Trial by Desire (Carhart #2)(45)

Perhaps it was because Kate could still feel her husband’s hands about her waist, his fingers hot against the base of her spine. Perhaps it was because, even through the soft wool of her dressing gown, she could feel the heat of his breath on her neck.

This time, he had said, I will catch you.

No mere gentlemanly politeness, that; she’d heard the ring of truth as he spoke, the hoarse acceptance in the timbre of his voice. It had been real, every last scrap of it.

Every scrap? No. There was one last scrap remaining, and it was jagged enough to slice through that nascent trust.

She had no notion what he would do if she told him the truth about Lady Harcroft. If Ned knew that Kate was the cause of his hours of search, would he still look at her with that same light in his eyes?

Maybe he would take her side. Support her. Congratulate her ingenuity.

Kate sighed. Be practical.

No. The practical answer was that he would shrink from her. That he would turn Louisa over to her husband. That he would shake his head at her, and the dragon-tamer would disappear. Because for all the apparent kindness of his words, his actions bespoke a rather different sort of trust.

It was night, and Kate was alone. Again. After all that heated talk this afternoon of trust, their marriage was still a mere token of what it could have been. Kisses—and no more. The absence left her hollow, as if she’d been burned to a shell by some dark fire.

And as to that last little thing, she was still as much a coward as ever.

Because this afternoon, as he’d held her, she had stood still and unmoving under his touch, content to simply soak in the feel of his hands against her. She’d been as passive as a lily-of-the-valley, tracking the path of the sun across the sky.

With time, all ink faded. If she did nothing, this memory—like the ink on their marriage license—would eventually bleach into nothingness. All that support, all his help—all that controlled anguish she’d felt in his hands on her—and still, he wasn’t coming to her.

Perhaps it was because of that controlled anguish that he wasn’t coming.

Everything Kate knew about the marital act, she had gleaned from her own limited experience, years prior, and the whispered discussions conducted among married ladies—which tended toward metaphor. Sly innuendo to Harcroft notwithstanding, she imagined she had a pretty good grasp of the process—from both the male and the female point of view.

Men, she had been told, required fairly regular release. They obtained this either through their wives, or through access to mistresses. Without that…well, the consequences hadn’t been spelled out to her, but any time the matter came up, every lady had nodded in concert. If there was one thing the ladies of the ton had agreed upon, it was that consequences attached under such unfortunate circumstances. And for the men, they were Exceedingly Dire.

Fever? Perhaps. Excruciating pain? Probably. Irrational behavior? Well, that would explain a great deal about gentlemen.

Ned had claimed that he’d honored their wedding vows. That assertion had seemed simply inconceivable to her at the time, given what she’d been told by her friends. But if he was telling the truth, he was suffering. It would, perhaps, underscore the fundamental irrationality that had kept him from visiting her bed, when she was obviously willing to do her duty.

Yes. Irrational behavior, resulting from deprivation, would explain a great deal about her husband—and so many other men.

Besides, if she offered him relief from that one condition, perhaps he would not judge her so harshly when he discovered what she had been doing.

Before her mind could go over the reasons why she didn’t dare do it, she stood and walked to her chest of drawers. Long ago, her maid had brought that night rail to Berkswift. That one—the one she’d planned to use when their marriage was young and innocent. It was nothing but flimsy silk and ribbons. Better yet, it spoke what she wanted without her ever having to say anything aloud. Near-nakedness spoke louder than words.

She took off the modest nightdress her maid had left for her and slipped the silk gown over her shoulders, her hands trembling slightly as she fastened it in front. Even with the fire burning in her room, she felt a chill in the air.

The temperature wouldn’t matter much longer.

She walked briskly to the door connecting their rooms and threw it open. She was struck by a blast of cold air. Her skin pebbled and she felt her ni**les contract in protest.

For some reason, he had built no fire in his room.

A branch of candles on a chest of drawers cast a pale and unforgiving light. The wood posters of his bed threw ominous shadows at her. Her eyes adjusted to the light as she brought her arms about her for what little warmth they would give—and she saw Ned.

He was seated on the edge of his bed. His mouth had fallen open in surprise.

And—oh, God, Kate stopped breathing again—he was naked. Completely, utterly, gloriously naked in all this cold air. The light painted his skin bronze all over—as if he were a cold, hard statue of a god, frozen in place, instead of a man made of warm flesh and blood.

But what flesh. She sighed in appreciation. What had seemed an imposing breadth of shoulders when covered in wet linen was an impossible expanse of chest, hard and corded. The muscles of his arms were tensed and contracted, almost as if he were in pain.

Almost? The way he looked at her, his lips caught in a surprised half grimace, he must have felt a great deal of pain. It could not have been even a second before her gaze dropped from his lightly furred chest to his navel. It might as well have been an eternity, though, for the blankness that enveloped her mind.