Regency Surrender: Forbidden Pasts. Elizabeth Beacon

as she could when they looked about to challenge each other to a bout of fisticuffs, if she was lucky.

      ‘Not as well as we think,’ Gideon said tightly and wasn’t that the truth, Callie thought cynically, wondering if anyone knew Sir Gideon Laughraine but Gideon himself.

      ‘But perhaps better than you would like us to?’ the man challenged him. If they were friends at all, it was clearly a prickly sort of friendship.

      ‘Perhaps,’ Gideon said, and addled Callie’s brain by climbing back into his seat and holding her hand as they faced his dashing acquaintance together. ‘We certainly don’t know each other well enough for you to have met my wife, Winterley, and that makes me wonder why you felt free to accost her on a public highway.’

      ‘Now here’s a dilemma,’ Mr Winterley drawled with a hard glance in Callie’s direction to tell her what he thought of her lapse of memory. ‘To give the lie to a lady, or admit you and I know each other not at all?’

      ‘Well, my dear?’ Gideon said with a frown as he dared her to deny him again.

      ‘I am indeed Lady Laughraine, but tend to forget it now and again. I beg your pardon, Husband, Mr Winterley,’ she said with a nod of curt apology towards each of them.

      ‘Lady Laughraine?’ Mr Winterley asked blankly. He shot another shocked glare at Gideon that said there was indeed more to her husband’s other life than she knew. ‘What a truly dark horse you are, Mr Frederick Peters.’

      ‘My husband’s full name is Gideon Frederick Peter Dante Laughraine, sir, but I shouldn’t take it as a slight you didn’t know him as such until today because he only lets the world see as much, or as little, of his true self as he thinks it needs to know,’ Callie told him with that alias of Gideon’s going round and round in her thoughts as she wondered what he had been up to in order to need it.

      The tall stranger seemed to pause on the edge of giving at least one of them a blistering set down before he took in Gideon’s ponderous string of names, then a look of unholy glee lit his face instead and he sent Gideon a mocking grin, as if he now knew far more about him than such a private man could want him to.

      ‘You appear to be an even darker horse than I thought you, Laughraine,’ he said slowly. ‘Oh, well met, Sir Gideon, and how d’you do?’ he added mockingly.

      ‘Well enough, but I’ll never understand you if I live to be a hundred, Winterley,’ Gideon said with a manly shrug. ‘Ours has never been a conventional marriage,’ he added casually, as if he and Callie kept it to themselves out of a perverse delight in secrets. Since she was the one to demand it came to an end nine years ago, she could hardly complain if he was making weak excuses for that deception now.

      ‘Then perhaps you should consult with your wife and match up your stories better in future. I wish you both a good morning and hope to see you at dinner. If you dine together as man and wife and not under your chosen aliases in different counties, of course?’

      ‘Then you are staying at Raigne?’ Gideon asked as if it confirmed his worst fears.

      ‘Lord Laughraine will invite me, d’you see? This time I rashly agreed to stay for a week or two to escape the husband hunters, since the little darlings will go to Brighton on Prinny’s coattails to carry on their craft out of season. Like a gullible innocent up from the country I agreed to his latest invitation to enjoy some bucolic tranquillity at his expense and quite forgot he was a great friend of Virgil and Virginia’s. Although given what has happened so far this year, I should feel less of a fool now I’m looking at the very good reason he wants me there, shouldn’t I?’ Mr Winterley said mysteriously.

      Callie supposed Gideon knew what the man meant, since she felt him flinch and heard a bitten-back curse. The only Virgil and Virginia she knew of were the last Lord and Lady Farenze; Gideon’s late grandfather and his wife. Still with that look of unholy amusement in his eyes, Mr Winterley blithely gave them both a seated bow before wishing them a genial farewell. Then he rode off as if he’d happened on an amusing sideshow at precisely the right moment to enliven a tedious moment.

      ‘Who on earth is that?’ she asked.

      ‘A friend, although you wouldn’t think so at times,’ Gideon replied tersely.

      ‘A friend you were about to call to account for simply exchanging greetings with me?’ she reminded him recklessly.

      ‘I have no patience with Winterley’s sort of politeness. You should be wary of him, too, Callie. He’s slippery as an eel and about as trustworthy as a fox.’

      ‘Maybe it takes a rogue to know one.’

      She tied the trailing strings of her bonnet into a militant bow she regretted as soon as the close-woven straw closed the heat in and threatened to make her head ache. Refusing to undo it after making such a grand gesture, she silently dared him to comment.

      ‘There’s no maybe about it,’ he said with an unrepentant grin and they resumed their journey in what she hoped was a dignified silence.

      ‘I have no wish to know what you have been doing while my back was turned,’ she managed to lie after they had continued for half a mile with her staring everywhere but at his face. An internal picture of a parade of his lovers kept plaguing her, as if a grey mist had settled on her shoulders in the most unlikely cloud and was blighting a glorious morning.

      He sighed as if she were proving to be the most exasperating of travelling companions and answered the question she had been trying so hard not to ask ever since he came back into her life. ‘No, Callie, I don’t have a mistress, nor a discreet married lover bored with her husband after filling his nursery with heirs. I’ve been celibate as a monk for lack of you, but you’d be sensible to wish I was busy chasing every strumpet in town right now. You’re right to watch me as if I’m a starving wolf about to swallow you down in one hungry bite, so maybe you’d best avoid provoking me with the likes of James Winterley again. I want you so badly every inch of me is on fire and at least now you can’t say you haven’t had fair warning.’

      ‘No man who loves as passionately as you could go nigh on a decade without a woman,’ she said sceptically, the image coming into her head of him in the arms of some sensual charmer purring with pleasure at his splendid body and skilful lovemaking.

      ‘I am a married man, in case you had forgotten,’ he said shortly.

      She tried to shrug off the doubts that made her want to smack the smile off that smug imaginary siren’s face, but he was a fully adult man and she couldn’t seem to get reason to overcome jealousy now they were side by side and she had felt the flex and steel of his body next to hers for mile after mile. Perhaps she should have agreed to travel in the stuffy carriage away from him, after all.

      ‘You revelled in being my lover, then my wife, before you decided I was a villain and you hated me. Don’t pretend you don’t want me nigh as much as I want you.’

      ‘You taught me not to trust my one and only lover, Gideon,’ she said as images of them locked in the wilder excesses of passion threatened to leave her certainty she never wanted to risk loving him again in the dust.

      ‘This isn’t the time or place for picking at old wounds,’ he warned with a significant nod back at the carriage where Biddy was fanning herself in the growing heat and beginning to look as if she regretted choosing that seat over this one. ‘I won’t admit to something I didn’t do, though,’ he added in a low, driven voice.

      ‘I don’t want to love you again, Gideon,’ she warned. She was breathless and on the edge of something dangerous and had to protect herself from being so vulnerable again.

      ‘Maybe I won’t ask you to,’ he replied flatly, before halting the carriage and insisting Biddy squeeze into the space atop the graceful little vehicle between them.

      * * *

      They were close to the end of their journey at last and Callie spotted familiar landmarks and the outlying parts of her grandfather’s former parish. She distracted herself