Regency: Courtship And Candlelight: One Final Season

Doing her best to be honest with herself now her future looked bleak, Kate stopped her perambulations and tried to face her own faults as unflinchingly as she was prepared to pick over Edmund Worth’s. Impatient with herself for being unable to consider him, or her feelings for him, with dispassionate coolness, she was about to pace her host’s fine Persian carpet when a sound in the corridor outside made her freeze in her tracks. Just making out the soft tread of a gentleman’s evening shoes on the marble floor outside, Kate muted a huff of impatient fury and turned to face the wretch who’d been chasing her all evening with defiant determination and the fireside poker.

‘Preparing to beat me off with more than just words this time, are you, my dear?’ the intruder asked her blandly and relief and something far warmer than that ran through her at the very sound of Edmund’s voice. It made her feel young and silly all of a sudden as she had to put her hand over her mouth to stifle a chuckle.

‘Only if you really annoy me, Lord Shuttleworth,’ she said, her heartbeat thundering in her ears for a very different reason now and her fear flying as wild curiosity about darkened rooms and their unknown possibilities took its place.

‘Maybe you should carry it at all times to fend off importunate suitors then?’ he said as he took it gently from her and returned it to its stand.

‘I can think of at least one person I’d like to leave with a few good bruises,’ Kate said darkly and saw him frown even in the semi-darkness.

‘Just say the word and I’ll do it for you.’

‘And then be forced to meet the repellent man at dawn as if he deserved to be rated a gentleman after all, my lord? I rather think not,’ she told him crossly and just the thought of him risking all he was to a pistol ball made her insides go as cold as if she’d swallowed an icicle.

‘I can take care of myself,’ he told her abruptly.

‘I dare say you can, but I’ll manage without your assistance on that front all the same. I do like to sleep at nights, you see?’

‘So do I, although you’ve robbed me of a great deal of that commodity since we first met,’ he informed her softly and Kate realised how close he suddenly was to her only at the instant when he slid a strong arm round her waist and pulled her against his muscular frame so easily it hardly even occurred to her that she might resist him.

‘Have I? How very inconsiderate of me, Edmund,’ was all the response she seemed able to offer, which was very odd of her, considering she’d come in here to avoid similar attentions from another man.

‘Yes, it was. So don’t you think it’s high time you shared a little of my sleeplessness to make amends?’ he murmured huskily.

‘Maybe …’ she began, but it was too late and he stopped her mouth by the simple strategy of kissing it until she forgot what she was going to say and almost everything else as well.

Chapter Seven

At the advanced age of one and twenty Kate had experienced only the most respectful of chaste salutes to compare this one with and they were no help at all, she decided hazily. She supposed having such a powerful guardian hovering like Nemesis in the background must have kept her ignorant of such dangerous delights until now. If Edmund had kissed her like this three years ago, she’d almost certainly have been married to him virtually ever since, but had either of them been ready for such heady enchantment then? It was a question she’d never be able to answer since he hadn’t kissed her until her wits were shot and her body singing with some wild hope she didn’t dare name until tonight. Abandoning any effort to reason with herself, she snuggled even closer to him, whilst raising too-willing lips to lure him back to her the moment he seemed about to recover his senses and back away.

‘Edmund,’ she murmured his name reproachfully, protesting any distance between them and wantonly hoping he could be persuaded to do it again.

‘Katherine?’ he replied, lingering on the syllables of her name as if it was a sensuous luxury in his mouth.

‘Kiss me again?’ she begged shamelessly.

So he did and this time there was nothing reverent and respectful about his wickedly knowing mouth as it opened hungrily on hers and, as soon as she echoed him in instinctive response, he plundered it ruthlessly. For the first time Kate felt the true allure of being seduced as well as seducing, with a man’s firm mouth and hot demands suddenly a wonderful promise, rather than a threat of terrible vulnerability or base subjection. She shivered in anticipation of something even more mighty, a force that could take her under and drown her in passion and sweetness, so she did her best to make sure she attained it by sneaking her hands up and about Edmund’s strong neck, then shocking them both by moaning against his lips when his tongue invaded her mouth and her knees turned to water.

It was heat and light and sustenance and she couldn’t currently imagine ever needing any other. He ran lingering, approving hands down the supple line of her slender back and she all but purred with satisfaction when he reached the firm swell of her buttocks and settled there for a hot, breathless moment before he swept that incendiary touch back up to mould her even closer into his kiss. Gasping with delight as his wicked tongue darted in and out of her wanton mouth in a rhythm even she recognised as primal, for all her ridiculous innocence, she clung as if he was her rock in a very stormy sea indeed.

Then he allowed them the sumptuous treat of lowering his hand to cup her breast and Kate wondered how she managed to stay standing for the rush of heat and temptation that rocked through her like a force of nature. She heard his breath catch at the willingness of her tightened nipples, obvious under the richness of silk and his exploring fingers and she stuttered out a sigh of delight when he explored one of them further until she moaned once again. All thought of where they were and what risks they were taking of being discovered fled as even the distant sound of music faded from her consciousness and all that mattered to her was him. Edmund, her almost-promised lover, hers. At last there were no questions in her head except for how soon the searing ache at the heart of her could be appeased with something he and no other could grant her. Caught up in her first taste of headlong, driven passion, she keened softly at the bolt of demand for more that ran through her like hot fire.

Head reeling from her innocently erotic responses to his runaway loss of control, as soon as he felt her mouth respond to his with untutored enthusiasm, Edmund tried hard to draw back, to let his longing hands fall from her magnificent body and put distance between them that his own harder, even more eager body certainly didn’t want.

‘No, stay,’ she urged, her voice husky and shaky and utterly in tune with every one of his feral instincts to possess her and carry her off to his lair and keep her there for ever. ‘Kiss me again,’ she demanded, so lost in what they’d set alight between them that he doubted she remembered her own name, let alone his.

‘If I do there will be no going back for either of us,’ he managed to grate out between lips stiff with wanting and needing to do exactly what she demanded.

‘Edmund,’ she whispered and it was an agreement, not a denial.

Triumph roared through him as his body tightened even more painfully. He struggled to leash his own out-of-control instincts and the need he’d kept under such a mighty curb ever since he’d met her in the face of her suddenly so wild, so natural, so truly Kate-like urgency. The lure of lowering her on their host’s fine carpet and thrusting into the warmth and welcome she was innocently laying out for him tempted him until it felt like too much of an effort, too much of a betrayal not to give in and take her to their mutual ecstasy.

He tensed to do as they both wanted and seize her by that ridiculously slender waist of hers and soothe and stoke her passion until neither of them had any choice but to let themselves sink onto the floor of this room in a stranger’s house and rut like a pair of spring-tortured animals. He’d always known she would be matchless and sweet and impulsive and unashamed in her wants and needs, if she ever let herself be the passionate and extraordinary woman she had it in her to become. Now that Kate was free from the restraints the miseries of the past had forced her to curb her true, passionate self with, she was utterly breathtaking as she took fire in his arms and demanded an intense seduction neither of them would ever want to forget.

And here they were, exactly where they should not be, with risk and scandal dogging every step along the way, and all it would take to set it off was someone else feeling the urge to wander as she had wandered and find them out. They were trespassing in the shadows of their host’s private rooms, with an open door at their back and hundreds of curious guests far too eager for any slight scandal that presented itself to their eager ears and eyes a matter of mere yards away. Reluctantly he restrained the ravenous wolf within him bond by painful bond, until he could gasp in a huge breath of cooling air and set his forehead to hers, drawing on an unexpected stock of true tenderness that surely only she could unleash in him at such a time.

‘Not here, lover,’ he murmured, ‘and certainly not now.’

‘Where then, and when?’ she demanded, the tremble in her low-voiced demand threatening to undo all the good he’d managed to do them.

‘In our marriage bed, after all is made right between us in our own eyes.’

‘It was right,’ she protested bitterly, drawing away from him as if his touch repelled her now and he cursed her contrary, headstrong nature, even as he knew very well it was one of the things that made him want her so unbearably that he’d take her on virtually any terms.

He wondered if he’d made a mistake after all by not seducing her as if she meant no more than a quick and lusty roll in the hay to him. Yet every instinct that wasn’t primitively crying out for her and a release from this nigh-overwhelming frustration shouted just as loudly that he’d have lost a crucial part of her if he’d sunk into her and brought them both to a quick and savage climax on the floor in a virtual stranger’s house with so much risk all around them.

‘Not until you know exactly what you want from me and why,’ he told her implacably.

‘I want you, and I want you now,’ she challenged him furiously.

‘But why, Katherine, why do you suddenly want me so much?’

‘Because …’ She almost let something betraying slip out, but stopped herself just in time, as she always had when it came to her feelings for him, whatever they might be, and now he doubted she knew any better than he did.

‘Because I’m irresistible, because I make your world shift and then brighten whenever I come into the room? Or is it just because I’m the first man to get past your ice-queen defences and make you feel the possibilities of being a real woman?’ he made himself ask in a voice husky with wanting to do just as she urged, to forget anything else and let the devil take care of afterwards.

Luckily she was far too innocent, far too confused to read his true state from that gruff enquiry, for if she truly ignored the scruples that had backed them away from the precipice and rubbed her roused body against his, butted her mouth against his and demanded more, he knew he’d be beyond controlling his response to her, beyond fighting this reckless need that tore at his self-control and snapped at the fetters he was trying to put on both their demons.

‘I really can’t imagine,’ she told him with such a superb attempt at frosty dignity he almost applauded, except that would drive her further back behind her defensive ramparts and he couldn’t allow that now they were so close to getting where he’d wanted them to be for so long.

‘Oh, I think you can, Kate,’ he murmured.

‘So you can prove to me I’m just a foolish woman like any other you might care to kiss in the dark? I think you just did that,’ she said quietly and all hope might have drained out of him, if he hadn’t reminded himself that everything about their recent encounter argued the exact opposite, if only she wasn’t so innocent. She didn’t know the difference between mere lust and the nigh-overwhelming passions and heady emotions they’d just lit in each other.

‘If that was all I wanted, I could have done it perfectly well three years ago and got it out of the way,’ he said flatly.

‘Arrogant, boasting braggart that you are?’ she gritted furiously.

‘Adult, realistic man that I am now,’ he corrected and did his best not to grin at her as she sucked in a mighty breath in order to denounce him comprehensively enough to slake her wounded pride. ‘Quiet!’ he ordered abruptly.

All Edmund’s senses were alert again as he remembered the world outside this silent, darkened room and cursed himself. He shouldn’t have taken such a reckless risk with Kate, shouldn’t have got so close to seducing her and himself in this risky, hole-and-corner fashion. His ridiculous susceptibility to her hadn’t withstood the purely tempting fact of her, alone and unguarded and almost sad in the darkness. She’d gone straight to his head like fine wine, just as she had the first time he’d ever set eyes on her, and it tore so painfully at his heart to see her pensive and lonely that he finally accepted Ben was right. He could never turn his back on her and all she meant to him, despite the nearly three years of effort he’d wasted trying to evict her from his heart. He cursed himself for making that discovery in such a place as he heard another whisper of sound from outside his host’s study.

‘Don’t you—’ She never quite managed to counter his abrupt order since he clamped an impatient hand over her mouth and forced himself to at least try to ignore the feel of it, soft and moist under his palm, since he wanted his senses alert for whoever was creeping about outside.

He saw a wicked glint come into Kate’s eyes even through the gloom, as if she knew very well that the connection between them had not been severed and probably never really would be now. She narrowed her gaze and let her sharp and sweet tongue lick his palm, even as she breathed in quite happily through her nose and watched him like a houri. No, he couldn’t succumb to her mischievous allure, the gnawing temptation to kiss and take and to hell with the consequences. Evidently he was as fast under her spell as ever, but he wasn’t going to be discovered here with her, because the decision to marry him or not would then be sidestepped and void as it became inevitable, and that would let her off the hook of having to admit how she felt about him. Marriage of convenience indeed! he scoffed silently. How could she be so wilfully blind to her own passionate nature?

‘Someone’s coming.’ He risked getting even closer to murmur in her ear and felt her senses jar and her mouth tense enough for him to risk taking his hand away.

Casting about him for any avenue of escape, he noted the locks on the long windows into the garden with something like despair. For a moment there seemed nothing for it but to face whoever was coming and announce his immediate engagement to the woman he’d wanted for so long, but he wasn’t inclined to let whoever was coming dictate their fate. Seeing a door into some lesser office ajar, he towed Kate inside before she could protest, or dig her stubborn heels in and brazenly await discovery, so he’d have to marry her without the admission of love he was determined to wring from her.

Kate peered through the crack in the door that was all Edmund had left them by rushing her in here and could just make out the faint glow of a single candle. She blinked against even that much brightness after the virtual darkness of the shadowed room and flinched away from the idea of being discovered cowering in here like a guilty felon. It would make so much less of what they had been doing, until Edmund had recalled what a gentleman he was, and even now frustration and awe tugged at her newly awakened senses. She swallowed an unladylike curse that they’d been interrupted, just when she’d been hoping he might seduce her after all. Instead they’d only gone a heady, headlong stride forwards, then sharply back to dull respectability again. She was undoubtedly fast and wanton, and maybe in the morning she’d feel suitably ashamed of herself, but just now she’d trade the last three years of dull respectability for three hours of sensational discovery in Edmund’s far-too-noble bed.

Her rebellious reverie was interrupted by the noise of a candlestick being carelessly plunked down, then the unmistakable sound of a man pacing. She should have been relieved that Bestholme had stopped searching for her, but wished whoever was marching up and down the book room at Jericho instead. Releasing a pent-up shush of breath in an exasperated sigh earned her a sharp nudge from the annoying man at her side. Even as she stung at his silent rebuke, she caught the sound of two voices murmuring and realised someone else had entered the room while she was working herself into a fine rage against fate and Edmund’s overactive conscience.

Then she heard Bestholme’s rather nasal tone after all and shuddered, but could hear little more until the furtive pair came closer to their side of the room and she hoped it wasn’t because of some give-away sound she or Edmund inadvertently let slip. Wondering why, if this was an assignation, they didn’t just shut the door and be done with it, or go and bother some other clandestine lovers with their unwanted presence, Kate shifted from one foot to the other to ease her cramped limbs and longed for them to leave.

‘I’m sure there’s nobody out there and I vow it’s like making an assignation with a little old lady who’s afraid of her own shadow, meeting you in secret and pretending all night that we mean nothing to each other, even if it does relieve the boredom of a very dull evening, but why won’t you do just this one little thing for me, George?’ Kate heard a distinctive husky voice murmur.

Whatever was Lady Tedinton doing here, risking whatever scraps of her tattered reputation she had left to her? And what on earth could she be asking an apology of a man like Bestholme to do for her? Deciding she was fated to overhear other people’s conversations tonight, Kate listened shamelessly, but when Edmund’s strong hand felt for hers in the darkness she clasped it gratefully and clung to the warmth and comfort he was silently offering.

Suddenly she didn’t need him to tell her the rumours of him and the unscrupulous woman standing only yards away from them being lovers were merely lies; a tale the peculiar female had no doubt thought up to puff up her own consequence. Not that Kate suddenly thought him a perfect Sir Galahad. No doubt he’d taken at least one or two willing beauties into his keeping in the past, since he wasn’t a monk or a saint, even if the mere thought of him doing so hurt far too much for comfort. There was a core of integrity about him that would not let him couple with a woman who held her husband and his family in such contempt that she didn’t care if most of society knew she’d cuckolded him repeatedly.

‘It’s a hell of a risk, Selene,’ Bestholme replied at last after considering whatever that ‘little thing’ might be for a very long moment to two listeners, forced to breathe so shallowly that Kate for one felt almost suffocated by her desire not to be heard and discovered by so unattractive a pair.

‘But I’m so very weary of warming an old man’s bed, Georgie. Please, say you’ll do this for me, lover? I so long to be free,’ her ladyship wheedled in a little-girl voice that somehow made their discussion all the more sinister.

‘No, I’m not risking putting my head in a noose to set you free in order for you to try to wed a man who has no more interest in you than a stone statue might have. Tedinton’s fortune would go to his heir anyway and I dare say your jointure would be tied up so tight not even the Lord Chancellor could get his hands on it. You’d end up worse off and alone, and I can’t afford to keep you, you’re far too extravagant and altogether costly a creature for me, my dear.’

‘That repellent brat is a minor and makes no effort to ingratiate himself with anyone and I’m certain you’re quite wrong about my jointure. Algy thinks the world of me and will leave me a rich woman.’

‘He might be a ridiculous old fool, but he’s far more possessive than you choose to realise. He won’t leave you a target for men like me after he’s gone, and the boy has a pack of embittered relations all longing to avenge the slights you’ve heaped on them these last ten years. The truth of it is that you’ve grown lazy, Selene. The world doesn’t revolve around you and what you covet for now, despite your belief you only have to scheme for whatever you want to get it.’

‘Just do this one little thing for me and I’ll make sure that high-nosed Alstone bitch has no alternative but to marry you,’ the woman cajoled and even as Edmund’s hand tightened on hers to offer comfort and denial of what the scoundrels were discussing so coldly, Kate had to put her other hand over her mouth to stop herself shouting out a protest at such a repulsive strategy and add the furious caveat that she wouldn’t marry Bestholme if her very survival depended on it.

‘And precisely how do you propose to do that?’ Bestholme asked.

‘I’ll whip up such a scandal she’ll beg you to wed her by the time I’ve finished.’

‘You don’t have the power, Selene my dear. Haven’t you realised by now that nobody as heedless as you are will ever hold sway among the ton? I doubt they mind your blatant peccadilloes with other men, or even the fact you married a fool for money for most of them did the same when it comes down to it, but you’re about as subtle as a town crier about your contempt for your husband and his cronies and he’s widely liked, for all he’s a senile old fool, and you, my dear, are not.’

‘Never mind preaching me a sermon and to hell with what a pack of pompous fools think, will you do it?’ Lady Tedinton replied in her lazy, malicious drawl as if they were discussing some minor favour instead of cold-blooded murder.

‘I’m still listening,’ Bestholme replied as if bored, but indulging her.

And so am I, Kate was tempted to shout and step out of hiding to confound the unlovely pair, but she shuddered at the very idea of confronting such a sordid pair of rogues and wasn’t it as well to know exactly what they were planning?

‘Quiet,’ Edmund mouthed a warning against her ear, but how had he known?

Kate was so busy struggling against the incendiary effect of just his breath on her ear lobe, his mouth so close against her neck she could almost feel the words form on his lips, that she missed Lady Tedinton’s first few words and frowned fiercely at him in the pitch darkness. How could she be so wrapped up in her response to his closeness that even the small matter of the murder of Lord Tedinton faded against the fierceness of the fire Edmund had lit between them with those few passionate kisses?

‘All you’ll need to do is be found with the silly chit in a scandalously dishevelled condition, then you can inform everyone you were just celebrating your engagement a little prematurely,’ she was saying in a scornful tone. ‘Even Carnwood won’t gainsay you when the silly wench is obviously in need of a husband.’

‘And you think I’m incapable of thinking up such a simple scheme myself, Selene? I’m almost insulted,’ Bestholme responded in that cold, indifferent voice Kate now knew was not an affectation, but reflected his true self.

‘You’re still being dunned and always begging so-called loans off me to pay off your endless debts, so you evidently don’t have the nerve to carry it out.’

‘Whereas you have the nerve and not the brains?’

‘Think so if you dare,’ Lady Tedinton hissed and Kate shuddered at the casual evil of it all.

‘I do dare, but that’s why you keep coming back to me, isn’t it?’ Bestholme demanded and there was the sound of a brief scuffle and then a horribly needy moan as Lady Tedinton demonstrated the truth of what he said.