Carrying The Gentleman's Secret. Helen Dickson

always careful to elude capture,’ Lydia said softly.

      ‘Always.’ He smiled. ‘I have not known you twenty-four hours, Miss Brook, and already you are beginning to know me a little too well.’ He looked down at his plate. ‘We should eat before the food gets cold.’

      Picking up his fork, after toying with his food, Alex gazed across the table at her lovely face. My God, he thought, she really was a beauty. Her long lashes drifted down as she looked at her plate, her soft red lips slightly parted. Her hair and gown were both unadorned, yet the effect was almost like nakedness, and Alex was both embarrassed and ashamed of the animal thoughts that flew through his mind as he looked at her.

      Looking up, Lydia met his gaze and raised her brows in silent enquiry.

      He smiled. ‘What?’

      ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

      ‘Why shouldn’t I look at a beautiful woman? You, Miss Brook, would make a saint forget his calling.’

      Lydia swallowed, feeling her cheeks redden. The very fact of this weakness was an irritant to her, making her vulnerable to her own body. ‘I’ve heard many flowery compliments in my time, but that, Mr Golding, is the most flowery of them all.’ Later she would realise her mistake. The delicious food and the quiet, warm atmosphere of the room had lulled her into regarding her companion as an equal, a person whom she could relax with.

      ‘You are a strange young woman, Miss Brook. I find your company both pleasurable and enlightening.’

      ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

      ‘You are more intelligent than most women of my acquaintance and, if you are not careful, you will have me falling in love with a woman’s mind—but her physical attributes cannot be ignored,’ he murmured, his gaze languidly sweeping over her, his eyes settling on the gentle swell of her breasts straining beneath the raspberry dress, measuring, lingering, a slow smile curling his lips.

      The soft sincerity of his voice, the tone of it, rippled over Lydia’s flesh and took her breath away—behind the words she detected an intractable force, coercing, seducing, and she was drawn to it, but then she remembered her purpose for being there. She tried to think of something to say, something that would restore the camaraderie and repartee of a moment before, but she was unable to say anything for the moment.

      ‘What else did Henry tell you about himself, Miss Brook?’ Alex asked, aware of the awkwardness of the moment and trying to steer clear of the direction in which his mind was wandering, but unable to take his eyes off her.

      ‘That—that his home was in America. When he proposed marriage I told him we should wait, to give it time until we knew each other better. But he said time was something he didn’t have. His father was dying across the Atlantic Ocean and he had to go home as soon as possible. I had no reason to doubt him. I cannot match him in education or experience—what knowledge I have was taught me by my mother. She was the daughter of a clergyman in Yorkshire. I have to work to make my living. Our backgrounds are dissimilar in every way.’

      ‘And yet you were prepared to marry him.’

      ‘Yes. He promised me so much.’

      Alex smiled, noting that her every movement as she sat was graceful and ladylike. There was a serenity of expression and stillness that hung about her like an aura and just being with her was an experience he had not sufficiently prepared himself for. She really was quite beautiful, far more beautiful than any woman present, and she intrigued him, troubled him. His instinct told him that hidden desires were at play beneath her layer of respectability. He noted a certain unease in her eyes and what lay behind the unease was a sense that something was not quite right. Yet exactly what it was, not knowing anything about her, Alex couldn’t have said.

      ‘You saw Henry as a purveyor of dreams.’

      ‘Perhaps it is best not to dream at all,’ she said softly.

      ‘How long have you known him?’

      ‘Three months.’

      ‘Where did you go? Where did he take you?’

      ‘Why do you ask?’

      ‘He is well known and popular among members of his club, his reputation that of a man about town who likes a good time.’

      ‘My time off from work was limited. We saw each other on Sundays and sometimes I could manage an afternoon during the week. We were alone mostly.’

      ‘That stands to reason. He wouldn’t want to advertise the fact he had taken a lover.’

      ‘We were not lovers,’ Lydia was quick to inform him, her cheeks flushing pink with indignation that he thought they were. ‘Never that.’

      ‘No? Then I have no doubt this is the reason why he insisted on a sham marriage. His desire to possess you must have been overwhelming—even though he never had any intention of leaving his wife.’

      ‘On occasion he did introduce me to a selection of his friends. Surely they would have said something—unless they didn’t know he was married either.’

      ‘Believe me, Miss Brook, they knew,’ he said drily.

      ‘You mean they were in on the deception? So I really was just some kind of amusement to liven up their bored lives?’

      ‘I’m afraid so. I told you it is not the first time he has done something like this, although he has never gone as far as being prepared to enter into a sham marriage to get what he wants. You must have something the others lacked.’

      She bristled. ‘No, I’m just another one in a line of women.’

      ‘Were you impressed by him?’

      She looked at him steadily. What woman would not be, she thought, having been raised as she was. ‘It was all so new to me. A different world.’

      ‘And now? Will you go back to what you were doing?’

      ‘I already told you that I have to. I have to work to live, Mr Golding. Throughout my life I have lived with the belief that happiness, security and future success would be available to me through the mainstay in my life—my mother—with her calm and gentle but firm ways. When she died all that changed—until I met Henry.’

      Alex nodded with understanding. ‘I am sorry. And your father?’

      Immediately Lydia’s eyes darkened and her face tensed. She looked away. ‘He...he is not in my life.’

      ‘I see.’ There it was, Alex thought, that was the something which was not quite right. He was intrigued. Why the reluctance to talk about her father? Sensing that his enquiry was sensitive to her, he did not press further. It was not his concern. ‘And your employer? Do you get on with him?’

      ‘I have always tried to, for my mother’s sake—they were lovers, you see.’

      ‘Then if that was the case, will he not help you?’

      ‘Alistair is a hard master. Working for him, I will never be more than an overworked, underpaid employee. I want to have a chance to make my own way, to be the dressmaker I know I can be—that my mother wanted me to be. I want to be a woman in my own right.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t expect you to understand. How could you possibly?’

      Alex did understand—more than she would ever realise. As the deprived son of an impoverished and more often than not inebriated estate worker, on the death of his parents when he was just a boy, his maternal grandfather had paid for his education at Marlborough and then Cambridge. Alex would be eternally grateful to his grandfather for making this possible, even though he’d spent almost every penny he had doing so.

      When Alex was eighteen, with his entire fortune of one hundred guineas given to him by his grandfather, he had worked his passage to America. Life had taught him that he had to grasp the opportunities when they arose. Nothing was going to be given to him. Gambling