Hope Tarr

by Untamed

  Lost in looking at her—surely she had the most elegant neck he’d ever seen—it took him a moment to catch up to the conversation. “I’m sorry, but who is Mrs…. Beeton?”

  “Was, actually. Sadly she died at only twenty-eight.” Though she didn’t say so, he sensed she was thinking that was her own age. “Isabella Beeton is the author of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. It was first published several decades ago but has since fallen out of print. It’s a wonderful book, full of all sorts of useful information and recipes for everything from boot blacking to sponge cake. Unfortunately, my copy was packed in the trunk that’s gone missing.”

  She looked so forlorn that Rourke found himself resisting the urge to reach out and take her small hand. “I have a feeling our luggage will be returned to us soon, mayhap this very day. But please, won’t you sit, for a minute at least?”

  Unlike the night before, when he’d studied to be rude, he rose and pulled out the chair beside his.

  She hesitated and then slipped into the seat, and he resumed his own. She looked over at him for a long moment and then said, “I know you own railways, or at least one very large railway, but beyond that, I don’t really know what you do. For good or ill, we are married now. I want to understand what it is you do, truly. Were you a squire, a gentleman farmer of some sort with tenants raising sheep and corn, I would have some sense of it, but commerce is something about which I know next to nothing.”

  He opened his mouth to assure her he wasn’t a gentleman of any sort, but clamped it closed again. Sarcasm was the very last thing that was called for, not when she was showing herself prepared to at least meet him halfway. More than halfway, for he doubted many women of her station cared overmuch for how the money that paid for their gowns and jewels and servants came about so long as it did.

  Warmed by her interest, he explained, “In general, the larger railway companies seek to amalgamate the smaller, independent ones. For the acquiring company, this is good business in that it results in raised profits and dividends for the shareholder. For the individual traveler, it depends. In some cases, a monopoly causes fares to be raised and service to decline. In our case, however, I fancy travelers benefit, as well. Acquisition of smaller lines has allowed our company to extend its scope of service. By way of example, before we acquired the Edinburgh-Glasgow Railway, we would have had to disembark and change trains yesterday, always an inconvenience, but especially so in the winter months. As it was, we were able to stay warm and dry in our seats the entire eight hours.”

  He’d expected her to point out that they’d hardly stayed “warm and dry” once they’d reached their destination. Instead she said, “The train we rode yesterday was one of yours?”

  “Aye, it was.” The locomotive with its state-of-the-art steam engine and shiny black-and-red-trimmed cars was a particular point of pride. “Once I took over … acquired controlling stock in the Edinburgh-Glasgow, my first action was to get rid of the old trains and outfit new ones with dining cars, water closets—” He stopped for fear of boring her.

  Kate looked anything but bored. Her gaze honed in on the diamond stud winking from his left ear. “So you really are a pirate, then?”

  The twinkle in her eyes told him she was teasing. Still, for whatever reason, he felt himself minded to give a serious answer. “Aye, I suppose I am. It’s a rich man’s world, Kate. For those not born to privilege, pillage and plunder are frequently the only avenues for bettering our lot.”

  To his surprise, she didn’t challenge him but answered with a mild nod. “My father has done nothing with the fortune he was born to other than squander it. Were the estate not entailed, there would be nothing left at all. Our blood may run blue, but it is tainted with the gamester’s disease. There are only so many economies one may make and still keep up appearances. At some point, money must be earned.” She bit her lip and looked down, the fingers of one hand plucking at a loose thread on the linen.

  Guilt stabbed him, for her father’s gaming had been the agent by which he’d blackmailed her into marrying him, after all. And then it hit him like the proverbial thunderbolt from above. What a bloody fool he was to not have seen it ere now.

  “That’s the reason you let Hadrian take your picture for those wee photographs, isn’t it? Modeling wasn’t a pastime, but a means to earning money. He paid you, didn’t he?”

  Until now, he’d assumed her modeling for Harry must be a hobby only, a pastime to satisfy a secret vanity. What an ass he was, as well as a hypocrite. As much as he railed against those who prejudged others based on appearances, he was guilty of doing the very same.

  Amber eyes ablaze, she started to push back from the table. “Whatever arrangement I made with Mr. St. Claire is a private matter.”

  Rourke’s arm shot out, his hand covering her small one, not to capture but to comfort. “For what it’s worth, Harry’s kept a closed clapper. But I’m not wrong, am I?”

  She blew out a breath and settled back in her seat, her hand for the moment resting still beneath his. “He didn’t pay me a salary, if that’s what you’re implying. PBs—Professional Beauties—never take money, but in my case we struck a bargain. In return for my sitting exclusively for him, he remanded to me half of the proceeds from every carte postale bearing my image sold in his shop. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to cover the household accounts and keep our creditors if not precisely happy, then at least not so angry that any one of them would go to the trouble of taking Papa to court. It was strictly a business arrangement,” she added, glancing up as though she might be reading his mind.

  Absurd as it was, he resented that Harry had been the one to come to her aid and not him. When she’d begun modeling, Rourke hadn’t yet met her. Even if he had, she projected such an abundance of confidence and self-possession he doubted he would have bothered to probe beneath the surface to discover her true situation. The woman with whom he’d waltzed at Lady Stonevale’s charity ball had hardly seemed in need of rescuing.

  He hid his niggling jealousy behind a smile. “I meant to marry a lady, but to marry one who is also a Professional Beauty, well, that is quite … something.”

  She shook her head, her gaze pointing down. “Professional Beauty is the moniker given to all ladies of society who sit for portrait photographs to be sold. I’m hardly anyone special. Common and middle-class people like to look at us and imagine how grand our lives must be. If only they knew …”

  Her voice drifted off. She blushed and dropped her gaze. On any other woman of her age, such an action would equate to simpering, but on his Kate—and he really had begun thinking of her as his—it was genuine modesty. The physical effect was enormously appealing. The pink rising in her cheeks only made her amber-brown eyes appear darker and more luminous.

  “Ah, Katie, such slender shoulders to bear such a great burden.” Kate, Katie, let me bear your burdens. Let me share your life.

  She flashed him a quick, tight smile, but her eyes looked bleak. “But then I’m known as Capable Kate for reasons obvious to all.” As if reading his silent question, she supplied, “My mother died giving birth to Bea. Until marrying you, I was the de facto mistress of my father’s household and mother hen to my sister. Capable Kate, they both call me. I’ve been stuck with the moniker since I was ten. I hated it, then. I fancied myself a princess like … my horse, but I’ve grown used to it over the years. You must admit, it fits.”

  So that explained her almost feverish industry. Kate had grown up believing she was valued only for what she could do for others, rather than feeling loved and loveable for herself. Until now, he’d always assumed his being orphaned was the equivalent of drawing the short straw. But based on what he’d just heard her say, he was no longer so sure about that. Unlike him, Kate hadn’t seemed to have had a Harry or Gavin or Daisy to show her otherwise.

  Gentling his voice, he asked, “Is there nothing you want for yourself, Kate?” His hand on hers still hadn’t moved, nor had she drawn it a
way.

  She shook her head. “Don’t go thinking I’m selfless, because I’m not.” She swallowed hard, setting off a visible ripple in the lovely long column of her throat. “I wanted so very many things for myself—my independence, the time to write my silly drivel and perhaps someday find a publisher to do something with it, chocolate, a horse.”

  He couldn’t help but notice how she used the past tense, not want but wanted, as though because of marrying him all her dreams were dead on the vine. Rather than tackle that topic now, he said, “I didn’t know you wrote.” Genuinely curious, he asked, “What sort of things do you write—if you don’t mind my asking, that is?” Kate’s literary aspirations were a new wrinkle, but she seemed such a private person he didn’t want to unduly intrude.

  She shrugged, and he let his hold on her slide away. “Short stories mostly, the occasional poem. Someday I’d like to try a novel. Small dreams, perhaps, and undoubtedly selfish of me, but they were mine and I cherished them, and now none of them will ever come true.”

  He felt as though he were back in the boxing ring and had just fallen for his opponent’s sucker punch to the gut. “And you think marrying me means you must give them all up?” Did she really see him as such a brute?

  Her silence was an answer in itself.

  He shook his head. “I have a stable stocked with horses, several Arabians, including a mare about to foal. There’s no reason you can’t ride any of them, well, all but one.” His most recent acquisition, a splendid stallion, Zeus, wasn’t yet broken to the saddle. “And you can pen your poems or whatever else it is you wish to write and have them published by whomever you please. I don’t ken much of such things, but I’ll beat down the publishers’ doors with my bare fists if that’s what it takes to have your work read.”

  “You really don’t mind?”

  He shook his head, ashamed it was such a marvel to her that he might be reasonable, let alone kind. “Why should I? Just as I go about my business during the day, so can you. As for chocolate, have as much as you please. There’s a sweet shop on High Street with hoards of the stuff, some of it imported from Belgium, mind.”

  That thought quickly led him to another. Ralph had yet to show his face, and he was coming to wonder if his manservant might have met with some snag over the luggage. Until it was retrieved, his bride had but one dress, the sad little sack hanging from her slender shoulders. A stop by the station might be just the thing.

  He lifted his hand from hers at last. “I’m headed into town myself on some, uh … business. What say you to accompanying me? We can buy you the biggest box of chocolates they have—and at least one wee dress.”

  Dividing his gaze between the two gowns the dress-shop owner held up, Rourke shook his head. “The green one is too garish, and the rose too girlish. My wife is a lady born, you see, and though admittedly very tiny, she is a woman grown.”

  Standing in her shift and a borrowed robe from the dressing room, Kate considered that for a man who claimed to know next to nothing about female fashions, her new husband had no shortage of opinions. As for his pointing out her small stature, true, she was slightly built but not freakishly so. Doubtless her husband was accustomed to stout, raw-boned Scottish lasses who could plow a field and birth a baby in the same day.

  The dressmaker, Mrs. MacBride, answered with an injured sniff. “I assure you, sir, these colors reflect the latest fashion, from Paris no less.”

  Kate heartily doubted the high-necked green gown with the tartan underskirt hailed from farther than the next county, but for once she held back from speaking her mind. Until her baggage arrived—if, indeed, it ever did—all she had to wear was her ruined traveling costume, the hemline still encrusted with grime despite that morning’s vigorous brushing.

  Impatient to be on their way—she’d agreed to come along only after he’d said she might stop by the office of the local gazette and place an advertisement for a housekeeper—she tapped him on the arm. “Perhaps we could purchase a bolt of fabric and one of those pattern books over there.” She gestured to the wall where several fashion publications sat in the wooden display rack.

  “You sew?”

  She nodded. “A little.”

  Actually she sewed a lot, not as a pastime but as a necessity. If only he knew how many of her and Bea’s gowns she’d stitched from patterns she’d created after pouring over the fashion plates in The Queen Magazine, Sylvia’s Home Journal, and Harper’s Bazaar, he wouldn’t be so quick to dub her a snob.

  “My lady wife to sew her clothes like a common mantua maker, I wouldna dream of it!”

  There he went again, his mood sliding from reason to lunacy in the blink of an eye. Kate drew in a deep breath and gritted her teeth. “Please.”

  Please must be the magic word, indeed. All at once, his gruff expression softened and the wildness left his eyes. He turned to her, and the heat of his gaze resting on her face had Kate forgetting to breathe. “Verra well, then, if that is what you wish.”

  Their purchases made and loaded into the carriage—it seemed he had a carriage house, as well as stables—they stepped out of the dressmaker’s shop onto the old cobbled street. “The sweetshop is next, I think,” Rourke said.

  Ever since their talk at breakfast, he’d been suspiciously accommodating, even nice to her. Resolved to take advantage of his good mood for however long it lasted, Kate said, “Do you think the proprietress will let me place one of these signs in her window, as Mrs. MacBride did?”

  She glanced down to the stack of hastily made advertisement posters in her arms. If she was going to return to her writing, that housekeeper couldn’t be brought aboard soon enough.

  He stopped in his tracks and smiled down at her, eyes smiling, too. “If you look at her as you’re doing now, I canna fathom her saying anything but yes.”

  Self-conscious, she reached up and touched the bonnet they’d just bought to make sure it was on straight. “How is it I’m looking?”

  He caught her hand and carried it to his lips, his warm, moist, kissable lips. “Adorable, lovely, that mouth altogether sweeter than any confectioner’s treat.”

  The wildness was returned to his eyes, only Kate didn’t think it was lunacy this time, but rather … passion. “Rourke!”

  His giant step brought their bodies brushing. “Kiss me, Kate.”

  She pulled back, gaze darting to the street beyond either of his broad shoulders. Several shoppers passed by, one girl goggle-eyed and giggling. She swung her gaze up to her husband’s. “But we’re in the middle of the street.”

  He spanned her waist with his hands, and against all reason Kate felt herself melting into the warmth of those big, broad palms. “Aye, so we are, but we’re married now. Kiss me, anyway. Kiss me as a lover would, as though you mean it.”

  Kate stood rooted in place. Her heart skipped, her breath hitched. And between her thighs, a slow, honeyed heat was making its presence known.

  “Are you ashamed to be seen with me, then?” Despite the glint in his eye, she had the feeling that this once he posed a serious question.

  She shook her head. “It’s not that.”

  “Then what is it? We’re no in London anymore. Any passersby will see a pair of newlyweds showing a bit of fondness for one another on the street.”

  “A bit of fondness, is that what you call it? Twice now I’ve let you cajole me into kissing you in public, and only look what has come of it.”

  “What, indeed.” He drew her to him and leaned down, his lips matching to hers.

  “How now, what luck is this?”

  They broke apart. Cursing beneath his breath, Rourke dropped his hands from Kate’s waist and turned about to the hansom cab drawn up at their side.

  His London servant, Ralph somebody or other, leaned out from the open carriage window. Snapped back to sense, Kate said, “Did you just come from the train station? We are on our way there now to see about the missing luggage. Had we known you were coming, we might have met you.”
<
br />   Struck by the number of we’s that short greeting included, she glanced over to Rourke, wondering if he’d noticed. Storm clouds rode her husband’s high brow, and his jaw seemed quite set.

  “Yes, Mr. Sylvester, had you seen fit to share your plans, we might have met you, indeed.”

  “There’s no need, milady. I have it right here.” He pointed to indicate the carriage boot.

  “You have my trunk!” Clapping her hands, she said, “That is happy news. I suppose we can all ride home together, then?”

  “Aye, so it would seem.”

  Standing at his washstand later that day, Rourke picked up his freshly stropped razor, and made the first downward swipe through the shaving soap on his face. “You couldna have held off hailing me for one wee moment?”

  Ralph handed him a towel—a freshly laundered towel—and shrugged. “It was a case of now or never. That hack was headed down High Street at full-steam speed. Besides, I thought you’d be happy to have your missing trunks back. Lady Kate, or rather Mrs. O’Rourke, certainly seemed so.” He winked, but Rourke refused to be teased out of his foul mood.

  Scowling into the mirror, he tossed the towel over his shoulders and wiped the blade on the cloth. “Bon vivant as you fancy yourself, did it no occur to you that I might be in the middle of something important, so to speak?”

  Ralph set the bottle of bay rum on the washstand next to the pitcher and basin. His hazel eyes found Rourke’s in the mirror. “She’s your wife. You can kiss her anytime … can’t you?”

  Rourke didn’t have an answer for that, at least not yet. As Kate’s husband, he had the legal right to do far more than kiss her. But eager as he was to bed her, to make love to her in every way she would accept, he realized he wanted more from her than simple sex. Taming her willfulness was one thing, seducing her by force entirely another. Standing on High Street, his lips lowering to hers, he’d understood that a physical claiming would no longer suffice.