by Anita Mills
It was as though he wanted to reach his hand across to her. But instead, he turned to the others at his side. “Gentlemen, I suggest we take Lady Volsky’s petition under advisement.”
It wasn’t enough for Patrick Hamilton. “Dean Hervey, it would seem to me that Countess Volsky has suffered immeasurably at the hands of a cold husband, whose sister used her in the quest for a child. I would ask that before we adjourn, a determination be made as to this panel’s recommendation to the court.”
He didn’t even mention the archbishop, making it clear he expected it to go to the ecclesiastical court. Hervey looked down at the papers before him.
“If you and Baron Winstead would care to wait in the outer room with Lady Volsky, we will discuss the matter. I do not expect the considerations to be weighty. Someone will inform you within the hour.”
Harry rose. “I thank you all for the justice you give my sister.”
Outside, he hugged her. “Kate, I have not the least doubt as to how they will rule. Not the least doubt.”
When he released her, she turned to Patrick Hamilton. “Thank you, sir—from the bottom of my heart, thank you. I know why you are so very highly recommended.”
He smiled. “I always wished to be an actor, you know, but such is not to be for respectable younger sons. The practice of law allows me to follow my heart. But,” he reminded her, “it is not over yet. There is still the criminal court, and then Parliament.”
“I know.”
Berry did not wait. When Katherine looked around her, he was gone.
“Mr. Hamilton,” a clerk said finally from the half-opened door. “You may speak with Dean Hervey now, if you wish.”
“Wait here.”
She closed her eyes and held her breath. Then she felt Harry’s hand clasp hers. “Buck up, Kate,” he whispered.
Hamilton could not have been gone above a minute. He returned, grinning.
“Countess Volsky, your husband has been chained with the commission of incest.”
London: September 11, 1815
It was the last step, and Patrick Hamilton had said she did not need to be there to hear it, that perhaps it would be less painful if she did not. But she could not wait idly at home while the bill of divorcement was debated and passed. It was a formality, Lord Leighton had assured her, but she had to see for herself.
She had spent much of the past week packing, ostensibly for a retreat to the sea, but she’d not yet told Harry she intended to cross it, that she intended to go to Florence. He’d try to dissuade her, she knew that. He’d tell her Bell Townsend would not make any woman a decent husband, she knew that also.
And she could not even say that Bell would marry her, or that he had not found another woman after her. But he’d haunted her dreams, he’d made her ache herself to sleep far too many nights for her to just forget him. She had to at least see him, to see if he still had his offer on the table. In many ways, she was not the same weak creature he’d taken across Russia. She’d finally gotten the spine and the pluck he’d given her credit for. And she was going to put it to the touch.
But she was not without a sense of reality. She knew he might not want her. But if he did not, he’d have to say it to her face. If he did not, he would have to tell her that those nights in Poland had meant nothing to him. And if he said that, she’d come home utterly defeated.
The court has already found Alexei guilty, and they had assessed him enough money to make her wealthy for a lifetime. The Russian ambassador had already delivered half of the settlement to Harry, and between them, he and she put it away where neither could touch it without the advice of Patrick Hamilton.
She adjusted her hat in the mirror while Peg fidgeted with her hair, pulling the tendrils about her ears as Galena had once done. She was about to make the same face at herself, but she could see Harry’s reflection behind her.
“Lud, Kate, but you look as though you are moving,” he observed. “Is there anything you have not packed?”
“Yes.”
“And you have ordered everything to be picked up tomorrow?”
“No. Some of it goes today.”
“Good of you to tell me,” he said. “Were you just going to let me come home to an empty house?”
“Of course not, stoopid!” She turned around. “Well, how do I look? Harry, I know it is nearly over, but I think I am more frightened today than I have ever been.”
“You look fetching. Truly. It would not surprise me in the least if Patrick Hamilton came up to scratch.”
“What fustian.”
“Fellow’s halfway to head over heels,” he murmured, testing her. “You couldn’t do much better, you know.”
“Oh?”
“And, his career doesn’t depend on his wife.”
“You are making every bit of this up.”
“No.”
“Harry, I am the next thing to an Antidote!”
“Kate, I won’t lie and say you are a beauty, but you are not hard on the eyes, either. Thing is, a man’s got to know you to appreciate you.”
“Thank you.”
“That’s why you did not show to advantage on the marriage mart, you know.”
“You are my brother.”
“I know of two others who think so also.”
“Who? Hamilton and who? Leighton?”
“Possibly. Maybe even Bell,” he suggested slyly.
Her breath caught in her chest. “He—he never said so, did he?”
“You should know that better than I, I’d think.”
“Have—have you heard from him lately?”
“Not lately.”
“Oh. Well, I daresay he must be enjoying Italy.”
“I daresay.”
“I owe him everything, you know,” she said, her voice dropping low. “Sometimes I have wished I hadn’t come home, but then—”
“It was truly a matter of honor, wasn’t it, Kate?”
“Yes.”
“Leighton said you reminded him of Lady Longford—she used to be Lady Kingsley.”
“For my spine, Harry—for my spine.”
“Are you ready?” he asked suddenly.
“Yes. Do I need the rouge pot, do you think?”
“No.”
He waited until they were down in the foyer, then he recalled that he’d left something. Running up the stairs, he went to her bedchamber rather than his. A cursory search of her packed boxes yielded nothing.
“Peg, they are coming for some of her boxes today, aren’t they?” he asked her maid.
“Yes, but—”
“Here—” He dug out a piece of paper with an address on it and handed it to her. “She copied down the address wrong. Give them this.”
As he hurried back down the stairs, the maid looked at the paper, wondering how Katherine Volsky could have mistaken Florence, Italy, for some place in Cornwall. She exchanged the cards nonetheless. Her ladyship might be mad as fire, but Peg herself was an English girt, and the thought of jaunting off to Italy had not been very appealing anyway.
The gallery was packed with the curious, some of whom had merely come to see the notorious Countess Volsky, the woman who had traveled thousands of miles to escape a dastardly husband. Not that many actually sympathized with her. To them, the civilized thing to do would have been to ignore it, to amuse herself with another Russian nobleman while Count Volsky enjoyed his sister’s company improperly.
“Er—” The elegantly attired gentleman drew out a wad of bank notes and held them up. “Ten pounds to anyone willing to give up a place.”
That section nearly emptied. For ten pounds most could push and shove their way in somewhere else. The gentleman moved to the front and sat down before removing his dove gray hat. Leaning back, he combed his blond Brutus with his Angers. And then he waited for a glimpse of her. He’d not been half so eager to see any female since his salad days.
He’d written Harry he was coming home, but Harry had asked him not to try to see Kate until
everything was over. Truth to tell, he hadn’t pushed the matter—he didn’t even know of his welcome. He only knew that he loved her desperately, that the months in Italy had been hell. For weeks after he’d left her in Warsaw, he’d turned over and reached for her in the night, then awakened with the knowledge that she wasn’t there.
Harry said that Patrick Hamilton, the solicitor he’d hired with Bell’s money, a man Bell knew only by repute, was completely taken with her. And he could tell by Leighton’s letters that George had not exactly been least in sight either.
Bell knew he didn’t deserve her, and he never would. He knew that. But he also knew that out of the dozens of women he’d held, out of the dozens who’d played the game with him, she was the only one he wanted to keep forever.
He saw her come in with her brother, Leighton, and a man he took to be Hamilton. It was enough to give his heart pause. Leighton he’d known was tall and handsome. But so was Hamilton. Both of them had to be several inches taller than he was.
He strained to see her as she was surrounded, and then watched her as she sat down. It had been a nasty, bitter business, but she carried herself with dignity. God, how many times she must have had to listen to how foolish she’d been, how gullible. How many times she must have had to repeat her heartbreak publicly, telling how it felt to discover that her handsome husband had preferred his older sister to her.
Hamilton, Leighton, and several others met together for a moment in a corner, then Hamilton came back. Bell did not miss the language of his look, nor the way he bent his head close to Kate’s. And he saw the way that she looked up, the way she smiled. He’d been away too damned long.
Then he saw why they had conferred. The bill was presented, read in its most sanitary language, saying nothing more than that Katherine, once Winstead, now Volsky, should be divorced from her husband on the grounds that he had deserted her bed and committed incest with his sister. There was a rumbling of “hear—hear,” then a passing vote. It had been so easy, he marveled at it.
Katherine was a free woman. There was a near mob scene below as people gathered to congratulate Patrick Hamilton. In a way, he was one of their own, and he’d won the woman’s freedom for her. Bell started down the back stairs, deciding he’d call on her later. Right now, the moment belonged to those who’d fought for her. Even to a man he’d paid a thousand pounds to save her.
As he came out into the front, he saw her again. Somehow Harry had managed to get her out. For the first time since he’d been seduced at fifteen, Bell felt like the callowest of youths.
“Kate!” he called out on impulse.
At first she didn’t hear where the word came from, and then he shouted more loudly. She turned around, and her heart rose in her throat.
He was as she remembered. His tousled blond hair still made him look almost like a little boy, and his gray eyes were as arresting as ever. She stood there, waiting, hoping.
He’d been in a hurry. Now he walked slowly, stopping before he reached her. He had to know—he could not wait half a day to put it to the touch. He grinned crookedly.
“Hallo, Kate.”
“Bell.”
“I didn’t want to run any longer. And I don’t give a damn about my rep anymore. And I don’t care if I am never invited to another party anywhere.” He knew he was bungling it badly. “The offer is still on the table, Kate,” he said. She stared at him, and for an awful moment, he was certain he was too late.
Then she smiled. “I was going to Florence to pick it up, Bell. My bags and boxes are all packed.”
“Oh, God, Kate.”
She could feel his arms around her, she could feel the soft superfine of his coat, and she could smell the Hungary water he’d worn for her. He was there. He’d come home to her. She clung to him as though he were her life, savoring the feeling of his cheek against her hair, of his breath against her cheek before she gave herself up to his kiss.
“Bell, for God’s sake—not here!” Harry hissed at him.
“I love you, Kate. I love you, Kate. And I don’t want to go to Italy—I’ve traveled too damned many miles for you already, he murmured against her lips.”
“Oh, lud!” She stepped back self-consciously.
“What is it?”
“My bags—they are on their way to Florence! And I bought all new clothes in hopes you would like them!’
“You can go naked for all I care,” he said, smiling foolishly.
“No—I sent her clothes to Cornwall,” Harry admitted. “I thought she meant to take you.”
“Cornwall!” she wailed. “Why on earth Cornwall?”
Bell’s smile turned to a full grin. “I’ve bought a house there—a big, grand house with room for children. And you can see and smell the sea from the windows. We don’t ever have to go through any of this again. It won’t make any difference if we are received.”
Patrick Hamilton had been watching with an intense war of emotions in his breast. He stepped forward manfully, however, to offer his services.
“I can arrange to facilitate a special license, for a fee, of course.”
“What do you say, Kate? Do you really want a worthless rake for a husband?” Bell asked her.
“No. I want a reformed one,” she told him happily.
Duchy of Cornwall: September 15, 1815
“You know, I do not think I can ever get enough of you,” he murmured into the crown of her hair.
She ducked beneath him and stood away from her desk. “I was writing to Harry to tell him how we are.” But even as she said it, she felt the same intense desire for him. “You know,” she whispered softly, “we are spending all our time in bed.”
“I know.” He looked over her shoulder to the unfinished letter, reading where she’d written to her brother. “Well, Adonis has wed the Antidote, making her supremely happy.” Leaning past her, he dipped her pen in the ink pot and carefully struck out the words “Antidote” and “her,” replacing them with “Original” and “him.”
“Now, where were we?” he asked, opening his arms for her.
He drew her against him, heating her body through the lawn nightgown with his own. He’d explored nearly every inch of her, and she was still the most seductive creature of his memory. His thumbs massaged her temples, drawing her head closer, and then he tasted her lips, savoring the soft, pliant feel of them as they parted. And then he was drowning in his own desire.
“Come to bed, Kate. There must be a hundred ways to show you how I feel.”
“And I want to know every one, she admitted shamelessly.”
His hands loosened the ties at her neck, then pulled her gown down over her shoulders. His head bent lower as he sampled each breast. He could feel her body quiver as her nipples hardened. It was going to be good again. The gown caught between them, then slid to the floor at his feet. She stepped back, hesitated, then her smile beckoned him as she backed to the bed.
As he followed her down into the depths of the feather mattress, he wondered yet again how he could have ever thought her plain. “You know what, Kate?” he whispered huskily against the hollow of her throat. “You are beautiful—absolutely beautiful in every way.”
For her answer, her arms closed around his shoulders, and her body moved beneath him, enticing him. He raised his head to hers, letting her tongue tease him, and as she brought her legs up, he possessed her body and her mouth at the same time.
She welcomed him eagerly, her hands urging him on, touching him, tracing the muscles of his back and his hips, taking what he gave her, carrying him with her, until he could wait no longer. He could not tell whether he heard her cries or his, and it didn’t matter. He lay there, sated, not wanting to move, feeling the warmth of her body around his.
When he looked down, her dark eyes were even darker with remembered passion. And her smile was as warm as any he’d ever seen. He kissed her before he left her, then rolled onto his side and pulled her close.
She buried her head into the gold, curlin
g hairs on his chest, knowing she was going to love him forever. He looked down at her, feeling a tenderness as intense as his earlier desire.
“What do you think of when we are like this?” he asked her.
“Falling stars,” she answered huskily. “When I close my eyes, they are everywhere.”
More from Anita Mills
The Fire Series
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