Mistress at Midnight by Sophia James Read Free Book Online

of garnering interest. It is a known fact.’
    ‘Such is the ease of being wealthy.’
    ‘Charles was rich, too. Perhaps you are more like Elizabeth Berkeley than you think.’
    She did laugh at that, the sound lost into a mirth that was humourless. ‘I cannot determine one trait that we might share, my lord.’
    ‘What of beauty?’ he replied.
    Was this a joke he played upon her? ‘I am hardly that, my lord.’
    ‘A woman who does not know her true worth is a rare and valuable thing.’ His voice allowed no tremor of falsity and when she turned towards him the breath left her body, his expression exactly the one she had seen at Taylor’s Gap: lust and want beaten back by will.
    Breaking the contact, he fisted his palm against his thighs so that every knuckle stretched white. the scars on his knuckles stood out as raised edges of knotted flesh.
    He swore soundly, the frustration expressedcoursing between them. She should have bidden him to let her make the rest of the journey alone, should have replaced her gloves with a stern reprimand and ordered him from the carriage. But she could not. Instead she sat there, too, the silence growing as an ache, her hands bare in her lap and cold, her head heavy against the cushioned velour of the seat. For twenty-six long years she had imagined exactly this, a man who might transport her from the tight restraint of her life and deliver her into temptation.
    His eyes glinted in the dark when she chanced to take a look, the bleakness in them shivering through green.
    ‘Your husband had questionable friends, Aurelia. Take care that they do not become your own.’
    He would warn her even given the public perception of her part in Charles’s murder. Gratitude rose unbidden.
    ‘I live a simple and quiet life with my father and sisters. There is little in me that could be of interest to anyone.’
    His laugh was menacing. ‘Somehow I doubt that entirely.’ The residual feeling existing between them since their kiss thickened.What on earth was happening to her? Hope drove into a veiled anger.
    He would never be hers . It was written in exactly who she was. As she moved away carefully, the space between them became bathed in a pool of light reaching in from outside and when she saw that they were back in Upper Brook Street the relief was indescribable.
    Braeburn House. The horses slowed to an amble and then stopped as Aurelia stretched the fabric of her unworn gloves out whilst deciding exactly what it was she would say. There were so many things that she might have told him, but in the end she settled on the one that would keep her family safe.
    ‘I relinquish you from any bargain that stands between us, my lord, and I realise that my insistence on an invitation to your ball was both forward and foolish.’ she enunciated the words very carefully and hoped that the need in her was not as visible as she thought it might be.
    ‘Your sister and Rodney Northrup may not say the same, Mrs St Harlow.’
    The words were cold and stilted, none of the delight of the evening held within them, and as if to underline his desire to have hergone he simply leaned across to the door and flipped the handle, gesturing to one of his servants to help her alight.
    He should not have been alone with her, jammed into the small space with the warmth of her skin and the rapid beat of her heart searing into all his good intentions. Aurelia St Harlow was his cousin’s widow and he was all but promised to Elizabeth Berkeley.
    The anger in him grew along with a more unfamiliar frustration as he ran his fingers across his face, hating the way he was never able to hold them still. The night had left him wrung out and tired with the wax and wane of emotion and he still had a great deal of it to get through before everybody left. He wished that the hour was later and that the throng who danced and laughed in the Hawkhurst town house could have been gone, especially the Berkeleys. He did not have the energy to deal