A Little Scandal (19 page)

But she had hardly taken two steps toward Isabel’s desk when Brigitte’s startled voice stopped her.

“Oh, miss!” she cried, as a grey-and-white blur streaked past her skirts, and into the hallway beyond the door she held open. “La chatte ! La chatte !

Kate was up and running before the words were fully out of the maid’s mouth. Isabel had all but adopted Lady Babbie as her own, and the feline had fallen for her constant offerings of creamed herring and milk, and had taken to sleeping on her bed instead of Kate’s. Kate did not mind, since she knew as soon as Isabel was well again, she would forget all about Lady Babbie, who would then return to Kate’s room.

But in the meantime, it was a challenge to keep the animal contained in the sickroom, since the door to it was left continuously open, allowing Lady Babbie to escape and explore sections of the house not necessarily welcome to her. This time, Kate saw, as she ran after the fleeing animal, she was headed for the door to Lord Wingate’s private chambers, rooms which Lady Babbie had expressly not been given permission to enter. Her heart rate speeding up, Kate careened after the fleeing animal, and just missed seizing her at the room’s threshold.

Kate did not hesitate. The door had been left partly open, most likely by the valet, who’d been conducting an inventory of his lordship’s waistcoats, having decided that morning that one appeared to be missing. It being made of flannel, it was supposed that Lord Wingate had disposed of it himself, but Duncan left nothing to chance, and had decided to make that determination for himself by conducting a thorough search of his master’s closets.

Kate pushed the door all the way open, then peered about the room, hoping to spy Lady Babbie right off, and spirit her away before Duncan happened to notice her presence.

The valet, however, was not in sight. And as it was the first time Kate had had an opportunity to enter the room, she was struck momentarily by the sheer immensity of the place, and could only stand there, panting and blinking, Lady Babbie completely forgotten.

The chamber was three times as large as her own, containing a massive fireplace, before which there was a comfortable arrangement of leather chairs and a sofa, and above which hung a crossed set of rather wicked-looking swords. At the opposite end stood an equally massive bed. Dark blue curtains fell from all four of its posts, sweeping the floor of the raised dais on which the bed stood. Matching dark blue material curtained the fourteen-foot windows that looked out across the park, and the carpet below Kate’s feet was also that same deep blue.

It was a very grand room—a very grand room, indeed—and yet, as Kate stood there looking at it, she was struck with a feeling of pity for him. Because it was a terribly large room to have all to oneself, and it seemed to Kate that the marquis must be very lonely in it, which was undoubtedly why he spent so much time out, away from it.

It was as she was standing there, thinking this perfectly ridiculous thought, that she became aware of the sound of vigorous splashing from behind her. Turning, she saw a half-open door, behind which stood a standing mirror.

“Duncan?”

Kate’s blood froze in her veins. It was Lord Wingate’s voice.

“Duncan, where have you got to with the towels?”

And then, to Kate’s horror, she glimpsed something so disturbing that, without another thought, she turned and bolted from the room. She did not stop running until she reached her own chamber, into which she flung herself, locking the door behind her.

Nor did she unlock it until some time later, when she was forced to, in answer to an irritated, “Miss Mayhew? Miss Mayhew, are you in there?”

Collecting herself as best she could, Kate went to the door and undid the lock, then opened it a fraction of an inch. His lordship’s valet stood in the hallway, holding an extremely irritated and rather damp Lady Babbie in his arms.

“Miss Mayhew,” Duncan said, with wounded dignity, as he thrust the cat toward her. “May I ask that in the future, you restrain this creature? I found it a moment ago, lapping water from his lordship’s bath.”

Kate took the cat silently and started to close the door, but the valet stopped her with a concerned, “Miss Mayhew? Are you quite all right? Do you want me to fetch Mrs. Cleary for you? Because if you don’t mind my saying it, you look as if you had seen a ghost.”

But it was not a ghost Kate had seen. It had been quite the opposite of a ghost, being very much alive. So alive, in fact, that the sight of it had burned itself into her memory, and Kate was quite certain it was never, ever going to leave.

Now she could only smile at the valet in a sickly fashion and say, “Oh, no. I’m quite well,” and then close the door, and lean upon it some more, perfectly unconscious of the fact that Lady Babbie was struggling frantically to escape her arms.

For what she had seen, of course, was Lord Wingate, in the flesh ….

The two of them were back in the Sledges’ library. They were wearing very much the same things they’d had on the day Lord Wingate had first made his extraordinary offer. The sun was filtering weakly through the stained-glass window in much the same manner. And, as had happened that day, Lord Wingate suddenly, quite without any warning, seized her about the waist, and pulled her against him.

Only this time, Kate didn’t stop him. She didn’t lay a finger on the nearby atlas. She didn’t so much as glance at it. Instead, she threw her arms about Lord Wingate’s neck, and raised her face toward his in a perfectly scandalous manner ….

And she didn’t care. She didn’t care a bit what happened.

And when what happened was that Lord Wingate lowered his mouth over hers, well, that was just fine. More than fine, as a matter of fact. It seemed to be exactly what she’d been longing for him to do all these weeks.

And when he tightened his strong arms around her, and she found herself molded to every contour of his lean, muscular body, his heat seeming to singe her through her clothing, well, that felt right, too. So right, in fact, that it seemed perfectly natural for her to run her hands along those rippling muscles, first the ones she felt beneath the sleeves of his coat, and then the ones beneath his shirt, along that hardened, thickly haired chest, and then the ones that made up the deeply ridged wallof his stomach, until finally she sunk her hands even lower, low enough so that she could feel the firm flesh of his thighs beneath his breeches ….

Only now, conveniently, he was bereft of those breeches. Lord Wingate was perfectly naked, and so was she. A second later, they were sinking down upon Cyrus Sledge’s cracked leather couch, their limbs and tongues entwined ….

It was at this point Kate woke up. Woke up panting, and with her hand between her legs.

And that was not all. Not only was her hand there, pressed up against the part of her which was throbbing so tenderly, but when she brought that hand away, it was damp.

And even as she sat there, trying to catch her breath, she realized that she was damp all over. There were rivulets of sweat between her breasts, not just between her legs.

She looked around her dark bedroom. Everything looked exactly as it had when she’d gone to bed a few hours before. But there seemed to be something different, something not quite right.

And then she remembered. Yes, of course. The difference was with her.

It wasn’t any good, of course. Try as she might, Kate could not get the image of what she’d seen in Lord Wingate’s bedroom out of her head. How could she? She had never in her life seen a naked man, except in paintings, and the occasional statue. And frankly, in her newly enlightened opinion, paintings and statues did not even begin to tell the story. Statues had no hair, for one thing, and paintings … well, all Kate could think was that most painters were men, and that when presented with a model who looked like Lord Wingate, they’d undoubtedly—out of sheer jealousy, if nothing else—underplayed the sheer immensity of … things, conscious that their own was nothing to it

Or so Kate supposed. There really was no other rational explanation for it. The thing had been huge. Lord Wingate was a big man—she had always known he was a big man. But she had seen plenty of paintings and sculptures of big men, and their things had never been as big as Lord Wingate’s.

And that hadn’t been all. It had been enough, of course, but it hadn’t been all. Because Kate had seen the whole man—with the exception of his head, the mirror having cut off his reflection at the neck. But then, she already knew what Lord Wingate’s head looked like, so what did she care about that? It was what she’d seen below his neck that she found impossible to stop thinking about.

His back had been to her, but the mirror had reflected everything she might otherwise have missed. Nothing was left to the imagination, from that broad expanse of chest, covered thickly all over with crisp dark hair; the flat, copper-colored nipples hidden within that hair; the firmly ridged abdominal muscles along his flat stomach; the concave indentations on either side of his smooth white buttocks; even the thick patch of hair between his legs, from the center of which hung that appendage that had Kate so thoroughly convinced artists throughout the ages had been sadly lacking in worthy models.

It was the sight of the whole man to which Kate kept returning in her mind’s eye—and now even in her dreams—despite her efforts to expurgate all memory of it. A few quiet hours of reading to the invalid Isabel had done nothing to drive it from her head. Even as she was pronouncing Mr. Dickens’s words, she kept thinking, Why, his shoulders were every bit as big as I imagined. And, I suppose I shouldn’t wonder at his thighs looking so very strong. After all, he rides every day. I wonder if he fences, too. He certainly looks as if he might.

Several times, Isabel had to call for Kate’s attention, and point out to her that she seemed to have skipped a page. Which, in her distraction, it appeared she had.

“Are you quite all right, Miss Mayhew?” Isabel wondered.

“Certainly,” Kate replied, too quickly. “Why do you ask?”

“You don’t seem at all yourself. Your cheeks are very pink.”

Kate pressed her hands to them. Her fingers did, indeed, feel refreshingly cool against her hot face.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s nothing. It’s quite warm this evening, and the windows are closed against your catching a greater chill.”

“Perhaps you are becoming ill, as well,” Isabel said, sounding quite delighted at the prospect “Oh, and then I shall have a chance to nurse you, Miss Mayhew. Won’t that be excellent fun?”

Kate found the idea of being nursed by the Lady Isabel Traherne highly amusing. But she managed to keep herself from laughing, and only said, “How very charitable of you, my lady.”

Still, later, before she climbed into her bed, Kate looked at her reflection in the mirror, and thought that Isabel was correct. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes unnaturally bright. Bright with newfound knowledge, Kate thought wryly to herself. How was she ever, she wondered, to look Lord Wingate in the face again, knowing as she did how his chest hair fanned out in a wide furry arc across where he was broadest, then tapered down as it neared his belly, thinning to the merest ribbon of hair beneath his navel, before flaring out into a thick nest between his thighs? How was she ever to sit across that vast plane of a dining table and attend to his polite attempts at conversation, while picturing him as she’d seen him last? How was she to keep herself from thinking of the smooth tanned skin stretched so taut over the swell of each of his biceps, or the obvious strength, so tightly controlled, of his broad back?

Impossible situation!

And now a few hours later—though it seemed only minutes to Kate, who, despite the disturbance of her thoughts, had fallen asleep almost as soon as her head hit her pillow—she’d awakened feeling as hot as if she’d been running, and almost as out of breath. Her bedclothes were twisted about her sweating body, and she had, she saw, flung off her nightdress at some point during the night

But none of that was as disturbing as her dream—or the fact that when she’d taken inventory of her limbs after waking, she’d found that hand tucked between her legs.

Even more horrifying was the fact that when she hastily jerked that hand away, a throbbing tenderness remained where it had been. Worse, the tenderness turned to an ache with every passing second she did not return her hand there.

Sitting up, her hair falling in sticky tendrils about her shoulders, Kate shook her head, trying to clear it.

Then something struck her windowpane, and Kate almost shrieked in surprise.

The glass didn’t break, but when another projectile rattled against it a second later, she realized that it was this sound that had awakened her in the first place. Her first thought, given the hour and the time of year, was bats. Her second, more rational thought was, Why, someone is throwing stones at my window!

And she instantly leapt up to see who that person was.

It was only at the last possible minute she remembered the fact that her nightdress lay in a puddle by one of her pillows. She flung it over her head, then went to another window which, due to the warm weather, she’d left open.

All three of her windows looked out toward the back of the house, over a small garden that contained not only well-tended and beautiful flower beds, but also a gazebo and a small fish pond, complete with a fountain. It was a restful place to enjoy breakfast or casual tea, and Kate had taken to spending no little amount of time there when her charge had no need of her.

Which was why it didn’t come as a complete surprise to her when she leaned out and saw a fair-haired man standing to one side of the small pear tree by the gazebo. It wasn’t surprising, but it was unnerving, to say the least. Kate, having spied him, immediately drew away from the window, her heart thumping unevenly.

Because, of course, though she couldn’t clearly make out his features, she assumed it had to be Daniel Craven.

Well, who else could it have been? All of her other acquaintances—well, her only other acquaintance, Freddy—would have contacted her in the traditional manner. Who but Daniel Craven, uncertain of his reception after her reaction when she’d run into him that night all those weeks before, would have reason to throw pebbles at her bedroom window? How Daniel had known the window was hers, or even how he had happened to find his way into Lord Wingate’s London garden, she didn’t stop to think. All she could think, as she stood there, clutching the neck of her nightdress, her mouth gone dry, her heart stuttering, was that he had found her. He had found her out.