Viscount Ravensberg took the seat beside her.
Despite all her good intentions Lauren felt a prickle of awareness along the arm closest to him and a stirring of anticipation that felt very like excitement. If he should be forward or impertinent or otherwise outrageous, she would deal him a sharp setdown. She almost looked forward to pitting her wits against his.
Life was usually so very dull and predictable.
She sat, as he expected, without touching the back of her chair with any part of her spine. But it would be inaccurate to describe her posture as ramrod straight. There was an elegant arch to her back. Indeed, there was grace in every line of her body. A disciplined grace, that was. And perhaps an unconscious one. Certainly she watched the play with all her attention, her hands motionless in her lap, her closed fan clasped in one of them.
Kit watched her.
Did she realize that he did so? Had she noticed the considerable stir of interest their entry into Farrington’s box had aroused in the pit and the other boxes? Numerous quizzing glasses and lorgnettes had swung their way, and heads had moved together in that way people have when exchanging gossip. There had been a flurry of talk, of course, when he had driven her in Hyde Park the day after dancing with her at the Mannering ball—particularly, according to Rush, over the fact that he had borne her off along one of the shadier paths instead of completing the social circuit with her. But two weeks had passed since that occasion with nothing to fan the flames of speculation.
She seemed oblivious to the interest she had aroused. She turned her attention away from the stage only when the first act ended.
“I had forgotten,” she said, “what it is like to watch a live performance of a play. One forgets one’s very existence, does one not?”
“I have not been watching the play,” he confessed, deliberately lowering his voice.
Her lips compressed in an almost imperceptible expression of annoyance, and she opened the fan in her lap. Clearly she understood his meaning. Equally clearly she still did not approve of his form of light flirtation. He did not approve of it himself. He was capable of far more effective subtleties. But he found it amusing to discover how far he could push her before she lost her cool control over her temper—and to discover too what would happen if ever he could push her so far. Was there anything interesting behind the cool faзade?
Everyone else in the box had risen. Farrington was bearing Miss Merklinger off in pursuit of a glass of lemonade. Her parents, very correctly, were following closely behind.
“Lauren.” Lady Wilma Fawcitt touched her cousin on the shoulder. “Sutton has offered to escort us across to Lord Bridges’s box to pay our respects to dear Angela. Do come along.” She smiled graciously at Kit. “Goodness, you will feel quite abandoned, Lord Ravensberg. But we will be back for the second act.”
Lady Bridges was Sutton’s sister, Kit recalled. He got to his feet. Miss Edgeworth did not. She fanned her face slowly and set one slim arm along the velvet rest at the edge of the box.
“I believe I will remain here, Wilma,” she said. “Do please convey my respects to Lady Bridges.”
Interesting!
Sutton and his betrothed had little choice then but to proceed with their visit to the Bridges’s box, which was at quite the opposite side of the theater. Miss Edgeworth looked down into the pit and continued to fan her cheeks as Kit resumed his seat.
“You were a reconnaissance officer in the Peninsula, Lord Ravensberg,” she said without turning her head to look at him. “A spy.”
She had been learning things about him, then? “I prefer the first appellation,” he said. “The word spy conjures up images of cloaks and daggers and hair-raising exploits of reckless derring-do.”
She turned to look at him then. “I would have expected such a life to appeal to you,” she said. “Was it not like that?”
He thought of the long, solitary journeys, sometimes on horseback, more often than not on foot, over hostile terrain no matter what the season. He thought of the endless wild-goose chases, of dodging French scouting parties; of making painstaking contact with partisan groups in both Portugal and Spain; of having to deal patiently and tactfully with petty dictators and wild hotheads and cruel, fanatical nationalists; of the unspeakable atrocities that happened far from the battle lines—the torture, the rapine, the executions. Of the weariness of body and spirit and the constant drain on the emotions. Of his brother . . .
“It was far more mundane and dreary, I’m afraid,” he told her with a laugh.
“And yet,” she said, “you were singled out for commendation in several dispatches. You saved your country on numerous occasions. You are a military hero.”
“My country?” He considered. “I doubt it. Sometimes as a military man one wonders exactly what it is one fights for.”
“Surely,” she said, “one fights for what is right. One fights on the side of goodness against the forces of evil.”
If that were so, why was insomnia such a problem for him? And the frequent nightmares when he did sleep?
“Do you believe, then,” he asked her, “that every Frenchman—and every Frenchwoman—is evil, that every Briton and Russian and Prussian and Spaniard is good?”
“Of course not,” she said. “But Napolйon Bonaparte is evil. Anyone who fights for him is evil by association.”
“I suppose,” he said, “France is full of mothers with sons slain in battle who believe the British soldier to be evil incarnate.”
She opened her mouth to speak but closed it again.
“It is war that is evil,” she said at last. “But then wars are provoked and fought by men. Did you acquire the scar beneath your jaw in battle?”
It ran from the hinge of his jaw on the left side to the point of his chin. “At Talavera,” he said. “I did not complain too loudly about it even at the time. Two inches lower and I would have been playing a harp for the rest of eternity.” He grinned at her and ran one knuckle lightly down the arm that held her fan, from the edge of her short, puffed sleeve to the top of her glove. Her skin was silky and warm.
All around them was a loud hum of conversation as members of the audience visited one another and shared impressions of the play and other gossip. And yet suddenly the two of them seemed very alone. He felt a totally unexpected stirring of sexual desire for this woman who did nothing whatsoever to arouse it. She possessed beauty in abundance but no overt femininity. He had not even seen a genuine smile on her face. Yet his body wanted hers.
She drew her arm away from him. “I have given you no permission to touch me, my lord,” she said. “In fact, I have given you no encouragement at all. Why did you arrange this . . . stratagem tonight?”
“I was tired of attending every interminable social event of the Season,” he said. “I have been becoming alarmingly respectable. How dull for the ton to have had no outrageous exploit of mine with which to titillate its conversations during the past week or so. I have been compelled to take action.”
“If I had smiled and fawned over you at Lady Mannering’s ball,” she said, “and if I had simpered and giggled during the drive in Hyde Park, you would have lost interest in me in a moment, Lord Ravensberg.”
“Good Lord, yes,” he agreed. Perceptive of her.
“I would thank you not to take the Lord’s name in vain,” she said so primly that he was momentarily enchanted. “I see that I have behaved in quite the wrong manner with you. I should have encouraged you.”
“There is always time,” he suggested, moving his chair half an inch closer to hers, “to mend your ways, Miss Edgeworth.”
“You mock me,” she said. “You laugh at me—constantly. Your eyes never stop laughing.”
“Smiling,” he said. “You do me an injustice. My eyes smile with delight because every time they behold you they see a woman so beautiful that no one after her is worth looking at—or thinking of or dreaming about.”