She scarcely heard him over the wild beating of her heart. The very smell of him was intoxicating. Who knew that men—or was it only princes?—smelled like this, like secret spice with a touch of leather and soap?
“It’s preposterous to think that my seeing your hair will delay your future domestic bliss,” Gabriel was saying into the curve of her neck. “It’s absurd.” His whisper burned her skin, sending little quakes down her body.
“Isn’t it?” he said, raising his head and looking down at her. His eyes shone with a kind of dangerous pleasure. She knew it was dangerous, and yet—
“I suppose,” she said, wondering what exactly she was agreeing to.
“Rank superstition,” he said. His lips feathered along the curve of her cheek. “And don’t think this is a kiss, Kate, because it’s not. It’s rot to feel that you can’t show your hair to anyone until you’re trotting about under your own name.”
She gasped. He was, his lips were, caressing her ear. “Oh!” She couldn’t help turning her head to the side so he could . . .
“You like that,” Gabriel said, his voice husky, melodic. The voice of the devil, Kate thought dimly, but she didn’t care. “If I promise not to corrupt you, Kate, may I kiss you? Please?”
He was all enticing male weight and sweet voice, but Kate fought to think clearly. Did it matter if she kissed a prince in a garden? Would it change the fact that she was going to find a good man and marry him?
She didn’t think it would. Not a kiss. If it stopped with a kiss.
“You mustn’t seduce me,” she said, and then stiffened at the sound of her own voice, somehow dropped into a deep and sensuous register that she’d never heard before.
He reacted to the sound too. His body seemed heavier on hers all of a sudden. He pushed up on his elbows, and her arms were free, but she didn’t strike him, or push him away. Instead they just stared at each other, there in the sunlit cloister surrounded by tangles of wildflowers and a few half-eaten meat pies.
“I do not want you to seduce me,” she said, drawing on years of striking clear bargains with tradesmen. She had to make it clear so that he didn’t just swoop over her with all that princely beauty. “I am—I am a
virgin
and I intend to be so on my bridal night.”
Gabriel nodded, and a lock of hair fell over his eyes again. He was so beautiful, so starkly masculine, that her throat closed and she couldn’t remember what else she had to say.
“I will not take your virginity,” he said, his deep voice steady. Then his mouth quirked and he brushed his lips over hers again. “Even if you beg me to.”
“Arrogant pig,” she muttered. “I’m not your entertainment, Gabriel. I can’t imagine why you’re here with me, but I know that you should be in your castle with your guests.”
“For some reason, I’m mad about your kisses, Kate.” His eyes caught hers, and she stilled the way a rabbit does in front of a cheerful fox. “I don’t know what it is. I can’t stop thinking about you. Kissing you was the first thing I thought about this morning when I woke up,” he said conversationally.
She blinked at him.
“I had been dreaming about our kiss in the boat, when you were wet and cradled in my arms.”
“You make me sound like a prize trout!”
“I would have liked to lick off every drop of lake water,” he said, his lips feathering along her cheek again. “If you were mine, I would have bundled you up and then slowly unwrapped you by the fire.”
Kate tried to find words, but they seemed to be lost in a storm of sensation: the rough timbre of his voice, the thrilling pressure of his body, even the random tune of a lark woven together into a spell that kept her still.
“I woke up this morning,” Gabriel said, “thinking of nothing more than rolling over and pulling you into my arms and kissing you again. Kissing: only kissing. As if I were a green boy of fourteen. In case you don’t realize it, Kate, kissing is not a man’s usual inclination in the morning.”
She frowned at him.
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” he said, “what a virgin you are.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a virgin,” she said stoutly. “Now if you’re done with reminiscing over your bawdy nightmares, would you mind getting up? You’re treating me like a feather mattress.”
“If I were treating you like a feather mattress, Kate—and believe me, there’s nothing I’d rather do—you’d be crying out with pleasure.”
Kate snorted. “Is there no limit to your vanity?”
“Are you daring me to prove myself?”
“No!” she said instantly, and gave such a decisive shove that he rolled to the side and she managed to scramble away.
G
abriel didn’t bother to rise; he just sprawled at her feet, a boneless, laughing man. He didn’t look like a prince at the moment. He looked as eager and alive as any Englishman gone a-courting.
“You—” she said, and stopped, shaking her head.
“Lost my mind,” he supplied. “Wick says so too.” He put his hands behind his head and grinned at her. “All I think about is you.”
“Absurd.” She bit her tongue rather than point out that she was skinny and old. “I don’t mean to concur with Wick’s assessment, but your castle is full of women who are ten times more beautiful than I. I’m sure your bride will rival them. Why aren’t you thinking about Princess Tatiana?”
“Because there’s something wickedly seductive about you, Kate. I’ll bet you’re more beautiful than the plump and powdery Victoria. And she was the most beautiful girl on the market this spring; everyone has told me so.”
“In the midst of lamenting over how poor Victoria has lost her looks,” she pointed out.
“They’re fools. You’re ten times more lovely than that angel over there. It’s not just because I snatched off your wig either. Do you know that your lips are the precise color of a raspberry?”
“Very nice,” she said, pretty sure that she ought to stop his compliments, but unable to do so. They felt like manna after the humiliations and fears of the last years.
“I love raspberries,” Gabriel said dreamily. “I like to nibble them, and suck them into my mouth until they explode in a burst of flavor. I like them every way, fresh, baked, in a pie.”
“Are you suggesting that I would taste good in a pie?” she asked, laughing a bit. She sat down on the very edge of the picnic cloth and picked up her wineglass.
“You would taste good in any fashion at all,” Gabriel said. “I am particularly fond of raspberry syrup.” There was sinful laughter in his voice.
Pictures from Aretino’s book poured into Kate’s mind, but—what could he mean?
Cold wine slid down her throat. She couldn’t let herself be overthrown by desire. For that’s what it was, this sharp heat between her legs, the wish to throw herself on top of him, the easy way in which the morality of a lifetime was being replaced by an ache instructing her to—
“No,” she stated.
He opened his eyes. “Had I asked you something?”
“
Why
have you lost your mind?” she asked. “Is it because I’ve allowed you such liberties?”
“Perhaps.”
She scowled at him. “Offer me a post as your mistress and I’ll stab you with a fork, just as Effie stabbed Beckham. Except the fork won’t go in your hand. I am not to be trifled with.”
“I like my mistresses fat and juicy,” he said, slanting her another of his wicked looks.
“If I ever became a man’s mistress, not that I would ever do so, he would have hair the color of sunlight, and eyes as blue as—as blue as sapphires.”
“A Jack-a-dandy of that sort will care more for his own beauty than yours.” He reached out and picked up an apple.
“Absolutely not,” Kate said, warming to her imaginary gentleman friend. “He wouldn’t be vain about his looks. He would be a perfect gentleman: humble, thoughtful, and utterly honorable. He would be so in love with me that if I threatened to leave him, he would—”
“Build a funeral pyre and hop onto it,” Gabriel interrupted.
“Never. He would throw himself at my feet and beg my forgiveness.”
“There’s the problem, Kate. He should have been there in the beginning, rather than paying for the pleasure of your company.”
“You’re right; I shan’t be his mistress. I’ll marry him instead.” She picked up a lemon tart and contemplated eating it. She was not in the least hungry, but it looked delicious. And it would keep her from looking at Gabriel, who looked even more delicious.
“So you’re planning to marry a man with golden hair, blue eyes, and the personality of a pudding? Sounds like Hathaway to me.”
“I’m considering him,” Kate said. “May I have some more of that wine, please?”
Gabriel reached behind him and picked up the bottle, then propped himself on one elbow so he could pour wine first into her glass and then into his. “He’s not bad.”
“I know,” Kate said, feeling a bit hollow. “The only problem is that Effie would quite like to marry him as well.”
“Effie is that girl who was in the boat with you last night.”
“Yes.”
“And she’s the one you’re offering to imitate, who nailed someone with a fork when he asked her to be his light-o’-love?”
“It was worse than that. Beckham kissed her in an improperly intimate fashion.”
“Do tell,” Gabriel said. “Were they kissing the way we do?”
He had pulled off his cravat, and his shirt revealed a triangle of chest. It was vastly improper. Kate pulled her gaze away. “
We
don’t kiss in any particular way,” she corrected him. “We may have exchanged a few kisses in the past, but—”
“We kiss as if the bloody room had burst on fire,” he interrupted. “We kiss as if making love didn’t exist and kissing was all there was.”
“Stop that!” She swallowed. “Beckham rubbed himself against her.”
“I do that,” Gabriel said, satisfaction ripe in his voice. “I’d like to do it again too. Have you lifted the ban on kissing? I can’t remember.”
“No, I haven’t,” Kate said, a fugitive shred of self-control emerging. “So Effie told Beckham he was a toad, or something along those lines.”
“
Not
part of our kissing,” Gabriel said. “You succumb. All I’ve heard are little murmurs, the encouraging kind.”
She decided to ignore him. “That made Beckham angry, so he reached out and simply grabbed her.”
“Grabbed her? Hadn’t he already done that?”
“With his hand,” Kate said, scowling. “Between her legs. Poor Effie was so overset by it that she could barely explain it to me now, a whole year later.”
“I want to do that too,” Gabriel said, sighing.
Kate picked up a fork.
“But I haven’t,” he said hastily. “So that’s when she forked him?”
“Yes, except he told everyone that she had groped him under the table and that’s how the forking happened.”
Gabriel looked up at her from under thick eyelashes. “Will you please grope me under the table, Kate mine?”
“I’m not your Kate,” she said, feeling her lips curve. Her treacherous heart was no match for a flirtatious prince on a summer’s day.
“That’s the odd thing,” he said, lying on his back again and shading his eyes with an arm. “You are, you are, you are.”
Kate put her glass to her mouth because if she didn’t, she would reach over and put her lips on his.
“So she forked him,” Gabriel said, after a second.
“And he deliberately destroyed her reputation in retaliation. Hathaway is a decent man. He has obviously seen through the rumors and realized that Effie would never grope anyone.”
“It wouldn’t be kind of you to take Hathaway from poor Effie under the circumstances,” Gabriel said. “Unless you are fond of the man, in which case you might keep in mind that matrimonial life with Hathaway promises to be boring. Those overly decent men don’t approve of groping.”
“Wives do not grope their husbands under the table,” Kate said, giggling.
“I shall make it part of the marriage settlement,” Gabriel said. “I need a grope once a week or I’ll wilt like a lily.”
“You wouldn’t wilt, you’d—” She broke off.
“What would I do?” Gabriel asked.
Her eyes fell, but after all, she had nothing to lose. “You’ll be off to another woman.”
Something flashed across his face so quickly that she couldn’t read it. “Ah, my title rears its ugly head again,” he said, a bit of chill in his voice.
“It’s nothing to do with your title. Husbands stray. They have mistresses, and they take
friends
.”
“Not everyone is as friendly as your godmother.” His voice was still cool.
She fiddled with her fork. “My father was—friendly.”
Gabriel nodded. “So was mine, as evidenced by Wick.” He got to his feet in one easy movement. “Shall we see if there are other statues hidden in the garden?”
She took his hand as he helped her up, feeling a pulse of relief. This conversation was uncomfortably intimate. More intimate even than kissing, which was odd.
“I see a couple of mounds of ivy that might hide statues,” Gabriel said, hands on his hips. “There, and over against the back wall.”
One of the mounds of ivy turned out to cover a pile of fallen bricks. “I wonder what it was originally,” Kate said.
“There’s no way to tell since it’s all to pieces. I think I’ll get some men to build a very small folly here. It would be a delightful place for a dinner
à deux
.”
“Do princes ever get to have intimate dinners of that fashion?”
“Of course!”
“But the castle is full of people demanding your attention,” Kate said. “Are you ever alone?”
“Of course,” he said again. But there was an odd expression on his face.
“When you go on archaeological digs, does everyone know you’re a prince?”
Gabriel pulled down a bit more ivy and inspected the fallen bricks. “They don’t care. I’m the foreign devil who’s odd enough to want them to excavate carefully, rather than simply tunneling toward the gold.”
That explained a great deal about Gabriel’s hankering for Carthage, to Kate’s mind.
“You’d better find another blue-eyed prig to marry,” he said, moving over to the vines clinging to the back garden wall. “It sounds as if Effie needs Hathaway or she’ll end up tatting baby bonnets for other people’s children.”
“Hathaway is not a prig!” Kate said, coming over to help. “He’s honorable, and decent.”
“So you said.” Gabriel sounded bored. “Perhaps what Effie needs is someone to take a skewer, rather than a fork, to Beckham.”
“It wouldn’t help Effie if you skewered him, unless Beckham confessed what happened so that everyone knew it was all a lie. I’m going to ask Henry to take care of it.”
“Lady Wrothe is undoubtedly a formidable knight, but what do you intend her to do?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “You know, this might be a portico. I think you’re wrong and there is a door into the castle courtyard. It only makes sense.”
“We looked from the other side,” Gabriel said, wrenching at a mass of ivy. It came down on top of him, trails and strands of ivy all around his shoulders. “There are no gates in the outer walls.”
“You look like a satyr,” Kate said, laughing.
“Give me my wine and my dancing girls,” Gabriel said, leering at her.
“Beware!” she said, dancing back. “I’ll stamp on your tail.”
“How do you know what satyrs look like? I thought you were so ill-educated.”
“I can read,” Kate said. “My father had Boyse’s
Pantheon
, so I read that.” She glanced over mischievously and couldn’t resist. “His library was quite thorough. He had Aretino as well.”
Gabriel was bending over, shaking his head to get the last leaves out of his hair. He straightened, and the look in his eyes sent a bolt of heat straight to Kate’s stomach.
“You’re trying to drive me mad,” he said conversationally, moving toward her with the grace of a predator.
“Well,” she squeaked, sounding like a bleating lamb, “I—I—”
Their kisses were everything he had described them to be: like a room on fire, like a house with no air. She melted into his arms and the pressure of his lips stole every sensible thought in her head.
And replaced them with lewd images from Aretino’s naughty book, pictures of male bodies that were all muscle and smooth skin, men with wild expressions on their faces—only they weren’t merely men; the face she saw in her mind’s eye was Gabriel’s.
His hands were sliding down her back now, moving slowly in a direction that they shouldn’t move, down . . .
But he shouldn’t be kissing her either, faithless man that he was.
“You promised,” she said, breaking away from him.
His eyes were black. “Don’t,” he said, and the word was like a groan. It weakened her knees.
“We agreed not to kiss.”
“That was before you admitted to ogling Aretino’s art, if one can give it that name.”
“I fail to see what that has to do with anything.”
He leaned back against the wall and laughed. “It means, my dear Kate, that you are that rare thing amongst young ladies: a woman with curiosity. And, to be blunt, lust.”
Kate’s cheeks started to turn pink; she could feel it. “I didn’t study the book,” she said haughtily, though she had. “I merely leafed through it and ascertained that it was inappropriate before putting it back on the shelf.”
“Liar.” He moved one lazy step, so he was just next to her again, though not touching. “What were your favorites, Kate o’ my Life? Did you like those naughty ones with more than two people in a bed?”