Horse Meat curled its lips at the mare, showing teeth. It could not have communicated more clearly, had it spoken:
Stay away from me. I am a dangerous stallion!
The gentleman looked from animal to animal. “I suppose not.” A soft smile of bemusement passed over his lips, and he turned to meet Kate’s eyes, once again halting her forward progress.
There was a restless vitality about those eyes that resonated with her. Something about him—his voice, his easy confidence—set her skin humming in recognition. She knew him.
Or maybe she just wanted to know him, and she’d invented this subtle sense of familiarity. She would have remembered a man like him.
Unlike other gentlemen, underneath his hat, his skin was sun-warmed gold. His shoulders were broad, and not by any artifice of padding. He was walking away from his steed, toward Kate.
No, she couldn’t possibly have forgotten a man like him. His gaze on her made her feel uneasy, as if he knew all her secrets. As if he were laughing at every last one.
“Well,” he said, “this is a pretty pickle, my lady.”
My lady? Ladies did not wear itchy gray cloaks. They didn’t cower under shapeless bonnets. Had he seen the fine walking dress she wore underneath when he lifted her up? Or did he know who she was?
His eyes flicked up and down, once, an automatic male survey of her figure, before returning to her face.
Kate was not fool enough to wish he’d let the horse trample her. Still, she wished he’d been on his way earlier. At least he didn’t remark on her outlandish garb. Instead…
“This,” he told her, gesturing with the reins of the animal he’d just acquired, “puts me in mind of one of those damnable logic puzzles a friend of mine used to pose when we were at Cambridge. ‘A shepherd, three sheep and a wolf must cross a river in a boat that fits at most two….’”
Understanding—and disappointment—took root. No wonder he wasn’t courting her ire by asking inconvenient questions about her cloak and her lack of companionship. He was one of those men. He addressed her with easy intimacy. A tone of expectation warmed his voice, entirely at odds with his formal “my lady.” She recalled his hands on her waist, that brief flash of heated contact, body to body. At the time, she’d noticed nothing more than a fleeting impression of hard muscle pushing her out of harm’s way. Now her skin prickled where he’d touched her, as if his gaze had sparked her flesh to life.
If he knew her well enough to attempt to win that wager, then he knew her well enough to gossip. He knew her well enough to spread the word in town, and well enough for that word to travel round until it reached Harcroft’s ears. It was no longer a question of if Harcroft would hear about this episode; it was a matter of what and when.
Kate didn’t dare panic, not now. She took a deep breath. She needed to make sure that the crux of his story had nothing to do with the clothing in which he found her.
“This isn’t the time for games of logic,” she said. “You know who I am.”
He stared at her in befuddlement. One hand rose to touch his chin, and he shook his head. “Of course I know who you are. I knew who you were the instant I set my hands on your hips.”
No true gentleman would have alluded to that uncouth contact. But then, no true gentleman would make her want to wrap her arms around her own waist, to press her palms where his had been before.
She cast him a brilliant smile, and after a moment he responded with a like expression. She crooked her index finger at him, and he took a step toward her.
“You’re thinking about that bet, aren’t you?”
He stopped in his tracks and shook his head stupidly—but all that false bewilderment could not fool Kate. She’d seen too many variants upon it over the years.
“It’s been on the book for two years now,” Kate said. “Of course you’re thinking of it. And you—” here she extended her gloved hand to point playfully at his chest “—you have convinced yourself that you will be the one to claim the five thousand pounds.”
His brows drew down.
“Oh,” Kate said with false charity, “I know. A lady ought not to mention a gentleman’s wager. But then, you can hardly be deserving of the term gentleman if you’ve entered into that pact to seduce me.”
That brought his shoulders straight up and wiped all expression from his face. “Seduce you? But—”
“Am I making you uncomfortable?” Kate asked with pretend solicitousness. “Are you perhaps feeling as if your privacy has been violated by my inquiry? Now, perhaps, you can imagine how it feels for me to have my virtue discussed all over London.”
“Actually—”
“Don’t bother protesting. Tell the truth. Did you linger here, thinking you would have me in bed?”
“No!” he said in injured tones. Then he pressed his lips together, as if tasting something bitter. “To be perfectly truthful,” he said in a subdued tone, “and come to think of it, yes, but—”
“My answer is ‘no, thank you.’ I already have everything a lady could wish for.”
“Really?”
He was watching her intently now. She could imagine him reporting this speech to his friends. If he did, the sum of the gossip would be her words, not her clothing. Harcroft would hear, but he’d think nothing of it. Just the story of another man who failed to collect. Kate counted items off on her fingers. “I have a fulfilling life filled with charitable work. A doting father. Virtually unlimited pin money.” She tapped her little finger and shot him another disarming smile. “Oh, yes. And my husband lives six thousand miles away. Now why in heaven’s name do all you fools believe I should want to complicate my life with a messy, illicit love affair?”
He froze, then recovered enough to reach up and rub the tawny bristle on his chin. “Would you know,” he said softly, “my solicitor was right. I should have shaved first.”
“I assure you, your slovenly appearance makes not one iota of difference.”
“It’s not the beard.” His hand clenched briefly into a fist at his side, and then relaxed.
She felt a grim delight at that sign of confusion. It wasn’t fair to take all men to task for her husband’s failings—but then, this one had set out to seduce her, and she was not in the mood to be kind. “You seem out of sorts,” she said, imbuing her voice with a false charity. “And foolish. And bumbling. Are you quite sure you’re not my errant husband?”
“Well, that’s the thing.” He glanced at her almost apologetically. And then he took another step toward her.
This close, she could see his chest expand on an inhale. He reached for her hand. She had time to pull away. She ought to pull away. His thumb and forefinger caught her wrist, as gently as if he were catching a dried leaf as it fell from a tree. His fingers found the precise spot where her glove ended and her flesh began. She might have been that leaf, ready to combust in one heated moment.
She desperately needed to escape, to reconstruct the feeling of success that had been so rudely taken from her. He smiled at her again, and his eyes twinkled ruefully. And suddenly, horribly, she knew what he was going to say. She knew why his eyes had seemed so unnaturally familiar.
She did know this man. She had imagined meeting him a thousand ways in the past years. Sometimes she had said nothing. Other times she’d delivered cutting speeches. She always brought him to his knees, eventually, in apology, while she looked on regally.
There was nothing regal about her now. In all of her imaginings, not once had she met him wearing an ill-fitting servant’s cloak, with smudges on her face.
Her wrist still burned where he touched her, and Kate jerked her hand away.
“You see,” he said dryly, “I’m quite sure that I am your husband. And I’m not six thousand miles away any longer.”
Chapter Two
SIX THOUSAND MILES. Three years. Ned Carhart had convinced himself that when he returned, everything would be different.
But no. Nothing had changed—least of all, his wife.
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She stared at him, her lips parted in shock, as if he had announced that he had a penchant for playing vingt-et-un with ravens. She drew her cloak about her. No doubt she wanted to shield herself from his gaze. And like that, it all came back—all the ragged danger of that old intensity—burning into the palms of his hands.
Her cloak was dusty all over and, thank God, falling about her as it did, it hid the curves of her waist. After all these years of careful control, the check he performed was almost perfunctory. Yes. He still controlled his own emotions; they did not jerk him around, like a dog on a chain.
But then, it had been a long while since he’d felt these particular emotions. Ten minutes in his wife’s presence, and already she’d begun to befuddle him again.
“You really didn’t recognize me,” he said.
She stared at him, suddenly mute and uneasy.
No, of course not. All that easy conversation? That, she’d produced for a stranger. A stranger who she believed had intended to seduce her, no less. Ned scrubbed his hand through his hair.
“Two years? There’s been a wager running for two years to seduce you?”
“What did you suppose would happen? You left me three months after our wedding.” Kate turned away. She took two breaths. He could see the rigid line of her shoulder even under all that wool. And he waited, waited for an outpouring of some kind. A diatribe; an accusation. For anything.
But when she turned back, only the clutch of her gloved hand on her cloak betrayed any unease.
That smile—that damnably enchanting smile—peeked out again. “And here I supposed your departure was the masculine equivalent of sounding the bugle to presage the hunt for your fellow gentlemen. You could not have declared it hunting season on Lady Kathleen Carhart any more effectively if you’d taken out an advertisement in the gossip circulars.”
“That’s certainly not what I intended.”
No. His thinking had taken a different cast altogether. When he’d left for China, he’d been young and idiotic; old enough to insist that he was an adult, and not wise enough to realize how far he was from the truth. He’d spent his early years playing the dissolute and useless spare to his cousin’s rigid, rule-bound heir.
He’d made himself sick on the uselessness of himself. When he’d married, he had hungered to prove that he wasn’t a child. That he could take on any task, no matter how difficult, and demonstrate that he had grown into a strong and dependable man.
He’d done it, too.
One woman—one who had already sworn to honor and obey him—shouldn’t have seemed so insurmountable a prospect.
Ned shook his head and looked at Kate. “No,” he repeated. “When I left, I wasn’t trying to send any message. It didn’t have anything to do with you at all.”
“Oh.” Her lips whitened and she looked ahead. “Well. Then. I suppose that’s good to know.”
She turned around and began to walk away. Ned felt the pit of his stomach sink, as if he’d said something utterly stupid. He couldn’t think what it was.
“Kate,” he called. She stopped. She did not look at him, but there was something—perhaps the line of her profile—that suggested a certain wariness.
He swallowed. “That wager. Did anyone succeed?”
She stiffened slightly, and then her shoulders lowered in defeat. Now she did turn around.
“Oh, Mr. Carhart.” It was the first time she had spoken his name since he’d returned, and she imbued those few syllables with all the starch of sad formality. “As I recall, I vowed to forsake all others, keeping only unto you, for as long as we both should live.”
He winced. “I wasn’t questioning your honor.”
“No.” She put her hands on her waist and then looked up at him. “I merely wish to remind you that it was not I who forgot our wedding vows.”
And with those words, she glanced up the packed dirt of the path to where his gray mare stood. She let out a deep sigh and turned away once more. For a second, Ned imagined grabbing her wrist again, imagined himself swiveling her around to face him. She wouldn’t look at him with sadness or that wary distance. In fact, distance was the last thing he wanted between them—
She cast him one final glance and then crossed to his mare, which was cropping grass by the side of the road. “One solution to your logical dilemma?” she said. “Get another boat.”
She took his horse’s reins and wrapped them around her wrist. And before he could say another word, she set off down the track.
Champion’s reaction to Ned’s mare meant that he could not walk close to Kate, not without risking a repeat of that skittish rearing and bolting. He perforce trailed after her, feeling rather like a clumsy duckling to her elegant swan.
The English countryside smelled like dust and autumn sunshine. His wife walked ten yards ahead of him. She strode as if she might outrun his existence entirely, if only she put one foot in front of the other quickly enough. Maybe it was madness, that he imagined he could catch the scent of her on the breeze—that half remembered smell of fine-milled soap and lilac. It was even more foolish to watch her retreating backside and wonder what else might have changed about her while he wasn’t looking.
Her hair, or what he could see of it from under that floppy gray bonnet, was still such a pale blond as to appear almost platinum. Her eyes still snapped gray when angry. As for her waist… He hadn’t lied when he said he recognized her by the feel of her waist in his hands. He hadn’t touched her often, but it had been enough. She was delicate, with that fine, elegant figure and those pale gray eyes ringed by impossibly long lashes.
When he’d married her, she had seemed like some bright creature. A butterfly, perhaps, its wings vibrant and shimmering in the sunlight. When she had smiled at him, Ned felt himself wanting to believe that it would be June forever, all warmth and blue skies. Instinctively, he’d shied away from that promise of eternal summer. After all, one didn’t talk to a butterfly about the coming snow, no matter how bright its wings appeared to be.
Fewer than twenty-four hours back in England, and he’d rediscovered how much of a threat his wife still posed to his equanimity. A man in control of himself wouldn’t have wanted to press her against that damned gritty stone wall, in broad daylight. A man in control of himself enjoyed his wife within the careful, pleasant confines of marriage.
Well. Ned had faced down a captain in Her Majesty’s Navy. He’d issued orders to an officer in the East India Company. He wasn’t the foolish boy who had left England, eager to prove himself. And he wasn’t about to let a little desire get the best of his discipline now.
The road ran on, and a fine sheen of dust gathered on the wool of his coat. They turned off the track and onto a wide, tree-lined way. Ned knew the road well. They were approaching Berkswift, his childhood country home. He supposed it was her home now, too; odd, that their lives had intertwined so, even in his absence.
As he walked down the lane, the lazy smell of cultivated earth recently turned in preparation for winter wheat, wafted to him. Even before they broke through the line of trees that shielded the estate from the road, Ned could conjure up the image of the manor in his mind—the golden-rose of the stone facade, the three long wings, the graveled half ring out front for carriages. At this time of the morning, the yard would stand empty, waiting to be filled by the day’s activities.
But as they came through the final copse of young birches, they did not find quiet. Instead, the drive was busy: positively boiling with servants. The cause of their work was clear. Three heavy black carriages stood on that circular drive before the house. Ned could make out a coat-of-arms, picked out in blue and silver, on the one standing nearest him.
In front of him, Kate stopped. Her entire body froze, her posture as rigid as a duelist poised at thirty paces. As he came abreast of her, she cut her eyes toward him.
“Did you invite him?” She gestured toward the coat of arms. “Did you invite him here?” She had not raised her voice, but her pitch had
risen a note or two.
“I just arrived in England myself.”
“That’s not an answer. Did you invite the Earl of Harcroft?”
That would be Eustace Paxton, the Earl of Harcroft. Most of the ton was related in some twisted fashion. Harcroft was Ned’s third cousin, twice-removed, on his father’s side. They’d been friends, of a sort, for years. He’d married even younger than Ned had. And just before Ned had left London, Lord and Lady Harcroft had done Ned a favor.
Kate was still watching him, her lips compressed in sudden wariness.
“No,” he said slowly. “The only one I’ve spoken to so far was my solicitor.” And even if word of his return had traveled, as no doubt it would, Ned didn’t see how Harcroft could have mustered himself out of bed in time to actually beat Ned to Berkswift, and traveling by heavy carriage no less.
Beside him, Kate frowned, as if he’d committed some egregious breach of manners. Maybe he had. Eight months aboard ship and a man forgot a great many things.
“I think that’s Jenny and Gareth’s carriage in front. Maybe they’ve come with Harcroft?” Gareth was his cousin, Gareth Carhart, the Marquess of Blakely; Jenny, his marchioness.
Kate smoothed her skirts with her hands, brushing them away from Ned subtly, as if whatever disease of gaucherie he carried might be catching.
“Lord and Lady Blakely,” she said primly, “are welcome here.” She stared forward fixedly and let out her breath.
She said nothing of Louisa or her husband. Kate and Louisa had seemed on their way toward friendship when Ned had left. Clearly, a great deal had transpired in Ned’s absence.
When Kate inhaled again, she straightened. It was as if she’d taken in a lungful of sunshine. Her face lifted, her eyes relaxed, her shoulders lost their rigid cast. If he hadn’t seen her unease just seconds before, he might have believed her expression genuine. “Unexpected houseguests,” she said. “What a pleasure this will be.”
And, handing the horse she had been leading to a groom, she walked in.
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