to try to find out why he went into that house and departed arrayed in the height of fashion among his own kind.’
‘Not a son of the church after all, then?’ he asked whimsically, but his brain was whirling with ideas as he went over all the possibilities her story presented.
‘Very far from it,’ she said disapprovingly.
‘You knew him, didn’t you?’ he suddenly realised, marvelling at her acquaintance with such fine gentlemen and instantly rigidly jealous of a man who could be a former protector of hers.
‘Only later, when I realised whose house it actually was. I can’t believe how convincing his disguise was, especially when he always seemed such an empty-headed fool when I met him at—’
She stopped, blank-faced and wary, as she bit back whatever it was she was going to say next. What a damned fool he was, he decided dazedly as he forced himself to assess Eloise La Rochelle anew. Her faultlessly unaccented accent, her unconscious elegance and that air she had of being a princess let out of her castle for a holiday and only pretending to be a female buccaneer, or even Eloise La Rochelle herself. An appalling suspicion crept into his obviously rather slow mind and he eyed her annoyingly calm countenance through the thickening darkness with hot fury clawing at his gut.
‘You met him in polite society, did you not?’ he asked coldly.
‘How can you even think such a thing?’ Louisa blustered, but ground to a halt as she met his steady, condemning gaze and decided the game was up. ‘Yes,’ she agreed stoically, trying hard to pretend having her clever disguise penetrated at exactly the wrong moment didn’t matter in the least.
‘Then you really are slumming it?’ he asked stiffly.
‘No, I’m looking for something real,’ she told him in a raw voice that threatened to tug at his heartstrings, so Hugh hardened his heart against her and made himself re-examine the information he had about her and reach another startling conclusion.
‘Say something unreal rather, Miss Alstone,’ he said stiffly, trying to be cool and logical, yet struggling with hot humiliation, and a disappointment he refused to examine at the thought of her laughing up her sleeve at him. She’d deceived him every step of her way last night and again this morning. ‘As far as I cared for anything or anyone in polite society, I gave Christopher Alstone’s little sister the benefit of the doubt when I heard that you’d been named the Ice Diamond by the wags, my dear, but at least now I know how richly you must have deserved that nickname and can learn to pity your victims instead.’
‘You never gave any fashionable female a second chance in your life,’ she scoffed. How could he have not seen the haughty minx for what she was the instant she eyed him like an offended queen across Kit’s office that first day?
‘Now there you’re more wrong than you’ll ever know,’ he said grimly, thinking of all the times he’d believed Ariadne, when only an idiot would take his wife’s interpretation over the plain facts. ‘I’m cured of it though, Miss Alstone, and if you made up this shameful tarradiddle for your own perverse amusement then I’ll see you publically exposed and pilloried for it as you deserve to be.’
‘I should have left you to your enemies, but oddly enough my sense of fairness wouldn’t let me leave you to take your chance against such overwhelming odds. I’m rapidly changing my mind, needless to say,’ she said, her face such a mask of polite indifference he couldn’t read what lay behind it, and how he hated the mass of contradictions gnawing away at his supposedly stern composure.
‘Good, I certainly need no help from the likes of you,’ he snapped.
‘You don’t even know me.’
‘I know enough.’
Hugh watched her lining up glib arguments to defend herself with and held up his hand to stop her. With his foul luck, and worse judgement, she’d be as convincing at it as his late wife had been. Ariadne had believed her own lies so steadfastly by the time she told them that she’d cheerfully swear to them, even when all the facts proved her wrong. Yet now she was dead and he was branded a murderer in all but proof. Dark grief, fury and shame threatened to swallow him up in the horror of that terrible crime once more, but he fought it back to hell where it belonged and hated this lying female all the more for showing him Hugo the Fool, the cuckolded husband, was still alive behind Hugh Darke’s cynical disguise.
‘I know you are the despair of your brother and sister, Miss Alstone,’ he said coolly enough, for all that hot fury raged under his surface calm. ‘Even I have heard that you lead half the otherwise sane men in polite society around by the nose with your beauty and various other perfections that elude me. It’s just as well known that you don’t care a snap of your fingers for a single one of them. You’re a cold-hearted vixen who dismisses her suitors as if she’s waiting for a prince or a king at the very least to decorate her cold brow with a crown, instead of the coronets you are apparently offered by the cartload every Season. And rather than make your long-suffering brother happy by graciously accepting one of those lords or their foolishly besotted heirs, you dance and flirt and charm them for your own idle satisfaction the one day, then give them a very cold shoulder the next.’
‘My, I am a bad woman,’ she said with deceptive mildness and Hugh realised he’d let some of his fury with Ariadne for being a liar and cheat and a lovely, dead, fool creep into his verbal attack on Kit’s little sister.
‘I don’t care what sort of a woman you are,’ he lied, ‘but I’ll certainly manage without your help from now on. Something tells me you’ll lead me further into the maze just because you can, rather than show me the way out of it.’
‘Don’t you want to know who your enemy is, then?’
‘How can I believe you? No doubt you have one or two inconvenient suitors littering your path to glory whom you would be very happy to rid yourself of at no cost to yourself.’
‘I get worse by the moment,’ she said with flippant amusement that only made him more furious with himself for being taken in by her, for believing her because he desperately wanted to, and for still wanting her so badly her refusal to accept any guilt for her actions threatened to charm rather than revolt him.
He’d fantasised about her in her lying disguise—heaven forbid he start doing so in her real one—that one day Kit and Eloise might have parted. It had gone, and he didn’t even want to think about the appalling pictures that set up in his mind now he knew who she really was. One day, Eloise might have turned to him for satisfaction and seduction; only now that that was impossible did he realise how deeply she’d tangled him in her devious web. Never having Eloise in his bed to laugh with, to live with and to come home to, knowing she would expect no more from a hollowed-out creature like him, cut like a knife to the gut and he wanted to be done with her, to be hundreds of miles clear of her before the pain struck and the fury stopped hiding his hurt at yet another betrayal.
‘Who is he, then?’ he made himself ask distantly, thinking how much he’d once wanted to know that very thing and now it didn’t seem to matter all that much.
‘Now, which of my discarded lovers do I despise the most?’ she mused, silently counting off on her fingers as if needing them to compile the best list.
Hugh clenched his fists against the urge to pound the old walls in a roaring frenzy because she’d used him for her own ends and he’d almost trusted her, until she proved him an idiot all over again.
‘The first one
