“I’ve inquired here and there,” he said with some pride.
“My friends?” she prodded.
“Your cook,” he admitted.
“She told your butler who in turn, told you.”
“Quite so.” He grinned.
She frowned. Shot up and spun away from him.
He caught her by the arm. “Darling, aren’t you pleased?”
“How can I be, Justin?”
His brows knit. His eyes dimmed. “They are for you. You alone.”
“They cannot be.”
“I know you raise roses,” he declared. “That you garden to lighten your anxiety. That you need the fragrance and the beauty to overcome—”
She froze, intimidated, exposed and damned furious. “You have spied on me.”
“No, not–”
“
Inquiring
does not constitute invasion of my private life?” she rebuked him.
He swept out two hands. “What do you think this is if it is not your private life?”
“For a day. A night! Hardly the sum total of my life!”
“But it should be.” He took hold of her shoulders, his hard power only serving to unnerve her even more. “You belong here. With me.”
“I cannot stay here.” Suddenly, she was embarrassed at her nakedness. Reality drove out all joy of her interlude with him. “I never should have come.”
“You could not refuse me.”
Trembling with outrage, she challenged him, “Because I needed your fees?”
His face crumbled. “Because you love me.”
To hear him speak the truth she dare not admit to herself made her shake with despair. Tears glittered in his eyes.
In her own, too. “Let me go.”
“I dare not. I will never get you back.”
How true. How very true.
“Marry me.”
“No.”
“I love you, Katherine. I always have. Marry me.”
“I will never marry anyone ever again,” she announced with a resolve that sounded hideous, even to her own ears.
Since they had resumed their acquaintance weeks ago, she had often studied his handsome face, his unconcealed emotions. She had seen humor and compassion, consideration and rejection. She thought she had seen surprise. Now she recognized shock.
“That’s absurd. You’ll marry again. You’ll marry me!”
“Never,” she told him with such severity he blanched.
“This is what marriage to Henry did to you,” he concluded, bitterness in each word.
“Yes. And that’s my resolution. No marriage. Ever. To you or anyone else.”
Chapter Four
Three weeks later on a Wednesday afternoon at two, she sat down in the drawing room of the Lord and Lady Winston Martindale upon the occasion of their annual At Home. Parliament had dismissed two days earlier, and the Martindales’ afternoon reception was one of the three closing highlights of the late Season. Few festivities remained which drew the Set before all dispersed to the countryside for the summer months.
“I shall be happy as a bee to leave town,” Maggie confided as she sat next to Kitty and fluttered her Chinese fan in the uncommon June heat.
“You are quite flushed, Maggie. You are very sure you are not….hmmm?” Kitty had asked this question twice this past week of her sister. “I recall being very hot when I was…in that way. You know.”
“I might be.” Her sister flashed her a brilliant smile. “But I am not yet positive.”
“Just wanted to be certain.” Glancing into the hall where others arrived for this party, Kitty flicked open her own fan and gave herself a nervous cooling off. God, if she could only be certain Justin would not attend, she could proceed to enjoy herself tremendously.
“Certain, eh?” Maggie eyed Kitty’s fan. “After your visit to a certain gentleman, I could ask you the same question.”
“No.”
No
.
Kitty knew she was not pregnant. She’d had the proof last week, much to her immense relief. Maggie had been nearly as wild as she to learn if she were
enceinte
. Her sister had known of her rendezvous with Justin—and if Maggie still had few facts about their affaire, they were enough for her younger, newly wedded sister to conclude that scandal and ruin might not be the only result of Kitty’s interlude at Belmont Manor.
“I still think you owe him an explanation for leaving,” Maggie ventured, her eyes straight ahead.
“I gave him one.”
“Did you?” Maggie challenged her with a huff.
Kitty drew back. It was not like her dear sister to pick an argument with her.
Maggie sniffed and fluttered. Sniffed and fluttered. “I doubt you told him all.”
“I have not even told
you
all
.”
“And it took you over a year to reveal what you did!”
“It took me a year to even speak the words, let alone—”
“There he is.”
“What?” Kitty sat straighter, her gaze darting to the foyer. And the dark, imposing handsomeness of Lord Justin Belmont. “Oh, no.”
“Do not leave, Puss,” Maggie breathed. “You’ll be so obvious.”
“I’ll be so
trapped
.”
“Good afternoon, Lady Carruthers,” Maggie cooed over an elderly matron who was passing them, intent on the buffet tables. She rose to take the lady’s hand. “So delightful to see you out.”
The lady lifted her lorgnette to her rheumy eyes. “And you, too, my dear. Margaret Downey, isn’t it?”
“Yes, my lady. Except I am now married. Lady Donaldson.”
“Oh, yes, yes. Fine gel. Fine. And this is your younger sister, eh?”
Kitty was on her feet. “Older.”
“Kit? Kat? What is your name, pet? Help an old woman, will you, like a good girl?”
“Katherine Varney, Lady Carruthers.” Kitty stood and put a hand to the old woman’s. Justin hovered just behind, conversing with Maggie’s husband. “Margaret and I have not seen you since her wedding.”
“Is that so?” The woman startled. “Did I enjoy it?”
Maggie chuckled. “Yes, my lady, you did. Here is my husband. Do say hello,” and Maggie—soon to die at Kitty’s own hand for desertion—led Lady Carruthers into a discussion with her spouse.
And that left, of course, Justin peering down at her from his infernally superior height. “Good afternoon, Lady Varney.
Darling
,” he ventured under his breath as he took her hand and kissed it in the Continental manner.
She snatched it back. “Lord Belmont.”
“You’re looking fetching.”
You’re looking too fit and rested and totally unconcerned, damn you
.
“Thank you.”
“I like your hat. New, is it?”
She patted her day bonnet of pink silk and white ostrich feathers, thrilled he was a man who could notice a woman’s attire. Still, she could not resist taunting him. “Very. I’m gratified you like me
in clothes
.”
“Oh, but I like you any way at all, Puss. A new frock to match?”
She wanted to preen in the new pink muslin, but she dared not, for this lavishness was one of her vices. “Yes. It is.”
“Purchased with your fees.”
“How do you know that?” she shot back, then checked surreptitiously around them to see if anyone paid any attention to them. None seemed to care about them, their heads together.
“I know so many things about you. Like what a spendthrift you are with your dressmaker.”
She gasped.
“Fear not. I approve of a lovely woman spending her money to adorn herself. And though you need wear not a stitch to be the most beautiful woman in London, I applaud your style, darling.”
“You know too much. And I am not your—” two gentlemen passed by—“darling.”
“But you are. And to boot, I adore your taste in day dresses as well as negligees. So you see, I like how you are spending my money.” He had that truly irritating way of laughing with one corner of his mouth turned deliciously up.
“My money.”
“Whatever you say, my Puss. I like what you’ve done with the fees. You do have taste.” He winked.
She scolded him with her eyes. “We’ve said hello. Smile at me now, and I shall leave to rejoin my sister.”
“But why?” He took hold of her arm. “We have just struck up a conversation.”
“We have not.”
“We are. Smile again, darling. And let me get you a glass of champagne.”
“I can’t drink the stuff,” she rejoined and stuck her nose in the air, hustled along nonetheless.
“Why not?” His hazel gaze turned dark and stormy.
“Makes me sick to my stomach.”
“
Why?”
he insisted.
She blinked, understanding his true question was about her physical condition. “Not because of
that
. Don’t be daft.”
He hurried her along the hall and into an alcove. “I’m afraid you’ve made me so, my dear. While I am relieved to hear that you are not pregnant—”
“Hush! Are you an idiot?”
“Mad, delusional, a cretin in the mix!” He stepped inside a tiny hallway lined with cupboards and closed two doors on either side of the four foot space. “Call me any name you like, my Puss. You are driving me out of my head!”
“Well deserved, too!” she blustered as he pulled her into his arms and she once more felt the marvelous sensation of being captured by him. Held against his warmth. His might.
“Not by half, you minx. You cash my bank notes. But you will not receive me at home. You avoid me at church. Walk around me in the Park. I am reduced to waylaying you like a highwayman at a party on Wednesday afternoon!”
A laugh bubbled up from her throat, but she squelched it. “We have nothing to say to each other.”
“No,” he said with dour tone. “We have so much to say that only this will do.” He caught her chin, wrapped one arm around her waist and kissed her as he had that first night in her drawing room. Long and lavishly. Repeatedly. Killing her reason and her resolve.
Her fan slid from her fingers. Her hands pulled him closer. These past weeks, she’d pined for him like a schoolgirl. She’d relived every moment in his arms, in his bed, even in his rose garden at his cottage. She had cried and mooned and railed at fate for what she could not have.