have no right to criticise my behaviour.’
He quite liked it when she squared up to him, he realized, leaning back against the squabs to study her mutinous expression. When she dropped the frigid mask she employed to deceive the rest of Society and revealed her true self. It made him feel privileged to get a glimpse of a facet of her nature she permitted nobody else to see.
He’d felt like this last night, too, when she’d been pleading with him to spare her maid. She’d completely forgotten all about acting as though she didn’t care about anything. Her eyes had glowed with a similar fervour, and those petal-soft lips had trembled with emotion….
It was only with a great effort that he tore his eyes from those tantalizingly tempting lips. It made his voice quite gruff when he said, ‘Catching you in the arms of your lover last night gives me every right to speak my mind. I know what you are capable of. I know what you are really like.’
He raised one gloved hand to silence her when she drew breath to object.
‘And I cannot, in all conscience, just allow you to carry on as you have been doing. Dammit, if anyone else had caught the pair of you together there would have been hell to pay. I have no confidence that if I do not, personally, put a curb on your behaviour you will not carry on sneaking out to meet him in secret. And it must stop. Do you hear me?’
She nodded, her lips pressed hard together on the reflection that there was nothing so infuriating as being ordered to do something she had already decided on doing.
‘Now, it will not be as bad as all that. If you do me one favour I am willing to arrange for you to see your young man, in circumstances which will compromise neither him nor you.’
‘You will do what?’ How could the man be so exasperating? She had been relying on him insisting she give Harry up completely.
‘I will arrange for you two to meet. But only when I, myself, will be your chaperon.’ He half turned towards her again. ‘Now, look. Everyone knows I have only very recently sold out. What could be more natural than for me to be seen about with other military men? Lieutenant Kendell will be accepted into certain situations if he is with me. And I seem to be exactly the sort of man your family would encourage you to mix with. The fact that we are here, riding out together, with only my own servants to chaperon us, is proof of that. It will be quite easy for me to ensure that you may see each other whenever his duties permit. In a properly managed, decorous fashion. Not in this sneaking way in which you have so far engaged.’
She felt ready to explode. The last thing she could do was tell him he had got completely the wrong idea about her and Harry. He had already made her feel stupid and selfish. If she admitted that she had fallen into the relationship in a fit of pique with her grandfather, and was now quite keen to wriggle out of it again, she would never live it down!
She was going to have to appear to agree to his terms. Oh, Lord, and that meant that she would have to meet Harry again and tell him to his face that she did not love him. Could never marry him.
It would be painful. Very painful. But in a way would it not be a fitting punishment for the way she had led Harry on these past months?
Though she still could not understand why on earth Lord Ledbury was so keen to act as a go-between. Just when she had been relying on him to put an end to what was becoming an increasingly untenable situation, he was coming to their aid—as though he had every sympathy for what he assumed was a pair of star-crossed lovers.
‘Why are you doing this?’
He took a deep breath. ‘I am going to ask you to do something for me that means I shall have to take you into my confidence. I am going to trust you to keep what I am about to tell you to yourself. Just as you are trusting me to keep my mouth shut about your continuing relationship with Lieutenant Kendell.’
He was going to trust her with a secret? A great deal of her irritation with him ebbed away. Even if his words did contain that thinly veiled threat about him keeping quiet so long as she kept quiet, nobody had ever reposed any confidence in her upon any matter whatsoever. On the contrary—all her life her male relatives had been drumming it into her that she was completely useless.
‘I want you to help a … a friend of mine.’ He frowned. ‘Perhaps it is best I go back to the beginning. You know I was wounded at Orthez last February?’
‘No.’ But hadn’t he said something about not being able to sleep because his leg troubled him? She looked down at it. Then her eyes flicked to the cane she recalled he’d made use of when he’d limped into Lucy’s ballroom the previous night.
She caught her lower lip between her teeth, feeling really ashamed of all the nasty things she’d thought about him just because he’d looked so grim-faced.
‘Stupidest thing, really,’ he admitted, looking a bit uncomfortable. ‘My horse got shot out from under me, and instead of jumping clear I let the damn thing roll on me. Clumsy. I was pretty well out of it for a while. And then I came to in the field hospital, with Milly defending me like a tigress from surgeons whose sole idea of a cure is to amputate anything that looks the least bit untidy. So, you see, she saved my leg.’
He held up one finger as though keeping score.
‘Then, eventually, I got sent back to England on a transport, while the rest of my regiment pushed across the border into France. Milly’s father, who was the regimental quartermaster, gave his permission for her to come with me as my nurse, thank God, else the fever I contracted would most probably have carried me off.’
He held up another finger.
‘I was weak as a kitten all through last summer. And desperately hard up. But thanks to Milly’s ingenuity and Fred’s skill at foraging—perhaps I should mention Fred is, or was, my batman—I slowly began to recover. And then winter came, and I took an inflammation of the lungs. It looked as though I was done for, but they both stuck with me even though by this time I could not even pay their wages …’
‘But you are a wealthy man!’
‘I am a wealthy man now,’ he corrected her. ‘Before Mortimer died I had to live on my pay. And what with doctors’ bills and so forth …’
‘But surely if you had applied to your family, they would have …?’
‘I have already told you that you are not alone in being disappointed in your male relatives, Lady Jayne. I wrote on several occasions, but never received any reply.’
‘How can that be? Did they not receive your letters? Do you suppose they went astray?’
‘Oh, no,’ he said, looking particularly grim. ‘The minute my brother died the family’s man of business came to inform me that I was now Viscount Ledbury—proving that they had known exactly where I was, and how I was circumstanced, all along.’
And they’d left him? Hovering between life and death? Oh, how could they?
‘Would it surprise you to learn that my first reaction on hearing of my older brother’s death was gratitude—for at last I had the means to reward the only two people who had shown any loyalty towards me?’
‘Not one bit.’
She was only surprised that he was so determined to do his duty by a
