He held it out to her. She stared at it as if she’d never seen a wedding ring before, or at least not like this one—yet it was totally indistinguishable from every other wedding ring she’d ever seen. It was just a plain gold band like her mother and Mrs. Driscoll wore.
“Well, aren’t you going to take it?” he asked.
She looked down as she peeled off her gloves. Surely she hadn’t expected him to get down on bended knee, take her hand into his, and slide it on her finger himself? Now that they were alone, there was no need for him to pretend being romantic with her.
She chastised herself for being so foolish as to think this was supposed to mean something more than a mere charade. She’d met him only three days ago, but then she knew of many brides who never met their husbands until the day before the wedding—and in a few cases, the day of the wedding. Nathan might be handsome and charming and cause her to think wicked thoughts in a way no other man had ever done before—at least not a flesh-and-blood man that she could actually see and touch, for until now those wicked thoughts had been confined to nameless, faceless men in her daydreams. But they could never really marry. The best she could hope for was someone like the widowed Mr. Throckmorton—but she’d traded that vague possibility for this absolute impossibility.
Only what had she expected when she’d traded places with Margaret Hathaway? All she’d been looking for was a way to get far, far away from Bellingham Hall and reach London.
This was the most she could ever hope for.
She held out her hand. He dropped the ring into her palm.
“I trust you know which finger it goes on.” He placed the wooden box back into his trunk.
She slipped it on the third finger of her left hand, feeling suddenly somber, and she wasn’t sure why. This might be her only chance to ever wear a wedding ring.
He dropped the lid on the trunk with a heavy thunk. “I’m sorry about your portmanteau. If you can stand to wear those clothes for one more day, I might see about buying you some more in the village tomorrow. The innkeeper’s wife might be able to assist in some way. Now let’s go downstairs and have some supper, shall we?”
Kate finally stood up and doffed her dusty pelisse, wishing she could have a bath. But what was the point, when she’d just have to put on the same dirty clothes again?
“And after supper,” he went on, “I’ll remain downstairs for the rest of the night, and tell anyone who asks that we had a quarrel and I’ve been banished from your bed. I’m sure you’ll have no trouble playing at that.”
He finally smiled, his white teeth almost dazzling her. She struggled to find something droll to say.
Something that wouldn’t betray how forlorn she felt at—at what?
She forced a smile. “How ironic. Just when I finally acquire a ring to fool everyone into thinking we’re married, now we have to convince everyone we’re not happily married.”
“That’s the spirit!” he said brightly. “We’ll sup and have ourselves a blazing row—but not so blazing that we end up being tossed out on our ears. I suspect this innkeeper, like all the innkeepers we’ve encountered thus far, runs a respectable establishment and will not hesitate to point that out to us should the occasion demand.”
* * * *
She seemed sullen through most of the meal, barely looking up from the food. Nathan couldn’t exactly blame her for being upset about her missing portmanteau, for she must have had her entire life packed in there. Had she, like he, also been traveling with jewelry?
He inquired.
“I own not a single piece of jewelry, save for a cross on a chain that I received for my confirmation half a lifetime ago,” she replied. “And as you can see, that’s safely around my neck.”
“Half a lifetime, you say?” He offered her a teasing smile. “You can’t be that old.”
“I was confirmed at the age of fourteen. Fourteen years are half of my life.”
He quaffed his ale. “Then that would make you—eight and twenty?”
“You sound as if you’re guessing. Are mathematics not your forte?”
“No, I do know that fourteen is half of twenty-eight. I just didn’t realize…” He let his voice trail off and inserted a large chunk of beef into his mouth.
“You didn’t realize what?”
Nathan kept his mouth closed as he chewed, though he did manage a mm-mmm through his tightly sealed lips. Ah, he detected some gristle. That would keep his jaws too busy to say anything for the next few moments.
She leaned ever so slightly forward. “You didn’t realize I was that old?”
“No, I didn’t realize you were the same age as me.” He held a napkin to his lips and disposed of the stubborn gristle.
“How old did you think I was?”
“I hadn’t really wondered or thought about it. Why do you sound so accusatory? Wouldn’t you rather be thought younger than you are?”
“And why would I wish to be thought younger than I am? Because of the notion that only a much younger woman can attract a better husband than an older one? Because all I can hope for at my advanced, decrepit age are old widowers with a dozen children, and even then they would only marry me because I started out as the governess in their household?”
“I think you know perfectly well that’s not all you can hope for,” Nathan countered. “Isn’t that why you want to go to London? You’re bound to find better prospects there.”
She pushed the vegetables around her plate. “Yes, indeed. I’m sure there’s a wider selection of old widowers in London than in York.”
He suppressed a chuckle. “If I know you, you still believe you can do better.” Certainly Nathan himself believed she could do better.
She set down her fork. “Whatever do you mean?”
He leaned closer to her, lowering his voice. “You traded places with Margaret Hathaway because you were afraid of having to marry an old widower. Your mother thinks you don’t stand a snowball’s chance in—in the Hellenes, where I don’t believe it ever snows, at least not enough to make a snowball—of marrying a more suitable prospect. You’d prefer a bachelor closer to your age, looking for a helpmate to fill not only his nursery but his lonely nights. A man who might marry you for love instead of mere convenience.”
“Love,” she whispered, so low he barely heard it. But he did. She whispered it like a breath, a sigh. She whispered it not in scorn or skepticism, but as something she longed for and did indeed fear she would never know.
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 n
erve 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?
Chapter Eleven
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 t
he 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.
Wagered to the Duke (BookStrand Publishing Romance) Page 13
