Sally James (13 page)

Kate washed and changed quickly. The dress was on the short side, and rather more voluminous than fashion dictated, but that was more because of Amelia's plumper figure than any drastic changes in fashion. She had brushed her hair and was ready to go back to the drawing room before Jenny, Amelia's maid, appeared, with a rather blunt apology for keeping her waiting.

'It doesn't matter, I am ready,' Kate replied.

Jenny sniffed, cast a disparaging eye over Kate's gown, and said gruffly that in that case she'd go back and finish her ladyship.

Kate wandered down to the drawing room, and while she was waiting occupied herself in looking at some old copies of the
Journal des Dames.
Becoming bored with this she went across to the window and looked down into the street. It was quite busy with carriages, bringing people home from visits, taking them out for dinner parties, and further along, where Upper Brook Street crossed it, there was a whole stream of carriages and riders returning home from the Park.

Then there was a slight commotion at the junction, and a smart curricle drawn by a pair of high-stepping greys swept round the corner and drew up outside the house. The driver leapt down and tossed the reins to his tiger who had scrambled hurriedly from his perch. He strode across the flags to thunder on the door immediately below the window where Kate, aghast, stood as if transfixed.

What was Adam doing here? He looked to be in the blackest possible mood. She began to tremble as she heard the butler, summoned by a repeated plying of the knocker, opening the door.

Then another vehicle, a drab hackney, drew up behind the curricle. While William fumbled for coins to pay the driver Darcy almost ran towards the door.

Suddenly recovering the use of her legs Kate fled across the drawing room and cautiously opened the door a crack. Could she escape upstairs? Where could she hide?

It was too late. Thrusting aside the feebly protesting butler, Adam was racing up the stairs two at a time.

'Tell your mistress the Earl of Malvern desires instant speech with her,' he flung over his shoulder.

As he reached the landing and saw Kate framed motionless in the doorway, he halted. Then as William and Darcy, both complaining loudly, entered the house he marched forwards and thrust the unresisting Kate backwards into the drawing room. He calmly closed the door on his pursuers, and turned the key in the lock.

'Adam!' she whispered. 'What - what are you doing here?'

'What the devil do you think I'm doing here?' he snapped. 'And what in the world possesses you to wear such a frumpish dress? Neither my mother nor Miss Byford would permit you to have that monstrosity.'

'I haven't any others here,' she replied angrily, thrown off balance by this remark.

'You must have the one you came here in, and even though it's not an evening dress you might have more taste than to change it for that dreadful rag. It's almost as bad as that first one I had the doubtful pleasure of seeing you wear. I had thought you were beginning to choose gowns with discrimination, once you had the money to pay a decent dressmaker.'

The unfairness of this attack had only just begun to sink into Kate's mind when Sir William could be heard outside, angrily demanding that Adam unlock the door at once.

'What are you doing here?' Kate repeated.

Adam sighed impatiently. 'I've come to take you home, of course. Don't you realize your aunt and my mother have been frantic with worry ever since they returned home to find you'd vanished from the house? I was delayed by a sudden crisis, one of the horses had fallen onto a hayfork and was badly injured, and I was unable to reassure them I knew where you'd be. They have been sending footmen all over the place with messages, before I could stop them. If this escapade is not the talk of the town by this evening we shall be fortunate.'

'I'm not coming home! It's not my home. I'm staying here with my cousins,' Kate told him defiantly.

He laughed, a somehow sinister sound. 'You are mistaken, my child.'

Kate stamped her foot in exasperation. 'I am not a child, and I wish - '

'Then stop behaving like one,' he suggested, and a gleam of pure amusement crept into his eyes.

Kate gulped, but had no reply. In any case the noise from outside, where Amelia had joined her husband and was screaming hysterically, while William appeared to be instructing his footman and Darcy to break down the door, made it difficult to be heard.

Adam stepped forward, slipped his arm about her waist and clamped her to him so firmly she could scarcely breathe. He swiftly unlocked the door and threw it open just as Darcy hurled himself at it.

Darcy, meeting none of the expected resistance, collapsed on all fours onto the drawing room floor, with a footman having some difficulty in preventing himself from falling on top of him. Adam sidestepped neatly and dragged Kate past them.

'I will call on you tomorrow, Byford,' he said quietly, and began to lead an unresisting Kate down the stairs.

'Malvern! Come back. You cannot take Kate away like this!' Sir William spluttered.

'I am taking her away,' Adam responded, unruffled.

'But she doesn't want to go,' Amelia sobbed, while Darcy, rising furiously from the floor, interrupted her angrily.

'Malvern, you'll meet me for this. Leave her here. Jackson, Starkey, stop him!'

The butler was nowhere to be seen, and the footman was discreetly standing behind his master. Neither responded to Darcy's order and the young man, thrusting his brother-in-law aside, plunged down the stairs in Adam's wake.

Adam had reached the hall. He twisted Kate so that she was on the side furthest from the stairs, and as Darcy arrived impetuously at the bottom of the flight he pushed him in the chest. Darcy, off balance, collapsed once more.

Adam swung Kate, who had recovered her wits and begun to struggle, up into his arms and carried her out into the street. Flinging her up into the curricle he took the reins, leapt in after her, and before she could move had given the horses, who were champing impatiently at the bit, the office to move. As the tiger, grinning, flung himself onto his perch Kate looked back to see Darcy and William standing helplessly on the doorstep glaring furiously after her.

Chapter Eleven

For a few moments Kate struggled to regain her breath. She was trembling with shock. No one had treated her in such a fashion since she had been three years old, and been carried screaming to her bed after a particularly distressing tantrum.

'Stop this carriage and let me down!' she ordered as soon as she was able.

Adam took not the slightest notice, concentrating on weaving a skilful way through the press of vehicles approaching Grosvenor Square.

'I said let me get down!' Kate repeated in a louder voice, and grasped his arm furiously.

'Nah, Miss, don' do that!' an anxious voice in her ear reminded her of the tiger clinging on behind.

Adam, tensing his muscles so that his arm remained rock steady and Kate's action did not cause him to tug on the reins, uttered briefly and viciously.

'I'm tempted to throw you out under the wheels of that dray!'

His tone was so cold and contemptuous that Kate shrank away from him, and before she had recovered sufficiently to make another protest they had arrived outside Malvern House.

The tiger sprang for the horses' heads, while Adam leapt from the curricle, turned and in one swift movement swept Kate up into his arms again.

Briefly she struggled, beating at his chest with angry fists, but someone had been on the watch and before he reached the steps the front door opened. As he carried her in and straight up the stairs Kate collapsed weakly against him, striving with all her willpower not to permit him the satisfaction of seeing the tears of fury and frustration fall.

He went past the drawing room, where she was conscious of faces peering out at them, and on up the stairs. On the third landing he kicked open the door of Kate's room and marched in, halting finally beside the bed.

'You will stay here, do you understand?' he said curtly, his face only a few inches away from hers. 'Little as I relish the prospect of marriage with a termagant such as you I promised Great Uncle George, and I mean to keep that promise. It's too late to drive you to Mrs Johnson's Academy now, but you will be kept under close guard until I drive you there on Monday. Once there I hope you will be taught to conduct yourself in a manner that will befit my wife. The sooner you learn to do so the sooner you will be able to leave the schoolroom behind and resume an adult life which today you have shown yourself unfit for.'

Instead of dropping her onto the bed, an action which Kate, shaking with fury and embarrassment at having been brought into the house in such a fashion in full view of whichever servants might be in the hall, was bracing herself for, Adam abruptly lowered her feet to the ground.

Kate tried to step away from him, for suddenly his proximity, the faint clean scent of a lemon-like herb mingling with the smell of horses and leather, the feel of his arms and the steady beating of his heart as she was clasped against his chest, were more than she could bear. However, he still held one arm round her waist, and instead of releasing her he pulled her still closer to him.

'I doubt if I'd have agreed if you hadn't been a damned fetching wench,' he remarked softly. Kate, startled and outraged, opened her mouth to retort but found instead that he covered it swiftly with his own, and she almost swooned with the unexpectedness of it.

Pulses were throbbing in her head, her eyes were closed, and her legs felt like jelly. If Adam had not been holding her so tightly she thought she must have fallen to the floor. His lips were hard, and they dominated her own as she tried weakly to twist away from him.

It was only for a brief moment, but to Kate it seemed an age before she realized it was not the pounding of her heart she could hear, but the sound of someone running up the stairs.

Adam finally released her and pushed her gently so that she fell back onto the bed. With a mocking grin he turned to confront Aunt Sophie in the doorway.

'Don't worry, she is unharmed. I suggest we leave her here to sleep and you see her in the morning when she has had time to recover her temper.'

With that he stepped outside and to Kate’s renewed rage locked the door.

Unable to move, she sat there for some time trying to untangle her whirling emotions. Superimposed on the dismay that her plan had been foiled was resentment at Adam's high handed manner in literally carrying her from Amelia's house, and bewilderment at the effect of his kisses. This one had left her breathless, her heart pounding as though she had herself just run all the way from Park Street and up several flights of stairs. Her knees were unable to support her, and her brain was incapable of coherent thought.

'Not a kiss, that wasn't a kiss,' she whispered suddenly. At least it had not been anything like his previous kisses. Lips were soft, and gentle, not fierce and hungry and punishing as Adam's had just been. And instead of the glow of contentment which the heroines of the novels she read always seemed to feel when their lovers kissed them, her body was on fire with brief but intense, flickering, tingling sensations she had never before known.

'He's not my lover,' she said suddenly, wondering why on earth the word had entered her mind. That must be it. Adam had attacked her, not kissed her, which accounted for the strangeness of her reactions to his kiss. With someone she loved, and who loved her, it would surely be very different.

Relaxing against the pillows she began to dream, as she had occasionally done in the last few months, of the man who would make her fall in love, and who would then carry her off to a life of everlasting bliss and contentment. Though she had declared to Adam and others that she had no wish to marry, she knew deep down this was only a defence. She was afraid she would never find a man she could love wholeheartedly, who would love her as intensely. If she ever did, his kisses would be different, she thought with satisfaction, but try as she might to conjure up the face and form of a man once seen in church at home, and who had seemed to her fourteen-year-old eyes to be an ideal focus for romance, the mocking, handsome face of Adam Rhydd was always before her. She shrugged mentally. That was probably to be expected after what he had done.

Then she recalled the words he had used which at the time she had been too startled to comprehend. He had called her a damned fetching wench. They were insulting words, never to be used to a lady, and she bridled at the thought, but to her renewed puzzlement she realized they indicated that in some way he admired her.

She sighed. She had never been encouraged to be vain, but she could not help knowing she was remarkably pretty. Her mirror only confirmed what many people, friends and acquaintances at home, as well as her new London friends and admirers, had told her. She had taken it for granted, thinking it a mere happy coincidence of colouring and features, but now she began to think seriously of the effect it had on other people.

Darcy, Martin, and many of the other young men she had met had made it plain that they were very taken with her too. They had been friendly and complimentary, although some of the prettier girls had seemed cold and less than anxious to be friends. But why should Adam, who was reputed an incorrigible flirt, had his pick of the debutantes, and was himself handsome enough to attract most women, be affected by her looks?

Perhaps, she thought suddenly, and for some reason the notion made her shiver, all he meant was that if she had been ugly and unprepossessing he would not have agreed to her grandfather's demands. Because she was pretty she was tolerable as a wife. And perhaps, if he had not promised, the old Earl would not have left him any money at all.

That must be it. Although if she refused to marry him he would get everything, the estates were not entailed and he might have been afraid he could be left with nothing. It was clear the late Earl had made a new will after meeting her, and he could easily have cut Adam out entirely.