She blushed furiously and instantly like the veriest virgin. Which of course she was.
Lady Hackworth likely would have known something provocative to say in reply.
Catherine didn’t have anything like that vocabulary. She was mute.
She wondered if he’d said it in an attempt to make her go quiet. To impose a distance.
Or was it to test her?
What did it say about her that all she thought about now was lying alongside him in a bed? Was that a test she had passed or failed?
For an instant it seemed as though he could read all of her thoughts clearly in her eyes, because his own flared so fleetingly hot that her knees all but turned to smoke and she felt an aching throbrightat the join of her legs.
This was her first inkling that the things said about him might be grounded in some sort of truth. She understood viscerally then that there were very good reasons she ought not be alone with him.
And perhaps these were the same reasons, deep down, she wanted to be alone with him.
She could add this to her list of London season revelations. And new experiences.
His face went unreadable again. She could see he was poised to bolt.
“By the way,” he said suddenly, “someone pouredwhiskey into the ratafia. I’ve asked a footman to dump it and to tell his hosts. But you might want to wait a bit before tasting any.”
“Very well. Thank you for steering me away from... iniquity.”
She could administer tests, too.
She felt his little half smile as a delicious shiver along her spine. As if he sensed she was beginning to consider whether certain kinds of iniquity were appealing.
“Oh, it’s entirely self-interest, Keating. I shouldn’t want you to return to The Grand Palace on the Thames drunk and frolicsome and rob me of valuable sleep.”
She laughed.
“There’s the music for your dance. I’m off again.Bon chance.” He turned.
“Have you a handkerchief, for the punching portion of the evening?”
He threw her a wry parting glance and patted the pocket of his coat by way of reply and disappeared.
How she hated it every time he vanished from view.
Chapter Nine
Allguests will eat dinner together at least four times per weekwas the very first rule printed on the little card handed to him when he’d taken a room, so clearly the proprietresses of The Grand Palace on the Thames took this seriously.
He’d survived the gathering in the sitting room.
The gathering had also more or less survived him.
So dinner was the next hurdle.
What had Keating called it? A cheerful racket. She’d enjoyed it so thoroughly she wanted to pattern the future dinners of her life upon it, and he found himself oddly curious to discover why. His own family dinners had been fraught, resentful affairs, as there often wasn’t nearly enough to eat, his parents were irritable, and his siblings liked to kick each other beneath the table.
The word he would have chosen for the dinner at The Grand Palace on the Thames was “mild uproar.”
But cheerful it definitely was, and as frank and frill-free as an occasion could possibly be, if a little merrily harrowing.
Hardy sat at one end of the table, Bolt at the other, and everyone else found chairs in between.
