The Winter Wife (5 page)

***

Given the shambles downstairs, the bedchamber was surprisingly clean and wonderfully snug to a woman shivering with cold. Silently Alicia removed her gloves, then slid her dripping red cloak from her shoulders, folded it and placed it on top of a carved wooden chest.

It seemed ridiculous to feel shy in the presence of the man she’d married eleven years ago, but she did.
Across the room, Kinvarra removed his muddy outdoor clothes, revealing a plain blue coat and buff breeches.

A
troupe of maids delivered hot water and a substantial supper, then disappeared, leaving
Alicia standing in a bedroom with her husband for the first
time in ten years.

She tried not to focus on the massive tester bed in the corner. Out

on the moors, she’d have scoffed at the idea of letting him touch her in passion, even if he wanted to. But with every moment in this room, a strange tension built between them, a tension that whispered of desire long denied.

Did Kinvarra feel this tremulous awareness too? Or was it all her imagination?
Was he hoping to join her in that bed?
And if he was, what would her response be? Last week, yesterday, an hour ago, it would have been a contemptuous refusal.

Now? Now, she wasn’t so sure what she wanted. She had an unwelcome inkling that she might want her husband.

She shivered, but whether with nerves or anticipation, she couldn’t have said.

Kinvarra poured a glass of claret from the decanter on the sideboard. He took a mouthful, then turned to watch
Alicia lower herself gingerly into an oak chair near the fire.
Frowning with concern, he strode toward her. “You told me you weren’t hurt.”

Again, that protective air. She fought to strangle the warmth curling in her heart.
And failed. Heaven help her, she needed to remember the last time they’d been alone together or she risked making an awful fool of herself.

She shook her head, even as she relished the blessed relief of sitting on something that didn’t move. “I’m bruised, and stiff from cold and riding, but, no, I’m not hurt.”

“
You were lucky.
The curricle is beyond repair. I know the road was icy, but the going wasn’t hazardous, for all that.
Was Henry driving too fast?”

“
Perhaps.” She paused before grudgingly admitting, “We were arguing.”

“
You?
Arguing with a man?”
Without shifting his gaze from her face, Kinvarra dropped to his knees before her. She guessed that he meant to help her remove her boots. It was an act familiar from their short intimacy, before everything went wrong. “I find
that hard to believe.”

“
Shocking, isn’t it?” Her lips curved upward in a reluctant smile as she stared down into obsidian eyes alight with sardonic amusement.

Nobody else had ever teased her. Even Kinvarra when they’d lived together had been too intense at first,
then too angry.
To her surprise, she found she enjoyed his playfulness. He’d been angry with her earlier, but she sensed no rage in him now. Instead, beneath his humor, he seemed watchful, waiting.
Another anticipatory shiver rippled through her.

He extended his glass and she accepted it. His attention didn’t waver from her face when she raised it to her lips. Heat bloomed inside her. From the wine and from the unspoken intimacy of drinking from the place his lips had touched. It was almost like sharing a kiss.

Stop it,
Alicia.
You’re letting the situation go to your head.

“
What were you quarrelling about?” Kinvarra asked with an idleness that his grave attention contradicted.

She returned the glass, her hand slightly unsteady. “I decided I’d been reckless to take up Lord Harold’s invitation to visit his hunting lodge. I was trying to get him to turn back to
York.”

She braced for gloating, a repeat of his triumphant reaction downstairs when he discovered she was still chaste. Kinvarra mightn’t want her, but she’d always known he didn’t want her sharing her body with anyone else either.

Her husband’s regard held no smugness. How astonishing. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said quietly.

She tried to sit up and scowl at him, summon one of the sharp- tongued responses that had come so easily out in the snow, but the

effort was beyond her. Instead she tilted her head back against the chair. She closed her eyes, partly from weariness, partly because she flinched from reading messages that couldn’t possibly be true in his dark, dark stare.

“
He wasn’t worthy of you,
Alicia.” Kinvarra’s soft voice echoed

in her heart, as did his use of her Christian name. He hadn’t called her Alicia since the early days of their marriage when they’d both still hoped to create something good from their union. “Why in God’s name choose him of all men?”

Shock held her unmoving as Kinvarra’s bare hand slid over hers where it rested on the heavy arm of the chair. His palm was warm and slightly callused. Harold’s hand had been softer than a woman’s. She berated herself for making the comparison.

She opened her eyes and stared into her husband’s face. Into the black eyes that for once appeared sincere and kind.

And she chanced an honest answer.

“
I chose him because he was everything you are not, my lord.” Even more shocking than the touch of his hand, she watched him

whiten under his tan. In all this time, she’d never realized that she had the power to hurt him.
The knowledge pierced her like a blade, left her shaken.

He jerked back on his heels, removing his hand from hers. She tried not to miss that casual, comforting touch.
The distance between them gaped like a chasm of ice.

“
I…see.” His voice firmed.
“At least I’d never leave a woman alone

to face down an angry husband with a blizzard about to start.”

Shamed heat stung her cheeks. She’d felt so strong and free and self- righteous when she’d arranged to go away with a lover.
After ten barren years of thankless loyalty to a man who hardly cared she was alive.

But in retrospect, her behavior seemed shabby. Ill-advised. Despite her doubts, bravado and pride had kept her to her course until she’d reached
York and that journey across the moors with no company but Harold and her howling conscience. She’d fought against feeling guilty about betraying Kinvarra, but it was no use. It seemed her marriage vows still held her fast, despite her long misery.
With every mile they’d covered, she’d become more convinced that succumbing to Harold’s blandishments had been a horrible mistake.

Damn Kinvarra. He’d scarred her soul and she’d never escape him. “You wouldn’t hurt me,” she said with complete certainty.

“
No, but Harold didn’t know that.”

She noted that he was upset enough to use Harold’s correct name. She tried to make light of the subject, but her voice emerged brittle and too high. “Anyway, no harm was done. I’m still the impossibly virtuous Countess of Kinvarra who doesn’t even sleep with her husband.
You may rest easy in your bed, my lord, sure that your wife’s reputation remains unblemished.”

An emotion too complex for mere anger crossed his face, but his voice remained steady. “Why now,
Alicia?
What changed?”

“
I was lonely.” Her face still prickled with humiliation and she knew from his expression that her shrug didn’t convince. “I needed to do something to mark my permanent break from you. It was, in a way, our ten year anniversary.”

A
muscle flickered
in his cheek and his stare was uncompromising.

“
And you wanted to punish me.”

Did she? Even after all this time, turbulent emotion swirled beneath their interactions.
What amazed her was that they seemed finally capable of holding a conversation that wasn’t composed entirely of spite and insults.
Apparently they’d both changed in their years apart.

She spoke with difficulty,
even as she wondered why she confided

in her husband of all people.
When they’d been married, he’d used any vulnerability as a weapon against her. “I haven’t touched a man since I

left you. I’m twenty-eight years old. I thought…I thought it was time I

tested the waters again.”

“
With that cream puff?” He released a grunt of contemptuous laughter and made a slashing, contemptuous gesture with one hand. “If you’re kicking over the traces, my girl, at least pick a man with blood in his veins.”

“
I’ve had a man with blood in his veins,” she said in a low voice. “I

didn’t like it.”

That couldn’t be regret in his face, could it? One thing she remembered about Kinvarra was that he never accepted he was in the wrong. But when he spoke, he confounded her expectations.

“
You had a selfish,
impulsive boy in your bed,
Alicia. Never mistake

that.”

Astonished, she stared at him kneeling before her. “When we parted, you blamed me for everything.
You said touching me was…was like making love to a log of wood.”

This time it was his turn to flush
and glance away. “I’m sorry you

recall that.”

Even now, the snide remark made her flinch.
Perhaps because there

had been an element of truth in his sneer. “It was rather memorable.” When he looked back at her, she read remorse in his eyes. “No

wonder you hated me.”

She shrugged again, uncomfortable with the candid turn of the discussion. Because the agonizing truth was that she hadn’t always hated him. Far from it. During most of their year together, she’d believed she loved him.
And every nasty word he’d spoken had slashed her youthful heart.

His unexpected honesty now forced her to recollect that she’d hardly been an angel in that particular argument. She’d called him a filthy, rutting animal and barred him from her bedroom.

Only now did she admit that he’d had provocation for his cruelty. And he’d been young, too.
At the time, his four years seniority had seemed a lifetime. Now she realized he’d been a boy of twenty-one coping with a difficult
wife, immature even for her seventeen years.

No wonder he’d been glad to see the back of her.

She struggled to swallow what felt like a boulder stuck in her throat.

If they’d spoken like this after their marriage, perhaps they might have stayed together. But of course, neither of them had been capable of setting aside pride and vanity to face why their union failed. Now it was too late.

Too late—the saddest words in the language.

Her voice emerged as a husky whisper and her hands tightened on the arms of the chair until they ached. “There’s no point revisiting all this history. Really, tonight we’re just chance-met strangers.”

Kinvarra’s lips tilted in the half smile that had made her seventeen- year-old heart somersault.
To her dismay, her mature self found the smile just as beguiling.

“
Surely more than that.” He raised his glass. “To my wife, the most beautiful woman I know.”