Beauty in Disguise (9 page)

“One occasion? We met nine years ago! It could be the only answer as to why I was attracted to you.”

“And that is why I could not tell you.”

Oh, she did not wish to cry, she did not wish to cry! She tried to stay angry by telling him her hardships, but none of those had anything to do with him. It seemed her mistake would haunt her for the rest of her life, and trying to explain it to him was impossible when the only thing she wanted him to know was how sorry she was that she had left him.

* * *

He was so surprised to find her, much less masquerading as someone else, that he barely took in one of every three words she said. It seemed she was mad at the world, even more so at him, and he could not understand it. His analytical mind failed him. Shouldn’t he be the one who was angry?

“You continue to speak in riddles! You seem to think I understand your barbs and your mysteries, but I assure you I do not.”

He realized a sparring match with her, as enticing as that might be, would get him nowhere. He did not know how to respond to her when he did not comprehend her anger. What did she mean, she was
shunned?
There was obviously much she was not telling him, but he would die before he would ask her. He only looked at her with a raised brow and outstretched hands, waiting. Let her make of it what she would.

“Then we will stick to the subject of Dinsmore Manor. How could you determine you were attracted to me from knowing me so long ago with a cloak covering my face and in less than an hour’s time?”

“Are you forgetting the occasions we met while you were Miss Montgomery? You knew who I was then—why not tell me the truth? I would not have given away your disguise once I understood why you were disguised in the first place! At any time you could have trusted me enough to tell me the truth. It would have been the honorable thing to do
.
”

“You are right, it would have been the honorable thing to do. It is only fair that you should be allowed to denigrate me for my actions nine years ago. Unfortunately, I let my heart rule my head when I decided to take this walk tonight.” She pulled her cloak close around her. The moon was very high in the sky. “And I will pay dearly for it.”

Dalton turned impaling eyes on her. Her heart? Was she going to reveal that she still had feelings for him? Could he possibly believe her?

Though she continued to speak of things he did not wholly understand, such as her
mistake,
he had to fight the pride he felt in her at overcoming the obstacles she had faced at every turn. However, he must remind himself how she had duped him purposely, for no apparent reason.

His resentment returned as he realized she never even considered the hurt she might be causing him. She made it all sound so innocent, but it had changed his life forever.

He could not believe he was standing here with the woman whose memory had tortured him for so many years, only to come to this. She was ripping his heart out again. This night had gotten progressively worse.

“You gave no thought to the Dinsmores and what they might fear with a complete stranger in their midst.”

His voice broke, and he coughed to cover the sound. “And you gave absolutely no thought to me when you pretended to be both women. You might have taken into consideration how your actions would disrupt my life.”

“No!” she exclaimed, her hands balled into fists. “I took you into consideration in every one of my actions. I did not want you to have to make decisions that an honest man could not. I did not want you to have to help me continue the lie to the Dinsmores. And I did not want to give you the opportunity to...reject me if I told you the truth.”

She started to cry, and he wished he could understand which part had hurt her so badly. “You did not have to pretend as the cloaked woman, and you did not have to pretend as Miss Montgomery—or Lady Kathryn, for that matter!
You
were
you!
”

“You were Lady Kathryn all along. It was Miss Montgomery who was a phony. I was on the verge of a real friendship to a real person, and there was no need to keep up the pretense after that. You could have told me the truth!”

“How dare you?” Kathryn cried. “It is very easy for you to stand there and say you would have taken an explanation of my ruse without a second thought. I say you would have been as angry then as you are now. Since you were planning to leave by the end of the fortnight, I would have been left behind as the companion, not the lady.” She wiped the tears on her cheeks and said softly, “Left behind again.”

“Again? If you have had some heartache in the past I am sorry. But now we will never know what I would have done, will we? Because you gave me so little credit, does not make it so. However, as that was in some measure what I wished for, that we might get to know one another better, I can truthfully say I am well out of it. Miss Montgomery was much more to my taste.”

“Now that you have your answers, you need never see nor think of me again.”

She pushed away from the tree and came to stand directly before him, anger emanating from every fiber of her being. “You believed that I was
two
different women, and it seems only one of them is acceptable to you. I find it quite a shame that you are only
one
person, and the one is in
no
way acceptable to me.”

She turned and walked away. “Good night, my lord,” she called over her shoulder.

“And good riddance,” he heard clearly, though it was said through tears.

She stopped and added, “I suppose my fate is in your hands. I will wake up in the morning to face it.”

“Oh, no you don’t!” He grasped Kathryn’s arm from behind. “Walking away and running away has been your trademark, no more. I want the truth, and I intend to get it.”

“You just said you had gotten what you came for,” she ground out, and wrenched her arm from his hand.

“All I learned is that you were forced into employment, and that you had to dupe people into getting a position.” He ran his hands through his hair out of frustration. “You have said much here tonight that I do not understand. I believe I need to hear the entire truth, what you are not telling me.” He then looked into her eyes and softened his tone. He wished he did not need to know more. He had gone into the army solely for the purpose of putting it all behind him, but the need remained.

“Why did you leave me nine years ago?”

* * *

What had he said? Did he really not know what happened to her? “I do not understand you, my lord?”

“I believe it is a simple enough question.”

“Are you asking me to believe that you do not know what happened after... When I left?” Kathryn’s mind began to race. Could there have been some way in which the entire affair was hushed up? No, it would have been impossible. How would her father have explained away an elopement or her disappearance?

“I do not ask you to
believe
anything. You have said many things I do not understand. I can only assume you wish to keep them to yourself. But I feel you owe me or, rather, that I deserve to know why you disappeared.” He seemed to
need
those answers. “I would like to know the entire truth so I may put my mind at rest. And I believe the best way will be from the beginning. However, it all depends on you. I cannot make you say what you will not.”

“Oh, dear,” she muttered under her breath. She could choose not to tell him and he would leave angry, but he would not leave hating her. He need only think badly of her action at the Dinsmores.

No. No more lies, no more hiding. It’s time.

“My lord, perhaps it will help me if you can tell me the last thing you know about that Season.” She so much wanted to hear about his entire experience during that time. Would he tell her whether or not he had developed feelings for her? She must not ask that of him; she only needed a place to start. Even that would no longer be important; he would not like what he was about to hear no matter where she started. But as he began to speak, she waited.

“Very well. We were a full two months into your first Season. We spent quite a lot of time together, and I thought you enjoyed my company as I did yours. I hoped... I thought... Confound it—it does not matter what I thought. One day I called at your home, and the house appeared to be completely shut up. I could find no reason for this over the next few days. Some said your family had received bad news and had gone back to the country. Others said they had heard you and your father went abroad. Most had no news of you at all.”

Kathryn could not comprehend this. How had her father arranged it all so deftly? He was certainly an intelligent and capable man, but to move the entire household back to Montgomery Hall in one day? And what of Lord Salford? He knew the truth and could have made her look even blacker.

“I wrote to your father at Montgomery Hall expressing my concern for you and your family, but I received no reply.” His voice rose, she thought, in anger. “So I joined the regiment at the end of the Season. I was there four years, and when my brother died, I sold out and spent the next few years learning to run the estate and taking care of my mother.”

He could have left it at that. Did he care for her more than he had shown her? She doubted it. So why did he need to know about this now?

“Do you mind if I sit down?” she asked him. He had risen from the branch, and frankly, she was tired.

He seemed to forget about the attack in all of this. “Do you remember Lord Salford?” she asked baldly.

“The name does not ring a bell. Should it?”

So antagonism would be his attitude. Very well, she would explain it and they would be done. “I met him at a ball about a month after we arrived in Town. He asked me to marry him.”

She thought she heard an intake of breath, but she decided she would get this out, then try to return her life to some sort of normalcy. “He told me he would die if he could not have me.” She laughed as she thought about that now. If anyone knew you did not die of a broken heart, she did. “I was young and stupid, and he convinced me we should elope.”

This time, it was not just an intake of breath. He walked to stand in front of her on the branch. “You agreed to an elopement?” The shock in his voice could not be disguised. When she looked up at him, the moon was behind him and she could not see his face. With his size and voice, she could easily have believed him to be an angel from God, reminding her of her unforgivable mistake.

“Yes, my lord, I eloped. I flatter myself that I thought I was truly loved. However, that is still no reason to elope.” She turned away from what she imagined would be in his eyes if she
could
see them. “If you will recall, I was not yet eighteen. He told me it was our only option if we wished to be together.”

He turned his back on her. She closed her eyes, trying to keep tears at bay. There had been enough tears to last a lifetime. Though she had always known he would turn his back on her, she had never imagined it quite so literally. She would not stop; she would reveal it all. “We spent days speeding toward Gretna Green. He was afraid my father was following us.” She had to laugh at that, too. Her father wanted nothing to do with her.

“It appears he knew my father better than I did. An outrider met us outside of the little inn that was to be our honeymoon idyll. He had one letter for Lord Salford and one letter for me.” She stopped, wondering if he was even listening any longer. “My lord, I am sure you are not interested in the gory details. That is what you needed to know, is it not?”

“Go on,” he said abruptly, his back still to her.

“My letter was quite brief. My father informed me that I was no longer his daughter and that my things would arrive over the following few days.” She thought Lord Dalton did not stand so tall or have his head so high for a moment, but her tears welled up in the remembering of it, so she did not spare many thoughts on him. “I was more afraid than I have ever been in my life, but I thought God would protect me through my new husband.

“Lord Salford’s missive, however, was much more informative. It seems he was counting on the receipt of my inheritance upon reaching my majority. My father was happy to inform him that I did not receive my inheritance until I was five and twenty. He was outraged and sure that my father would change his mind once we were married.” Her tears flowed freely now, but as he could not see them, she did not care.

“He was not, however, as sure as he led me to believe. It seemed the truth had begun to sink in, and when he told me to wait in the parlor while he bespoke our rooms, he stole one of Father’s carriage horses and rode off into the night. I never saw him again.

“As I have already explained, I spent the next few years taking positions, being groped, manhandled, lied about and fired from each one. When Matty came up with the disguise, she believed God was providing a way that would allow me to gain employment that would last as long as my charges grew up, in the case of a governess, or died, in the case of a companion. From God? I never thought so. He could not forgive the mistake I made.”

She was ready for this to be over. “I was bound to be found out at some point in my life. I suppose God chose this one for some purpose, but as He is rather put out with me, I have no doubt it was to shame me further.”

“And your father? Where is he?”

“I do not know. I
do
know, however, that he has always been implacable. I never doubted his love for me as we spent all those years without my mother. But that same love demanded something in return. I discovered it was conditional love, and I had no desire to be rejected by him a second time.”

There was complete silence for what seemed an eternity. He finally broke it. “So you left me for another man and did not have the decency to let me know you did not return my feelings.”

His feelings? Was he saying he
had
loved her?

“You not only left me, you eloped—something an honorable woman would never have agreed to.” She flinched, but she did not respond; she deserved it.