Regency: Courtship And Candlelight: One Final Season. Elizabeth Beacon

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.