Trial by Desire (Carhart #2)

“Horses have clean mouths,” Ned intoned innocently. “Harcroft, where are you— Ah. Well.” He turned to his wife. “There he goes.”


A slight, satisfied curl to her lips was the only indication she gave that she’d intended to drive the man off. The signs were all there, for anyone to see.

“You,” Ned said, “are…”

“He did speak of the devil,” Kate said. “A little taste of the diabolical, I believe, would do him good.”

“Oh, yes. I have it. ‘Speak of the devil, and he licks your peppermints.’”

Kate snickered. “Something like that.”

“Also, thank you.”

“For driving off your friend?” She looked surprised.

“No. The more I discover about what transpired in my absence, the more responsibility I realize you’ve taken on. I had assumed that Gareth would take on much of it—that was our agreement when I left, you know. But then, responsible as Gareth always has been, he would never have noticed the little things. The human touches. Like Mrs. Alcot.”

Like Louisa Paxton, Lady Harcroft.

Kate nodded regally and held out her hand again. For a tiny instant, he contemplated taking those delicate fingers in his. Stripping off her glove, baring that soft skin to the sun and his touch.

But she wasn’t asking for importunity. He put another peppermint in her palm instead. She didn’t throw this one, though; instead, she weighed it from hand to hand, as carefully as if it were an ingot of metal whose worth she had yet to judge.

Finally, she looked up at him. “What does Harcroft matter to you?” Her eyes were almost silver with refracted light. They seemed to cut through Ned.

He had been so much in sympathy with her, he’d forgotten. She didn’t trust him. She didn’t know he knew. The question wasn’t idle. She wanted to know if he might betray her.

Ned swallowed.

She’d never trusted him with the truth of her competence. He wanted her to tell him the truth, let him into her life. He wanted her to judge him worthy of knowing her—the true Kate, the one she hid away.

“Harcroft is a distant cousin,” Ned said softly. “We were friends, long before, when we were younger. I think we’re rather too dissimilar now to be more than acquaintances.”

“But he’s your family.”

“Half of polite society is my family, if I must count him my relation,” Ned said dryly. “If you must know, my main obligation to Harcroft is that he assisted me with the people I think of as my true family. When Jenny and Gareth married, Harcroft and his wife welcomed Jenny—Lady Blakely—into society. It wasn’t clear at the time that she would take. With his assistance, she did. I am not insensible of my obligations to him. But he’s not true family.”

“True family,” Kate mused quietly. “Those are the people who ask, and on whose say-so, you go halfway round the world? People like Lord Blakely, then.”

She looked up at him.

“Rather like oxygen,” Ned agreed, “inhaled into lungs that burn with exertion. Family consists of the people who are vital, even though sometimes they hurt. But if you’re worried that I feel some obligation to Harcroft that would make me reveal that little trick you played on him with the peppermints, or, um, anything else—worry no more.”

She glanced at him, and then looked away once again. “And who do you include in this category of true family, then?”

“Jenny,” Ned said instantly. “Gareth. My mother. Laura—that’s Gareth’s half sister. She and I were practically raised together. It’s not a large group, Kate.”

Still she didn’t say anything. Her lips pressed whitely together.

He’d wanted her to know that the people who could command his loyalty were few, that she could rely on him. Obviously, that hadn’t worked.

She was looking at him still. Not one muscle had shifted in her face, and yet he could see that the glitter in her eyes was not hatred or even mistrust. He’d completely misunderstood; this wasn’t about Harcroft, somehow. He was never going to understand women. By the furrow in her forehead, he guessed he’d said something truly awful. He’d misread that silver glint all along. She wasn’t angry with him. She was devastated.

“Christ,” he swore in confusion. “What did I say? I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

She shook her head. “Wrong question. It’s what you didn’t say.”

“Very well, then. What didn’t I say?”

“Nothing I didn’t already know.” Her words were bitter, and now she looked down. “And nothing that I couldn’t have expected. It doesn’t matter.”

The edge of the sunlight caught the smallest reflection of moisture in her eyes. She was doing a valiant job of not crying. Her nostrils flared. She took in a deep breath, no doubt intending it to be calming. “It does. Kate, I don’t actually want to cause you pain, you know. If you would just tell me—”