“Now then,” he said, once their feet began to move in the familiar steps, “suppose you tell me why you hate me.”
Kate trod on his foot. Lord, he was direct. “I beg your pardon?”
“There is no need to maim me, Miss Sheffield.”
“It was an accident, I assure you.” And it was, even if she didn’t really mind this particular example of her lack of grace.
“Why,” he mused, “do I find I have difficulty believing you?”
Honesty, Kate quickly decided, would be her best strategy. If he could be direct, well then, so could she. “Probably,” she answered with a wicked smile, “because you know that had it occurred to me to step on your foot on purpose, I would have done so.”
He threw back his head and laughed. It was not the reaction she’d been either expecting or hoping for. Come to think of it, she had no idea what sort of reaction she’d been hoping for, but this certainly wasn’t what she’d been expecting.
“Will you stop, my lord?” she whispered urgently. “People are starting to stare.”
“People started to stare two minutes ago,” he returned. “It’s not often a man such as I dances with a woman such as you.”
As barbs went, this one was well aimed, but sadly for him, also incorrect. “Not true,” she replied jauntily. “You are certainly not the first of Edwina’s besotted idiots to attempt to gain her favor through me.”
He grinned. “Not suitors, but idiots?”
She caught his gaze with hers and was surprised to find true mirth in his eyes. “Surely you’re not going to hand me such a delicious piece of bait as that, my lord?”
“And yet you did not take it,” he mused.
Kate looked down to see if there was some way she might discreetly step on his foot again.
“I have very thick boots, Miss Sheffield,” he said.
Her head snapped back up in surprise.
One corner of his mouth curved up in a mockery of a smile. “And quick eyes as well.”
“Apparently so. I shall have to watch my step around you, to be sure.”
“My goodness,” he drawled, “was that a compliment? I might expire from the shock of it.”
“If you’d like to consider that a compliment, I give you leave to do so,” she said airily. “You’re not likely to receive many more.”
“You wound me, Miss Sheffield.”
“Does that mean that your skin is not as thick as your boots?”
“Oh, not nearly.”
She felt herself laugh before she realized she was amused. “That I find difficult to believe.”
He waited for her smile to melt away, then said, “You did not answer my question. Why do you hate me?”
A rush of air slipped through Kate’s lips. She hadn’t expected him to repeat the question. Or at least she’d hoped that he would not. “I do not hate you, my lord,” she replied, choosing her words with great care. “I do not even know you.”
“Knowing is rarely a prerequisite for hating,” he said softly, his eyes settling on hers with lethal steadiness. “Come now, Miss Sheffield, you don’t seem a coward to me. Answer the question.”
Kate held silent for a full minute. It was true, she had not been predisposed to like the man. She certainly wasn’t about to give her blessing to his courtship of Edwina. She didn’t believe for one second that reformed rakes made the best husbands. She wasn’t even sure that a rake could be properly reformed in the first place.
But he might have been able to overcome her preconceptions. He could have been charming and sincere and straightforward, and been able to convince her that the stories about him in Whistledown were an exaggeration, that he was not the worst rogue London had seen since the turn of the century. He might have convinced her that he held to a code of honor, that he was a man of principles and honesty…
If he hadn’t gone and compared her to Edwina.
For nothing could have been more obvious a lie. She knew she wasn’t an antidote; her face and form were pleasing enough. But there was simply no way she could be compared to Edwina in this measure and emerge as her equal. Edwina was truly a diamond of the first water, and Kate could never be more than average and unremarkable.
And if this man was saying otherwise, then he had some ulterior motive, because it was obvious he wasn’t blind.
He could have offered her any other empty compliment and she would have accepted it as a gentleman’s polite conversation. She might have even been flattered if his words had struck anywhere close to the truth. But to compare her to Edwina…