Wagered to the Duke (BookStrand Publishing Romance) (17 page)

But that wasn’t all. Something about the way she said it sent a strange jolt of desire through him.

He did want to be loved. But did he want to be loved by the woman sitting across from him? This maddening but extraordinary thistle of a woman who was only using him to get to London where she would have more if not better prospects, because deep in her heart she didn’t believe she could ever do better than a widower.

“You don’t want to settle for a decrepit, old widower, Katherine. You know you don’t.”

She glanced around the dining room at the other guests and then finally flashed him a smile that seemed to throw him off-balance as she held up her left hand, fluttering the fingers. “I haven’t. I settled for you, remember?”

He quirked a brow. “‘Settled?’”

She resumed eating. “Well, it was either you or the decrepit, old widower.”

He sat back, pressing the napkin to his mouth so she wouldn’t see the smile on his face. “I guess this means you didn’t trap me into marriage because of love.”

She widened her eyes only briefly before stabbing her fork into her beef so hard the tines went right through to the plate with a startled clink. “If I was looking for love, do you honestly believe I would acquire it by
trapping
a man? Obviously you know very little about love.”

He took another sip of ale, as if that might cool the baffling sting her words evoked. “And you do?”

She put down her fork to survey him with a very intent, but still inscrutable expression, as if he’d just hit a nerve but she didn’t want him to know that.

“I know enough about love to know you can’t trap anyone into it,” she said softly. “Enough to know you won’t necessarily find it at that Cinderella ball your aunt is staging for you, even if you do happen to find a bride there. That’s why there are so many loveless marriages in the
ton.
I believe there’s a vast difference between looking for love, and finding love. People who look for love usually end up disappointed and disenchanted. But people who find it will find true happiness.”

Nathan stared at her, deeply intrigued. “So if I understand you correctly, you believe that people find true love only when they’re not looking for it.”

She daubed her lips with a napkin. “That is only what
I
believe. You may believe something entirely different. Maybe you don’t wish to marry for love, but simply to acquire an heir.”

“We all want to be loved, Katherine. Even you want to be loved, though you think you’ll never find it.”

She stared at him with those unfathomable, pale-green eyes. “Of course I want to loved, and I’d like to think that someday I will find it. But I pride myself on being a woman of great sensibility, so I know that today is not that day.” She suddenly rose. “I bid you a good night.”

He raised his voice. “You’re still going to make me sleep in the taproom?”

She stood rigidly, though her eyes darted about, as if checking to see if anyone else in the dining room was watching. “Well, someone must pay for losing my portmanteau. I can’t very well make Bilby sleep in the taproom, can I, since I’m not married to him, and he’s probably going to spend the night there in any case. Also, I’m still quite piqued that when it came time for you to place the ring on my finger, all you did was hold it out to me as if you expected me to take it and slip it on myself!”

That had bothered her? “Oh, is that why you just stared at it as if you had no idea what it was? And to think all this time I’ve been confounded by the notion that there exists in this world a woman who doesn’t recognize a wedding ring when she sees one. Thank you for clearing that up for me, my dear.”

He heard a few guffaws scattered around the dining room, but he wasn’t about to let his own eyes dart about. The fact that he’d heard the guffaws was all he needed to know.

“Good night.” She huffed out of the dining room without a backward glance.

Nathan finished his meal in silence and afterward retired to the parlor where he took an armchair by the fireplace and simply stared at the flames crackling within.

Just two more nights of this, three at the most, and then he’d never have to see her again.

Only why did that leave him feeling—this was the only word he could think of, and even then, because he thought
dejected
was slathering it on a bit thick—disappointed?

That disappointment certainly couldn’t be the same disappointment she’d mentioned a short while ago, because he wasn’t looking for love. Certainly not in some wayside inn.

But could he have found it?

“You, too?” Startled out of his musings, Nathan glanced up to see Mr. Driscoll.

Driscoll took the chair across from him. “Tell me, you’re an old married man by now. How long do I have to wait before it’s safe to go upstairs?”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.” Actually, Nathan thought he did but was in no mood for this or any conversation. He wanted to continue pondering the possibility that maybe he’d found something he wasn’t even looking for.

“Apparently my bride needs time to ‘get ready.’” Driscoll sighed and leaned forward, cupping a brandy snifter in his hands. “I think she’s just trying to delay the inevitable. You know, she’s the one who insisted on a journey all the way to London. I was all for staying where we were and spending the wedding night at my house. Why the devil does she think I built it?”

“To live in after you took her on a bridal journey to London.”

“Her father owns that carriage, as well as the coachman and the horses. Now I can’t help wondering if he also owns me.”

“May I ask why you married her?”

“For her dowry, of course. Her father is the local squire, the wealthiest man in the district. It also helps that she’s quite the buxom beauty. I take it that’s why you married Mrs. Fraser?”

An awkward silence dropped between them.

“For her dowry,” Driscoll clarified.

“Nothing so mercenary as that, and nothing as vapid as her looks and figure,” Nathan said testily. “I was trapped, plain and simple.” And in a sense, he had been, though he was hard-pressed to feel resentment now.

Driscoll chuckled. “You don’t suppose she regrets it now? I mean, married only three days and already she’s banished you from her bed. But who am I to talk? I’ve only been married a few hours, and already I feel as if I’ve been banished from the bed before I can even get into it.”

“Your bride hasn’t banished you, my good fellow. She fully expects you to come upstairs. As you said, she just needs time.”

“No, that’s what
she
said. But time for what?”

“To get ready.”

“Yes, but what does that mean? Did Mrs. Fraser tell you the same thing last night?”

Nathan pinched his nose and pressed his fingers to his brow. He was so weary of the constant charade.

Driscoll blathered on. “After the ceremony this morning, instead of going to the house I’d built for us, she wanted to leave right away for London. Once we were in the carriage, I tried to—well, you know—and then she happened to spot you and your wife walking along the side of the road, and demanded that we stop for you. And all to stop
me.
”

“Not that I’m ungrateful you did, but why did you accede to her demands? Especially when she wouldn’t accede to yours? Isn’t there something in the marriage ceremony where the wife makes a vow to obey her husband?”

“By God, Fraser, you’re right.” Driscoll rose from the chair. “Why are we both sitting here? Let’s go upstairs and claim our rights!”

“You go. Maybe I’ll have a whisky first.”

Then maybe he would go upstairs, by which time she’d be asleep, for he really didn’t want to sleep down here, and not just because it would be more uncomfortable.

Only what would happen if—when—she woke up?

Kate sat alone in the tiny room listening to the rain lashing the shuttered window as she contemplated the single candle. She fancied she might have an idea of what it was like for prisoners in solitary confinement—though she’d heard they didn’t even have candles.

She thought she’d been bored out of her wits at Bellingham Hall. At least there’d been a
few
books to read. She’d kept a diary, for she’d always kept a diary, but after a while the entries became indistinguishable from the ones in the diary of Louis XVI.
Rien. Rien. Rien.
Even her mother finally stopped searching Kate’s bedchamber for her diary so she could read it. It’d been at least three months since Kate had caught her rummaging around for an extra handkerchief as Mother’s own collection was being laundered and she didn’t want to send a maidservant because her nose was running, whereupon she’d emit a loud but decidedly dry sniff. Mother always claimed it was quicker to just slip into her daughter’s bedchamber and borrow one of hers.

At Bellingham Hall she’d had more than enough time to catch up on her embroidery, but there were only so many linens with so much stitching space, and so many screens to cover and bonnets to trim with no place to wear them.

There’d also been a pianoforte, though it was painfully out of tune owing to the cold, wet weather always sweeping across the moors.

The tedium had been torture. Now she wondered if it would kill her.

Here she didn’t have a book to read. She didn’t have a journal to write in. She didn’t have any embroidery to stitch. She didn’t have any sheet music from which to play the pianoforte—not that she could have, since she hadn’t seen an instrument downstairs. Everything she owned in the world was in her missing portmanteau, save for her reticule, which held the important triad of H-items—hairbrush, handkerchief, and housewife, the latter a sewing kit in case she needed to mend any of the clothes she no longer possessed. There was just enough thread to sew on a button or two and mend a hole in a seam that couldn’t otherwise be concealed by keeping her arms down or covering it with a cleverly tied sash, but not enough to keep her amused by embroidering her name on the edge of a pillowslip that wasn’t even hers.

Since the frock she wore had no discernible rips or missing buttons, it seemed there was nothing else to do but go to bed—and right after supper!

How she longed for a bath! She hadn’t had one since the night before she left Bellingham Hall. She’d spent all day yesterday and half of today surrounded by people who seemed to have transferred their own dust and sweat and various odors to her person, and part of the other half walking down the road clad in her heavy wool pelisse. While sitting so close to Nathan in the Driscoll carriage, she’d worried he might be repulsed by three days’ worth of traveling filth clinging to her, even if he was just as dirty. Or maybe he wasn’t. She certainly hadn’t noticed. She’d been too distracted by other things—like the way his hand, clasped in hers, seemed to toy with the edges of her garter hidden beneath her muslin skirt.

She kicked off her dusty half boots. She reached around to unbutton her frock and slipped it over her shoulders. It didn’t even slide down her body and legs. Weighted down with a day’s worth of dust and perspiration, it dropped to her ankles with a dejected plop.

She stepped out of the soiled puddle of muslin and picked it up, holding it to her face. She wrinkled her nose and tossed it in direction of the chair. It partially covered the seat and then slid over the edge to the floor, as if it sensed it wasn’t worthy to occupy any other surface.

She lifted her shift to reach her garters and untied them. Her stockings felt as if they were glued to her limbs. She stood up straight, her arms at her sides. She really didn’t need the garters anymore. The tops of her stockings did not so much as sag or even slip. She paced around the room, back and forth, the floorboards creaking beneath her steps, but the stockings remained firmly in place.

She pushed on the tops of them, but they wouldn’t budge. She had no choice but to pinch them by the top edges and then peel them all the way down her legs, turning them inexorably inside-out. She sighed as cool air swept around her bare legs. She flung the limp stockings to the floor, where they lay tangled like a pair of discarded snakeskins. She remembered when she was a little girl playing in the garden of their house in London one day, and she’d come across something that looked like a dead snake. She’d called her brother Anthony, who crouched down to examine it—and even pick it up, to her disgust—only to tell her it wasn’t a snake at all, but merely the old skin of a snake who’d shed it in favor of fresh, new skin.

That meant there was still a live snake slithering nearby, and only then had she screamed.

Kate pinched the fabric of her shift here and there, so it wouldn’t cling to her body. She removed her drawers, thinking she could at least rinse them out in the washbowl—but only after she washed herself.

She removed her spectacles and stood at the washstand, pouring water from the ewer into the matching bowl. She splashed water on her face and then unbuttoned her shift, pulling it open to bare her breasts.

“Come, dear, let me see you.”

Kate nearly jumped out of her skin as her heart lurched, and she pulled her shift closed, glancing around the room, but she didn’t see anyone. The door into the hallway was firmly closed, and the shutters were pulled over the window. The armoire was securely shut, if only because she didn’t have anything to put in it. She peered behind the screen, but no one was there. Nor did she see anything under the bed except clumps of dust. The lid on Nathan’s trunk was locked, which annoyed her immensely. She could’ve entertained herself rifling through it. He might even have brought a few books along, since he liked to read, too.

“You
can
see me, Mr. Driscoll.” That was a woman’s voice—Mrs. Driscoll’s, obviously—and now it dawned on Kate that what she heard was from the room next door. She swept her gaze over the wall but couldn’t find any holes. It was simply as thin as her shift.