In Love With a Wicked Man (22 page)

“Stop flogging yourself over that,” he said gently. “I was glad for the holiday from—” He couldn’t find the words. A man could not escape himself; not for long.

“What?” she said. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” he said, giving her hand a gentle squeeze. “You look lovely tonight, Kate. That dress . . . well, there are no words, really.”

Her head still tucked against his shoulder, Kate gave a muffled laugh. “I wore it with the notion of seducing you,” she said in a voice of quiet confession. “But this does not seem like seduction.”

And yet it was. It was the most dangerous sort of seduction. The kind that made a man ache with longing and regret, and wish for things he ought never have.

“Ah, Kate,” he said, kissing her forehead again. “We are fools.”

“Perhaps,” she said.

And there seemed nothing left to do save kiss her. To run that awful risk of further hurting her. Besides, Kate had caught the resignation in his voice, and already lifted her head from his shoulder. So Edward tipped up her chin with his finger, and brushed his lips over hers.

“
Kate
,” he whispered.

Kate’s arm came up to curl around his neck, and the kiss fired to something hotter and sweeter. He felt her breath hitch. He stroked the seam of her lips, then pushed them open with his tongue, thrusting inside to entwine his tongue around hers.

She made a sweet sound of pleasure, her nails curling into the wool of his coat collar. She tasted tart, like wine, and smelled of soap and new-mown grass. Clean and pure.

Yes, seduction of the worse sort. The innocent sort, perfectly designed to entice a man who had known nothing but depravity. Any bought-and-paid-for female could seduce a man with her body and her wiles; some would do it just to prove they could. But this was a seduction of the heart. A longing so deep it drove like a spike into his soul.

He stroked his tongue sinuously along hers, one hand still set to the curve of her face, and felt her quicken to his touch. Her hand was pressed to his heart, warming his skin through the silk of his waistcoat. He tried to keep his mind on the door, to stay alert to any sound, but it was useless. She drowned him in desire.

But it was Kate who broke the kiss and pulled away, her breath a little fast.

“Kate?” he murmured, his eyes searching her face in the darkness.

“Come to my bed tonight,” she said on a rush.

Already he could feel blood surging. His cock hardening. The will to say no vanishing.

Edward brushed his lips over hers. “Yes,” he whispered. “Midnight?”

She nodded. “I had better go back inside,” she said, scooting away and leaping to her feet. “You will come? I have seduced you?”

He felt himself smile in the darkness, and for once there was no bitterness in it. “You had me seduced, Kate, from the moment I opened my eyes at Bellecombe.”

“Edward,” she said quietly, “you don’t have to say that. I know I’m not . . .”

“Beautiful?” he gently supplied. “Your beauty, Kate, is quiet. Elegant and graceful. And for however brief a time we are lovers, I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell me what I think.”

“Well. It seems you know your own mind, then.” She started toward the door, but stopped to glance back at him in the gloom. “Edward, you’re very kind,” she whispered. “And I
do
know you. Forgive me for saying I did not.”

“Kate, love, I am not that man,” he said. “The man who opened his eyes and saw your face. The man who teased and flirted with you so blithely. That isn’t me; it never will be. So I misled you. And I’m sorry for it.”

Kate slowly shook her head. “Perhaps you have let your work—or your past—determine who you think you are,” she said, her voice a little tremulous. “But there is another man inside of you. I know. I have seen him.”

“You saw a man with a fractured skull.”

She laughed weakly. “No, just a bump on the head,” she countered. “I saw you,
Ned
Quartermaine. And you are a very decent sort of man.”

But he was not. Nor was he even gentleman enough to correct her. Moreover, it would have done no good. Kate was half in love with him. Or in love with the notion of being in love, at least.

Still, Kate made Edward wish he’d lived his life a little differently. That he had not resigned his army commission in such a fury, angrily pursuing something he’d never been meant to have. Even the bastard son of the Duchess of Dunthorpe had had a chance to make something decent of himself.

But he had snuffed out that chance and—in a young man’s fit of grief and rage—turned into something not so very different from what his father had been.

And now that man was going to Kate’s bed. It was unconscionable, really. His intentions were not honorable.
He
was not honorable.

He rose and went into the lamplight, then extracted his pocket watch.

Midnight, it seemed, could not possibly come soon enough.

CHAPTER 11

A Romantic Assignation

“K
ate, you should have a real maid,” said Nancy, drawing the brush through her sister’s hair. “A lady’s maid, I mean. Like Mamma has Tillie.”

“What, someone who’s paid to listen to my tantrums? And to pick up the shoes I hurl across the room?” On a laugh, Kate lifted her gaze to the mirror. “No. I have you, Nancy. For now.”

“For now,” her sister agreed, drawing the brush again.

Nancy stood in her nightgown and wrapper just behind Kate, her luxuriant strawberry-blonde hair hanging down her back in riotous curls, shimmering in the firelight as she brushed out Kate’s unusually elaborate arrangement.

They had always made do this way, she and Nancy; taking turns brushing out and lacing up and unhooking whatever required unhooking. Kate was the seamstress, expert at replacing buttons and darning up rips. Nancy had a way with ribbons and colors, often laughingly declaring that, were Kate left to her own devices, she’d simply dress in shades of brown so that nothing need match.

Given all that, a lady’s maid had seemed an unnecessary extravagance. So, at the end of a late evening—if it ran past dear Peppie’s bedtime—it was always just Kate and Nancy.

Nancy had found a stray pin at the nape of Kate’s neck, and was working it free. “How did you find Aurélie tonight?” she asked evenly.

“Ooh, now there’s a weighty question,” said Kate, watching her in the mirror. “On the whole, she’s been on quite shockingly good behavior. She isn’t flirting
too
outrageously with any of the gentlemen, nor drinking too much champagne. And she’s stopped pushing Reggie in my face.”

“She still insists on seating you near one another at dinner,” Nancy pointed out, tossing the hairpin onto Kate’s dressing table.

“Yes.” Kate sighed. “There is that.”

“
Hmm
,” said her sister, taking up her brush again.

Nancy wanted to talk about something, Kate could tell. A little anxiously—and selfishly—she glanced at the ormolu clock on her mantelpiece. Half past eleven.

She returned her gaze to the mirror before her. “So, how does Aurélie like Richard?”

“She adores him as much as I do,” said Nancy. “Can you not tell?”

“And yet tonight,” Kate murmured, “you danced with every gentleman present
except
Richard. Well, and Edward.”

“Actually, Edward was the only gentleman I did ask,” Nancy admitted, “but he turned me down. What is your point?”

“That Aurélie is flinging gentlemen at you,” Kate grumbled. “Her new scheme, I daresay, is to torment poor Richard into doing something rash. Do be careful, Nancy, please.”

Actually, it had been obvious for the last two days that Aurélie had surrendered to Richard’s earnest charm and utter devotion to Nancy. But whether that would translate into support for Nancy’s marriage—or something more devious—Kate could not have said. Perhaps she had been too fixated on her own desires to spare Nancy’s a thought.

In any case, Aurélie’s support, or lack thereof, scarcely mattered; in keeping with England’s archaic laws, a woman was not thought competent to grant a daughter permission to marry. Only her father or her guardian could do so. And since Nancy’s father was dead, that left only her guardian . . .

“Uncle Upshaw is coming,” Kate warned. “By midweek, at the latest.”

Nancy sighed, and tossed the brush onto the dressing table with a clatter. “Well, that will just ruin everything,” she said. “Uncle will frighten Richard to death. And the fact that Aurélie thinks we should marry will just turn him further against Richard.”

Kate widened her eyes. “
Does
she think you should marry?”

Nancy shifted her gaze and shrugged. “Oh, who can ever know, Kate, what Aurélie really thinks?” she said. “All she’ll do is wink and smile and tell me to trust that all will come aright in the end.”

“Yes, just like a fairy tale!” said Kate mordantly. She rose from the dressing bench, and gave her sister a hug. “I will speak strongly to Uncle Upshaw, Nan,” she said, “
if
you’re sure that no one else will do?”

Tears welled in Nancy’s eyes—and, as with everything she did, Nancy was beautiful when she cried. “No one else
will ever do
,” she said. “I wish to be Richard’s wife. I wish to work at his side for the greater good of our parish. Why can no one see the honor in that?”

“I see it,” said Kate, catching her sister’s hands and giving them a squeeze. “I will talk to Uncle, and I will make him see it—or at the very least, Nancy, I will do my best. I promise.”

“Your opinion will go twice as far as Mamma’s, at least,” said Nancy, blinking hard. “All she ever says is ‘La-de-da, never mind Upshaw! He’s just a stick-in-the-mud to be got round.’ ”

“Hmm. Well.” Kate kissed her sister’s cheek. “I’ll do all I can. I promise. Night, Nan.”

“Yes. Good night.” Her sister was halfway to the door when she stopped and spun around again, her pretty brow furrowed. “But Kate . . .”

“Yes?” Kate was already climbing into bed by way of discouraging any lingering. “What is it?”

“What did Aurélie and Anstruther quarrel about tonight?”

“Tonight?” Mystified, Kate shook her head. “When? I didn’t see any quarrel.”

“A while after the dancing started,” said Nancy. “Mamma tried to coax him onto the floor but he wouldn’t go, so she grabbed . . . someone. De Macey? Afterward, she spoke a few words with Edward—with Mr. Quartermaine, I mean—then he stalked off somewhere, too. Outside, I think. And next I knew Aurélie and Anstruther were out in the passageway looking daggers at one another.”

“Good heavens.”

“Not shouting, mind,” Nancy added. “Aurélie is too refined to hurl shoes or words or anything else outside her bedchamber. But I know her temper when I see it—and Anstruther’s, too.”

Kate winced. “I will talk to him,” she assured Nancy. “Whatever Aurélie did—well, I shall undo it. Something to do with tomorrow’s shooting, no doubt.”

“Oh, yes. Probably.” But Nancy didn’t leave. “Oh, and Kate? I wanted to tell you—Mrs. Cockram cornered Reggie before dinner tonight.”

“Oh, Lord.” Squire Cockram’s wife was the village’s second-best gossip, nearly neck-and-neck with Mrs. Shearn. “What did she say?”

Fleetingly, Nancy hesitated. “She said the entire village was happy to see him home,” she answered, “and that they trusted the two of you had ‘grown up a bit.’ That everyone was counting on him this time. I think the implication was clear.”

“All too clear,” said Kate sardonically. “Well. I think we can assume that word of Heatherfields having been sold to Edward has not got round yet.”

“No, not a whisper.” Nancy wrung her hands a little. “Kate, ought I not have told you? I don’t want to worry you. I
don’t
.”

Kate smiled. “It does not matter,” she lied. “Good night, Nancy.”

With a niggling sense of guilt for having rushed her sister away, Kate slipped from the bed and dashed back to her dressing room as soon as Nancy shut the door. She bathed and brushed her teeth all over again, and dabbed on a hint of rosewater.

Then, as she pulled on her best nightgown, Kate caught sight of herself in the mirror.

She felt suddenly such a fraud. She hardly looked like the sort of woman who made midnight assignations with a dangerous, dashing man.

She looked like Miss Katherine Wentworth, ordinary country mouse.

Kate sighed, and sagged down onto her dressing bench. Aurélie would have known how to go on—and probably would have given Kate advice if she’d had gall enough to ask for it. Even Nancy knew how to look tempting; it came to her innately.

Kate picked up the brush Nancy had tossed down and turned it over and over in her hands, wishing she could absorb a little of her sister’s charm from it. Since their accidental tryst in the rose garden, it had dawned on Kate that everything between her and Edward had changed radically. How could she hope to please him now?

Before it had been so much simpler. Making love to a man with no history—no complications, no faults, and no memory—had been a fantasy. It had felt as though they clung to each other in some private and intimate world; an extraordinary place where the ordinary did not exist. Because, in a way, it had not.

But now her ordinary life was all around her and Edward was in the middle of it; no less desirable—but certainly no longer a fantasy. He was a real man with a well-remembered past and some very dangerous edges. She should have considered that more carefully before wriggling into her seductive green and gold dress.

Gowns like that were not meant for girls like her anyway. The dress didn’t make her beautiful, it merely distracted from her ordinariness. And it complicated things. Because Kate’s life was not going to return to normal when Edward left. She had foolishly let herself fall in love with him.

She was in love with wicked Ned Quartermaine, a man who was the very antithesis of what she needed. He was not
Mr. Edward
, handsome, pleasant, and slightly incapacitated houseguest. He was like an uncaged lion roaming loose in her house. He had a stubborn streak, a vile temper, and a scarred past.

Oh, there was great goodness in him, she was certain of it. But he was still the very last sort of man she should have fallen for—and the very last sort who should have fallen for her, because now he could doubtless remember every woman who had come before her. Every lover he had taken to his bed. And Kate didn’t kid herself. There had been many, many women in Ned Quartermaine’s bed.

She wanted to trust that, in Edward’s eyes, she was desirable. But that was so very hard to do. Kate had once believed Reggie desired her—and only her. Oh, men routinely made such claims; she knew that now. But she had not known it then. She had trusted Reggie completely, both as a friend and as her fiancé. She had lost her good sense in his words of love and adoration, and utterly lost her sense of self in the plans they had made for their future.

And if she had perhaps not loved Reggie with a passion that made her heart soar, she had nonetheless loved him sincerely. She had been young, and he was just Reggie; she had known him—and his foibles—all her life. And she had just wanted to be happy. Not giddy. Not desperately, madly in love. She had never expected that.

Yes, in accepting him, Kate had been settling, and contentedly so.

But Reggie had not been settling. He had meant all along to keep Bess, the lovely but penniless widow he’d set up in Bloomsbury. For all Kate knew, he kept her there still—and two or three children in the bargain. She had learnt the hard way that one could not trust a word that came out of Reggie’s beautiful mouth.

She slammed the brush down and willed her hands not to shake. This was stupid. Edward was not Reggie. Men—no matter what Aurélie often said in the midst of a shoe-slinging snit—were not all alike. And if Edward had wanted a beautiful, more experienced lover, she reassured herself, he could have chosen Lady Julia, who had certainly shown him her cards.

Caught between anticipation and anxiety, Kate glanced at the clock.

It was a little past midnight already. He was late. Perhaps he was still playing at billiards with de Macey. Or perhaps he had simply come to his senses. Or perhaps Lady Julia had shown him something besides her cards . . .

A little angry that she had just expended such worry over another man, Kate got up, put out her lamp with a flick of her wrist, then climbed back into bed. Only the fire in the hearth lit her room now. She watched it snap and lick at the coals, its shadows dancing up the wall adjacent, and wondered if this was all there would ever be for her.

A big, empty bed.

In what felt tonight like a big, empty castle.

I
T WAS WELL
past midnight by the time the Comte de Macey banked his last ball and put Edward out of his misery. The dandified Frenchman studied every shot as if it were an exercise in physics upon which the future of his nation hung. He was, in short, a bloody good billiards player, and Edward’s mind had been elsewhere.

In Kate’s bed, specifically.

After racking his cue and paying de Macey his ten-pound wager—the largest he ever permitted himself—Edward glanced at his watch and wondered if Kate would have locked him out by now. Hastily, he retraced his steps from that distant corner of the castle back to the main staircase.

As he started toward the top of the stairs, however, he heard voices in the great hall. Looking through the balustrade, he saw Aurélie Wentworth and Richard Burnham standing on the threshold below. Edward hesitated on the landing, uncertain what to do.

The last of the guests were finally departing, for through the open door, he could see Jasper assisting Squire Cockram into the Burnhams’ coach. The young rector looked anxious to follow. But Mrs. Wentworth clasped one of his hands between her own, her tone lightly teasing.

“And so you wish to marry my daughter,
n’est-ce pas
?” she said, her mouth curled into that odd half smile that seemed perpetually upon her lips. “She is very young, you know.”

“Yes, I wish to marry her desperately.” Burnham swallowed hard, poor devil. “More than anything, ma’am.”

“That is all very well.” She patted his hand a little condescendingly. “But to paraphrase our American friends,
mon cher
, to the victor goes the spoils of war.”

He drew back a fraction. “One does not like to think of love as war.”

Mrs. Wentworth laughed lightly and let his hand go. “Perhaps not, Mr. Burnham, but in my experience, it is very much so,” she said, “and on every level. We fight a battle for love, sometimes every day.”

“Indeed, ma’am?” Both hands free now, the rector was turning his elegant beaver hat around and around by its brim almost anxiously. “I never thought of it in such a light.”

Mrs. Wentworth leaned very near. “Tell me, Richard—
may
I call you Richard?”

“Certainly, I wish you would.”

Again, the almost wicked smile. “Then tell me, Richard,” she said. “Are you that rarest of creatures every woman searches for?”

“Well, I hope so, ma’am. But what sort, precisely?”