once. “Which one?”
“Yes, which Lady Thurston? Mirabelle or my mother?” She happened to know that both Lady Thurstons were currently to be found in the dowager Lady Thurston’s chambers with Mrs. Summers, but she’d bet a week’s allowance neither of the gentlemen before her were aware of it.
“Both,” Hunter replied, a coolness creeping into his tone. “They’re in the dowager Lady Thurston’s chambers.”
“Oh.” It was fortunate she wasn’t given to making wagers. “Right. Er…”
“They’re waiting, Lady Kate.”
“Yes…yes, of course.” She rose from her chair. “Do excuse me, Lord Martin.”
Hunter ushered her out across the foyer, past the front staircase and down the hall—all in silence.
Kate bit her lip and glanced up at him. “Am I to assume neither Lady Thurston wishes to speak with me?”
When his only response was a cold look, she decided to choose discretion over valor and keep her mouth closed for the remainder of their walk down the hall. He brought her to the small private sitting room and led her inside. He closed the door, turned around slowly, and then stood there, staring at her—looming over her—for several painfully long moments. When he spoke, finally, his voice held both displeasure and a world of disbelief.
“Which one?”
“I…” Oh, dear. She cleared her throat. “I’d rather hoped for more time with Lord Martin.”
“More time,” he repeated.
“Yes.” She took a deep breath and decided to get the conversation over and done with. Perhaps she’d be very lucky and he’d be pleased, even impressed with her resourcefulness. “Lord Martin has agreed to sell to me a barrel of brandy for an unspecified amount of money tomorrow morning. I’m to meet him at the bench behind the half wall at five.”
By the muscle working in his jaw, it was fairly clear that he was neither pleased nor impressed by her resourcefulness.
“I’d have known the amount of money,” she was quick to add in a rather frantic bid to delay his response. “But I hadn’t the chance to ask. I hadn’t a chance to convince him to meet me at a time and place less impractical either. He picked the details of our rendezvous with the notion he’d be hauling along an entire barrel of brandy. Are we quite certain he’s in charge of this operation? Because—”
“Enough.”
Hunter drew a deep breath through his nose and made an attempt to relax the tight knot of muscles between his shoulders and calm the sick rolling in his gut. He wasn’t going to lose his temper. He was not going to begin issuing unreasonable orders just because Kate had once again put herself in danger. This time by questioning a known smuggler, whom she’d once had a tendre for, and who still had a tendre for her, and who now expected to meet her at dawn so that they might exchange money for illegal goods and—
“What the bloody hell were you thinking!”
Very well, he was going to lose his temper.
She shifted her weight and gave him a hopeful smile. “That the information might be of use?”
It was, but that wasn’t the point. “I ordered you to avoid Lord Martin.”
“And so I have, at every opportunity,” she countered. “There was simply no way for me to do so in the parlor. Not without giving him the cut direct in front of a room full of people, and I thought it best to avoid that sort of attention. The rumors that would have resulted—”
“I also ordered you not to try your hand at charming information from him.”
“Strictly speaking, you said it was too much involvement. You never explicitly forbade it.”
The knot in his back grew tighter. “That is—”
“Also, what I did wasn’t so much charm as goad.” She shifted again. “Strictly speaking.”
He bent his head to catch and hold her gaze. “I am ordering you, explicitly forbidding you, from doing anything, speaking to anyone, or going anywhere that has to do with the smuggling operation unless you do so under a direct order from me. Do I make myself clear?”
That, he assured himself, was a perfectly reasonable order.
Apparently, Kate did not agree. “You’re being unreasonable.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m…” He wasn’t going to let the argument disintegrate into a childish string of accusations and denials. But bloody hell, if she had made herself a target…
“I am not. And,” he was quick to interject, “if we continue on in this vein, we’ll never get around to deciding what’s to be done with the information Lord Martin gave you.”
She pressed her lips together as if to physically restrain her tongue.