Cinderella After Midnight. Lilian Darcy

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СКАЧАТЬ lit up. “Oh, Earl. Why don’t we? He’s right. It isn’t just young people, and they’re playing our sort of music.”

      Seconds later, Cat had to watch her elusive quarry stumble across the ice under the escort of a seventeen-year-old skate bunny. Patrick sat back in his seat, meanwhile, openly enjoying her poorly disguised chagrin.

      “They’re serving more supper,” he said, then gestured at Jill, who was swishing by with a tray of filled plates.

      She came to an elegant halt—she really was a beautiful skater!—and laid two plates down in front of them with a beaming smile. This quickly turned into a confused glare at Cat when she thought Patrick wasn’t looking.

      Why are you wasting your time with this guy? the glare said.

      Cat gave a tiny frown back and shook her head, as if to say, “Believe me, I’m trying to shake him off!” then Jill swished away with her tray once more.

      “She skates well,” was Patrick’s comment.

      “Yes, she does, doesn’t she?” Cat began warmly, then corrected her tone quickly. “That is to say, she seems more skilled than most of the people one sees on the outdoor rink at Gstaad.”

      “Ah, we’re back to Gstaad,” Patrick murmured.

      He tortured her without mercy as they ate. Cat hated herself for appreciating every moment of his cleverness. Never once did he say straight out that he knew she was a fraud. That would have been too easy. But he broke her cover again and again.

      He trapped her and let her go again like a cat toying with a mouse, and she almost begged him, “Okay, you win. Call management and get me thrown out, if you’d enjoy the sight of my humiliation. I won’t bother to tell you why it matters so much. You’d only shrug.”

      But he didn’t make his first move, and in the end she didn’t ask him to. Instead, she held desperately to the faint, fading hope that it would turn out all right. What other choice did she have?

      Some minutes later, however, the Wainwrights came back, and despite Mrs. Wainwright’s suspicious glare, her husband gallantly whirled Cat away to dance at last. Patrick, surprisingly, didn’t interfere.

      Suddenly, when she’d really believed all hope was lost, it was easy. Oh, it was so wonderfully easy! Here she was, out on the dance floor with a perspiring councillor, who was like putty in her hands.

      One eager question from him about her ancestral home led her smoothly into the subject of chemical contamination of the poor, dear ancestral trout stream and consequent tragic demise of the poor, dear ancestral trout.

      The councillor’s open-jawed interest in everything she said then allowed her to run on about the charming bed-and-breakfast mansion she was staying at in upper Highgate Street, and how the owner of the bed-and-breakfast was very concerned about the proposed rezoning of one block of lower Highgate Street, where, she understood, the houses had been built on the sight of a former tannery.

      The ground, according to the bed-and-breakfast owner, was hopelessly contaminated from the tanning chemicals below the surface of added top soil and rock fill, and it would be a tragedy, quite simply a shocking, frightful tragedy, if the contamination—not known about by the general public, by the way, because it had been hushed up—was brought to the surface through reckless bulldozing by developers.

      In any case, the heritage value of the old Victorian houses on that particular block was, “like my own ancestral estate of Dungrove Castle,” absolutely priceless and must on no account be sacrificed to the frightful greed of commercial interests.

      “Lady Catrina, you are absolutely right,” said the councillor eagerly. “You couldn’t have known this, of course, but environmental contamination and deliberate hushing up of its presence is one of my most strongly felt issues, and it’s the most amazing coincidence that I should meet someone like you who shares my concerns.”

      He took a moment to mop his brow with a big, plaid handkerchief, as if the fluency of his oratory was exhausting him, then said, “As for the heritage values, of course I wish we, here in the United States, had the sensitivity of you British nobles in that area. Rest assured, however, that this city—as well as you personally, my dear—”

      He really did have a very pleasant smile, Cat noted.

      “—can count on my influence in council to hold these forces of darkness at bay, and council is going to know that at the very next meeting, because I am not going to hold my cards to my chest any longer. The rezoning in lower Highgate Street is off!”

      The music ended at that moment, and a very breathless Councillor Wainwright escorted Cat off the floor and back to the table.

      Before he reached it, he was waylaid by his wife Darlene, saying urgently, “Earl? Earl! Grab that waitress. She’s missed our table, and I’m ready for my supper. Those canapes wouldn’t have fed a bird. Earl? Go after her!”

      He loped off obediently in the wake of the waitress, almost forgetting about the ice in his eagerness. His wife, evidently not trusting either his persistence about supper or his immunity to any of the beautiful women here tonight, followed him.

      Cat turned from the councillor and reached the table, her success glowing in her face and making her smile helplessly.

      She’d done it. She had actually done it! Pixie’s home and the other gracious Victorian houses in lower Highgate Street were safe, as were the other families who lived in them. Seven and a half weeks from now, when the vital council meeting was due to take place, sleazy Barry Grindlay would have no more reason to try and con poor, frail, simple-hearted Pixie out of her one and only asset.

      Now, if she could only find Jill, tell her the good news and get out of here…

      “Pleased about something, Lady Catrina?” said Patrick’s darkly amused voice just a few feet away.

      Cat dropped into her seat, knocked hollow by the man once more. Everyone else from this table was dancing or greeting friends, and he sat here alone. His long body was draped in his seat in a lazy sprawl and just one corner of his mouth was lifted in a smile.

      Of course she hadn’t forgotten about him. Somehow she suspected she wasn’t going to find it very easy to do that, even after this event was over. His voice, his smile, the feel of his arms around her as they danced, his clever way with words and the searching, half-amused, half-cynical look in his blue eyes were all things that would haunt her, waking and sleeping, for weeks. And there was another quality to him, as well. Or maybe it was a quality in the air between them. Either way, she couldn’t put a name to it.

      But at least until a moment ago she had kidded herself that his involvement in her evening was done.

      It was instantly apparent that he didn’t agree. When she stammered out something inane about a frightfully pleasant conversation with Councillor Wainwright during the dance, he laughed aloud. It was a complicated sound, more than the simple expression of amusement.

      “While there’s no one else around,” he suggested, leaning forward, “let’s be a little more honest about this, shall we?”

      “Wh-what do you mean?” she said, although she knew quite well.

      “You have about as much right to call yourself Lady Catrina Willoughby-Brown as I would have to call myself СКАЧАТЬ