“You’re splitting hairs.” She kept her back turned to him, obstinate thing that she was. Yet somehow the delicate line of her back was even more seductive than the curve of her bosom. He would like to fall on his knees and trace each bump of her spine with his tongue.
He shouldn’t be thinking that, Gabriel realized dimly. She wasn’t for him. Not for him . . . not for him. Kate bent over to peer more closely at something hidden in the grasses, and his mind presented him with a picture of himself kissing her waist, then slipping down, down . . .
“Shall we have our luncheon?” he said, growling out the words.
“There’s another marble here,” Kate said, pulling at a tangle of ivy and weeds.
He grunted and came to her side. He wrenched so hard that a great bunch of ivy came loose, roots and all, sending dirt and leaves flying into the air.
“A statue of a child this time,” Kate said, dropping on her knees.
The irresponsible, lustful side of Gabriel’s body approved of that. Yes . . . on her knees . . .
He turned away and stamped back outside the garden to fetch the picnic basket, cursing his lust.
Wick was right. He was chasing Kate only because he couldn’t marry her, and he couldn’t bed her either. Because he was an idiot, in short.
And probably she was right too. He was a self-important ass who snatched off her wig just to suit himself. He was getting as bad as Augustus. As Rupert. Wick had kept him in line for most of their lives, belting him when he started to believe that his title meant anything . . .
But had he turned into an ass anyway, when Wick wasn’t watching? Probably.
Twenty-three
K ate cleared the last weeds from the statue of the child. She was a chubby toddler, sitting on the ground in a smock, and laughing. “Hello there,” Kate murmured to the little stone girl. “I wonder . . .”
She pulled ivy from her pedestal and found a simple inscription: Merry, Darling.
“Your gloves are ruined,” came a voice over her shoulder.
“My maid brought along boxes and boxes of gloves,” she said. “Look, Gabriel. Isn’t she a dear? She has ringlets.”
“And wings,” Gabriel pointed out. “She’s a baby angel.”
“Do you suppose that she was Merry—or was Merry a beloved kitten, perhaps? She reminds me of the cupids in the north corridor. Perhaps she was made by the sculptor stolen from Italy, the one who escaped in a butter churn.”
“Does one erect a statue just for a kitten? My guess would be that this is a memorial, if not the actual grave itself.” He bent down and brushed away a head of yarrow that nodded against the child’s cheek.
“That’s so terribly sad,” Kate said.
“There’s an instinctive wish to remember the child playing and laughing,” he said. “When we were excavating Barbary two years ago, we discovered that the tombs of children were full of toys so that they could play happily in the afterlife.”
Kate nodded. “Not so different, I suppose, from putting a statue of Merry actually playing in the garden.”
“I have a little pot upstairs that I’ve been working on. It came from a tomb, and it originally held knucklebones. Presumably they were the boy’s own toys. I’ll show it to you someday.”
“It sounds fascinating,” Kate said, meaning it.
“My old professor, Biggitstiff, is an arrant blockhead, and threw out the pot, knucklebones and all. In fact, he had the men simply throw dirt in the tomb after he discovered there wasn’t any gold inside.”
“Is he interested only in gold?”
“In truth, no. But he’s interested in fame. He wants the big find, the exciting discovery. Something as trifling as the grave of a poor child would never interest him. That’s what bothers me about his excavation of Carthage. He’ll be rampaging about, looking for Dido’s grave, and doubtless destroying all sorts of interesting artifacts.”
His voice had moved away again and she looked over her shoulder to find that he was spreading a blanket in a relatively clear spot of grass.
“Come and eat,” he called.
She scrambled to her knees and came to join him. “It’s a feast,” she said with satisfaction.
“Take off those filthy gloves,” Gabriel said. He waved a chicken leg at her.
“Mmmm,” Kate said, stripping off her gloves. “Things smell so much better in the outdoors; have you noticed?” She bit into the chicken.
He didn’t answer, just handed her a glass of wine that slid, light and faintly sparkling, down her throat.
She didn’t notice until she’d eaten the chicken leg, a meat tartlet, a piece of mouthwatering cheddar cheese, and a pickled quail’s egg that he hadn’t answered. In fact, he wasn’t even eating; he was just propped up on his elbow watching her. And handing her food.
She narrowed her eyes at him over a piece of almond cake. “What?” she demanded.
Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “Nothing.”
“What are you up to?”
“Trying to fatten you up,” he said readily enough. “You’re too thin, even though you weren’t sick in the spring.”
“I’ve never been plump,” she stated.
“Ah, but you need more than that gorgeous mop of hair to catch a husband,” he said infuriatingly. “The best Englishwomen are soft. Luscious, really. Look at Lady Wrothe, your godmother. She’s like a gorgeous overbaked loaf, even at her age.”
Kate ate the rest of her cake and scolded herself silently for minding that, apparently, he didn’t find her luscious.
Gabriel had rolled over and was lying on his back, legs crossed, eating a chicken leg. His breeches clung to muscular thighs; her eyes drifted to broader shoulders. His eyes were squinted shut against the sun, and his eyelashes lay on his cheeks like an invitation.
“I didn’t mean to say that you ripped the wings off butterflies,” she said abruptly, pulling her mind away from the prince’s princely attributes.
“What about the illegitimate children I had with fields of milkmaids? Did you mean that?” he asked interestedly, though he didn’t bother to open his eyes. Instead he just reached out a hand. “May I have one of those little pasties?”
She put a meat tart in his hand. “I would imagine that princes might have any number of bastard children,” she said. “What woman could resist you? And I didn’t mean that as a compliment to your charms.”
“I heard you,” he said. He was silent for a moment.
“Not that I mean you would have to employ force,” she added, feeling a qualm of conscience. He was so beautiful that he didn’t even need a title to have women at his feet.
“I know.” He held out his hand again, broad but slim-fingered, a powerful man’s hand. She put a second tart squarely on his palm.
“My brother Rupert,” Gabriel said, “has any number of bastards. He’s a pretty fellow.”
“You’re—” She broke off just in time.
“Not as pretty,” he said. “Rupert is more of a prince than I am. You should see him when he’s ruffled and bewigged. He’d drive you into a blind fury, no doubt about it.”
“Really?”
“He looks like someone in a fairy tale, and he acts like someone in one of Aretino’s books,” Gabriel said, turning over and propping himself up on his elbow.