Indiscreet Read Online Free PDF Page A

table to be engaged in conversation. She appeared to have little conversation and was soon largely ignored by the gentlemen to her left and right, poor girl. Lord Pelham was deep in conversation with Miss Veronica Lipton throughout dinner.
    Catherine enjoyed being an observer rather than a player, though it had not always been so. Being an observer lent amusement to life and saved one much heartache. It was far more pleasant, she had discovered gradually over the years, to guard one’s emotions, to keep oneself at one remove from life, so to speak. Not that she did not involve herself in a number of busy activities, and not that she did not have friends. But they were safe activities, safe friends.
    She found her eyes caught by Lord Rawleigh’s at a moment when half her mind was listening to the Reverend Lovering’s eulogy on the roast beef, just consumed, and the other half was woolgathering. She smiled into the familiar face a split second before she remembered that it was not familiar at all. He was a stranger. And she had done it again soon after assuring herself that it could never happen again. Her eyes slid awkwardly away from his and her fork clattered rather noisily on her plate.
    But what was wrong with smiling at him when their eyes metby chance across the table? They had, after all, been presented to each other and had conversed in a group together for a few minutes before dinner. There was no reason at all why she should have looked away in confusion. Doing so had made her appear guilty, almost as if she had been stealing admiring glances at him and had been caught in the act. She frowned in chagrin and looked determinedly back at him.
    Viscount Rawleigh was still observing her. He raised one dark and haughty eyebrow before she jerked her eyes away again.
    And now she had made matters worse. How gauche she was! Merely because he was a handsome man and she felt the pull of his attractiveness as any normal woman would?
    She smiled at the Reverend Lovering, and thus encouraged, he launched into praises of the superior discernment Mr. Adams had shown in the choice of chef.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    SHE was a widow. Interesting. Widows were always many times more desirable than any other type of female. With unmarried ladies one had to tread carefully—very carefully, as Nat had recently discovered to his cost. If one was a man of fortune and some social standing, one was seen as a matrimonial prize, to be netted at all costs by interested relatives, even if not by the young lady herself. Besides, unmarried ladies were quite unbeddable unless one was prepared to pay the ultimate price.
    He was not. Only that once. Never again.
    And married ladies were dangerous, as Eden had found within the past few months. One could lose one’s life in the face of anirate husband’s bullet or have to live with the guilt of having killed a man one had wronged. Even if the husband was too cowardly to issue a challenge, as appeared to have been the case with the man Eden had cuckolded, there was always the censure of the
ton
to be borne. That meant absenting oneself from London, and even perhaps from Brighton and Bath for a year or so.
    Females who were not ladies were generally a bore. They were necessary for the slaking of one’s appetites, of course, and they were often marvelously skilled between the sheets. But they were too easily had and they generally had nothing at all to offer except their bodies. They were a bore. It was several years since he had employed a regular mistress. He preferred casual encounters if the choice must be made. But they posed their own danger. He had brought his body more or less safely through six years of fighting in the Peninsula as well as through Waterloo. He had no wish to surrender it to a sexual disease.
    No, widows were perfect in every way. He had twice had affairs with a widow. There had been no complications with either. He had left each when he