A Little Scandal (43 page)

“That’s not why. You can’t think I actually care what they say.”

“Don’t you? That’s not the impression you gave me earlier. You seemed to care a good deal what they said …. Still, I suppose if you wish to return to London, we could arrange it. But if resuming your duties as Isabel’s chaperone is part of your scheme, I’m afraid you’ll have to rethink it.”

She cocked her head. What game was he playing? “Why?”

“Well, she’s obviously never going to be invited anywhere again, not after the scandalous way she ran off with Mr. Craven. She’s quite thoroughly ruined her reputation. So she’ll hardly have need of a chaperone, I think.”

“No,” Kate agreed, her gaze downcast. “But she’s going to need a mother.”

“Is she?” Burke’s tone was dry. “And have you a suitable candidate for the job in mind?”

Kate raised her gaze. “Burke,” she said firmly, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner about my … our baby. I’m sorry I said I wouldn’t marry you. And I’m sorry I acted like such a … hypocrite.”

One corner of his mouth—just one—turned upward. “I rather liked the hypocrite part,” he admitted.

Then, as if he couldn’t help himself, he reached out and wrapped strong fingers around her wrist. Like a fisherman reeling in a line, he pulled her inexorably toward him, until she was standing between his legs, over which were draped the folds of his dressing gown. He looked up at her, his fingers looser now around her wrist, but still possessively encircling it.

She dropped her gaze. She couldn’t help it. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to look into his soul. It was more that her hand, which she’d been running along his body, had reached the knot in his dressing gown’s sash, and was now hovering just over the material covering another part of him in which Kate felt a deep and sincere interest.

“Me, too,” Kate said, though she hadn’t the slightest idea what she was admitting to. She was busy wondering what Burke would think if she gave that knot in the sash to his dressing gown a tug. He would probably think her more of a hypocrite than ever.

She must have struck something sensitive with her fingers—although her touch had been very light, indeed—since Burke suddenly stiffened, the hand around her wrist tightening its hold on her convulsively. But when she lifted her gaze to meet his, she noticed that the undefinable something she’d seen—dropped like a veil across his eyes—was still there.

“Kate,” he began.

But she didn’t let him finish. Instead, she took hold of one of the ends of his dressing gown’s sash, and gave it a tug. The material bunched together, and then slowly parted, revealing the fact that underneath the robe, the marquis was as naked as he’d been that day she’d seen him stepping out of his bath. What was more, that part of him in which she’d felt such an all-consuming interest had reacted to her earlier, feather-light touch, and had grown to a proportion that surprised even Kate, who’d seen it in a good many states.

“Kate,” Burke said, in a very different voice.

But she wasn’t listening. Like someone in a trance, she reached out and wrapped the fingers of her free hand around the thick shaft before her.

For once, it was Burke who sucked in his breath. A second later, he’d released her wrist, and had placed both hands on her hips, drawing her toward him with an unintelligible exclamation. Kate flattened one hand against his bare chest, but she kept the other where it was, even when his mouth captured hers, his tongue thrusting through the token barrier of her lips.

And then they were falling backward across the bed, in a tangle of satin and lace, Kate’s long blond hair falling to form a tent around both their faces. Burke tried to roll over on top of her, but the hand she’d placed against his chest stopped him, though Kate applied only the slightest of pressure to it.

“Not yet,” she whispered, when he reared back to look at her questioningly.

But the questioning look vanished the instant she replaced the hand she’d held against his sternum with her lips. She kissed his chest, giggling as the thick forest of hair there tickled her nose. Then she lowered her head to rain kisses on each of the ridges formed by his iron-hard stomach muscles. And then she dipped her head even lower.

That was when Burke felt obligated to stop her.

He didn’t want to stop her. More than anything, he wanted to let her keep going, to allow her to do what he’d been secretly dreaming of her doing these many weeks. More than anything, he wanted to feel those sweet lips on him.

But not yet. Not when he was so swollen with need for her—having come so close to losing her—that he could hardly think.

But Kate wouldn’t be put off. She looked up the length of his body, her hair spilling like a puddle of silk across his thighs, and said, quite tartly, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, I imagine.”

To which Burke could make no reply, because she’d already placed that mouth—that mouth which had both irritated and bewitched him for so many months—where he’d so longed to have it.

But not for long. Because he couldn’t stand it for very long.

A few seconds only, and he reached out, cupping her face in his hands, his fingers embedded deeply in her smooth straight hair. He brought her mouth up to his—that impossibly small, impossibly soft mouth—plundering it with his lips and tongue, while pushing her back, back against the bed. It had been a day—just a day—since he’d last had her, and yet it felt as if years had gone by. He had to bury himself within her, or burst right then.

Maybe that was why he did what he did next, which was to release her face and reach down to fling up the hem of her nightdress. Then, his mouth still on hers, he ran a hand along the length of each of her legs, beginning with the insides of her thighs and ending with the arches of her feet. Then, abruptly wrenching his mouth from hers, and placing it instead against one of her breasts, his hot breath and tongue branding her nipple through the thin material of her nightdress, he reached down to circle each of her ankles with one of his large brown hands. Then, before she knew what he was about, he was spreading her legs, bending them at the knee, opening her to him, as wide and as far as she could go. He lifted his face from her breast as he did this, and looked into her eyes.

And that was when Kate finally saw through the crack in the emeralds of his eyes. And what she saw there—the naked longing; the possessive need; the desperate anguish; and most of all, the fierce protective love—made her wonder how she’d ever left this man, how she’d ever even entertained the idea of spending her life without him.

And then his mouth was on hers again, not so much kissing her as consuming her, devouring her, even as his hands left her ankles and went to cup her buttocks, raising them up, bringing her, softly damp, radiating a hypnotic, welcoming heat, against his straining erection ….

He dove into that heat with a groan, burying himself in that tight, wet sheath. As always, she gasped as he entered her, tensing as if afraid something inside of her was going to be ripped apart by his tremendous need. And then, when she realized it was all right, that she wasn’t broken, she opened to him almost shyly, embracing him with her warmth, but only allowing him to sink into her by degrees, the way one sank into a hot, steaming bath.

Only that wasn’t enough. That wasn’t enough for him. He needed to sink in all at once. He needed to pour himself into her, to lose himself in her. Raising his head, breaking their kiss, he tightened his grip on her hips. Then he watched her face as he lifted her toward him, and then drove himself—all of himself, all at once—into her.

She arched against him, her head falling back, exposing the long white column of her throat. Her breasts—their hard buds of nipples seeming to singe him, as if they were made of fire, and not flesh—were crushed against him. She was, he saw, senseless in her need for him. And that was how he wanted her. Because that was how she made him. Senseless. No other woman he had ever known had been capable of rendering him so perfectly senseless with lust. No other woman had ever opened up to him—both physically and emotionally—the way Kate had. No other woman had ever let herself become so mindless with passion as the one writhing beneath him just then.

That mindlessness—the fact that Kate was as caught up in her desire for him as he was in his desire for her—was what finally sent him over the edge. One minute he was plunging deeper and deeper into her—knowing this was not how he’d wanted it; he’d wanted it sweet and gentle, not rough and forceful, but with Kate, it seemed, he had no self-control, none at all—and the next, he was teetering on the edge of sanity. What pushed him over that edge was the sudden tightening of all of Kate’s muscles, including the ones gripping him between her legs. Suddenly, she was climaxing, her orgasm ripping through her the way lightning ripped through a summer sky. And then he too was lost in a thunderclap of a release, his entire body shuddering as he finally did pour himself into her, bathing her with liquid fire.

Even after he’d emptied himself within her, he stayed where he was, buried deep inside. She didn’t protest. In fact, he wasn’t sure she could if she wanted to. She seemed completely spent, as well, her limbs tangled in the heavy folds of his dressing gown, which he had neglected to remove. He could feel her heart beating beneath his, however—proof she was still amongst the living—sporadically at first, getting gradually slower, and more even.

After a while, he lifted his head, and looked down at her.

Her face was flushed, her lips and cheeks a deep pink. There was an unnatural brightness to her eyes, which looked at him with shrewd knowingness.

“Burke,” she said. He could feel her voice, sweetly hoarse, reverberate through both of their bodies. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

“Indeed?” He brushed those rosy lips lightly with his mouth. “And what is that?”

“Will you marry me?”

“Hmmm,” he said. “I think, if we don’t, people will talk. Don’t you agree?”

She showed him that she did, in no uncertain terms.

“Burke,” Kate said with a laugh, as she walked alongside him, one hand on the grip of a perambulator, and the other in the crook of his arm. “It’s nothing but an old wives’ tale.”

“Nevertheless,” Burke said somberly. “We shouldn’t take any chances. We’re talking about my heir, you know.”

“But it’s perfectly ridiculous.” Kate looked up at him from the beneath the brim of her new spring bonnet, which had been delivered, all the way from London, only the day before. “Have you actually seen Lady Babbie anywhere near the baby’s cradle?”

“Every morning,” he asserted. “When I go in. There she is, sitting by it.”

“Well, certainly. Because she adores him. But you’ll note you said sitting by the cradle. Not in it.”

“Nevertheless—”

“Nevertheless, it simply isn’t true. Ask Nanny. Cats do not sit on babies’ chests and smother them while they sleep, Burke. I can’t believe you’ve been listening to servants’ gossip.” She nodded her head toward Isabel, who was strolling several yards ahead of them, her fingers through the arm of a tall, fair-haired young man. “You’re worse than Isabel.”

At the mention of his daughter’s name, Burke glanced in her direction. “And that’s another thing,” he said. “How long are we going to let this go on?”

“Let what go on, Burke?”

“This.” He lifted a hand and gestured toward Isabel, who was twirling a lace parasol above her head and laughing rather coquettishly at something her companion had said. “This … flirtation, I suppose you’d have to call it, between Isabel and Freddy Bishop.”

Kate, pausing to reach inside the perambulator and adjust the baby’s cap, said, without looking up, “Really, Burke. It’s a very good match. You ought to be overjoyed. I was perfectly convinced, when the truth came about Daniel, that she’d never look at another man. You remember how she cried for days? But now she’s like a different person. And she could do much worse.”

“Worse?” Burke rolled his eyes. “What could possibly be worse than having one of your old beaux as my son-in-law?”

“Geoffrey Saunders,” Kate said, straightening up again, and slipping her fingers back through his arm. This time, Burke took hold of the baby carriage’s handle, and pushed it as they strolled along the grounds of Wingate Abbey.

“At least Geoffrey Saunders,” Burke said, “was sufficiently young enough for her. Bishop’s old enough to be her father.”

“Nonsense. He’s only ten years older than she is, Burke. You’re thirteen years older than I am. And acting it, I must say.”

He glared down at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Kate smiled teasingly. “Only that I think you need to prepare yourself for the inevitability of Duncan beginning to lay out flannel waistcoats for you. I wouldn’t be surprised to see you turning rheumatic, what with the fact that you’re starting to believe old wives’ tales, and are so thoroughly jealous of your daughter’s suitors. What’s next, Burke? Warm milk before bed?”

He said, with wounded dignity, “I will have you know, Lady Wingate, that I have never needed a flannel waistcoat in my life, and that I am about as close to being a rheumatic as you are to needing a cane. And furthermore, it’s not my daughter’s suitors I’m jealous of. It’s the fact that this particular one used to be an admirer of yours.”

“Oh,” Kate said, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “That’s all water under the bridge. I’m a distant memory, as far as Freddy is concerned, same as that soprano of his. He’s vowed to me that Isabel is the only true interest in his life, for now and forever after.”

Burke made a sound that very closely resembled a harrumph. Kate restrained herself from pointing out that this was a hopelessly middle-aged thing to say. Burke was, after all, still hearty at thirty-seven. Hadn’t he proved it just that morning, by making good on his long-ago threat—or perhaps it had been a promise—of waking every day with her beneath him?

“Besides,” Kate said, with a laugh. “If you think you don’t like the idea of Isabel and Freddy, think how Lady Palmer must feel, having me as her son’s future mother-in-law. Well, stepmother-in-law, anyway. Even now that the truth’s come out about Papa, I think she still blames him for sending her husband to an early grave. Now she’s going to have to put up with the ignominy of being related to me, at least through marriage. And I’m not even going to mention what you did to her drawing room.”