Free A Summer to Remember by Mary Balogh Page B

behind.
    “Lauren.” Lady Wilma Fawcitt touched her cousin on the shoulder. “Sutton has offered to escort us across to Lord Bridges’s box to pay our respects to dear Angela. Do come along.” She smiled graciously at Kit. “Goodness, you will feel quite abandoned, Lord Ravensberg. But we will be back for the second act.”
    Lady Bridges was Sutton’s sister, Kit recalled. He got to his feet. Miss Edgeworth did not. She fanned her face slowly and set one slim arm along the velvet rest at the edge of the box.
    “I believe I will remain here, Wilma,” she said. “Do please convey my respects to Lady Bridges.”
    Interesting!
    Sutton and his betrothed had little choice then but to proceed with their visit to the Bridges’s box, which was at quite the opposite side of the theater. Miss Edgeworth looked down into the pit and continued to fan her cheeks as Kit resumed his seat.
    “You were a reconnaissance officer in the Peninsula, Lord Ravensberg,” she said without turning her head to look at him. “A spy.”
    She had been learning things about him, then? “I prefer the first appellation,” he said. “The word
spy
conjures up images of cloaks and daggers and hair-raising exploits of reckless derring-do.”
    She turned to look at him then. “I would have expected such a life to appeal to you,” she said. “Was it not like that?”
    He thought of the long, solitary journeys, sometimes on horseback, more often than not on foot, over hostile terrain no matter what the season. He thought of the endless wild-goose chases, of dodging French scouting parties; of making painstaking contact with partisan groups in both Portugal and Spain; of having to deal patiently and tactfully with petty dictators and wild hotheads and cruel, fanatical nationalists; of the unspeakable atrocities that happened far from the battle lines—the torture, the rapine, the executions. Of the weariness of body and spirit and the constant drain on the emotions. Of his brother . . .
    “It was far more mundane and dreary, I’m afraid,” he told her with a laugh.
    “And yet,” she said, “you were singled out for commendation in several dispatches. You saved your country on numerous occasions. You are a military hero.”
    “My country?” He considered. “I doubt it. Sometimes as a military man one wonders exactly what it is one fights for.”
    “Surely,” she said, “one fights for what is right. One fights on the side of goodness against the forces of evil.”
    If that were so, why was insomnia such a problem for him? And the frequent nightmares when he
did
sleep?
    “Do you believe, then,” he asked her, “that every Frenchman—and every Frenchwoman—is evil, that every Briton and Russian and Prussian and Spaniard is good?”
    “Of course not,” she said. “But Napoléon Bonaparte is evil. Anyone who fights for him is evil by association.”
    “I suppose,” he said, “France is full of mothers with sons slain in battle who believe the British soldier to be evil incarnate.”
    She opened her mouth to speak but closed it again.
    “It is
war
that is evil,” she said at last. “But then wars are provoked and fought by men. Did you acquire the scar beneath your jaw in battle?”
    It ran from the hinge of his jaw on the left side to the point of his chin. “At Talavera,” he said. “I did not complain too loudly about it even at the time. Two inches lower and I would have been playing a harp for the rest of eternity.” He grinned at her and ran one knuckle lightly down the arm that held her fan, from the edge of her short, puffed sleeve to the top of her glove. Her skin was silky and warm.
    All around them was a loud hum of conversation as members of the audience visited one another and shared impressions of the play and other gossip. And yet suddenly the two of them seemed very alone. He felt a totally unexpected stirring of sexual desire for this woman who did nothing whatsoever to arouse it. She possessed beauty in