Lady Varney's Risqué Business by Cerise Deland Read Free Book Online Page B

silhouetted by the sun. Complimented but wary of his knowledge, she had to ask, “How do you know that?”
    “I’ve inquired here and there,” he said with some pride.
    “My friends?” she prodded.
    “Your cook,” he admitted.
    “She told your butler who in turn, told you.”
    “Quite so.” He grinned.
    She frowned. Shot up and spun away from him.
    He caught her by the arm. “Darling, aren’t you pleased?”
    “How can I be, Justin?”
    His brows knit. His eyes dimmed. “They are for you. You alone.”
    “They cannot be.”
    “I know you raise roses,” he declared. “That you garden to lighten your anxiety. That you need the fragrance and the beauty to overcome—”
    She froze, intimidated, exposed and damned furious. “You have spied on me.”
    “No, not–”
    “ Inquiring does not constitute invasion of my private life?” she rebuked him.
    He swept out two hands. “What do you think this is if it is not your private life?”
    “For a day. A night! Hardly the sum total of my life!”
    “But it should be.” He took hold of her shoulders, his hard power only serving to unnerve her even more. “You belong here. With me.”
    “I cannot stay here.” Suddenly, she was embarrassed at her nakedness. Reality drove out all joy of her interlude with him. “I never should have come.”
    “You could not refuse me.”
    Trembling with outrage, she challenged him, “Because I needed your fees?”
    His face crumbled. “Because you love me.”
    To hear him speak the truth she dare not admit to herself made her shake with despair. Tears glittered in his eyes.
    In her own, too. “Let me go.”
    “I dare not. I will never get you back.”
    How true. How very true.
    “Marry me.”
    “No.”
    “I love you, Katherine. I always have. Marry me.”
    “I will never marry anyone ever again,” she announced with a resolve that sounded hideous, even to her own ears.
    Since they had resumed their acquaintance weeks ago, she had often studied his handsome face, his unconcealed emotions. She had seen humor and compassion, consideration and rejection. She thought she had seen surprise. Now she recognized shock.
    “That’s absurd. You’ll marry again. You’ll marry me!”
    “Never,” she told him with such severity he blanched.
    “This is what marriage to Henry did to you,” he concluded, bitterness in each word.
    “Yes. And that’s my resolution. No marriage. Ever. To you or anyone else.”

 
     
     
     
    Chapter Four
     
     
    Three weeks later on a Wednesday afternoon at two, she sat down in the drawing room of the Lord and Lady Winston Martindale upon the occasion of their annual At Home. Parliament had dismissed two days earlier, and the Martindales’ afternoon reception was one of the three closing highlights of the late Season. Few festivities remained which drew the Set before all dispersed to the countryside for the summer months.
    “I shall be happy as a bee to leave town,” Maggie confided as she sat next to Kitty and fluttered her Chinese fan in the uncommon June heat.
    “You are quite flushed, Maggie. You are very sure you are not….hmmm?” Kitty had asked this question twice this past week of her sister. “I recall being very hot when I was…in that way. You know.”
    “I might be.” Her sister flashed her a brilliant smile. “But I am not yet positive.”
    “Just wanted to be certain.” Glancing into the hall where others arrived for this party, Kitty flicked open her own fan and gave herself a nervous cooling off. God, if she could only be certain Justin would not attend, she could proceed to enjoy herself tremendously.
    “Certain, eh?” Maggie eyed Kitty’s fan. “After your visit to a certain gentleman, I could ask you the same question.”
    “No.” No . Kitty knew she was not pregnant. She’d had the proof last week, much to her immense relief. Maggie had been nearly as wild as she to learn if she were enceinte . Her sister had known of her rendezvous with Justin—and