“It can’t have been easy,” Kat said softly, “losing her mother so young.”
Sebastian drew her closer, his cheek resting against her hair. They were all marked in an unseen but hurtful way, he thought, the motherless children of the world. Guinevere had been little more than a babe when she lost her mother; Sophie Hendon had sailed away to a watery grave the summer Sebastian was eleven, while Kat had been twelve or thirteen when her own mother and stepfather had been killed. He knew some of what had happened on that dark day, but not all of it. “At least she still had a home,” said Sebastian, thinking of all Kat herself had lost on that misty Dublin morning. “And her father.”
“He doesn’t seem to have concerned himself overly much with her.”
Sebastian was silent for a moment, remembering his own father’s bitter withdrawal on that long-ago summer of death. “Perhaps. Yet he cared enough not to want to see her married to a penniless young man.”
Kat tilted her head to look up at him. “Yes. But for her sake? I wonder. Or his?”
“Morgana claims Athelstone didn’t force her sister to marry Anglessey. That the Marquis was Guinevere’s own choice.”
“Perhaps she decided that if she couldn’t have the man she loved, she might as well marry for wealth and a title.”
Sebastian felt the shiver that ran through her as she spoke. He rested his hip against the windowsill so that he could circle her with the warmth of his body, the warmth of his love. “I wonder how Varden felt about that?” he said softly.
She rested comfortably against him. “It doesn’t seem to have blighted his life. He’s often at the theater with a crowd of other young bucks, laughing and eyeing the dancers. Watching him, one would say he hadn’t a care in the world.”
“He seems to have taken Guinevere’s death hard enough.”
“Well he would, wouldn’t he? They were childhood friends.”
He ran his hands up her sides, enjoying the feel of her bare flesh beneath his touch. “They might very well have been more than that. Still.”
She rested her arms on his shoulders so that she could look again into his face. “You think Varden is the lover Bevan Ellsworth claims fathered Guinevere’s child?”
He threaded his fingers through her hair, combing it back from her forehead. “We don’t know for certain she even had a lover. It’s not something I’m prepared to take on Bevan Ellsworth’s word.”
She was quiet for a moment, thinking, and he watched her. He loved the way her mind worked. In a world where women learned from an early age to affect an air of helpless ignorance, Kat was a strong, intelligent woman and she wasn’t afraid to show it.
At least not with him.
Finally, she said, “What I don’t understand is, where does the Prince Regent fit into any of this?”
Sebastian blew out a long breath. “I suppose it’s possible her murder was completely cold-blooded—that her killer’s sole purpose was simply to use her to cast suspicion upon the Prince Regent and increase his unpopularity. But if that were true, then why select Guinevere Anglessey as the victim? Why not Lady Hertford, or one of the other women with whom Prinny has been closely linked?”
“Perhaps she was simply…convenient.”
Sebastian ran his hands up and down her arms, his gaze on the night-darkened window beside them. Somewhere out there…somewhere, in some corner of this sprawling, dangerous city, lay the answer to what had happened to Guinevere Anglessey, and why. If he only knew where to look. “It would help if Lovejoy could find out where she went in that hackney.”
“Her abigail might know.”
By now the clouds had completely covered the moon, plunging the street below into a gloomy darkness only faintly illuminated by the feeble glow of the streetlamps. A shadow seemed to detach itself from the house at the corner, a phantom of a shape that was there and then gone.
“What is it?” Kat asked when Sebastian leaned forward, his hand tightening on the drapes beside them.
“I thought I saw something. A man watching the house.”
“It’s just shadows. The trees moving in the wind.” She pressed her chilled body close to his. “Come back to bed.”
He wrapped his arms around her, lending her the heat of his own body. He nibbled at her neck, breathed softly against her ear. But what he said was “I need to go home. It’s late.”
“Stay,” she whispered, her naked body moving suggestively against his, her hands roving over him with a lover’s familiarity. “I like waking up to find you still beside me.”
“You could wake up beside me every morning if you’d marry me.”
He felt her stiffen in his arms. She drew back to meet his gaze, the playful eroticism fading from her eyes to be replaced with something stark and painful. “You know why I can’t do that.”
He knew why she thought she couldn’t do that. They’d been through it all a thousand times before, yet he still couldn’t stop himself from saying, “Why? Because I am a viscount and you are an actress?”
“Yes,” she said simply.
He pushed out a harsh, frustrated breath. “You realize, don’t you, that if Guinevere had been allowed to marry the man she loved, she’d probably still be alive today.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I know that I—”
