T he woman who emerged from Kate’s bedchamber was swathed in black from her head to her toes.
Gabriel offered her his arm, feeling a ridiculous pleasure run through him. “Be careful not to trip,” he said as they walked down the corridor.
The veil trembled as Kate shook her head. “I’m having trouble walking; I can’t see where I’m going. How does she manage this?”
“She’s been in mourning a long time,” Gabriel said.
“How long?”
“Forty years, give or take ten.”
Silence.
“You’re thinking she’s overly mournful.”
“I would never characterize a princess in a negative light,” Kate said primly, though he knew damn well that was a lie.
“It was actually very clever,” he told her. “My father would have found her another husband, but she fell into such a cataclysmic fit of grief that no one would have her.”
“I gather her grief wasn’t all it could have been?”
“My brothers and I loved to go to her chambers. We would play speculation and bet each other with cherry stones. She gave me my first taste of cognac, and lots of very good advice.”
“Such as?”
“She loved to think of improbable scenarios. For example, what if Noah’s flood happened again? How would we survive?”
“Good question,” Kate said. “Did she have the answer?”
“We decided a good boat with a hold full of nuts would save us. When I was small I used to steal filbert nuts from the table so that she could build up a store. I suppose she ate them privately; she never disillusioned me. Every time it rained I would happily think about the vast reserves of nuts stowed under her bed.”
“Very kind of her,” Kate said. “What would she have to say about swineherds’ daughters?”
“Stay away from them,” he said promptly.
“My father would undoubtedly say the same of nearly married princes,” she said.
They were coming down the grand stairs now. “A last cluster of footmen and we’re free,” he whispered.
“Should I hobble?”
“No need. Wick isn’t here, and he’s the only one who might notice. I’m going to put you in the dog cart and take the reins myself. I’ll tell you when we’re out of sight of the front door. We’ll leave the road immediately.”
The moment he gave the word, Kate pulled up the veil and wrestled it off her head. “That is hot ,” she cried. She had a high flush and—
“Another wig?” he asked, disappointed. The night before, she’d been so drenched that he hadn’t been able to tell exactly what color her hair was, but he thought it was yellow, like mustard or old wine.
“I always wear a wig,” she said primly. But then she looked at him and laughed, and he felt a bolt of desire so fierce that he almost dropped the reins. “My hair is my only glory, so I’m saving it for when I can truly be myself: Kate rather than Victoria.”
“You’re Kate today,” he said.
“No, I’m not. The only reason I’m out driving with you is that Victoria is a bit of a trollop,” she said with a wicked little smile. “I myself would never do anything like this.”
“What do you do instead of trolloping?” he asked with not a little curiosity.
“This and that,” she said lightly.
There was a bit of silence as he negotiated the dog cart off the road and onto a little track that wound around the castle, just under the walls. “What sort of things?” he asked. “Taking care of pigs?”
“Actually, no pigs,” she said. “That’s a cheering thought, isn’t it? If I get to feeling downtrodden I can just contemplate what might have been, in short, the pigs.”
“Do you feel downtrodden?”
“Now and then,” she said airily. “I have such a ferocious temper that people tread on me at their peril. Besides, my godmother is taking me in hand, and next time you see me, I’ll be respectably living in London with Henry at my side.”
Lady Wrothe must be giving her a dowry, Gabriel thought, which was decent of her. Though he hated the idea of Kate flirting with cretinous Londoners; in fact, it made him want to snatch her and—
Act like the bad prince in a fairy tale.
Christ.
“You look a bit hot,” Kate said. “Where is this nunnery, anyway?”
“We’re not actually going to a nunnery. We’re going around the side of the castle, and we’ll enter one of the gardens, a secret one.”
“A secret garden . . . how on earth did you find it? Don’t tell me that a fairy led the way.”
“I was given a key. It’s a secret merely because the gate opens out to the castle grounds, rather than the courtyard, so no one bothers to go there. Even Wick hasn’t investigated it.”
They drove in a circle around the castle for a few more minutes. Then Gabriel pulled up the pony and jumped out, throwing the reins over a small bush. He grabbed a basket from the cart and turned to give Kate a hand, but she was already out of the cart.
He wanted—what he wanted was ridiculous. He wanted to be blatantly possessive, to pluck her from the carriage, carry her to the gate. He wanted to throw down a blanket and pull up her skirts right there in the open air where anyone could see them.
He wanted to—
He’d lost his mind.
That was the explanation, he thought, walking after Kate, who was hopping about and picking flowers like a five-year-old. Wick was right. The whole question of marriage, of Princess Tatiana’s imminent arrival, had rattled his mental state.
He was about to marry. Marry. Which made it all the more unfortunate that—he stopped and rearranged his breeches—there was no one he wanted to be with but one illegitimate daughter of a swineherd, gathering daisies a few feet away.
It was just like a fairy tale, except that life wasn’t like fairy tales, and princes didn’t get to be with swineherds’ daughters, not unless they broke every social convention they had learned in their life.
And he wasn’t going to.
Even though the look of Kate’s body as she bent over to pick another flower made him so hungry and possessive that he found his fingers were shaking. He put the basket down and let fly a volley of silent curses, his favorite method for regaining control.
It had worked in his brother’s court; it worked now.
“Let’s go in, shall we?” he called, walking to the door and unlocking it. The brick wall was high and very old, so old that he could see it crumbling in places where ivy was pulling it down.
He pushed the door open to a tangle of yarrow, butterbur, and purple comfrey. Mixed in here and there were the nodding heads of cabbage roses, petals thrown to the ground as if a young girl had been scattering birdseed.
“Oh!” Kate said. “It’s wonderful!” She ran forward, holding up her skirts. “It really is a secret garden. There are secret statues too. See, there’s one, almost hidden in that clump of sweetbriar.”
“Probably a goddess,” Gabriel said, as Kate pulled back the ivy trailing over pale stone shoulders. Together they pulled down a clump of ivy that hung over the statue’s face.
“Oh,” Kate said, her voice hushed. “She’s beautiful.”
“She’s crying,” Gabriel said, surprised.
Kate reached forward and wrenched at another tangled strand of ivy. “She’s an angel.”
The young angel’s wings were folded; she looked down, her face white as new snow and sadder than winter.
“Oh Lord,” Gabriel said, backing up a step. “This isn’t a secret garden, it’s a graveyard. They might have told me that.”
“Then where are the graves?” Kate said. “Look, there’s nothing at her feet but a pedestal. Wouldn’t the family be buried in the chapel?”
“Yes,” Gabriel said with relief, thinking of the tombs of the lords and ladies Pomeroy neatly lined up in the castle’s chapel. “But why on earth is she here otherwise?”
Kate was bending over and pulling ivy from the pedestal. Suddenly she started giggling.
“What?”
“It is a graveyard,” she said, laughing even harder.
“Remind me never to escort you on holy ground,” Gabriel said, bending over. He started reading aloud. “ In loving memory of . . . who ? I can’t read it.”
“ My dearest Rascal ,” Kate finished for him. She pulled aside a bit of sweetbriar and moved around the pedestal. “And not just Rascal either. Here’s Dandy and”—she moved again—“ Freddie ! Oh my, I have to bring my Freddie here. It’ll be like visiting the tombs of one’s ancestors in Westminster Abbey.”
“It appears that I have my own dog graveyard,” Gabriel said. “If I had a pack of them, the way you do, I could measure out their little graves while they were still alive. I’d start with Freddie, since he’s likely to die of fright any day now. I’ll show this place to my uncle; maybe he’ll feel better if we plant a statue out here of a pickle-eating dog.”
She poked him. “You’re ridiculous.”
He reached out and pulled off her wig. It came with a scattering of hairpins and a shriek. He plopped it on top of the long-suffering angel.
“Nice,” he said with satisfaction, not meaning the angel, who had taken on the look of a tipsy trollop in the pink wig.
The sun slanted over the rosy old bricks and loved Kate’s hair, every buttery, angry strand of it.
She was yelling at him, of course. No one ever yelled at him. No one but Kate . . . and that was because she was a different class, a class that didn’t know that you could never scold a prince.
He hadn’t even been reprimanded when he was nothing more than a princeling. His nurse, and his brothers’ nurses, knew their place. He used to push, when he was a lad, and try to make the servants angry. No one rebuked him, even when he set the nursery rug on fire. When Rupert got one of the upstairs maids with child, his father just laughed.
Only Wick had looked at him in disgust when he saw the rug and told him he was a right fool. He had struck him, of course, and Wick hit him back, and they ended up rolling on the ground, and afterward he felt better. Because a child knows when he deserves a scold, and if he doesn’t get it . . .
Well.
If someone had raked his brother Augustus over the coals once in a while, Gabriel thought, he wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to that infernal friar who happened by with his promises of gilded halos. Augustus knew inside—as they all knew—that he didn’t deserve all he had.
The truth of it made you distrust people, because they lied . . . In Augustus’s case, it made him afraid about what would happen after his death.
Kate didn’t lie. It was fascinating to hear the real anger in her voice.
And that anger, perversely, caused a rise in his breeches.
Or perhaps it was her hair. It shone as if strawberries had been woven into gold. “I just wanted to see your crowning glory,” he explained, breaking through her diatribe. “You’re right. It’s beautiful.”
“I told you,” Kate said, but he broke in when she took a breath.
“I know. You were saving it for the moment when you meet Prince Charming himself. Rubbish.” She had her hands on her hips and she was glaring at him like a proper fishwife. Gabriel felt a surge of happiness.
“It may be rubbish to you,” Kate said fiercely. “But I told you my reasons and you—you simply rode over them roughshod, because you think that anything you do is acceptable.”
He blinked at her, her words sinking in.
“Don’t you?” she demanded. “In your narrow, arrogant little world, you can snatch off a woman’s wig simply because you want to, and you could tear off butterfly’s wings too, no doubt, and father children on milkmaids, and—”
“For Christ’s sake,” Gabriel said. “How did we get from wigs to milkmaids and butterflies?”
“It’s all about you,” she said, glaring at him.
The ridiculous thing was that even though she was saying terrible things about him—all true, except for the butterflies and the illegitimate children—he just felt stiffer, more like snatching another one of those kisses and not stopping there, but tumbling her onto a patch of grass.
“Don’t think I misunderstand that look in your eye,” she said, and her own eyes got even sharper.
“What am I thinking?” Damned if his voice didn’t come out of his chest in a rumble, the kind of husky sound that a man makes when—
“You’re thinking that you’re going to break your own promise,” she said, folding her arms over her breasts. “You’re about to persuade yourself that I really want you to kiss me, even though you promised you wouldn’t. Because in your world—”
“I’ve heard that part,” he said. “About my narrow world. Do you want me to kiss you?”
He felt as if the whole world held its breath for that second, as if the aimless sparrows shut their beaks, and the bees hovered, listening.
“For Christ’s sake,” she said with disgust, turning away. “You’ll never understand, will you?”
He understood that the curve of her neck was somehow more delicious than that of any woman he had seen in years. As she had her back turned, he quickly rearranged his breeches again. “You think I’m a jackass,” he said helpfully. “You’re probably right too. Because I promised, I won’t kiss you. On the other hand, I never promised not to remove your wig. You instructed me, as regards your wig, which to my mind is something quite different from giving my word.”
“You’re splitting hairs.” She kept her back turned to him, obstinate thing that she was. Yet somehow the delicate line of her back was even more seductive than the curve of her bosom. He would like to fall on his knees and trace each bump of her spine with his tongue.
He shouldn’t be thinking that, Gabriel realized dimly. She wasn’t for him. Not for him . . . not for him. Kate bent over to peer more closely at something hidden in the grasses, and his mind presented him with a picture of himself kissing her waist, then slipping down, down . . .
“Shall we have our luncheon?” he said, growling out the words.
“There’s another marble here,” Kate said, pulling at a tangle of ivy and weeds.
He grunted and came to her side. He wrenched so hard that a great bunch of ivy came loose, roots and all, sending dirt and leaves flying into the air.
“A statue of a child this time,” Kate said, dropping on her knees.
The irresponsible, lustful side of Gabriel’s body approved of that. Yes . . . on her knees . . .
He turned away and stamped back outside the garden to fetch the picnic basket, cursing his lust.
Wick was right. He was chasing Kate only because he couldn’t marry her, and he couldn’t bed her either. Because he was an idiot, in short.
And probably she was right too. He was a self-important ass who snatched off her wig just to suit himself. He was getting as bad as Augustus. As Rupert. Wick had kept him in line for most of their lives, belting him when he started to believe that his title meant anything . . .
But had he turned into an ass anyway, when Wick wasn’t watching? Probably.