“You’ve never met this other agent?”
“Apparently not in connection to the War Department. It falls to you to keep me informed of any major developments that might warrant my involvement.” He reached for his pen again, and tapped the end of it against the desk. “Also, it would help, considerably, if you could keep Lady Kate from seeking my company.”
Hunter grinned. “She’s quite eager to speak to you of the baroness’s salons.”
“Bloody hell.” He stopped tapping the pen. “I should never have accepted that mission to Stockholm.”
Six
As the clock in the hall struck eleven, Kate snuggled into the cushions of an overstuffed chair, sighed happily, and opened her book. Probably, she should feel a touch guilty for leaving Lizzy up in her room while the guests laughed in the parlor and she hid in the small, out-of-the-way sitting room, but as much as she loved Lizzy, there were times when a person wanted a spot of solitude to sit and think…or read a silly novel without suffering through eye rolls from her lady’s maid.
She wasn’t to have that solitude. Within a few minutes of sitting down, the door swung open, and Mr. Hunter stepped inside.
“Good evening, Lady Kate.”
“Mr. Hunter.”
Kate’s pulse sped up in pleasurable anticipation as Mr. Hunter crossed the room. She’d not had a chance to speak with him in private since her mother had joined them in the parlor, which had preceded Lord Martin joining them, and that had preceded nearly every young unmarried lady in the room joining them. After tea, she’d gone to her room to work on her music until dinner. At dinner, they’d been seated at opposite ends of the table, and after dinner, he’d gone to the study for brandy while she’d made polite conversation in the parlor. She’d managed to sit through nearly an hour of the last before she’d made her excuses and gone to her room for her book.
She’d thought not to see Mr. Hunter again until breakfast, but with their new friendship established, she was happy to be mistaken.
He took a seat across from her and tilted his head to read the spine of her book. “The Adventures of Lady Amelia and the Valiant Prince Edward.” He straightened and smiled at her. “Not a particularly creative title is it?”
She felt the color rise to her cheeks and berated herself for not hiding the book in the cushions when he’d come in. Clasping the book in tight hands, she waited for him to say more.
When he didn’t immediately, she frowned at him in confusion. “Aren’t you going to poke fun?”
“Didn’t I just?”
“I meant at me, for reading it.”
He leaned back in his chair. “If I wanted to mock you for your choice of reading material, I would have done so long before now. Whit’s mentioned your penchant for such novels in the past.”
“Oh.” She would have to have a discussion with Whit about what he should, and should not, tell his friends. “He shouldn’t have.”
Hunter considered her. “Why read them if they embarrass you?”
“I’m not embarrassed to read them,” she argued. She was embarrassed to have been caught reading one by him, which was an entirely different matter.
“If you insist,” he returned generously. “But that doesn’t answer my question. Why do you read them?”
She shrugged and fiddled with the binding of the book. “I find them diverting. I like the adventure.” And the romantic aspects, but she wasn’t about to admit that.
“You wish for adventure,” he guessed.
“Doesn’t everyone?” she asked, looking up.
He gave a slight shake of his head. “Most prefer the security found in a life of monotony.”
“I don’t think that’s true. Human beings are naturally drawn to drama.”
“As long as it’s someone else’s.”
“Yes, you may be right.” She tapped at her book thoughtfully. “Perhaps I’m no different.”
A weighted pause followed that statement, and she looked up to find him watching her closely, his dark gaze unreadable.
“You’re different,” he said softly.
She wanted to look away, or at least shift in her seat a bit. The room seemed too still all of a sudden, the air between them loaded with tension. Through a considerable act of will, she sat perfectly still, looked him in the eye, and berated herself for being foolish. Air was physically incapable of becoming tense.
“Are you attempting to compliment me?” she asked, and if her voice came out a little breathless, it couldn’t be helped.
His lips curved up, and he let the silence draw out a heartbeat longer before responding. “Compliments aren’t attempted. They’re given, or they’re not.”
“Well, which was yours?”
“Do you feel complimented?”
She blinked a few times, thought about it, then said, “I honestly don’t know.”
“Then you have your answer.”
She opened her mouth, closed it again.
“You needn’t look so crestfallen,” he told her on a soft laugh. “It wasn’t an insult, merely an observation.”
“I’m not crestfallen,” she countered. She was, however, inexplicably disappointed, and hoping it didn’t show.
Rather than respond, he considered her for a second, and then very smoothly, and quite unexpectedly, rose from his chair. Kate had a moment to wish she could move about with such elegance, and to wonder why she felt let down that he should abruptly decide to leave, and one last moment to wonder why he wasn’t headed in the direction of the door. And then, quite suddenly it seemed, he was standing over her. Or, to be more precise, looming over her.
There was so very much of him. His broad form blocked out the light of the fireplace and cast a shadow over her figure. He wasn’t touching her, there was plenty of space between every part of her and every part of him, and yet she felt completely overwhelmed. Not for the life of her could she manage a single syllable of speech or even a flicker of movement. She could barely string two coherent thoughts together.
She felt trapped, utterly enthralled. And too confused to know if she cared for the sensation or not.
He reached down and she watched, a bit dumbfounded, as he slipped her book from hands gone lax. “Tell me, Lady Kate, is this the sort of adventure you long for? A dashing prince who will shower you with compliments?”
It came as some surprise to her that she was able to find her voice. “What…what sort of adventure would that be? One doesn’t do anything when complimented. Except say thank you.”
“There are an infinite number of ways to say thank you.” He set the book aside and took her hand to draw her to her feet as easily as he had drawn the book. “Some of them very, very adventurous.”
He slipped his free arm around her waist and ever so slowly pulled her to him. A small voice in the back of her head told her to resist, to pull away. She ignored it. She didn’t want to resist. She wanted to see where the excitement dancing under her skin would lead.
She wanted to be adventurous.
He drew her near until his hard chest was pressed against her breasts, and he brought his other hand to curve firmly around the back of her neck. Everything inside of her thrilled at the feeling of being held so close. He seemed to be all around her at once. His body, his scent, his voice.
Had she really thought him overwhelming before? How could she have, when that sensation had been nothing, nothing, compared to this.
He bent his head toward hers. “I’ve never in my life met a more beautiful woman. Now…” His breath brushed her parted lips. “Say thank you.”
Enthralled, enchanted, and wildly curious, Kate let herself be led by instinct. She placed a hand on his chest, closed her eyes, and pressed her lips to his.
If Hunter was surprised by her acquiescence, he gave no indication of it. His mouth moved over hers in a soft and skillful rhythm, and she felt the excitement inside her build. Dimly, she noticed his breath tasted like spearmint tea and he smelled of clean soap and the sea air.
Wanting to savor both impressions and discover more, she lifted her arms and wrapped them around his neck.
The hand at her neck slid down to her shoulder, then lower to brush along her breast on its way to her hip. She gasped at the sensation, then gasped again when his mouth left hers to trail warm kisses along her jaw and down her neck. Each kiss left a delicious prick of heat in its wake.
His mouth found hers again, and his hands caressed her back in a long, slow stroke to the top of her gown. She felt the warmth of his fingers brush her skin and then they were working on the buttons of her gown.
She pulled away, just enough to find her breath and her voice. “Wait. Stop.”
His hands stilled but he continued to brush his lips softly, teasingly against hers. “Are you sure, Kate?”
“Yes. No. Yes.”
He slowly straightened and let her go, but lifted a finger to trail along her cheek.
“I wonder,” he said softly. “You spend your days dreaming of a man who will offer you adventure, but do you have the courage to reach for what you want when it’s handed to you on a platter?”
The burn of anger and shame instantly replaced the heat of passion—most of it, anyway. Did he think her a common doxy, then? Did he expect her to throw herself at the first gentleman who offered her a bit of adventure?
“Do not presume to know how I spend my days, nor what it is I dream of, Mr. Hunter. Furthermore, while you may fancy yourself a storybook hero”—she coolly pushed his hand away—“I see only a man with a grossly inflated opinion of himself.”
His face took on a darker cast. “Is that so?”
“That is so,” she replied with a succinct nod and a very subtle step backward.
She should have made it a little less subtle, because he was on her before she could take her next breath.
If the first kiss had been a dance of gentle seduction, the second was a war of wills. There was nothing soft in the way Mr. Hunter held her against him. Nothing coaxing about the way he moved his mouth over hers. It was hard and insistent—a dare and a demand at once. She wasn’t sure she could answer either. What she did know was that she desperately wanted to wrap her arms around his neck again. She wanted to give in to the excitement that was building once more, not in the slow and steady progression of before, but in a climb so rapid it left her light-headed.
She felt herself shifting to try to get closer. Perhaps she’d give in for just a moment.
Without warning, he let her go and stepped back to leave her cold, gasping, and to her mortification, leaning just a little.
“What do you think of my opinion now, Lady Kate?”
She wanted to gape at him, nearly as much as she wanted to throw something at his head. He looked smug. She felt dizzy, hot, and muddled, and he looked smug. The rotter.
“You, Mr. Hunter,” she managed through gritted teeth, “are no prince.”
His lips curved up in a humorless smile. “You have me there.”
She searched for something to say to that, but found her options were limited as he was, essentially, agreeing with her. She gave him a cold, hard look instead, then spun on her heel and left.
Minutes later, she let herself into her room with the careful stealth of a thief, or tried to anyway. She did stub her toe on the doorframe and tripped a bit on the rug as she crossed the room in semidarkness, but the resulting noise wasn’t enough to alert Lizzy of her presence, which was the entire reason she was trying to be stealthy.
She didn’t want to see anyone right now, let alone an inquisitive friend. She wanted to be left alone to think, and to fume.
What do you think of my opinion now, Lady Kate?
She didn’t need to think on it at all to know Mr. Hunter was absolutely not the romantic prince of her dreams. He wasn’t even a gentleman. Perhaps he was a rake, after all. Perhaps he was the dangerous pirate she’d thought him earlier. The fact that she’d read a number of novels featuring pirates—and that she’d had her fair share of dreams involving those pirates—wasn’t something Mr. Hunter needed to be made aware of, ever.
She set the candle she’d pilfered from the library on the fireplace mantel and stared at the flame without seeing it.
What was she to do with the man, now? A friendship clearly wasn’t going to be feasible. Friends didn’t go about kissing their friends senseless in out-of-the-way sitting rooms. She didn’t at all care for the idea of being enemies, or even adversaries. Being openly at odds with someone made her distinctly uncomfortable. She preferred avoidance to active confrontation, even with the very few horrid individuals of her acquaintance. And despite her displeasure with him at the moment, she wouldn’t go so far as to describe Mr. Hunter as anything approaching horrid.
Perhaps it would be best if she returned to her original plan of pretending his actions didn’t concern her in the least, which meant she would also need to pretend the kisses hadn’t bothered her, which was really only another way of saying she would need to pretend the kisses hadn’t happened at all.
She could do that, she decided with a decisive nod. She could most certainly do that.
In her first season, she had allowed Lord Martin to briefly press his lips to hers in her mother’s garden. Not long after, she’d decided it would be best if she behaved as if that event had never taken place. She’d managed that well enough, and Lord Martin could be a deuced persistent young man.
Seven
By five o’clock the next day, Kate had come to the conclusion than in comparison to Mr. Hunter’s skills of persistence, Lord Martin was a mere novice. And a clumsy one at that, because while Lord Martin had a tendency to trail her about like a child stepping on her heels, Mr. Hunter kept a respectable distance even as he followed her from room to room.
It was the oddest thing, to see him appearing everywhere she went. Even now, as she sat outside on the back veranda, a book of poetry in her hands, she just knew he was watching her from the windows behind her. What could the man be thinking? In the past, he seemed to loom whenever they happened to be in the same room, but he’d never before stalked her.
Perhaps he was working up the nerve to form an apology, she mused. Perhaps she would accept it.
She swallowed a laugh at her false conceit. Of course she would accept it, provided it was sincere. She detested being at odds with someone and always took advantage of the first reasonable opportunity to smooth things over.
Besides, now that she’d had the night for her temper and embarrassment to cool she had to admit that he hadn’t done anything worse than kiss her…and then act monstrously arrogant about it.
Perhaps she’d make him squirm a bit before she accepted his apology.
He would not be apologizing.
Hunter didn’t mind apologizing as a rule. A well-crafted appearance of contrition was capable of smoothing many a rough path. For the time being, however, his purposes were better suited by keeping the path between him and Kate a little uneven.
From his position at the window, Hunter rolled his shoulders and thought through his next move. It was going to be a challenge, both keeping close to Kate and maintaining the appearance of being just out of reach. After careful consideration, he decided that the most expedient way of doing both was to inform her of the smuggling operation and offer her an opportunity to participate in the investigation. The benefits were twofold. First and foremost, there was no possible way for him to continue following her about without arousing her suspicions. Which brought him to his second reason—he bloody well wasn’t going to be following the chit about.
She could come to him, and appealing to her sense of adventure would assure she did.
He’d always meant for her to come to him, he’d just forgotten that pertinent bit of information for a moment in the sitting room last night. His jaw clenched at the memory. It hadn’t been his intention to let things get quite so out of hand. He’d intended to kiss her, certainly, but that kiss was meant to be no more than a test. He’d wanted to know how susceptible
Lady Kate was to seduction, and as he had expected, she was open to it, but not easily blinded by it.
What he hadn’t expected, was what an unholy temptation kissing Lady Kate would be for him.
He’d never intended to take her innocence in the sitting room. Reaching for the buttons of her gown had only been part of the experiment. And yet a small, irrational part of his mind had hoped she wouldn’t demand he stop. Some part of him had wanted to forget the purpose of the kiss, and see if she could be persuaded to ask for more.
And that was nothing, nothing compared to the temptation he’d felt the second time they’d kissed. She’d fallen into the heat of it within moments, and it would have been an easy thing for him to press his advantage. He’d come close to doing just that, so close to letting all his careful planning go to waste for a few minutes of pleasure…Well, an hour of pleasure at least, but that wasn’t the point. He didn’t want Kate for a few minutes, or an hour, or even the duration of a house party. He wanted her for a lifetime. And a spontaneous tumble was not the best way to go about acquiring that lifetime—an expedient way, certainly, but not the best. He’d be damned if his marriage would be founded on something as flimsy as a compromising.
Confident he could, and would, do a better job of remembering what he wanted from Kate in the future, he smoothed his cravat, brushed a bit of lint from his coat and stepped outside onto the veranda.
“Good afternoon, Lady Kate.”
She spared him a brief glance over the top of her book as he walked around to take a seat beside her. “Is there a particular reason you’ve been following me about all day, Mr. Hunter?”
“Several, in fact. Would you care to hear them?”
“Not really,” she replied and turned the page. “I’d rather you just stop.”
“Can’t, I’m afraid. I’ve orders.”
“Orders?” She laughed a little at that and looked up. “From whom?”
He hid a smile when her eyes darted to his mouth. He’d known she would try to pretend the kisses hadn’t happened, just as he’d known she would not be able to pull it off.
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