Chapter Twenty Three
Somehow, Kate forced enough strength into her lax arms to shove herself away from Elliot. She staggered backward on wobbly legs, managing to dodge the hand he stretched out to steady her by an inch, perhaps less. Her head swam, dizziness assailing her as she felt the blood drain from her face.
He could not have wounded her more if he had had a sword at hand to run her through. And he didn’t even know it.
“Katie,” he said, his brow furrowed in concern as his fingers curled around empty air. “What is wrong?”
Kate breathed in wretched little catches that tore at the inside of her throat.
The beginnings of a sob collected in her chest, held there only by the hard swallow that forced it back down toward her stomach.
But it would come up again. She couldn’t keep it down there forever.
“Don’t—don’t joke about such things,” she said, fisting her clammy palms in her skirts.
Her gloves—where were her gloves? In her reticule. She’d left it atop the window sill.
Elliot let his arm drop back to his side, and a muscle flexed in his jaw. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “I didn’t mean that…how it might have sounded.”
That he would have to marry her, he meant to say.
Obligation—and nothing else. That sob was forcing its way right back up her throat.
Kate gritted her teeth against it, turned her back upon him to snatch up her reticule.
“Don’t,” she said, and even she could hear the devastation which had bled into her voice.
She blinked furiously against the tears that pressed against the back of her eyes as she tugged open the drawstrings of her reticule and yanked her gloves back onto her hands.
“Just don’t.” Her heart was breaking, and he didn’t even know it.
His warm hand fell upon her shoulder. “Katie. Please.” His voice was low, cajoling. The sort of voice he might’ve used once to sweet-talk his way out of trouble. To soothe hurt feelings, smooth ruffled feathers.
This wasn’t a hurt he could wave away with a sweet voice and a cheeky grin.
With the flash of that dimple in his cheek.
With that blithe laugh, that abashed shrug.
With all of those things she had loved about him for so damned long.
Almost the whole of her life. She simply hadn’t known it—hadn’t recognized it—until now.
How strange and tragic, to find that she had a heart capable of this sort of love just in time for it to be broken.
Kate wrenched herself away, finding her footing once more as she headed for the library doors.
“Katie.” There was a queer insistence in the hiss he’d made of her name. The sound of his footsteps followed along behind her, hot upon her heels. “You can’t go out there just yet. Please just—please just stay.”
Not for even one more moment. There was only so much humiliation a woman could be expected to stomach for one evening, and already there was a seething mass of wretched sounds burning within her lungs.
As she had known they would, the sound of his footsteps faded some distance from the door. She had only had to reach it, after all, for he would not pursue her further than that.
He couldn’t. Not without the risk of being obligated to marry her.
But she would not have long thereafter. A count of one hundred, he’d said.
She let the door close silently in her wake as she stepped out into the hallway which was, blessedly, empty. A new set had begun in the ballroom, and the sound from the retiring room had noticeably diminished.
Kate allowed herself exactly four seconds to breathe in deeply, to release a tremulous exhale, and to smother the shrill, agonized sound that emerged upon it with her fingers. There. It wasn’t enough, but this wasn’t the place. The rest would have to wait.
She locked her jaw, set her shoulders, and charged once more down the hall toward the ballroom.
So little time left, and she had to make good use of every second available to her.
But at least there would be no public scene, even if he did manage to catch up to her before she could make good her escape.
He could never risk such a thing. Certainly not where Miss Applegate might be watching.
A set was in progress, and it was easier now to slip through the crowd of onlookers, weaving her way around the outside of the room to the space where she had last seen her mother.
Kate cast her gaze about, searching through the press of bodies for a flash of the seafoam green gown Mama was wearing.
There, in the row of chairs against the rear wall.
Though her posture was perfectly correct, there was the weight of exhaustion hanging heavily upon her shoulders, pressing them down.
Slow blinks behind the lenses of her spectacles.
Surreptitiously, Mama lifted one hand to her mouth to smother a yawn.
Good. Mama would be every bit as eager to leave as she was. Kate stifled a sigh of relief, brushing out her skirts as she approached.
“There you are,” Mama said with a weary smile as she caught sight of her. “I had begun to wonder.”
“I’m afraid something I ate must have disagreed with me dreadfully,” Kate said as she smoothed at her skirts, which were more wrinkled than they had appeared within the library. “Would you mind if we left a little early?”
“Oh, no, not at all,” Mama said in tones of abject relief as she rose to her feet. “I was ready to retire hours ago. Let us find Lord Elliot and—”
“No!” Kate yelped. “That is, there is no need. I crossed paths with him on my way back from the retiring room,” she lied, struggling to produce even so much as a wan smile to go along with it. “He said we ought to go ahead without him…and it really is quite urgent, Mama.”
“I see,” Mama said, though by the purse of her lips and the wrinkle that had appeared within the plane of her forehead, Kate surmised that she did not. “Well, then. Let’s make haste then, shall we?”
Kate threaded her arm through Mama’s and guided her through the crowd toward the main ballroom doors as her heart beat out a frantic, harried rhythm in her chest. Thirty seconds, more or less, to make her escape. As furtively as she could manage, she turned her head to glance over her shoulder.
Less, then. Significantly less.
Elliot certainly hadn’t waited for a count of one hundred.
He had made the ballroom already, and his gaze found her immediately, landing upon her with the force of a blow.
She had never seen him wear such an expression of raw determination before, unnerving in its intensity.
Her pulse broke into an anxious flutter as he began to move toward her.
She said on a choked breath, “I think I’m going to be ill.”
The desperation rife in her voice must have alarmed Mama enough to redouble her pace, and Kate experienced a small fraction of relief.
Elliot would have to round the whole of the dance floor, still, and that would hold him up for some time.
The breadth of his shoulders would not allow him to weave and wend his way throughout the room so easily as she had done.
The music faded to a muted, distant melody as the ballroom doors closed behind them. There at the end of the hall, between the staircase leading to the upper floors and the large front door, a liveried footman waited, offering a bow as they approached.
“Shall I send someone for your carriage?” he asked.
“No, no,” Kate squeaked out, squeezing Mama’s arm. “The fresh air will do me good. It cannot be too far.” She hoped. Fervently, she hoped. “If we might hurry, Mama.”
In deference to their wishes, the footman opened the doors to usher them through and out into the night. The street was dark and quiet, lined with carriages waiting to carry their owners home when the ball let out.
“Ah, the luck,” Mama said, patting Kate’s arm as she canted her head to indicate a carriage perhaps thirty feet. “That’s it just there, isn’t it?”
Yes. Yes. The first true bright spot in an evening that had gone so sour, so swiftly. Kate charged toward it, all but dragging her mother in her wake. The coachman had been dozing in his seat, sinking into the fabric of his greatcoat. He startled awake as Kate cleared her throat.
“Miss Littlefield,” he said, gritting his teeth through a yawn as he climbed down to open the carriage door. “Mrs. Littlefield. My apologies, the ball wasn’t meant to let out for another half hour.”
“We elected to leave a bit early,” Kate said as she helped her mother into the carriage. “I am not feeling at all the thing. If you could convey us back home with all due haste—”
“Certainly. And Lord Elliot?”
Somehow, Kate managed to stretch her lips into a grim smile as she took her own seat, sweeping her skirts out of the way of the door. “No need to wait for him. He will make his own way home,” she said, and snapped the carriage door shut.
The carriage shifted as the coachman climbed back into his seat. In a moment he cracked the reins, and the carriage began to move, rattling over the cobblestones.
This time it wasn’t the jarring motion of the carriage that turned her stomach. This time it was heartbreak and humiliation. Kate folded her hands in her lap, digging the nails of one hand into the fleshy palm of the other through the fabric of her gloves. Don’t cry. Not yet. Please, God, not yet.
As the carriage gained speed, heading away from the ball, she thought she heard a fierce, “Katie!” echoing in the distance.
But perhaps it, like so many other things just lately, had been only her imagination.
∞∞∞
The darkened windows of Devon’s townhouse had a sinister air about them at this time of night, like empty-socketed eyes peering down at Elliot in open accusation. Even the door, painted in black lacquer, made the entryway appear as a mouth hanging open in a gasp of pure, horrified outrage.
Elliot blew out a breath as he fished for the key in his pocket, half-convinced the door intended to snap him in half before he could make it through.
He’d had to return to his bachelor’s lodgings to retrieve the key—there had been no need to have it with him during the ball—and that had necessitated walking several streets in the hopes of finding a hack available.
Because Kate had left him standing there on the pavement even as he had shouted her name, irrespective of who might have been listening.
Without hesitation, she had left him. And in those frantic minutes that had followed as he had searched for a hack, as his mind had struggled to arrange itself into some sort of order and to cobble together the perfect, proper explanation, he had realized—it wouldn’t matter. Not this particular evening, at least.
Even if Hodges could be prevailed upon once again to grant him just five minutes, which he held very much in doubt, it wouldn’t have been nearly enough time to say all there was to say, much less to permit her the time to say her own piece.
And so instead of racing to his brother’s townhome in hot pursuit, he had instead headed to his own lodgings to retrieve his key and return beneath cover of darkness. To slip in undetected and steal the time he required right from beneath the noses of his brother’s staff.
Assuming, of course, that Kate did not immediately call the whole of the household down around his head and have him tossed out on his arse.
Elliot slipped the key into the lock and turned it. The click of the mechanism within sounded gratingly loud in the quiet of the street. He breathed a sigh as the door opened silently into the yawning darkness within.
A hand slid out, slapped over the key still within the lock, and pulled it free. A face appeared in the sliver of the open door, one disapproving eye peering out at him. “I’ll take that, thank you,” Hodges said gruffly, as he retracted his hand and the key with it.
Elliot’s mouth dropped open in mute astonishment. “Hodges,” he said. “That’s my key. Give it back!”
“You’ll have it back when you can be trusted with it,” Hodges said, with a critical sniff. “The audacity of sneaking into the house this time of night.”
Gritting his teeth against a response that would certainly not see his key returned to him with any additional alacrity, Elliot said, “You weren’t meant to know. You were meant to be asleep!”
“And I might have been,” Hodges said. “If Miss Littlefield hadn’t come back from the ball looking like she’d been run straight through the heart.”
Elliot’s heart wrenched in his chest. “We had a bit of misunderstanding,” he said. “Did she…say anything to you?”
“Not until after Mrs. Littlefield had retired,” Hodges said. “Plain as day she didn’t wish her mother to know of it, but she crept down for a cup of tea and asked if we might not admit you for breakfast as we generally do.”
Elliot reared back in offense. “It’s my brother’s house!”
“And Miss Littlefield is, in point of fact, your brother’s guest. Naturally, her wishes are paramount.” Hodges lifted his chin in haughty condescension. “I had something of a feeling, given what I know of you, my lord,” he said, “that you would be along sooner or later.”
Christ. He’d walked straight into a trap, and he hadn’t even known it. And now Hodges had his key, and Kate—Kate was tucked away up in her bedroom, safe and secure and, if Hodges had guessed only the half of it, devastated.
Elliot hunched his shoulders, guilt weighing heavily upon his chest, upon his heart. “I really do need to speak with her as soon as possible,” he said.
“Certainly, my lord,” Hodges said, in the bland, even monotone of the perfectly proper English butler he was. “Tomorrow, at a reasonable hour—that is to say, after breakfast—you may leave your card with me at the door and I will see if Miss Littlefield is receiving.”
Oh, now, really. Enough was enough! “Hodges,” Elliot ground out. “I swear to you, I have no intention of leaving this spot until you let me speak with Kate.”
“Fair enough, my lord,” Hodges replied. “It is a public street.”
He snapped the door shut in Elliot’s face. A moment later, there was the click of the lock and the faint strains of Hodges humming a merry tune as he retreated from the door. And Elliot was left alone on the street, in the dark, to stew in his misery.