“Kate,” he said. His fists had started to unclench—not just the ones at the end of his arms, but the one that had been growing again in his stomach. It wasn’t so much because of what she’d said, either ... though what she had said had been enough, more than enough, to assuage his rage. It was more because of the way she’d said it, the throb in her voice, the blush, the fact that she couldn’t meet his gaze. Suddenly, the reason behind her animosity toward him became clear. At least, he thought so.
“Kate,” he said again, longing to reach for her hand, but restraining himself, since he felt he’d already scored victory enough simply by getting her to admit as much as she had. “Listen to yourself. Did you hear what you just said? If what you just said is true, how can you even think of not marrying me?”
To his utter astonishment, Kate—even-tempered, rational Kate—let out a sob. She turned her face away, so he could not see it past the wide brim of her bonnet ... but he saw her slender shoulders shake, and quite definitely heard the sob.
But when he instinctively reached out toward her, those shoulders stiffened at once. The next thing he knew, she had crushed herself against the side of the chaise farthest from him, and cried, still without looking at him, “For God’s sake, can’t you sit over there and leave me alone?”
Burke did as she asked, but only because he could see she was in no mood to be appealed to rationally. Slumping against the back of the seat, he eyed her, wondering if it was possible that sometime during the night—or rather, the early hours of the morning, perhaps after he’d left to talk to the driver—someone had come along and taken the sweet, reasonable Kate he’d known, and replaced her with this irrational, upsetting Kate. He had long thought her the least changeable woman he had ever met, not at all prone to the sort of temperamental sulks and fits he’d grown accustomed to from other women of his acquaintance, most notably his own daughter.
And yet now he was discovering that any woman, no matter how rationally she carried herself the majority of the time, could be struck by these sudden and completely unexplainable mood swings.
Unless, of course, there was some reason Kate was behaving this way. Some reason, aside from the obvious one, that she was still angry with him for trying to make her his mistress. But he had already apologized for that, as well as tried to make it up to her by proposing. So why was she still so upset? He did not believe she was the type of woman to hold a grudge. If she were, she never would have agreed to help him search for Isabel.
Well, she’d get over it, he supposed. When all this was over—when, God willing, they found Isabel, and Kate, as he knew she would, reasoned her out of this mad plan to marry that bastard Craven—then he would make it all up to her.
See if he didn’t.
Chapter Twenty-eight
It was past midnight by the time they arrived in Gretna Green. Kate had long since sunk into an uneasy and not very comfortable sleep, and when the chaise finally stopped moving, she didn’t wake up. Instead, she settled herself more deeply into the seat, appreciative that the jolting she’d endured for so many hours was halted at long last.
But she wasn’t allowed to sleep for long. Soon she was being rocked again, not by the motion of the moving carriage, but by a hand upon her shoulder.
“Kate, wake up.” The marquis’s breath was warm upon her ear. “We’re here.”
She rolled over irritably until her back was to him—not an easy feat, since the seat was narrow, and her crinoline very wide, indeed. Still, she was comfortable—well, more comfortable than she’d been all day, anyway—and couldn’t bear the thought of moving.
“I don’t care,” she said, keeping her eyes tightly closed, as if doing so would make him disappear. “Just let me sleep.”
“You can’t sleep in the chaise, Kate.”
Burke’s voice was filled with something undefinable. In her sleepy haze, Kate took it for tolerant amusement, and she wanted to say, I am not a child, even though she knew she was acting like one. Only she was so tired. Why couldn’t he just go away and let her sleep?
Then, the next thing she knew, he’d slipped one arm behind her back, and another beneath her knees, and was lifting her bodily out of the chaise.
Kate was awake at once, fully awake and extremely unhappy. She expressed this unhappiness by sending a fist in the direction of the marquis’s breastbone.
“Put me down,” she said. “I’m not an invalid. I can walk.”
The marquis looked down at the ground. “But Kate—”
“Put me down, I said.”
Burke sighed, and did as she asked. She immediately sank up to her ankles in an enormous puddle of muddy rainwater.
“Oh ....” Dismayed, Kate lifted her hem and looked down at her thoroughly soaked feet. Burke, beside her, looked down at them, as well, as she turned her ankle this way and that, squinting at the damage in the light that spilled from the windows of the inn.
“I tried to tell you,” he said. He didn’t sound tolerant anymore, but he definitely sounded amused. “But you just hit me—”
“I know,” she said.
“You’re the one who insisted on being put down.”
“I know,” she said.
“If you hadn’t found my proximity so repugnant,” he said, “I would happily have carried you all the way up to the room.”
“I know,” she said, this time through gritted teeth. The water was really quite cold.
Beside her, the marquis sighed. Then, bending down, he lifted her again.
This time, Kate did not protest. In fact, she threw her arms around his neck, and held on for all she was worth as he carried her across the stable yard, up the stairs to the inn door, through the door and into the fire lit front room ...
Where Kate saw so many people glance up at them from the tavern tables at which they sat, that she instantly buried her face in his shoulder, so that she did not have to meet their gazes. Burke noticed, of course, and found that amusing, too. She heard him chuckle, deep in his throat.
Well, wasn’t that nice? Wasn’t it just so nice that she was able to provide him with so much amusement?
“It’s not funny,” she said, her voice muffled against his coat.
“It isn’t,” he agreed with her, as he began mounting the stairs to the second floor. “But you are.”
“I’m not,” she said, her voice still muffled. “I’m embarrassed. And tired and hungry and wet and miserable, that’s all. I don’t need people gawking at me.”
“You needn’t worry,” he informed her conversationally. “They think we’re married.”
That made her raise her head. “They do?” she asked. “Why?”
“Well, I had to tell them so, when I found out they only had the one room left.” He stopped walking, suddenly. “And here it is.”
He flung open the door without even jostling her, then placed her gently on a deeply cushioned settle before a huge, roaring fire. Its heat instantly pervaded her damp boots and stockings, making her realize what she hadn’t before, which was that not only was she tired and hungry and wet and miserable, but she’d been quite cold, too.
But the heat, comforting as it was, wasn’t enough to keep her from reflecting that Burke Traherne had an infuriating tendency to get his own way, where she was concerned.
“Supper’s on its way,” Burke said, straightening, and stripping off his gloves and coat. “I can’t vouch for its being edible, this late in the night, but the innkeeper assures me his wife has a meat pie or two tucked away somewhere. So long as it isn’t haggis, I suppose it will be all right.”
Kate felt the heat from the fire warming her face and hands, as well as her near frozen feet. It was a delicious feeling, to have gone so suddenly from such discomfort to such total luxury. Well, not total. She still had to get her boots off, of course, which was going to take some doing, considering that the laces were surely wet through, which would not make them at all easy to manipulate.
“Ah,” she heard Burke say, wh
en there was a tap upon the door. “That must be the food.”
Then he disappeared for a while, and Kale was left by herself in the settle, which wasn’t at all bad, considering the lethargy that was stealing over her, the delightful sleepiness she could feel returning. Really, there was no need to fuss over the fact that he’d managed to make it so that they would once again be sharing a bed. She could sleep right here, right on the settle, and not feel the worse for it. That was what she’d do. She’d sleep right here, without even bothering about her boots. So her toes were wet? They’d dry during the night. And then tomorrow morning, when she was bound to feel horrible again, she would have that many fewer things to worry about ....
“Here.” The marquis shoved something under her nose that steamed. “Drink this.”
The steam, she had to admit, smelled delicious. She asked, “What is it?”, even as she was wrapping her fingers around the handle of the tankard, and tilling it toward her lips.
“Hot buttered rum,” he said.
She made a face, and silently handed the tankard back to him. But he pushed it toward her. He said, “It might help.”
“I feel fine,” Kate said. “But I definitely won’t tomorrow, if I drink that.”
He took the tankard and, with a disapproving frown, removed it from her sight. But just as she was starting to relax a little again, he was back, this time kneeling down beside the settle. He seized her left ankle.
“What,” Kate demanded, bolting upright, “do you think you’re doing?”
“You can’t sit here, Kate, in these wet shoes.” He had lifted her left foot, and placed it on his upright thigh. Now he plucked at the laces of her boot, not meeting her gaze, apparently completely absorbed in his work. “You’ll catch cold.”
She knew he was right, and that what he was doing was hardly as shocking as some of the other activities in which the two of them had engaged the night before. And yet somehow, her modesty—the shreds of it she had left—was outraged.
“You can’t just,” she sputtered, and then realizing she was speaking loudly enough to be heard down the hall, perhapseven all the way belowstairs, lowered her voice. “You can’t just start—start taking off my boots like that.”
“Certainly I can,” he said, sounding infuriatingly reasonable.
“No you can’t,” she insisted. “And you can’t just tell people that we’re married when you know perfectly well we’re not.”
He asked, quite calmly, “What would you have wanted me to do instead, Kate?”
“Well, is this the only inn in Gretna Green? Couldn’t we have found one with two rooms available?”
“After midnight? In this weather? At this time of year, with the hunting so good?” He regarded her humorously above her knee. “Besides, what would have been the point? You know we’d only have ended up together again, in the end.”
She sucked in her breath to hiss, “Burke, last night was a—”
“Mistake,” he said, turning back to her soaked laces. “Yes, yes, I know. This morning, too. You’ve made your feelings on that matter perfectly clear. Turn your foot a little this way, would you, sweetheart?”
“And that’s another thing,” she said. “You can’t call me sweetheart. I am not your sweetheart.” He had pried off her left boot. Now his fingers started to slide up her leg, beneath her skirt. She immediately snatched her foot away.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked with a gasp.
He snatched her foot right back again. “Removing your stocking,” he said, keeping a firm grip on her ankle. “It’s drenched.”
He was right, her stocking was drenched. And bending over to remove it herself, with her corset stays pinching, and her crinoline bunching up, was not something she relished. She was so tired. And his fingers were so warm .....
What was it she’d been saying? Oh, yes. She’d been reminding him—and herself—of how futile it was, this dream that they might, one day, find happiness together.
“I am not your sweetheart,” she repeated, as he went to work on her stocking, which was buttoned to the cuffs of her pantaloons. “I am your daughter’s former chaperone, whom you debauched and—”
“I didn’t debauch you,” Burke interrupted, concentrating very hard on the buttons, which happened to be well under her skirt and crinoline, just above her knee. “You debauched me.”
Kate could feel his breath, as well as the heat from the fire, on her thighs. It was a singularly unusual sensation, despite the fact that she still had the linen of her pantaloons to act as a shield between her bare skin and the heat of both his breath and the fire.
Despite these distractions, she went on, a bit grandly for a woman whose lover’s head was between her knees. “In case you’ve forgotten, I was a virgin. Virgins are incapable of debauching anyone.”
“What kind of virgin,” he wanted to know, having successfully navigated the buttons, and now gently peeling the stocking down her calf, his fingertips just skimming the smooth white skin of her leg, “goes running about the house in the middle of the night dressed the way you happened to be dressed that evening?”
“Are you saying that I wasn’t a virgin?”
“No,” he said, having brought the stocking down past her heel, and up over her toes, then flinging it aside. “I’m just saying that anyone who was guarding her innocence as closely as you seem to think you were would have selected nightwear that was a little less ... arousing.”
He tucked her left foot, now bare, back onto the cushion of the settle, then seized hold of her right foot.
“That,” Kate said, “is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in my life.”
“The person who lures the other,” Burke said, unlacing her right boot a good deal faster than he had her other, now that he’d got the hang of unlacing ladies’ boots, “into sin through the use of her sensuality, is, by definition, the debaucher. Which makes you, Miss Mayhew, the guilty party. And you are not only guilty of debauching me, by the way, but of cruelly deserting me the following day, as well.”
“Only,” she declared, “because you were trying to make me your mistress.”
“And then,” he went on, as if she hadn’t spoken, “when I proposed, I was again coldly rebuffed.”
“You only asked me to marry you because you found out I come from a family that once had some money and property.”
“Not to be offensive, Kate,” he said, as he slowly lifted her skirt again and went to work on her right stocking, having made short work of her right boot. “But though I’m certain you loved your father very much, and he certainly might once have been a gentleman, he died under very different circumstances—”
“It isn’t true,” Kate declared truculently. “What everyone says about him. It isn’t true.”
“—and yet, knowing those circumstances full well, I still want to marry you. So how do you explain that?”
“Lunacy?” she suggested.
But it was becoming difficult to speak, because his fingers were on her again. She felt his knuckles graze the inside of her leg. This sensation, much more so than the feel of the heat of the fire, was what was making it very hard to remember what they were arguing about—or even that they were arguing at all.
“I’ve retained enough of my wits to have gotten us to Scotland in record time, haven’t I?” Burke pointed out.
“Only,” Kate said, “out of fear that your daughter might meet the same fate as I did.”
“Not so,” he said, gently peeling the stocking down the curve of her calf. “If I thought Daniel Craven loved Isabel half so much as I love you, I would not have been opposed to the match.”
She suddenly found it extremely difficult to speak. She cleared her throat. “That,” she said, and had to clear it again. “That—”
“It’s true,” he said. He ran his hand along the skin from which he’d just peeled the sodden stocking. “You know it’s true.”
“I don’t,” she said, having even more trouble sp
eaking now. “I can’t—”
And then speech became completely impossible, because he had lowered his lips to the place where his hand had been. Kate nearly catapulted off the bench when she felt the prickly bite of his whiskers against the silken skin of her thigh, followed immediately afterward by the infinitely gentle caress of his lips—and then the feather-light but white-hot stroke of his tongue.
Kate’s hand flew out. She didn’t know what she was trying to do, stop him, or urge him on. But when her fingers met his thick, dark hair, they seemed to curl instinctively, until she was grasping him closer to her, and not pushing him away, No, not pushing him away at all.
“Burke,” she said, but the name came out sounding funny, more like a gasp than an actual word.
And it didn’t have the effect she’d wanted at all. Instead of stopping, instead of lifting his head, the marquis only became more persistent. He had tugged up the lace-trimmed cuffs of her pantaloons until they were bunched around the middle of her thighs. Now his mouth moved steadily up her leg, seeming to incinerate every inch of skin it encountered along the way—in a manner not unlike the way the fire, blazing before them, was rapidly turning the wood at its center to ash. Kate felt as if the marquis’s tongue was turning her to ash ....
And it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, this being consumed in flame.
Oh, no. Not at all.
And then his fingers, sly and knowing, were slipping through the slit in the gusset of her pantaloons. Kate inhaled sharply as she felt them brush against her warm, moist core—not once, which might have been accidental, nor even twice, but three times, each contact sending jolts of pleasure through her.
And then they stayed there, those strong, competent fingers, purposefully pressing against that part of her which for so long had craved his touch. Kate’s own fingers gripped his hair verytightly now, tightly enough to have hurt, if he’d been in a state of mind to notice anything except her breathless excitement, and the eager pounding of his own heart.
A little scandal Page 29