A Most Unladylike Adventure by Elizabeth Beacon Page A

he eyed her annoyingly calm countenance through the thickening darkness with hot fury clawing at his gut.
    ‘You met him in polite society, did you not?’ he asked coldly.
    ‘How can you even think such a thing?’ Louisa blustered, but ground to a halt as she met his steady, condemning gaze and decided the game was up. ‘Yes,’ she agreed stoically, trying hard to pretend having her clever disguise penetrated at exactly the wrong moment didn’t matter in the least.
    ‘Then you really are slumming it?’ he asked stiffly.
    ‘No, I’m looking for something real,’ she told him in a raw voice that threatened to tug at his heartstrings, so Hugh hardened his heart against her and made himself re-examine the information he had about her and reach another startling conclusion.
    ‘Say something unreal rather, Miss Alstone,’ he said stiffly, trying to be cool and logical, yet struggling with hot humiliation, and a disappointment he refused to examine at the thought of her laughing up her sleeve at him. She’d deceived him every step of her waylast night and again this morning. ‘As far as I cared for anything or anyone in polite society, I gave Christopher Alstone’s little sister the benefit of the doubt when I heard that you’d been named the Ice Diamond by the wags, my dear, but at least now I know how richly you must have deserved that nickname and can learn to pity your victims instead.’
    ‘You never gave any fashionable female a second chance in your life,’ she scoffed. How could he have not seen the haughty minx for what she was the instant she eyed him like an offended queen across Kit’s office that first day?
    ‘Now there you’re more wrong than you’ll ever know,’ he said grimly, thinking of all the times he’d believed Ariadne, when only an idiot would take his wife’s interpretation over the plain facts. ‘I’m cured of it though, Miss Alstone, and if you made up this shameful tarradiddle for your own perverse amusement then I’ll see you publically exposed and pilloried for it as you deserve to be.’
    ‘I should have left you to your enemies, but oddly enough my sense of fairness wouldn’t let me leave you to take your chance against such overwhelming odds. I’m rapidly changing my mind, needless to say,’ she said, herface such a mask of polite indifference he couldn’t read what lay behind it, and how he hated the mass of contradictions gnawing away at
his
supposedly stern composure.
    ‘Good, I certainly need no help from the likes of you,’ he snapped.
    ‘You don’t even know me.’
    ‘I know enough.’
    Hugh watched her lining up glib arguments to defend herself with and held up his hand to stop her. With his foul luck, and worse judgement, she’d be as convincing at it as his late wife had been. Ariadne had believed her own lies so steadfastly by the time she told them that she’d cheerfully swear to them, even when all the facts proved her wrong. Yet now she was dead and he was branded a murderer in all but proof. Dark grief, fury and shame threatened to swallow him up in the horror of that terrible crime once more, but he fought it back to hell where it belonged and hated this lying female all the more for showing him Hugo the Fool, the cuckolded husband, was still alive behind Hugh Darke’s cynical disguise.
    ‘I know you are the despair of your brother and sister, Miss Alstone,’ he said coolly enough, for all that hot fury raged under his surface calm. ‘Even I have heard that you leadhalf the otherwise sane men in polite society around by the nose with your beauty and various other perfections that elude me. It’s just as well known that you don’t care a snap of your fingers for a single one of them. You’re a cold-hearted vixen who dismisses her suitors as if she’s waiting for a prince or a king at the very least to decorate her cold brow with a crown, instead of the coronets you are apparently offered by the cartload every Season. And rather than make