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

Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful.

— from Catriona Lacey’s private copy of FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Cat Lacey’s fingers were shaking as she closed them around the letters she’d just stuffed into her bag.

Oh God. Oh sainted Margaret. She did not have a pistol. What the devil was she going to do if some footpad attacked? Throw her correspondence at him? Bury him in a shower of reader notes and bills of sale?

She lifted her chin and projected a confidence that she absolutely did not feel. “Out with it,” she said. “Who are you, and why are you spying on me?”

Very slowly, two figures emerged from their hiding place behind the shrubbery. Cat cursed herself—she ought to have noticed that that shrub was not usually placed there!

Although, on the other hand, the day she started growing suspicious of shrubbery was perhaps the day she needed to retire from her current occupation.

As the two would-be spies edged closer—one had her hands upraised as if to underscore her total lack of threat—Cat attempted to make sense of the sight before her.

The probably-not-footpads appeared to be two well-dressed women. The one with her hands up was a head shorter and built like a Renaissance Venus, with black glossy hair spilling out in all directions from beneath her hood.

The taller one had ice-blond hair drawn back from her face. She was all cheekbones and elegant lines, her lips parted, her brilliant blue eyes inexplicably terrorized.

She was…

Cat’s mouth fell open. “Lady Georgiana?”

Georgiana closed her mouth. Licked her lips. Then croaked, “Catriona.”

It was she, 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 make any of those things square with what she knew of Lady Georgiana Cleeve.

The dark-haired woman was looking up at her companion in bemusement. “You know her?”

“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. “Why are you here?”

“Busy morning,” Georgiana said desperately. “Lots to do. Books to deliver. Shrubs to… trim.”

The friend directed an appraising glance toward Cat and her reticule. “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?”

“ Were we? 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 and his career 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 after blackmail ?

Surely not. The Alverthorpe earldom was blessed with riches in abundance. It had been the Lacey family whose straits had been desperate. Whose fragile security had been so easily toppled.

“Nothing,” Georgiana said. “I want nothing. I—”

“Do you mean to unmask me to the public, then? Have you some prejudice against the genre?” Her temper began to rise despite herself, her voice growing louder.

She would not let anyone put Jem in danger. Not even herself.

“No!” Georgiana’s lashes fluttered, then stilled. “Of course not. I would never do that.”

“What then—”

“I am Geneva Desrosiers,” Georgiana said. “You must know that. Surely everyone in London knows who I am by now.”

Cat blinked. She stared up into Georgiana’s extraordinary face, which looked a trifle greenish now—though perhaps that was a trick of the light.

“You,” she managed, “are…” She blinked again, more rapidly, as if to resolve the Lady Georgiana of her memory with the one standing before her now, declaring outrageous things by the light of the newly risen sun. “ You are Geneva Desrosiers?”

Georgiana’s body had gone very still, her posture all frozen perfection. “Yes,” she said. “I am.”

Cat could not make sense of it. Georgiana Cleeve was the Gothic novelist Geneva Desrosiers? It seemed impossible.

No—it was impossible. Cat had been reading Geneva Desrosiers’s novels for nearly a decade. If Georgiana was Geneva Desrosiers, she must have begun writing before Cat and her family had even left Woodcote. She could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen.

“How?” Cat said. “How can you be?”

Georgiana’s face was so determinedly expressionless that Cat almost missed her shiver of emotion—would have missed it, in fact, if she hadn’t been staring at Georgiana in frank astonishment. Georgiana’s lips compressed, and her face registered the tiniest flash of—

What was it? Anger? Resentment?

“I don’t know why it should be so hard to believe,” Georgiana said stiffly. “You are a novelist yourself. I presume you are not surprised that a woman can write of the full spectrum of human experience and even beyond it. There is no reason for you to act shocked.”

“It’s not that ”—for God’s sake, she was the last person in the world to cast judgment upon what women could and could not do—“but… why ? Why would you do it?”

Cat knew why she had done it.

Four years ago, when she had brought out her first book, her family had been balanced on a wire, one tiny disaster away from toppling off into poverty and desperation. She had done it for the money. She had done it so that Jem would never have to live a hair’s breadth from ruin again.

She thrust the memories away and waited for Georgiana’s answer.

It did not prove satisfying.

“My reasons are my own,” Georgiana said finally. The flash of indignation had gone from Georgiana’s expression, leaving behind an icy severity that Cat found almost intimidating.

Cat thrust up her chin, because she refused to be outmatched. “I don’t understand it. You have no need for money or fame. You are the daughter of an earl, for heaven’s sake.”

“Things have changed,” Georgiana said. Her voice was clipped.

“Those are not the sorts of things that change. Your birth, your position—”

“I assure you,” Georgiana said tersely, “they do.”

Cat found herself briefly at a loss for words.

This frosty, forbidding stranger was Lady Georgiana Cleeve? She could remember the girl in ringlets, for heaven’s sake, curled up in a window seat with her book, positioned half behind the drapes.

But—well. She supposed it was true. Much could change in a decade. Cat knew that as well as anyone.

When she spoke again, her voice had softened with the blunted edge of her shock. “Lady Georgiana—Miss Desrosiers—what are you doing here at Belvoir’s? Why have you tracked me down?”

A ghost of an expression passed across the carved ivory of Georgiana’s face. Cat could not quite make it out.

Some part of her brain—a distant and perhaps not entirely sane part—registered that Lady Georgiana had a handful of pale freckles outlining the restrained shape of her mouth.

“You must have noticed,” Georgiana said finally, “that there have been a number of similarities in our recent works.”

Cat’s brows drew together as she took in Georgiana’s words. “I—what? Do you mean The Witch in the Castle ? That was over two years ago, and my publisher said it was nothing to worry about.”

“The Witch in the Castle,” repeated Georgiana, “to begin with. And then there is the matter of our protagonists with identical names, and our books organized around galvanic theory, and our—”

“Wait,” said Cat. “What? Our what ?”

Their books had similarities? Notable ones?

How had she not known of it? Why hadn’t her publisher told her?