Daring Masquerade

by Mary Balogh

  “Put me down this instant,” Kate demanded, trembling with rage, “or I shall shriek and start clawing at your face so that you will be sorry you ever set eyes on me.”

  “If you do those two things, Katherine,” Nicholas said, “I doubt if I will be sorry. I shall be dead and so will you. On horseback is not the place for an out-and-out fight. Wait until we reach the cottage and then you may go at me to your heart’s content.”

  “I shall screech out for help to the first person or building I see,” Kate warned.

  “Then I shall have to silence you in the way I did once before. Do you remember?” he asked, taking her indignant lips within his own a fraction of a second before she realized his intent.

  Kate shook her head vigorously. “You will hang for this, you know,” she said. “This is kidnapping.”

  “Hanging will be a sight swifter and less painful than some of those other deaths you threatened me with yesterday,” he said.

  Kate lapsed into a sullen silence while her mind planned strategy for when they would arrive at the cottage. Unfortunately she was distracted by a physical discomfort that soon absorbed every ounce of her consciousness. She would not! She would not give him the satisfaction. But in the end she was compelled to. Her screaming neck muscles would no longer hold her head away from his shoulder. Of course, she thought to cover her mortification, even that was his fault. He had deliberately seated her so that she was not quite upright. He shrugged his shoulder so that her head slipped into a more comfortable position against his neck.

  Neither of them said another word until the horse was drawn to a halt in the small cobbled yard before Russ Evans’ cottage. Nicholas swung himself down from the saddle and lifted an unyielding Kate down after him.

  “Go inside,” he directed. “I shall just see to my horse before I join you. The Evanses have conveniently been persuaded to take themselves off for the day to visit Mrs. Evans’ brother.”

  Kate considered turning and marching through the gateway. But if she did that, she would merely lose further dignity by being hauled back again. She walked with dangerous meekness into the house and through the low, dark passageway to the little parlor at the back. She removed her bonnet and gloves and turned to face the door.

  “I do not consider this a very clever or tasteful joke, sir,” she said as soon as Nicholas entered the room, his disguise already abandoned. “I hate you and despise you and I wish to be on my way to London. I have nothing whatsoever to say to you.”

  “You are a liar, Katherine,” he said coolly.

  Her temper flared instantly. “I am a liar,” she said. “I am a liar? Well, sir, I see this is a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black. And what might you be, sir?”

  “You see?” Nicholas said in triumph. “I have proved my point already. You obviously have a great deal to say to me, Katherine. Why not say it and give me a chance to defend myself?”

  “Can there be any defense to what you have done to me?” she cried.“I believed your story. I pledged myself to help you. I risked a great deal to get away from the Abbey at night so that I could come here to warn you of danger. Twice. And I gave myself to you. A small matter, you may think. But you knew that I did so terrified that I would find the act as repulsive as I always had. But I trusted you. I gave you myself, not only my body. And what did you do to repay me? You came to the Abbey as a guest with a different name; you treated me abominably; and you gradually made me trust you again. And again I gave myself to you. But you did it all out of contempt. When I had made myself completely vulnerable with you, you did not even trust me enough to tell me who you were. And you say that you wish to defend yourself?”

  “I can defend myself, Katherine,” he said. “It was not you I did not trust. It was myself.”

  “Oh, famous!” Kate said, turning half away from him and raising her hand to an invisible audience on the ceiling. “You were afraid that, having told me, doing so would become a sort of habit and you would have been telling everyone?”

  “I was afraid that I would not be able to keep away from you,” he said.

  She stared at him, incredulous. “Pardon me for a fool,” she said, “but if three nights ago was keeping away from me, what, pray, would being close to me involve?”

  “Three nights ago I admitted failure,” he said, “and gave in to my love for you.”

  “Love!” Kate spat out the word as if it were a week-old fish she had drawn out of a garbage heap. “Is it love to take a woman to bed and not even tell her with whom she lies? You do not know the meaning of love, Nicholas Seyton. You have confused the word with lust.”

  “Nonsense!” he said. “You know as well as I do, Katherine, that what happened between you and me three nights ago was the result of a very deep love and was a near-perfect expression of it. You are overdramatizing, hoping that I will go down on my knees to you or show some other sign of desperate groveling. I have no intention of even beginning to cater to such silly whims. I am not going to be an abject worshiper to your aloof goddess. It is marriage with you I intend to have. A lifetime marriage modeled after that experience of oneness that we both had in bed three nights ago.”

  “Well!” Kate’s voice was very quiet but it was vibrating. “Silly whims. And you want a marriage with me. Do you know what marriage is, Nicholas? Marriage is a man free to live whatever life he pleases and a woman who is his slave. She must dedicate her whole life to pleasing him, even if he is impossible to please. She must at least learn to dodge his wrath whenever she may. She must learn to obey his every whim, to keep her own ‘silly’ thought and feelings to herself, to lay her down meekly whenever he feels like relieving himself of a lustful impulse, and to consider herself fortunate beyond the general run of females if he refrains from beating her except when unusually provoked. That is what marriage is. Don’t talk to me of feelings of oneness.”

  “Was your marriage a very dreadful ordeal?” he asked quietly.

  “No, not at all,” she said. “I believe it was a very normal marriage, sir. I learned early to be obedient, and Giles was not normally a violent man. He was content to revile me with his tongue. Doubtless I deserved every tongue-lashing I had. I was a worthless creature, he told me on numerous occasions. He must have been right. He was my husband. A husband is always right.”

  “Why did he beat you?” He was almost whispering.

  Kate laughed harshly. “For a dreadful misdemeanor,” she said. “I deserved every painful stroke of his hand. I dared to try to wriggle my way out from beneath him as he lay on top of me drunk and snoring. He had taught me long before that a wife does not move even a finger while a husband is about his business, or even afterward until he pleases to remove himself from her bed.”

  “Poor Katherine!” Nicholas said. “But you are not describing marriage, love. You are describing one particular one, a marriage in which there was no love whatsoever, only selfishness and brutality on the one side and a hopeless submissiveness on the other. Your husband was a brutal man, my dear, even if he raised a hand to you on only one occasion. The man was a dolt. You, worthless? You are worth more than the whole world and the sun and the moon and all the stars together to me, Katherine. You are my whole fortune. My life.”

  Kate’s jaw tightened and her eyes flashed. “You are a very clever man, Nicholas Seyton,” she said. “You can treat me with the utmost contempt for several weeks and then you think you can have me melting in your arms merely because you know how to use words prettily. How can I be your life? You deceived me!”

  “Sometimes, Katherine,” he said, turning away from her to the window in exasperation, “I have serious doubts about your intelligence. Do you not see that I deceived you just because you are my world? I did not know what manner of man Clive Seyton was. I did not know whether he could be an evil and violent man when threatened. There was every chance that he might discover that other people in addition to himself were in search of those papers and other evidence to prove my legitimacy. I was te
rrified of your involvement. I was even afraid for your life at first until I realized that the earl was incapable of any criminal violence. I wanted you to believe that I had given up so that you would do likewise.”

  “That is why you left—or pretended to do so—without a word?” Kate asked. “I am expected to believe that?”

  “Yes,” he snapped back at her, turning an angry face to her. “You are expected to believe that. How was I to know that you would be foolish enough and quite impossibly brave enough to continue on your own?”

  “I am still foolish, then,” Kate said bitterly.

  He clucked his tongue and strode toward her suddenly. He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her against him. “Katherine,” he said, “why do you not listen to all of what I am saying, instead of pouncing on individual words? Can you not hear what I am saying? I care for your safety. I admire you. I adore you. I love you. And I suppose you do not believe me.”

  She caught hold of his lapels and clung to them. “I am afraid to,” she said fiercely through her teeth.

  “Afraid,” he said. “Ah, Katherine, must you judge me according to the image of manhood that your husband set before you? What of your father? Is he too incapable of love and of treating a woman as if she were a person?”

  “My father is one of a kind,” she said.

  “And Giles Mannering was one of a kind,” he said, “as am I. I am myself, Katherine, just as your father is himself, and your husband himself, and you yourself. I am not perfect. We would not be here arguing like this if I were. But neither are you perfect, love, or you would have had the courage to forgive me long before this. We are people, Katherine, two people who stimulate each other quite sufficiently to enable us to enjoy a lifetime of friendship and fighting and loving. We will never have a tranquil life together, my dear, but I do not think I could contemplate life without you. And fight as we surely will, I can promise you one thing. I may blister you with my tongue as you will me, but I will never leave you feeling worthless, because I will always allow you to give as good as you get. And I will never blister you with my hand or any other weapon, Katherine.”

  “I knew it,” she said, staring belligerently at the top button of his waistcoat. “I knew that if I let you talk to me, I would let my anger cool. I didn’t want it to cool. I thought I would be safe if I could get away and gain employment as a governess. I had decided to live a quiet, dignified life. If I marry you, I shall be storming at you and screeching at you and behaving in a quite undignified way every day of my life.”

  He laughed suddenly. “You, quiet and dignified, Katherine Mannering?” he said. “Never, love.”

  Kate, clutching at his waistcoat button, lost her battle with her dignity. She snorted with laughter. “It was not a very realistic dream, was it?” she admitted.

  “Far better to have a good fight with me every day,” he said.

  “And to make love with you, Nicholas,” she said wistfully, raising her eyes to his. “You do it so beautifully. I think I would have to give in just for that.”

  “Only for that?” he asked, his forehead against hers.

  “No, of course not only for that,” she said. “If there were only that between us, it would not really be worth having, would it?”

  “You will marry me, Katherine?” he asked.

  “Well, good heavens,” she said, jerking her head away from his, “do I have to spell the word out? Y-e-s. Are you satisfied?”

  He grinned. “I think so,” he said. “Yes, in fact. It is just that this argument has gone on rather longer than I expected. I have arranged for the carriage to take you and Audrey to London while Anatole and I accompany you on horseback. I want you with me when I meet my mother, and I want to marry you in the presence of my family and yours. We will be expected back at the Abbey almost before I have time to take you upstairs to make love to you. Pardon me, my love: with you.”

  “Now?” she said, her eyes wide. “Upstairs? Here? In broad daylight?”

  “In short, yes,” Nicholas said, grasping her hand and grinning down at her. “And right now. I positively refuse to be rushed once I am in bed with you. But I intend to rush you up the stairs.”

  He suited action to words, and soon Kate was running to keep up with his long strides along the passageway to the staircase.

  “Oh!” she said suddenly, hauling back on his hand. “Nicholas, no, I can’t. Of course I can’t. You are going to be an earl. I had forgotten. You will not wish to marry me. I am nobody. I have never even been brought out.”

  He stopped and turned toward her. “Katherine,” he said, “let me make one thing very clear. You may always tell me what you think and what you wish. But in one thing I shall demand total obedience. You will not—and I repeat, not—tell me what I wish. Do you understand?”

  She looked up at him with deceptive meekness. “Yes, my lord,” she said. “I am practicing, you see. Then I am not permitted to tell you that you wish to make love with me upstairs right now in broad daylight?”

  His eyes narrowed. “And if I were not in such a rush to get down to business,” he said, “you would have another quarrel on your hands, you saucy minx. Now, for God’s sake, Katherine Mannering, hold your tongue and let me love. Is that a quotation, by the way?”

  But he did not give her a chance to reply and perhaps set another quarrel in motion. If he said John Donne, she would be sure to say Ben Jonson. His lips met hers and his tongue plunged into her mouth in such a sizzling promise of what was about to happen abovestairs that Kate meekly wrapped her arms around his neck, molded her body to his, and put up no argument when he reached down, his mouth still covering hers, and swung her up into his arms. He began a remarkably swift ascent of the stairs considering that he carried no featherweight and was further hampered by the fact that his eyes were closed and his mouth and nose otherwise occupied than with breathing.

  “Nicholas?” Kate said drowsily all of half an hour later, one of her fingers tracing a pattern on his naked chest.

  “Mm?” He kissed the top of her head.

  “About this smuggling business,” she said, her voice gaining energy.

  Nicholas pulled back his head and grinned down at her. “Is the honeymoon over so soon, my love?” he said with a sigh. “Well, it was a beautiful loving, Katherine. We will be good together, will we not? Yes, my dear Mrs. Mannering, what about this smuggling business?”

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  Mary Balogh was born and educated in Wales and now lives with her husband in Saskatchewan, Canada. She has written more than one hundred historical novels and novellas, more than thirty of which have been New York Times bestsellers. They include the Bedwyn saga, the Simply quartet, the Huxtable quintet, and the seven-part Survivors’ Club series.

  The Westcott Series

  Someone to Love

  Someone to Hold

  Someone to Wed

  Someone to Care

  The Survivors’ Club Septet

  The Proposal

  The Suitor

  The Arrangement

  The Escape

  Only Enchanting

  Only a Promise

  Only a Kiss

  Only Beloved

  The Huxtable Quintet

  First Comes Marriage

  Then Comes Seduction

  At Last Comes Love

  Seducing An Angel

  A Secret Affair

  The Simply Quartet

  Simply Unforgettable

  Simply Love

  Simply Magic

  Simply Perfect

  The Bedwyn Saga

  Slightly Married

  Slightly Wicked

  Slightly Scandalous

  Slightly Tempted

  Slightly Sinful

  Slightly Dangerous

  The Bedwyn Prequels

  One Night For Love

  A S
ummer to Remember

  The Mistress Trilogy

  More Than A Mistress

  No Man’s Mistress

  The Secret Mistress

  The Horsemen Trilogy

  Indiscreet

  Unforgiven

  Irresistible

  The Web Trilogy

  The Gilded Web

  Web of Love

  The Devil’s Web

  Standalone Novels

  The Wood Nymph

  A Chance Encounter

  The Double Wager

  A Masked Deception

  A Certain Magic

  An Unlikely Duchess

  Lady with a Black Umbrella

  Red Rose

  Christmas Miracles

  Christmas Gifts

  Silent Melody

  Heartless

  Longing

  Beyond the Sunrise

  A Matter of Class

  A Counterfeit Betrothal

  The Notorious Rake

  The Temporary Wife

  A Promise of Spring

  Lord Carew’s Bride

  Dark Angel

  A Christmas Bride

  Christmas Beau

  The Famous Heroine

  The Plumed Bonnet

  A Christmas Promise

  A Precious Jewel

  The Ideal Wife

  The Secret Pearl