A Most Unladylike Adventure by Elizabeth Beacon Page B

your long-suffering brother happy by graciously accepting one of those lords or their foolishly besotted heirs, you dance and flirt and charm them for your own idle satisfaction the one day, then give them a very cold shoulder the next.’
    ‘My, I
am
a bad woman,’ she said with deceptive mildness and Hugh realised he’d let some of his fury with Ariadne for being a liar and cheat and a lovely, dead, fool creep into his verbal attack on Kit’s little sister.
    ‘I don’t care what sort of a woman you are,’ he lied, ‘but I’ll certainly manage without your help from now on. Something tells me you’ll lead me further into the maze just because you can, rather than show me the way out of it.’
    ‘Don’t you want to know who your enemy is, then?’
    ‘How can I believe you? No doubt you have one or two inconvenient suitors littering your path to glory whom you would be very happy to rid yourself of at no cost to yourself.’
    ‘I get worse by the moment,’ she said with flippant amusement that only made him more furious with himself for being taken in by her, for believing her because he desperately wanted to, and for still wanting her so badly her refusal to accept any guilt for her actions threatened to charm rather than revolt him.
    He’d fantasised about her in her lying disguise—heaven forbid he start doing so in her real one—that one day Kit and Eloise might have parted. It had gone, and he didn’t even want to think about the appalling pictures that set up in his mind now he knew who she really was. One day, Eloise might have turned to him for satisfaction and seduction; only now that that was impossible did he realise how deeply she’d tangled him in her devious web. Never having Eloise in his bed to laugh with, to live with and to come home to, knowing she would expect no more from a hollowed-out creature like him, cut like a knife to the gut and he wanted to be done with her, to be hundreds of miles clear of her before the pain struck andthe fury stopped hiding his hurt at yet another betrayal.
    ‘Who is he, then?’ he made himself ask distantly, thinking how much he’d once wanted to know that very thing and now it didn’t seem to matter all that much.
    ‘Now, which of my discarded lovers do I despise the most?’ she mused, silently counting off on her fingers as if needing them to compile the best list.
    Hugh clenched his fists against the urge to pound the old walls in a roaring frenzy because she’d used him for her own ends and he’d almost trusted her, until she proved him an idiot all over again.
    ‘The first one to come into your head will do,’ he said cynically, wondering exactly how many lovers she’d managed to draw in under the very noses of the
ton
.
    ‘Oh, well, that would be you.’
    ‘I’m not your lover,’ he said starkly.
    ‘Only because I chose a disguise that held you back, Captain Darke, you being a pirate of such peculiar honour as to never take his employer’s moll, however much he might long to. If I hadn’t hit on that particular alias, we would have been lovers by now and you knowit. Imagine it—us two being lovebirds, liars, then sworn enemies together all in one day.’
    ‘This is not a joke, madam.’
    ‘No, you’re right, it’s not,’ Louisa said desolately, stiffening her backbone and forcing herself to meet the hostility in his starkly austere gaze. There was no point defending herself against such revulsion, no reason to believe he’d ever change his bigoted, second-hand opinion of her. ‘But it’s more of a comedy than a tragedy.’
    ‘And if only you knew how close one can be to the other, you might stop wilfully creating havoc wherever you go,’ he muttered furiously, seeming to retreat into himself, to brood on something apparently even worse than wicked young ladies like herself.
    ‘Which is rich, coming from you,’ she accused and suddenly had all his attention as he glared at her with acute grey-blue eyes.
    ‘What else do