“I do not remember what we talked about,” Katherine told her. “We conversed on a number of different topics.”
“Well, I do not care what anyone says about his reputation,” Cecily said with a sigh and a marvelous lack of consistency. “I think he is by far the most handsome gentleman in the ton-not counting Con, of course. Oh, and your brother.”
“Constantine is very handsome,” Katherine agreed. “It is his Greek heritage. Your brother is just as handsome. Indeed, they look a great deal alike.”
Cecily’s brother was Elliott Wallace, Viscount Lyngate, Katherine’s brother-in-law.
“And I believe Stephen will have more than his share of ladies sighing over him when he is a little older,” Katherine added.
After a little more conversation and a series of yawns, Cecily finally went off to bed-to Katherine’s great relief. She really did not want to talk with anyone. She did not want to think either. She wanted to sleep, preferably for a long, long time.
She was forced to both think and talk the following afternoon, though, when the dowager Viscountess Lyngate returned from a drive in the park, where she had met and talked with Lady Beaton. She sat at tea in the drawing room with Katherine, Cecily having gone off to the library with one of her new friends and that young lady’s maid. Lady Lyngate was only very gently reproachful.
“You are twenty years old, Katherine,” she said. “Older and considerably more sensible than Cecily. I do not doubt that your behavior was above reproach last evening-it was not your fault, after all, that Lord Montford was of your party. It was most unfortunate that we had no advance warning. However, gossip is everyone’s favorite occupation in London during the Season, and even the faintest possibility of impropriety can feed drawing room conversation for a week or more and seriously compromise a lady’s reputation. It might be wiser in the future, my dear, to avoid Baron Montford’s company altogether, or, if that is impossible as it was last evening, to remain with everyone else of your party at all times so that no one can have any reason whatsoever to couple your name with his. He really is beyond the pale of respectability, you know, charming as he can be when he sets his mind to it. But since you did walk with him last evening and allow yourself to lag behind the others-though I do blame Lady Beaton for not keeping a far more careful eye upon you-I do hope he was the soul of honor.”
She looked inquiringly at her young charge.
“Oh, but of course he was,” Katherine assured her.
“Of course.” Lady Lyngate smiled. “He is, after all, a gentleman despite his shocking rakehell ways, and he knows how to behave in genteel company. I daresay his reputation is somewhat exaggerated anyway. No one can be quite as wild as he is reputed to be.”
“No,” Katherine agreed.
“This has not been a scold, Katherine,” the dowager assured her. “It has merely been a word of caution from someone older and perhaps wiser in the ways of fashionable society than you. I have only your best interests at heart.”
“I know you do, ma’am,” Katherine said. “I appreciate your concern. It is very kind of you to care.”
“Not at all,” Lady Lyngate said, leaning forward in her chair to pat her hand. “You are missing your family, are you not?”
“Oh,” Katherine said, and to her surprise and embarrassment tears filled her eyes, “yes, I am. I have never been separated from them for so long before now.”
Even when Vanessa had been married to Hedley Dew and living at Rundle Park with him and his family, she had been less than a half hour’s walk away, and one or more of them had walked the distance almost every single day.
The dowager clasped her hand and squeezed it.
“Perhaps,” she said, “Elliott and Vanessa ought to have taken you with them after all. It is not even as though they are to miss all the rest of the Season, is it? They will be back here soon.”
“They wanted me to stay here,” Katherine said, dabbing at her tears with her handkerchief. “They wanted me to stay and enjoy myself. And of course I am doing just that.”
“Of course you are,” the dowager said kindly. “Was Vauxhall as lovely as ever?”
“Oh, even lovelier, ma’am.”
Katherine longed for her sisters and brother with a gnawing ache. Yet she was glad they were gone from town. What would she say to them today? How would she stop herself from blurting out the whole sorry, sordid story to them? She needed time to recover.
It was pointless to ask herself what she had been thinking last evening. She had not, of course, been thinking at all. Or not rationally anyway. It was quite horrifying to realize how quickly and easily she could succumb to the seductive charms of a practiced rake and to the base cravings of her own body.
In her own mind she had even called it love.
She had thought herself gloriously, passionately in love with a dashing, dangerous man.
How gauche of her. How… humiliating!
She would have allowed him…
No, she would not. At every moment she had been about to stop him. She would have done so before it was too late.
No, she would not have done.
It had already been too late.
She had him to thank for the fact that she was not irretrievably ruined today-a fallen woman.
It had all been calculated, deliberate on his part. He had set out quite coldly and deliberately to seduce her. He had arranged to be of her party at Vauxhall, and he had plotted to draw her away from the others and onto that dark, deserted path-and then off it behind a tree. He had planned it all.
How easy she had made it for him. He had stopped only because it was too easy to offer any interesting challenge.
There was a written wager in one of the notorious betting books at a gentlemen’s club. With her name in it. Her name was being bandied about by countless gentlemen of the ton. And perhaps today he would be amusing them all with an account of exactly what had happened.
Only one thought persisted in Katherine’s brain as she sipped her tea and conversed with her hostess. She wanted to go home-preferably all the way home to Throckbridge. She wanted her old life back. It had been a serene and happy one. She wanted to go back there and marry Tom Hubbard, who had asked so many times that they had probably both lost count. But no, Warren Hall would be better. Meg and Stephen were there. And it was in the country, in Hampshire, far away from London.
“We are to be busy during almost every moment of every day for the next week and a half,” the dowager was saying. “It is very gratifying, is it not? And both you and Cecily are swarmed by admirers wherever you go. It should be altogether possible to have both of you happily betrothed before the Season ends and perhaps even married before the autumn. Is there any very special gentleman, Katherine?”
Katherine set down her cup with a clatter and blinked her eyes so that they would not fill with tears again.
“I want to go home,” she said.
She could not bear-she really could not bear the very real possibility that she would see Lord Montford again as soon as she set foot beyond the door. She could not bear to see him again.
Ever.
“Oh, you poor dear,” the dowager said, getting to her feet to come and sit beside Katherine and set a comforting arm about her shoulders. “Of course you do. I have sensed it, but I did not realize just how homesick you are.”