Dangerous to Hold (33 page)

Sleep did not come easily. As she began to relax she thought back to the last time she and Marcus had made love. It didn’t help to remind herself that he’d been trying
to humiliate her. Her body was telling her something different. It ached with unsated desire; ached to feel Marcus’s embrace again.

Groaning, she gritted her teeth and started counting sheep.

Two days later, Catherine came out of the local saddlery where she’d taken one of Vixen’s bits to be repaired, and found Marcus waiting for her in a hired hackney. He didn’t descend from the coach to help her up. Instead, he extended his hand and pulled her in.

As the hackney moved off, she said, “Is so much secrecy really necessary?”

He shrugged. “I don’t want to rouse suspicion. Everyone thinks my wife is off visiting relatives in Spain. If they see me with you, people are bound to start talking. I’m thinking of you, Cat.”

She looked up at him, and Marcus continued, “They’re going to talk even more when we dissolve our marriage. You know, of course, that everything will have to come out? I mean your identity, Cat. There’s no possibility of keeping it a secret.” She looked dismayed, and he went on, “You’ll have to appear in person. Whom did you think you would be when they questioned you—Catalina or Catherine?”

“I never gave it a thought,” she said faintly.

“Well, think about it now.” There was a pause, and he said quietly, “We must tell the truth. If we lie and are later found out, our divorce may well be quashed. I can’t divorce Catalina Cordes without bringing Catherine Courtnay into it. It was Catherine Courtnay who posed as my wife these last weeks.”

She knew that he was thinking of the succession. A man in his position had to be sure that his children were his legal heirs, especially his firstborn son. She looked at the finger which was now bare of his wedding ring, and her eyes began to tear.

“What—?” She cleared her throat. “What do your solicitors have to say about it?”

“So far, I’ve told them very little. I wanted to make sure, first, that you understood everything would have to come out. However, I did learn that the Scottish divorce is out of the question. It seems that too many English couples have gone that route, and now one has to be Scottish before their courts will give you a hearing. Don’t look so forlorn. There are other possibilities open to us.”

She wasn’t forlorn. Her pulse had quickened and her spirits had lifted. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m in no hurry. How did your family react when you told them Catalina had been called away to visit a sick relative?”

Marcus chuckled. “They descended on my doorstep,
en masse
, to demand what the devil was going on. Even Tristram came down from Oxford. They had the idea that all was not right between us. I put them off as best I could. They’ll learn the truth soon enough.” The smile left his eyes and he looked at her in a way that drove her lashes down to hide her own feelings. He said quietly, “You made quite an impression on them, Cat.”

Her heart felt as though it were breaking. She got out hoarsely, “No more than they made on me.”

He looked out the window. “I read your piece in
The Journal.
You were right and I was wrong. I hope you will accept my apologies for ripping into you. It was to the point, yet it was compassionate.” He turned his head to look at her. “You wrote it for Penn, didn’t you?”

Since she couldn’t find her voice, she nodded.

“He read it, you know, but I don’t think he recognized himself in it. He doesn’t think his drinking is a problem. And actually, since he’s arrived in town, he hasn’t touched a drop.”

“Penn came too?”

“Oh, Helen insisted on it. And now I’m insisting that they stay for the little Season. I thought you’d be pleased.”

She managed a smile. “You’ve done well, Marcus. I’ve heard how you forced society to accept Helen. I think it’s wonderful.”

“You wouldn’t recognize her. Or Samantha either.
They’re having the time of their lives. Penn and I, of course, are the ones to suffer. Every afternoon and evening, we take turns doing our duty—escorting our ladies from one engagement to another. I’ve persuaded David to stay on too. Penn and he spend a good deal of time together looking over horses. At Christmas, Tristram will join us again, then we’ll all be together.”

Every word he uttered seemed to be aimed straight at her heart. She couldn’t listen to more. “When do you intend to tell your family the truth?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

He hesitated, then said flatly, “On whether or not you are pregnant with my child.” He gave her a moment to let his words sink in. “It’s been almost a month. Cat, are you pregnant?”

She looked up at him with huge, stricken eyes. “No, Marcus,” she said. “I’m not.”

When Marcus returned to town, he went straight to his club in St. James to meet with his cousin.

David ordered dinner, beefsteak with the obligatory bottle of burgundy. Marcus then asked him how the morning had gone.

David pulled a long face, and laughed. He’d spent the morning with Penn, looking for a stud stallion to go with the mare Marcus had sold him. This was all Marcus’s idea. He wanted Penn’s every waking moment to be occupied so that he wouldn’t have time to think of his next drink.

David said, “I’m sure Penn thinks I don’t know a gelding from a brood mare. In other words, he thinks that, as a breeder of horses, I’m a disgrace to the Lytton name. We’ve arranged to go to Tattersall’s tomorrow.”

“I’m obliged to you,” said Marcus. “And I mean that, David. It’s good of you to give up your time for Penn.”

“It’s no sacrifice. He knows more about horses than I could learn in a lifetime. You’re very lucky that he manages your stud for you.”

“It’s his stud too.”

“I don’t think he sees it that way. He sounds quite bitter.” David looked up. “I beg your pardon. I shouldn’t have said that.”

Marcus waved his apology away. “I don’t know how Penn came to be so touchy. He wasn’t always like that. How is the beefsteak?”

They were about ready to leave when Peter Farrel caught sight of them and came over. Marcus hadn’t seen Peter since the night of his godmother’s ball, the night that Freddie Barnes was murdered.

“Marcus, I’m glad I caught you,” Peter said with his usual abruptness. “There’s a rumor going around that I think you should know about.” His eye fell on David. “How do you do, Mr. Lytton?”

“What rumor?” demanded Marcus.

“They say that you’ve hidden your wife away because you think her life is in danger.”

“Why should I think that?”

“You know, we spoke of it before. Because you’re the only English soldier left from that place in Spain.”

“What has that to do with my wife?”

“Don’t be obtuse, Marcus. If you’re a target, she may be a target too.”

“Whose target?”

“How should I know? One of the partisans who was with you, one presumes. Or that Rifleman. Just be careful, Marcus. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. G’day to you, Mr. Lytton.” And with that, Farrel sauntered off.

Marcus turned to David. “Have you heard this rumor?”

“Yes, I have, but the story was so convoluted that I didn’t know what to make of it.”

“I don’t know what to make of it either,” said Marcus.

Farrel’s words stayed with Marcus on the short walk home to Cavendish Square. He was annoyed that the gossip had hit so close to the mark, at least on one point. At the same time, he wasn’t afraid that Catherine’s life was in danger. Major Carruthers had convinced him that the murderer’s object had been achieved when he’d
eliminated all those who might recognize him again and place him at
El Grande’s
base. The episode with the lantern on the tower stairs and the attack against him in Hyde Park were not connected. Still, the mystery continued to tantalize him. Who was the murderer and what had driven him to commit so many murders? Was it the Rifleman, or, as Farrel had suggested, was it one of the partisans? He thought of
El Grande
and cursed under his breath. He was jealous of that young man, and that did not sit well with Marcus.

He suspected that once Catherine were free of him, she would eventually marry
El Grande
, and that did not sit well with him either. He had no excuse, really, for the delay in seeing his solicitors, except his own reluctance to proceed with the divorce. A divorce wasn’t something to be entered into lightly. He was thinking of Catherine.

Bloody hell!
Who was he trying to convince? There was a lot more to it than that. He didn’t want a divorce. He missed her. In spite of everything, he actually missed her. A sane man would be glad to be rid of her. But not he! The sad truth was he was bewitched by a woman who had repeatedly betrayed him.

He didn’t know why he was angry. He’d stopped being angry a long time ago. This wasn’t the first time he’d gone over things in his mind, and he’d come to acknowledge that Catherine wasn’t entirely to blame. She was, after all, an agent. She’d been under orders, and couldn’t have told him anything, even if she’d wanted to.

Something Carruthers had said came back to him. The major had told him that because Catherine had not reported the incident on the tower stairs, she could no longer be trusted as an agent. At the time, Carruthers’s words had only infuriated him. She hadn’t said anything about the tower stairs incident because she’d suspected
him
of trying to murder her. When he’d had time to cool down, he came to see what Carruthers was getting at. Catherine’s loyalties were divided. Marcus wasn’t making any assumptions about her feelings, but at the very least she hadn’t wanted to see him hang.

He wasn’t blameless either. He’d bullied her at every turn or he’d tried to. And when she’d stood her ground,
he’d become as sulky as a schoolboy. He could hardly believe, now, that he’d asked her to be his mistress. The one thing he could say in his own favor was that he hadn’t tried to seduce her. She’d come to him of her own free will. Now that he knew about Amy, he realized how much Cat must have forgiven him before she’d taken that step—not because he’d ravished Amy, Cat would never forgive that—but because Amy had once been his mistress.

Just thinking about Amy, even now, made the color rise hotly in his cheeks. He still found it hard to believe that Amy Spencer was Cat’s sister. In other words, his sister-in-law was once his mistress. And Cat had been curious about his relationship with Amy. The damnable thing was, so was he. He could remember the house in Chelsea in which he’d installed her, he could remember a yellow sofa, and he remembered he’d been hot for her. And that’s all he remembered. He had only been twenty-two at the time, and if Cat only knew it, he’d been hot for every pretty woman who caught his eye. Amy was only one in a long line of mistresses over the years, and not one of them was memorable. It was just his bad luck that he’d once chosen the sister of the woman who would one day be his wife.

A picture formed in his mind. He saw them all sitting down to Sunday dinner,
en famille
, his wife at the foot of the table, as was proper, and his former mistress … He said something crude under his breath, and a passerby looked at him askance and turned away in another direction.

Of course, Amy was the least of his problems. There was still the question of Cat’s feelings for
El Grande.
She’d put that young man on a pedestal. On the other hand, he’d rather be the man in her bed than the man she hero-worshiped with a young girl’s devotion. Of the two of them, he had the better bargain. It was damn cold on a pedestal. And damn hot in Cat’s bed.

The passion had been real. He’d relived their last night together many times over, and he was convinced that the passion had been real. She’d been shocked by his ardor, hell, he’d shocked himself, and he had initiated her
into too much too soon. He’d done things with her, to her, that he’d never done with another woman, and asked things of her that he hadn’t known he was going to ask, but nothing that could be called wrong between a man and his wife. At least, not by his lights. And she hadn’t protested, or tried to restrain him. She had given him the freedom of her body as he had done with her, and they’d both reveled in it.

All this was beside the point. Cat wanted a divorce, and he had promised to take care of it. He couldn’t delay any longer. Tomorrow. He would set up an appointment with his solicitor first thing tomorrow morning.

Face like granite, he slammed into his house. Giles, the footman, came forward to take Marcus’s hat and coat, but one look at his master’s murderous expression made him veer off and discreetly disappear behind a potted palm.

Under the brilliant glare of a thousand candles, Marcus’s godmother, Lady Tarrington, surveyed the crush of guests in the ballroom of her house in St. James’s Square. Her receptions were always well attended, but this one was exceptional—in spite of the fact that the Season had not begun. This was the little Season that preceded Christmas. And the reason so many had come was because everyone was curious about Marcus and his family.