by Untamed
Clapping broke the spell. He released her, and Kate took a shaky step back. She opened her eyes to his grinning face. “There’s nay need to be bashful, sweeting. We’re wed now in the eyes of God and man.”
Her palms itched to slap away that smug smile and replace it with her handprint, but they were in a church, after all. Mindful of her surroundings, she let him lead her down the few steps to where their small party spilled out into the aisle. A makeshift receiving line formed, and subdued congratulations made the rounds.
Shaking Hadrian’s hand, Rourke announced, “We must have a photograph to remember this happy day.”
More than content to forget, Kate shook her head. “I won’t stand for a photograph with you wearing that ridiculous costume.”
He backed up to the front pew. “Is that your final answer?”
Spoiling for a fight after that morning’s ill treatment, she tossed back her head. “Yes, it is.”
“Will you sit for one instead?”
Kate opened her mouth to answer in the negative, but before she could get out so much as a syllable, her husband’s arm wrapped about her waist like a whipcord, pulling her down. They fell back against the bench, Rourke buffering the impact and Kate landing hard atop him. Slung across his hard-muscled thighs, the edge of his forearm circling her waist, Kate had never before felt so humiliated, so powerless to direct her fate. Skirts bunched, feet dangling, and hat sliding forward over one eye, she could only imagine how ridiculous, how comical, she must appear.
“Let me up, you great ox. I won’t be … photographed in … disarray.” She tried pulling herself upright, but his arm bracing her waist held her fast.
He pulled her closer, stealing her breath. “You canna deny me this memento of our nuptials, my sweet.”
“I can and I will.”
“Nay, I’ll be wanting this image of my angel on our special day. I insist.”
“And I insist you shall not.”
“Mind, mere minutes ago you swore to obey me in all things.” His voice was a warm hiss in her ear.
Kate hissed back, “Like rules, there are some vows made to be broken.”
“Not that one.” His head swiveled to the photographer. “Take the bloody photograph, Harry. We’ll want a memento of this sacred moment to see us through the fifty-odd years of bliss ahead.”
Fifty-odd years; it might as well be a prison sentence. Feeling frantic, Kate shouted out, “Mr. St. Claire, don’t you dare so much as lay a finger on that striking cord!”
Clearly torn, Hadrian hesitated. He looked from the groom to the bride and then over to his wife. “Callie?”
She lifted her shoulders and shrugged. “I’d say you’re damned either way, darling.”
“That was my assessment, as well.”
Hadrian ducked behind the camera. His silver blond head disappeared beneath the black cloth. A moment later, the flash flared. Black spots skittered before Kate’s eyes.
Lifting the cloth, the photographer looked out, “That one might come out a bit blurred because of all the, uh … kicking. Shall I take another?”
“Aye!”
“No!” Kate managed to work one arm free. Using her elbow, she dealt her new husband a sharp backward jab.
Behind her, he stifled a groan. “My blushing bride is only shy of having her picture taken.”
“Don’t be absurd. I have sat for Mr. St. Claire any number of times.” She stopped herself, but not soon enough.
Her husband’s chuckle tickling her ear confirmed she’d made his point for him. “And so you shall again, my sweet.”
Kate stilled. Submitting to having a second picture taken in that ridiculous pose was a serious blow to her badly wounded pride. She hoped that jab had hurt him, a little at least. Better yet, she hoped it left a large and painful bruise. She expected she’d find out later that night unless he slept in a nightshirt, which she doubted. In a matter of hours, she would see his naked chest along with all the naked rest of him. The prospect raised a powerful, primal ache.
Dear God, I’m no better than a harlot.
It had taken this moment, this definitive epiphany, for Kate to learn something new about herself, something dark and shameful, and until now, quite secret, even to her. Where her new husband was concerned, she was a wanton. What other explanation was there for wanting to lie with a man who treated her so ill?
Matters worsened as the morning wore on. They’d scarcely crossed the threshold of the town house where the wedding breakfast was to be served when Rourke announced they must leave after the first toast was drunk. “Most patient, virtuous, and sweet wife, it is time for us to away.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Kate snapped. “It’s not as though Scotland is going anywhere, though one can always hope. For the present, I mean to enjoy this lovely breakfast along with our guests, if for no other reason than it cost a fair piece.”
She could calculate the cost of her bridal breakfast down to a single toast point topped with crab if only because, like everything else, she’d directed the menu. She congratulated herself she’d struck a near-perfect balance between keeping up appearances and not sending them all to the poorhouse. Bankrupting them was her father’s bailiwick, not hers.
Strolling into the dining room where the food was laid out, Kate scarcely spared him a backward glance. The array of lobster patties, pastries, and strawberries with clotted cream made her mouth water and her stomach rumble. For the past week, she’d subsisted mainly on worry, weak tea, and wafers. Now that the deed was done and her doom sealed, she discovered she was famished.
Every dish looked and smelled enormously appealing—all save for the bridal cake. Set on a cloth-covered table to the side, its trio of tiers frosted with almond cream and festooned with candied fruit in the shape of orange blossoms, it had been delivered the night before. The topmost tier served as the stage for two figurines, a miniature bride and groom. The bride’s painted porcelain face looked smiling and content, the groom’s equally blissful.
“There is a dining car on the train.” Rourke’s voice sounded beside her.
Picking up a plate from the stack, she waved him away. “Go if you must. I will take a later train and meet you.”
To drive home her point, she used a pair of silver serving tongs to lift a lemon-curd tart from the pastry platter onto her plate.
“You would have us spend our wedding night apart?” She fancied he sounded a trifle hurt.
Kate was careful not to let her indecision show. As much as she dreaded being alone with her new husband “in that way,” the prospect of going to her bridal bed alone brought a sharp stab of disappointment.
She cloaked the latter in a devil-may-care shrug. “If we must, then so be it. As you said, we likely have fifty-odd years ahead.”
“Bonny Kate, it is I who say whether or not we must spend this night apart, and I say we must not. Faith, I’d no sleep a wink without my turtledove tucked ’neath my wing.” He swooped in, his arms going about her back and waist.
“Leave off.” The plate slid from her fingers and bounced onto the carpeted floor. She tried shoving him away, but to no avail. He remained as immovable as a boulder. “We have spent every night of our lives apart ere now. Surely one more will do us no harm. And I am most certainly not your turtledove. Why on earth are you speaking in this strange, stilted fashion?”
He hauled her over his shoulder. “Come, my love, we must away. Our love nest awaits us, and I mean to sleep beneath my own roof this night.”
Kate’s head hung like an upside-down anchor, her bum pointed due north, and her legs dangled weightless, one satin slipper falling off and striking the floor. She kicked out at his legs and pounded her fists upon his back, all to no avail.
He bore them steadily toward the door, family and guests clearing an aisle to the exit. On the way there, he paused to shake hands or receive a wink or a pat on the shoulder from one of the males in attendance.
“Mr. St. Claire, make him set me down.” Mo
uth twitching, Hadrian looked away.
Her gaze alighted on his suffragette wife. At last an ally, perhaps even a champion. “Callie, help me. Surely you of all people cannot countenance what amounts to an abduction.”
“You might be surprised,” Rourke murmured. Apart from being slung over his shoulder like a sack of meal, she was doing her best to ignore him.
Callie shook her dark head. “Nor can I halt it. You are married now, and the current laws give Rourke dominion over you. We are petitioning Parliament to have the unjust laws governing marriage altered for that very reason.”
“But I haven’t time for petitioning Parliament. I need help—now!”
Callie shifted her shoulders to indicate her helplessness. “For the present, there is not much that may be done.”
Hanging upside down as she was, Kate couldn’t be sure but she thought she glimpsed a small Mona Lisa-like smile touching the brunette’s mouth. “And you call yourself a feminist.”
In her present predicament, maintaining one’s dignity was a losing battle. She twisted her head to look back at Rourke. “Set me down, you bloody ox. Have you taken leave of your senses?”
He gave her buttocks a less than gentle squeeze. “Mayhap I have, milady, but as I said before, we are all fools in love.”
They boarded a northbound train to Scotland from the station at King’s Cross. On the way to the station, Rourke stopped off at his Hanover Square house and changed out of his wedding attire and into normal clothes. He hadn’t minded the bells overmuch, but those pointed slippers had begun to pinch.
Kate had waited in the carriage. She hadn’t spoken a word to him since he’d carried her out of her father’s house and deposited her on the red leather carriage seat. Fortunately her little maid had raced after them with her carpetbag of immediate essentials, and Ralph, with Harry’s help, had loaded her trunk into the carriage boot.
Standing on the platform, he’d found himself wishing they were lovers headed for a honeymoon in truth. By way of breaking the ice, he’d offered up some of the history of the station.
“Legend has it King’s Cross is built on the site of Boudica’s final battle, or else her body is buried beneath the platforms. There are passages under the station her ghost is said to haunt.”
“Fascinating.” She turned her back on him.
And so began their first day as husband and wife.
Occasionally some of the uniformed workers who passed them by recognized Rourke, but he tapped the side of his nose, signaling them to silence. Before stepping onto the first-class car, he turned over their trunks to a porter with some very special instructions.
They settled into their first-class compartment. Silence descended. Leaning back against the tufted leather seat, Rourke glanced over at his bride. Seated across from him, her white-knuckled hands wrapped about the handle of the unwieldy-looking carpetbag in her lap, she was so far keeping her own counsel. Silent as the sphinx, was more like it. Though the train had yet to leave the station, she’d fixed her gaze out ever since they’d first sat down.
Ordinarily he wouldn’t have minded. In his opinion, most people prattled too much as it was. The ritual of silent prayer meetings at Roxbury House had touched his soul in a way that traditional church services never had. Had he been born in an earlier era, the medieval period when his castle had been built, he might have made a fair monk, not because he was especially godly or religious, and certainly not because he was interested in celibacy, but because he liked the idea of living in a community where people reserved speaking for those times when they truly had something to say.
But in this case the silence felt more leaden than golden, the dull weight of it making the waiting time stretch out. Rourke felt as though they’d been sitting stalled on the tracks for hours, though, of course, that was not so. Wondering what time it was, he pulled out his timepiece, and then remembered he’d left his glasses in the pocket of his discarded “wedding” suit. That was going to be a problem.
He stretched out the fob chain to his wife. “Can you tell me the time?”
She swiveled her head from the window. “Of course, I can tell time. Do I seem a simpleton?”
Rourke sucked in a breath. While he’d rather enjoyed the antics at the church and the breakfast, too, he could already see this taming business was turning into hard labor, a labor of… love. “I asked if you would read me the time. I havena my glasses.”
“Oh.” She gave the watch face a quick glance as people with perfect vision might do. “It’s coming on a quarter ’til one.”
“How close to coming on?”
Amber eyes flashed to his face. “A minute or two, give or take? Why, are you in some sort of rush? Is someone chasing us?”
Actually, Ralph Sylvester was secreted in one of the second-class cabins. Once they disembarked at their destination station of Linlithgow, Rourke intended to give the butler-cum-valet-cum-coachman a head start to the castle. The latter was crucial to setting up the next act of his personal play.
But beyond any behind-the-scenes machinations, Rourke was a man who ate, slept, and rose by the clock. He took considerable pride in the fact that, according to the latest timetable report, his trains never veered off schedule by more than a minute. Perhaps it came from having little or no structure as a child, but living according to rigorous routine felt more a freedom than a restraint or imposition. Once he’d left Roxbury House, he’d missed the bells that had regulated meals, lessons, recreation, sleeping and waking, and even worship.
He glanced across to Kate, her head once more turned to look out onto the platform. Rourke wasn’t fooled. He didn’t for a moment doubt that she was every whit as aware of him as he was of her. Unfortunately for him, she was also just as stubborn.
Leaning back in his seat, he found himself studying the woman with whom he would share not only his bed, but also his life, the next fifty years of it at least. From the few embraces they’d shared, he knew her skin really was that petal soft, her hair that sweet smelling, her lips and tongue as delectable as a ripe peach. Were circumstances different and theirs a normal marriage, he might well choose this moment to draw the car’s velvet curtain all the way closed and reach for her. He’d never made love on a moving train, or a stalled one, for that matter. Given that he owned the whole bloody railway, that fact struck him as both ironic and a shame. He had the urge to reach out and lift his bride onto his lap to straddle him, tunnel a hand beneath her skirts and finger her, the honey from her sex trickling like treacle onto his hand, covering his mouth over hers to muffle her first soft moans and then her throaty cries. The fantasy, vivid, brought on one hell of a cock stand.
He shifted in his seat. Inadvertently his knee bumped her leg.
She swiveled her head around and pinned him with a glare. “Must you fidget so?”
Fidget—Jaysus, if only she knew.
He reached into the brown paper bag of food items he’d bought from the vendor cart back at King’s Cross. “Apple?”
“No, thank you.”
“If you fancy a hot meal, there’s a dining car a few compartments down from this one.”
He ought to know. The northbound line on which he’d booked their seats was one of his, the shiny black and red steam locomotives the finest of his fleet, the blueprint of their interior laid out in his head.
She shook her head.
“Are you certain? We dinna disembark ’til Linlithgow.
That’s almost an eight-hour journey, mind.”
“Yes, Mr. O’Rourke, so the printed ticket said.”
“I have a name, you know. It’s Patrick.” For whatever reason, he still very badly wanted to hear her call him by his given name.
“I am aware of that. And a middle name, as well. Donald?” Her lips twitched.
“Donald was my mother’s da’s name.”
She cocked her head to the side. “Perhaps I’ll call you Donald. You just might look like a Donald.”
She was teasing him, but
at least she was talking to him again. “Dinna dare. If you won’t call me by my given name, then call me Rourke as my friends do.”
Her brows lifted. “Ah, yes, and you and I are such great friends, aren’t we?”
The sarcasm wasn’t lost on him, but for the time being he would do his best to ignore it. “As we’re wedded now, here’s hoping we’re no enemies.”
Back in London, two former Roxbury House friends-turned-married-lovers stood in the crowded greenroom of their newly renovated theatre, sipping champagne and shaking their heads at their friend Rourke’s extraordinary telegraphed news.
Kate and I wed. STOP.
Taking train to castle in Scotland. STOP.
Come up for Gav’s birthday next month. STOP.
The telegram arrived before Daisy stepped out onstage as Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Fortunately Hadrian and Callie, both witnesses to the hasty wedding and sworn to secrecy until now, had arrived before the final act to fill in the glossed-over details. Apparently not only had their brash friend coerced Lady Katherine into marrying him, but once she had, he’d swept her off her feet and carried her away—literally.
Gavin took a sip from Daisy’s champagne flute and then passed the glass back. “Rourke wedded to a blue-blooded shrew; there’s a play in that, as well as ample poetic justice. If I hadn’t helped him get the special license, I might think he was playing a practical joke on us.”
“Why, darling, that brilliant mind of yours isn’t only for legal matters, is it?” Catching his blank look, she elaborated, “As Shakespeare might say if he were still alive, the play’s the thing. In this case, the play’s already written and has been for several hundred years.”