The Winter Wife (2 page)

Swiftly Kinvarra dismounted, knowing his mare would await his signal, and ran to free the distressed horse.
As he slid down the muddy ditch, a hatless man scrambled out of the smashed curricle.

“
Are you hurt?” Kinvarra asked, casting a quick eye over him. “No, I thank you, sir.”
The effete blond fellow turned back to the

carriage. “Come, darling. Let me assist you.”

A
graceful black-gloved hand extended from inside and a cloaked woman emerged with more aplomb than Kinvarra would have believed possible in the circumstances. Indications were that neither traveler

was injured, so he concentrated on the trapped horse.
When he

spoke soothingly to the terrified
beast, it quieted to panting stillness, exhausted with thrashing.
While Kinvarra checked its legs, murmuring calm assurances, the stranger helped the lady up to the roadside.

The horse shook itself and with a few ungainly jumps, ascended the bank to trot along the road toward its partner. Neither animal seemed

to suffer worse than fright, a miracle considering that the curricle was

beyond repair.

“
Madam, are you injured?” Kinvarra asked as he climbed the ditch. He stuck his riding crop under his arm and brushed his gloved hands together to knock the clinging snow from them. It was a hellishly cold night. Christmas tomorrow would be a chilly affair. But then of course his Christmases had been chilly for years, no matter the weather.

The woman kept her head down.
With shock?
With shyness? For the sake of propriety? Perhaps he’d stumbled on some elopement or clandestine meeting.

“
Madam?” he asked again, more sharply.
Whatever her fear of scandal, he needed to know if she required medical assistance.

“
Sweeting?”
The yellow-haired fop bent to peer into the shadows cast by her hood. “Are you sure you’re unharmed? Speak, my dove.
Your silence troubles my soul.”

While Kinvarra digested the man’s outlandish phrasing, the woman stiffened and drew away. “For heaven’s sake, Harold, you’re not giving a recitation at a musicale.”
With an impatient gesture, she flung
back her hood and glared straight at Kinvarra.

Even though he’d identified
her the moment she spoke, he found himself staring dumbstruck into her face.
A
piquant, vivid, pointed face under an untidy tumble of luxuriant gold hair.

Furious and incredulous, he wheeled on the milksop. “What the devil are you doing with my wife?”

***

Alicia Sinclair, Countess of Kinvarra, was bruised, angry, uncomfortable, and agonizingly embarrassed. Not to mention suffering the aftereffects of her choking terror when the toppling carriage had tossed her around like a pebble in a torrent.

Even so, her heart lurched into the wayward dance it always performed at the merest sight of Sebastian.

She’d been married for eleven miserable years.
Their short interval living as man and wife had been wretched. She disliked her husband more than any other man in the world. But nothing prevented her

gaze from clinging to every line of that narrow, intense face with its

high cheekbones, long, arrogant nose and sharply angled jaw. He looked older than the last time she’d seen him, more cynical if that was possible. But still handsome, still compelling, still vital in a way nobody else she knew could match.

Damn him to Hades, he remained the most magnificent
creature

she’d ever seen.

Such a pity his soul was as black as his glittering eyes.

“
After all this time, I’m flattered
you recognize me, my lord,” she

said silkily.

“
Lord Kinvarra, this is a surprise,” Harold stammered, faltering back as if anticipating violence. “You must wonder why I accompany the lady—”

Oh, Harold, act the man, even if the hero is beyond your
reach.
You’re safe. Kinvarra doesn’t care enough about me to kill you.

Although even the most indifferent husband took it ill when his wife chose a lover.
And Kinvarra had always suffered an overabundance of pride.
There wasn’t the slightest hope that he’d mistake
Alicia’s reasons for traveling on this isolated road in the middle of the night. She stifled

a rogue pang of guilt.

Curse Kinvarra, she had absolutely nothing to feel guilty about. “I’ve recalled your existence every quarter these past ten years, my

love,” her husband said equally smoothly, ignoring Harold’s dismayed interjection.
Although the faint trace of Scottish brogue in Kinvarra’s deep voice indicated that he reined in his temper. His breath formed white clouds on the frigid air. “I’m perforce reminded when I pay your allowance.
A
substantial investment upon which I receive woefully little return.”

“
It warms the cockles of my heart to know that I linger in your thoughts,” she sniped. She refused to cower like a wet hen before his banked anger. He sounded reasonable, calm, controlled, but she had no trouble reading the tension in his broad shoulders or in the way his

powerful hands opened and closed at his sides as if he’d dearly like to hit something.

“
In faith, my lady, you speak false. Creatures of ice have no use for a heart.”
A
faint, malicious smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “Should I warn this paltry fellow that he risks frostbite in your

company?”

She steeled herself against Kinvarra’s taunting. He couldn’t hurt her now. He hadn’t been able to hurt her since she’d left him.
Any twinge was merely the result of temporary shakiness after the accident.
That was all. It couldn’t be because this man retained the power to stick needles into her feelings.

“
My lord, egad, I protest.” Fortunately, shock made Harold sound less like a frightened sheep. “The lady is your wife. Surely she merits your chivalry at the very least.”

Harold had never seen her in her husband’s company, and some reluctant and completely misplaced loyalty to Kinvarra meant she hadn’t explained why the Sinclairs lived apart.
The accepted fiction was that the earl and his countess were polite strangers who by mutual design rarely met.

Poor Harold, he was about to discover the nasty truth that the earl and his countess loathed each other.

“
Like hell she does,” Kinvarra muttered, casting her an incendiary glance under long dark eyelashes.

Alicia was human enough to wish the bright moonlight didn’t reveal quite so much of her husband’s seething rage. But the fate that proved capricious enough to fling
them together tonight of all nights wasn’t likely to heed her pleas.

“
Do you intend to present your cicisbeo?” Kinvarra’s voice remained quiet. She’d long ago learned that was when he was most lethal.

Dear God, did he plan to shoot Harold after all?

Her hands clenched in her skirts as fear tightened her throat. Lacerating as Kinvarra’s tongue could be, he’d never shown her a moment’s violence. But did that extend to the man she planned to take into her bed? Kinvarra was a crack shot and a famous swordsman. If it came to a duel, Harold wouldn’t stand a chance.

“
My lord, I protest the description,” Harold bleated, sidling further away. He’d clearly also heard the unspoken threat in Kinvarra’s question.

Oh, for pity’s sake.
Was it too much to wish that her suitor would stand up to the scoundrel she’d married as a silly chit of seventeen?

Alicia drew a deep breath of freezing air and reminded herself that she favored Lord Harold Fenton precisely because he wasn’t an overbearing brute like her husband. Harold was a scholar and a poet,

a man of the mind. She should consider it a mark of Harold’s superior intelligence that he was wary of Kinvarra.

But her insistence didn’t convince her traitorous heart.

How she wished she really was the callous witch Kinvarra called her.
Then she’d be immune both to his insults and to this insidious attraction that she’d never conquered, no matter how she tried.

“
My lady?” Kinvarra asked, still in that even voice that struck a chill into her soul sharper than the winter wind. “Who is this…gentleman?”

She stiffened her backbone and leveled her shoulders. She was made of stronger stuff than this. Never would she let her husband guess that

he still had power over her. Her response was steady. “Lord Kinvarra, allow me to present Lord Harold Fenton.”

Harold performed an uncertain bow without stepping any nearer. “My lord.”

As he straightened, tense silence descended.
Alicia shifted to try and warm up her icy feet, fulminating against the bad luck that threw her in Kinvarra’s way tonight.

“
Well, this is awkward,” Kinvarra said flatly,
although she saw in his

taut, dark face that his anger hadn’t abated one whit. “I don’t see why,”
Alicia snapped.

It wasn’t just her husband who tried her patience.
There was her lily-livered lover and the perishing cold.
The temperature must have dropped ten degrees in the last five
minutes. She shivered, then silently cursed that Kinvarra noticed and Harold didn’t. Harold was too busy staring at her husband the way a mouse stared at an adder.

“
Do you imagine I’m so sophisticated that I’ll ignore discovering you in the arms of another man? My dear, you do me too much credit.” She stifled
the urge to consign Kinvarra to perdition. Just as she

stifled
the poignant memory that once he’d called her his dear and his love and he’d meant it. Once, briefly,
long ago. “If you’ll set aside your bruised vanity for the moment, you’ll understand that we merely

require you to ride to the nearest habitation and request help.
Then you and I can return to acting like mere acquaintances, my lord.”

He laughed and she struggled to suppress the sensual awareness that rippled down her spine at that soft, deep sound. “Some things haven’t changed, I see.
You’re still dishing out orders.
And I’m still damned if I’ll play your lapdog.”

“
Can you see another solution?” she asked sweetly.

“
Yes,” he said with a snap of his straight white teeth. “I can leave you to freeze. Not that you’d notice.
Your blood has always been colder than Satan’s icehouse.”

Her pride insisted that she send him on his way with a flea
in his ear.
The weather—and what common sense remained under the urge to wound that always flared
in Kinvarra’s vicinity—prompted her to sound more conciliatory.

It was late. She and Harold hadn’t passed anyone on this country road. Bleak, snowy moors extended for miles around them.
The grim truth was that if Kinvarra didn’t help, they were stranded until morning. And while she was dressed in good thick wool, she wasn’t prepared

to endure a night in the open.
The chill of the ground seeped through her fur-lined boots and she shifted again, trying to revive feeling in her frozen feet.