her knees, her eyes shaded by a wide straw hat as she watched Charlie chasing a ball. An open parasol was lying by her side.
‘Maman, look!’ Charlie hurled the ball high, then flung himself full length to catch it.
The woman clapped, the enthusiasm of her applause tipping her hat back off her head to roll away down the slope. Long brown hair, the colour of milky coffee, glossy in the sunlight, tumbled free from the confining pins and she laughed. ‘Catch my hat, Charlie!’
Maman? Grant started forward as Charlie caught the hat, turned and saw him. He rushed uphill shrieking, ‘Papa! Papa! Look, Maman—Papa’s home.’
The woman swung round on the rug as Charlie thudded into Grant, his hard little head butting into his stomach. He scooped him up, tucked him under his arm and strode down to her. She tilted her head back, sending the waves of hair slithering like unfolding silk and giving him an unimpeded view of an oval face, blue eyes, a decided chin and pink lips open in surprise.
‘My…my lord, we did not expect to see you for another day at least.’ Her face lost its colour, her relaxed body seemed to tighten in on itself.
Kate? Of course it is Kate, but… He did something about his own dropped jaw, gave himself a mental shake and managed to utter a coherent sentence. ‘I made good time.’ He set Charlie on his feet. ‘Maman?’
‘Stepmamas are in fairy stories and they are always wicked. So I asked Mr Gough for the words for mama in lots of languages and we looked them up and I chose maman. Maman likes it,’ his son assured Grant earnestly. ‘She said it was elegant.’
‘Will you not sit down?’ It was extraordinary how it was possible to sound quite calm outwardly when her insides were in a jumble of feelings, the overriding one of which was confusion. Kate gestured towards the open basket and managed what she hoped was a welcoming smile. ‘Do have some luncheon. We have enough food to withstand a siege. Charlie, as always, assured Cook that we might be lost in the woods for days. We never are, but Cook does not like to take the risk.’
When in doubt when dealing with a man, feed the beast, her mother had always said with a chuckle. Kate kept her tone serious and was rewarded by the slight upward tilt of one corner of Grant’s mouth. He had a sense of humour, then. It had not been possible to detect it in his dutiful letters, which had not been made any less dry by the fact they contained nothing but gossip. Presumably that was all wives were supposed to be interested in.
Wives, of course, were perfectly capable of reading the news-sheets and keeping informed that way, although that simple fact did not seem to occur to men. Her brother, Henry, had always been amazed when she revealed an opinion on anything from income tax to child labour and he firmly believed that thinking led to weakening of the feminine brain. Kate pushed away the resentment and watched her husband as he moved round to drop to the rug at her side and discovered Anna lying under the parasol, kicking her legs and chewing on a bone ring.
Grant reached over and tickled her and the resentment retreated some more. He was good with the children, she must remember that.
‘She has grown and she looks to be thriving. As do you,’ he added. ‘I scarcely recognised you.’
From the way Grant shut his mouth with a snap he realised that was a less than tactful remark. Instead of saying so Kate wrestled her hair into a twist and jammed the hat back on top. ‘Babies tend to grow in the natural course of things. But she is very well, as am I.’ She sent him a considering, sideways glance, making sure he saw it. ‘You look much better than I remembered.’
That very forward remark obviously caught him by surprise. Grant tossed his low-crowned hat aside and shifted round to look directly at her, eyes narrowing. ‘Thank you. I think.’
She had known him to be a good-looking man when she married him, but not this attractive, with a London gloss on his hair and clothes, his face tanned from his long ride north. ‘In December you looked haggard, bruised and exhausted. You were recovering from a blow to the head and you were grieving,’ Kate said with a slight shrug. His eyes moved down to her breasts as she moved and she caught her breath at the answering flare of heat in her belly. The fact that she had a figure obviously interested him. No doubt it was the transformation of her bosom; men could be very predictable.
It was nearly five months since Anna’s birth now. She had passed through exhaustion to a conviction that when she felt stronger she never wanted a man to touch her again. After all, her first, and only, experience had not been so pleasurable as to have her yearning for more.
And that comfortable state had lasted for three months until the moment when she had looked up from the dinner table to see Grant’s portrait hanging on the opposite wall, just as it had since the day she arrived. It had been part of the decoration of the house, hardly regarded, but that evening she had felt a startling stab of attraction as she met the direct green gaze. The feeling had been so visceral, so unashamedly physical, that she’d choked on her fish terrine and Mr Gough had rushed round the table to offer her water.
Since the arrival of Grant’s letter announcing his return she had been in an unseemly state of confusion, alarm and anticipation. This was her husband—and husbands expected their rights.
‘After all, I was in the process of giving birth,’ Kate continued calmly, hoping the frankness of her words accounted for the heat in her cheeks. The thought of Grant exercising his husbandly rights made her positively breathless. ‘It is hardly surprising that we both now appear to be tolerably well looking in comparison. Of course, I could tell that you were a well-favoured man, even then, but it must be a relief for you to discover that I am not quite as bracket-faced as you feared.’
‘It is difficult to know how to reply to that.’ Grant was not used to being left at a loss for words, she could tell. Possibly he was slightly flattered, although he must be accustomed to being regarded as good-looking. Possibly also he was feeling a trifle awkward about letting her see what he had thought of her before.
‘There is no need to say anything.’ She was not a conventional beauty, she never had been, but she thought that these days she looked at least tolerable, and, if Grant now thought so, too, she was content with that.
‘I have been away a long time, longer than I intended.’ He had decided to get all the apologising over at once, it seemed. Kate wondered if the length of his absence had anything to do with his mental image of his new wife. Had he escaped to London and the arms of a beautiful mistress? As apologies went, it was not very effusive, more a statement of fact than of regret.
‘We have managed very well and you were a most regular correspondent.’ Not that I understand you any better now than before you left. And you are a man, not a saint, so I must not feel jealous of a mistress—she is only to be expected. But if you take one up here, one that I know about, that will be a different matter. The stab of jealousy was unexpected and she diverted it into a vicious cut at the pastry in front of her. ‘Would you care for a slice of raised pie?’ she enquired to cover the impulse to snap out a demand to know all about this theoretical other woman. ‘It is chicken and ham.’
‘Papa, are you home for long?’ Charlie had been sitting almost on his father’s feet, obviously on the point of bursting with the effort to Be
