A little scandal

by Patricia Cabot

  He continued speaking, of course. That was not all he said. He spoke for some time, and with a good deal of energy. But Kate did not hear him. Because he had said that he loved her. He had said that he was in love with her.

  Oh, God. Of all the things he could have said, why had he said that? The one thing, the one thing guaranteed to make her melt! How had he known? How had he known? And how was she supposed to harden herself to him now? It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. He was only saying it because he knew—he knew, dammit—what it did to a girl, hearing the man she loved say something like that. He was using weapons against her for which she had no defense, no defense at all. Oh, God, she told herself.

  “I should have realized it before, I know that,” Burke was saying, when she was able once again to focus on his words. “But it had been so long since I felt anything, anything at all but rage, I didn’t recognize it for what it was, and ... Well, after all, Kate, you know how my first marriage ended. I haven’t exactly been anxious to try that experiment again. But you, Kate. Since you left, I’ve been doing everything I could think of to hasten the end of this empty, blockheaded life of mine ....”

  Remember, she said to herself, trying to summon up the sort of indignation she knew she ought to feel. For he was, after all, the enemy. One of them. A member of the tribe that had, in the end, betrayed her family, and let their killer go unpunished. He could not be trusted.

  She said aloud, her voice constricted, “A black phaeton. With yellow trim.”

  “Kate!” He launched himself across the chaise, and this time, it wasn’t her hand he snatched up, but all of her, taking her in his arms as if she were no weightier than a doll.

  “What,” he demanded, giving her a shake, his livid face just inches from hers, “am I going to have to do to make you forget I ever said any of those things? What am I going to have to do? This?”

  And then he was kissing her.

  As simple as that, he was kissing her, and she ...

  Well, she thawed.

  He was an excellent kisser, Burke Traherne. Not that she hadn’t known that before. She remembered, only too well. But as if he wanted to be sure—perfectly sure—she hadn’t forgotten, he reminded her, his mouth moving over hers in a slightly inquisitive manner—not tentatively, by any means, but as if he were asking a question for which only she, Kate, had the answer.

  It wasn’t until Kate felt the intrusion of his tongue inside her mouth that she realized she’d answered that question, somehow—though she hardly knew how, much less what that question had been ... until suddenly there was nothing questioning at all in his manner; he’d launched the first volley and realized that Kate’s defenses were down. That, then, had been the question. Now he attacked, showing no mercy.

  It was then that it struck Kate, as forcibly as a blow, that this kiss was something out of the ordinary, and that perhaps she was not in as much control of the situation as she would have liked. Though she struggled against the sudden, dizzying assault on her senses, she could no sooner free herself from the hypnotic spell of his lips than the iron grip in which he held her. She went completely limp in his arms, except for her hands, which, as if of their own volition, slipped around his neck, tangling in the surprisingly soft hair at the nape of his neck. What was it, she wondered dimly, about the introduction of this man’s tongue into her mouth that seemed to have a direct correlation to a very sudden and very noticeable tightening sensation between her thighs?

  Even in her heightened state of arousal, Kate was not unaware of the fact that Burke seemed to be suffering a similar discomfort. She could feel it, pressing urgently through the rings of her crinoline. He had let out a low moan, smothered against her mouth, when she’d slid her hands around his neck, and now, as his need for her chafed against the front of his trousers, his strong arms tightened possessively around her. Callused fingers caressed her through the thin material of her dress, and she realized they were moving inexorably close to her breasts. If she let him touch her there, she’d be lost, she knew.

  And she had to stop him, because she was no Sara Woodhart, who was loose enough to enjoy without compunction the attentions of men she had no intention of marrying. She was Kate Mayhew, who had a reputation to uphold. Granted, that reputation was not exactly a flawless one, but it was all she had, after all ....

  And then those strong, yet incredibly gentle, fingers closed over one of her breasts, the nipple of which had already gone hard against the heat of his palm.

  Tearing her mouth away from his and placing a restraining hand against his wide chest, Kate brought accusing eyes up to his face, and was startled by what she saw there, a mouth slack with desire and green eyes filled with ... with what? Kate could not put a name to what she saw within those orbs, but it frightened as much as it thrilled her.

  She had to put a stop to this madness, before things went too far again.

  “Burke,” she said, through lips that felt numb from the bruising pressure of his kiss. “Let go of me.”

  Burke lifted his head, his expression as dazed as a man who’d just been roused from sleep. Blinking down at her, he gave every indication of having heard her, and yet his hand, still anchored upon her breast, tightened, as if he had no intention of releasing her. When he spoke, it was with a hoarse voice, his intonations slurred.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “The last time I let go of you, you went away, and it was three months before I saw you again.”

  So what if in response, she seized his face in both her hands and dragged it down until his lips were on hers again? Who could blame her? It wasn’t as if she could help it. It wasn’t as if it made her happy, the ease with which he was able, with the merest touch, to render her so helpless in his hands. Especially when those hands were doing things to her, as they were just then. For though he kept one hand clamped firmly around the back of her neck, beneath the fall of her hair, obviously to keep her from pulling away—as if she’d ever be foolish enough to want to do that—the other was still singeing her breast straight through the material of her dress, and threatening to dip even lower ....

  But not before the carriage driver was rapping on the door, telling them that the roads were too flooded to travel, and would his lordship mind waiting out the storm at this inn to which he’d just now pulled up?

  Chapter Twenty-six

  It was the thunder that woke her. It rattled the glass in the window beside her bed.

  Kate sat up in the darkness, and stretched out to move the small curtain aside. Outside was only darkness, covered in a blanket of streaming water. She knew it had to be very late, because she could not see the lights in the windows of the hostelry across the road. The small village at which they’d been forced to make their unscheduled stop was asleep. Everyone in England, she imagined, was asleep.

  Except for her.

  It was a mercy, she supposed, that the thunder had wakened her when it did. She had been caught in the net of another one of those dreams—those horrible, wonderful dreams she’d been having ever since that fateful day she’d happened to spy the marquis at his bath; dreams she’d continued to have long after she’d left his company, dreams that left her, every time she waked from one of them, hot and breathless, with a hand between her legs. It was shocking. It wasn’t any way for a lady to behave.

  And yet she could no more stop herself from dreaming of him, it seemed, than she could stop herself from breathing.

  And so, in the end, she’d been forced to give up trying. She now never even bothered putting on a nightdress, because she knew perfectly well it would only end up over her head and tangled in her bedclothes by morning. And when she woke with her hand clenched between her legs, she simply kept it there.

  It had seemed the best way, overall, to handle the situation. Certainly better than doing what she’d longed to, which was to return to Park Lane, knock on Lord Wingate’s door, and beg him to take her back.

  But now he wasn’t miles away in London. He was in th
e room next door, sleeping soundly, like any good British citizen should have been, at such an hour. He had been politely attentive to her all through dinner, and had not renewed his wild proposal from the chaise ... nor the more physical proposal he’d made a little later. Possibly that was because now that he’d had time to reflect, he realized marrying the daughter of the notorious Peter Mayhew was not, perhaps, the wisest course of action.

  Not, Kate supposed, that she could blame him.

  Lightning filled her bedroom. Ten seconds later, thunder rumbled again, not as loudly as before. The storm, which had followed them from Lynn Regis, was moving away at last. With any luck, by morning it would be gone, and they’d have clear roads to Scotland.

  Which was why, Kate told herself, she was a fool to lie here, blinking in the darkness. She ought to get some sleep. She had a long, arduous day of travel ahead of her.

  She had just closed her eyes when she heard something that wasn’t thunder or the rain. Opening her eyes again, she sat up and looked about the night-shrouded room. Roadhouses were notoriously rat infested, although this one had appeared to her to be cleaner than most, and she’d seen more than a few cats slinking about the place. Still, even Lady Babbie had been known to let a big one get away. Sweeping a hand to the floor, Kate snatched up one of her boots, and hurled it in the direction from which she’d heard the noises.

  Kate, whose aim had always been good, knew she had scored a hit when she heard someone say, “Oof!”

  But rats didn’t say “Oof.”

  Then, after a clatter which was undoubtedly the boot falling to the floor, Lord Wingate’s voice cut through the darkness. “Dammit, Kate,” he hissed. “It’s only me.”

  It was Lord Wingate—opening the small adjoining door between their two rooms, a door Kate had not, of course, thought to lock before she’d retired. Well, she certainly hadn’t thought he might be bold enough to try for a nocturnal assault. She had requested, a bit nervously, that they take separate rooms, and Lord Wingate had not argued.

  Now she saw why. They had separate rooms, all right. Separated by a door.

  She heard the strike of a match, and then light flooded the little room. He had brought a candle with him, and now he raised it, and looked at her by the light of its flame. Too late, she remembered she hadn’t a stitch of clothing on, and she snatched the sheets close to her chest.

  “What do you want?” She averted her eyes from what the candlelight revealed, which was that he wore only a dressing gown, the front of which had fallen open above the sash when he’d raised the candle, revealing a long vee of exposed chest.

  “I thought I heard you call me,” he said.

  “Well,” she said. “I didn’t.”

  Although even as she said it, she was not at all certain it was true. She had certainly been dreaming of him just minutes before, and she very well might have cried out his name during one of the dream’s more erotic moments.

  “Kate,” he said, placing the candle on the small table beside her bed. “I heard you distinctly. I was reading, and—”

  She pulled the sheets higher, the closer he came to the bed. “I may have called you,” she admitted grudgingly. “But only in my sleep. I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

  Only unfortunately, instead of being insulted and going away, Lord Wingate actually lowered himself onto the mattress beside her, and put his elbows on his knees, and his face in his hands.

  “It’s all right. I couldn’t sleep anyway,” he said to the floorboards. “There’s no possible way we’ll get there in time, you know, Kate. Not with all this rain.”

  Isabel. That was all he wanted. To speak of Isabel.

  “Oh, no,” she said, with a certainty she was far from feeling. “We’ll find her. Of course we will.”

  “No.” His back was to her, his face hidden from view, but everything about him conveyed the enormous pain and guilt he was feeling. “We won’t. We’ll be too late. And then she’ll have to marry him.”

  Kate, struck by the pathos in his deep, masculine voice, reached out in spite of herself, and laid a hand sympathetically upon his broad, strong back. For the situation was far graver than Burke had imagined. Daniel Craven would never marry Isabel. Kate knew that.

  But she couldn’t, of course, tell the girl’s father that.

  “Not necessarily,” she said, with an optimism she was far from feeling. “I mean, Isabel is headstrong, yes, but she isn’t stupid, Lord Wingate.”

  “For God’s sake,” he said, and it sounded to Kate as if he were speaking through gritted teeth, although she couldn’t tell for sure, since he still didn’t turn to face her. “Call me by name, Kate. When you say ‘Lord Wingate,’ it sounds so cold, I can’t bear it.”

  She hesitated. “All right,” she said finally. “All right. Burke, then. Certainly you’ve spoken to your daughter about ... well, about what goes on between a man and a woman. Haven’t you?”

  He still didn’t turn around. “Of course not,” he said bitterly. “I thought you did.”

  “Me?” Kate raised her eyebrows. “Certainly not! Whatever would have made you think—”

  “Well, you taught her everything else. You taught her how to dress, and do her hair. I just assumed—”

  “But Lord—I mean, Burke. Really, it’s up to the parent to speak to his child about such things ....”

  “Well, I never did, all right?”

  He swung around then, and faced her. Kate instantly wished he hadn’t. The candlelight brought into high relief the planes of his face, which, though not at all handsome, had a strength and undeniable masculinity that Kate had always found perfectly irresistible. And now, creased as it was with concern for his daughter, Lord Wingate’s face was, to her, more attractive than ever.

  “It never occurred to me,” he said. “I raised her from a baby, Kate. I’m the one who saw that she bathed, and dressed, and ate. I couldn’t do everything. You know how she is. It was all I could do just to make sure she wore clothes every day. And it wasn’t exactly a subject upon which she ever expressed the slightest curiosity. Not that, if she had, I’d have known what to say. There are some things—very few, but some—that fathers simply can’t explain to their daughters.”

  Kate dropped her gaze. She had to, or risk transferring the hand that had been on his back to his cheek, which, though rough with a day’s growth of bristles, looked eminently strokable. Remember, she told herself.

  “Well,” she said. “Then perhaps, if he should try something, Isabel will be so shocked, she’ll leave him.”

  She could feel his gaze on her, though she hadn’t the strength to look him in the eye. “It was Craven,” he said abruptly.

  Kate blinked at him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “It was Craven,” he said again. “Isabel told me it was Daniel Craven that night in the garden, and not Lord Palmer. And yet you let me think it was. Why?”

  Kate, startled by this sudden change of subject, swallowed, but still she did not lift her gaze from the quilt she’d kicked in her sleep to the bottom of her bed. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Not anymore.”

  “It does matter,” he said urgently. “It matters a good deal, indeed. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She licked her lips. Her mouth had suddenly gone very dry. “Well,” she said. “I suppose ... I suppose because I didn’t want you to kill him. I thought .... I thought that would just cause another scandal, and it seemed to me there’d been enough of those to go round ....”

  “You were protecting me?” he asked incredulously. “You allowed me to believe something terrible about you, in order to protect me?”

  She made the mistake of looking up, then. “And Isabel,” she said, not wanting him to think she’d done it for him. Because then, of course, he might think she cared. Which she did not. She most definitely did not.

  And yet it seemed doubtful, when he looked into her eyes, that he was going to continue to believe that for long. Because she was certain that penetrating
gaze of his had seen right through the charade of uncaring she’d been trying so carefully to construct. Just as, it seemed, he could see right through the sheet she’d held hiked up to her chin, as if its meager shelter could protect her from what she knew—with mingled feelings of excitement and nervousness—was about to happen.

  “Then,” he said, in that same deceptively gentle voice he’d used in the carriage, “you must have liked me a little, Kate. If you wanted to protect me from scandal, I mean.”

  She wanted to look away. She wanted more than anything to look away. So why couldn’t she? All she seemed able to do was sit there and stare into his eyes, noticing, now that he was sitting so close, that they weren’t completely green, after all. There were tiny gold specks in them, like tiny goldfish, swimming in a green pond.

  “I suppose I did,” Kate said. “Then.”

  “But you don’t,” he said, reaching for the sheet she was holding on to, “anymore?”

  “Correct,” she said, tightening her grip on the thin linen.

  “Then why,” he asked, giving the sheet the gentlest of tugs, “are you here?”

  “I told you,” she said. “I came for Isabel—”

  But that was all she managed to get out before he leaned down and covered her mouth with his own.

  As far as kisses went, she supposed this one was fairly devastating. It wasn’t like the hard, possessive kisses he had given her that night in his library. Nor was it like the sweet, exploratory kisses they’d shared afterward, in his bedroom, before he’d started talking so wildly of bookshops and phaetons. It was more like the one in the carriage ....

  Although not exactly like that one, either. Because this one was filled with something Kate couldn’t recognize, not having encountered it before. And yet, as Lord Wingate—Burke. When was she going to remember to call him Burke?—kissed her, she began to realize what that something was.