left with a mere rout chair,’ Kate managed in the hope of filling that horrible quietness and giving his lordship an excuse to go.

‘Will you do me the honour of promising me a dance tonight, Miss Alstone?’ The wretched man seemed to take perverse pleasure in asking her after all.

She silently handed over her dance card, refusing to gush or let him know the idea of dancing with him filled her with far more dismay than he could ever be allowed to know. Once they’d danced together so easily, their steps so harmonious there was no need to think about it. It had been the one thing they agreed on without any effort at all, and now even that would be blighted by his profound dislike of her. He handed the card back and she saw he’d put his initials beside two dances with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Now she must endure two cold and indifferent waltzes with him—the very prospect made her shiver.

‘Until later then, Miss Alstone, Lady Pemberley,’ he said with an elegant bow and a social smile that made Kate’s heart ache for some odd reason.

She managed to curtsy with equal elegance and flash just as bland and indifferent a smile. ‘Later, Lord Shuttleworth,’ she managed to agree airily and kept that mere upturn of her lips in place for several moments after he walked away, lest anyone see her flinch at how her formerly impassioned suitor had grown so cold and distant towards her.

‘Are you actually going to find yourself a husband this Season or not, Katherine Alstone?’ Eiliane demanded with would-be carelessness that didn’t deceive Kate one iota about which particular one she had in mind, despite Viscount Shuttleworth’s obvious antipathy to the very idea.

They strolled across the room to greet friends and acquaintances, whilst Kate considered her answer and tried to tease Edmund Worth out of her errant thoughts. How very like Eiliane to ask the question nobody else dared, just when she didn’t want to be asked most.

‘Maybe,’ Kate replied cautiously as Eiliane plumped down on an elegant sofa. She fervently hoped nobody else would be able to hear the conversation she’d been trying not to have for a week or more against the babel of noise caused by musicians tuning up and the general hum of greetings and gossip.

‘Well, if you’re not sure, I might as well make a superb match for your sister Isabella while you make up your mind if you want marriage and a family of your own, or would prefer a lifetime of dull spinsterhood and worthy causes. Miranda and I have wasted three years of effort on you between us already, and I’m not inclined to seek out a man you won’t turn your nose up at if you have no intention of marrying him when I finally manage to find him,’ Eiliane continued relentlessly, just as if the most eligible gentleman Kate had ever refused to marry hadn’t just crossed their path again mere minutes ago to remind them what a fool she was.

‘How kind of you to point out that I’m one and twenty and almost on the shelf, Eiliane, but you’ll have to wait for Izzie to recover from the mumps first.’

Her so-called friend waved the exquisitely painted fan her besotted husband of nearly a year had presented her with before he’d left her alone in London for a whole week—barring his entire London staff, Kate herself and Eiliane’s legion of friends, of course.

‘The Season’s hardly begun yet, so if your sister is a week or two late in arriving it will only add to the sensation she’ll cause when she does get here. I feel I can safely predict that dearest Isabella will be proclaimed a diamond of the first water the instant the gentlemen of the ton set eyes on her.’

‘Of course she will be,’ Kate agreed equably, ‘but I still don’t intend to snap up any available bachelor who crosses your path before she arrives to eclipse me.’

‘Sometimes, Kate Alstone, you make me completely furious,’ Eiliane accused contrarily. ‘You just will not realise your looks are out of the common run and none the worse for being unusual. You’d have been the toast of St James’s ever since you came out if you’d just hold your tongue and simper winningly for once. The gentlemen quake in their shoes when they’re rash enough to pay you a compliment and receive one of your waspish disclaimers instead of a polite smile for their pains.’

‘And I suppose you always held your tongue and smiled until your cheeks ached when you were a débutante, your ladyship?’

‘I was different,’ her ladyship admitted with a reminiscent smile that made Kate wonder just how different her chaperon had been and envy her a little.

‘You still are,’ she replied with her real smile that always showed the warmth of her affection for the recipient and this time made Eiliane chuckle, despite the apparent urgency of her quest to marry Kate off.

‘Well, if you say so, my love, although I never had any looks to speak of, and only got dear Sir Ned Rhys and then my darling Pemberley to look at me twice by being good company, instead of twittering at them endlessly as the mercenary females who flocked round like a pack of vultures insisted on doing.’

‘And you’re always so outstandingly modest with it.’

‘Any woman who is wilfully ignorant of her own advantages constitutes a danger to herself and every sentient male who has the misfortune to set eyes on her,’ Eiliane announced with queenly dignity and a significant look in her direction Kate managed to pretend she hadn’t seen.

‘Izzie hasn’t the smallest chance of being unaware of her looks when most of the unattached gentlemen of the ton will line up to tell her what she can easily see in her own mirror,’ she said cheerfully, for she’d never envied either of her sisters their spectacular looks. ‘Not that she’ll relish the sort of nonsense the silliest will pour over her at every turn when she does finally arrive. So the answer to your very rude question, Lady Pemberley, is that, yes, I must marry if I don’t want to become an antidote, and finding me a suitable gentleman to wed will prevent you foisting some handsome idiot on my little sister out of sheer ennui,’ Kate said, eyeing one such gentleman who’d proposed once, all too certain he’d succeed where others had failed.

‘You’ve kept too many of his ilk at a distance for too long, Kate my love.’

‘I’d certainly never encourage such a straw man,’ Kate replied, but the prospect of her fourth London Season had made her think very hard about what she wanted out of life before she’d come to town this year.

Over the long winter months she’d decided mutual interests and a sincere friendship with her future husband would last longer than an uncomfortable heat and irrational passion disguised as love. Of course, she was too cool and sceptical a lady now to feel that sort of midsummer madness for a gentleman anyway and, imagining how that sensible decision would be applauded by most noble families, she gave vent to a long-suffering sigh.

Her own family didn’t even seem to realise how tedious it could be to be watched with misty-eyed speculation whenever she met a new gentleman. ‘Would this be The One?’ they seemed to ask themselves constantly and Kate had even detected signs of such mawkishness in her brother-in-law, Christopher Alstone, Earl of Carnwood, of late. She’d always thought him far too hard-headed and cynical to think that because he’d made a love match, she must necessarily want to do the same.

His marriage to her elder sister Miranda demonstrated that passionate love existed, of course, and then her one-time governess had tumbled headlong into love with Kit’s best friend and business partner, Ben Shaw, to prove it beyond all doubt. Ben and Charlotte clearly adored each other, for all they sparred constantly, and now even Ben’s natural father and dear Eiliane Rhys had joined in the conspiracy and wed each other at last. Yes, love obviously wasn’t a myth, but she’d seen the damage it could do as well and had no intention of succumbing to such an unreliable emotion herself.

‘Any woman in search of an amenable husband should discount that one immediately,’ she added distractedly, considering the idiotic man striking a pose nearby and wishing she could recall his name. Meeting Shuttleworth seemed to have interfered with her memory as well as her ability to think rationally. ‘I want a gentleman good-natured and polite enough to make me an amiable husband, not one with too high an opinion of himself to treat me with any consideration.’

‘Advantages we have wasted our breath pointing out to you in various gentlemen until we’re nigh hoarse for the last three years and in all that time you’ve proved as indifferent as a marble statue. If you don’t mean to fall in love, at least banish the thought of such a wicked travesty of marriage from your mind this instant, Katherine Alstone. You possess completely the wrong temperament for a cold and businesslike alliance and would be wretched within a month if you made one,’ Eiliane Pemberley pronounced in a fierce whisper that spoke volumes of her disapproval and her new position, for she’d never harm her husband’s public dignity, even if she had little concern for her own. ‘Besides which, I couldn’t bear to watch you belittle yourself and whomever you chose to make miserable for the rest of your lives. Most men deserve better than that from a wife, Kate, even if you don’t seem to think you do from a husband for some odd reason.’

‘Most of our kind think it perfectly normal to feel no more than friendship and a polite affection for their spouse,’ Kate muttered mulishly, ‘and all those deluded gentlemen must actually want to marry me, since they keep begging me to say yes.’

‘Which is precisely why they’re so unsuited to make a so-called convenient husband, although, given the way you treat them, I can’t but wish the lot of them would come to their senses and teach you a lesson or two in humility.’

‘I’m always perfectly civil,’ Kate said defensively.

‘When you don’t happen to be busy, or would like a personable gentleman to squire you about a ballroom while you flirt and gossip with no fear of comeback. That’s not civility; it’s cynical exploitation.’

A strong sense of justice forced Kate to reluctantly agree that she took her admirers for granted. Only one of them had ever tempted her to yield to his urgent wooing and marry him and she’d treated Edmund Worth, Lord Shuttleworth, so abominably in order to fend off his increasingly passionate demands that he’d left London before the end of her first Season and not indulged in another until now. Let Eiliane know that particular dark secret and she’d throw Kate at the unfortunate man’s head and embarrass both of them beyond bearing.

Not that he fitted any description of an unfortunate man she’d ever come across. He was noble, wealthy and an unusually intelligent gentleman of wit and character. Three years ago his youthful intensity and fiery devotion had frightened Kate into insulting brusqueness, borne of an irrational fear that he could too easily steal her heart, just as her elder sister’s treacherous first husband had cynically taken hers and then trampled on it ruthlessly and even gleefully, before callously deserting her in the most appalling circumstances.

Now she was one and twenty and still unwed, even if that was by her own choice. With the added disadvantage of flaming red hair she still found annoying after twenty-one years of living with it, even possessed as she was of the famous dark blue Alstone eyes and just enough height to render her graceful, Kate thought of herself as an oddity. She formed part of a close circle of family and friends who only wanted her to be happy, yet perhaps she just didn’t deserve to be so after breaking a young man’s heart so callously once upon a time?

Watching Shuttleworth avoid a matchmaking mama with a preoccupied nod, she wondered where her wits had gone wandering off to three years ago. If she’d only seen a hasty, impulsively passionate and rather callow youth in the man he’d been then, didn’t that make her almost as headstrong and foolish as her sister Miranda had been at seventeen when she’d fallen in ‘love’ with a man so unworthy of her he wasn’t fit to kiss the hem of her gown after a muddy walk? If she had been wilfully blind in her determination not to follow Miranda’s example, could that mean Lord Shuttleworth might have been the love of her life and her ideal husband, if only she’d had the courage to say yes to him three years ago? Indeed, had the passionate sincerity of his youthful determination to wed her been the real reason her suitors ever since had seemed so colourless and interchangeable that she felt not a single qualm about refusing any of them?

His lordship had clearly got over any lingering infatuation he’d ever felt for her while he was away, since it had taken him two evening parties and a night at the play to find time to reintroduce himself to her after three years of absence. Tonight it would have been rude beyond anything his gentlemanly instincts could endure to ignore her in Eiliane’s company, but all the time they’d been together he’d watched her with cynical grey eyes, their irises rayed with a silvery jade green that she couldn’t recall studying quite so diligently in the past. Her heart had actually fluttered under his steely scrutiny; she’d felt it and cursed it for being so susceptible as she curtsied and observed his elegant bow and finely tuned indifference to whatever she might feel upon meeting him again.

‘Perhaps I became useful to some of the eligible bachelors somewhere along the way,’ she mused absently to Eiliane now. ‘A safe habit we have fallen into on either side without noting it. They know I shall turn down their suit, so they feel safe declaring themselves my slaves and proposing to me in the certainty I’ll refuse.’

‘And you truly think that sort of habit would make a suitable basis for a lifetime commitment to love and honour a man if you broke it and shocked and perhaps horrified him by accepting him at last, Kate? It sounds a nightmare to me when you’re young and full of promise and would do so much better if you’d only look for happiness within this theoretical marriage you’re contemplating so coolly,’ Eiliane retorted.

‘Love can’t always be a bolt of lightning.’ Kate defended herself rather uncomfortably, because all of a sudden it seemed rather a sterile scheme to marry for less even to her. ‘Sometimes I dare say it needs time to grow into something much more comfortable and this year I might meet a man I can respect for his integrity and honour as well as his sense of duty. Mama and Papa made a marriage of convenience, don’t forget, and they seemed happy enough together.’

‘They made the best they could of second-best, my girl, being people of wit and character. It was their love for their children that gradually bound them together, rather than any great passion for each other, and I know for a fact that your mother loved a man her family deemed unsuitable for her until the end of her days.’

‘Oh, so it’s all her fault then, is it?’ Kate asked impetuously, finding someone to blame for the streak of passionate recklessness that ran through the Alstone sisters like a fault line in a mining seam, then she realised what she’d given away and could have kicked herself. Give Eiliane such a promising bone to worry at and she wouldn’t rest until it was stripped bare of all sorts of possibilities.

‘I knew it!’ Eiliane exclaimed, as Kate winced. But at least her so-called friend’s shrewd gaze had slewed away from Lord Shuttleworth, which was some consolation, for it now being centred so mercilessly on her instead, she supposed ruefully. ‘You’re terrified of falling in love with a handsome face, then bitterly regretting it, just as your sister did so disastrously, aren’t you?’ Lady Pemberley accused her triumphantly, as if she’d won a significant battle and Kate must now admit love was vital to a happy marriage after all.

‘Of course not,’ she lied hotly, but felt her cheeks flush and cursed her telltale redhead’s complexion.

‘You are, my girl, and you wouldn’t be prattling to me about marriages of so-called sense if you were not cravenly terrified of letting your heart rule your head. What you should do if you possess even a sliver of good sense is use this Season to find the man you’ll love and respect for the rest of your days together, before it’s too late. If you meet that man after you’ve contracted some hollow alliance with another, you’ll condemn both him and your unfortunate lover to a lifetime of suspicion and misery, as well as putting your very soul in jeopardy into the bargain!’

‘Stop overdramatising everything. I possess a much colder nature than my mother or either of my sisters,’ Kate insisted and Eiliane just raised her darkened eyebrows sceptically and refused to be drawn. ‘Because I was born with this unfortunate-coloured hair, everyone thinks I’ve got fiery passions to go with it, and you’re all quite mistaken!’ Kate told her crossly, wishing even her nearest and dearest would stop falling back on the ridiculous cliché that redheads always had temperaments to match their fiery colouring.

‘Having watched you grow from a babe in arms into an intelligent, beautiful and often exasperating young woman, Katherine Alstone, I do believe I know your true nature far better than you do yourself,’ Eiliane said slowly, as if she’d just discovered the key to a conundrum that had long been puzzling her.

‘Then you’ll also know how much I don’t want to be engulfed by a grand passion, or become pale and interesting as I pine uselessly for a man who might well pass me by without a second glance,’ Kate defended herself uncomfortably.

‘I suppose we might find a gentleman who’s either too preoccupied with another woman, or too blind or daft to be knocked all of a heap by your youth, beauty and usually shining intelligence and wit, if we searched the whole kingdom for him diligently enough, my love, but very few men will ever pass you by without a glance, I can assure you,’ Eiliane said with a knowing smile. ‘And love won’t kill you, you know, Kate. I’ve endured it twice now and found it quite breathtakingly wonderful both times. Indeed, I consider myself exceptionally blessed to find it twice, even if I am rather a superannuated wife for poor Pemberley to lay claim to.’

‘Nonsense, he was lucky indeed to win you and well he knows it,’ Kate responded hotly, ready to argue black was white in order to see someone she loved as much as Eiliane happy again. ‘It’s just that I can’t bear the idea of depending on someone else for my happiness, Eiliane, not that I don’t believe in the possibility of love for anyone else.’

‘Which is ridiculous if you’ll only think about it a little harder, Kate. Indeed, it’s totally illogical if we’re going to go about this in the cool way you seem to favour.’

‘I know, but I can’t seem to change my mind, even with so many examples of wedded bliss in front of me to form a corrective,’ she told Eiliane ruefully.

‘I blame myself,’ her friend replied gloomily, ‘I should have insisted on wrenching the two of you from your grandfather’s custody as soon as your sister Miranda turned up on my doorstep one morning with such woe and misery in her poor sad eyes that I knew he wasn’t fit to look after a couple of kittens, let alone three vulnerable and lively young girls.’

‘Don’t do that to yourself, love, for none of it was your fault and how could you have removed us from Wychwood without kidnapping us? Once someone eventually noticed we were gone there would have been a fearsome uproar and my aunt would have insisted we return to even less freedom than we had to start with. Don’t ever blame yourself for any of what happened when we were children, dearest Eiliane. And if not for you, we would never have been sent to school, so just think what we would have missed in dear Charlotte Wells, as we all thought she was then.’

‘Aye, that’s true, Charlotte is a darling girl and exactly the right wife for my new son, for all Ben wouldn’t thank me for naming him so, since he’s far too big and self-sufficient to stand in the least need of even an unofficial stepmother, but Charlotte couldn’t make up for the neglect of your entire family, Kate. You have such a vast capacity for love, my dear, it seems an appalling waste that it might be lost or misplaced in some insipid and bloodless marriage when you could have so much more if you let yourself believe you could safely fall in love.’

If all three Alstone sisters had been born plain as porridge and wall-eyed, they’d still be beautiful to the Marchioness of Pemberley, and only the finest gentlemen in the land good enough for any one of them, Kate thought, affection overcoming exasperation as she acknowledged to herself how lucky they all were to have her. Eiliane was wrong, though, and if Kate wasn’t to die an old maid, then she’d have to find a man she could respect in order to have the children she longed for, and what point was there in regretting what might have been?

Chapter Two

Her bridges could fairly be considered irrevocably burnt so far as Edmund, Viscount Shuttleworth, was concerned and Kate would have to look elsewhere for a convenient husband. Which was just as well, she reassured herself, considering she’d always sensed a huge capacity for passion and melodrama in herself and curbed it as sternly as she could, lest it lead her into some terrible tangle of love and fury and wanting that would damage all concerned beyond mending.

‘I intend to make a list and, when I’m sure my choice of husband is quite suitable, I’ll just have to find some way of making sure that gentleman agrees with me,’ she asserted stalwartly, not quite able to meet Eiliane’s eyes as her scheme sounded cold and rather depressing even to her when she said it out loud.

‘Why wait?’ Eiliane prompted sardonically, obviously at the end of her patience with such an implacably self-deluded idiot. ‘If you’re so very determined to go against your very nature, and God help the poor man you settle upon if you are, then why not begin straight away? Tonight’s entertainment should make an ideal opportunity for you to start such a search—considering that most of the débutantes haven’t yet arrived and those who have are still too overawed to offer you much competition. Why, you will almost have the field to yourself, my dear, apart from all the other not-so-young ladies who’ve been out too long and are desperate to catch a suitable husband, of course.’

‘I’m only one and twenty,’ Kate protested feebly, unable to keep a still tongue in her head in the face of what she knew perfectly well was deliberate provocation.

Eiliane gave an airy wave of her exquisite fan. ‘No longer a sparkling young débutante, nor yet quite a faded quiz at her last prayers. How some of those vibrant young girls just out of their schoolrooms will pity you,’ she went on relentlessly, seeming determined to provoke Kate into an argument that would disprove her claim to be chilly and passionless. ‘To be so sought after initially, then left unwed three years on argues either that you’re ridiculously finicky and far too high in the instep, or that the gentlemen have stopped asking you.’

‘Then why do they still do so in such numbers, I wonder?’ Kate defended herself absently, her eyes once again on Lord Shuttleworth as he seemed almost as if he’d felt her gaze on him and decided to allow her a closer look.

‘Because the unattainable is always so very alluring,’ Lady Pemberley replied, a little too seriously for Kate’s taste, ‘and I don’t want you to become a target for the less scrupulous rakes of the ton, my love. Better if only you’d accepted Shuttleworth years ago rather than take that primrose path to misery, I suppose. At least marriage to him would put the predators off until you presented him with a couple of heirs. Not that he’d make anyone a complacent husband,’ she ended with a warning nod at the fascinating masculine figure they’d both been watching.

‘Please don’t turn all intense and Celtic on me just now, Eiliane dear,’ Kate said absently, most of her attention on the nobleman forging a path towards them. She wondered fleetingly if he still felt more for her than he’d have her and the rest of the world believe—which only went to show what happened when she listened to her friend’s ridiculous ideas about love.

‘No, my love,’ Lady Pemberley replied meekly and Kate shot her a rueful, exasperated glance, before going back to surreptitiously watching his lordship.

If only Shuttleworth had still been inclined to fall at her feet and beg her to marry him, they could be wed by the end of the Season and then nobody would be able to lecture her on the subject of love matches ever again. Except this older, grimmer Edmund Worth looked very unlikely to agree to an affectionate alliance with her, based as it would have to be on mutual interests and polite friendship instead of the flash and burn of love he’d once promised her. It seemed impossible to picture living at his side in such a temperate style, but was she capable of offering more even to him?

‘Lord Shuttleworth,’ she greeted him, oddly chagrined when his expression became more guarded rather than less so.

She smiled awkwardly in the hope of establishing a polite sort of acquaintance between them, since nothing else seemed likely, and he eyed her cautiously, as if she might launch into a mad jig at any moment and embarrass him in front of the assembled company.

‘Is it time for our waltz already then, my lord?’ she asked clumsily and groaned inwardly at her own ineptitude. Obviously she wasn’t very good at actually encouraging gentlemen, even if it was only to be a little more civil.

‘And if only this next dance were to be one, how delightful that would make my evening,’ he replied with an unforgivable glint of amusement in his grey-green eyes. He pointed helpfully to her dance card, which stated unambiguously that she was to honour another gentleman with the quadrille. Lord Shuttleworth must have been merely passing when she had made it impossible for him to do so without snubbing her even more crushingly than even he seemed prepared to do.

There was no point in stuttering and apologising, so she sent him a weak parody of a smile and stood silent and embarrassed, wishing she could think of a way to banish the suggestion of mockery playing about his mouth. It wasn’t quite a sneer or altogether a smile and she found it flustered her ridiculously in a man who had once been her devoted cavalier. Anyway, she really didn’t want him to kiss her—well, not that much—and, even if she did, it was probably out of sheer, perverse curiosity. He’d grown into a much more formidable man than she’d ever dreamt he would. What a shame if he’d cooled toward her just when her interest in him had sharpened, she decided, with an odd jar of panic in her stomach. And where had that ridiculous idea come from in the first place? Why on earth would she want this man-icicle to kiss her, ever? She must have run mad without anyone noticing if she thought being kissed by Edmund Worth would bring her anything but confusion and distaste, swiftly followed by their mutual embarrassment and an even chillier estrangement between them than there was now.

If only she hadn’t had to leave him enjoying the company of her devious duenna far more than he did that of her charge, Kate might have found her dance perfectly agreeable. Her partner was an excellent dancer in direct defiance of the air of world-weary cynicism he seemed to think marked him out as a pink of the ton. Instead, she missed steps in her attempts to watch Eiliane and Lord Shuttleworth having a comfortable coze and silently dreaded what that unconventional lady might be saying to his lordship.

‘Come now, Miss Alstone,’ the gentleman beside her chided, finally losing patience with such an inattentive partner, ‘either dance with me or pretend to be overcome by the heat, so we may be quit of each other and this dance without causing a scandal.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir; I must be a little distracted by all this noise and bustle after so many months in the country, but I shall do better from now on,’ she excused herself rather feebly.

‘Good, for it does nothing for a fellow’s good opinion of himself to dance with a lady whose attention is so patently on another man,’ he told her with a frankness she found surprising in one she’d always thought dandified and affected.

Kate was very careful to mind her steps for the rest of the dance while she wondered if she had truly seen any of the gentlemen who had habitually sought her out at the balls and parties of the London Season. Until tonight she’d been able to flatter herself she was a reasonably intelligent and well-educated female who was also independently wealthy and up to snuff. So what hope was there of her finding that perfect husband for herself when she’d clearly misjudged herself so very badly?

‘Thank you, Miss Alstone,’ her partner said as the music faded and he bowed to her with jaded grace, ‘you know how to depress a gentleman’s pretensions most effectively,’ he told her quietly and calmly. ‘I shall not be troubling you with them again after tonight.’

‘Sir, I have no idea of your meaning,’ she protested rather faintly as that sense of nothing being quite what it seemed tonight haunted her again.

Was she asleep and in the grip of a nightmare where everything seemed normal, but in truth nothing was quite as it should be? Unfortunately not, for her dance partner was continuing and she doubted she’d allow him such an air of disillusioned cynicism in her dreams.

‘Not your fault, Miss Alstone. I should have had the sense to listen to fair warnings when they were given me. Had I done so, doubtless I wouldn’t feel so disenchanted now I’ve discovered they were correct.’

As they’d reached the sofa Lady Pemberley had annexed by the end of that crushing speech, the disillusioned gentleman bowed and took himself off to the card room to join his cronies, no doubt to confirm that Miss Alstone was a shameless flirt who lacked the courtesy to keep her attention on her conquests once she’d made them in order to eye up her next one. Kate’s mind reeled. How odd that she’d got up this morning believing that she was a pleasant enough person to be with.

‘Now this is our dance, is it not, Miss Alstone?’ the cause of it all informed her suavely, getting to his feet as she approached and looking as if exchanging Eiliane’s lively company for her own was a sacrifice he was most unwilling to make.

How did this confounded man ever delude himself he wanted to marry me so desperately when he’s clearly revolted by the idea of spending half an hour in my company nowadays? Kate asked herself wordlessly as they joined the couples on the dance floor for a waltz that seemed more in the nature of a penance to him rather than a pleasure. ‘So why did you keep asking me?’ she finally questioned aloud, startling herself and shocking him into actually looking at her. His arm went across her back to take her other hand and a cool shiver of something untamed with an edge of warning ran through her like wildfire.

For an instant she felt strangely shaken by the intimacy of their locked gaze and the fluid, familiar movements of their bodies as his warmth engulfed her, taking the sense of chill and alienation out of her evening for a blissful moment as their bodies at least recalled how well they’d always danced together. She was strongly tempted to lean into his arms and let him guide her expertly around the floor without making much effort on her own part. Instead she made herself whirl and turn and glide as actively as he did himself, partly because he was a superb dancer and it seemed a waste not to, and partly because it gave each of them time to think of all the changes three years had made in the other whilst he considered that appallingly crass question she couldn’t believe she’d actually asked him out loud.

‘Maybe because you dance superbly,’ he finally said with a faintly mocking smile, taking her remark at its lightest value and lobbing it back at her with a neatness that made her heart skip a beat in what felt oddly like panic.

Not because he’d once wanted to be with her above any other female then, or had dreamt of holding her in his arms from one waltz to the next, one ball to another? Not because he’d missed her sadly through all the long weary summers and winters since the last time he’d held her so close and danced with her, so superbly matched to every step as they had been so very long ago and ironically still seemed to be now when everything else was different between them?

‘Thank you, my lord,’ she replied a little stiffly. ‘Luckily I can return your compliment without the least risk of flattery. Lord Shuttleworth has always been rated one of the finest dancers to grace the ton.’

‘Now isn’t that fortunate for him?’ he parried sardonically, but his only response to her implied challenge was to make their dance even more energetic, perhaps to stop her finding breath to ask him any more inconvenient questions.

‘Very,’ she gasped and decided to wait for anything more until they stopped spinning about the room in this dizzying whirl.

He moved with a poise and latent strength she couldn’t recall noticing before and a tingle of awareness shot through her when he tightened his grip on her to guide her past a dab of candle wax on the highly polished floor. Kate had to remind herself she was looking for a courteous and undemanding husband, not a disdainful and probably very demanding lover, and that Shuttleworth clearly didn’t want to occupy either position in her life anyway. Her body remained unconvinced by such logic and troubled her with the most outrageous fantasies which her mind shied away from while they waltzed in apparent harmony. Kate did her best to ignore her own baser instincts and Shuttleworth’s unspoken disdain while she smiled at nothing in particular as if her life depended on it.

Edmund George Francis St Erith Standon-Worth, keep your head, that gentleman silently demanded of himself as he held the ravishingly lovely Miss Katherine Alstone in the crook of his arm and tried not to think her being naked and passionately willing as she danced in his arms to an even more intimate tune, preferably without the interested gaze of the cream of fashionable society upon them, of course.

What on earth did the copper-haired torment mean by staring at him across the ballroom as if she’d never set eyes on him before, as if he’d finally come to her attention as something more than a dancing, talking marionette and she was intent on beckoning him to her side by sheer force of will? Could anything good be flying about her busy brain? he wondered, as he tried his best to pretend she was merely a polite acquaintance, despite the fact that his disobliging body and most of society knew he’d been besotted with her from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her three years ago. Unfortunately she knew it as well and, try as he might, he couldn’t relax and just enjoy this dance with a graceful and accomplished partner who should now mean absolutely nothing to him.

He’d been far too boyish and silly to hide his infatuation with her three years ago. When she’d carelessly turned him down that last time as if she was waving away an annoying fly or a brash young puppy pestering her with unwanted adoration, he’d told himself his stupid obsession with her had been a youthful folly he would very soon grow out of, and that one day he’d look back on it with astonishment that he’d ever been so young and gullible. Well, he’d made it so at last by cutting her and all the dreams he’d had of her painfully and painstakingly out of his heart so he could come here again to find the woman he could marry and live with for the rest of his days, and that woman was not Katherine Alstone.

This spring, he’d assured himself as he travelled from his very substantial estates in Herefordshire to his impressive house in Grosvenor Square, he’d look about him for a quiet and biddable female to become his viscountess. Marrying the too-clever, tricky and far-from-biddable beauty his heart had once been set on so uselessly would have been a disaster on both sides. He’d told himself blithely that he was grateful to her for saving them both from such a fate and he should thank her on his knees for refusing him again and again.

It had seemed such a sensible plan when he was still at Cravenhill Park, where Miss Alstone had refused an invitation to stay for the summer and get to know him better with a sweet, distracted smile and a brief assurance that they were too young and probably wouldn’t suit anyway.

How would she know? he silently quizzed himself as he struggled with a strong urge to shake the slender, curvaceous, infinitely desirable and utterly contrary female until her perfect white teeth rattled even now, when both of them were three years older and supposedly wiser.

He shifted uncomfortably to avoid making yet closer contact with her and inflaming himself even further and caught surprise in her blue, blue eyes as she turned to look up at him questioningly. Turning the movement into a demand that she spin fluidly past a less sure couple, he fought a whole pack of demons at the feel of her body so close to his, moving so gracefully to the steps of the dance and reminding him, as if he needed reminding, exactly who he held in his arms at last, warm and desirable and all too real.

No, he ordered himself as his body responded instinctively to hers and he fought the magic fiercely, he was done with self-inflicted torture. He’d wrung Kate Alstone from his thoughts and routed her from his heart and never again would he spend restless nights tossing and turning as he was driven distracted by a bitter yearning for her in his bed, at his board and for ever by his side. Knowing, for the simple reason of having tried it in the throes of youthful desperation, that making love with a demi-mondaine he’d fooled himself looked just like her would never satisfy his ridiculous fantasies of Kate, warm and shameless in his bed, with every inch of her velvety skin and stubborn will in tune with his desires at last, he utterly refused to become the besotted, driven idiot she’d once made of him ever again.

Once he’d let himself see the gaping chasm between heated dream and chilly reality, he’d contented himself with his estates and the odd trip to Bath to see his elderly aunt, until the blessed day when he had finally got himself under strict enough control to be indifferent to Kate Alstone. By some benign fluke, it was in that elegant and usually middle-aged spa town that he’d met Therese, a lush and lovely widow ten years his senior, who took him to her bed and taught him there were other women in the world besides Kate, however little his heart wanted to admit it at the time. Then, after what he’d thought was a mutually satisfying association, Therese decided to marry again. So she’d wed a man ten years her senior after declaring herself quite ineligible as the next Viscountess Shuttleworth when he offered to make her so.

‘You are too young, my love, too idealistic and intense to be happy in such a lukewarm arrangement,’ she’d told him that last time they were together. ‘We have been happy, but it’s time for us to part. I shall wed my colonel and make him an excellent wife, but I’m not the woman you dream of when you cry out her name in your sleep. Either convince that one to marry you, dearest Edmund, or tear her out of your heart before you wed some poor girl who’ll be for ever second-best.’

He’d protested, of course. Assured her that if she married him she and the family they could make together would always come first. But Therese had chided him for offering what he couldn’t deliver and he’d hesitated too long before she gave him a sad smile and left to plan her wedding to her still handsome and rather rich colonel and to settle three counties away, which was probably just as well for all three of them. Therese was a fine woman with a quick wit and a kind heart and she now had a settled life with a man who adored her. Edmund liked and admired her, but he didn’t adore her. Though nor, he told himself sternly, did he adore the redheaded beauty who’d once driven him half-mad with headlong, youthful love and longing for her.

So this year he’d quit Cravenhill for London, determined to find himself a wife who wouldn’t drive him to the brink of insanity every time she smiled at another man. With her he would retire to his acres, where they’d live a life of quiet contentment and usefulness, spiced by an occasional visit to the capital to catch up with old friends. Such a pity that it all sounded so deadly dull just now.

No, it wasn’t dull, it was sensible. He wanted to be at peace in his own skin and he wanted children, not just to inherit his title and lands, but because he’d been a lone, noble and therefore very privileged orphan ever since he learnt to walk. And he wanted sanity and routine and a sense of rightness about his life, not insanity, uncertainty and a mess of passion, frustration and exasperation that Kate Alstone would offer her long-suffering husband, when she finally condescended to admit one to her bed, if not her heart.

Easy enough to weigh his hopeless passion for Kate against that yet-to-be-born tribe of children and the faceless, sweet and loving Lady Shuttleworth, who would give them to him and love every single one as much as she adored him, and be quite certain he was cured. Now none of it was quite so clear-cut and he felt thoroughly out of sorts and nearly as deeply exasperated with Kate as he was with himself.

Curse the contrary female for looking at him tonight as if she liked the man he’d become far more than the foolish boy he’d once been. Trust her to reawaken the slumberous, wanton siren he’d once made of her in his obsessed, Kate-tortured dreams and remind him how lifeless his sweet wife sounded by the side of the rich and passionate promise Kate could offer a potential husband. If, of course, the lucky devil succeeded in awakening the sensuality she managed to hide so well from herself. For he doubted she had any idea with what heady promise her delightfully curved lips and very pleasing form tantalised an idiot like him.

‘She—is—not—what—she—seems,’ he intoned under his breath, enduring the feel of her delightfully formed body brushing his tension-tightened muscles as he shifted her for the final turn and prayed for a rapid end to this torture. She is everything she seems and more, the faint waft of her rose-perfumed skin in his oversensitive nostrils taunted him back, the soft shift of woman-warmed silk tantalising his guiding fingers even through his supple evening gloves, as if every sense he had was uniquely attuned just to her. But she’s not for you; she’s not part of your domestic idyll. She doesn’t want to love you, the argument began again in his head and he was relieved when the music finally wound down and he could let his hand drop with what might seem unflattering haste to someone who couldn’t read his mind.

Three years on he was more mature, cynical and tried and tested by life than he had once been, but she was three years lovelier, three years away from the eighteen-year-old débutante she’d been then. Then she’d been a girl close to being unformed compared with the gorgeous creature she was now, all rich curves and slender, elegant limbs that carried the usual Alstone height with a panache all her own. He forced himself to remember she was also haughty and cold as he finally made himself step away from the unattainable siren she really was.

What she really was just now, he observed rather ruefully, was an offended goddess who considered herself slighted by some mere mortal who’d dared turn his back on her extraordinary beauty. He caught the hint of suppressed fury in her indigo gaze, the tightening of her lush lips into a line and then a brief pout that warned him his danger wasn’t over, as if he didn’t already know it from his dratted body’s reaction to her proximity. He so desperately wanted to kiss those rosy, lushly discontented lips of hers that he had to clear away an imaginary frog from his throat to manufacture an excuse not to offer her his crooked elbow for a precious moment of respite from her touch.

It was either that or stalk off and abandon her to the giggles of the avidly watching gossips and seek less incendiary company. Even to avenge himself for all those broken nights and wasted days, he couldn’t do it to her. She still had no idea what she did to a man, he decided. High time she wed some unfortunate idiot, who could then spend his time rescuing her from her own folly and leave Edmund to find his sweet, nebulous viscountess and an easier life. The sooner the better, he assured himself and finally decided he was cool enough to offer Miss Alstone that arm and escort her into the supper room after all.

What a fool he’d been to be so full of misplaced confidence she meant nothing to him any more that he’d written his initials on the supper dance to prove he was cured. Evidently something about her called to him on a deeper level than he’d realised, but there was still time left this Season to effect a complete cure. Legions of débutantes would soon arrive and might even be lovely and amenable enough to put Kate Alstone out of his head entirely. He frowned as an inner voice informed him that rumours of such a fabulous paragon would have reached him by now, if such a creature existed outside the covers of a highly coloured novel.

Such an impossibly ideal girl would cause riots if she so much as set foot in the capital, but instinct informed him lugubriously that he’d still prefer the woman at his side to such an exquisite creature. No, he told himself doggedly, he’d choose his kind, pleasingly pretty and so far purely mythical wife, and just managed not to pull his arm away before Kate could settle her hand gingerly into the crook of his elbow, as if he might bite her if she didn’t keep a strict eye on him.

Suddenly Edmund’s sense of the ridiculous reawakened and he made up his mind to distract himself with the heady task of confusing the lovely Miss Alstone, whilst searching for his true quarry. It would do the redhaired witch good, he assured the doubter within. He wouldn’t be cruel, heaven forbid, but someone should make her realise she existed in the same world as the rest of faulty humanity, not on a higher plane where everything was ordered to her convenience.

Chapter Three

‘How is everyone at Wychwood, Miss Alstone?’ he asked in a tone even he knew was insufferably indifferent to her answer, although he liked the Earl of Carnwood and his spectacularly lovely wife. Now he came to think of it, if Miss Kate Alstone resembled her fiery sister as strongly in character as she did in outward beauty, he couldn’t walk away from her to wed a less unique woman. Thank you for not being made in your elder sister’s extraordinary image, he silently praised the beauty at his side, but even he wasn’t yet a bitter enough man to say it out loud.

‘All very well,’ she replied stiffly, as if she could read his thoughts, and he made himself look into her intriguing indigo eyes to make sure he was mistaken.

No, he informed himself sternly, he refused to cave at the hint of wistfulness in her gaze, the faint droop of discontent and perhaps a hint of longing in the curve of her rosy-lipped mouth. It was an illusion, he reminded himself. She might look as if she longed for a tithe of her sister’s passionate and mutually loving marriage for herself, but she didn’t have the least intention of following Miranda Alstone’s stormy path through life. After enduring her chilly lack of attention for a whole Season, he’d concluded Kate had no heart to lose. Trust her to decide to feel piqued that she’d finally lost his adoration tonight, just when he was starting his hunt for a very different female.

‘My sister is expecting to present Lord Carnwood with another pledge of her affection very shortly,’ she added to her terse assessment, again with that hint of wistful longing in her voice he wished she’d learn to conceal a little better.

To anyone else he supposed it might seem a tone of rueful irony, a discreet nod towards the fact that her sister and brother-in-law were deeply in love and therefore made insufferable company for a rational human being. Too many months spent learning her moods and interests from avid observation, he thought crossly. What an irony if she so longed to carry brats of her own that she was prepared to take him as her husband after all, just when he’d realised he couldn’t tolerate such a marriage to a wife he’d once longed to adore until his dying day. Compassion threatened as he wondered why she thought it safe to love her children and not her husband, who could be her equal and her passion. No, Carnwood and his countess were unique and he was done with dreams; Kate was not the wife for him.

‘Ah, well,’ he replied carelessly, ‘your brother-in-law is sadly in need of an heir.’

‘Kit will feel the need for whomever my sister presents him with, my lord. Not even the most cynical and uncaring spectator could deny that.’

Now he’d really offended her, just as he’d intended to. What a shame, then, that the fleeting vulnerability of hurt he glimpsed in her eyes, the not-quite-hidden wince as he pretended indifference to two people he liked and envied, pained him as well. Better this way, he reminded himself and smiled encouragingly at a certain Miss Transome he’d been introduced to earlier and her hovering swain. With any luck, they would join them at supper and break up any suggestion of a tête-à-tête between himself and the beauty at his side before too many people recalled that he’d once been mad, deluded and desperate for her.

‘La, my dear Miss Alstone,’ Miss Transome spouted so fulsomely so that Edmund almost regretted encouraging her, even to save himself an intimate supper with a woman he couldn’t have and didn’t want. ‘How finely you two do dance together. It quite put us off our own feeble attempts, did it not, Mr Cromer?’

‘Yes, quite,’ poor Cromer replied as if his throat was parched after all the monosyllabic replies he’d made this evening to his voluble companion. ‘Get supper for the ladies, eh, Shuttleworth?’ he managed in a magnificent feat of oratory.

‘Quite,’ he replied, apeing his old school friend’s sparse conversational style and they resorted to the groaning supper table to procure enough refreshments to silence even Miss Transome for a few idyllic moments.

Edmund decided both he and his taciturn friend had been rash to attend a party so obviously organised for the benefit of single ladies who’d survived too many Seasons unwed, before fresh débutantes arrived to outdo and outflank them. It was perhaps the last chance for such ladies to catch the eye of a potential husband before open season was declared on them. One glance at their hostess for the evening and her superannuated eldest daughter should have any sane bachelor saying a hasty farewell and dashing off to his club in order to survive and fight another day. He, of course, had a reason to attend any party where he might meet his elusive future viscountess, but what on earth had led Cromer to risk it?

‘She’s m’aunt,’ Cromer explained obscurely and Ed mund must have looked almost as puzzled as he felt, because his friend added a brief explanation. ‘Lady Finchley, she’s m’aunt.’

‘That accounts for it then,’ he conceded.

‘Your excuse?’ Cromer asked morosely.

‘Idiocy,’ Edmund replied, borrowing some of his friend’s abruptness.

‘Must be,’ Cromer commiserated as they turned back with their booty. ‘Though the Alstone icicle’s a beauty,’ he conceded generously.

‘Aye, but is she worth enduring the frostbite for, I wonder?’ Edmund asked in a thoughtful undertone as he watched her nod regally to an acquaintance.

‘M’father wants me to wed. Always liked Amelia Transome, but the thing is that she will talk. Much better tempered than my cousin Finchley, though,’ Cromer risked waxing lyrical.

Scanning the room and finally spotting Miss Finchley seated at a flimsy table with a widower of at least five and forty, who still looked hunted and not very willing, Edmund sympathised. Miss Transome was open and amiable, but the thought of being fluttered at over the breakfast table for the rest of his life must make the strongest man hesitate. Neither female bore the slightest resemblance to his dream wife, so he turned his attention back to Kate Alstone with a sneaking feeling of relief that he didn’t stand in Cromer’s shoes and could at least please himself whom he brought to supper, so long as she wasn’t the woman who pleased him all the way to the altar.

‘Oh, how perfectly lovely,’ Miss Transome gushed at the loaded plates.

‘Quite,’ Kate said with much less enthusiasm, and Edmund wondered if she’d been talked into a headache by Miss Transome’s busy tongue and dreaded carrying the burden of conversation with her on his own.

Kate nibbled unenthusiastically at her supper, despite poor Lady Finchley having pushed out every boat she could launch in the hope of netting her daughter a husband at long last by hiring an excellent chef. To be fair, the headache she felt tightening her hairpins and nagging at her temples had nothing to do with Miss Transome’s prattle, so the blame for that must lie at Lord Shuttleworth’s door. Wretched man, she decided, as she surreptitiously surveyed him with a disillusioned gaze.

Once upon a time he would have fallen at her daintily shod feet given the slightest hint of encouragement, but now that she’d finally steeled herself to accept a husband, he certainly wouldn’t be one of her suitors.

She hoped she was too proud to wilfully mistake his indifference to her tonight for a fleeting headache or a black mood on his part. There was too much distance about him to lay his behaviour at such a random and socially convenient cause and gaily expect tomorrow to bring amendment. He no longer desired her, now she finally wanted to become a wife and mother, and it was the frustration of it all that had caused her headache. It wasn’t as if she cared for him, other than as she might for any man she’d once known and come to value for his integrity and the dry sense of humour that had once lurked under his youthful enthusiasm.

Now it was gone, she decided guiltily that she’d always secretly revelled in Edmund’s apparent obsession with her and the certainty that he’d always long for her, even if he couldn’t have her. Had it been a guilty pleasure she knew she ought not to feel to know one person on this earth probably still thought of her as uniquely desirable? She really hoped not, since that would make her a tease or a shrew, then and now. And he certainly didn’t want her now, so why did it feel as if someone had taken away the most promising treat she’d ever pretended she didn’t really want in the first place?

So all in all it was little wonder that she was nursing the beginnings of a fine headache and an inexcusable grievance against Edmund Worth, just because he no longer felt inclined to make a fool of himself over the Honourable Katherine Alstone. Now that there was no chance of him offering for her ever again, she supposed she could acknowledge in her own head that it would have been wrong to accept him anyway, when he so obviously wanted to love his wife and she certainly didn’t want to love her husband. However, she wondered uneasily if she would have found it so wrong to accept him on such terms if he hadn’t made it so very clear they were no longer on offer.

Kate surreptitiously scanned the room under cover of Miss Transome’s interminable prattle for any likely bachelors, now the most promising one of all was struck off her list. Not one of those present made the idea of sharing the intimacy required to bring her children into the world seem anything other than a nightmare. There would be other balls and routs, of course; ones where the gentlemen were both more plentiful and a little more willing to be charmed, although the other ladies would also be both more sparkling and more innocent, if also more tongue-tied.

Most eligible gentlemen had spurned Lady Finchley’s rout for their clubs, which severely limited her choices. Sensible gentlemen, she decided, as she noted her fellow quizzes dotted about the supper room, trying their best to be all the things their desperate mamas bade them be. Miss Transome was projecting vivacity with such determination Kate wondered if she might sprout wings and fly up to the ceiling and circle about them all, still twittering frantically as she did so. Nearby, Miss Wetherby had cornered the market in pale and interesting and was reclining gracefully on a fragile chair that looked to be her only support in a failing world. And just what was Miss Alstone doing? Wilting too, Kate decided crossly; she was drooping like a wallflower and refusing to even try to be civil to those about her, just because she’d been disappointed in hope, if not in love.

‘Do you attend Mrs Flamington’s ridotto, sir?’ Miss Transome asked Mr Cromer with apparently artless curiosity, and Kate could have told her just from reading Mr Cromer’s hunted expression that it was unlikely.

‘No,’ he managed reluctantly, before courting even more silence by popping a bite of lobster patty into his mouth and consuming it very slowly as if to stop his reckless tongue committing him to something the rest of him didn’t agree with.

‘Are you planning to be there, Lord Shuttleworth?’ the lady asked earnestly.

Yes, how about you? Kate asked him with silent malice as she watched him swallow his chicken puff with gallant determination and even manage not to cough while he did so. Seeming to read her very thoughts, he cast her a repressive look and Miss Transome a warm smile that probably gave her far more encouragement than he ever dreamt it would, if the flush of sudden colour in her cheeks and the pleased sparkle in her eyes was anything to go by.

Kate sympathised with the foolishly romantic nature concealed under all the fluff and froth, even as she had to fight a primitive urge to ruthlessly crush any hopes of capturing Shuttleworth’s interest that might be stirring in Miss Transome’s receptive breast. He wasn’t hers to be possessive about, and had made that abundantly clear tonight. If he wanted to land himself with a wife who’d foolishly long for his love and affection for the rest of their days together, then that was his problem. Except that some annoying part of her argued it was hers as well, however hard Kate tried to ignore it.

‘I fear I’m otherwise engaged that day,’ he said with apparent regret.

‘Yes,’ Kate said with a hint of malice, ‘Lady Tedinton has a waltzing party, has she not?’

When she’d heard rumours that a lady with a Frenchified name, who might or might not be Selene, Lady Tedinton, had shared a lot more than a mere friendship with young Lord Shuttleworth while they were both in Bath one spring, Kate had dismissed them as mere gossip, even if the thought of him sharing that exotically beautiful lady’s bed had pained her with surprising sharpness while she did so. An honourable young gentleman like Shuttleworth wouldn’t cuckold a man of Tedinton’s venerable years and genial temper, she’d assured herself, even if her ladyship was twenty or thirty years younger than her lord and reported to hold to a conveniently elastic interpretation of her marriage vows. Since neither had confirmed or denied the rumour, it had flourished on and off and Lady Tedinton was even said to preen to her friends for having fascinated such a potent young lord.

Now Kate was nowhere near so certain Edmund would refuse the invitation in the lovely Lady Tedinton’s somnolently knowing sloe eyes and could see how his leanly handsome face and fine form would appeal to a jaded wife of her ladyship’s sybaritic nature. In that lady’s position, with a much older husband preoccupied with affairs of state and his estates, as well as his children from his first marriage, would she be tempted to dally with a vigorous young gentleman who’d be sure to make her a passionate and considerate lover? She hoped not, but eyeing Viscount Shuttleworth surreptitiously now, Kate knew she’d find him nigh irresistible if she stood in Lady Tedinton’s expensive Parisian shoes, even if she wouldn’t much like the fit of them.

Anyway, it certainly wasn’t jealousy that pricked at her as Edmund explained himself to Miss Transome far more warmly than he’d spoken to her all evening. It was merely pique that one who had once seemed to adore her had returned to town looking as if he couldn’t imagine what madness had come over him to have ever thought her the centre of his universe.

‘I am engaged on business that day, Miss Transome, but most of my acquaintance seem set on going to the ridotto, so you certainly won’t lack for companionship if you intend to go yourself.’

If only because Mrs Flamington was rumoured to possess a very pretty daughter it would abound in eager young gentlemen, Kate thought cynically, then ordered herself not to be such a sharp-nosed nag and to sympathise a little more with her new friend when she was only intent on the same outcome as herself. In fact, she informed herself ruefully, she and Miss Transome were sisters in adversity.

‘And you, Miss Alstone,’ Lord Shuttleworth asked at last, as if she were only a polite afterthought, ‘are you bound for Hill Street or Cavendish Square that day?’

‘Neither, Lord Shuttleworth,’ she replied uninformatively.

‘How unfortunate for your admirers.’

‘I dare say they will endure it.’

‘Ah, but endurance and enjoyment are so distant, Miss Alstone, that I wonder you don’t at least try to pity your disappointed admirers a little more,’ he taunted her, and drew Miss Transome’s attention by doing so, which felt far worse to Kate than enduring his contempt unnoticed.

‘I intend to enjoy my visit to an old friend who is currently bereaved and therefore does not seek out such bright company, but I wish both hostesses and their guests well in my absence of course, my lord,’ Kate managed coolly.

‘Beautifully put,’ he acknowledged with a fencer’s bow and Kate felt tears prick her eyes at the thought that where once upon a time they’d almost been friends, now they were very much more like bitter enemies.

The air of chilly politeness between herself and Lord Shuttleworth hadn’t escaped the notice of the gossipmongers and Kate felt every speculative gaze and insincere enquiry after her health like little darts. Longing to be securely among family and friends once again, Kate realised how privileged she was to have escaped the attention of the more vicious gossips until now.

‘I knew you were feeling low for all you denied it, my love,’ Eiliane scolded gently as they rode home in the carriage at long last. ‘So why on earth did you insist on staying so late at that very dull party?’

‘Because to leave early would have provided even more food for the gossips,’ Kate admitted wearily and silently thanked her friend for not rubbing her nose in tonight’s many humiliations, especially after their earlier discussion. A conversation that now seemed so arrogant and misguided on her side she could hardly bear to recall it with hindsight and squirmed in her comfortable seat. If he’d managed nothing else tonight, Lord Shuttleworth had taught her how little she mattered in the great scheme of things and most especially how little she meant to him.

‘Oh, don’t concern yourself about them,’ Lady Pemberley said cheerfully, ‘they’re so hungry for some thing juicy to chew over after so many months away from the capital that if they can’t find a real scandal they’ll make one up out of nothing. Give them a few days for a real one to erupt and they will soon be distracted from trying to make trouble where it doesn’t already exist.’

‘And it’s not exactly a scandal if a gentleman who once admired me no longer does so,’ Kate replied rather hollowly, not sure if she was reassuring Eiliane or herself.

‘Of course not, but don’t forget most of the younger ladies present tonight have been found wanting in comparison to you over the last few Seasons, my dear, and feel a little pity for their plight. Many of them will never climb off the shelf fate has left them on so pitilessly, the poor dears.’

‘I’m not sure I will now and I do feel for them, even if I can’t admit they were ever measured by my low standard and found wanting. I never intended to set myself A1 at Lloyd’s and everyone else at nought, Eiliane.’

‘Ah, but that’s the problem. Not only are you beautiful, graceful, well born and surrounded by people who love you, but you’re also astonishingly unaware of how unique and lovely you are. No wonder half the ladies of the ton secretly envy you and the other half want you to fall flat on your very pretty nose, Kate dear. If I didn’t love you so much, I might dislike you myself for being so unreasonably beautiful.’

‘How can anyone possibly be so appallingly mistaken, let alone you, Eiliane? I’m the least perfect person you’ll ever encounter, even if you live to be a hundred, and I’m certainly not beautiful.’

‘I know none of us are perfect this side of heaven, but you really are fortune’s favourite, my love, even if it doesn’t feel like it just now,’ Eiliane replied with that depth of understanding that always floored Kate at unexpected moments. As Lady Rhys and now the Marchioness of Pemberley, her friend had set up so many humane schemes for rescuing the poor, the unfortunate and even the plain criminal, that Kate could only wonder at her energy and try to respect her judgement.

‘It certainly doesn’t,’ she admitted as she stepped out of the carriage, glad of the comfort Eiliane had managed to bring into her husband’s lofty town mansion as they were welcomed home after a trying evening. ‘Although I do feel blessed to exchange Lady Finchley’s ballroom for your fine residence, Madam Marchioness,’ she managed to tease her friend and hostess lightly.

‘It’s nice enough now, I suppose,’ Lady Pemberley conceded rather absently as she set eyes on her new lord, gracefully sauntering out of his library as if he hadn’t galloped his poor horse back to his London home almost mercilessly, then waited with restless impatience for his lady’s return once he finally got here.

‘I thought you were meant to be away for a whole week,’ Eiliane chided, eyeing her tall, upright and still very handsome lord as if checking him for any sign of damage.

‘I soon got my business over and done, so there seemed no point lingering to me when I could be more comfortable at home,’ he replied, gazing at his lady as if he’d not set eyes on her for a month.

Watching them with exasperated affection and faintly amused by their refusal to admit they were happy as larks together, Kate left them to it and went up to bed, allowing her maid to fuss over her with such unusual docility that the girl finally asked if her mistress was sickening for something.

‘No, it’s just the headache,’ she explained as patiently as she could.

‘Oh, then you’re not in love, Miss Kate?’

‘Certainly not. I can imagine nothing worse,’ she replied with such revulsion even Eiliane might have believed her, if she wasn’t otherwise occupied.

‘I can, and I think it would be wonderful,’ came the dreamy reply.

‘Bah! For heaven’s sake, take yourself off to bed and stop bothering me with such absurd notions, before I feel compelled to scream.’

‘You’ll see,’ her maid informed her with sharp nod and, deciding there was no more to be done to change her young mistress’s mind, took herself off to bed, presumably to dream of a nebulous lover who’d take her for granted and father ridiculous numbers of babes on her before neglecting her for someone less careworn, Kate decided, with a cynicism that seemed excessive even to her.

Maybe it would be better to have the illusion of loving someone to look forward to though, at least until cold reality broke through and spoilt it all, she thought wistfully while she climbed into bed and extinguished her candle. Before she succumbed to exhaustion, she thought that for as long as the enchantment lasted, a person might be deliriously happy with the one they thought they loved, before real life proved what a fairytale it all was and that so-called love faded away as if it had never been.

Chapter Four

However much she wanted to, it somehow seemed impossible to make her excuses and stay home when Kate received an invitation to the ball Lord and Lady Tedinton were holding to launch his lordship’s daughter into society. Of course, it wasn’t jealousy of lovely Lady Tedinton and whichever gentleman she might or might not have taken as her lover in the last couple of years that had made her so reluctant to come, but Kate couldn’t help wishing the evening over and done with before it had scarcely begun now she was here. Her ladyship was looking exotic and sensuous and strikingly beautiful, and Kate supposed it was no surprise that Lord Tedinton had succumbed to her youth and voluptuous figure and seductive smile, even if he clearly should have known better at his age.

Either others didn’t share her reluctance to be here, or were so curious to see how her ladyship would behave towards a stepdaughter barely seven years younger than she was herself that they couldn’t bring themselves to stay away, because it seemed to take for ever for the parade of coaches drawn up at the Tedinton town house to reach the front door. Kate wondered why this particular party was so popular, when Lady Tedinton made so little effort to court her own sex and the patronesses of Almack’s and one or two other grande dames could make or break any social event. Obviously his lordship’s good character and generous opinions commanded loyalty from his peers, but Kate thought many of those present were here in expectation of hearing or seeing something scandalous and would be acutely disappointed if Lady Tedinton failed to provide it.

Kate took one look at Miss Tedinton and decided the poor girl knew exactly what was in the minds of many of those who were so effusively wishing her well. As Eiliane had pointed out, the gossips were eager and primed for mischief after a dull winter and Kate heartily wished she didn’t have to be here to witness the poor girl’s obvious embarrassment. Yet if she’d stayed away it would probably cause even more speculation about Shuttleworth’s defection from the ranks of her admirers and her reaction to his coolness toward her. Too many people knew, or thought they knew, that Lady Tedinton might have captured Lord Shuttleworth’s very close attention if the rumour mill was to be believed. How gleefully they’d all have talked tonight if Kate had played the coward and not come when they also knew Shuttleworth had once been her most devoted cavalier. As she waited with Eiliane to be announced and greeted as effusively as a marchioness and her protégée must be, even if the words must stick in Lady Tedinton’s elegant throat, Kate wished someone would wave a magic wand and telescope time so she could be at the other end of this evening in the time it took to snap her fingers.

‘You look splendidly,’ Eiliane murmured reassuringly and Kate was cross with herself for betraying any hint of her feelings. ‘That new gown is a triumph and you’ll cast all the débutantes into the shade in it tonight because, although it’s white and perfectly proper, none of them could carry it off with such élan.’

‘Thank you. It seems there may be something to be said for being one and twenty after all, then,’ Kate managed to reply as she smiled ruefully at her chaperon and wondered yet again why she was still feeling so nervous about tonight.

It was true that her white silk gown with its corded and looped trim and belled-out skirt was considerably more sophisticated than anything a débutante would dare wear and she felt a little better at the sight of her looking elegant and surprisingly assured in one of the long mirrors probably placed to throw more light on to the stairs. The style was a little fussier than she liked, but as the dressmaker had informed her, when she’d tried to order it made up in a plainer style, that was the mode and it was unthinkable for Miss Alstone to be thought dowdy and behind the times. The belled skirt and very high waist undoubtedly suited her figure and one of the few advantages of red hair was that even the most severe critics could never accuse her of being insipid. Being one and twenty, she could also wear her mother’s pearl-and-diamond set without being informed she was fast and the fact of them at her neck and wrists and ears felt both reassuring and right.

Funnily enough, it wasn’t the débutantes she was most concerned about, but Kate smiled brightly and tried to look eager for the delights ahead of her when they finally reached the head of the receiving line and she met Lady Tedinton’s apparently sleepy-eyed gaze. Her ladyship’s dark gaze chilled and Kate was tempted to seek out another of those well-placed mirrors to check there wasn’t a knife plunged between her shoulder blades she was, as yet, too frostbitten to feel.

‘How lovely that you could both attend our humble little entertainment,’ her ladyship cooed as if utterly delighted they’d come.

‘Oh, we wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ Eiliane responded just as insincerely and Kate wondered once more at the polite lengths the great ladies of the ton would go to in order to best their enemies. ‘Such an interesting use of flowers and drapery to accentuate the colouring of such an angelically fair girl,’ Eiliane added with a pointed glance at his lordship, who suddenly looked thoughtful about the unsuitable cerise-silk swags that festooned the ballroom at such an innocent affair as a débutante ball.

‘Dear Philippa is such a passionate lover of this particular shade of dusky rose silk that nothing I could say would change her mind about ordering yards of it to drape the ballroom with. Wise heads are so seldom found on young shoulders, don’t you agree, Lady Pemberley?’ their hostess parried sleepily.

Kate saw ‘dear Philippa’ conceal a frown and shoot a helpless, hunted glance at her papa behind a fan that was also dark rose to match the silk draped behind her and quite the wrong colour for any débutante to carry, let alone a blonde and blue-eyed girl like Miss Tedinton. The expensive and elaborate fan looked distinctly odd against the stark white simplicity of the ball gown even her ladyship hadn’t been able to argue against buying for such a young girl, as if she’d been given it to hold while someone far more sophisticated was busy. After all, Kate thought cynically, why spend a penny more on her stepdaughter than necessary, when her ladyship could pass on her cast-offs to her and spend it on herself?

Lord Tedinton looked pitifully relieved at his wife’s implausible explanation and was obviously too blinded by his beautiful countess to see beyond the end of his own nose. Kate ardently pitied the children of his first marriage and smiled encouragingly at the unlucky Philippa while Eiliane exchanged insincerities with their hostess. Receiving a shy smile in return, Kate made a mental note to bully the more pleasant youths of her acquaintance into demanding Philippa Tedinton’s dance card, before her stepmama pushed her into more venial hands in the hope of getting her off her hands more swiftly, and cheaply.

‘Dreadful woman,’ Eiliane whispered as they walked down into the ballroom and paused to take a discreet survey of the company.

‘I doubt most of the gentlemen present would agree with you,’ Kate murmured, watching a few of the fascinated males and searching for one in particular, although she chided herself for being such an idiot all the time she did so.

‘Some have sense enough to see through the obvious,’ Eiliane said, sounding as if she was trying to reassure her protégée that Edmund was one of the wise who’d already done so, although why she should when he meant nothing at all to Kate was quite beyond her.

‘And some do not,’ Kate said bleakly, her eyes briefly pausing on Edmund’s golden-brown head. He was bending over one of the prettiest of the current crop of débutantes to initial her dance card. Then he gave her a gallant bow and an altogether too charming smile of farewell, until later.

‘Not that you care what he thinks,’ Eiliane continued blandly and Kate stopped pretending not to watch Lord Shuttleworth long enough to give her so-called friend a long cool look instead.

‘No, not that I have so little sense as to do that,’ she agreed silkily.

‘Liar,’ Eiliane murmured softly, then spying out the best seat in the house, again managed to procure it with a polite, ruthless smile that suddenly made it hers by right. ‘I’m far too old to stand about like an exhibit at a fair and too young to sit on a chaperon’s bench,’ she said placidly when Kate raised her eyebrows at her tactics.

‘And you only ever lay claim to whatever age you’re admitting to at the time when it suits you to make use of it.’

‘One of the few gifts middle age offers is the opportunity to exploit it at regular intervals.’

‘And your rank?’

‘Oh, yes, that, too, of course. A sensible person must make use of any unfair advantages the good Lord gifted them in support of a good cause, don’t you agree, Shuttleworth?’ Eiliane asked the one man Kate didn’t want to see until she’d got over watching him either court an overgrown schoolgirl, or be eyed by their hostess as if she were a hungry cat intent on catching the finest prey she could spot.

Kate told herself she was merely disappointed not to be given the chance to avoid him all evening and greeted him with the brusque nod he deserved for all the self-doubts and turmoil he was putting her through. She then could have cheerfully hit him—if she weren’t such a rational person—when he returned it with a distant bow.

‘That depends on the circumstance, your ladyship,’ he replied with an easy smile Kate envied her friend as she felt her own face stiffen into a chilly mask so she’d be ready for the contrast when he finally deigned to meet her eyes.

‘Always so cautious, Shuttleworth?’ Eiliane teased.

‘Not always,’ he parried rather dourly and Kate would have been a fool to read his cool glance as approving of her in any way. ‘But I always agree with you, your ladyship, as it saves me so much energy,’ he said with a lazy smile that did such unfair things to Kate’s breathing she wondered if she was coming down with more than just bruised pride and dented self-esteem. A severe cold? Influenza, perhaps?

‘The rest of us have to live with the consequences when she becomes more certain of her own omnipotence than Madame Marchioness here has any right to be though, my lord,’ she reproached him lightly, wondering why she was bothering to speak to him at all when he didn’t seem to welcome either her presence or her conversation.

‘Neither of us will ever attain such a happy state whilst we have the corrective of your abrasive tongue available to put us right, Miss Alstone, isn’t that so, Lady Pemberley?’ he parried.

‘It is,’ Eiliane said with such heartfelt sincerity that Kate felt her confidence in her own judgement falter once again.

‘Am I really so brusque and disagreeable?’ she asked unguardedly.

‘Only when you’re not being right all the time. It really is most annoying in you,’ he said, openly taunting her now and Kate told herself she was a fool to feel shaken and deeply unsure of what she’d built on the wreckage she and Izzie had been left with after the collapse of their once-safe little world.

‘Just because you happen to think it’s your divine right to be correct instead?’ she asked him smoothly enough, refusing to even try to meet his eyes this time.

‘Of course,’ he said with the hint of a frown between his dark brows, so perhaps her avoidance of his eyes had given away her uncertainty and, yes, just a touch of hurt that he seemed to think her so arrogant and self-satisfied.

‘I won’t allow masculine superiority as a defence, just because the rest of the world suffers from the delusion it actually exists, your lordship. To claim it, you’ll have to prove you possess it,’ she challenged him and finally managed to meet his silver-green gaze as if it cost her nothing but a coolly ironic smile.

‘I’d be delighted to do so, when you finally manage to screw up sufficient courage to risk defeat at my hands, Miss Alstone,’ he replied, making no attempt to mask a heat in his look that echoed the wolfish, challenging smile on his suddenly very tempting masculine mouth.

Feeling as if she’d already suffered a loss when her wildest fantasies centred on his lips as if they could unlock the secrets of the universe, Kate clenched her fists resolutely at her sides. Seeing the threat of an easy victory in his intent and suddenly very green gaze, she made herself hold it steadily, as if doing so cost her no effort at all. Hopefully only she knew her fingernails were threatening to bite through her kid gloves and into her soft palms as she clamped down on her more primitive instincts in the hope they might give up in the face of bleak reality.

‘Don’t flatter yourself, my lord,’ she warned him softly.

‘No need, when you’ve done it for me by refusing to pick up any of the challenges I cared to throw out in the past.’

‘I am not a coward, and you’re the one who retreated from the fight.’

Suddenly the air was crackling with something more than the slightly bitter teasing of two people who’d once had such promise of linking and entwining their lives, yet failed to take that vital step together. Kate’s mouth felt inexplicably dry and her pulse was racing, but she made herself meet him glare for dare. Half-conscious they were in all too public a space for such a contest of wills and wishes, she still couldn’t let her eyes fall modestly and step away from him. Giving an involuntary sigh as she continued to hold his jade-and-steel gaze without flinching, she allowed herself the small concession of licking her lips to slick their inexplicable dryness and marvelled at the feral heat that flared in his eyes as he changed from confident, taunting challenger to offer a darker and deeper world of sensual threat instead.

‘I think you’re going to miss the first waltz if you don’t hurry, my dears.’ Eiliane intruded a little too brightly on their silent, too-significant struggle for some victory Kate didn’t even understand wanting to achieve so desperately in the first place.

‘And what a shame that would be,’ she managed to say as acerbically as everyone seemed to expect her to, even if her lips felt numb and her tongue oddly stiff in her parched mouth.

‘Have you already promised yourself to someone else, Miss Alstone?’ Edmund asked relentlessly, for some reason best known to him refusing to do what she fully expected him to and walk away to find the pretty little miss he’d been talking to earlier.

‘No, but I dare say you have.’

‘You’d be wrong and not for the first time then, so perhaps you’d best hurry up and join me for it, before we attract even more attention to ourselves,’ he replied.

‘I never dance with noblemen who order me to do so, attention or otherwise.’

‘Then pray do us both the favour of joining me on the dance floor, before the tabbies make all sorts of mistaken assumptions about our tardiness, Miss Alstone,’ he demanded more than asked.

Seeing that he was right and they were attracting far too much notice for comfort, she took his offered hand and let him lead her onto the floor, as if she could imagine nothing more pleasant than to dance with the rude, contradictory, disturbing man. Instead it felt as if he’d just snapped the tethers of the polite pretence that should have held them both in check and left them perilously adrift in a world where she had no bearings or familiar landmarks to chart it by.

‘Why do you suddenly seem to hate me, my lord?’ she heard herself ask as soon as they were launched into the dance. She was silently cursing herself for agreeing to be held so close to him, so curiously in sympathy considering their new antipathy and the odd fact that he’d never affected her like this in the past, when he’d just been a skilful partner who didn’t tread on her toes.

‘I don’t hate you, Kate, would that I could,’ he answered her with no hint of a smile to soften his hard-eyed scrutiny of her upturned face.

‘Perhaps it would be easier,’ she agreed rather wistfully.

‘For you or for me?’

‘For both of us.’

‘Then you are a coward,’ he murmured, but still he held her as if she was precious and their steps harmonised with such ease it felt as if they’d been born to dance together.

‘How so?’ she managed to murmur, fighting a stupid urge to lay her head on his shoulder and dream her way through this waltz, as if all that mattered was being held so close to him nothing could come between them. At least imagining how that shocking spectacle would appear was enough to stiffen her spine and make her set a little distance between them.

‘If you ever find the courage to really look into that guarded heart of yours, Miss Alstone, you might find your answer to that question and a few others as well,’ he informed her even as he twirled and confused her in time with the dance.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said, wishing she was in a position to cross her fingers against that uneasy lie, for she was beginning to wonder herself.

‘I know, that’s the pity of it all,’ he responded rather grimly and they spent the rest of the dance in uneasy silence.

Their waltz was over too soon and not soon enough, so they could step away from each other at last with more than just physical space yawning between them. Kate marvelled at herself for being such a fool as to have refused to marry him so often in the past, even as the guarded part of her drew back and whispered he’d always ask too much of her, however many times he asked and she said no. She told herself to be grateful he’d had the sense to slash through whatever bonds bound them to each other three years ago. Yet it didn’t feel right that they should now go their separate ways as if they’d never once mattered to each other. She hesitated ridiculously when he offered her his arm so distantly at the end of their dance, as though he were about to conduct someone he barely knew and didn’t much like back to her chaperon.

She laid her fingers on his immaculately tailored coat sleeve and did her best to look undaunted and serene while a flash of hot and confusing warmth shot through her at the feel of such latent power beneath her fingertips. It was utterly ridiculous to feel intrigued by even so light a touch on his muscular arm, when she’d been more or less immune to his physical allure on first acquaintanceship. She was still struggling with this odd twist to their relationship that now left her more conscious of him than he was of her when they were rudely interrupted.

‘What a delightful display that was, don’t you agree, my love?’ Lady Tedinton greeted them with apparent laziness as Kate and Edmund unwarily stepped off the dance floor and straight into her path.

‘Oh, they’ll need to practise for a few more years yet before they’re even half as good at it as you are, my dear,’ her husband replied and Kate could see how little her ladyship relished being lumped in with those who were accomplished and experienced, but no longer young, even if her husband seemed oblivious to her quick frown of displeasure.

‘Practice makes perfect, don’t you agree, Lord Shuttleworth?’ the lady responded, avid hunger brazenly obvious in her heavy-lidded eyes as she ran them over him, as if testing his power as a lover and liking the idea of taking him as her current one a little too well, whatever their past relationship might be.

‘Only until that perfection is achieved, my lady,’ he said with a supremely elegant bow Kate thought was more an attempt to distance himself from the woman than offering her even a hint of encouragement.

‘But if it’s not properly maintained, even perfection can fade away from lack of application,’ the lady murmured and Kate wondered at her daring, at the same time as she marvelled at her husband’s wilful blindness to her true nature as she tried to joust with a potential lover under his very nose.

‘A little imperfection always seems so much more human to me,’ Edmund replied with a surprisingly warm look in Kate’s direction that she decided was his way of subtly informing Lady Tedinton she was much less to him than she thought herself to be, since he’d just put Kate ahead of her and everyone knew they were no longer even friends.

‘Yet no doubt surprisingly tedious after a while. A person of taste and refinement, not to mention experience, cannot find it easy to be burdened with a bungling amateur forced to strive for mastery of a set of skills that comes to others with almost instinctive ease. It must be tedious indeed to endure such gauche fumbling at such times,’ her ladyship responded.

How so much malice could be directed at her with one heavy-eyed, apparently amused glance was almost beyond Kate. She was tempted to shrug her shoulders and make a polite excuse before drifting away with an absent farewell, but she owed Edmund more than that, even if he was confounding and confusing her more than she’d dreamt he could when she was three years younger and even more foolish.

‘If one takes lessons from a fine teacher, they can be enormously stimulating for both pupil and educator in my experience,’ she managed to defend herself as coolly as if she had no idea their three-way battle concealed a nasty set of double meanings that were all going straight over Lord Tedinton’s head.

‘Since I hear that your former governess used her position in a noble household to gain a rich and powerful husband, one can only suppose the less wary gentlemen among the ton need to be very careful indeed of those lessons, Miss Alstone,’ her ladyship said with a faux smile only her husband would ever trust.

‘Would it be her position as my governess, or that of the only grandchild and sole heiress to the Duke and Duchess of Devingham you intend to cite, my lady?’ Kate said with such apparent pleasantness she was sure she heard her adversary’s perfect white teeth snap together with impotent fury.

‘Since the odd creature foolishly renounced the latter, then it must be the former, and what a very fine scheme it turned out to be,’ Lady Tedinton said, letting temper flash out recklessly, as if she sensed her most coveted lover slipping out of her grasping fingers when Edmund’s eyes iced over in obvious contempt.

‘Sometimes,’ he said with such chilly calm even Kate shivered, ‘it takes an inveterate schemer to spot a careful plan where none ever existed, my lady.’

Since he also bowed to the apparently noble couple with ceremonious elegance and an empty social smile, Lord Tedinton laughed and seemed as unaware of his lady’s fury as he was that she was being subtly accused of being devious and spiteful.

‘Indeed it does—now, are you going to honour me with that dance or not, my dear?’ he said as brightly as if they were all getting along famously. ‘After all, you lured me away from our duty of greeting belated guests on the promise of one, so we’d best join the next set and let them see exactly why we deserted them, eh?’ he urged his wife indulgently.

Kate smothered a chuckle at her ladyship’s barely masked impatience with his doglike devotion. The obnoxious female was already watching them with ill-concealed fury; presumably she wanted Edmund to share that devotion and hated Kate for being there to rescue him from her witchy wiles. If only the deluded female knew how little Edmund actually wanted Kate herself now, the awful woman would probably triumph and crow unbearably over her, she decided, sincerely hoping she could escape such an unpleasant encounter when Edmund’s engagement to some dewy-eyed débutante was finally announced.

‘What did you ever see in her?’ she asked unwarily once their host and hostess had taken to the dance floor and the music was loud enough to mask her voice from an interested listener.

‘Since you refused to become my wife more times than either of us care to be reminded, you have renounced all right to ask me that impertinent question, Miss Alstone. So I suggest you keep your arrogant opinions and any other ill-informed and ill-natured gossip you have garnered about me to yourself in the future,’ he told her as icily as he’d just set down her ladyship and Kate knew she’d be on the verge of tears if she let herself risk such a public loss of control.

Biting her lower lip to keep it from wobbling, she nodded to him regally as words deserted her, but she refused to let her steps falter under his icy silver-green gaze, or show any sign that she was even conscious of Lady Tedinton’s darts of dark-eyed resentment, as that lady barely even bothered to pretend her attention was centred on her husband or the dance.

‘I wish you a good evening, my lord,’ she managed to say expressionlessly enough as they neared Eiliane, who was gossiping happily with one of her cronies on the dark rose-coloured sofa that now reminded Kate almost insupportably of their hostess for the night.

She curtsied to him with formal grace, he bowed with almost as distant a hauteur as he’d used to depress her ladyship’s pretensions and they parted before Eiliane had even spotted them returning together and been able to come up with a pretext for keeping them so.

‘This must be one of the most tedious parties either of us ever had the poor judgement to attend, Kate,’ her mentor greeted her cheerfully, once the friend she’d been so absorbed in pumping for the more interesting secrets of the haut ton had departed to bully some hesitant youth into dancing with her débutante daughter.

‘Indeed,’ Kate managed as she resorted to the small amount of cover allowed by her fan to conceal some of her confusion.

‘You’re overset, my love,’ Eiliane exclaimed, even more concerned when the hectic colour in Kate’s cheeks ebbed as she recalled Edmund’s cold fury with her at even the mention of his rumoured amour with their hostess.

‘I’ll do well enough once I’ve got my breath back,’ she managed to say calmly enough as she wondered why on earth she’d let her tongue run away with her in such an appalling fashion just because the very idea of Edmund making love to that vixen had made her feel ill.

‘Nonsense, we’ll call for our carriage and go home. I’ll be glad of an early night and you look as if you could do with a week of them all of a sudden.’

‘No!’ Kate thought of how insufferably Lady Tedinton would triumph and smirk if she was weak enough to turn tail and go home like a whipped dog after that obnoxious encounter. ‘I would rather stay a little longer and perhaps go on to Mrs Farnborough’s as we had planned. That last dance was quite a vigorous one and I shall be perfectly fine in just a moment.’

‘Will you, my love?’ Eiliane asked shrewdly and Kate wished her a little less acute for once, but hoped her friend had no idea of the real reason why she was feeling so out of sorts and low spirited.

‘Yes, I shall feel quite restored once I’ve had a rest. It would never do if I gained a reputation for giving myself die-away airs after all, for you’d never get me off your hands then,’ she joked weakly. She refused to even consider the fact that it felt as if she’d never look at another man for the rest of her life and feel the least desire to marry him, or even stand up with him for a waltz after her bittersweet ones with Edmund had spoilt her expectations of any other partner.

She certainly refused all invitations to waltz for the rest of the evening, but brazened out the remainder of the pantomime it rapidly became to her. Seeing the daughter of the house dance with the suitable young gentleman she and Eiliane managed to throw into her path helped and, from Lady Tedinton’s petulant expression, Kate thought her new enemy was probably having an even less satisfactory evening than she was. She allowed herself a brief smile of triumph when they finally left the Tedintons’ ballroom, quite certain there was a metaphorical dagger in her back this time.

Chapter Five

‘There it all is then, shipshape and neat as you like,’ Ben Shaw, the other half of the firm of Stone & Shaw Shipping that he and Kit Alstone, now the latest Earl of Carnwood, had set up long before his lordship even dreamt of inheriting the family wealth and titles, informed Edmund the next day. As this came after an exhaustive tour of the warehouses and the new enclosed dock Stone & Shaw were building by the side of the one they’d already outgrown, then a return to the elegant offices they now kept in the City for a résumé of the firm’s finances and projections for future profit, Edmund could only agree with him.

‘Even I can see that for myself, thank you,’ he told his formidable friend and business associate and wondered why Ben Shaw thought he needed reassurance that, while he was at the helm, Stone & Shaw would turn a fine profit for any investors lucky enough to be admitted into the select ranks of their stockholders.

‘If you didn’t come and see it all for yourself every now and again, I wouldn’t have much respect for you as a man or an investor, and I dare say we’d never have done business together in the first place,’ Ben told him.

‘So long as I don’t try to interfere in the way you run the enterprise from day to day, I presume?’

‘Aye,’ Ben admitted wryly, ‘you’ve the measure of me on that front, my fine young lord, and that’s plain to see.’

‘Not as young as I was,’ Edmund defended himself automatically, although such teasing bothered him much less than it had when he was first admitted into the august boardroom of Stone & Shaw, probably because he had been thought likely to become part of the family Ben Shaw protected and loved as fiercely as if they truly shared ties of blood, by marrying Kate Alstone.

Would his refusal to become part of that family, now he’d finally returned to the ton with the aim of taking a suitable wife who wasn’t Miss Alstone, mean an end to such an unexpectedly comfortable and profitable friendship? If so, he’d regret it deeply, Edmund decided, and settled down for an excellent glass of burgundy and a companionable cigarillo, determined to enjoy them and this unlikely friend while he still had the chance.

‘Speaking of your relative youth, or lack of it, when are you going to get down to the business of finally wedding and bedding that stubborn girl of ours?’ Ben came straight out and asked the question Edmund had been dreading all morning.

‘I’m not,’ he admitted bravely, considering Ben was the largest and most formidably tough man Edmund had ever encountered and could probably mill him down without even having to break his stride.

Coming under the steady examination of a pair of grey eyes that suddenly looked as if they were determined to see into the very depths of a man’s soul wasn’t the most comfortable experience of Edmund’s life, but he held his ground and managed not to sigh with relief when Ben sat back in his chair and watched him blandly instead of reaching for his neckcloth and attempting to strangle him with it. ‘Because?’ was all Ben said while considering this new state of affairs.

‘I can’t imagine a worse fate than being in love with a woman who merely tolerates me, especially if we were to be bound inextricably together for life, can you?’ Edmund replied, thinking of the Tedintons and barely managing to hide a shudder at the idea of being trapped inside a marriage like that one.

‘No,’ Ben admitted, ‘but it beats me why you’ve now decided she won’t do when last time you were in town you were so madly in love with her you couldn’t even consider wedding anyone else.’

‘Beats me as well, but maybe I finally saw the truth of the matter, before she got so bored with turning me down that she decided to accept me just for a change of scenery.’

‘I think you would have discovered you had underestimated her if she did so,’ Ben said sagely and Edmund wondered if the unconventional giant did indeed know Kate Alstone far better than he did. He’d once lavished such minute attention on her every mood and gesture that it seemed a sad reflection on Edmund’s judgement and so-called powers of observation if he’d failed to understand her after all that effort.

‘No, for I won’t ask her again, so the situation will not arise,’ he insisted, denying himself the luxury to hope that he was wrong about her after all. ‘I lost my taste for being a tame lapdog to her some time over these last three years.’

‘Then if she weds another man, you’ll be entirely indifferent?’

No! The certainty of it roared through him like a sudden bitter tempest on a summer day. He’d hate her, and the cur she married, until his dying day.

‘Not entirely,’ he admitted out loud.

‘Not in the least, you young fool,’ Ben informed him roughly. ‘Had my Charlotte even threatened to promise herself to another man, I’d have torn him apart limb by limb and danced on his lousy body, then taken her to bed and loved her until she saw some sense. So either you don’t love Kate and never have, or you still do and owe it to yourself and her not to end your life in Newgate dangling on the end of a hangman’s rope. Although, I suppose in your case, my lord, it would be a jury of your peers and a silken noose at Tyburn instead of a hempen collar.’

Despite Ben’s mockery of his rank and what he’d make of the stern resolution Edmund had made to find himself a suitable wife this year and forget Kate Alstone if he ever found out about it, Edmund didn’t feel excluded from the select ranks of Ben Shaw’s friends. Either the unconventional giant didn’t believe Edmund could turn his back on his passion for the wretched female he’d once thought so firmly lodged in his heart he’d never shift her, or Ben was determined to stand his friend, irrespective of those other loyalties.

‘I’ve no taste for martyrdom,’ he admitted at last.

‘As well Kit Alstone’s occupied elsewhere, then, for he’s a damned idiot when it comes to his precious family and those he truly loves. He might decide you’ve dishonoured Kate’s good name and challenge you to a duel if you don’t wed her after all, for if ever I met a hot-headed fool when he’s in a temper, it’s my lord Carnwood.’

‘She’s the one who turned me down time and again, not the other way around,’ Edmund protested.

‘Well, I did say he was a damned fool, didn’t I?’

‘And you think me one as well?’

‘I never claimed to understand any of you great lords of creation and I can’t say that a closer acquaintanceship with the two of you has improved what I already had very much.’

‘And I don’t see how you intend to get away with that hackneyed line any more, considering we all know who your father is now,’ Edmund said with rash courage, for it was also common knowledge that Ben Shaw was no respecter of titles and ancient privilege.

‘Let’s hope the Marquis of Pemberley stays so busy with his new wife that he won’t interfere with your plans then, whatever they are, for he’s devilish fond of Kate as well,’ Ben warned, discussing his natural father with an ease neither of them had ever thought to hear when he’d still been so convinced he hated his lordly sire.

‘Aye, it’s bad enough having his wife’s attention fully fixed on me, without adding Lord Pemberley’s eagle-eyed scrutiny to the mix—along with Lord and Lady Carnwoods’ thrown in for good measure,’ Edmund admitted ruefully.

‘Don’t delude yourself I’m too busy to interfere myself, will you?’

‘I never delude myself that badly, but what beats me is why,’ Edmund said.

‘Because I don’t believe you can really turn your back on the headstrong minx after you fell in love with the little devil at first sight, and don’t forget I was there to see you behaving like a mooncalf when it happened, so don’t try to deny it. I’ve met men who could cut themselves off from a woman they once cared for like that, as if she’d never existed or was cold in her grave, but you’re not one of them. Kate cares for you more than either of you seem to know, and I don’t think you’re fool enough to turn aside from the magnificent female she’ll become if she weds the right man, if only she’ll just throw caution to the wind and accept you at long last.’

‘Thank you for thinking I am that man, but I’d have to be fool enough to ask her first. So what holds her back from being that woman anyway then, Ben?’

‘And you once claimed to be in love with her?’ Ben said with a hint of scorn in his deep voice that made Edmund flinch, despite knowing it was Kate who had been so set against falling in love once upon a time rather than he. ‘I can’t but marvel at fine young gentlemen who call infatuation love, then flit from girl to girl, like strutting peacocks waving their tail feathers, with not a worthwhile thought in their silly heads.’

‘I certainly thought myself in love with her three years ago, until she convinced me it was hopeless; if that makes me vain and idle, then so be it.’

Ben gave Edmund another of those searching glances, then nodded as if making up his mind about something. ‘I never really thought you guilty of those vices, so Kate obviously made a fine fist of whistling your mutual happiness down the wind, but have you ever stopped being furious with her long enough to wonder why?’

‘No, I just realised my one-sided love would make our lives a farce, even if I managed to persuade her to say yes instead of no in some moment of weakness.’

‘If you really loved her, you wouldn’t have given up at the first hurdle.’

‘Hardly that.’ Edmund was stung into justifying himself as he looked back over that wild springtide when they’d both been painfully young and he’d been alternately effervescent with hope and cast into the depths of despair by Kate’s inability to see how finely suited they could be, in bed and out, if only she’d open her eyes and see the rich possibilities of it all.

‘I grant you she’s stubborn and can be damnably difficult to either drive or lead at times,’ Ben conceded.

‘Difficult? She’s nigh impossible,’ Edmund told him with a bitter exasperation he thought he’d conquered, but it seemed that his friend was right and he still had strong feelings toward Kate Alstone, even if foremost among them was currently vexation, closely followed by something darker and angrier and born of three wasted years apart that he refused to examine more closely right now.

‘There are one or two good reasons why she’s not exactly the easiest female to live with at times,’ Ben said almost apologetically, which in itself was enough to render Edmund momentarily speechless.

He shook his head over what those reasons might be and must have looked as puzzled as he felt. ‘I can’t imagine what they might be,’ he replied at last.

‘Then apply the brains God gave you and use your imagination, Edmund. Have you ever stopped to wonder how you might feel if you were brought up as a much-loved and indulged child of a happy family instead of a noble and indulged orphan? Then imagine that, one by one, you lost every person in the world who was dear to you one way and another, all but your little sister, whom you then had to fight like a tiger to protect from the suddenly hostile world around you. Kate and Isabella Alstone lost their parents, their brother and, to all intents and purposes, their elder sister in quick succession when Kate was little more than ten years old. Their grandfather, who should have protected them both and loved them all the more, was so wrapped up in his own selfish grief and fury at the fates that he abandoned those two little girls to the so-called care of his daughter, Lady Ennersley, and her daughter, and I wouldn’t trust either with my pet dog, let alone the comfort and education of two innocent and supposedly helpless young girls.

‘Take my word for it, Edmund, those two unnatural females are the worst harpies I ever met, and I was brought up near the rookeries and certainly know a harpy when I see one. They constantly belittled and even beat Kate and threatened to do the same to her little sister, except Kate used to get in their way so they couldn’t reach her, which of course meant that they chastised her instead. They also robbed them of all those two little girls held dear, refusing to let them even see Eiliane Rhys as she was then. I know my darling stepmama tried time and again to wrench them both out of their icy grasp, but old Carnwood ignored the plight of his own grandchildren and refused to do anything to stop his daughter or the devil’s spawn she gave birth to making their lives a misery for far too long.

‘Those two heartless witches told them he hated them for living when his son and then their brother died and maybe they were even right, for he never made any effort to look to their welfare until it became more comfortable to act on Eiliane’s constant nagging to at least send them to school rather than to refuse to do so. Their aunt and cousin also managed to convince Kate that nobody but the servants cared what became of them, and that even they only gave a damn what happened to them because they were paid to. If not for my darling wife, Shuttleworth, those girls would have remained alienated and adrift even at the school their old fool of a grandfather eventually sent them to, solely to get them out of his way and to stop Eiliane’s constant letters and enquiries about them, and calm the hornet’s nest she stirred up among his wider family to shame him into action.

‘Now I respect Charlotte’s judgement and my own instincts well enough to be certain there are very deep and passionate feelings hidden behind Kate’s cool façade, even if you can’t see it. To the wider world she’s a confident and desirable young beauty with riches and privileges at her fingertips most young women would envy her, but if that’s all you see when you look at her, Edmund Worth, maybe you don’t deserve her after all. You might be better off with a less complex and difficult woman if you’re merely in search of an easy life with a conformable wife who’ll exclaim over your cleverness hourly and give birth to a pack of spineless brats you can hand your wealth and titles on to before you finally die of boredom.’

Perhaps as a fortunate, if often lonely, orphan he had been guilty of envying Miss Katherine Alstone her loving family and so had failed to look beyond the cool indifference with which she met the eyes of the world. He knew better than to dismiss the counsel of a man he respected, Edmund decided, and neither could he ignore the opinion of Ben’s wife, a woman of such extraordinary character, integrity and unusual looks that he couldn’t help but admire her, from a safe distance.

‘Maybe I’m not the man you take me for, and perhaps I don’t deserve Kate Alstone as I should if I can’t gain her love, but I never managed to knock down that wall of touch-me-not indifference you claim she’s hiding behind, Ben, even when I was trying my damnedest to demolish it.’

‘I suppose you know what they say about faint heart not winning fair lady?’

‘All very well, but three years ago my doglike devotion did nothing to win her affection or convince her she can trust me. I hope you don’t expect me to sit at her feet for another three, risking being kicked aside every time she wonders if another pet might not suit her better.’

‘Maybe she doesn’t want a pet in the first place, then.’

‘What does she want then, man? I’m damned if I know any more.’

‘Just that—she wants a man and not a lapdog. She’s a sensible female and finds them pettish and yappy and who can blame her? I’m relieved my wife has never shown any sign of falling for the breed.’

‘From what I can tell she just adopts strays, and the larger and uglier the better.’

Edmund recalled his visit to their eccentric household last week with a reminiscent grin. Mrs Shaw had lately taken in a hound of very mixed breeding and huge size, who bayed at all her visitors and buried his bones under her best furniture, whilst protecting her and hers from all and sundry, even though she didn’t actually stand in need of any protection so far as he could see.

‘My point exactly,’ the lady’s husband agreed smugly.

Edmund wondered what the ton would make of the son of a marquis, even one born the wrong side of the blanket, who smugly claimed kinship with a mongrel of the most mixed variety and dubious origins. Possibly Ben’s very indifference to his own blue blood, and most of his father’s peers along with it, explained why he wasn’t just tolerated, but lionised by all but the most stiff-necked of them. It seemed to him that there was nothing quite so intriguing to most of the ton as someone so genuinely unimpressed by their elegant show and lofty traditions as Ben Shaw appeared to be.

‘So next time I call on Miss Alstone, you think I should growl menacingly at all other visitors who dare to enter Lady Pemberley’s drawing room?’ Edmund asked with a rueful grin. ‘Then perhaps I could pin any gentlemen I don’t like the look of up against the wall with teeth bared, whilst I attempt to bay loudly at the same time and dribble down their shirt fronts or all over their precious Hessians while I’m doing it?’

‘If you could leave out the drooling, that will probably go down better,’ Ben said with a reminiscent shudder and Edmund almost pitied him that aspect of the overenthusiastic Prometheus, as Charlotte had christened her latest waif.

‘Maybe, but I am what I am, Ben, and have never been good at pretending to be otherwise, I’m afraid,’ Edmund admitted ruefully, almost ashamed of himself for lacking the guile to storm and bluster sufficiently to gain Kate’s attention at last.

‘No need, you’re rich, titled and personable, Shuttleworth, so why would you need to be other than what you are? Just show Kate how much you’ve grown up since you fell all of an adoring heap at her feet three years ago. Make her see that you’ve become your own man while she wasn’t paying attention before you give up on her, that’s all I’m suggesting.’

‘All?’ Edmund echoed faintly, but he grinned at his unexpected mentor just the same and left after an interesting as well as an enlightening morning in a thoughtful frame of mind.

It might have been possible to set his face against the very idea of loving Kate and abhor her inability to see what was in front of her pert nose when he was a hundred miles from her and spare her incendiary presence, Edmund admitted to himself as he walked away from Stone & Shaw’s neat offices. He might even have found a sweet and biddable wife to put in her place if only she’d stayed away this Season. Kate was too near now; too real and right in front of him night after night, proving how much less life with that sweet little wife would be than one with her. Maybe it wouldn’t be fair to offer another woman so little when she might find an untainted young spark to make little paragons with instead. And how could less ever be good enough, despite his three-year-old resolution never to let Kate Alstone trample roughshod over his dreams again?

Despite the vow he’d made to himself to forget her, he still yearned for her in his bed and at his board night after night in his dreams and in his deepest, darkest fantasies. If he couldn’t beat his obsession with her, why not use it to trap her with her own scheming? He’d seen her summing up the young bloods and even the personable widowers in search of a wife to look after their restless and motherless broods and had wanted to strangle her for looking about her for a suitable, coldly selected, unloved husband. Still, he might be able to use her stubborn misreading of her own character and get her up the aisle before she realised they could never be so little to each other if they both lived to be ninety.

Hadn’t apparent indifference got him a lot further already than devotion ever had? He recalled the feel of the sway and dip of her lush but streamlined body against his in the dance and gave a reminiscent grin. If she was to be lured out of her ivory tower, wasn’t he already halfway to tumbling her into his arms instead? With such a promising start he’d be a fool if he failed to draw the real Kate even further out from behind those defensive barriers of hers.

The prospect of a future he’d resigned himself never to achieve was heady, but the last thing he wanted to do was risk more humiliation at Kate’s hands. Next time he asked her to marry him he’d make quite certain the skittish redheaded torment was ready to say yes at last. So there had to be a very long way to go before he could be sure his last offer was met with eagerness, rather than the absent-minded kindness she might show a boot-boy who’d spilled lamp oil on the furniture and was being tiresomely emotional about the whole tedious business of clearing it up.

Edmund had walked through the City and into Mayfair, probably only escaping being robbed because he’d dressed plainly for his trip round Ben’s empire. Potential thieves took one look at such a distracted gentleman and decided he was either mad and too much trouble to bother with, or a poet or an artist caught up by his muse and therefore too poor to be worthwhile. He’d experienced such a revolution of feelings since he’d set out from it this morning that he got back to Worth House in Grosvenor Square only to find he couldn’t settle to anything, so he took his favourite hack out in an attempt to calm his seesawing feelings instead.

Did he really love Kate Alstone? That was the question that trumped all the others, he decided, as the black gelding finally won free of the mêlée and Edmund allowed him a little more freedom. Deciding it wasn’t too late to ride into the countryside to avoid the curious and the sociable when the evenings were drawing out and there was a moon tonight anyway, he set the powerful animal on the road to Richmond and tried to keep at least half his mind on their going.

When he’d first met her, perhaps he’d still felt less than other men, because he was the last of his line and couldn’t join one of Wellington’s regiments to fight Bonaparte, or follow Ben Shaw and the Earl of Carnwood’s example and forge his way by his own efforts. Even as a boy he’d known he couldn’t leave his land and his people masterless and abandoned to the uncaring hands of the Crown as the Prince Regent, with his voracious appetites and gargantuan debts, would strip every asset the Worths had built up so diligently over centuries, then sell it piecemeal to whoever offered the most money.

Had his secret insecurity, when he’d been forced to turn his back on the army he’d once longed to join and dutifully go to Oxford instead, made him doubt himself, until he’d felt Kate’s rejections were all he really deserved? If it had led him astray about himself and the woman he wanted to love for life, then he cursed it. Ben Shaw’s shrewd summary of Kate’s well-hidden fears and insecurities had made him see at last why she might hold back from love, or any other emotion that would leave her vulnerable to hurt. He raged against the very thought of how badly hurt she had been and fervently wished he’d been the one to punish those two she-devils instead of Kit Alstone. Everyone knew he’d banished the old earl’s daughter to a remote estate and ordered her to stay there on pain of losing even that, and the lady’s daughter had been told to live abroad with the secret husband she’d apparently been wed to ever since her seventeenth birthday, despite her subsequent and bigamous marriage to another man.

So why hadn’t Edmund had the confidence to see through Kate’s almost absent-minded tolerance of her eager court and him in particular when they’d first met? What excuse did that young sprig have for not looking into her dark blue Alstone eyes and finding the real Kate she still hadn’t dared to fully become lurking under all that wary indifference? That Kate was lion-hearted and passionate and he wanted her fierce protection and all that pent-up love she was so wary of giving for his children, and a share of that last commodity for himself as well, or he’d end up envying them and that would never do.

Well, he could see her now and had her firmly in his sights at last. He was his own man now, too, and if not the dashing hero he’d once dreamt of being, he was strong enough to shoulder his responsibilities and even enjoy them most of the time. He’d got his estates running at a healthy profit and restored the depleted fortune managed, or mismanaged, by his various trustees until his majority, so if he could take on all that and succeed, why not have one last, reckless throw at winning the woman he’s always wanted above all others as well?

He grinned at the memory of how he’d managed to confuse Kate recently without even trying; now he was in earnest, keeping her off balance and paying attention long enough to claim her heart and her hand suddenly didn’t seem so unlikely after all.

Chapter Six

‘What a brilliant catch Lord Shuttleworth will make some lucky girl, now he’s obviously looking out for a more suitable wife,’ Kate heard one of the chaperons behind her whisper rather loudly to her crony a week or so later and knew perfectly well that she was meant to hear every word. After all, she had refused to marry the lady’s impecunious elder son in no uncertain terms at the end of last Season and that did put a doting mama off a girl rather badly.

It was true, of course, that she’d watched Edmund dance with all the prettiest and most eligible débutantes the Season rejoiced in night after night and could vouch for the fact that, while all seemed to agree he was a very fine gentleman and would make an even finer husband, some were shamelessly eager to march him up the aisle of St George’s, Hanover Square, at the double.

‘Indeed, my dear—he’s so rich, so well born and so handsome that he’s without a doubt the finest catch to be had this Season,’ another lady, who persisted in thinking Kate had deliberately eclipsed her elder daughter’s début, and blamed her for that poor girl having to marry a mere mister with only two large country estates and a town house to his name, asserted. ‘The Tedinton woman seems quite set on cuckolding her poor husband with him, but that won’t bar him from marrying well. My dear little Felicity is too young yet, but your girl hasn’t made enough effort to captivate such an eligible young lord up to now, my dear; you should remind her of her duty to her family.’

‘Darling Charity is quite determined on her Mr Holt and he on her, so Henry will agree to the match in the end, I dare say, and Lord Shuttleworth can marry where he pleases so far as I’m concerned,’ the first lady replied placidly enough, since Mr Holt was commonly held to be a very wealthy man and she was obviously a realist.

‘It’s a well enough match, I suppose, but Shuttleworth would make a very fine feather in any mama’s cap,’ the second said wistfully.

‘Especially Lady Tedinton’s,’ the first lady said with a shrewd and significant nod in the languorous and lovely Countess of Tedinton’s direction.

‘That, my dear, rather depends on whether she’s intent on wearing him on her bonnet or her sleeve,’ her friend replied with heavy significance.

‘Surely not even she would do that, especially during her daughter’s come-out Season when it would be more fitting if he caught the chit rather than the mother?’

‘The girl’s only her stepdaughter, don’t forget, and not ten years younger than the painted hussy her father married in some fit of madness. Tedinton should have known it would end in disaster once he’d made such a ridiculous second marriage.’

‘That woman can’t pull the wool over the ladies’ eyes, even if the gentlemen hang on every word that falls from her painted lips. She’s little more than a strumpet and not a very well-bred one at that.’

‘I pride myself on always being able to read a person’s true nature, despite any shoddy façades they may care to throw up to confuse people. Even Tedinton won’t be able to fool himself her affairs and her low appetites don’t exist for ever, for all that she’s a beauty.’

‘True, but she’s nowhere near as clever as she thinks she is. The woman has risen too high and now thinks she can have whatever, or whomever, she wants. Such arrogance will prove her downfall one fine day and it won’t be a moment too soon for me when she tried to condescend to me last time we crossed each other’s paths.’

‘Well, I doubt she’ll try it twice, my dear, but there’s no mistaking exactly what, or rather whom, she wants right now,’ the other lady replied meaningfully. Lady Tedinton was watching her stepdaughter chatter animatedly with Lord Shuttleworth whilst reclining on a nearby sofa and eyeing him as if she’d like to pounce and never mind how many spectators saw her do it.

‘Her thoughts are written all over her face, for all she thinks we’re too stupid to read them, yet he looks more entranced by the girl. Tedinton would be a fool to turn down such a match on the say-so of a wife who wants Shuttleworth herself. So that match would put the cat among the pigeons, and set others with their eye on him in their place once and for all,’ the first lady said sweetly.

Kate did her best to look serenely unconscious of their spite while she fervently hoped they were wrong. She wasn’t well acquainted with the girl, but she was pretty enough and might be charming as well for all she knew. However, she was clearly no equal match for Edmund Worth. He deserved a woman who wouldn’t bore him before the honeymoon was over and, if he met that lady, Kate supposed she’d have to shrug her shoulders and look about her for that perfect husband a little more diligently than she was doing at the moment.

‘Certain ladies need to realise that it’s never wise to be too finicky and risk coming back Season after Season, don’t you agree, dear?’ the second of her detractors continued relentlessly, with a significant nod in Kate’s direction she pretended not to see.

‘Luckily our darling girls are in no danger of finding out that pert opinions and overweening vanity will almost certainly land them on the shelf for good.’

‘Quite—I never could abide such precocious chits myself,’ her friend agreed while Kate planned their imminent demise in minute and purely theoretical detail, to keep from verbally grinding them under her chariot wheels as her restless temper demanded she must.

‘Our dance,’ pronounced Mr Cromer concisely at just the right moment to stop her leaping to her own defence in a reckless fashion.

‘Indeed,’ Kate replied gratefully, having come to value his sparse conversation over the last weeks, as he began to court Miss Transome in earnest.

Who would have dreamt a few years ago that Amelia Transome and Kate Alstone would ever come to enjoy each other’s company so much, when each had eyed the other during their début and decided they had little in common? Now Kate valued Amelia’s kind heart and generous nature and wondered at herself for not seeing past her chatter and fluttery manner before. And at least Amelia regarded Mr Cromer dancing with Kate as the lesser of two evils, since she couldn’t dance every dance with him herself. In her company at least he wasn’t being giggled over or eyed speculatively by one of the eager newcomers or their husband-hunting mamas, and Kate felt at ease with at least one of her dancing partners, so all three were content. Yet Mr Cromer had a good friend in Lord Shuttleworth and every now and then Kate would glance up and find him standing by the other gentleman’s side and watching her, as unreadable as he was unsmiling while he did so. His lordship hadn’t asked her to dance again and she told herself that she was relieved.

‘Shuttleworth ain’t serious about that chit, y’know?’ Mr Cromer informed her during one of the country dances.

‘He gives a very good impression of it, then,’ she replied, just as if she had every right to feel bitter, which she most certainly did not.

‘Chivalrous to a fault, always was. Easing her path into society quiets his conscience, I suppose.’

Then it was true. Edmund had been Lady Tedinton’s lover and evidently he still felt guilty about that and, considering the wretched woman was another man’s wife, so he should. How could he have fallen for that heartless female’s overblown charms? No, there was no need to wonder about that; Kate only had to flick a look at the sultry beauty doing her best to look faintly amused by her stepdaughter and his lordship to know exactly why a gentleman would find such lazy sensuality irresistible.

Yet Kate thought from the downward curve of her pouting lips that the lady was secretly furious at his defection. Turning the situation over in her mind, Kate shivered as she contemplated the sort of marriage she’d fooled herself she wanted. The very idea of casually following in the footsteps of Lady Tedinton and taking lovers once she’d borne Edmund’s heirs made her want to weep now. Then, imagining how she’d feel if they’d actually wed and she’d found out about the exotic Lady Tedinton afterwards, she felt a strong temptation to go into strong hysterics. So maybe it was as well this was neither the time nor place to consider what her revulsion at the very idea said about her own feelings toward Edmund Worth.

‘Bestholme,’ Mr Cromer remarked obscurely after they’d finished their dance and he was escorting her back to where Eiliane and Miss Transome were sitting.

‘Yes?’ Kate said encouragingly.

‘Fortune hunter,’ he warned with a shake of his head for emphasis.

‘Ah, I thought so,’ she said with a grateful smile.

It set the cap on a hateful evening that Mr Bestholme seemed even more desperate to corner her attention when she refused to take to the dance floor with him. He besieged her with sly comments and overfamiliar touches whenever he could force himself closer to her by using the crush of guests as an excuse and if she didn’t get away from his damp, cruel hands and hungry eyes soon she was going to be sick. Eventually she disgusted herself by taking to her heels and fleeing his far-too-persistent and public pursuit, even resorting to the ladies’ withdrawing room where even he wouldn’t have the gall to follow her.

Sure the man would think nothing of compromising her into marriage if that was the only way he could get his repellent hands on her fortune, she quit her temporary sanctuary and trespassed into the private part of the house to plan a rapid retreat to Derbyshire and the safety of Kit’s fearsome protection, if her determined evasion of Mr Bestholme didn’t persuade the human leech she wasn’t going to be tricked, pressured or just plain forced into marriage.

It seemed a coward’s way out even to her, but it sounded so tempting after the last few weeks of disappointed hopes and mistaken dreams. To be in Derbyshire with spring softening even the starkly beautiful peaks with its lovely bounty, to breathe in good clean air and be able to ride all day without having to be civil to a soul if she didn’t choose to meet one, seemed like heaven just at the moment. And what a relief it would be to escape the nagging feeling that three years ago she’d turned away the one man who could have made leaving her beloved Wychwood for a new life as his wife and mother of his children a wonderful adventure, rather than an impossible sacrifice.

Yet even while she was searching through possible excuses for running away, mentally planning her journey and thinking up a story that would convince Kit and Miranda when she got home that she was perfectly well and happy, just jaded with London and the social Season, she knew she couldn’t do it. There were her detractors to outface and, more important than any of them, there was Izzie, who would be here very soon—how could Kate not be here to witness her little sister’s social triumphs and enjoy her lively company once more? It might hurt far too much that Edmund had decided to look elsewhere for a bride and a lover, but she was an Alstone and would not turn tail and run at the first setback put in her path by unkind fate.

There was Eiliane to consider as well, of course, and, come to think of it, she was oddly distracted tonight and unlike her usual sharp-eyed self for some reason. Her chaperon had hardly seemed to notice Bestholme’s increasingly bizarre behaviour tonight and Kate frowned as she wondered belatedly if there was something seriously wrong with her dear friend and mentor. Then she had her two newest friends to see safely wed, of course, and Amelia Transome had gallantly deployed her most determined chatter on Kate’s behalf tonight in a selfless way that commanded equal loyalty. Even Mr Cromer had put his stalwart silence between her and Mr Bestholme as often as he could without seeming too particular himself, but nothing had put the awful man off his single-minded pursuit of her fortune.

Kate could practically hear the ill-natured gossip breaking out all around her if she went back into the ballroom to make sure her chaperon wasn’t sickening for something. Awarding herself five minutes of peace and quiet would do no harm, she assured herself cravenly, and stole on through the half darkness of the private rooms of their host and hostess’s town house with a guilty sense of playing truant from reality and fortune hunters, as well as intruding on their privacy.

Edmund eyed the assembled company and almost wished he’d stayed in Herefordshire this Season after all. Yet the fine hairs on the nape of his neck were prickling as if trying to warn him of some danger the rest of him was slow to pick up. Lady Tedinton, with her silly pretence that he had already been her lover and would shortly be so again, was a damnably inconvenient complication he’d certainly not bargained for and he’d had to waste far too much time tonight avoiding her very obvious lures and any hint he might be susceptible to them. He did his best not to meet her gaze as he searched the room in vain for a glimpse of Kate’s glorious red curls, but something told him he’d soon have to take the time and trouble to convince Selene Tedinton once and for all that she meant nothing to him and never would, in terms even she couldn’t misinterpret as part of the game she so loved to play.

‘Something’s amiss,’ Cromer informed him brusquely as he joined him with a worried frown on his face.

‘There’s always scheming afoot at affairs like this one,’ Edmund responded coolly, even if his friend’s unease only added to his own.

‘Miss Transome claims that Lady T. and Bestholme are up to something,’ Cromer said with resigned acceptance that Amelia’s sayings and doings were more important to him than he’d dreamed they could be until recently.

‘Any idea what?’ Edmund asked, suddenly very interested in them as well.

‘Don’t know. Unholy pair at the best of times. Welcome to each other, except the Tedinton woman keeps looking at Miss Alstone as if she’d like to kill her slowly, then stamp on her grave. Miss Transome’s convinced the woman’s hatching a scheme to put Miss Alstone out of the picture for good so far as you’re concerned.’

‘She’s mistaken her adversary then,’ Edmund said curtly.

‘Or her quarry.’

‘Yes, she couldn’t be more wrong there,’ Edmund replied softly.

‘Going to stand here gossiping all night, then?’ Cromer prompted.

‘No, I’ll deal with the harpy in my own good time, after I’ve tracked down Miss Alstone and seen her safely back to her chaperon’s side once more.’

‘Aye, she’s been gone too long for her own good. You go and find out where she’s up to and we’ll cover your backs as best we can.’

‘Thank you, the confounded woman is a damned nuisance at the best of times and this isn’t one of them,’ he said grimly. ‘Sometimes I’d like to strangle her.’

‘Better marry her as soon as possible instead—obviously made for each other,’ his friend said with understated irony that was currently wasted on Edmund as he fumed at Kate’s protracted absence.

‘I’ll think about it,’ Edmund said tersely and with a casual look about him to locate the Marchioness of Pemberley and Bestholme, who was, luckily for him, still in the ballroom and not pursuing Kate around the half-lit gardens or goodness only knew where else she might be hiding herself.

Satisfied Kate’s chaperon was engrossed with old friends now and blissfully unaware that anything was amiss, he left by way of the card room as if he hadn’t a care in the world, even as he fought an irrational fury that Kate hadn’t come to him for help instead of bolting for the shadows. After searching the quieter rooms of their host’s residence, he was beginning to think trouble existed in Miss Transome’s overheated imagination when he caught the faint, unmistakable scent of Kate Alstone lingering in an otherwise deserted corridor leading towards his host’s library. He stilled his already near-silent footfall and listened for any further sign of the elusive, overly independent female.

Despite knowing very well she should return to the ballroom and prepare to endure a whole evening of dodging Bestholme as stoically as she had it in her to manage, Kate had wandered furtively on through private rooms she knew very well she shouldn’t intrude into. The farther she got from the ball, the more she felt like a hind with the noise and threat of hounds and huntsmen fading behind her and the harder she found it to turn about and go back. She scoured a dark room for unexpected fortune hunters and allowed herself a huge sigh of relief once her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she still found no sign of the repulsive creature—nor any hidden galleries or dangerously secluded corners he might spring out from.

Sinking into a snug high-backed chair by the unlit fire, she wondered if the lady of the house sat there to embroider or read whilst her husband laboured over his speeches in the House of Lords, which were apparently earnest, detailed and well intentioned, but guaranteed to empty that august chamber almost as fast as a cry of fire. It made a rather appealing picture of two lives entwining over the years so that, even if she didn’t share his interest in politics, her ladyship sat and kept her lord company whilst he pursued one. Shifting in her chair, Kate wondered if Eiliane had been right all along. Maybe marriage wasn’t a military campaign from which all emotion must be sternly banished and all hope of anything better shorn ruthlessly away in case it proved false.

Too late for such a conclusion to make any difference to her situation, she decided sadly, but she still felt irrationally betrayed by Edmund’s defection when she had absolutely no right to. Such a shame that she’d spurned him so emphatically during her first heady Season, when she’d been too young to realise just what wonderful possibilities were being offered her and grab them with both hands. Now he was so indifferent to her it felt as if some long-anticipated treat had been withdrawn and her life was suddenly limited and dry for the lack of it. Squirming in her comfortable seat, Kate braved an answer to so many of the questions troubling her and it only made matters worse. Edmund, who no longer wanted her, who despised her for turning him away, who seemed determined to court a sweet and suitable wife not in the least bit like Kate Alstone—somehow he mattered uniquely to her and it was obvious to anyone who had two eyes to see with that she no longer meant a thing to him.

Cursing her younger self for refusing to see that he’d make her an ideal husband and lover, Kate felt unable to just sit and contemplate her own idiocy and jumped to her feet to pace restlessly. She couldn’t put her hand on her heart and admit it was irrevocably his and therefore broken beyond mending and, as he now watched her with hard disillusionment instead of adoration in his silver-green eyes, that was just as well. Yet Kate had an uncomfortable suspicion she’d been testing Edmund’s devotion from the moment they first met, and considering it had proved such a chimera, maybe she’d been right not to trust it enough to agree to marry him.

Doing her best to be honest with herself now her future looked bleak, Kate stopped her perambulations and tried to face her own faults as unflinchingly as she was prepared to pick over Edmund Worth’s. Impatient with herself for being unable to consider him, or her feelings for him, with dispassionate coolness, she was about to pace her host’s fine Persian carpet when a sound in the corridor outside made her freeze in her tracks. Just making out the soft tread of a gentleman’s evening shoes on the marble floor outside, Kate muted a huff of impatient fury and turned to face the wretch who’d been chasing her all evening with defiant determination and the fireside poker.

‘Preparing to beat me off with more than just words this time, are you, my dear?’ the intruder asked her blandly and relief and something far warmer than that ran through her at the very sound of Edmund’s voice. It made her feel young and silly all of a sudden as she had to put her hand over her mouth to stifle a chuckle.

‘Only if you really annoy me, Lord Shuttleworth,’ she said, her heartbeat thundering in her ears for a very different reason now and her fear flying as wild curiosity about darkened rooms and their unknown possibilities took its place.

‘Maybe you should carry it at all times to fend off importunate suitors then?’ he said as he took it gently from her and returned it to its stand.

‘I can think of at least one person I’d like to leave with a few good bruises,’ Kate said darkly and saw him frown even in the semi-darkness.

‘Just say the word and I’ll do it for you.’

‘And then be forced to meet the repellent man at dawn as if he deserved to be rated a gentleman after all, my lord? I rather think not,’ she told him crossly and just the thought of him risking all he was to a pistol ball made her insides go as cold as if she’d swallowed an icicle.

‘I can take care of myself,’ he told her abruptly.

‘I dare say you can, but I’ll manage without your assistance on that front all the same. I do like to sleep at nights, you see?’

‘So do I, although you’ve robbed me of a great deal of that commodity since we first met,’ he informed her softly and Kate realised how close he suddenly was to her only at the instant when he slid a strong arm round her waist and pulled her against his muscular frame so easily it hardly even occurred to her that she might resist him.

‘Have I? How very inconsiderate of me, Edmund,’ was all the response she seemed able to offer, which was very odd of her, considering she’d come in here to avoid similar attentions from another man.

‘Yes, it was. So don’t you think it’s high time you shared a little of my sleeplessness to make amends?’ he murmured huskily.

‘Maybe …’ she began, but it was too late and he stopped her mouth by the simple strategy of kissing it until she forgot what she was going to say and almost everything else as well.

Chapter Seven

At the advanced age of one and twenty Kate had experienced only the most respectful of chaste salutes to compare this one with and they were no help at all, she decided hazily. She supposed having such a powerful guardian hovering like Nemesis in the background must have kept her ignorant of such dangerous delights until now. If Edmund had kissed her like this three years ago, she’d almost certainly have been married to him virtually ever since, but had either of them been ready for such heady enchantment then? It was a question she’d never be able to answer since he hadn’t kissed her until her wits were shot and her body singing with some wild hope she didn’t dare name until tonight. Abandoning any effort to reason with herself, she snuggled even closer to him, whilst raising too-willing lips to lure him back to her the moment he seemed about to recover his senses and back away.

‘Edmund,’ she murmured his name reproachfully, protesting any distance between them and wantonly hoping he could be persuaded to do it again.

‘Katherine?’ he replied, lingering on the syllables of her name as if it was a sensuous luxury in his mouth.

‘Kiss me again?’ she begged shamelessly.

So he did and this time there was nothing reverent and respectful about his wickedly knowing mouth as it opened hungrily on hers and, as soon as she echoed him in instinctive response, he plundered it ruthlessly. For the first time Kate felt the true allure of being seduced as well as seducing, with a man’s firm mouth and hot demands suddenly a wonderful promise, rather than a threat of terrible vulnerability or base subjection. She shivered in anticipation of something even more mighty, a force that could take her under and drown her in passion and sweetness, so she did her best to make sure she attained it by sneaking her hands up and about Edmund’s strong neck, then shocking them both by moaning against his lips when his tongue invaded her mouth and her knees turned to water.

It was heat and light and sustenance and she couldn’t currently imagine ever needing any other. He ran lingering, approving hands down the supple line of her slender back and she all but purred with satisfaction when he reached the firm swell of her buttocks and settled there for a hot, breathless moment before he swept that incendiary touch back up to mould her even closer into his kiss. Gasping with delight as his wicked tongue darted in and out of her wanton mouth in a rhythm even she recognised as primal, for all her ridiculous innocence, she clung as if he was her rock in a very stormy sea indeed.

Then he allowed them the sumptuous treat of lowering his hand to cup her breast and Kate wondered how she managed to stay standing for the rush of heat and temptation that rocked through her like a force of nature. She heard his breath catch at the willingness of her tightened nipples, obvious under the richness of silk and his exploring fingers and she stuttered out a sigh of delight when he explored one of them further until she moaned once again. All thought of where they were and what risks they were taking of being discovered fled as even the distant sound of music faded from her consciousness and all that mattered to her was him. Edmund, her almost-promised lover, hers. At last there were no questions in her head except for how soon the searing ache at the heart of her could be appeased with something he and no other could grant her. Caught up in her first taste of headlong, driven passion, she keened softly at the bolt of demand for more that ran through her like hot fire.

Head reeling from her innocently erotic responses to his runaway loss of control, as soon as he felt her mouth respond to his with untutored enthusiasm, Edmund tried hard to draw back, to let his longing hands fall from her magnificent body and put distance between them that his own harder, even more eager body certainly didn’t want.

‘No, stay,’ she urged, her voice husky and shaky and utterly in tune with every one of his feral instincts to possess her and carry her off to his lair and keep her there for ever. ‘Kiss me again,’ she demanded, so lost in what they’d set alight between them that he doubted she remembered her own name, let alone his.

‘If I do there will be no going back for either of us,’ he managed to grate out between lips stiff with wanting and needing to do exactly what she demanded.

‘Edmund,’ she whispered and it was an agreement, not a denial.

Triumph roared through him as his body tightened even more painfully. He struggled to leash his own out-of-control instincts and the need he’d kept under such a mighty curb ever since he’d met her in the face of her suddenly so wild, so natural, so truly Kate-like urgency. The lure of lowering her on their host’s fine carpet and thrusting into the warmth and welcome she was innocently laying out for him tempted him until it felt like too much of an effort, too much of a betrayal not to give in and take her to their mutual ecstasy.

He tensed to do as they both wanted and seize her by that ridiculously slender waist of hers and soothe and stoke her passion until neither of them had any choice but to let themselves sink onto the floor of this room in a stranger’s house and rut like a pair of spring-tortured animals. He’d always known she would be matchless and sweet and impulsive and unashamed in her wants and needs, if she ever let herself be the passionate and extraordinary woman she had it in her to become. Now that Kate was free from the restraints the miseries of the past had forced her to curb her true, passionate self with, she was utterly breathtaking as she took fire in his arms and demanded an intense seduction neither of them would ever want to forget.

And here they were, exactly where they should not be, with risk and scandal dogging every step along the way, and all it would take to set it off was someone else feeling the urge to wander as she had wandered and find them out. They were trespassing in the shadows of their host’s private rooms, with an open door at their back and hundreds of curious guests far too eager for any slight scandal that presented itself to their eager ears and eyes a matter of mere yards away. Reluctantly he restrained the ravenous wolf within him bond by painful bond, until he could gasp in a huge breath of cooling air and set his forehead to hers, drawing on an unexpected stock of true tenderness that surely only she could unleash in him at such a time.

‘Not here, lover,’ he murmured, ‘and certainly not now.’

‘Where then, and when?’ she demanded, the tremble in her low-voiced demand threatening to undo all the good he’d managed to do them.

‘In our marriage bed, after all is made right between us in our own eyes.’

‘It was right,’ she protested bitterly, drawing away from him as if his touch repelled her now and he cursed her contrary, headstrong nature, even as he knew very well it was one of the things that made him want her so unbearably that he’d take her on virtually any terms.

He wondered if he’d made a mistake after all by not seducing her as if she meant no more than a quick and lusty roll in the hay to him. Yet every instinct that wasn’t primitively crying out for her and a release from this nigh-overwhelming frustration shouted just as loudly that he’d have lost a crucial part of her if he’d sunk into her and brought them both to a quick and savage climax on the floor in a virtual stranger’s house with so much risk all around them.

‘Not until you know exactly what you want from me and why,’ he told her implacably.

‘I want you, and I want you now,’ she challenged him furiously.

‘But why, Katherine, why do you suddenly want me so much?’

‘Because …’ She almost let something betraying slip out, but stopped herself just in time, as she always had when it came to her feelings for him, whatever they might be, and now he doubted she knew any better than he did.

‘Because I’m irresistible, because I make your world shift and then brighten whenever I come into the room? Or is it just because I’m the first man to get past your ice-queen defences and make you feel the possibilities of being a real woman?’ he made himself ask in a voice husky with wanting to do just as she urged, to forget anything else and let the devil take care of afterwards.

Luckily she was far too innocent, far too confused to read his true state from that gruff enquiry, for if she truly ignored the scruples that had backed them away from the precipice and rubbed her roused body against his, butted her mouth against his and demanded more, he knew he’d be beyond controlling his response to her, beyond fighting this reckless need that tore at his self-control and snapped at the fetters he was trying to put on both their demons.

‘I really can’t imagine,’ she told him with such a superb attempt at frosty dignity he almost applauded, except that would drive her further back behind her defensive ramparts and he couldn’t allow that now they were so close to getting where he’d wanted them to be for so long.

‘Oh, I think you can, Kate,’ he murmured.

‘So you can prove to me I’m just a foolish woman like any other you might care to kiss in the dark? I think you just did that,’ she said quietly and all hope might have drained out of him, if he hadn’t reminded himself that everything about their recent encounter argued the exact opposite, if only she wasn’t so innocent. She didn’t know the difference between mere lust and the nigh-overwhelming passions and heady emotions they’d just lit in each other.

‘If that was all I wanted, I could have done it perfectly well three years ago and got it out of the way,’ he said flatly.

‘Arrogant, boasting braggart that you are?’ she gritted furiously.

‘Adult, realistic man that I am now,’ he corrected and did his best not to grin at her as she sucked in a mighty breath in order to denounce him comprehensively enough to slake her wounded pride. ‘Quiet!’ he ordered abruptly.

All Edmund’s senses were alert again as he remembered the world outside this silent, darkened room and cursed himself. He shouldn’t have taken such a reckless risk with Kate, shouldn’t have got so close to seducing her and himself in this risky, hole-and-corner fashion. His ridiculous susceptibility to her hadn’t withstood the purely tempting fact of her, alone and unguarded and almost sad in the darkness. She’d gone straight to his head like fine wine, just as she had the first time he’d ever set eyes on her, and it tore so painfully at his heart to see her pensive and lonely that he finally accepted Ben was right. He could never turn his back on her and all she meant to him, despite the nearly three years of effort he’d wasted trying to evict her from his heart. He cursed himself for making that discovery in such a place as he heard another whisper of sound from outside his host’s study.

‘Don’t you—’ She never quite managed to counter his abrupt order since he clamped an impatient hand over her mouth and forced himself to at least try to ignore the feel of it, soft and moist under his palm, since he wanted his senses alert for whoever was creeping about outside.

He saw a wicked glint come into Kate’s eyes even through the gloom, as if she knew very well that the connection between them had not been severed and probably never really would be now. She narrowed her gaze and let her sharp and sweet tongue lick his palm, even as she breathed in quite happily through her nose and watched him like a houri. No, he couldn’t succumb to her mischievous allure, the gnawing temptation to kiss and take and to hell with the consequences. Evidently he was as fast under her spell as ever, but he wasn’t going to be discovered here with her, because the decision to marry him or not would then be sidestepped and void as it became inevitable, and that would let her off the hook of having to admit how she felt about him. Marriage of convenience indeed! he scoffed silently. How could she be so wilfully blind to her own passionate nature?

‘Someone’s coming.’ He risked getting even closer to murmur in her ear and felt her senses jar and her mouth tense enough for him to risk taking his hand away.

Casting about him for any avenue of escape, he noted the locks on the long windows into the garden with something like despair. For a moment there seemed nothing for it but to face whoever was coming and announce his immediate engagement to the woman he’d wanted for so long, but he wasn’t inclined to let whoever was coming dictate their fate. Seeing a door into some lesser office ajar, he towed Kate inside before she could protest, or dig her stubborn heels in and brazenly await discovery, so he’d have to marry her without the admission of love he was determined to wring from her.

Kate peered through the crack in the door that was all Edmund had left them by rushing her in here and could just make out the faint glow of a single candle. She blinked against even that much brightness after the virtual darkness of the shadowed room and flinched away from the idea of being discovered cowering in here like a guilty felon. It would make so much less of what they had been doing, until Edmund had recalled what a gentleman he was, and even now frustration and awe tugged at her newly awakened senses. She swallowed an unladylike curse that they’d been interrupted, just when she’d been hoping he might seduce her after all. Instead they’d only gone a heady, headlong stride forwards, then sharply back to dull respectability again. She was undoubtedly fast and wanton, and maybe in the morning she’d feel suitably ashamed of herself, but just now she’d trade the last three years of dull respectability for three hours of sensational discovery in Edmund’s far-too-noble bed.

Her rebellious reverie was interrupted by the noise of a candlestick being carelessly plunked down, then the unmistakable sound of a man pacing. She should have been relieved that Bestholme had stopped searching for her, but wished whoever was marching up and down the book room at Jericho instead. Releasing a pent-up shush of breath in an exasperated sigh earned her a sharp nudge from the annoying man at her side. Even as she stung at his silent rebuke, she caught the sound of two voices murmuring and realised someone else had entered the room while she was working herself into a fine rage against fate and Edmund’s overactive conscience.

Then she heard Bestholme’s rather nasal tone after all and shuddered, but could hear little more until the furtive pair came closer to their side of the room and she hoped it wasn’t because of some give-away sound she or Edmund inadvertently let slip. Wondering why, if this was an assignation, they didn’t just shut the door and be done with it, or go and bother some other clandestine lovers with their unwanted presence, Kate shifted from one foot to the other to ease her cramped limbs and longed for them to leave.

‘I’m sure there’s nobody out there and I vow it’s like making an assignation with a little old lady who’s afraid of her own shadow, meeting you in secret and pretending all night that we mean nothing to each other, even if it does relieve the boredom of a very dull evening, but why won’t you do just this one little thing for me, George?’ Kate heard a distinctive husky voice murmur.

Whatever was Lady Tedinton doing here, risking whatever scraps of her tattered reputation she had left to her? And what on earth could she be asking an apology of a man like Bestholme to do for her? Deciding she was fated to overhear other people’s conversations tonight, Kate listened shamelessly, but when Edmund’s strong hand felt for hers in the darkness she clasped it gratefully and clung to the warmth and comfort he was silently offering.

Suddenly she didn’t need him to tell her the rumours of him and the unscrupulous woman standing only yards away from them being lovers were merely lies; a tale the peculiar female had no doubt thought up to puff up her own consequence. Not that Kate suddenly thought him a perfect Sir Galahad. No doubt he’d taken at least one or two willing beauties into his keeping in the past, since he wasn’t a monk or a saint, even if the mere thought of him doing so hurt far too much for comfort. There was a core of integrity about him that would not let him couple with a woman who held her husband and his family in such contempt that she didn’t care if most of society knew she’d cuckolded him repeatedly.

‘It’s a hell of a risk, Selene,’ Bestholme replied at last after considering whatever that ‘little thing’ might be for a very long moment to two listeners, forced to breathe so shallowly that Kate for one felt almost suffocated by her desire not to be heard and discovered by so unattractive a pair.

‘But I’m so very weary of warming an old man’s bed, Georgie. Please, say you’ll do this for me, lover? I so long to be free,’ her ladyship wheedled in a little-girl voice that somehow made their discussion all the more sinister.

‘No, I’m not risking putting my head in a noose to set you free in order for you to try to wed a man who has no more interest in you than a stone statue might have. Tedinton’s fortune would go to his heir anyway and I dare say your jointure would be tied up so tight not even the Lord Chancellor could get his hands on it. You’d end up worse off and alone, and I can’t afford to keep you, you’re far too extravagant and altogether costly a creature for me, my dear.’

‘That repellent brat is a minor and makes no effort to ingratiate himself with anyone and I’m certain you’re quite wrong about my jointure. Algy thinks the world of me and will leave me a rich woman.’

‘He might be a ridiculous old fool, but he’s far more possessive than you choose to realise. He won’t leave you a target for men like me after he’s gone, and the boy has a pack of embittered relations all longing to avenge the slights you’ve heaped on them these last ten years. The truth of it is that you’ve grown lazy, Selene. The world doesn’t revolve around you and what you covet for now, despite your belief you only have to scheme for whatever you want to get it.’

‘Just do this one little thing for me and I’ll make sure that high-nosed Alstone bitch has no alternative but to marry you,’ the woman cajoled and even as Edmund’s hand tightened on hers to offer comfort and denial of what the scoundrels were discussing so coldly, Kate had to put her other hand over her mouth to stop herself shouting out a protest at such a repulsive strategy and add the furious caveat that she wouldn’t marry Bestholme if her very survival depended on it.

‘And precisely how do you propose to do that?’ Bestholme asked.

‘I’ll whip up such a scandal she’ll beg you to wed her by the time I’ve finished.’

‘You don’t have the power, Selene my dear. Haven’t you realised by now that nobody as heedless as you are will ever hold sway among the ton? I doubt they mind your blatant peccadilloes with other men, or even the fact you married a fool for money for most of them did the same when it comes down to it, but you’re about as subtle as a town crier about your contempt for your husband and his cronies and he’s widely liked, for all he’s a senile old fool, and you, my dear, are not.’

‘Never mind preaching me a sermon and to hell with what a pack of pompous fools think, will you do it?’ Lady Tedinton replied in her lazy, malicious drawl as if they were discussing some minor favour instead of cold-blooded murder.

‘I’m still listening,’ Bestholme replied as if bored, but indulging her.

And so am I, Kate was tempted to shout and step out of hiding to confound the unlovely pair, but she shuddered at the very idea of confronting such a sordid pair of rogues and wasn’t it as well to know exactly what they were planning?

‘Quiet,’ Edmund mouthed a warning against her ear, but how had he known?

Kate was so busy struggling against the incendiary effect of just his breath on her ear lobe, his mouth so close against her neck she could almost feel the words form on his lips, that she missed Lady Tedinton’s first few words and frowned fiercely at him in the pitch darkness. How could she be so wrapped up in her response to his closeness that even the small matter of the murder of Lord Tedinton faded against the fierceness of the fire Edmund had lit between them with those few passionate kisses?

‘All you’ll need to do is be found with the silly chit in a scandalously dishevelled condition, then you can inform everyone you were just celebrating your engagement a little prematurely,’ she was saying in a scornful tone. ‘Even Carnwood won’t gainsay you when the silly wench is obviously in need of a husband.’

‘And you think I’m incapable of thinking up such a simple scheme myself, Selene? I’m almost insulted,’ Bestholme responded in that cold, indifferent voice Kate now knew was not an affectation, but reflected his true self.

‘You’re still being dunned and always begging so-called loans off me to pay off your endless debts, so you evidently don’t have the nerve to carry it out.’

‘Whereas you have the nerve and not the brains?’

‘Think so if you dare,’ Lady Tedinton hissed and Kate shuddered at the casual evil of it all.

‘I do dare, but that’s why you keep coming back to me, isn’t it?’ Bestholme demanded and there was the sound of a brief scuffle and then a horribly needy moan as Lady Tedinton demonstrated the truth of what he said.

‘Take me now,’ she growled.

‘No, it’s too risky,’ her lover argued and gave a low chuckle that made Kate shiver at the cold lustiness of their loathsome need for each other, ‘and I like you desperate, Selene. By the time Tedinton has pawed you all the way home and tried to mount you like a man, you’ll be glad to meet me in that very convenient summerhouse he’s had built in the garden for us, if he only knew it, and feel a real man between your legs again at last.’

‘I hate you,’ she informed him throatily and there was another of those horrible interludes as Kate heard them kiss noisily and even caught the sound of fine cloth tearing as they went at each other like beasts.

‘I like the way you hate. Now tidy yourself up, then get back to the ballroom and persuade that old fool to take you home early. I’ll go the other way and come back through the garden, so nobody will know you were with me. It’s only the fact I’m supposed to be courting a fortune that keeps my creditors off my back as it is, so who knows what they might do if they found out about you, my lovely doxy?’

‘Foreclose?’ Lady Tedinton asked as if discussing the weather and Kate felt sickened at the sound of her lover’s flat-handed slap, presumably to somewhere that didn’t show. ‘I could come to you in the Fleet,’ she offered throatily, as if violence made her more eager and Kate wondered if she might disgrace herself and Edmund by actually being sick, then considered the consequences and managed to control her revulsion after all.

‘No, try informing on me to get me sent there and you’ll rapidly discover what a mistake you’ve made. Just behave yourself and go on keeping that senile old idiot sweet, then be where I told you to be by dawn, Selene, or I’ll take my pleasure elsewhere. There are plenty of younger and more obliging mistresses than you who can be had for a lot less trouble than you cause me,’ Bestholme warned carelessly.

‘I’ll be there,’ Selene Tedinton replied urgently.

‘I know,’ her repulsive lover drawled huskily and Kate heard his footsteps recede while the light faded as he ungallantly took his candle away, leaving his mistress still in the dark.

A few moments later there was the swirl of silk and satin and an exasperated curse, then softer footsteps receded towards the ballroom until all seemed silent and empty in the room beyond this airless office they’d been trapped in.

Chapter Eight

‘Have they really gone?’ Kate whispered as quietly as anyone could whilst making a sound at all.

‘I hope so, since you’re restless as a cat and nowhere near as silent,’ Edmund grumbled back.

‘I was quiet as a mouse and resent your aspersions, my lord,’ she informed him with as much dignity as a lady could assemble whilst shut in this cupboard of a room with the unbelievably infuriating Viscount Shuttleworth and forced to listen to murder and her own forced marriage being planned outside it.

‘Then for heaven’s sake do it softly for a change.’

Kate stamped a soft-soled foot on the runner and hoped Bestholme really had left and so wouldn’t hear the faint thump it made against the oak floor underneath. If being angry with Edmund for very little reason helped keep her from falling into hysterics over what she’d just overheard, then Kate was all for it.

‘Virago,’ he chided impatiently.

‘Tyrant,’ she flashed back at him.

‘Come on, I’ve had enough of lurking in the dark like a thief,’ he growled in an exasperated masculine rumble and towed her as abruptly out of their hiding place as he’d hauled her into it in the first place.

‘Just as well they really have gone,’ Kate carped even as she clung to his hand like a lifeline. ‘We’d have been in a fine pickle if he’d stayed here in order to give her a head start for the ballroom.’

‘He’s not that much of a gentleman and we’re in a fine pickle anyway,’ he told her seriously.

Thinking back over the last however long they’d now been away from the ballroom and propriety, Kate could only agree with him. ‘How are we going to stop them?’ she asked shakily.

‘We aren’t.’

‘Then you’re prepared to let that harpy and her disgusting paramour murder her husband without even lifting a finger to stop her?’

‘No.’

‘Then what are we going to do?’

‘We are going to do nothing. When you cease your incessant nagging and let me think, I dare say I will eventually find a way to stop them without a scandal.’

‘And I just sit about simpering while you stamp about brooding and proving what a clever gentleman you are?’

‘You’re a single female with a reputation to consider.’

‘Bah! If I were a married woman without any shreds of one left to me, you’d still find a way of excluding me,’ she fired back at him, struggling to free her hand from his at last, although it felt very comfortable in the misogynistic, contrary man’s hold and part of her really didn’t want to stand alone after such an evening.

‘Yes, I would,’ he told her implacably.

‘Why? I’m not a fool or a hysterical female given to fainting and die-away airs.’

‘No, just because you’re you,’ he told her rather obscurely, ‘and you’ll be busy,’ he added by way of a diversion.

‘Busy?’

‘Planning our wedding,’ he said and Kate felt the odd sense of detachment she’d been suffering ever since he’d stopped kissing her finally threaten to overwhelm her.

‘I thought you just said “our wedding”,’ she said faintly.

‘I did.’

‘But how can I do that when we aren’t going to be married, Edmund?’

‘Because we are, Kate.’

‘Solely because you just kissed me in a private room where nobody could see us? That’s complete nonsense and nobody will know what we’ve been doing if we don’t tell them.’

‘They will when we return to the ballroom together in a state of disarray and hint very strongly that we’ll shortly be announcing our engagement. I may despise Bestholme and his whore, but I’m not above borrowing that scheme now the devil’s in the driving seat.’

‘Nonsense, if you go ahead and I follow you into the ballroom a little later, nobody will dream we were together all this time, or that either of us heard anything we shouldn’t have tonight. Nobody need be any the wiser.’

‘You have a simple-minded faith in the gossips suddenly turning incurious about all you say and do that I could find almost admirable, Miss Alstone. If only it wasn’t so misplaced and silly,’ he told her, suddenly back to the aloof and superior Lord Shuttleworth he’d been towards her since returning to town and Kate refused to ask herself why his icy tone hurt and the hard look she could imagine in his eyes cut through her so coldly. ‘You have now been absent for far too long to just shrug it aside and pretend you’ve been innocently drifting about, and I don’t want those two black-hearted villains realising you overheard their assignation,’ he went on relentlessly and Kate felt her palm itch to slap some sense back into him.

‘Then what do you suggest that I do instead, you infuriating man?’ she gritted through clenched teeth.

‘Be thoroughly compromised by me, or prepare to embrace life as a social outcast,’ he informed her so laconically she felt that odd sense of not being quite connected with the real world threaten her again.

‘You can’t do this, Edmund, you’ll be dragooned into marrying me if we appear together in such a state as you suggest and we both know that you don’t want to wed me any more,’ she protested in a fierce whisper.

‘Better that than risk that unsavoury pair realising you were wafting about listening to out-of-the-way conversations, Kate,’ he declared not very encouragingly.

‘How flattering,’ she told him crossly, wishing she could turn her back on the infuriating monster and walk away.

‘Find a bit of steel to stiffen your backbone, for goodness’ sake, Miss Alstone,’ he chided like some large and handsome gadfly sent to plague her by a malign fate.

‘Why should I resign myself to such a fate when you obviously don’t have the least desire to marry me?’ Kate managed to say in defiance of her inner idiot, who was demanding stridently that she accept eagerly and be glad he felt honour-bound to marry her after being so sternly set against it.

‘Needs must when the devil drives,’ he said coolly and must have decided he was done with useless words and it was time for action before things got worse.

He hustled her out of a side door and into the garden proper before she could find breath or words to protest with and urged her inexorably closer to the long windows of his lordship’s fine ballroom, but not close enough for propriety, of course. The further they got from that darkened room the better, even if it was leading them closer to marriage, Kate decided numbly, and cursed herself for not fighting this more strongly. It was hard to fight temptation when it beckoned so wickedly.

‘You could leave me here alone,’ she whispered softly in defiance of her own eagerness for any sort of marriage with him, even this forced one.

‘So you could be quizzed from now until next Christmas on the identity of your cowardly lover?’ he murmured back, and anyone watching them would probably mistake them for fellow moon-led idiots lured out here by such promising darkness, she decided crossly. ‘Go back in that room alone after spending such a long time away from it and your chaperon, and you’ll be ruined without anyone having to plot against you,’ he continued relentlessly, ‘and in acute danger once that harpy realises you could have overheard her plot to murder her husband, whilst you wandered about in the shadows so carelessly that anything might have happened to you.’

‘And being a perfect gentle knight you’re sacrificing yourself instead?’

‘No, being a pattern-card of perfection was so dull that I gave it up,’ he declared flippantly.

‘Along with me?’ she murmured, then could have kicked herself for letting him know how much his recent rebuffs had hurt her.

‘I thought I’d save myself the pain of enduring another crushingly polite refusal,’ he told her and Kate hurt at the careless apology in his deep voice. ‘I dare say marrying you won’t be so bad once I get used to the idea again,’ he added.

‘And if you think I’ll stand by idly while you have affairs with other women you will be sorely disappointed, Edmund Worth,’ she informed him in a fierce undertone.

‘That’s entirely up to you, dear Kate. If you keep me otherwise occupied, I probably won’t have the time or the opportunity to stray,’ he observed and silenced her with another mind-stealing kiss.

Furious, she did her best to bite him, so he deepened his kiss and dared her give whatever she might have had the wits to withhold until now. Defeated by her own need of him, her body seemed to meld itself to Edmund’s powerfully lean one of its own accord and wild heat burst into instant life again. She angled her wanton mouth to his in a way she should think appallingly fast but didn’t. Never mind fast, her deepest buried instincts warred with her training, he’ll still marry you now, even if he doesn’t really want to.

She couldn’t make herself break away, even with that chilly thought in the back of her mind, but she clenched her hands at her sides and refused them the luxury of his lithely muscled body. It didn’t abate the searing wildfire flaming through her like a force of nature, but it made her feel a little better about herself and the self-control she’d once prided herself upon.

Unimpressed, his hands ran over her in an unashamed exploration and she loved it. She’d always denied being capable of deep feeling, in her ignorance of how elemental and out of control she would be with the right man. Now he let his wicked hands find a way between them, despite her body’s ridiculous efforts to plaster itself against him like a poultice, and Edmund ran an approving thumb over a raised nipple that immediately hardened and begged for more without permission from her. She had to fight not to moan and cry out a frantic demand for more, for everything. If not for the half-painful gnaw of need, the half-wondrous goad of heat at the heart of her, of course she would put distance between them and escape the purely physical spell he’d cast over her, yes, that was just what she would do, in a minute.

This was the wild and passionate Kate he’d always known existed beneath that façade of serenely composed beauty. Edmund managed to find enough willpower from somewhere to put a distance between them and convince himself painfully that he’d discovered enough about her most secret passions for now, in public or almost public as they were. He forced his hands away from her delicious body before his fascination with it broke his self-control. She was flushed and breathless, her soft gasps for air drawing his attention to her lush, but firm, young breasts, rising and falling rapidly against the low neckline even a single lady could wear by her fourth Season without being considered intolerably fast.

Her eyes were wild and more beautiful than he could ever recall seeing them even in his dreams as they blazed with feelings he would give half his fortune to read fully. Her lips parted as she fought to get her breath back and his eyes lingered on them with hungry fascination as she slicked them with her sharp little tongue. If he wasn’t to throw himself on her and ravish her on the lower terrace of his hostess’s garden, he must get their engagement rolling relentlessly on before she lost that starry-eyed, just-kissed look and remembered all the doubts and fears that inhabited her contrary thoughts whenever he wasn’t in a position to haze them with merciless passion. An image he’d best not dwell on if he wanted to get the next few minutes over with without causing an even bigger scandal than the one he had in mind.

‘Come,’ he ordered brusquely as he towed her back to the shark-infested waters of the ton, before she balked.

‘I still can’t see why …’ Miss Alstone seemed about to take over from his wild Kate, so Edmund summarily tugged her into the ballroom and put an end to her nonsense.

‘Good heavens!’ Cromer exclaimed at the sight of a stormy-eyed, very thoroughly kissed Kate on Edmund’s arm and just managed to suppress a grin. ‘They’re quite right about that dangerous moonlight,’ he mumbled as he stepped back to let the company see what it had done to so cool and collected a couple.

‘Good heavens, indeed, and yes, very right,’ Edmund replied calmly.

‘I don’t think they had much to do with it,’ his Kate mumbled tartly and Edmund wondered if he was suffering from shock and hallucinating when she didn’t just tear herself away from him and flounce off. It wasn’t every day a man heard murder plotted, and with Kate pressed so close he’d struggled to listen to a word of it. He’d wanted her so mercilessly and now he nearly had what he’d longed for so deeply within his grasp at long last, what had happened so far tonight almost seemed unreal to him for a few moments.

‘I hope you’ll congratulate us, Cromer, for I refuse to wait any longer after three years of waiting for a yea instead of a nay, even if her former guardian and brother-in-law hasn’t agreed to it yet,’ he said with a possessive look at Kate.

‘Carnwood cutting up rough, is he?’ Cromer asked obligingly, managing to look astonished while his eyes told them he didn’t believe a word.

‘You see? Everyone thinks I’m your ideal husband,’ he whispered in Kate’s ear and felt her tense, as if she might jump away and deny every last truthful hint of how they’d been amusing themselves since they left the ballroom that he was building up so carefully. ‘Try it and I’ll kiss you right here,’ he threatened softly.

‘I hate you,’ she told him between clenched teeth and he met the heat and fury of her furious glare with a satisfied smile.

‘Hate away, my fierce Kate,’ he murmured and heard a sentimental sigh from somewhere close by.

‘Mountebank!’ she condemned in a spitting undertone, but still made no effort to pull away or give his apparent devotion the lie.

Looking as if he was trying very hard to come down to earth, Edmund considered his friend’s previous question. ‘No,’ he replied to the clever lead, ‘but I can’t tear myself away long enough to go up to Derbyshire and ask him.’

‘Should think you’ve obtained his permission often enough in the past,’ Cromer said.

‘So I keep telling Miss Alstone, but it took me until tonight to convince her I can’t endure to wait and be wed with the full fanfare and fuss of a grand wedding. I’ll have to go and beard Carnwood in his lair now she’d agreed at last that our wedding must be soon, then maybe we can get on with being my lord and my lady at long last.’

‘Short notice, gossips bound to twitter like starlings in an apple orchard,’ his taciturn friend warned sagely and Edmund gave an expressive shrug before looking significantly about him at the eagerly whispering throng.

‘I’ve waited long enough,’ he said loudly enough for most to hear him and enjoy a fresh wave of delighted speculation.

He smiled wolfishly at Kate, hoping his eyes conveyed a warning to back him up now this was all but irrevocable. She really had the most extraordinary eyes, they were truly ultramarine, he decided distractedly, savouring the word on his tongue as he almost murmured it aloud. Very blue, he translated, and was in grave danger of falling into the wondrous depths of them and not caring where it took either of them. Most blue, he corrected in his head, and freed himself of their spell just in time to stop himself kissing her passionately in public.

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