Duchess of Seduction (Hearts in Hiding 3)

the thought that in seconds, their stupid charade would be at an end and she’d be where she should have been for the past ten months—in her husband’s arms. They’d waited far too long. Now, within minutes, they could be right back in that room, or, better still, in their own bed, finishing off the wonderful business that had brought them here.

As she clutched at her wildly beating heart, Cressida saw her own hopes mirrored in the expression on his face, and her heart surged with love and longing.

“Justin!”

They both turned at the cry, checked by its note of desperation, and Cressida felt her joy turn to confusion as the figure at the end of the passage ran toward her husband and Miss Mariah threw herself into Justin’s arms.

“Oh, Justin!” Just two simple words but uttered in such heart- felt tones that Cressida needed to be a fool not to understand that some deep emotion bonded the two of them.

Justin did not push the woman away. He did not unclasp her fingers, which gripped him behind his neck. He did not step politely away. No, his expression changed from passion to some- thing curiously deeper in a response that quite clearly conveyed to Cressida how much this woman meant to him. Miss Mariah?

“Madame Zirelli!”

She heard the name from the lips of a nearby patron who stopped in the passage and stared, confused a moment, before moving on.

Miss Mariah was Madame Zire!i? The woman who had been Justin’s mistress before he’d married Cressida.

In the moment that the truth revealed itself, Cressida traded hope and happiness for the sorrow of all the world’s betrayed women. She would have preferred anger to the heartbreak that consumed every hope for their shared future she’d ever allowed herself. What a fool she’d been to have missed what had been staring her in the face. The woman to whom Justin had turned during these long months when Cressida had not wanted him had indeed been his old mistress, as Catherine had insisted at the ball.

“Justin, I always knew I could rely on you!” Miss Mariah wept. Cressida’s stomach roiled and she felt the bile, excoriating and bitter, burn her throat.

Apparently unaware of Cressida standing a few yards farther up the passage, Miss Mariah’s limpid gaze encompassed only Justin as she clasped his shoulder, pulling him down for her kiss, her greeting revealing a depth of feeling between them that went beyond friendship.

Or anything a wife would condone.

Heaving in a wrenching breath, Cressida brushed the tears from her eyes and picked up her skirts, ignoring her husband’s imploring call as she gathered speed, all but running along the corridor and out into the street where her carriage was waiting.

As she pulled in her trailing skirt, she heard his desperate cry from the top step of the portico.

“Cressida, come back!”

She rapped on the roof, signaling impatiently for the coachman to go.

“Cressida, it’s not what you think. Talk to me—!”

He was at the carriage door, grasping the handle, while she gasped her anger and outrage to John the coachman in one imperative command that he obey her and whip up the horses. Hunched up in the carriage, numb and trembling with shock, she dared not look out through the window in case the sight of Justin, pleading and confused, staring after her in the street, caused her to weaken her resolve and turn back.

She’d accepted that Justin had a very good reason for being at Mrs. Plumb’s. No, she hadn’t questioned that at all. At every turn, she’d given him the benefit of the doubt before challenging her greatest fears in order to give herself once more to him.

What a fool she was.

Justin would follow her and try to make her believe some concocted story, but right now she needed to talk matters over with someone who knew all about straying husbands.

For hadn’t Justin been just like James only worse. At least James no longer pretended he cared for Catherine.

Chapter 11

The moment Catherine received her, Cressida realized her error.

For a start, the house was in darkness. She’d hoped to find her cousin up and playing cards or recently returned from an evening out and full of post-revelry cheer.

Instead, a glowering Catherine appeared at the top of the stairs, an enormous muslin cap covering her elaborately dressed hair and a shawl thrown hastily over her nightgown.

“Good Lord, Cressy, do you know what time it is?” she demanded. “Unless Justin has thrown you out, I’ve not the patience to listen to tales of Thomas’ teething woes.”

Cressida swayed at the bottom of the stairs, her anguish over recent events turning to indecision. She’d not come for a sympathetic hearing, for there was scant kindness in Catherine at the best of times, but she’d not expected such a vituperative greeting.

Oh Lord, what had possessed her to seek out Catherine? It was Justin she should be speaking to, not her viperish cousin. She was bound to Justin for life and, if he could explain his way out of this or persuade her out of her misery enough to enable her to forge ahead, a happiness only temporarily wounded was more than most wives could hope for under such circumstances.