Society's Beauties. Sophia James

Lindsay’s smile was bright as she bid Aurelia goodnight. Then she drew Elizabeth Berkeley away from her grip on Lord Hawkhurst’s person with talk of the colour and cut of the gowns that were her very favourite in the room tonight.

      Aurelia gained the distinct impression that in doing so the woman was helping her.

       Chapter Four

      ‘I most certainly did not expect you to accompany me home, Lord Hawkhurst.’

      He smiled, his teeth white in the dark of the carriage and his thighs less than an inch from her own. ‘But I wanted to, Mrs St Harlow, because it will give us the chance to talk about how it is you know Lord Frederick Delsarte and his lackeys.’

      ‘They were acquaintances of my husband.’

      ‘But not of yours?’ No humour lingered now, his voice cold, cut glass.

      She shook her head. ‘My disapproval of their antics was more than obvious, I should imagine.’

      ‘Did Charles ever hurt you?’

      The very intimacy of the question made her turn away. ‘No. He was a wonderful husband.’ The words were exactly those she had used in the courts when the law had tried to lay the blame at her feet for his unexplained death.

      ‘Why is it that I think you lie?’

      she turned back. ‘I have no idea, my lord.’

      The air all around them contained something that she had never felt before. The pure and utter longing for a man, this man, their unfinished kiss from a week before shimmering on the edge of a lust so foreign it made her feel light headed.

      ‘Charles enjoyed a wide interpretation of the word “fairness” and when he died at Medlands there were probably a number of people both in London and further afield who breathed a sigh of relief to hear of his passing. As his wife you must have known this.’

      Such criticism hung in the darkness, a living and breathing thing, defining all that Charles had been. Given that what he said held a great dollop of truth Aurelia found it hard to argue. ‘There were also a number who may have mourned him.’ She stated this with as much certainty as she could feign. Those who came up for the party weekends at a country mansion who held strict morals in little worth probably rued his passing, but she doubted there were many others. The Medlands estate had buried him with a smile upon its collective face, their lord and master a man who held little regard for the feelings and needs of others more lowly born than he was.

      When Lord Hawkhurst caught her hand and held it tight, she could feel tremors within the strength—a surprising thing, that, given his easy confidence. The night of London was black and endless, a quarter-moon lost behind banks of cloud, leaving only them in the dark and empty space of the world.

      The warmth of his skin comforted her though, a solid contact amidst all that was strange and she felt her fingers curl around his. He did nothing to resist.

      ‘I would have asked you to dance again if I knew a scandal wouldn’t have ensued because of it.’

      She could not believe he would admit this, to her, a stranger. ‘Lady Elizabeth Berkeley may not have been pleased about that,’ she retorted, hating the bait she threw at him. It was beneath her to involve such an innocent young beauty for her own means, but there it was and she did not take it back. Rather, she waited.

      ‘A title like mine, and the possessions accompanying it, have a way of garnering interest. It is a known fact.’

      ‘Such is the ease of being wealthy.’

      ‘Charles was rich, too. Perhaps you are more like Elizabeth Berkeley than you think.’

      She did laugh at that, the sound lost into a mirth that was humourless. ‘I cannot determine one trait that we might share, my lord.’

      ‘What of beauty?’ he replied.

      Was this a joke he played upon her? ‘I am hardly that, my lord.’

      ‘A woman who does not know her true worth is a rare and valuable thing.’ His voice allowed no tremor of falsity and when she turned towards him the breath left her body, his expression exactly the one she had seen at Taylor’s Gap: lust and want beaten back by will.

      Breaking the contact, he fisted his palm against his thighs so that every knuckle stretched white. the scars on his knuckles stood out as raised edges of knotted flesh.

      He swore soundly, the frustration expressed coursing between them. She should have bidden him to let her make the rest of the journey alone, should have replaced her gloves with a stern reprimand and ordered him from the carriage. But she could not. Instead she sat there, too, the silence growing as an ache, her hands bare in her lap and cold, her head heavy against the cushioned velour of the seat. For twenty-six long years she had imagined exactly this, a man who might transport her from the tight restraint of her life and deliver her into temptation.

      His eyes glinted in the dark when she chanced to take a look, the bleakness in them shivering through green.

      ‘Your husband had questionable friends, Aurelia. Take care that they do not become your own.’

      He would warn her even given the public perception of her part in Charles’s murder. Gratitude rose unbidden.

      ‘I live a simple and quiet life with my father and sisters. There is little in me that could be of interest to anyone.’

      His laugh was menacing. ‘Somehow I doubt that entirely.’ The residual feeling existing between them since their kiss thickened. What on earth was happening to her? Hope drove into a veiled anger.

      He would never be hers. It was written in exactly who she was. As she moved away carefully, the space between them became bathed in a pool of light reaching in from outside and when she saw that they were back in Upper Brook Street the relief was indescribable.

      Braeburn House. The horses slowed to an amble and then stopped as Aurelia stretched the fabric of her unworn gloves out whilst deciding exactly what it was she would say. There were so many things that she might have told him, but in the end she settled on the one that would keep her family safe.

      ‘I relinquish you from any bargain that stands between us, my lord, and I realise that my insistence on an invitation to your ball was both forward and foolish.’ she enunciated the words very carefully and hoped that the need in her was not as visible as she thought it might be.

      ‘Your sister and Rodney Northrup may not say the same, Mrs St Harlow.’

      The words were cold and stilted, none of the delight of the evening held within them, and as if to underline his desire to have her gone he simply leaned across to the door and flipped the handle, gesturing to one of his servants to help her alight.

      He should not have been alone with her, jammed into the small space with the warmth of her skin and the rapid beat of her heart searing into all his good intentions. Aurelia St Harlow was his cousin’s widow and he was all but promised to Elizabeth Berkeley.

      The anger in him grew along with a more unfamiliar frustration as he ran his fingers across his face, hating the way he was never able to hold them still. The night had left him wrung out and tired with the wax and wane of emotion and he still had a great deal of it to get through before everybody left. He wished that the hour was later and that the throng who danced and laughed in the Hawkhurst town house could have been gone, especially the Berkeleys. He did not have the energy to deal with Elizabeth’s unrelenting innocence in the light of his thoughts in the carriage, or the hopeful encouragement of her mother. He also knew that as the host he should not have left the party, but the opportunity for time alone with Aurelia St Harlow had been too enticing.

      Cassandra Lindsay greeted him as he walked back into his downstairs salon a little time later.

      ‘Lady Elizabeth