Untamed (27 page)

Rourke awoke with a start, nearly tipping over in his chair. He’d been dreaming of Kate, but then that was nothing new. That night’s dream, however, seemed different somehow, achingly vivid. Even awake, the memory stuck with him. Mad though it was, he could almost believe she’d stood there in the study with him. He’d always thought hallucinations to be tricks of the mind that affected the sight, and yet he swore he detected the orange blossom scent of her hair.

But given the breakneck pace she kept up by day, his bride would have retired to bed long ago. Kate must be the most industrious woman Rourke had ever known. Catching her alone during the day was proving all but impossible. The woman operated like a factory machine, her slender hands always engaged in some busy, worthwhile task. In a little over a week, she’d transformed his castle from a ramshackle ruin to a gracious home, winning over his servants and tenants and neighbors alike. So much for the spoiled, selfish termagant he supposed he’d married. Whether patiently repeating a new receipt to his hard-of-hearing cook, delivering a basket of food to a bedridden tenant, or overseeing the concoction of an herbal remedy to ease his elderly neighbor’s gout, Kate was the most giving, least selfish person he’d ever encountered. Her scolding tongue she seemed to reserve for him alone, though their bouts of bantering were more amusing than annoying.

His gaze fell to the play lying on his blotter. The odd thing was, he had no recollection of closing it. He must have done so in his sleep. Once again he’d fallen asleep reading, or rather rereading it, searching the paragraphs of prose for suggestions or even clues on how to go about wooing his lady wife. Unfortunately, in the play, Petruchio’s seduction and the shrew’s surrender occurred offstage. Nor did Master Shakespeare trouble himself to explain how the fictional Kate came to be a shrew in the first place.

When it came to the real-life Kate, Rourke fancied he had that part figured out. Seeing her as a person and not a conquest, he more than suspected her caustic comments and flashes of temper weren’t really shrewishness as much as they were the defenses of a lonely and vulnerable woman. When the other day she’d let slip that her father and sister called her Capable Kate, Rourke had glimpsed the hurt beneath the pride she affected. Thinking of it now, he felt a rush of guilt when he considered that perhaps he wasn’t so very different from her feckless father or spoiled sister or the London swells who’d pursued her. Like them, he’d used her, in his case to further his social ambitions and bolster his pride. Small wonder she wanted him nowhere near her at night. Ever since she’d moved into the adjoining room, he’d slept with one ear cocked, but so far he’d not heard one wee tap upon that connecting door.

Rourke rose to round the desk. Crossing the carpet to the first of several bookshelves, he shoved the copy Daisy and Gavin had given him on the shelf beside its mate. He wanted his bride in his bed, but more than that, he wanted her in his life.

Until now he’d convinced himself that taming her was a sort of rehabilitation on par with the transformation he and his fellow orphans had undergone at Roxbury House. Casting his efforts in that noble light, changing her had seemed as much for her good as his. Once she left off her wildness and settled down to her duty, they could be happy, he knew it. But for the first time since he’d whisked her out of the churchyard and onto the train, he doubted the purity of his motives. He’d stalked her like quarry and then trapped her into a marriage she’d made it clear from the very beginning she didn’t desire. Kate’s happiness had never been his primary consideration. Until now he hadn’t considered it—or her—at all.

Now that he did, he found he no longer cared about taming her. To change one thing about Kate struck him as the height of hubris. But he still meant to win her.

And for that, the play was most definitely not the thing.

The next morning Kate sailed inside the breakfast room, looking so fresh and pretty in a new habit of hunter green that Rourke felt his heart lifting at the sight of her. “Out for a ride, are we?”

“I can’t speak for
we,
but that is certainly my intention.” She picked up a china plate from the sideboard and set about filling it, scarcely sparing him a glance. When she sat down beside him, he fancied a chill wind had entered the room.

He reached out to lightly touch her arm. “Shall I come with you?”

She jerked away as though he’d touched her with a hot brazier rather than his bare hand. “No.” Beneath the short filmy veil of her riding hat, she glowered at him. “And I’ll thank you not to paw me at table.”

Her scornfulness took him back to that day almost two years ago when he’d taken her riding in Hyde Park. She’d accused him of pawing her then, too. Had they really lost so much ground overnight?

Just the other day he’d taken her on a tour of his stables, and he’d proudly pointed out all his stock, including Zeus, his prize Arabian. Rourke had a trainer coming in from Derby. Until the man arrived, the horse wasn’t to be so much as touched by anyone other than himself or the stable manager. Kate had glanced at the beast stomping in his stall and declared she would be quite content to ride Buttercup or a similarly docile mount.

She must have woken up on the wrong side of the bed. Either that or it must be her woman’s time of month. He was as yet hardly in a position to know. When he’d come to bed late last night, he’d actually considered knocking on the connecting door. But setting his ear to the panel, he hadn’t heard so much as a peep coming from her room.

His dog lumbered over to her. Crooning sweet nothings, Kate reached down and scratched the beast’s ears. Watching the slow, gentle movements of her fingers, fingers he’d yet to feel on his bare skin, Rourke owned that he was jealous, actually jealous, of a dog.

She set her plate down on the floor and pushed back her chair to rise. “I’ll be off, then.”

Rourke started up. “Are you certain you don’t want company?”

She hesitated and then lanced him a look,
their
aristocratic look, that straight-through look that said he was invisible to the likes of her. And then she sniffed,
their
sniff, as if to indicate he was dirty or certainly not as sweet-smelling as she. Finally she lifted one side of her mouth in a sneer—
their
sneer—the twisted smile telling him that no matter how much money he made, he would never be worthy. And then she cut him, cut him like a prized diamond slicing through common glass.

“Quite certain I don’t want yours.”

His own wife had given him the Cut Direct.

Stunned, Rourke wandered into his study to work, but instead found himself staring blindly at the ledger. The rows and columns of numbers might as well have been Egyptian hieroglyphics for all the meaning they held. All his life, he’d had a gift for ciphering, but now he couldn’t say for sure that one and one still equaled two.

It was no use. He slammed the ledger closed and mentally reviewed the bizarre breakfast episode once more in his head. Kate’s waspishness reminded of the time when, as a boy at Roxbury House, he’d let Harry and Gavin goad him into poking at the wasps’ nest with his shoe. Like opening his heart to Kate, it had seemed a good idea at the time, but in the end he’d gotten badly stung.

He’d thought they were becoming close, or certainly
closer.
Over the past weeks, their verbal sparring had become more thinly veiled flirtations than declarations of war. A current of unchecked desire undercut their every gesture, glance, and touch. Like the explosive fuses he’d once set to carve railway tunnels from sheets of solid rock, it would be only a matter of time before one or both of them imploded. There was no help for it. Whether she was wooed or not, Rourke was going to have to bed his wife.

When the knock sounded outside his study door, he was grateful for the intrusion. Though he should hold his gratitude in reserve, the thought occurred to him it might be Kate.

“Come in.”

The door opened, revealing not his wife but Hamish Campbell, his stable manager. Tamping down his disappointment, Rourke beckoned the servant inside. Hamish doffed his tweed cap and made a study of the tops of his boots.

Impatient, Rourke prompted, “What can I do for you, Hamish?”

Hamish lifted anguished eyes from the cap he twisted between his hands. “I don’t rightly know, Mr. O’Rourke. I’m not so certain I should have come.”

“My door is always open, you know that. Now tell me, what is the trouble?”

Hamish blew out a breath. “Coming between a man and his wife, carrying tales, well, it’s not ordinarily my way, sir. You know that.”

His heart kicking into a canter, Rourke said, “Out with it, man.”

“It’s your lady, sir. She marched herself out to the stable a short while ago and asked that Zeus be saddled for her. I tried telling her your orders are that no one is to go near Zeus without your permission but … well, she wouldn’t hear of it. Saddled the beast herself and took off like cannon shot.”

Fear fisted Rourke in the gut. The horse showed great promise, but for the time being he was a wilding. He had kicked his way out of his stall and jumped the paddock fence to freedom a good half-dozen times.

“You did the right thing in coming to me.” Rourke was already on his feet, rounding the desk and halfway to the door. “How long ago did she leave?”

“Ten minutes, give or take.”

Rourke considered reprimanding him for waiting that long, only he hadn’t the time to spare. Kate already had ten minutes’ lead on him, assuming she’d managed to keep her seat. If not, she might be lying on the ground injured or worse. It was the prospect of what counted as “worse” that had his pulse pumping and his heart threatening to hammer a hole in his chest.

His hand found the doorknob. The brass slipped in his slick grasp. One foot out into the hallway, he didn’t bother with looking back. “Have my horse saddled at once.”

When I get my hands on you, Kate …

He left the thought unfinished, the alternative too frightening to bear.

Sod off, Rourke.

Kate pressed her knees into the stallion’s sides, and the animal took off through the open barn door. She crouched low and hugged the horse with her knees. Her hat whipped off, and rather than worry about it, she gloried in the fingers of wind raking her hair and the tepid winter sunshine on her face. The paddock, carriage house, and several other dependency buildings whizzed by on either side of her head. A fallow field lay to her left. To her right was the drive leading past the gatehouse and out to the main road.

She turned the horse toward the field. The low fence would be an easy jump, and beyond it the terrain was flat. From the estate map she’d glimpsed in Rourke’s study, she could ride for several leagues and encounter nary a hill. With any luck, Zeus would exhaust himself eventually and let her lead.

“Kate. Kate!”

A man’s shout sounded from behind. She didn’t have to look back to know who it was. Rourke.

“Halt, Kate. I said
halt.”

By now Kate considered she’d more than proved her point. She would have been only too happy to end her husband’s object lesson then and there, only the stallion clearly had other ideas. He headed for the road at a fast gallop.