Interesting!

Sutton and his betrothed had little choice then but to proceed with their visit to the Bridges’s box, which was at quite the opposite side of the theater. Miss Edgeworth looked down into the pit and continued to fan her cheeks as Kit resumed his seat.

“You were a reconnaissance officer in the Peninsula, Lord Ravensberg,” she said without turning her head to look at him. “A spy.”

She had been learning things about him, then? “I prefer the first appellation,” he said. “The word spy conjures up images of cloaks and daggers and hair-raising exploits of reckless derring-do.”

She turned to look at him then. “I would have expected such a life to appeal to you,” she said. “Was it not like that?”

He thought of the long, solitary journeys, sometimes on horseback, more often than not on foot, over hostile terrain no matter what the season. He thought of the endless wild-goose chases, of dodging French scouting parties; of making painstaking contact with partisan groups in both Portugal and Spain; of having to deal patiently and tactfully with petty dictators and wild hotheads and cruel, fanatical nationalists; of the unspeakable atrocities that happened far from the battle lines—the torture, the rapine, the executions. Of the weariness of body and spirit and the constant drain on the emotions. Of his brother . . .

“It was far more mundane and dreary, I’m afraid,” he told her with a laugh.

“And yet,” she said, “you were singled out for commendation in several dispatches. You saved your country on numerous occasions. You are a military hero.”

“My country?” He considered. “I doubt it. Sometimes as a military man one wonders exactly what it is one fights for.”

“Surely,” she said, “one fights for what is right. One fights on the side of goodness against the forces of evil.”

If that were so, why was insomnia such a problem for him? And the frequent nightmares when he did sleep?

“Do you believe, then,” he asked her, “that every Frenchman—and every Frenchwoman—is evil, that every Briton and Russian and Prussian and Spaniard is good?”

“Of course not,” she said. “But Napolйon Bonaparte is evil. Anyone who fights for him is evil by association.”

“I suppose,” he said, “France is full of mothers with sons slain in battle who believe the British soldier to be evil incarnate.”

She opened her mouth to speak but closed it again.

“It is war that is evil,” she said at last. “But then wars are provoked and fought by men. Did you acquire the scar beneath your jaw in battle?”

It ran from the hinge of his jaw on the left side to the point of his chin. “At Talavera,” he said. “I did not complain too loudly about it even at the time. Two inches lower and I would have been playing a harp for the rest of eternity.” He grinned at her and ran one knuckle lightly down the arm that held her fan, from the edge of her short, puffed sleeve to the top of her glove. Her skin was silky and warm.

All around them was a loud hum of conversation as members of the audience visited one another and shared impressions of the play and other gossip. And yet suddenly the two of them seemed very alone. He felt a totally unexpected stirring of sexual desire for this woman who did nothing whatsoever to arouse it. She possessed beauty in abundance but no overt femininity. He had not even seen a genuine smile on her face. Yet his body wanted hers.

She drew her arm away from him. “I have given you no permission to touch me, my lord,” she said. “In fact, I have given you no encouragement at all. Why did you arrange this . . . stratagem tonight?”

“I was tired of attending every interminable social event of the Season,” he said. “I have been becoming alarmingly respectable. How dull for the ton to have had no outrageous exploit of mine with which to titillate its conversations during the past week or so. I have been compelled to take action.”

“If I had smiled and fawned over you at Lady Mannering’s ball,” she said, “and if I had simpered and giggled during the drive in Hyde Park, you would have lost interest in me in a moment, Lord Ravensberg.”

“Good Lord, yes,” he agreed. Perceptive of her.

“I would thank you not to take the Lord’s name in vain,” she said so primly that he was momentarily enchanted. “I see that I have behaved in quite the wrong manner with you. I should have encouraged you.”

“There is always time,” he suggested, moving his chair half an inch closer to hers, “to mend your ways, Miss Edgeworth.”

“You mock me,” she said. “You laugh at me—constantly. Your eyes never stop laughing.”

“Smiling,” he said. “You do me an injustice. My eyes smile with delight because every time they behold you they see a woman so beautiful that no one after her is worth looking at—or thinking of or dreaming about.”

He was enjoying himself enormously, he realized—and wooing her in quite a different way than he had planned, with a quite blatant lack of subtlety. But there was no conventional way of wooing this woman, he suspected.

“I rest my case,” she replied, a faint blush coloring her cheeks. “There is no common ground between us, my lord, upon which any sort of meaningful relationship might be built—if that is your intent. We are as different as night and day.”

“And yet night and day meet fleetingly at twilight and dawn,” he said, lowering his voice again and narrowing his eyes and moving his head a quarter of an inch closer to hers. “And their merging sometimes affords the beholder the most enchanted moments of all the twenty-four hours. A sunrise or a sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder.” He grinned wickedly at her and touched his fingertips to the back of her gloved hand.

She moved her hand sharply away and then, seeming to recollect that they were on public view, raised it gracefully in order to fan her flushed cheeks. “I know nothing of passion,” she said. “You are wasting your time with me, my lord. I am not the sort of woman on whom words like these will have any effect whatsoever.”

“The theater is certainly overwarm,” he said softly, his eyes on her fan.

She ceased her movements abruptly and turned her head to look directly into his eyes. He expected her to move back when she saw how close they were, but she stood her ground, so to speak. He could sense anger hovering behind her control, and willed it to burst forth, even in this very public setting. Especially here, perhaps. They would instantly become a spectacular ondit. But he could almost see her reining in her temper before she spoke.

“You would be well advised not to continue pursuing me after tonight,” she said. “I will not accept any future invitation that includes you, my lord. I am accustomed to moving in circles where gentlemen are unfailingly gentlemanly.”

“How intolerably dull for you,” he said.

“Perhaps,” she said, plying her fan again, “I like a dull life. Dullness is much underrated. Perhaps I am a dull person.”

“Then perhaps,” he suggested, “you should marry someone like Bartlett-Howe or Stennson. Every time they move they are lost to view within a cloud of dust.”

He thought for an intrigued moment that she was going to laugh. Then he was convinced that she was drawing breath in order to deliver the blistering setdown he had been trying his damnedest—Lord knew why!—to provoke. But dash it, the door of the box opened before she could either laugh or explode, and she turned her head away sharply to gaze down into the pit again.

Kit rose and bowed to Mrs. and Miss Merklinger, helped them resume their seats, and asked them how they had enjoyed the first act. He grinned and winked at a poker-faced Farrington, and resumed his seat beside Lauren Edgeworth only moments before Sutton and Lady Wilma returned and regaled everyone with a rйsumй of every topic of conversation they had pursued with Lady Bridges and her party.

The second act of the play rescued them all from death by boredom.

Chapter 5

It rained intermittently for five days straight. It was impossible to walk any farther abroad than the back garden of the Duke of Portfrey’s house during the brief intervals between heavy downpours of rain. Lauren would have been perfectly content to remain quietly indoors, keeping Elizabeth company and busying herself with her needle and her pen, but everything around her seemed to conspire against any such hope.

The Duchess of Anburey came the morning after the theater visit with gentle reproof for Lauren’s having agreed to remain alone with Viscount Ravensberg when Wilma had very properly tried to draw her away to call at Lady Bridges’s box. Even when Lauren pointed out that she had stayed in Lord Farrington’s box from choice and that their tкte-а-tкte had been conducted in full view of any of the theater patrons who had cared to look, her aunt informed her that a lady could never be too careful of her reputation. Especially Lauren, under the circumstances, she added significantly.

She invited the Duke and Duchess of Portfrey and Lauren to dine the following evening. It would have been a reasonably pleasant family event, Lauren thought afterward, if it had not been for the presence of the lone outsider, another of the Earl of Sutton’s worthy, dull friends, who was seated next to Lauren at dinner and scarcely left her side all evening. It was most provoking to be six and twenty years old, a jilted bride, so to speak, and the object of all the determinedly well-meaning matchmaking efforts of several of one’s relatives.