One Final Season (15 page)

‘None of it was your fault, my lord,’ Kate replied.

‘Ah, but it was, I have been bitterly to blame in all this,’ he said sadly and she could hardly meet the sadness in his eyes as he admitted how mistaken he’d always been in his much younger wife, until tonight. ‘Can I trouble you for your help, gentlemen?’ he went on with resigned dignity. ‘The wretched woman is too cunning for me and will escape before I can work out what must be done about her.’

‘Of course,’ Kit agreed with equal resignation. ‘Shuttleworth?’

Edmund nodded and, with a brief smile for Kate, stepped forwards to face a task no true gentleman could ever relish.

‘We will all remain here for the rest of the play,’ Mrs Mausley said, stepping forwards from the shadows where she’d been standing, horrified and silenced by the whole ugly tableau even the best-mannered lady could hardly pretend not to hear when it was taking place in her own box. ‘Frederick will accompany Lady Pemberley and the dear girls home at the end of it, and the rest of us will follow their carriage to make sure no harm comes to them,’ she added, as if that arrangement would prove a match for a veritable army of ruffians.

‘And I’ll ask Pemberley to join you as soon as possible,’ Edmund said shortly. Since they knew the marquis would be here as fast as his noble legs could carry him if he thought his lady was in danger, all three lords and one supposed lady left the box and trusted the remainder with the delicate task of keeping up appearances.

‘Well, it’s a shame her infamy is probably going to be covered up,’ Eiliane said comfortably enough as she shifted her chair so as to get a better view of the stage.

‘But these things have to be done,’ Mrs Mausley agreed, with a significant glare at her son and daughter, who hastily nodded and looked horrified at the idea they should be the route by which such news got out. ‘I suspect the woman will be found out to be mad anyway. I’ve thought for some time that nobody could be quite so blatantly unconcerned about her own misconduct being discovered if she wasn’t unhinged, and now it seems I am proved right.’

‘For the sake of her unfortunate children and poor Tedinton, I’m not quite sure if that’s better or worse than her just being bad,’ Eiliane put in with a sad shake of her head and Kate marvelled to see what had been a rather wary acquaintanceship between two women who had little in common becoming a firm friendship in front of her eyes.

‘What will they do, then?’ Kate asked.

‘We must trust the gentlemen to make sure she can’t do any more damage,’ Eiliane said, smiling brightly at an acquaintance in a box on the opposite side of the theatre as if nothing untoward had occurred.

‘One of those gentlemen married her in the first place,’ Kate couldn’t help muttering her dissent.

‘Yes, but dear Kit and your Edmund won’t allow him to ignore the way she’s tried to destroy your engagement and plot to murder, however unlikely that creature she’s been meeting was to bestir himself on her behalf if she did but know it. Now do be quiet, Kate dear, for Isabella and I wish to see the rest of this fine play, even if you lack the stamina for it.’

‘Great ladies,’ Fanny Mausley murmured as she sat down next to Kate and gave her a mischievous smile that made her realise just why Isabella liked this flighty girl so much. ‘So essential to the proper regulation of society,’ she parodied some former teacher mercilessly, ‘but, oh, so wearying to live with,’ she added in her own voice and Kate gave a splutter of laughter and earned a fine crop of glares and hushing as the curtains drew apart and Kean stepped onto the stage once more.

‘Lucky it was Kean and not some lesser actor tonight, because otherwise we would have been fidgeting in those hard seats for hours wondering what their lordships were up to and not being able to leave and find out for appearances’ sake. I for one am extremely grateful to him for diverting us so royally tonight,’ Eiliane admitted once her own particular lord had handed them up into his fine carriage and climbed in, before ordering the door closed on the world.

‘Lucky, indeed,’ Kate echoed faintly and sat back in her seat to watch darkness and light flash past the windows as the coachman did as he’d been bid and got them home as quickly as possible. ‘Poor little girl,’ she muttered as she watched the shadows where any footpad or streetwalker or saint might walk unseen by the hurrying throng rushing home to their comfortable homes and cosy hearths after an evening of enthralling drama.

‘Indeed,’ Eiliane replied sadly, knowing perfectly well who Kate was talking about. ‘And if she’d only behaved herself and not tried to lash out at so many others, I for one would never have begrudged her stellar rise from such appalling beginnings.’

‘Don’t waste your pity on her, love,’ said Lord Pemberley, who had evidently been informed of what had gone on tonight by Edmund or Kit. ‘It’s poor old Tedinton I feel sorry for, and his unfortunate family. All he ever did was fall foolishly in love with a lovely face, and the rest of them did nothing at all to deserve a crazed harpy being thrust into the midst of their family.’

‘All the same—’ Eiliane began.

‘No,’ he stated firmly, ‘I’m not having you find her some place where she can abuse the trust of those who gave it to her and worry you half to death while she does so. No, Tedinton was fool enough to marry her, he can find a way to feed, clothe and house her while somehow keeping her away from him and his at the same time. You are not getting involved with that heartless vixen in any way.’

‘Very well, my love,’ Eiliane said with such mild agreement Kate nearly leaned over and felt her friend’s forehead to see if she was running a fever. ‘I shall be very glad to get back to Pemberley after Kate’s wedding,’ she admitted and Kate met her sister’s eyes as the coach finally pulled up outside Pemberley House and the flare of torches gave them enough light to see each other.

‘Are you quite well, Eiliane dear?’ she finally asked when they were all four of them inside the cosy parlour Eiliane always resorted to after a busy night to relax and reconsider the evening, and what an evening this one had been.

‘Very well, Kate,’ her hostess said with a dreamy smile. ‘Very well, indeed.’

‘Good,’ she replied rather hollowly, at sea about Eiliane’s distracted manner and the rather odd mix of incredulity and shock and pleasure that she seemed to be able to see in Lord Pemberley’s usually humorous grey eyes even after hearing such a tale.

‘I just
can’t
keep it quiet, Pemberley, even if you can. Not from my own family,’ Eiliane burst out at last.

His lordship looked at her, smiled and rolled his eyes to the ceiling as if consulting Jupiter, who was painted on it, even in this relatively small private room of his grand town mansion. ‘Very well, love, I should have known better than to ask it of you in the first place,’ he agreed at last.

‘It was such a shock,’ Eiliane said, blushing and looking almost girlish and confused about whatever ‘it’ was.

‘It was that, indeed,’ he replied and, distinguished peer of the realm whom the government consulted about their more insoluble problems as he was, he gave Kate an enormous schoolboy grin and laughed delightedly at some glorious joke only he and his wife were privy to at the moment.

‘You know I have been out of sorts lately, Kate?’

‘Yes, even I have noticed that, Eiliane,’ she said solemnly, but she was beginning to add two and two and make four at last and couldn’t suppress a broad smile of her own even while Izzie looked more puzzled than ever.

‘Pemberley badgered me into seeing a quack as I was so tired and my stomach was uncertain and I even felt a little sad now and then, which is just not like me, as you know. I thought I needed a tonic or perhaps even a week or two in a nice quiet seaside village where I could rest and breathe in good sea air for a while, but it seems that I was wrong.’

‘Oh, my!’ Isabella finally burst out, eyes round and mouth half-open as she recognised those symptoms from Miranda’s confinements at last. ‘You’re going to have a baby, Eiliane?’

‘I am,’ said Eiliane blissfully.

‘We are,’ his lordship put in, as proud as a peacock.

‘I’m so pleased for you both that I don’t have the words to describe it,’ Kate said joyfully and hugged Eiliane gently, then threw caution to the wind and hugged his lordship as well.

‘Can we be godmamas to him or her?’ Isabella asked eagerly and danced up to repeat Kate’s hugs with interest.

‘You can, my love. Kate might be busy with her own…husband by then,’ Eiliane said on a stumble that had Kate blushing nearly as much as she was herself.

Eiliane meant of course that she could be
enceinte
herself when the time came to christen my lord this or my lady that in Pember Hall’s ancient chapel. The thought was so heady she could quite see why her host and hostess were acting like a pair of besotted teenagers at the prospect of becoming parents so late in life.

‘I’m far too old, of course,’ Eiliane claimed suddenly.

‘Then what does that make me, love?’ Lord Pemberley asked genially.

‘Distinguished, which is most unfair of you,’ his wife answered. ‘I’m four and forty; that’s much too ancient an age to be becoming a mother for the first time.’

‘What did the doctor say about that?’ he asked patiently, as if they’d already had this conversation several times already.

‘That I’m healthy as a horse a good many years younger than whatever the equivalent age to me in horse years might be and that learning to sit still for a few moments a day in order to give my babe a rest would do me a world of good.’

‘Sensible man,’ her doting husband told her.

Kate met Isabella’s eyes and they nodded to each other before leaving the room without Eiliane or her lord even knowing they’d gone.

‘They’re so happy,’ Kate whispered when they were both in her bedroom with the door shut to keep out interested ears.

‘So happy and so in love. I don’t care what anyone says, Kate, even if I have to be Eiliane’s age to find a man I can love like that, I’ll stay single until I do.’

Kate was silent, contemplating love and good fortune and the merits and drawbacks of a civil contract of marriage.

‘Anyway,’ her sister said as she reviewed her declaration and evidently decided it might not be altogether tactful in present company, ‘I’m going to ask Fanny’s mother if I can stay with them until I come north for your wedding, Kate. It really is high time Eiliane stopped flitting about town every night as if she’s got to fill every hour she’s not with his lordship with constant activity. They need a week or two at Pember Hall together to enjoy it and relax a little before your wedding as well as after it. After all, dear Lord Pemberley works far too hard as well and now at last they’ll both have a reason to look inwards instead of outwards for fulfilment.’

‘Mrs Mausley will want to know why,’ Kate cautioned, wondering when her sister had become so perceptive and just what she perceived about her.

‘I doubt it; neither she nor Fanny is as scatterbrained as they pretend to be.’

‘I realised that tonight,’ Kate said thoughtfully. ‘Indeed, I realised quite a lot of things tonight.’

‘High time you did, big sister,’ Isabella told her with a cheeky smile, then happily went off to plan her life for the next few weeks and probably that of Lord and Lady Pemberley and the entire Mausley family as well.

Chapter Fifteen

K
ate sat down on her very comfortable feather bed, smoothed the delicate silk brocade of the cover and ran a hand over fine linen and lace-covered pillows almost as if apologising to them for something. Then she slipped out of her fine cream silk gown and laid it carefully aside, before divesting herself of all her evening finery. She donned a very plain dark gown, her heaviest and most concealing cloak and a dark jockey cap she sometimes wore for riding to cover her give-away hair, then sat down on the bed to wait for stillness and silence to overtake the household.

Edmund left Lord Tedinton’s house in Green Street along with the Earl of Carnwood and was very glad to be doing so at last. Neither of them had a spring in their step after such an evening and Edmund shook his head wearily when Kit invited him to Alstone House for brandy and perhaps a cigar because, he informed Edmund wryly, ‘I’ll get damned little sleep tonight without Miranda in my bed.’ Love, Edmund thought as he bade Kit Alstone goodnight, was a hard taskmaster. It drove his friend and future brother-in-law to bark and growl at anyone who came between him and his Miranda, even when it was Kate. How would it feel to know the lady you married longed for you, waited for you so impatiently every minute you were gone, hungered for you in her bed as much as you did for her in yours until neither of you could sleep very much at all if the other wasn’t there?

Like a triumph and a banquet and a victory parade all rolled into one, he decided wistfully and told himself Kate was just as unique in her own way as her passionate sister. He could hardly complain if what made her so also rendered her more aloof and in control of herself than her elder sister. It was ironic that she was the true redhead of the pair, he decided, as he let himself in through his front door with the neat key he’d had made for himself when he finally persuaded his doting staff not to wait up from cellar to attic every time he was out late at night. Miranda, Countess of Carnwood, had a thick mane of parti-coloured hair that had brown, blond and red all mixed up in it somewhere, but it was Kate who’d inherited her famously lovely mother’s rich red locks. Kate, who did her best to fight the passion and intensity and sheer beauty hidden in the depths of her deep blue Alstone eyes. His Kate, who would never let her heart rule her head, or tell the world with unguarded gestures or intimate touches and gazes and stolen kisses when she didn’t quite care if anyone was by or not, how very much she loved her lord.

Still, he would have her in his bed and gracing his house, or houses, and she would be the woman who birthed his heirs if they were blessed with any. Kate would be the mother of his children, the mistress of his estates and the lover of his dreams. He was a happy man, and in a few weeks’ time he would be an ecstatic man with a redheaded enchantress in his bed who had no idea of her own power, or the possibilities she held once she became fully a woman and not an innocent, however she might argue with that description.

She’d walked into his heart when she’d been that unfledged beauty three years ago and now he was quite resigned to the fact that he’d never manage to remove her from it, whatever he tried. Back then, her height and those lovely bones of hers had hinted at the promise of even more startling beauty to come, even deeper enchantments to entrap the unwary. Well, he’d been unwary; he’d stumbled headlong at her feet in a tongue-tied confusion of rampant youthful lust and idealistic worship of the goddess she was too human to be. No wonder she’d looked on him so warily, as if he might embarrass them both with some public display of devotion and make them into a laughing stock; no wonder she’d refused to marry him when he’d begged her to do so as if his life depended on it. Idiot, he castigated himself as he impatiently ordered any of his staff he caught lurking in corners, just in case he needed a twenty-five-course banquet or a suit of bespoke armour in the middle of the night, he supposed whimsically, off to bed.

At last he reached his bedchamber and shut the door on the world with a heartfelt sigh, squashing the urge to indulge his household by ringing his bell and ordering someone to come and relight the candles that were usually left burning in one or two sconces ready for his homecoming, however often he told them he was quite capable of lighting them himself when he got home. After the day and night he’d just endured he felt the need for light and a fire, even if it was nearly June, and then he’d sip a leisurely glass of cognac in front of it as he tried to come to terms with all that had happened since he’d left it last.

Stretching and giving a mighty yawn, then rubbing a weary hand over his stiff shoulders and up to the rigid muscles in his neck as he felt the effects of that long and demanding ride to Derbyshire and back, he wondered about just tumbling face down onto the bed fully dressed and letting sleep and blessed forgetfulness overcome him for a few hours. He was about to force himself to reach for the tinderbox and shed some light on his undressing and ablutions when a stir of movement from the direction of the bed set his senses prickling and his thoughts racing wildly. He cautiously let them reach out, explore possibilities as he made what he could of the information available. No hairs were rising on the back of his neck, or at least if they were it was not in fear but exhilaration. His skin wasn’t crawling, but an incendiary flush roared over it that he was glad only he knew about in this heavy darkness.

‘What the devil are you doing here, Kate Alstone?’ he demanded as he finally found that tinderbox. It only took him about half a dozen strikes of the flint with suddenly very unsteady hands to get a spark and produce flame enough to light a candle, then a spill to put to the fire they were surely going to need.

‘If you need me to explain that, my lord, then we’re both in trouble,’ she joked sleepily as she sat up to stretch and yawn and send his heated imagination into the ether. ‘You’re very late in coming home, Edmund.’

‘Had I known you were awaiting me, I certainly would not have been.’

‘Well, that’s good,’ Kate replied, still feeling rather astonished that she’d fallen asleep on his very comfortable bed and trying hard to gather senses that were only concerned with his presence and all the possibilities it raised. ‘You don’t look terribly pleased to see me, Edmund,’ she finally managed to inform him a touch inadequately.

‘You really don’t want to know about that,’ he muttered darkly and she smiled to herself as she just caught the tail end of an even softer, really inventive series of much-tried curses.

‘Oh, but I do,’ she murmured in what she hoped was a sensual drawl, but feared might have come out as a doubtful whisper, not doubtful about being here, just dubious about whether he actually wanted her to be.

‘Never mind me, this is about you, Kate,’ he told her far too seriously.

‘No, it’s about us.’

‘What sort of “us” had you in mind?’ he asked cautiously as if he wanted her to spell it out in humiliating detail before he took up all the implications of her being here in the first place and did something about it, be it yea or nay to her implied and perfectly shameless proposition that he take her to bed and ravish her until the stars faded and she must steal home with the dawn.

Now there was enough light to see as well as sense him, she watched his face for a few clues as to how he was feeling about her intrusion and saw the strained tension about his mouth, the weariness of his shadowed eyes and wondered if she’d chosen the wrong night to come here after all. Then she called on all she knew of him and sensed the avid hunger in him, probably laid bare by that very tiredness, and saw the slight shake in his hand as he fed the fire he’d lit. No, it hadn’t been wrong, she decided triumphantly, it had been perfectly right. If not, he’d have sat by it, so tired and jaded by the events of the evening that he couldn’t sleep as he brooded over the whole wretched business detail by detail, just in case he could have done something differently, something that would have saved such bitterness and despair for Lord Tedinton and his unfortunate family.

‘This sort of us,’ she informed him huskily and she surged up off the bed and came to stand in front of him with shameless boldness, meeting his gaze with everything she’d come here to tell him tonight in her eyes.

‘Stay here like this, Kate, and I won’t be able to keep my hands off you for much longer,’ he warned, as if that was a threat to her and not a promise and she put out a tender hand to outline his face as if still learning him in the darkness he’d just dispelled.

‘I’d be highly insulted if you could,’ she told him as she got to his mouth and felt it firm even more under her butterfly touch, as if that was the only way he could keep it from doing exactly what she wanted it to, which was ravishing her from her fingertips to her toes and back again—even if she was a bit foggy about the most intimate details in between.

‘I can’t control the need I have of you enough to be restrained and careful with you tonight. You must go, Kate, while I can still let you,’ he whispered as if to speak out loud might snap his leash and let out all the pent-up desire for her that he’d subdued for so long and she’d been so afraid they’d finally killed between them.

‘I don’t want your control any more, Edmund,’ she told him through lips that were so ready for him they’d gone full and pouting and soft and eager for the matchless taste and feel of his against hers in anticipation.

Deciding he could have all the explanations and justifications and logic his male mind needed afterwards, but not now, she impatiently breached the gap between them and let her body argue for her. At least it knew what it wanted, even if he was too much of a gentleman to do as she longed for him to and seduce her until she was mindless, beyond thought and caught up in this huge new continent of experiences she and her lover had what felt like for ever to explore.

‘I just want you, my love, so please will you seduce me before dawn breaks and this all gets a lot more complicated and public?’

‘Even more complicated than it already is?’ he said would-be coolly, but she felt the shock jar through him at those two words, the sudden change from that weary edge in his husky voice to an energised, utterly present lover without a tired bone in his body. At least that eagerness soothed her jumping nerves at making that bold statement of fact.
‘My love?’
he echoed as if unable to quite believe his ears.

‘Yes! Now will you just kiss me and get on with making me and you into that “us” we just talked about? We only have a week for our clandestine affair, because if you think we’ll have any chance of loving in every sense of the word under Kit’s roof once he gets me back to Wychwood, then you have far too sanguine a nature, Edmund Worth.’

‘I have a very hopeful temperament,’ he told her with the hint of a laugh back in his voice. ‘Heaven knows, I’ve needed it badly enough these last three years.’

‘Edmund!’ she protested and glared up at him with demand and need and just that slight edge of temper in her eyes.

‘Kate,’ he breathed her name as if it was a promise; ‘Kate,’ he repeated as he brought his lips so close she actually heard herself keen an inarticulate invitation. ‘My lovely Kate.’

Impatient for now of the reverence in his voice, even while she took it in and stored it up to gloat over later, she licked her lips and slyly brushed his with her tongue as she did so. Instantly she was engulfed in fire and need and joy as he took her mouth in a kiss that abolished thought for both of them.

She had those transforming, sensually matchless kisses from the night of the Wyndovers’ ball to warn her, and entice her, of what a difference making love with Edmund might make to the very essence of her life, but that night she’d still been unaware of so much. Now she felt the heat of him, the hardness of him and wanted everything, all of him, all over her. She stretched against him, blissfully butting curves and long, lushly sleek limbs against the dense-packed muscle he somehow managed to fit on to his deceptively lean frame. With nothing held back, she had the sheer luxury of being able to explore him boldly. Running her hands over his powerful shoulders, she felt those muscles loosen and unknot under her hands, then change again and flex as he shifted to hold her even closer and smoothed his own exploring hands over her eager body.

He melded her even more intimately to him by widening his stance, bringing one leg round to draw her explicitly against the hard maleness he made no effort to disguise from her. Wriggling wantonly against him, she gasped an inarticulate, greedy moan against his plundering mouth and let her hands wander lower, over the cleanly streamlined narrowness of his waist to appreciate the tight male buttocks that were braced with the weight of both of them as he curved her even more closely, yet more intimately together. Even this wasn’t enough, this wasn’t someone else’s book room or a terrace where other lovers might be too close by; this was my lord’s bedchamber where nobody would interrupt them until morning, and probably not even then. The presence of that wide feather bed lured and promised and intrigued her more than any other bed ever had in her life. There they could explore, discover and experience so much more that she almost wished he’d stop kissing her and learning her inch by tantalising inch long enough to get them there without any further ceremony.

‘Hmm,’ she managed inarticulately when he raised his mouth from hers long enough to gasp in an unsteady breath.

Feeling his lips curve against hers, she wondered what the infuriating man could find at all funny about a perfectly sensible comment. She frowned, then pouted, then paid the price by having her lower lip oh, so gently nipped, then soothed with his tongue and explored until that inarticulate murmur turned into a long feminine moan of pleading she’d never even thought could leave her own mouth before she realised she was all his and he was hers.

‘I can just about stop now, if I have to, Kate,’ he told her huskily, even as his lips seemed unable to put more than a half-an-inch gap between his and her mouth to say it. ‘I’ve waited so long for you, I could still just about wait another month until we’re married,’ he told her and the words sounded as if he had to think about shaping every one with truly Edmund-like determination, because any words but love words and lovers’ murmurs had no real meaning between them in his half-lit bedchamber in the still watches of the night.