to escape, to reconstruct the feeling of success that had been so rudely taken from her. He smiled at her again, and his eyes twinkled ruefully. And suddenly, horribly, she knew what he was going to say. She knew why his eyes had seemed so unnaturally familiar.
She did know this man. She had imagined meeting him a thousand ways in the past years. Sometimes she had said nothing. Other times she’d delivered cutting speeches. She always brought him to his knees, eventually, in apology, while she looked on regally.
There was nothing regal about her now. In all of her imaginings, not once had she met him wearing an ill-fitting servant’s cloak, with smudges on her face.
Her wrist still burned where he touched her, and Kate jerked her hand away.
“You see,” he said dryly, “I’m quite sure that I am your husband. And I’m not six thousand miles away any longer.”
CHAPTER TWO
SIX THOUSAND MILES. Three years. Ned Carhart had convinced himself that when he returned, everything would be different.
But no. Nothing had changed—least of all, his wife.
She stared at him, her lips parted in shock, as if he had announced that he had a penchant for playing vingt-et-un with ravens. She drew her cloak about her. No doubt she wanted to shield herself from his gaze. And like that, it all came back—all the ragged danger of that old intensity—burning into the palms of his hands.
Her cloak was dusty all over and, thank God, falling about her as it did, it hid the curves of her waist. After all these years of careful control, the check he performed was almost perfunctory. Yes. He still controlled his own emotions; they did not jerk him around, like a dog on a chain.
But then, it had been a long while since he’d felt these particular emotions. Ten minutes in his wife’s presence, and already she’d begun to befuddle him again.
“You really didn’t recognize me,” he said.
She stared at him, suddenly mute and uneasy.
No, of course not. All that easy conversation? That, she’d produced for a stranger. A stranger who she believed had intended to seduce her, no less. Ned scrubbed his hand through his hair.
“Two years? There’s been a wager running for two years to seduce you?”
“What did you suppose would happen? You left me three months after our wedding.” Kate turned away. She took two breaths. He could see the rigid line of her shoulder even under all that wool. And he waited, waited for an outpouring of some kind. A diatribe; an accusation. For anything.
But when she turned back, only the clutch of her gloved hand on her cloak betrayed any unease.
That smile—that damnably enchanting smile—peeked out again. “And here I supposed your departure was the masculine equivalent of sounding the bugle to presage the hunt for your fellow gentlemen. You could not have declared it hunting season on Lady Kathleen Carhart any more effectively if you’d taken out an advertisement in the gossip circulars.”
“That’s certainly not what I intended.”
No. His thinking had taken a different cast altogether. When he’d left for China, he’d been young and idiotic; old enough to insist that he was an adult, and not wise enough to realize how far he was from the truth. He’d spent his early years playing the dissolute and useless spare to his cousin’s rigid, rule-bound heir.
He’d made himself sick on the uselessness of himself. When he’d married, he had hungered to prove that he wasn’t a child. That he could take on any task, no matter how difficult, and demonstrate that he had grown into a strong and dependable man.
He’d done it, too.
One woman—one who had already sworn to honor and obey him—shouldn’t have seemed so insurmountable a prospect.
Ned shook his head and looked at Kate. “No,” he repeated. “When I left, I wasn’t trying to send any message. It didn’t have anything to do with you at all.”
“Oh.” Her lips whitened and she looked ahead. “Well. Then. I suppose that’s good to know.”
She turned around and began to walk away. Ned felt the pit of his stomach sink, as if he’d said something utterly stupid. He couldn’t think what it was.
“Kate,” he called. She stopped. She did not look at him, but there was something—perhaps the line of her profile—that suggested a certain wariness.
He swallowed. “That wager. Did anyone succeed?”
She stiffened slightly, and then her shoulders lowered in defeat. Now she did turn around.
“Oh, Mr. Carhart.” It was the first time she had spoken his name since he’d returned, and she imbued those few syllables with all the starch of sad formality. “As I recall, I vowed to forsake all others, keeping only unto you, for as long as we both should live.”
He winced. “I wasn’t questioning your honor.”
“No.” She put her hands on her waist and then looked up at him. “I merely wish to remind you that it was not I who forgot our wedding vows.”
And with those words, she glanced up the packed dirt of the path to where his gray mare stood. She let out a deep sigh and turned away once more. For a second, Ned imagined grabbing her wrist again, imagined himself swiveling her around to face him. She wouldn’t look at him with sadness or that wary distance. In fact, distance was the last thing he wanted between them—
She cast him one final glance and then crossed to his mare, which was cropping grass by the side of the road. “One solution to your logical dilemma?” she said. “Get another boat.”
She took his horse’s reins and wrapped them around her wrist. And before he could say another word, she set off down the track.
Champion’s reaction to Ned’s mare meant that he could not walk close to Kate, not without risking a repeat of that skittish rearing and bolting. He perforce trailed after her, feeling rather like a clumsy duckling to her elegant swan.
The English countryside smelled like dust and autumn sunshine. His wife walked ten yards ahead of him. She strode as if she might outrun his existence entirely, if only she put one foot in front of the other quickly enough. Maybe it was madness, that he imagined he could catch the scent of her on the breeze—that half remembered smell of fine-milled soap and lilac. It was even more foolish to watch her retreating backside and wonder what else might have changed about her while he wasn’t looking.
Her hair, or what he could see of it from under that floppy gray bonnet, was still such a pale blond as to appear almost platinum. Her eyes still snapped gray when angry. As for her waist … He hadn’t lied when he said he recognized her by the feel of her waist in his hands. He hadn’t touched her often, but it had been enough. She was delicate, with that fine, elegant figure and those pale gray eyes ringed by impossibly long lashes.
When he’d married her, she had seemed like some bright creature. A butterfly, perhaps, its wings vibrant and shimmering in the sunlight. When she had smiled at him, Ned felt himself wanting to believe that it would be June
