Page 28 of Ladies in Hating (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #3)

The vampyress was not a creature of the night at all, it seemed, but a human woman, made of fire and sinew and heart.

— from Lady Darling’s manuscript in progress

It was just past dawn when Georgiana roused herself. She always woke early, to see to Bacon.

But this time, when she woke, her arm was splayed across Cat’s chest, and their legs were intertwined. Cat’s fingers loosely braceleted Georgiana’s wrist, somewhere at the level of Cat’s heart.

They were both naked. At some point in the night, Cat had laughed and strewn her wet chemise across the back of a chair beside the stove before she’d stumbled back to the bed.

The sheets were still a little damp, tangled round their feet, and Georgiana looked for so long at their intertwined fingers that her eyes started to burn.

Cat’s skin was more gold than her own. Cat’s whole body seemed gilt-edged in the faint morning light, and she smelled of rose soap and, beneath that, the sweet warm scent that clung to her skin. Georgiana breathed her in and felt—

She scarcely knew what she felt. It seemed dangerous to feel so happy. It seemed impossible that Cat could be here—some fey caprice that could be withdrawn in an instant.

Fear—a familiar companion—made itself known in the tightness of her chest, but she tried to fight it back. She had promised. She had promised Cat that she would not run away.

She slipped out of the bed, dressed quietly in the shadows, and took Bacon and her purse downstairs to arrange for breakfast and a conveyance back to London.

She suspected Cat would have chosen the mail coach for herself, but Georgiana could afford the post-chaise and so she secured it for an hour hence and decided to let Cat argue with her later.

By the time she made it back upstairs with hot fruit tarts to break their fast, Cat was already awake, dressed, and stirring the coals to bring them back to life.

Cat paused and looked up when Georgiana came back into the chamber, and Georgiana could’ve spent a lifetime staring at Cat’s morning-scrubbed cheeks, the sweet curve to her lips—the way happiness settled itself upon her face and lingered there.

“Good morning,” Georgiana said. She felt hideously awkward—she was blushing—God’s teeth, how was this morning-after meant to go? “I’ve hired us a carriage. We leave in an hour.”

That had come out too abruptly. She knew it had. Some inward part of herself watched in horror as she trampled upon the fragile trust that had blossomed between them the previous night.

But to Georgiana’s surprise, Cat did not seem put off. The corner of her mouth tipped up, lopsided and impudent. “Did you now?”

She crossed the room in two long strides, closed the door firmly behind Georgiana, and then went up on her toes to put her mouth very close to Georgiana’s ear. Her breath tickled, and Georgiana shivered, just a little, as the sensation coasted over her skin. “I shan’t waste a moment, then.”

They were late to the appointment with the post-chaise.

Inside the carriage—after a vigorous argument about payment that Georgiana won by an appeal to Bacon’s poor nerves—Cat proposed that they review the papers she had purloined from the corpse.

She brought them out of her jacket and passed them to Georgiana, then promptly shocked Georgiana speechless by lifting Georgiana’s ankle, unlacing her boot, and putting her thumbs into the arch of Georgiana’s stockinged foot.

Georgiana stared mutely at her from above the unintelligible writing.

“Don’t mind me,” Cat said. “I’m merely trying to get another look at your ankles.” Her grin was so wonderfully, terribly familiar—saucy and vibrant and shamelessly flirtatious.

Georgiana felt her cheeks go hotter and hotter, and she buried her face in the papers and tried not to make eye contact while Cat did marvelous things with her competent hands.

“I have no idea what these are meant to indicate,” Georgiana said when her face cooled and her brain resumed more or less typical functioning.

“Do you see the little moons? I thought the papers might have something to do with Luna Renwick, but I cannot imagine what they might mean, or why that fellow had them on his person. Did you say his name was Rogers?”

“Rogers, yes.” Georgiana considered the papers. “We might go to Belvoir’s and talk to Selina about him. See if she knows where he went after she put him out. And, if we are going to Belvoir’s, we ought to invite Iris as well.”

Cat’s mouth quirked, and she moved on to Georgiana’s un-massaged foot, even though Georgiana was certain she had not looked at it mournfully. “That’s your friend from the shrubbery?”

“Indeed.” Ah yes, there was all the blood rushing to her face again. She’d missed it, in the sixty seconds or so that it had gone. “Iris works with translations of ancient languages. If anyone can make sense of whatever code this has been written in, it’s certainly Iris.”

“We shall do it then.” Cat’s gaze went to the window, where Bacon had gone up on his hind legs to put his tiny front paws on the glass. “We’re not so far from Woodcote Hall, just now. Does Bacon recognize it?”

“He does not.” Georgiana heard the way her voice sounded, stiff and cold, and could do nothing to prevent it.

“Oh. You’ve not been there together? I had thought…” Cat hesitated, then said cautiously, “Ambrose did not receive you, then? After he became earl?”

Georgiana scarcely knew how to respond. She had no idea what Ambrose would have done or said. She had not let him say anything.

She knew it had been the right choice. She knew it was safer for Ambrose and Percy that way. And still, she felt ashamed to tell Cat what she’d done. To admit how poisonous it was to associate with her publicly.

She felt, somehow, just as vulnerable as she had when Cat had asked her to strip off her clothes. Ludicrous, how easy it was to touch and kiss with her eyes closed—and how difficult to bare herself in the light.

“I have not visited Woodcote Hall,” she said finally. “Not for a very long time.”

“I see,” Cat murmured. Her fingers played along the seam of Georgiana’s stocking. Her hands were as expressive as her face—terribly, fearfully gentle wherever they touched. “I can picture it so clearly in my mind.”

“Woodcote?”

“Mm. It was not all bad, you know. The library. The grounds.” Cat flicked a charged glance up at Georgiana’s face. “You.”

“You’re only saying that because you know that I… that I fancied you.” Ah God, why was it so dreadful to say it aloud? Thank heaven she had not told Cat about the journal with all the hearts round her name.

Cat laughed, as warm and generous as an open hand. “Perhaps a little. But we were happy there. Even my father would not have done anything differently.”

Georgiana stared, incredulous, across the carriage. “How can you say that?” She knew—she knew precisely—what her father had done to the Lacey family. Every time she saw the worn edges of Cat’s cloak, she thought of it—how her family had been the author of their poverty.

“Well, he would certainly have chosen not to get sick. That part he would have changed.” Cat’s mouth tipped up at the corner, bittersweet and fond. “But he would not have changed who he loved, and how.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Cat’s dark lashes fluttered down to her cheeks and then back up, startlement written upon her face. “You don’t know? Why your father put us out?”

Georgiana’s chest felt tight. She hated this—hated speaking of her father, recalling the whims of his cruelty.

“I didn’t know it to be anything in particular.

He was always that way. He fired one of the maids because she dropped a glass and left a shard in the carpet, and Percy got a hole in his coat. ”

His volatility had made him all the more frightening to her. She’d known for a long time that there had been no way to please him. No way to make herself safe enough.

See what happens when you’re all alone.

Cat was still gazing at her in surprise. “My father fell in love with your brothers’ tutor. Your father caught them together. That’s why we were thrown out.”

“What?” Georgiana realized her mouth had dropped open, and she snapped it closed. “Mr. Bidwell?”

Cat laughed, very soft. “Yes. Hugh Bidwell. He was the kindest, gentlest man. He adored your brothers, and Jemmy, and me—no doubt he’s the reason Jem and I are so fond of books.”

Georgiana squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again. Cat was still there, smiling to herself and casually rearranging Georgiana’s understanding of the past. “I thought—was your father not married? Twice?”

Cat’s mouth quirked. “Some people fancy ladies and gentlemen both, you know.”

Yes, of course. Of course she knew that, although her own preferences certainly did not seem to have ever trended toward the male half of the populace.

“I am aware of that,” she managed. “But I had no idea—your father— and Mr. Bidwell —”

“My father called him Hugh, if that makes it easier to fathom.”

“Not especially!” Georgiana could recall Hugh Bidwell clearly; he had been a fixture at Woodcote Hall until Percy had gone to Oxford, around the same time that the Lacey family had left Woodcote.

He’d been very thin, soft-spoken, possessed of a startling pair of black eyes and even more startling thick black eyebrows.

He had not seemed the sort of man to inspire life-altering passions.

Cat laughed again and relinquished Georgiana’s foot, only to lean forward and grasp her fingers instead.

“My father always said that Fate had given him two great loves—my mother and Hugh—and that he would never be churlish enough to quibble with Fate. My mother died when I was four, and he was… shocked, I think, to find love again. He had not anticipated it.”

Georgiana let Cat entangle their fingers, even as she tried to make sense of Cat’s words. “What about Jem’s mother? They were married, were they not, before your father came to be employed at Woodcote?”

Cat’s smile balanced on the knife-edge between love and grief.

“Oh, Patience. Yes. She was—” She hesitated, searching Georgiana’s face for a moment, and then went on.

“Jem knows this already, but it is not something we discuss freely with others. Patience was a barmaid in the village. She was already with child when they married. My father did it to protect her, and then she died of childbed fever and so—Jem was ours.”

Georgiana blinked, trying to square this revelation with her understanding of the Lacey family. “But that means—why, that means he is not your brother at all, if you share neither a mother nor a father.”

Cat’s fingers tightened on hers. “Jem is my brother.”

“Yes. To be sure. I meant only that you do not share blood—”

“Jem is my brother in every way that matters.” Cat’s face had gone deathly serious, her smile wiped clean. “I would do anything—sacrifice anything—to keep him safe.”

“I do understand that,” Georgiana said again. “Blood is not what makes a family. I know.”

“Yes.” Cat’s grip on her fingers, which had gone almost painful, loosened a little.

“Yes, that’s so.” She rubbed her thumb across Georgiana’s knuckles and went on.

“When we were sent away from Woodcote Hall, my father hoped that Hugh would join us in London, but instead Hugh went abroad. He was a good man, Hugh, but fearful, too. He was afraid to love my father openly, even among their friends—and afraid, I think, that what had happened at Woodcote might happen to the two of them again. So he took a position as a secretary in Italy.”

Georgiana’s heart twisted in her chest, and it seemed hard, somehow, to draw in a breath.

It was a story she knew by heart, a choice she had made for her own family.

Safety over love. Over everything. She could not imagine how anyone could choose differently.

She had to force her response past the tightness in her throat. “It’s difficult. To believe that you deserve happiness when the world would tell you that you do not.”

“I know.” Cat turned her hand over to link her fingers with Georgiana’s.

“My father knew it as well. He was the one who forged Hugh’s references for him, in fact.

” Her mouth curved up. “My father did not begrudge Hugh when he left, as far as I could tell. He was heartbroken, of course. But he understood too.”

“Your father was a very good man.”

Cat’s thumb brushed across Georgiana’s knuckles. “The best of men. It is because of him that I felt safe to be who I am. To love as I do and not to be afraid.”

Georgiana shook her head. “But your father…” She swallowed back the words, but Cat seemed to understand.

“Lost? Suffered heartbreak?”

“Yes.” Georgiana’s voice rasped.

“I cannot tell you there is nothing to fear,” Cat said. “But it was his nature to love. He could not have done otherwise. And he would not have been himself if he had not prized the stretches of joy more than he feared the intervals of pain.”

Georgiana could scarcely understand the sentiment. Sometimes she suspected everything she did was driven by a desire to protect herself from hurt.

Even her brothers—

Sometimes she wondered if she had cut them off not to shield them, but to wall off her own heart. They could not reject her—not for her career, not for the way she loved—if she did not give them the chance.

“Georgie mine…” Cat hesitated, and her fingers twitched on Georgiana’s hand.

Georgiana’s pulse leapt at the sound of the pet name. At how much she had wanted to hear it just this way, in the light. “Yes?”

“It’s enough,” Cat said. “This. Us, together this way. You are enough.”

The sunlight through the windows turned the deep brown of Cat’s eyes lighter, a rich amber. Her fingers on Georgiana’s spoke a language that Georgiana could almost understand: wanting and ease together, an unhurried confidence.

And then Cat smiled.

And though Georgiana had memorized it by now—the way happiness looked upon that extravagant mouth—she reached out and brushed her thumb across Cat’s lips anyway.

But as much as she wished to, she could not bring herself to smile back.