‘Practice makes perfect, don’t you agree, Lord Shuttleworth?’ the lady responded, avid hunger brazenly obvious in her heavy-lidded eyes as she ran them over him, as if testing his power as a lover and liking the idea of taking him as her current one a little too well, whatever their past relationship might be.
‘Only until that perfection is achieved, my lady,’ he said with a supremely elegant bow Kate thought was more an attempt to distance himself from the woman than offering her even a hint of encouragement.
‘But if it’s not properly maintained, even perfection can fade away from lack of application,’ the lady murmured and Kate wondered at her daring, at the same time as she marvelled at her husband’s wilful blindness to her true nature as she tried to joust with a potential lover under his very nose.
‘A little imperfection always seems so much more human to me,’ Edmund replied with a surprisingly warm look in Kate’s direction that she decided was his way of subtly informing Lady Tedinton she was much less to him than she thought herself to be, since he’d just put Kate ahead of her and everyone knew they were no longer even friends.
‘Yet no doubt surprisingly tedious after a while. A person of taste and refinement, not to mention experience, cannot find it easy to be burdened with a bungling amateur forced to strive for mastery of a set of skills that comes to others with almost instinctive ease. It must be tedious indeed to endure such gauche fumbling at such times,’ her ladyship responded.
How so much malice could be directed at her with one heavy-eyed, apparently amused glance was almost beyond Kate. She was tempted to shrug her shoulders and make a polite excuse before drifting away with an absent farewell, but she owed Edmund more than that, even if he was confounding and confusing her more than she’d dreamt he could when she was three years younger and even more foolish.
‘If one takes lessons from a fine teacher, they can be enormously stimulating for both pupil and educator in my experience,’ she managed to defend herself as coolly as if she had no idea their three-way battle concealed a nasty set of double meanings that were all going straight over Lord Tedinton’s head.
‘Since I hear that your former governess used her position in a noble household to gain a rich and powerful husband, one can only suppose the less wary gentlemen among the ton need to be very careful indeed of those lessons, Miss Alstone,’ her ladyship said with a faux smile only her husband would ever trust.
‘Would it be her position as my governess, or that of the only grandchild and sole heiress to the Duke and Duchess of Devingham you intend to cite, my lady?’ Kate said with such apparent pleasantness she was sure she heard her adversary’s perfect white teeth snap together with impotent fury.
‘Since the odd creature foolishly renounced the latter, then it must be the former, and what a very fine scheme it turned out to be,’ Lady Tedinton said, letting temper flash out recklessly, as if she sensed her most coveted lover slipping out of her grasping fingers when Edmund’s eyes iced over in obvious contempt.
‘Sometimes,’ he said with such chilly calm even Kate shivered, ‘it takes an inveterate schemer to spot a careful plan where none ever existed, my lady.’
Since he also bowed to the apparently noble couple with ceremonious elegance and an empty social smile, Lord Tedinton laughed and seemed as unaware of his lady’s fury as he was that she was being subtly accused of being devious and spiteful.
‘Indeed it does—now, are you going to honour me with that dance or not, my dear?’ he said as brightly as if they were all getting along famously. ‘After all, you lured me away from our duty of greeting belated guests on the promise of one, so we’d best join the next set and let them see exactly why we deserted them, eh?’ he urged his wife indulgently.
Kate smothered a chuckle at her ladyship’s barely masked impatience with his doglike devotion. The obnoxious female was already watching them with ill-concealed fury; presumably she wanted Edmund to share that devotion and hated Kate for being there to rescue him from her witchy wiles. If only the deluded female knew how little Edmund actually wanted Kate herself now, the awful woman would probably triumph and crow unbearably over her, she decided, sincerely hoping she could escape such an unpleasant encounter when Edmund’s engagement to some dewy-eyed débutante was finally announced.
‘What did you ever see in her?’ she asked unwarily once their host and hostess had taken to the dance floor and the music was loud enough to mask her voice from an interested listener.
‘Since you refused to become my wife more times than either of us care to be reminded, you have renounced all right to ask me that impertinent question, Miss Alstone. So I suggest you keep your arrogant opinions and any other ill-informed and ill-natured gossip you have garnered about me to yourself in the future,’ he told her as icily as he’d just set down her ladyship and Kate knew she’d be on the verge of tears if she let herself risk such a public loss of control.
Biting her lower lip to keep it from wobbling, she nodded to him regally as words deserted her, but she refused to let her steps falter under his icy silver-green gaze, or show any sign that she was even conscious of Lady Tedinton’s darts of dark-eyed resentment, as that lady barely even bothered to pretend her attention was centred on her husband or the dance.
‘I wish you a good evening, my lord,’ she managed to say expressionlessly enough as they neared Eiliane, who was gossiping happily with one of her cronies on the dark rose-coloured sofa that now reminded Kate almost insupportably of their hostess for the night.
She curtsied to him with formal grace, he bowed with almost as distant a hauteur as he’d used to depress her ladyship’s pretensions and they parted before Eiliane had even spotted them returning together and been able to come up with a pretext for keeping them so.
‘This must be one of the most tedious parties either of us ever had the poor judgement to attend, Kate,’ her mentor greeted her cheerfully, once the friend she’d been so absorbed in pumping for the more interesting secrets of the haut ton had departed to bully some hesitant youth into dancing with her débutante daughter.
‘Indeed,’ Kate managed as she resorted to the small amount of cover allowed by her fan to conceal some of her confusion.
‘You’re overset, my love,’ Eiliane exclaimed, even more concerned when the hectic colour in Kate’s cheeks ebbed as she recalled Edmund’s cold fury with her at even the mention of his rumoured amour with their hostess.
‘I’ll do well enough once I’ve got my breath back,’ she managed to say calmly enough as she wondered why on earth she’d let her tongue run away with her in such an appalling fashion just because the very idea of Edmund making love to that vixen had made her feel ill.
‘Nonsense, we’ll call for our carriage and go home. I’ll be glad of an early night and you look as if you could do with a week of them all of a sudden.’
‘No!’ Kate thought of how insufferably Lady Tedinton would triumph and smirk if she was weak enough to turn tail and go home like a whipped dog after that obnoxious encounter. ‘I would rather stay a little longer and perhaps go on to Mrs Farnborough’s as we had planned. That last dance was quite a vigorous one and I shall be perfectly fine in just a moment.’
‘Will you, my love?’ Eiliane asked shrewdly and Kate wished her a little less acute for once, but hoped her friend had no idea of the real reason why she was feeling so out of sorts and low spirited.
‘Yes, I shall feel quite restored once I’ve had a rest. It would never do if I gained a reputation for giving myself die-away airs after all, for you’d never get me off your hands then,’ she joked weakly. She refused to even consider the fact that it felt as if she’d never look at another man for the rest of her life and feel the least desire to marry him, or even stand up with him for a waltz after her bittersweet ones with Edmund had spoilt her expectations of any other partner.
She certainly refused all invitations to waltz for the rest of the evening,