Nick lay watching the morning light build outside his windows, the discomfort of his unsatisfied body at odds with the deep contentment of his mind.
Kat was curled up against him, her head on his chest, one hand tucked confidingly in his, deeply asleep. He smiled, his mouth buried in the soft tangle of her hair. The most difficult thing had been not to tell her he loved her. Every instinct had urged him to do so; his mind had urged caution. Caught up in the emotional tumult of her first sexual experience, could she trust her own responses in the cold light of day? Could he?
No, best to let her think, to ponder on what his own abstinence might mean, wonder about his motives a little. On the night of the dinner party he had planned, that was when he would tell her and hope that she had fallen just a little in love with him—enough to agree to give up her desperate independence and take on what he realised, if his father and Robert did not, must seem an even more daunting responsibility.
She liked him, trusted him, that he had always known. She seemed, by her innocent responses to him, to find him attractive, but none of that would be enough for Kat. She wanted love and he had to make sure she saw it as genuine, not a trap to hold her to this marriage that was not a marriage.
The sun was edging higher: time to move. He slid carefully out of bed, hardening his heart against the small grumble of protest she made. With the care of a ladies’ maid he picked up discarded petticoats, hunted for stockings and garters, found an errant glove and began to ferry all of Kat’s clothing back to her own dressing room.
Then he returned to the big bed, reached under the covers and picked Kat up. She turned in his arms, half-waking, and her mouth found his neck just below the fading marks of the noose. Her lips moved slightly as if tasting and the caress almost undid his will power. Nick stood with her in his arms, breathing deeply until the urge to lay her down and rip off his clothes ebbed a little, then strode into her bedchamber and tucked her into her own bed, pulled the covers up snugly around her, turned on his heel and walked away.
He went and looked out over the park, shining in the early morning light. The chilly waters of the lake beckoned as a cure for his aching loins and overheated imagination. His mouth curled at the thought of what any early-rising guest might think if they saw him striding across the dew-soaked grass in the full splendour of a Chinese silk dressing gown and diving into the lake. That would be taking eccentricity a little too far.
But there was Grandfather George’s plunge pool, which the previous Duke had had constructed in the aftermath of his Grand Tour in imitation of a Roman bath house. Nick pulled on the heavy dressing gown, snatched up a towel and padded off along the corridors in the direction of the Duke’s suite.
The pool was concealed with heavy drapes further down the corridor from his father’s bedchamber. Nick slipped in and saw that it was full of clear, doubtless cold, water with a stand of towels by the side. It was a rectangle with a curved end set within a small pillared room with some of the statues the Duke had brought back from Italy and marble inlays on the floor. He remembered it as being perhaps four foot deep and just long enough to take two strokes from end to end, with a submerged bench all around the edge.
Too shallow for the dive he was hoping for to shock his system into some semblance of calm, but he cast off his robe, stepped down into the pool and ducked under the water. It was as cold as he expected and wonderfully effective. With a sigh of relief Nick struck out and took two plunging strokes to the apse end, turned and dived under the surface to glide back again.
As he surfaced, tossing the wet hair back from his face, the curtain opened and his brother and Roderick Graham appeared. They were still in evening dress, more than a little owl-eyed and dishevelled, and Robert had a champagne bottle by the neck.
‘Hello, Nick,’ he said amiably. ‘Didn’t expect to see you here.’
‘You are drunk,’ Nick observed. ‘If you’re coming in, for heaven’s sake get undressed first.’
‘What? Oh, yes, good idea. We’re a bit tired, that’s all,’ Robert announced, shedding clothes on to the marble with a fine disregard. ‘Not drunk, just a bit on the go.’
‘Aye, that’s the way of it,’ Graham announced, suddenly sounding extremely Scottish. He tossed his waistcoat on to the pile of Robert’s clothes and peered hazily at Nick. ‘Hurt your neck?’
Nick slid further down on the submerged bench until the water reached his chin. ‘Leather military stock,’ he said lightly, ‘Damn things chafe like the devil at first, I’ve never lost the mark.’ He choked as a slapping wave of water hit him with Robert’s uncoordinated tumble into the pool, followed by the lawyer’s slightly more graceful descent. ‘Will you have a care, you clumsy oaf?’ He slapped his brother lightly over his soaked head and suddenly found himself seized in a wrestler’s hold. The two of them struggled, laughing and spluttering in the cold water, all at once boys again. Graham fended off one, then another, and finally managed to duck both of them, at which they turned on him and pushed him under.
Nick surfaced, almost weeping with laughter, to find himself regarding the toes of a pair of Morocco leather slippers and the hem of a sombre red silk robe. ‘Oh, God.’
‘Inaccurate and blasphemous,’ his father observed frigidly. ‘Might I hope that one of you will be good enough to knock on my door and inform me when my bath is available? If, that is, there is any water left in it.’
From the swirling water Nick realised that the other two had taken cowardly refuge behind him. ‘Yes, sir. I mean, we are just about to get out now, sir.’
‘Then I will remove myself from what will doubtless be a thoroughly unedifying sight.’
The curtain swished closed and Nick hauled himself out of the pool with a rueful chuckle. ‘And how old did that make you feel?’ he enquired of Robert, who was clambering out the other side.
His brother considered carefully. ‘Fourteen,’ he hazarded. ‘Damn it, I wish I had his tongue—or is it that left eyebrow?’
‘I have no idea, they are both lethal.’ Nick finished a brisk towelling and pulled on his robe, which he had had the foresight to hang up. ‘How do you two intend to get back to your rooms?’ He prodded a saturated pile of cloth, then shook out the pile of towels. ‘It will take more than one of these to cover your blushes. I suggest you hurry before the upstairs maids are about.’
Katherine swam up out of a dream where she was floating in a mass of black velvet, sipping champagne while Nick caressed her body with peacock feathers. ‘Tickles,’ she murmured faintly and woke to find her own tumbled hair was tickling her nose.
‘Are you awake, Miss Katherine?’ It was Jenny, who stopped tiptoeing around the room and drew back the curtains with a swish. ‘It’s a lovely day.’
Katherine struggled up sleepily against the pillows, her brain fuddled by the incredible dreams that had filled her night. Then she saw Jenny’s expression as the maid waited impatiently at the end of the bed. ‘What happened?’
‘Happened?’ Katherine blinked at her.
‘After supper. The master told me I could go up to bed any time I wanted because he would look after you.’
‘He said …’ Katherine was suddenly very awake indeed. It had happened, it was not a dream. Nick had made love to her last night.
Jenny was positively fidgeting with impatience. ‘Is it all right now? You are staying married to him?’
‘No. No, nothing happened that meant I could not get an annulment,’ she said firmly, ignoring Jenny’s downcast face while she wrestled with last night’s events and what they meant.
Had anyone seen them leave? Had they