G reat stone steps curved up the inside wall of the turret. Kate concentrated on not tripping over her floor-length veil, trying not to think about the foolish mistake she was making even climbing those steps.
Gabriel meant to seduce her. She knew it in her bones. So why, why was she taking step after step into his lair, so to speak? Was she to be the second of her father’s daughters to disgrace his memory by finding herself unmarried and with child?
Not that her father’s memory could be disgraced, she reminded herself. What disgracing there was to do, he had done himself. The very memory of her father and his philandering made her jaw set.
She would see Gabriel’s little pot. And she would let him kiss her. But nothing further, and that much only because—it would be stupid to deny it to herself—she had the most terrible infatuation with the man.
Which probably happened to the prince at least every other Tuesday, and unless she wanted simply to be grist for the mill of his arrogance, she would never let him know. So, as she threw off the veil, she put a nonchalant look on her face, as if she visited gentlemen’s chambers on a regular basis.
As if those same gentlemen planned to kiss her into a wanton frenzy, and the only thing standing between them and her virtue was the strength of her will.
Unfortunately for Gabriel’s plans, her will had gotten her through seven years of hard labor, humiliation, and grief. It would get her through this encounter unscathed.
“What a lovely room!” she cried, turning around. From the outside, the castle’s two turrets looked squat and round, like baker’s hats. But the rooms inside were high-ceilinged and airy. “You’ve put in glass windows,” she said appreciatively, going over to look.
“They were here when I arrived,” Gabriel said, coming to stand at her shoulder.
“And what a view,” she exclaimed. The castle stood at the top of a slight hill. The window at which she stood looked to the back of the castle, and manicured lawns stretched before her, edged at the far end with a stand of beeches.
“The maze looks so simple from above,” she murmured, putting her fingers against the cool glass. “Yet Henry and I failed to make it through and were dumped out there, by the ostrich’s cage.”
“It is simple, but clever. I’ll show you how to get to the center.” He was leaning against the wall, looking at her, not at the maze. His eyes touched her like a caress, sending a prickle of warning down her spine. At the same time, warmth drifted to her more intimate parts.
He wasn’t supposed to look at her like that. Rank seducers didn’t look like that. They didn’t say things that assumed time beyond the present, space outside this small room.
“I can stay only a moment or two,” she said, as much to herself as him.
“You’ll like the view over here,” he said, taking her hand and leading her across the room. The windows opposite looked down onto the dusty drive which she and Algie had traveled a few short days ago. From above, the road drifted along by twists and turns into a violet distance where dark groves met the late afternoon sun.
“It makes you think of a fairy tale,” she said, awed.
“The kind where a prince waits at your feet?” He said it lightly, but there was something there too.
“A princess is making her way up that road,” Kate pointed out. She turned away again and flitted rather blindly across the room until she was brought up short by an enormous carved bed. As if she’d been scorched, she swung about and walked in the opposite direction.
“Well,” she said, “perhaps we should have that kiss now.”
“Not yet,” Gabriel said.
Kate sat down on a beautiful little chair, upholstered in coral velvet, and took time arranging her skirts. Then she looked up. She was tired of the game of wits they were playing. It was too sophisticated for her, too reminiscent of the sort of complicated and refined conversations that Henry likely had with her beaux .
“You asked the right question earlier,” she said. “Who am I?”
He sat down opposite her, not taking his eyes from hers.
“I am the elder daughter of my father, Victor Daltry. He was the younger son of an earl, and had a snug estate, built from my mother’s dowry. After my mother died, he left the entire estate to my stepmother, Mariana, who bestowed it on her own daughter, Victoria.”
“You are not illegitimate,” he stated.
“No. My parents were married.”
“And your grandfather was an earl.”
“I have almost no dowry,” she said. “Mariana dismissed my governess and most of the household staff seven years ago, when my father died. I can bargain down the price of bread; I can mend a stocking; I cannot dance a polonaise.”
He took her hand, turned it over. “I am sorry.”
“I should have left years ago, but that would have meant leaving my father’s servants and his tenants at Mariana’s mercy. I stayed, though my stepmother dismissed the bailiff. She could not dismiss me, you see.”
Gabriel put her palm to his mouth and kissed it. “Go on.”
“There’s nothing else to tell,” she said. “Now I have decided to leave, which probably means that Mariana will throw out most of our tenants, who are hardly scrabbling an existence as it is. The harvest was poor last year.”
He nodded.
“The woman who is on her way to you . . . she is a princess.”
With a gesture so graceful that it seemed natural to him, he slipped from the chair to his knees beside her. “True.”
“Your brother Augustus is an ass to have thrown out his family, and you have a castle to support. I know what it’s like to have responsibilities of that sort.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, and the color of his eyelashes was like the color of regret. With a kind of piercing sorrow, she knew that she would never forget this prince.
It wasn’t his dark head and fierce eyes, his unruly hair. It was the way he’d taken in his odd relatives, the menagerie, his aunt’s reader, even the ostrich and the pickle-eating dog. It was the way he looked at her, the way he laughed, the way he brushed the weeds from Merry’s face.
And she would never, ever forget the moment when a prince knelt at the side of her chair. When she was old and gray, and contemplating a life that she hoped would be richly satisfying, she would still remember this.
“If I were not a prince, would you have me?” He said it so low that she almost didn’t hear. “To put it another way, if you had thousands of pounds, Kate, if your estate was your own, would you buy me? Because that’s what I needed, you know. I needed a woman who thought I was worth the price, and my brother found one in Russia.”
“Don’t ask me that,” she whispered. “My mother bought my father, and he never gave her a moment’s happiness. I would never buy a man.”
He bent his head again. “The question is irrelevant; I apologize for asking it.”
“Why did you ask it?”
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a prince?” His head jerked back up, and his eyes were bitter, his mouth a hard line. “I cannot do as I wish. I cannot be what I wish. I cannot marry whom I wish.”
She bit her lip.
“I am trained to put my honor and my house above all else. I think the pressure of it has driven my brother Augustus a little mad. He is an ass, as you say. But he’s also crippled by the burden of having so many souls depending on him.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“I would like, just once, for a woman to see me as other than a person with a coronet. Simply as a man, no different than other men.” The words wrenched from his chest.
She stopped him by putting her hands to his face. “Hush.” His lips felt cool and soft under hers, and for a moment she just paused there, in an innocent kiss, the kind that maidens give each other.
But his skin was prickly under her fingers, and his smell, his wild masculine scent, came to greet her, and her mouth opened instinctively. One stroke of her tongue and his arms came around her, strong as steel bands.
She toppled forward against his chest and he swept an arm under her legs and just held her there, against him, his mouth slow and fierce at the same time. He kissed so sweetly that she could have wept, and yet the warmth building in her legs at the touch of his tongue against hers made her feel nothing like crying.
She gave some sort of inarticulate murmur and wound her arms around his neck.
“Yes,” he whispered fiercely. “This is the way it is with us, Kate. Isn’t it?”
She couldn’t answer because she was waiting for him to kiss her again. “Please,” she said, finally.
He laughed, a dark sound that felt like canary wine rushing through her veins. “You’re mine for the moment, Kate. Do you hear me?”
She raised her head and met his eyes. “Not a prince, but a man,” she whispered, running her hands into his thick hair, so that his ribbon slipped over one shoulder and fell to the ground. “Gabriel, not Your Highness.”
“And you are Kate, my Kate,” he said to her. His lips rubbed across hers as if they were young wooers, too simple to know the ways of the wicked. “I won’t take your virginity, because that is yours to give and not mine to take. But Kate, I warn you now that I intend to take everything else.”
He looked down at her, and the expression in his eyes was pure sinful invitation. Kate felt her lips curl without her conscious volition. “How do you know,” she whispered, “that I won’t do the same for you?”
Gabriel closed his eyes for a moment. “I have no doubt of that.”
She leaned forward and licked, delicately, the strong column of his neck. A shudder went through his body and then he rose, still holding her. Kate thought he would lay her on the bed and tear off her clothes.
But instead he put her gently back into the little velvet chair. “Stay,” he commanded, for all the world as if she were Caesar.
“Gabriel,” she said, conscious of the husky timbre in her voice. “Won’t you—won’t you kiss me again?” And she stood up, because she was never any good at taking orders, as Mariana could attest.
“You’re so much taller than other women,” he said. He put a finger on her nose and then drew it slowly down to her chin. “You have a beautiful nose.”
“That’s the compliment I was longing for,” she said wryly.
“This is my evening,” he said, “and I have planned it very carefully.”
Kate put her hands on her hips. She felt saucy and sensuous and joyful all at once, as if desire and laughter were bubbling in her veins. “Oh, so you think you can merely order me about?”
“I have to come and go,” he said, grinning back. “But do you know what I have in mind, Kate?”
She shook her head. “Devilry, no doubt,” she muttered.
“I’m going to drive you mad,” he said, conversationally. “I’m going to kiss you and tease you and taste you . . . and leave. And then I’ll come back and do the same thing again. And again.”
Her mouth fell open. “You will?” Rather to her embarrassment, her voice didn’t sound scandalized as much as curious.
He stepped away from her. “You said you wanted a rest. Would you like a bath or a nap first?”
Kate looked around the great circular room. There was a curtained area to one side, but other than that, it was all one chamber. “You want me to take a nap? Here?” He must have no idea how the blood was pounding through her, warming parts of her body that she rarely thought about. “I’m not sure I can rest at the moment.”
“I understand,” he said, as courteously as if he had offered her a cup of tea. “Perhaps later. Well, I’m afraid that I need to dress for the evening meal. Would you like to sit down? This won’t take long.”
Kate blinked. Was he planning to undress in front of her? “What of your valet?”
“My valet has been commandeered to help Wick this evening,” he said with a grin. “So I have to dress myself.” He reached up and began to slowly untie his cravat.
“Do you need assistance?” Kate asked, mesmerized by the golden skin that appeared as he pulled the cravat free.
Looking at her, he shook his head and widened his stance. As if he had bade her, the movement made her eyes go to his legs. His breeches were tight, molded to his thighs. She jerked her gaze back up in embarrassment.
With an easy movement he pulled off his coat and tossed it on the bed. He was wearing a waistcoat of striped toilinette edged with crimson binding. It fitted close to his chest; a beautiful linen shirt billowed as he casually pulled it free of his breeches.
Kate watched as if she were entranced, not saying a word. She almost felt as if she were at the circus, at a special private performance. There was an air of theater to Gabriel, and the dramatic, laughing flare in his eye showed that he was exploiting every second of it.
“I need help with my cuffs,” he said. With an easy stride, he presented one cuff to her. She bent her head over the snowy linen, and pulled apart the small ruby buttons that held his cuffs together.
Without a word, he held out the other cuff. It was curiously erotic, the turn of his wrist, the way the shirt fell back on his arm. “How did you get this scar?” she said, touching a white mark on his forearm.
“Excavating in Egypt,” he said. “Two years ago. I was bitten by a barga snake; the only remedy is to slash the bite as quick as you can and let it bleed free. Luckily I had a knife to hand.”
“Awful!” Kate said. “But it worked?”
“I was sick for a few days, but not much venom had reached my system.” He stepped back and his sleeves fell to his elbows.
She was thinking about Gabriel slashing his own arm, and not paying attention. “Kate,” he said. There was a kind of deep timbre to his voice that sent a little quake down her legs.
He was toying with the top button on his waistcoat. Her eyes were drawn to those clever fingers. He slipped the first button free and moved to the second. Kate’s mouth felt dry, watching as the buttons came free, one after another.
The linen of his shirt was translucent, giving just a glimpse of taut muscle underneath. Gabriel didn’t say a word, just slowly slid from one button to the next.
As he undid the last button, he pulled off the waistcoat and threw it toward the bed. From the corner of her eye, Kate saw the garment hit the coverlet and slide to the floor.
But her entire being was focused on those teasing hands. “It’s rather hot in here,” Gabriel said, his voice darkly amused.
Kate made a shuddering attempt to maintain some sort of calm. “I’m afraid I forgot to bring my fan,” she said.
“Here’s one,” he said, reaching over to the large table to the right and handing her one. It was a lady’s fan, exquisite, delicate, and obviously valuable. With a sudden thump of her heart, she realized that there had been other women in this room, that she probably wasn’t the first to watch the prince undress himself.
But he was shaking his head. “Not what you’re thinking, love. That’s a seventeenth-century German noblewoman’s fan, with an interesting painting. I picked it up in Bamberg.”
“Of course,” she said, opening it carefully. “That swan presumably represents Zeus?”
“Yes, Leda stands to the right, primly dressed in the clothing of a burgomaster’s wife. It’s one of the things that interest me about the piece.”
Kate fluttered the fan just under her eyes. For some reason it gave her a kind of impudent courage to hold it before her mouth. “Weren’t you about to take off your shirt?”
“Actually,” he said, pulling free the back part of his shirt, “I generally take off my breeches first.”
Kate made a little sound.
“Boots first,” he said conversationally. He turned, bent over, and pulled off his right boot. Kate raised the fan to hover just below her eyes. The second boot was off, and he was facing her again.
“Breeches next . . . or stockings?” The sensual curve of his mouth was enough to make her squirm with a thirsty sense of power.
“Since you’re asking me,” she said, fluttering the fan again. “Stockings.”
He bent over again. Watching the hard-muscled curve of his leg made her pulse beat fiercely.
Then he stood in front of her, legs apart, hands on his hips. “The breeches,” he said, with a primitive joy in his eyes.
She raised an eyebrow, as if nothing he could show her would cause particular interest. Of course she knew what the male anatomy looked like, if only from her embarrassed—but fascinated—study of Aretino’s engravings.
But it was entirely different to watch Gabriel’s hands swiftly unbuttoning his placket, under the shelter of his white shirt. He watched her intently.
“Shall I continue, lady?” he asked, as courteous as any medieval knight.
“Aye,” she said, and cleared her throat, met his eyes boldly. “Do.”
His hands paused at his hips, his eyes sizzling into hers. “I would rather you did this for me,” he said.
She almost dropped her fan.
“Kneeling at my feet,” he said, “coaxing my breeches to fall to the floor so that you could touch me . . . taste me . . . as you will.”
Kate swallowed.
It wasn’t Aretino’s pictures that came to mind, but the image of herself, kneeling before him, pulling his breeches down just as he was doing now. Leaning forward and—
His shirt was tented in the front. She frowned, trying to remember the smallest details of those engravings. That was just it: They were small.
“It seems you see something that keeps your attention, my lady,” he said.
“Ump,” she said ungracefully. “You may continue.” She waved her fan.
The white shirt rose, covered his face, fluttered in the air, fell to the side.
Kate’s mouth fell open, but it was behind the fan, so he couldn’t see it. Gabriel had to be three times the size of the men Aretino portrayed. “You are a bit larger than the pictures would suggest,” she whispered.
“Italians,” Gabriel said, standing with his hands on his hips and obviously enjoying her fascinated gaze. “Wait until you see the statues in Florence. Some of those statues have all the endowment of a small boy.”
“Well,” Kate said, forcing herself to look up, but that only gave her the chance to see what the rest of him looked like, the taut stomach, the muscled chest, the arrow of hair leading down to . . . to there .
“And now I must dress myself,” Gabriel said, casually turning. “I asked my man to set out evening clothing. We’re dancing tonight, did I mention that?”
Kate bit her lip at the look of him from behind, the powerful swell of his shoulders narrowing to his waist. Even his arse was muscled and powerful, as unlike Algie’s plump round bottom as imaginable. “Yes,” she said faintly.
He bent over to pick up a costume left for him on the side table.
“I don’t always bother with smalls,” he said chattily. “But when a man is wearing silk breeches, it stands to reason. Especially if there’s the faintest possibility that his rod might make an appearance.”
She nodded like a silly doll as he pulled on his smalls, followed by stockings embroidered with clocks in gold thread.
“Those are very nice,” she managed to say, and cleared her throat again.
“I can’t say I generally pay much attention to my dress.” Gabriel hauled on a pair of silk breeches so tight that they showed every bulge. Every bulge.
“You can’t wear that,” she gasped, before she thought.
“Don’t you approve?” He grinned at her.
“I can see—anyone can see—” She gestured toward his front.
He gave himself a careless pat. “That’s not going anywhere until I’m out of this room. I’ll have to walk slowly down the stairs and think about something dreadfully boring.”
A billowing shirt went over his head, but this one was considerably more elegant than the one he had worn, with a gorgeous little frill at the neck.
“I must beg a favor, my lady,” he said, as grave as any courtier.
“Yes?”
“My cuffs.”
Her fingers slipped and trembled, pushing the rubies through the buttonholes on his shirtsleeves. If the truth be told, she felt ravenous. And that was no proper emotion for a young lady to feel.
“There you are,” she said. Her voice came out a husky rumble.
Gabriel moved to the glass and tied his cravat in a moment, his hands moving so swiftly, pleating, folding, and tying, that she could hardly follow.
“How are you tying your cravat?” she inquired, striving desperately to have a conversation. Any sort of conversation. Anything to stop herself from lusting after him like a veritable trollop.
“The Gordian knot,” he said. “It’s not too high or fussy and allows me to breathe.”
“Algie told me that he often ruins four to five cravats at a time,” Kate said. “He tries to create a Trône d’Amour, but he calls it a trumpeter.”
The corner of his mouth turned down. “He looks like a long-necked goose.”
Next was a silk waistcoat, a dark sea green with black embroidery. And finally he shrugged into a coat made of the same material, as tight as it was resplendent.
He pulled on a pair of buckled shoes. “I suppose I might wear slippers,” he said, “but they’re bloody cold on these stone steps.”
Without pausing he moved back to the glass, pulled back his thick hair and pulled it tightly into a queue. “Powder?” he asked himself, and then turned to her. “Must I powder? It is my own castle, after all.”
“Surely most gentlemen will be in wigs,” she managed. From being a naked, virile man he had transformed to a fairy-tale prince. “Your—Princess Tatiana will expect you to wear a wig.”
“Loathe them. On me and you. This will have to do. My sword,” he said, looking about. He picked up his rapier and buckled it around his hips, under his coat. “Gloves.” He snatched up a pair from the table.
Then he walked to just before her and put a leg forward, slid into a graceful court bow. “My lady, I fear I must leave you.”
Kate took a deep breath. The man in front of her was the epitome of elegance, as gorgeous a piece of manhood as ever graced a castle. She rose to her feet, held out her hand.
He raised it to his lips, and she felt the touch of his tongue like a brand. Her fingers trembled and he rewarded her with a smile that would have made a saint swoon.
“I shall return as soon as I am able.” He turned, the wide skirts of his coat flaring behind him.
Kate stood in place, watching, feeling as if she’d been bewitched. He almost left, turned at the last minute. “I forgot,” he said. “Something to keep my guest occupied during my absence.”
He reached out, picked up a small velvet-covered book, and tossed it to her. Reflexively she reached out and snatched it from the air.
“There’s my Kate,” he said, a wry smile quirking his lips. “Do you know how many women would have squealed and allowed the book to drop to the ground?”
The door closed quietly behind him.
Kate stood for a moment longer, and then looked down at the book. Her fingers rubbed across the velvet and she slowly opened the front cover, read the title page.
The School of Venus .