“I shall screech out for help to the first person or building I see,” Kate warned.
“Then I shall have to silence you in the way I did once before. Do you remember?” he asked, taking her indignant lips within his own a fraction of a second before she realized his intent.
Kate shook her head vigorously. “You will hang for this, you know,” she said. “This is kidnapping.”
“Hanging will be a sight swifter and less painful than some of those other deaths you threatened me with yesterday,” he said.
Kate lapsed into a sullen silence while her mind planned strategy for when they would arrive at the cottage. Unfortunately she was distracted by a physical discomfort that soon absorbed every ounce of her consciousness. She would not! She would not give him the satisfaction. But in the end she was compelled to. Her screaming neck muscles would no longer hold her head away from his shoulder. Of course, she thought to cover her mortification, even that was his fault. He had deliberately seated her so that she was not quite upright. He shrugged his shoulder so that her head slipped into a more comfortable position against his neck.
Neither of them said another word until the horse was drawn to a halt in the small cobbled yard before Russ Evans’ cottage. Nicholas swung himself down from the saddle and lifted an unyielding Kate down after him.
“Go inside,” he directed. “I shall just see to my horse before I join you. The Evanses have conveniently been persuaded to take themselves off for the day to visit Mrs. Evans’ brother.”
Kate considered turning and marching through the gateway. But if she did that, she would merely lose further dignity by being hauled back again. She walked with dangerous meekness into the house and through the low, dark passageway to the little parlor at the back. She removed her bonnet and gloves and turned to face the door.
“I do not consider this a very clever or tasteful joke, sir,” she said as soon as Nicholas entered the room, his disguise already abandoned. “I hate you and despise you and I wish to be on my way to London. I have nothing whatsoever to say to you.”
“You are a liar, Katherine,” he said coolly.
Her temper flared instantly. “I am a liar,” she said. “I am a liar? Well, sir, I see this is a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black. And what might you be, sir?”
“You see?” Nicholas said in triumph. “I have proved my point already. You obviously have a great deal to say to me, Katherine. Why not say it and give me a chance to defend myself?”
“Can there be any defense to what you have done to me?” she cried.“I believed your story. I pledged myself to help you. I risked a great deal to get away from the Abbey at night so that I could come here to warn you of danger. Twice. And I gave myself to you. A small matter, you may think. But you knew that I did so terrified that I would find the act as repulsive as I always had. But I trusted you. I gave you myself, not only my body. And what did you do to repay me? You came to the Abbey as a guest with a different name; you treated me abominably; and you gradually made me trust you again. And again I gave myself to you. But you did it all out of contempt. When I had made myself completely vulnerable with you, you did not even trust me enough to tell me who you were. And you say that you wish to defend yourself?”
“I can defend myself, Katherine,” he said. “It was not you I did not trust. It was myself.”
“Oh, famous!” Kate said, turning half away from him and raising her hand to an invisible audience on the ceiling. “You were afraid that, having told me, doing so would become a sort of habit and you would have been telling everyone?”
“I was afraid that I would not be able to keep away from you,” he said.
She stared at him, incredulous. “Pardon me for a fool,” she said, “but if three nights ago was keeping away from me, what, pray, would being close to me involve?”
“Three nights ago I admitted failure,” he said, “and gave in to my love for you.”
“Love!” Kate spat out the word as if it were a week-old fish she had drawn out of a garbage heap. “Is it love to take a woman to bed and not even tell her with whom she lies? You do not know the meaning of love, Nicholas Seyton. You have confused the word with lust.”
“Nonsense!” he said. “You know as well as I do, Katherine, that what happened between you and me three nights ago was the result of a very deep love and was a near-perfect expression of it. You are overdramatizing, hoping that I will go down on my knees to you or show some other sign of desperate groveling. I have no intention of even beginning to cater to such silly whims. I am not going to be an abject worshiper to your aloof goddess. It is marriage with you I intend to have. A lifetime marriage modeled after that experience of oneness that we both had in bed three nights ago.”
“Well!” Kate’s voice was very quiet but it was vibrating. “Silly whims. And you want a marriage with me. Do you know what marriage is, Nicholas? Marriage is a man free to live whatever life he pleases and a woman who is his slave. She must dedicate her whole life to pleasing him, even if he is impossible to please. She must at least learn to dodge his wrath whenever she may. She must learn to obey his every whim, to keep her own ‘silly’ thought and feelings to herself, to lay her down meekly whenever he feels like relieving himself of a lustful impulse, and to consider herself fortunate beyond the general run of females if he refrains from beating her except when unusually provoked. That is what marriage is. Don’t talk to me of feelings of oneness.”
“Was your marriage a very dreadful ordeal?” he asked quietly.
“No, not at all,” she said. “I believe it was a very normal marriage, sir. I learned early to be obedient, and Giles was not normally a violent man. He was content to revile me with his tongue. Doubtless I deserved every tongue-lashing I had. I was a worthless creature, he told me on numerous occasions. He must have been right. He was my husband. A husband is always right.”
“Why did he beat you?” He was almost whispering.
Kate laughed harshly. “For a dreadful misdemeanor,” she said. “I deserved every painful stroke of his hand. I dared to try to wriggle my way out from beneath him as he lay on top of me drunk and snoring. He had taught me long before that a wife does not move even a finger while a husband is about his business, or even afterward until he pleases to remove himself from her bed.”
“Poor Katherine!” Nicholas said. “But you are not describing marriage, love. You are describing one particular one, a marriage in which there was no love whatsoever, only selfishness and brutality on the one side and a hopeless submissiveness on the other. Your husband was a brutal man, my dear, even if he raised a hand to you on only one occasion. The man was a dolt. You, worthless? You are worth more than the whole world and the sun and the moon and all the stars together to me, Katherine. You are my whole fortune. My life.”
Kate’s jaw tightened and her eyes flashed. “You are a very clever man, Nicholas Seyton,” she said. “You can treat me with the utmost contempt for several weeks and then you think you can have me melting in your arms merely because you know how to use words prettily. How can I be your life? You deceived me!”
“Sometimes, Katherine,” he said, turning away from her to the window in exasperation, “I have serious doubts about your intelligence. Do you not see that I deceived you just because you are my world? I did not know what manner of man Clive Seyton was. I did not know whether he could be an evil and violent man when threatened. There was every chance that he might discover that other people in addition to himself were in search of those papers and other evidence to prove my legitimacy. I was terrified of your involvement. I was even afraid for your life at first until I realized that the earl was incapable of any criminal violence. I wanted you to believe that I had given up so that you would do likewise.”
“That is why you left—or pretended to do so—without a word?” Kate asked. “I am expected to believe that?”
“Yes,” he snapped back at her, turning an angry face to her. “You are expected to believe that. How was I to know that you would be foolish enough and quite impossibly brave enough to continue on your own?”
