Chapter Fourteen

"Miss Keating's father is a physician. Isn't that charming?" Lady Hackworth had taken Catherine gently by the elbow and steered her, like a tray of proffered sweetmeats, to a pair of beautiful people, a man and a woman with titles. She thought they might be a viscount and his wife. Lord and Lady Glossop?

They looked at her uncertainly—then back at Lady Hackworth—which darkly amused Catherine. They were probably wondering why they were being compelled to commune with a peasant wearing a two-year-old dress.

And she fought the urge to roll her eyes. Of all the things being a doctor was, charming was probably the least of them.

She would have loved for Lord Kirke to be wrong, except she'd known all along that he wasn't.

She had done, for the first time in her life, something she knew was reckless and foolish: she'd come without a chaperone, slipping out of The Grand Palace on the Thames to hail a surprised hack driver, who took her to St. James's Square and the Hackworth town house. Lord Kirke was right: she was not that sort of person.

As far as she knew, Lord Kirke hadn't been in when she'd left.

He hadn't been at dinner, either.

And the whole last hour or so had felt like walking barefoot over cut gems. Everyone was beautiful. But all of their edges were glitteringly sharp and uncomfortable to brush against. They were witty and quick but their accents were all drawled, London-y irony, as though they took nothing at all seriously. She thought about how Northumberland haunted her vowels. She knew she betrayed her otherness the moment she opened her mouth.

Lord Vaughn wasn't present. Perhaps he knew better than to associate with the Hackworths, too.

She felt she hadn't really anything to say to them—how could they find her life particularly interesting? And yet they seemed to be enjoying her anyway, the way they would enjoy a pantomime. She was aware that they saw her as both very pretty and quaint. She knew that to consider something quaint, one must feel superior to it, at least a little.

She knew that if she asked what they thought about Lord Kirke in the airy, insinuating, knowing sort of voice that Lady Hackworth used conversationally, they would likely tell her. And as much as she wanted to know—she was afraid to know.

"What is your favorite poem by Byron?" she asked Lady Glossop, when someone mentioned Keats. This was a salon, after all. She thought she might as well exhibit a little of her education.

There was a little silence. Followed by a sympathetic head tilt.

"Oh, my dear, we don't talk about him ever since that little to-do between him and Lord Hackworth over Lady Hackworth." She said it on an admiring hush. "Everyone wants her, you see."

Ugh.

"Tell me, Miss Keating," Lady Glossop pressed on a hush. "You danced with him. You were close enough. What does he smell like? Lord Kirke? I've always wondered. We have a wager, you see."

Catherine stared at her. For God's sake.

But oh, she'd never been more sorely tempted. "Like sin and strawberries," she considered purring. Or "Like sulfur and brimstone and blossoms all rolled into one."

But she knew anything glib she said would be repeated, and possibly printed in the gossip sheets. She would never, never, never do that to him.

"My parents raised me not to sniff members of Parliament," she said gravely, instead.

"Oh," Lady Glossop said, bored with her again.

"Why did he ask you to dance, do you suppose?"

"I don't know," Catherine said, and offered a blandly disingenuous expression.

They didn't seem to know how to respond to that.

Catherine stifled a sigh. She didn't particularly want to be anything other than who she was. But it was a strange, gray feeling to know there were people in the world who viewed her as a novelty. It was new, and she supposed it was valuable to know that such a viewpoint existed, and that she wanted none of it.

She liked the people at The Grand Palace on the Thames, which was where she properly fit. She wished she was there right now.

Well, it had been an experience, even if coming here was a mistake. She was sorry she'd come, because it was a reminder of how empty the world could feel when no one truly knew you. It seemed a foreshadowing of the loneliness that seemed to lie in wait for her if her London season was a failure, after all, and in a fit of superstition, it made her want to bolt.

And it seemed patently ridiculous, infuriatingly ridiculous, that a famous, scandalous politician—thirty-five years old, with a little gray in his hair and faint lines about his eyes, and the most fascinating face she'd ever seen—should suddenly feel like her best friend, when he could so easily do without her.

Surely this, too, was the fault of London. If she were to return home, perhaps every bit of this confusion would recede like a fever.

And yet. She'd somehow been certain he would appear here tonight anyway, despite his well-founded scorn for the Hackworths. Because she had seen the expression fleeing his face as she'd turned around in the little park today.

Raw hunger.

It had shaken her, and thrilled her nearly beyond bearing. Because something in her responded to it as powerfully as one wolf calling to another in the dark. She thought she might never be comfortable again.

"I don't feel well," she said abruptly to the Glossops.

And she quickly slipped away and went out the door to find a hack to take her back to The Grand Palace on the Thames.

"You've been quiet all night, Kirke."

White's was as lively as it ever was during the season. Dominic had joined some fellow Whigs for a game of five-card loo, brandy, and a discussion about developing apprenticeship programs for some of the children who were in the worst of the workhouses, like Bethnal Green.

He was, in fact, miserable. As restless as if he were wearing a hair shirt. Nervy. Which was unlike him. He was beset with a guilt that he for a change probably didn't quite deserve.

"I can't tell if you're complaining or celebrating, Holmquist," he said finally.

"Can't it be both?" Holmquist said idly.

Dominic smiled.

"He's probably dreaming of ways to make Farquar uncomfortable."

Dominic didn't reply. The whole of his mind was elsewhere. He was playing badly which was also unlike him, and unfair to the other players. It took all the fun out of beating him.

He reached into the pocket of his coat and touched the blossom he'd tucked in there earlier. His fingers caressed the petals.

Finally, slowly, he laid down his cards.

"Gentlemen, I fear I must take an early leave of you. Try not to mourn."

He departed swiftly, leaving behind a ring of startled faces and a losing hand.

On a typical night, hacks swarmed White's like gnats about a picnic, ready to ferry home drunk lords. Dominic hailed one straightaway, and gave him the directions to St. James's Square.

"Hurry, please, if you're able," he asked the driver as he boarded, and filled his palm with coins.

He didn't know why he should feel so anxious.

He leaned forward the whole of the way there, as if he could compel the horses to go faster.

As they pulled closer to the Hackworth resident, twilight had turned the tops of the buildings into shadows and the sky mauve. But there was enough remaining daylight that he knew, at once, the woman standing in front of the town house was Keating.

He knew it was her by the way she held herself, and the way the light glanced from her hair.

She was shivering, pulling her shawl tightly around the shoulders of her muslin dress. Her expression was hunted.

He tensed.

She appeared to be craning her head, looking for a hack.

"Why the devil is she..." he muttered.

Why had no one noticed that she had left the town house, and alone, to boot? This infuriated him as irrationally as the fact that he hadn't been there to see her out.

He thumped the roof of the carriage and the driver pulled it to a halt.

He pushed open the door and leaned out.

"Keating," he called. Quietly. Gruffly.

She halted and her head swiveled all about looking for the voice. She actually looked upward for a moment. The notion that she might think of his voice as the voice of a deity amused him. Or perhaps she thought it was instead the voice of a gargoyle lining the roof.

Finally she turned and saw him leaning partway out of the open carriage door.

She went abruptly still.

When their eyes met, he could feel the jolt of it in his body, as surely as he'd gone over a rut in the road.

They regarded each other across that short expanse of cobblestone.

He finally beckoned with a sideways tip of his head.

She hesitated.

Then her shoulders rose and fell in a sigh.

And resolutely, she crossed over to him.

She pretended not to see the hand he extended to help her up and climbed gracefully enough into the carriage, pulling the door shut behind her.

He thumped the ceiling again and the carriage lurched into motion.

Because "Didn't I tell you?" and "You were right, when aren't you?" hardly needed to be said aloud, they let the silence say it for them.

He took absolutely no satisfaction in that.

Nor did either of them mention the reason he just happened to be rolling through St. James's Square in a carriage when his plans hadn't involved a soiree at St. James's Square.

Or the reason she had been outside.

They both knew why.

She'd instinctively known he would not be able to stay away.

Dominic was nervous enough to want a cheroot.

Absurdly, his heart accelerated.

Finally, he shrugged out of his greatcoat. "Here," he said quietly.

She glanced over and up at him, then down at the coat. She tipped forward a little so he could gently settle it around her shoulders.

She carefully leaned back against the seat.

Something radiant swelled in his chest at the sight of her in his coat.

He felt peculiarly delicate and volatile, as if he were some substance that might spill over and ignite. He had come because he could not help himself. It somehow felt as though she'd won, and surely for her to have won must mean that he had lost. He'd gotten so used to thinking of his life in terms of battles. He hated losing.

He studied her profile. She was staring straight ahead into the twilight, subdued, but not defeated. Thoughtful. But he thought he detected a worried shadow across her brow. Why his throat should feel tight with emotion he didn't know.

He slid one arm gently behind her and wrapped the other about her waist the way he might exhale, instinctive and unconscious. He gathered her up.

She folded her arms atop his and settled, softly, back against his chest, as if, God help them, they'd done it just so a thousand times.

Her head rested right over the traitorous thud of his heart. Surely, she would feel it.

As the carriage rolled along, he just held her. It seemed all he had available to him by way of apology for the ton and the way it was. He wished it otherwise in that moment, even though he had mastered its thorns and battlefields and relished conquering them. If the world was different, would there be a point to him? He was who he was.

The point to him now seemed to be that he was the person against whom she leaned, and sighed in a sort of relief.

Imagine that. Imagine someone finding comfort in his arms.

His chin brushed her temple. He closed his eyes because her hair against his cheek was silky and he wanted, for one mad moment, to feel only this ever again. Every muscle in his body locked against a furious onslaught of longing.

His breathing went shallow.

And as the carriage bumped along, beneath his hands her ribs rose and dropped with her breath, which fell softly on his chin.

He heard a rustle as she shifted slightly in his arms. Suddenly his chin no longer rested against her hair.

And then he felt her fingertips, light as a moth landing, on his jaw.

Then skim along the curve of his bottom lip.

He could feel his heart beating in his throat.

His breath came in shreds now.

He opened his eyes to find her gazing up at him from the crook of his arms. Her pupils were large. Her expression, solemn.

Their lips were so close he could feel her breath against his.

When she kissed him—a whisper-soft bump of her lips against his—it could easily be construed as an accident of proximity. If either of them chose.

He closed his eyes against the exultation that roared through him. It was laced through with danger and a lust he could taste in his throat.

It felt like a question.

It felt like permission.

His will crumbled into dust.

"Keating..." he whispered.

When he claimed her lips with his own, their vulnerable softness nearly broke him.

She sighed against his lingering, nearly chaste kiss, a skim of his mouth over hers, as her fingertips glided along the line of his jaw, traced his ear, twined in his hair. As though she had imagined long before how she would touch him. Had wanted to feed the knowledge of him to her senses.

He could not recall ever being touched with this sort of reverence. As though he was being joyously discovered.

He felt absurd, as vulnerable as a clam without a shell. And yet some need he'd apparently kept chained in an inner dungeon yearned toward the tenderness like a whipped dog. It undid him, that she could so easily expose him. He was part fury, part wonder.

In the twilight of the hack, in this world apart from the world, it seemed safe to surrender to raw tenderness. His trembling fingertips trailed along the silky skin of her throat as his lips brushed her brow... then her temple... then lingered to savor the swift thump of her pulse in the hollow beneath her ear. The little jump of her rib cage beneath his hand and her sigh of pleasurewhen he touched his tongue to the whorls of her ear made him feel as powerful as Zeus hurling lightning bolts down from a mountaintop. This was magic: her body stirring and rippling with desire, coming alive with his touch.

Soon the gentleness ran parallel with tightly leashed savagery. His hard cock strained against the fall of his trousers. And when he returned to the miracle of her petal-soft lips, it was to part them with his so he could taste, then plunder, the sweetness and heat of her mouth. He groaned low in his throat.

She looped her arms around his neck to pull herself ever closer, as if she understood she was the source of his pleasure and torment. She was giving herself up to him to do what he would.

And only a fool or a saint wouldn't take and take.

God help him, he was neither.

With each stroke of his tongue and glide of his lips, he showed her how desire had strata, layers and layers that could be built and banked toward a glorious madness that only surrender could relieve.

She met him with instinct and abandon and fiery need.

When his palm glided over the lush curve of her arse to press her against his hard cock, she gasped and instinctively arched against him. Chasing her own pleasure.

He was shaking now from a desire that seemed anarchic enough to slip his control.

She slid his hand up from her waist to cup her breast, her head went back on a gasp. He looked down into the huge dark pupils. Her breath fell in short gusts against his chin. Her chest swayed with it.

Her hand rested against his jaw as he lowered his head and kissed her long and slowly and deeply, almost lasciviously, so he could feel the hitch of her breath, her moan of pleasure vibrate through his body when he circled his thumb over the hard peak of her nipple through the muslin of her bodice.

Lust drove a spike right through the top of his head.

Now was the time to lay her back, furl up her skirts, and guide his cock into the snug wetness between her legs. He imagined the two of them fucking like animals there in the rolling carriage. Her body pulsing around him as her first release came upon her.

In the state they were both in, he knew she would let him.

"Dominic?" she whispered against his mouth. Surrendered. Dazed with desire.

Her trust undid him.

"God," he rasped.

Like a man struggling up from the bottom of the volcano, he pulled gently away from her.

He dropped his forehead into his hands.

And his body heaved like a bellows.

Catherine's senses rioted in protest at this abrupt abandonment. They wanted more of what they'd been given. If she touched her own skin now, she was certain she would feel her blood vibrating in her veins like a rough river.

Dizzily, she stared at him, but he was clearly overcome. His back heaving as he fought to recover his breath and his composure. Her own breath came in stormy gusts.

She had felt his desire for her humming in his body. She knew if she reached over and touched him now, she would feel it still.

She was awestruck by her own power.

By the need for him, thwarted, not yet receded.

She touched her fingers to her lips. They were swollen and tender. The taste of him lingered in her mouth, like a liquor she would never cease craving, and furious longing swelled in her anew.

Finally he turned his head.

They looked across at each other in a long moment of silence. It wasn't even full dark. There had been an eternity and mere moments involved in that kiss, and it was a shock to become aware of the world again. The sound of the wheels of a carriage over cobblestones seemed like something from a foreign land.

They would arrive at The Grand Palace on the Thames in mere minutes.

"Your hair," he said finally. His voice was quiet. "It's coming out of its pins."

"Oh. Will you... can you..." Her voice surprised her. It was hoarse, as if passion had scorched it away.

And small.

And uncertain now.

Very gently, so tenderly, he slid a pin free of her hair. He smoothed the wayward hair back in place, and with precise care, replaced the pin. Then did it with another.

His hands were trembling.

"There. Repaired," he said.

She managed a little smile.

He was watching her thoughtfully now, and she again resented fiercely his ability to hide his thoughts. But then, he was a lawyer and a politician, and had been alive longer, and had learned what she was learning: there were now and again very good reasons not to let anyone know what you felt. But she had a sense for what he was about to say.

"Don't apologize," she said.

"Keating..."

"You were going to. I refuse to hear it. I wanted to kiss you. You knew I wanted to kiss you. You wanted to kiss me. We kissed."

She hadn't known a kiss would have so many dimensions. He had also touched her breast, and all of this had been the revelation of a lifetime. All of it merely suggested to her that there was more to discover. She was terrified she would never learn it, and yet somehow relieved, too.

She knew they had both paced along a dangerous precipice.

He finally smiled, albeit faintly. "That is a fair summary of events."

"I do not consider that we are engaged. I do not consider myself compromised. I will not tell a soul. I do not consider myself ravished."

He took this in, wordlessly.

But she could hear his breathing, slower now. Why did it seem so precious, the sound of him recovering from passion? Just... the sound of him living. Why did it make her feel so tender?

Finally, his mouth tipped at the corner. "If you do not consider yourself ravished, perhaps I went about it the wrong way."

"I cannot say that I have anything to compare it to," she said carefully, slowly, "but I should like to say it felt as though you did everything perfectly."

Some fierce emotion suffused his face then—a blaze of raw longing, of vulnerability. So beautiful and bright her breath hitched.

It was gone before she could decide what it meant.

There was a little pause.

"So what you mean to say is that you were curious," he said carefully. "And it was a new experience."

It was a moment before she understood. He'd offered these words to her as a safe option, for both of them. Curiosity: that was all this feverish interlude was. It needn't be spun into a story. It needn't have ramifications. It needn't mean anything at all. It could be just another souvenir of her time in London.

And while this was a relief, it still somehow felt like a betrayal of both him and herself when she said, "Yes. I was curious. And my curiosity was satisfied. Thank you."

He nodded. Pulled in a long breath and released it slowly.

"You best go inside now. I'll wait here to make sure you're inside safely."

They both knew full well they could not enter the house together.

He'd used the word "home," which somehow didn't seem inappropriate, because if The Grand Palace on the Thames was anything, it was a home. And for a mad moment she wished it was, that he would be there and they could tumble from this carriage into a bed, and he could show her every other thing she knew he knew.