Page 6 of Ladies in Hating
She was…
Cat’s mouth fell open. “Lady Georgiana?”
Georgiana closed her mouth. Licked her lips. Then croaked, “Catriona.”
Itwasshe, though Cat certainly wouldn’t have recognized her from the strangled rasp of her voice.
She had changed in the near-decade since Cat had last seen her. She’d been a lovely teenager, but she was extraordinary now, almost overpowering in her beauty. Her features were sharper, more patrician, somehow even more restrained than they had been back then.
Back when—back when—
Cat’s mouth moved before the thought was fully realized in her brain. “Lady Georgiana, what on earth are you doing here?”
In an alley. Behind London’s most scandalous library. At dawn.
She could not makeanyof those things square with what she knew of Lady Georgiana Cleeve.
The dark-haired woman was looking up at her companion in bemusement. “Youknowher?”
“Yes,” Georgiana said. Her voice still sounded strangled. “I—she was—”
“My father was Lady Georgiana’s butler,” Cat said crisply. “At the Alverthorpe country estate.”
Cat had grown up in Wiltshire, had been just fourteen when her father had taken the job at Woodcote Hall. It had almost seemed a dream at first—the big beautiful manor, the library she might sneak into if she stayed up very late or woke very early indeed.
And then it had not seemed such a dream after all. In time.
But she recalled Lady Georgiana—the daughter of the house, quiet, almost desperately reserved. She remembered the notes that Georgiana had made in the margins of some of the books in the library: her tiny, delicate hand, the perspicacity of her observations. Cat had suspected that Lord Alverthorpe did not know precisely what his daughter was reading from the library.
He certainly did not know that his butler’s daughter sometimes found her way to the same.
Was Georgiana… a patron of Belvoir’s? And if so, what was she doing here at dawn behind a shrub?
Georgiana seemed to have recovered her powers of speech and movement. She was tugging very lightly on her friend’s cloak. “Lovely to see you again, Catriona. We’re off to—ah—to—”
Her friend stood firm, despite the increasingly urgent yanks Georgiana was delivering to her outer garment. “Wait.Wait. I thought we were here to—”
“No,” Georgiana said. “We weren’t.”
“Yes,” said Cat. “Whyareyou here?”
“Busy morning,” Georgiana said desperately. “Lots to do. Books to deliver. Shrubs to… trim.”
The friend directed an appraising glance toward Cat and herreticule. “Do you really have a pistol in there? And, by the by, are you the Gothic novelist Lady Darling?”
Cat coughed.
Georgiana’s face, a pale flawless oval, went even paler. “You don’t have to answer that. We were just going, really, weren’t we, Iris?”
“Werewe? Because I was under the impression that you were here to identify this woman—which you have—and present to her your concerns—which you decidedly have not.”
Cat stood straighter, rattled despite her best intentions. Her identity as Lady Darling was a secret that had been thus far easy for her to keep, given that Catriona Lacey was a fairly anonymous figure herself. But she had her reasons for keeping her authorial career separate from her private life.
She had her brother andhiscareer to think of, and she did not want anyone to associate him with her scandalous choices.
“I can see that you have come here with some preexisting knowledge,” she said flatly. “What do you want from me?”
Were they afterblackmail?
