A Little Scandal (34 page)

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 the 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.

And what it was, was longing.

She was quite certain of it. Because of course, she was feeling it, too. Had been feeling it, for all the time they’d been apart. It was as if, though her mind knew differently, all her body. knew was that here was another body that had once given hers great pleasure.

And now all it wanted was to experience that pleasure again.

Which would explain why Kate didn’t protest when Burke gave the sheet she held a final, emphatic tug, and pulled it from her grasp entirely. She reached out, blindly—because of course he was still kissing her, his tongue easily breaking past the token resistance she put up with her lips—to stop him, but all she succeeded in doing was touching his chest where the dressing gown fell open. Her hand met with that hard wall of muscle and crisp dark hair—and his hand, the one that had tugged away the sheet, closed over one of her warm, bare breasts … and that was all.

She was lost.

It was so easy. It was so easy to give in to him, to his kissing, which was soon no longer filled with longing, but with hunger, a demanding hunger. It was so much easier to give in to him than to fight him. Because what did fighting get her? Nothing, except maybe some slim sort of intellectual satisfaction. But what was that, when his fingers were giving her so much physical satisfaction, first spinning tiny circles around her straining nipples, then eliciting gasps of shock from her as he skimmed them across the smooth flat surface of her stomach? It was an assault, she knew that. A skillful assault on all her senses, meant to make her forget everything that had happened between them, except how his body had once made hers feel.

And her body had not forgotten. How could it, when everything about him, from the intoxicating smell of him, that musky odor which he alone possessed—and the merest whiff of which made her knees feel as if they were dissolving—to the caress of his callused fingers on her tender skin, reminded her?

Not only reminded her, but goaded her into launching an attack on her own. No sooner had her hand come into contact with the bare flesh of his chest than she was pushing away the folds of his robe, and fumbling, with embarrassing eagerness, at the knot in the sash which kept that robe closed. He, of course, had no such concerns, as she was so conveniently naked beneath the sheet he’d pulled away. He had already torn his mouth away from hers, and was dragging his lips—his day-old growth of whiskers were singeing her every place they touched—down her throat, and toward the breast he’d captured.

Still, she would not be put off. She tugged once more at the knot, but when it continued to evade her, she plunged her hand beneath it, and found satisfaction by curling her fingers around the stiffening rod the robe had kept hidden from view. Burke, who had by that time discovered and conquered one of her nipples with his mouth, and was busy branding it with his tongue, let out a violent hiss at this, and lifted his head. He pinned her with an inscrutable glance, at which Kate only widened her eyes, and tightened her grip on him, mostly just to see what would happen.