When a Scot Loves a Lady (11 page)

Madness
. She was not a wanton. She was a coolheaded, rational being. This man was a flirt, a cretin, and she had nothing whatsoever in common with him except that they clearly seemed to enjoy kissing each other. She ran her hands along his arms, drunk on him now, the caress of his mouth carrying her along the insanity. She touched his face and everything inside her softened. The plane of his high cheekbone and hard jaw was perfection, taut and barely rough from the day's whisker growth.

“I wanted you to kiss me.” She heard herself utter the words, breathless and trembling, unable to control anything. It was the whiskey, the dark stair, the man holding her to him. His eyes were so dark in the wavering shadows of candlelight and heavy with desire. He took her mouth anew and she gave herself up to the strokes of lips and tongue now turning her liquid. There was hot breath and more heat where his palm splayed upon her back, and her breasts and belly pressed against the hard wall of his chest, her fingertips gripping his arms. She wanted to feel even more, to make this secret indiscretion a moment to remember every night as she lay on her spinster's couch.

She shifted her hips.

Abruptly he released her.

Kitty's breaths came in little jagged bursts. She could do nothing but stare at the mouth that possessed such skill and the eyes that seemed none too pleased.

“Weel, nou ye've had yer kiss.” His voice was rough. Rather, rougher than usual. He grasped her shoulder and put her away from him entirely. Peeling her hand from around his arm, he brought the candle between them and wrapped her fingers around the holder, then released both. The flame flickered too hot, but neither moved to widen the space between them.

Kitty's mouth would not close.

“If you did not wish to kiss me”—her voice sounded foreign—“you needn't have.”

“Oh, A wished tae.” He drew a thick breath, turned his head away and rubbed a palm across his face.

He pivoted and clattered down the stair. The kitchen door smacked shut behind him. Hand shaking about the candle-holder, Kitty sank back against the wall. She closed her eyes.

She would not regret it. Not until the morning. With the morning would come sobriety and a return to rationality. For now whiskey reigned, and the sensation of his lips on hers lingered, and the desire pulsing inside her was wonderfully welcome.

Tomorrow would be soon enough for regret.

T
he following morning Kitty's head ached, her stomach hung like a sack of sour milk below her ribs, and her cheeks burned incessantly. But this paled in comparison to the news Emily announced on waking her.

“A portion of the stable roof collapsed beneath the weight of the snow and nearly injured Lord Blackwood's horse. It got off with a minor scratch, however.”

“Good heavens!” Kitty sat up in bed. “Was anyone hurt?”

Emily peered at her. “What a peculiar question to ask, when I have said a horse escaped harm.”

Kitty drew the covers off and turned away from her friend to climb from the bed. Emily was an odd duck, but no slow top.

“I only wondered how it came to be discovered. Ned, I must suppose.”

“Lord Blackwood. He went out to feed the animals and the roof fell while he was within.”

The peer who kissed like a god tended to his own cattle like a stable hand and was nearly injured doing so. Kitty rubbed the sleep from her eyes, her hands unsteady.

“We must be happy, then, that he and the horses are safe.” She drew off the nightshift Mrs. Milch had lent her and shivered in the cold. She reached for her own fine linen garment and pulled on her stockings. Emily came to her to tie the stays about her ribs.

“The gentlemen and some men from the pub are seeing to the repairs now.”

“I hope they are not under the influence of strong drink.” Had he been the previous evening in the stairwell? She had been far too inebriated to judge. He said he'd wanted to kiss her, but he certainly hadn't looked it after he actually did so.

But, before… She must have imagined that look in his eyes. They hardly knew each other. Yet for a moment an uncanny awareness of something shared had glistened between them.

It was certainly all in her imagination. After all, her imagination had once convinced her that Lambert Poole loved her. Her imagination had made him into a man worthy of being loved.

“Mr. Yale, it seems, can hold his liquor well enough,” Emily commented.

Kitty darted a glance over her shoulder. “I am sorry you must be trapped here with a gentleman you so dislike.”

Emily secured the laces and reached for Kitty's petticoat and gown. “I do wish we had a button hook.” She began fastening the wool. “I don't dislike him, Kitty. I disrespect him. The two are far different.”

“Are they?” Kitty saw nothing in Lord Blackwood that she typically admired in gentlemen, no elevation of mind or character. Except something about him was not right. The pieces did not fit together. The steely glint in the backs of his eyes that had been there even as he'd said he wanted to kiss her did not suit the man he otherwise appeared. And how strange his expression when he had come in from the stable earlier and told her he would go out after the servants if she wished.

But perhaps that coldness was only a remnant of his tragedy. And perhaps Kitty was refining upon it far too much and making herself a complete ninny.

“Of course they are different, Kitty,” Emily said soberly. “Liking has everything to do with character and disposition. Respect has to do with a gentleman's mode of life. But I shall get along well enough until we leave. Lord Blackwood has lent me another book,” she finished as though that was all in the world a woman needed to be happy.

“More poetry?”

“A play in verse. Racine's
Phaedra
.” Emily made quick work of fastening Kitty's gown and then Kitty went to the pitcher of water on the stand. She broke the thin crust of ice and washed her face.

The handsome barbarian with big shaggy dogs liked to read French theater. Her insides felt somewhat trembly too now.

“Has Mrs. Milch prepared breakfast yet?”

“Eggs again. We must make the bread for dinner tonight.”

“You are determined to do so?”

“Of course.”

“How is the road this morning? Has anyone seen the mail coach?”

“Mr. Yale reports that no one has passed yet.”

No escape then from her foolish nerves and this unwise preoccupation, made considerably worse since she now knew far too much about him—his scent, the caress of his tongue, the hard contoured man-shape beneath coat sleeves and waistcoat. She could not think, could not organize her thoughts at all, it seemed, a thoroughly unprecedented state.

Being infatuated with a man at five-and-twenty felt absolutely idiotic. But perhaps it was not so singular. Her mother occasionally showed moderate giddiness over Lord Chamberlayne. Of course, Lord Chamberlayne was intelligent, a consummate gentleman, and a successful politician. While Lord Blackwood … had very large dogs.

She must be mad.

And so bread baking it would be.

K
itty stood before a wooden block in Mrs. Milch's kitchen, bent over a lump of dough as the inn mistress offered instruction on kneading. In a matter of days she would be sweeping floors and plucking chicken carcasses. Possibly feeding slop to the pigs if there were any pigs to be fed.

“One must press it like this, Mrs. Milch?” Emily queried, brow creased.

“No, miss. Like this. But the Quality shouldn't be making bread, I still say,” she added damply. “As like, milady agrees with me.”

“Oh, I haven't any feeling about it one way or the other.” Kitty didn't care how she busied herself. At this point she would do anything to escape her confusion. The snowbound inn was closing in on her with merciless vigor, much as Emily's knuckles now dug into the dough.

She felt ill, betrayed by the spinsterish longings suddenly burst upon her. For over five years, since Lambert took her innocence and she began to hate him, she knew she would never marry. She was ruined to be a bride to a respectable gentleman, and as she could not provide children even if a man were to offer for her, she could not in good conscience accept. She'd told herself she did not want a husband. Men were not to be trusted. She would be perfectly happy living out her days with her mother as her closest companion, Lord Chamberlayne or no.

But Kitty could pretend no longer. In truth she had known that the night she determined to follow Emily into Shropshire. She'd left her mother and Lord Chamberlayne to settle matters between themselves because she did not wish to live with her mother her entire life. She wanted something else of life.

Her hands stilled, then slipped from the dough. She had not been honest with herself. Her infatuation with a man of the Earl of Blackwood's cut proved it.

She was tired of justifying her childhood mistake through sophistication and pretending to the world that she was glad to be spurned by so many among polite society. She was tired of the lonesome future she had envisioned for herself. Her heart ached for something else, something sweeter and finer. She
longed
to fall. Image shattered. Innocence regained in simple, unpremeditated happiness.

But a woman like her was not allowed to fall. A woman who had given away her most precious possession without benefit of marriage was, rather, propositioned and groped. She was kissed in dark stairwells, and the gentlemen who did the propositioning, groping, and kissing did not feel obligated to offer anything more. Anything respectable. Anything permanent. Anything that might fill the loneliness.

“Milady, you mustn't muss your skirts.” Mrs. Milch lifted Kitty's hands and wiped them with a clean cloth with the delicacy of a lady's maid. “I never mind a bit of flour on me, but don't you be getting it on your fine silks and what have you's when there's Quality gentlemen about.”

Kitty looked into the woman's droopy eyes and saw understanding. But that was impossible. Everything about this dreamlike sojourn in snowy Shropshire was impossible.

She cast her gaze to the kitchen doorway as though it were a portal for escape, like the open door of Emily's traveling carriage had seemed to her in London.

The earl appeared there.

Her entire body flushed with heat. She had always before admired the unmarred visages of gentlemen who spent most of their time in town. Lord Blackwood's cheeks glowed with cold and exertion, and she revised her position. He was wonderfully tall and as thoroughly gorgeous as the night before by firelight during dinner and in the dark stairwell during her own private dessert. She
felt
like the girl he had called her, idiotically infatuated and wanting him to kiss her again more than she could bear.

“Guid day, leddies.” He took them all in with a glance, then looked to the inn mistress. “Ma'am, yer husband begs ye set a kettle o tar on the fire for sealing the boards.”

“Now the man's sending the Quality on his errands instead of Ned. Where's that boy got to?” Mrs. Milch released Kitty's hands.

“Gane tae the smithy tae retour the saw.”

Emily looked up. “Have you finished the stable roof already?”

“Aye, miss. Moony haunds, as ye be at weeman's work here.” He glanced at the dough-covered table and smiled.

Kitty had to look away.
Women's work
. He approved of ladies baking bread, she understood possibly three out of four words he spoke, yet his smile took her breath.

Oh, God,
what
was going on inside her? How could she swing from one extreme to the other?

“I am astounded at the difficulty of this task,” Emily commented. “But Mrs. Milch is a very competent teacher after so many years laboring at it.”

Kitty swallowed over her lumpy throat. “My lord, is y—”

His gaze shifted to her.

“—y-your—” Her tongue failed.

An exceedingly uncomfortable silence filled the kitchen.

His mouth quirked slightly to the side. Kitty could not spare a thought to care that Emily stared at her now, or that she had never stuttered before in her life. If only he would
talk
more and
look
less she might make it through this without embarrassing herself completely.