Free The Turncoat by Donna Thorland Page B

Howe exclaimed, looking up at the head of the stairs. “Here she is now.”
    The girl descending the stairs was everything Tremayne had expected. Her hair was elaborately curled and piled high on her head. Her brows were artfully plucked and tinted to set off dark, painted eyes. She wore no powder, because her skin was as white as milk already. She wore a diamond on a velvet ribbon around her neck, dyed to match the pale blue of her gown, which plunged to a perilously low square neckline. Her skirts were hemmed to show a daring amount of ankle, and from her wrist dangled a painted fan. An artful, useless creature, of the sort Tremayne found most distasteful: powdered, plucked, and primped, and choked and cuffed with pearls like pigeon’s eggs. Everything from her brocade pumps to her plunging neckline spoke of citified sophistication and coquetry.
    Worst of all, the girl was Kate.

Five

    The girl who had accompanied Angela Ferrers to Washington’s headquarters six weeks ago would have stopped dead in her tracks at the sight of Peter Tremayne. The coquette who emerged from Mrs. Ferrers’ crucible of artifice and subterfuge might only have dropped her fan, and recovered nicely by the time her silk-shod feet touched the marble floor.
    The woman who had survived a month in the decadent salons of occupied Philadelphia, and captured the affections of its most louche scion, betrayed her surprise to only two men in the room, and Peter Tremayne alone had the knowledge to interpret the flash of panic in her kohl-rimmed eyes.
    Caide broke off from his match to down a beaker of punch and sweep the girl into his sweaty arms. She forestalled his too-intimate embrace, turning lithely to offer Peter Tremayne her hand. “Who is this, Bay?” she asked, as though she had never set eyes on Tremayne before.
    Caide released her and bowed. “Peter, may I present my fiancée, Miss Dare.”
    “Lydia,” Kate supplied, looking him steadily in the eye and challenging him to say different.
    He took the hand offered, which for six tortured weeks he had desperately wished to possess again, as Caide completed their introduction. “Lydia, my heart, my love, my joy, may I present my cousin, Major Peter Tremayne, Viscount Sancreed.”
    Tremayne planted his kiss lightly on her stiff fingers and released her arm to fall like an unstrung marionette at her side. Caide was too drunk and excited to notice.
    “Don’t you know, Bay? We’ve met before,” Tremayne said.
    Again the flicker behind her eyes, which only he could read.
    “Where was that, Major?” She covered her fear with a flourish of her gilded fan.
    “Boston, I believe,” he said, careful to choose a city Bay had never visited.
    Caide, now deep in his cups, was oblivious to the charged environment. “Never been there. Full of filthy Rebels.” He slipped his arms around Kate from behind and drew her back flush against him, burying his face in her elegantly mounded hair.
    It was a gesture Tremayne had seen before. When they were boys, Bay was fiercely attached to his mother. He would flee to her for protection from their outraged tutor, or Tremayne’s father, whichever one had caught them at their latest exploit. Bay would wrap his arms around her, nestle his cheek against her shoulder in the curls of her wheat-colored hair, and beg her to intercede for them.
    But the hands now clasped around Kate’s waist were the same hands that had held the farmer’s wife down that morning, in the pretty clapboard house with the stone-walled kitchen.
    “Bay,” she murmured in his ear, “I’m tired. I want to find Peggy’s mother and go home.”
    “No, you mustn’t go.” He released her and swung her round him like a child. “Peter’s only just arrived. And I’ve promised Robert a rematch.”
    “There will be other nights.”
    “I’ll take her to find her chaperone,” Tremayne offered. “I’ve had enough carousing myself.”
    Caide rolled his eyes at his cousin, as he had done since