O Night Divine A Holiday Collection of Spirited Christmas Tales - Kathryn Le Veque Page 0,39

been seduced by William Satterly and made to pay the price for their joint sin entirely on her own, she had never been tempted by a man. No amount of flirting, no matter how handsome or charming the flirter was, had ever swayed her decision to swear off men for good. And yet the moment she had seen Oliver Weston, it was as if something inside her had been unlocked. She wanted to giggle and flirt. She wanted to steal kisses and share sidelong glances and secret touches. In a matter of seconds, it was as if she’d become the girl she had once been and she couldn’t fathom how.

Deciding that the safest course of action was to let the truth of her past do the work for her, Elizabeth confessed everything. “My daughter is illegitimate. I am only in society because she managed to marry well enough that they will tolerate my presence rather than the provoke the ire of my son-in-law, Viscount Seaburn. But prior to all of that, I was the daughter of a gentleman… a gentleman who has since disowned me and vowed to see me dead before I would ever be permitted to set foot on his property again.”

“And this man happens to be my neighbor,” the marquess surmised.

“Yes,” Elizabeth answered. “And now that you know the truth of it, you may take me back to the dowager duchess’ home. I’d prefer not to make a scene about things but, naturally, I understand why any association between us would be impossible.”

He glanced at her, then glanced back at the driver who was pretending not to listen. Then he said the most shocking thing that Elizabeth had ever heard, the thing that she had never imagined any man would ever say to her.

“Why on earth would I do that? I never assumed, given that you marched into a gaming hell in the dead of night, that you were the sort of woman who did things in the traditional way.”

“Having a child out of wedlock is a bit more than simply nontraditional,” Elizabeth insisted. Was the man utterly mad? He was a peer of the realm!

He stared at her for just a moment and then, with a slight shake of his head, he offered, “We all have a past, Miss Burkhart. No one reaches our respective ages without amassing some sort of secret or sin.”

Elizabeth blinked at him in surprise. “I inform you that I have committed what, at least in the eyes of society, is the most unpardonable sin, and that is all you have to say about it? I’m practically a pariah!”

He offered a shrug in response, the movement emphasizing shoulders that owed none of their breadth to the padding of a skilled tailor. “Perhaps it’s my very American sensibilities, having spent the better part of my life in that country, but I find it shockingly unfair that men expect to be allowed to do as they please for as long as they please and then somehow be entitled to a virginal bride as they teeter with one foot in the grave.”

Well that was all well and good, Elizabeth thought. It was a fine thing, indeed, for him to be so very egalitarian about such matters. But none of that changed the fact that she wasn’t looking to be any man’s mistress and she could hardly be wife to a man, assuming he’d ever ask her to be, that lived in such proximity to her family. Her former family. They’d forbidden her from publicly claiming them and her pride would not allow her to do so ever again. “Regardless of that, any association between us would be… complicated by those old hostilities.”

“I like complications, Miss Burkhart,” he said. “I daresay I thrive on them.”

“You are a very strange man, Lord Whittendon.”

He turned to face her more directly then. “Indeed. I would say we both qualify as strange given that we’re having conversations with the same dead man.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Elizabeth denied.

“Liar.”

She glared at him. “You have no right—”

“Who is Burney?”

Elizabeth had hoped she was wrong. She had hoped that it was some sort of fluke—that perhaps he’d only turned to stare at the fireplace as she did because he noted the direction of her gaze. But she’d never uttered that name aloud. Not to him. Not to anyone.

“I cannot answer that question,” she said simply.

“Cannot or will not?”

Elizabeth considered her response carefully. She wanted to deny it, to deny all of it.