A Kiss at Midnight

He wasn’t supposed to look at her like that. Rank seducers didn’t look like that. They didn’t say things that assumed time beyond the present, space outside this small room.

“I can stay only a moment or two,” she said, as much to herself as him.

“You’ll like the view over here,” he said, taking her hand and leading her across the room. The windows opposite looked down onto the dusty drive which she and Algie had traveled a few short days ago. From above, the road drifted along by twists and turns into a violet distance where dark groves met the late afternoon sun.

“It makes you think of a fairy tale,” she said, awed.

“The kind where a prince waits at your feet?” He said it lightly, but there was something there too.

“A princess is making her way up that road,” Kate pointed out. She turned away again and flitted rather blindly across the room until she was brought up short by an enormous carved bed. As if she’d been scorched, she swung about and walked in the opposite direction.

“Well,” she said, “perhaps we should have that kiss now.”

“Not yet,” Gabriel said.

Kate sat down on a beautiful little chair, upholstered in coral velvet, and took time arranging her skirts. Then she looked up. She was tired of the game of wits they were playing. It was too sophisticated for her, too reminiscent of the sort of complicated and refined conversations that Henry likely had with her beaux .

“You asked the right question earlier,” she said. “Who am I?”

He sat down opposite her, not taking his eyes from hers.

“I am the elder daughter of my father, Victor Daltry. He was the younger son of an earl, and had a snug estate, built from my mother’s dowry. After my mother died, he left the entire estate to my stepmother, Mariana, who bestowed it on her own daughter, Victoria.”

“You are not illegitimate,” he stated.

“No. My parents were married.”

“And your grandfather was an earl.”

“I have almost no dowry,” she said. “Mariana dismissed my governess and most of the household staff seven years ago, when my father died. I can bargain down the price of bread; I can mend a stocking; I cannot dance a polonaise.”

He took her hand, turned it over. “I am sorry.”

“I should have left years ago, but that would have meant leaving my father’s servants and his tenants at Mariana’s mercy. I stayed, though my stepmother dismissed the bailiff. She could not dismiss me, you see.”

Gabriel put her palm to his mouth and kissed it. “Go on.”

“There’s nothing else to tell,” she said. “Now I have decided to leave, which probably means that Mariana will throw out most of our tenants, who are hardly scrabbling an existence as it is. The harvest was poor last year.”

He nodded.

“The woman who is on her way to you . . . she is a princess.”

With a gesture so graceful that it seemed natural to him, he slipped from the chair to his knees beside her. “True.”

“Your brother Augustus is an ass to have thrown out his family, and you have a castle to support. I know what it’s like to have responsibilities of that sort.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and the color of his eyelashes was like the color of regret. With a kind of piercing sorrow, she knew that she would never forget this prince.

It wasn’t his dark head and fierce eyes, his unruly hair. It was the way he’d taken in his odd relatives, the menagerie, his aunt’s reader, even the ostrich and the pickle-eating dog. It was the way he looked at her, the way he laughed, the way he brushed the weeds from Merry’s face.

And she would never, ever forget the moment when a prince knelt at the side of her chair. When she was old and gray, and contemplating a life that she hoped would be richly satisfying, she would still remember this.

“If I were not a prince, would you have me?” He said it so low that she almost didn’t hear. “To put it another way, if you had thousands of pounds, Kate, if your estate was your own, would you buy me? Because that’s what I needed, you know. I needed a woman who thought I was worth the price, and my brother found one in Russia.”

“Don’t ask me that,” she whispered. “My mother bought my father, and he never gave her a moment’s happiness. I would never buy a man.”

He bent his head again. “The question is irrelevant; I apologize for asking it.”

“Why did you ask it?”

“Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a prince?” His head jerked back up, and his eyes were bitter, his mouth a hard line. “I cannot do as I wish. I cannot be what I wish. I cannot marry whom I wish.”

She bit her lip.

“I am trained to put my honor and my house above all else. I think the pressure of it has driven my brother Augustus a little mad. He is an ass, as you say. But he’s also crippled by the burden of having so many souls depending on him.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“I would like, just once, for a woman to see me as other than a person with a coronet. Simply as a man, no different than other men.” The words wrenched from his chest.

She stopped him by putting her hands to his face. “Hush.” His lips felt cool and soft under hers, and for a moment she just paused there, in an innocent kiss, the kind that maidens give each other.

But his skin was prickly under her fingers, and his smell, his wild masculine scent, came to greet her, and her mouth opened instinctively. One stroke of her tongue and his arms came around her, strong as steel bands.

She toppled forward against his chest and he swept an arm under her legs and just held her there, against him, his mouth slow and fierce at the same time. He kissed so sweetly that she could have wept, and yet the warmth building in her legs at the touch of his tongue against hers made her feel nothing like crying.

She gave some sort of inarticulate murmur and wound her arms around his neck.

“Yes,” he whispered fiercely. “This is the way it is with us, Kate. Isn’t it?”

She couldn’t answer because she was waiting for him to kiss her again. “Please,” she said, finally.

He laughed, a dark sound that felt like canary wine rushing through her veins. “You’re mine for the moment, Kate. Do you hear me?”

She raised her head and met his eyes. “Not a prince, but a man,” she whispered, running her hands into his thick hair, so that his ribbon slipped over one shoulder and fell to the ground. “Gabriel, not Your Highness.”

“And you are Kate, my Kate,” he said to her. His lips rubbed across hers as if they were young wooers, too simple to know the ways of the wicked. “I won’t take your virginity, because that is yours to give and not mine to take. But Kate, I warn you now that I intend to take everything else.”

He looked down at her, and the expression in his eyes was pure sinful invitation. Kate felt her lips curl without her conscious volition. “How do you know,” she whispered, “that I won’t do the same for you?”

Gabriel closed his eyes for a moment. “I have no doubt of that.”

She leaned forward and licked, delicately, the strong column of his neck. A shudder went through his body and then he rose, still holding her. Kate thought he would lay her on the bed and tear off her clothes.