Page 49 of Kathryn

“Don’t be clever with me,” Becky snapped, briefly forgetting Katie’s elevated status.

“Alliterative just means that both names start with J’s. Remember that rhyme we learned when we were little? Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers?”

Becky grunted but looked appeased.

Although they’d been playmates as children—indeed all the Bellamy offspring had socialized with the children from the village—Becky had left school and gone into service when she turned ten. The months that followed Becky’s departure had been the loneliest in Katie’s life up until then. Not only had she lost Becky, but her other friends from the village—Dora, Meg, and Sharon—also left school to begin working.

Their lives had diverged, and Katie had seen them infrequently in the years that followed. She’d often envied Becky and wished that she, too, could go into service. Not because she had a burning desire to do backbreaking labor from dawn to dusk, but because it would have gotten her away from her mother.

Even though Katie had been the youngest—and therefore least important—of five daughters the countess’s expectations had still been onerous. Her brother Dauntry and their oldest sister Aurelia had drawn the majority of their mother’s oppressive attention, but the countess had not spared the rest of them the sharp lash of her tongue.

Thankfully, the countess had been banished to Bath five years earlier after misbehaving at the annual family Christmas house party. But that hadn’t stopped her from writing letters, one every two weeks for the past five years and weekly letters since the night of Katie’s ill-conceived kissing contest.

For a change, Katie had been amused as the countess had swung between disgust and delight—disgust at Katie’s reprehensible behavior, but delight that she’d landed such a matrimonial prize—in letters that often ran to four pages.

A significant portion of the last two letters had been unsubtle hints that Katie needed her mother’s guidance in the early months of her marriage.

Katie had laughed out loud at the thought of inviting the countess to live with her. As if she didn’t have enough problems!

Speaking of problems, Dulverton—mounted on a magnificent black horse that looked exactly like all his other black horses—trotted up beside Jeremy and the two men exchanged a few words before the servant nodded and urged his mount into a gallop that took him out of sight.

Dulverton had an excellent seat, his big body more suited to the black riding breeches and black clawhammer than it was to evening clothes. He looked even more massive and implacable than usual. He and the massive black horse moved as one, making it easy to imagine him with furs draped across his bare chest and his pale hair long, rather than cropped, and streaming behind him like a Viking marauder.

Her gaze lingered on his magnificently thewed thigh flexing beneath the tight leather of his breeches. How was it that he looked even bigger today than he had felt lying on top of her last night?

Dulverton turned toward the coach and caught her ogling, his pupils pinpricks and his irises shockingly pale in the bright light of day.

Katie wanted to look away, but that would be letting him win, wouldn’t it? Instead, she stared right back at him, her pulse pounding harder the longer he held her pinioned by his impassive gaze. An image of him from last night, when he had looked anything but emotionless, flickered through her mind’s eye.

He turned away abruptly, and she exhaled shakily, as if a boulder had suddenly been lifted off her chest.

Katie had experienced attraction before, of course, but this raw, enthralling lust was unlike anything she had ever felt. She had certainly not been seized with crippling desire for Jasper. She had enjoyed flirting with him at parties and assemblies and dancing with him far more than she had ever liked the physical aspect of their relationship.

The sorry truth was that Katie had only capitulated to Jasper’s incessant pressure for physical intimacy because she had sensed his attention slipping the longer she denied him her body.

In hindsight it was obvious that all he’d ever wanted was to bed her. But Katie had been a sheltered seventeen-year-old country girl who’d been so lonely for her brother and sisters, and so desperate for affection of any sort, that Jasper had barely needed to exert himself to get her on her back.

The hatred she’d borne Jasper for so many years no longer burned like a bonfire but still roiled beneath the surface like molten rock. Katie looked forward to the day when it would cool completely, and she would be able to think of him with as much emotion as she did any other stranger.

In any event, her affair with Jasper had not prepared her in the least for whatever she now felt for Dulverton. The duke was an entirely different animal than her glib, selfish erstwhile lover. Based on his behavior in her bed last night, Dulverton desired her. And yet today he was no different than he’d been since that fateful night in the Earl of Sutton’s garden. Clearly he had no interest in her outside of the bedchamber. That should not be any surprise given the offer he’d made her; all he wanted was an heir.

Katie needed to throttle any emotional attachment that threatened to develop after last night. Dulverton liked sex, even with the woman who had trapped him into marriage. That is all there was to it and only a self-deluding fool would hope for more.

“I brought this for you, Your Grace.” Becky held out a familiar tapestry bag.

Katie frowned. “I don’t want that.”

“Needlework will give you a way to pass the time. You can hardly stare out the window for eleven hours.”

Oh, yes, I can. I do it all the time.

“I brought a book,” Katie said, giving the bag a look of loathing. Needlework had been the only way in which she had ever pleased her mother and just looking at a tambour or embroidery silks made her feel ugly, useless, and lower than a worm.

“I suppose I should be grateful that you possess at least one accomplishment,” the countess had often said, her cold, critical gaze burning twin holes into Katie, as if she could see every lazy or wicked thought she’d ever had.

Katie still did needlework when she was forced to—for example when one of her sisters asked her for something—but she took no joy from it anymore.

Becky sighed and lowered the bag. “You do the loveliest work I have ever seen, Kat. I have never met anyone who can bring flowers and birds to life the way you can. I don’t understand why you suddenly took it in such dislike.”