Chapter Eight

Catherine watched him peruse her dance card with every appearance of interest and knew a fresh wave of indignation that anyone should say unkind or prurient things about him. No doubt a man like him—a charismatic public figure—would always simply be a lightning rod for imaginations.

He looked up. "First of all, I think it would be helpful to know what sorts of qualities you are looking for in your ideal husband."

She blinked. Catherine had never thought about her husband search in terms of qualities one could list, as though she were going to market for ingredients for soup. She'd always imagined she would know when she met him by how he made her feel. But she supposed the season was referred to as the marriage mart for a reason.

"Well, I suppose I should like him to be friendly."

"Friendly," Lord Kirke repeated warily. He made the word sound like "scoundrel."

She nodded, very amused by this.

"Like a... spaniel?"

"Not unlike a spaniel," she clarified. "Pleasant. Cheerful. Loyal. Always happy to see me. Like that. I think that would be very pleasant."

"Comes when he's called, and can fetch you a pheasant you've shot, a face-licker, that sort of thing?"

"I hear nothing to object to in that list of things, though no one has ever licked my face. Perhaps I'd like it. I should hate to dismiss it out of hand. I've come to London for new experiences, after all."

Every time his eyes creased at the corners with amusement, she felt as though she'd won a prize.

"As admirable as your spirit of adventure is, Keating—a word of caution about saying such things candidly to your dancing partners. You're liable to open up regrettable conversational avenues. A London ballroom is boiling with hidden peccadillos."

"Is that so?" She was alarmed and intrigued. "Isn't it better to find out about them as soon as possible?"

"You'll want to save some mystery for marriage. A lifetime is a very long time."

"I suppose you ought to know, having lived most of your life already."

It was a risky joke. But he mimed being stabbed in the heart, to her delight.

"It's to do with London and obscene wealth," he explained. "People's habits mutate in unusual ways when they've no useful occupation."

"Nothing a little work in the mines wouldn't cure, I'm sure," she said.

He grinned, and her heart soared. "Precisely. Very well. You're looking for a friendly chap. What else? Should he have money?"

She flushed. "Well. That is. I should hope so. How will we feed the children otherwise?"

"No need to be coy about money, for God's sake, Keating. What other reason is there to marry?"

She was amused at this baldly unromantic notion of marriage. "Have you ever been married?"

She regretted asking at once. She was worried her question had been insensitive or too bold. What if he was a widower, and his heart had been irreparably broken?

What if she simply disliked the answer, for... some odd reason?

She realized her breath was held and her heart had taken up an odd slamming rhythm.

But he just snorted softly. "No. Can you imagine the sort of husband I'd be?"

She studied him, attempting this as earnestly as if he'd made a literal request.

"It's not the easiest thing to do," she admitted, hesitantly.

His smile was difficult to interpret.

She found she simply could not quite slot him into one of her favorite cheerful images of a potential husband: passing the fried bread around the table while the sun poured through a kitchen window. Or standing quietly, his arms wrapped around her, as they watched the sun go down. Despite his fine manners and his title, he didn't seem the least bit domesticated. He wasn't at all like the merry, teasing young men she'd imagined courting her.

But she thought the top of her head would reach to just beneath his chin, and she could almost, even now, imagine how her cheek would feel pressed against the wool of his coat, and how his hands would feel on the flat of her back.

Her heart gave a startling, strange lurch.

"How many children will the two of you be wanting?" he asked.

Her composure took a moment to recongregate.

"Ah... well, I hope... there will be enough so that when we all laugh at a joke around the dinner table, it makes a happy sort of racket. And so that when we gather around the pianoforte we can sing harmony. Like at The Grand Palace on the Thames."

Something so fleetingly warm suffused his expression that she went still. As though he'd been hopelessly charmed. She could not imagine why.

"How many siblings have you now, Keating?"

"Well, I haven't any," she said almost apologetically. "There was just the three of us." She cleared her throat. "My father and mother and me. But now there's just the two of us. My mother passed away five years ago after an illness."

"I'm very sorry to hear it," he said gently.

"Thank you. That is a kind thing to say. We do miss her very much. Whereas you have many siblings?"

"Oh yes. There were seven of us. I'm in the middle. My parents are no longer with us. Five of us are still alive. We are all exactly as lovable as you might expect."

She smiled at that. "I expect it's why you would savor a little quiet time to yourself quite often, from living among so many people."

She had the sense she'd surprised him somehow.

"Perhaps," he admitted, shortly. The corner of his mouth lifted, somewhat ruefully, but his eyes were a bit guarded. As though she'd inadvertently uncovered a secret.

"Somewhere in the middle of two and seven children would be just about right, I think," she said.

"So you'll want a good income to feed your three and a half or so children," he said briskly. "This fellow, Mr. Gardner"—he pointed to a name on her dance card—"while by all accounts charming, and altogether fine company at White's if one is desperate for company, is hunting for an heiress because he bet an enormous sum that his high-flyer could beat Lord Ipswitch's in a race, and he lost."

"Oh my," she breathed, startled. "And he seemed pleasant enough. He has a very cheerful face. I'm not one of those. An heiress. I've a bit of a dowry, but not the sort that would make anyone's pulse race. I'm afraid a young man is going to have to like me rather a lot to make up for it."

"Laying aside that hurdle," he said matter-of-factly, which made her muffle a shout of laughter with her palms, "what about courtship habits? Do you go in for poetry? Chaps declaiming about blue eyes and flaxen hair and that rot, er, that sort of thing? I feel it only fair to warn you that I've heard Babcock"—he pointed to the second name on her card—"writes wagers in the form of poems in the betting books at White's. Though I suppose a chap has to do something to stand out in a crowd of admirers, and he's otherwise unobjectionable. Apart from the inadvisable wagers. He also laughs at his own jokes, which—and this is subjective of course—are not funny."

"If only I had a crowd of admirers! But I don't know why you should object to poems when you are so eloquent."

She'd said this a little too fervently, she realized, and was instantly abashed.

His slow smile tingled the back of her neck. "Am I, then, Keating?"

She cleared her throat. "That is, don't you write speeches for a living?"

"Speeches. Not poems. I don't stand before my fellow MPs there and spout rhymes, Keating. Eloquent, I'll humbly allow, when I'm at my best, but they're also practical and purposeful. I began life as a lawyer and I still think like one. Poetry is meant to diffuse and I feel it is best to be direct, to eliminate potential for confusion in matters of—in all matters."

She stared at him.

He'd stopped himself. He'd been about to say "in matters of romance" or something to that effect, she was certain of it.

She was almost unbearably intrigued.

What would this directness entail? Baldly issued invitations to climb him?

She shoved the image aside.

"Oh, I shouldn't think so, regarding poetry," she finally managed. "It would be a bit awkward, wouldn't it, if the poem isn't good? I think I would find it excruciating because I don't know if I'd be able to make the right grateful sounds as I'm not very good at pretending. I loathe to hurt anyone's feelings. But if it's someone I like very much I would be touched by the effort."

He listened to this with apparent solemn absorption. "In short, you think poetry best left to the professionals, like Byron."

"Perhaps I do! And oh my, aren't his poems lovely? Are you acquainted with him?" It seemed plausible. Lords all seemed to be acquainted.

"I have indeed met the man. And if anyone would be inclined to attempt face-licking, it's Byron."

She laughed, which tapered into a sigh. "Well. Thankfully my hair isn't flaxen, as I don't think anything rhymes with it."

"Waxen," he said at once, somewhat absently. "No, it's amber now, in the lamplight."

She immediately went mute from an almost violent rush of pleasure at his words.

She fought an urge to touch her hair, as if it was suddenly aglow like a candle flame. She felt, oddly, shyly, as though she'd been crowned. It wasn't poetry. And yet it was, to her.

It was probably the sort of thing he said all the time. Amber was just a color, after all. Just like flaxen.

They were watching each other, and for a moment doing only that. It seemed a strangely sufficient occupation. Her heart bumped once again almost painfully hard against her ribs, and then resumed its usual pattern at twice its usual speed. Perhaps all along he had been noticing the details of her the way she'd been noticing the details of him.

Clamber, she thought, rhymes withamber.

And "clamber" reminded her of climbing. As in Lady Clayton wanting to climb him.

Suddenly every inch of her skin felt warm.

She was overcome with confusion, and tempted to duck her head. But she refused to do it, lest she miss a second of the way in which he was regarding her: as if he'd never seen anything so worthy of his attention.

Cross herself or lift her skirts, was how Lady Hackworth had put it. One was for protection, the other was surrender. She supposed that they were the reflexive natural responses to anything so powerfully compelling it unnerved, something that one didn't quite understand... but wanted anyway.

He probably couldn't help the intensity of his gaze any more than, for instance, a falcon could. It was likely just his nature.

She recalled suddenly, and too vividly, how a small V of his chest had been exposed by his clawed-away cravat the night he'd moved into the room above her.

Her fingers hummed with the new, shocking, urgent compulsion to know the texture of his skin.

"That's just as well," she finally said, a trifle subdued. "As I don't believe anything about me is waxen."

"No, you've the healthy complexion of someone accustomed to striding about the hills and vales of Upper Sheep's Teat."

"Precisely," she said, with some relief at the jest. "Unlike that pallor you've acquired from carrying all that coal up from the mines."

When he grinned at that, happiness was a strange pressure in her chest, as though her heart had literally puffed up with it.

There was a little silence.

She cleared her throat. "And... and I also think I should like to admire him," she ventured, somewhat shyly.

His brows dove again. "Admire him. His pearly smile? His bank account? His title? His Richmond estate?"

She flushed. "His character. I should like to admire the way he conducts his life, and the things he believes in, and the way he treats people. His convictions. And his... his accomplishments."

There was a beat of silence. "Ah."

She could see at once that he knew why she'd said it, because she hadn't any practice being the least bit sly or subtle.

And now he was clearly a little wary. Oddly, she thought she saw something like regret or sadness flicker in his eyes. Maybe even pity.

Oh God. She was embarrassed.

"Like my father," she added hurriedly. "Who is a very fine man."

"I'm certain he is," he said gently. Carefully.

A moment or two passed where he seemed to be considering what to say. "I would only advise that even heroes are just men underneath the skin. And awe isn't what keeps your bed warm at night."

She blushed furiously and instantly like the veriest virgin. Which of course she was.

Lady Hackworth likely would have known something provocative to say in reply.

Catherine didn't have anything like that vocabulary. She was mute.

She wondered if he'd said it in an attempt to make her go quiet. To impose a distance.

Or was it to test her?

What did it say about her that all she thought about now was lying alongside him in a bed? Was that a test she had passed or failed?

For an instant it seemed as though he could read all of her thoughts clearly in her eyes, because his own flared so fleetingly hot that her knees all but turned to smoke and she felt an aching throb right at the join of her legs.

This was her first inkling that the things said about him might be grounded in some sort of truth. She understood viscerally then that there were very good reasons she ought not be alone with him.

And perhaps these were the same reasons, deep down, she wanted to be alone with him.

She could add this to her list of London season revelations. And new experiences.

His face went unreadable again. She could see he was poised to bolt.

"By the way," he said suddenly, "someone poured whiskey into the ratafia. I've asked a footman to dump it and to tell his hosts. But you might want to wait a bit before tasting any."

"Very well. Thank you for steering me away from... iniquity."

She could administer tests, too.

She felt his little half smile as a delicious shiver along her spine. As if he sensed she was beginning to consider whether certain kinds of iniquity were appealing.

"Oh, it's entirely self-interest, Keating. I shouldn't want you to return to The Grand Palace on the Thames drunk and frolicsome and rob me of valuable sleep."

She laughed.

"There's the music for your dance. I'm off again. Bon chance." He turned.

"Have you a handkerchief, for the punching portion of the evening?"

He threw her a wry parting glance and patted the pocket of his coat by way of reply and disappeared.

How she hated it every time he vanished from view.