A Kiss at Midnight

And he wasn’t going to.

Even though the look of Kate’s body as she bent over to pick another flower made him so hungry and possessive that he found his fingers were shaking. He put the basket down and let fly a volley of silent curses, his favorite method for regaining control.

It had worked in his brother’s court; it worked now.

“Let’s go in, shall we?” he called, walking to the door and unlocking it. The brick wall was high and very old, so old that he could see it crumbling in places where ivy was pulling it down.

He pushed the door open to a tangle of yarrow, butterbur, and purple comfrey. Mixed in here and there were the nodding heads of cabbage roses, petals thrown to the ground as if a young girl had been scattering birdseed.

“Oh!” Kate said. “It’s wonderful!” She ran forward, holding up her skirts. “It really is a secret garden. There are secret statues too. See, there’s one, almost hidden in that clump of sweetbriar.”

“Probably a goddess,” Gabriel said, as Kate pulled back the ivy trailing over pale stone shoulders. Together they pulled down a clump of ivy that hung over the statue’s face.

“Oh,” Kate said, her voice hushed. “She’s beautiful.”

“She’s crying,” Gabriel said, surprised.

Kate reached forward and wrenched at another tangled strand of ivy. “She’s an angel.”

The young angel’s wings were folded; she looked down, her face white as new snow and sadder than winter.

“Oh Lord,” Gabriel said, backing up a step. “This isn’t a secret garden, it’s a graveyard. They might have told me that.”

“Then where are the graves?” Kate said. “Look, there’s nothing at her feet but a pedestal. Wouldn’t the family be buried in the chapel?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said with relief, thinking of the tombs of the lords and ladies Pomeroy neatly lined up in the castle’s chapel. “But why on earth is she here otherwise?”

Kate was bending over and pulling ivy from the pedestal. Suddenly she started giggling.

“What?”

“It is a graveyard,” she said, laughing even harder.

“Remind me never to escort you on holy ground,” Gabriel said, bending over. He started reading aloud. “ In loving memory of . . . who ? I can’t read it.”

“ My dearest Rascal ,” Kate finished for him. She pulled aside a bit of sweetbriar and moved around the pedestal. “And not just Rascal either. Here’s Dandy and”—she moved again—“ Freddie ! Oh my, I have to bring my Freddie here. It’ll be like visiting the tombs of one’s ancestors in Westminster Abbey.”

“It appears that I have my own dog graveyard,” Gabriel said. “If I had a pack of them, the way you do, I could measure out their little graves while they were still alive. I’d start with Freddie, since he’s likely to die of fright any day now. I’ll show this place to my uncle; maybe he’ll feel better if we plant a statue out here of a pickle-eating dog.”

She poked him. “You’re ridiculous.”

He reached out and pulled off her wig. It came with a scattering of hairpins and a shriek. He plopped it on top of the long-suffering angel.

“Nice,” he said with satisfaction, not meaning the angel, who had taken on the look of a tipsy trollop in the pink wig.

The sun slanted over the rosy old bricks and loved Kate’s hair, every buttery, angry strand of it.

She was yelling at him, of course. No one ever yelled at him. No one but Kate . . . and that was because she was a different class, a class that didn’t know that you could never scold a prince.

He hadn’t even been reprimanded when he was nothing more than a princeling. His nurse, and his brothers’ nurses, knew their place. He used to push, when he was a lad, and try to make the servants angry. No one rebuked him, even when he set the nursery rug on fire. When Rupert got one of the upstairs maids with child, his father just laughed.

Only Wick had looked at him in disgust when he saw the rug and told him he was a right fool. He had struck him, of course, and Wick hit him back, and they ended up rolling on the ground, and afterward he felt better. Because a child knows when he deserves a scold, and if he doesn’t get it . . .

Well.

If someone had raked his brother Augustus over the coals once in a while, Gabriel thought, he wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to that infernal friar who happened by with his promises of gilded halos. Augustus knew inside—as they all knew—that he didn’t deserve all he had.

The truth of it made you distrust people, because they lied . . . In Augustus’s case, it made him afraid about what would happen after his death.

Kate didn’t lie. It was fascinating to hear the real anger in her voice.

And that anger, perversely, caused a rise in his breeches.

Or perhaps it was her hair. It shone as if strawberries had been woven into gold. “I just wanted to see your crowning glory,” he explained, breaking through her diatribe. “You’re right. It’s beautiful.”

“I told you,” Kate said, but he broke in when she took a breath.

“I know. You were saving it for the moment when you meet Prince Charming himself. Rubbish.” She had her hands on her hips and she was glaring at him like a proper fishwife. Gabriel felt a surge of happiness.

“It may be rubbish to you,” Kate said fiercely. “But I told you my reasons and you—you simply rode over them roughshod, because you think that anything you do is acceptable.”

He blinked at her, her words sinking in.

“Don’t you?” she demanded. “In your narrow, arrogant little world, you can snatch off a woman’s wig simply because you want to, and you could tear off butterfly’s wings too, no doubt, and father children on milkmaids, and—”

“For Christ’s sake,” Gabriel said. “How did we get from wigs to milkmaids and butterflies?”

“It’s all about you,” she said, glaring at him.

The ridiculous thing was that even though she was saying terrible things about him—all true, except for the butterflies and the illegitimate children—he just felt stiffer, more like snatching another one of those kisses and not stopping there, but tumbling her onto a patch of grass.

“Don’t think I misunderstand that look in your eye,” she said, and her own eyes got even sharper.

“What am I thinking?” Damned if his voice didn’t come out of his chest in a rumble, the kind of husky sound that a man makes when—

“You’re thinking that you’re going to break your own promise,” she said, folding her arms over her breasts. “You’re about to persuade yourself that I really want you to kiss me, even though you promised you wouldn’t. Because in your world—”

“I’ve heard that part,” he said. “About my narrow world. Do you want me to kiss you?”

He felt as if the whole world held its breath for that second, as if the aimless sparrows shut their beaks, and the bees hovered, listening.

“For Christ’s sake,” she said with disgust, turning away. “You’ll never understand, will you?”

He understood that the curve of her neck was somehow more delicious than that of any woman he had seen in years. As she had her back turned, he quickly rearranged his breeches again. “You think I’m a jackass,” he said helpfully. “You’re probably right too. Because I promised, I won’t kiss you. On the other hand, I never promised not to remove your wig. You instructed me, as regards your wig, which to my mind is something quite different from giving my word.”