“Not that kind of kiss.” His voice was dark and thick.

Kate stilled, uncertain what he meant.

His arms closed around her. “I’ll keep you a virgin, Kate. I promise on my word of honor. But let me discover you, give you pleasure, love you.”

“L—”

He took the word from her lips. Their kiss was as untamed as the garden they stood in. It was the kind of kiss that skirted the edge of propriety even though his hands stayed at her back, and hers around his neck.

It skirted propriety because they both knew the kiss was like making love, that there was an exchange, a possession and a submission, a giving and a taking, a forbidden intimacy.

Kate staggered away, her knees weak. She turned rather than meet his eyes, knelt at the corner of the picnic cloth, and began to put silver back in the basket.

“I’ll send a footman out to clean up, you foolish creature,” Gabriel said.

“I’m not a creature, and there’s no need to create work for someone that we could easily do ourselves.”

“I’m not creating work.” Gabriel reached down and pulled her to her feet. “It is their work. And if you don’t think that a footman will leap at the chance to escape Wick’s eagle eye, then you don’t know my brother well enough.”

“Still,” Kate said uncertainly. She glanced over to see him frowning at her. “Don’t start thinking I’ve been toiling as a maid instead of a swineherd,” she told him, turning and walking toward the gate. “I’ve never been a maid.”

“Of course not,” he said, taking her arm. “You’re a lady.”

She glanced suspiciously at him, but he was smiling down at her as innocently as if he’d commented on the weather.

Twenty-five

C learly, Beckham was a scoundrel. And scoundrels, in Gabriel’s experience, generally showed their true colors when drunk.

He consigned that part of his plan to Wick, telling him to ply his guests with too much champagne. Wick rolled his eyes at this dictum, but at dinner Gabriel noticed the footmen whizzing around the tables refilling glasses, as busy as ants at harvest time.

The plan certainly had a marked effect at his own table. Lady Dagobert’s daughter Arabella stopped throwing him longing, if halfhearted, looks, and bent her attentions entirely on young Lord Partridge, to her left. By the fourth course, she had turned a charming shade of pink and was sagging gently toward Partridge’s shoulder.

Her mother, on the other hand, turned a less-than-charming shade of puce and remained strictly upright.

Still the courses, and the champagne, kept coming. The countess loosened her corset, metaphorically speaking, and told him a meandering tale about an ailing aunt who lived in Tunbridge Wells. “Illness,” pronounced the countess, “should not be encouraged. My aunt has made a lifetime habit of it, and I do not approve.”

Gales of laughter from Kate’s direction seemed to suggest that the conversation at her table was rather more lively than that at his own. The one time he looked over his shoulder, Hathaway was leaning so close that the man could certainly see down Kate’s bosom, and having the opportunity, likely was doing so.

That thought apparently caused an expression of such savagery to appear on his face that Lady Dagobert inquired whether he was having a spasm. “My aunt,” she confided, “claims to have spasms on the quarter hour precisely. I told her that if so she would surely die of apoplexy when the clock struck noon.”

“One has to assume that she did not comply?” Gabriel inquired.

“I meant it in a helpful manner,” the countess said. “If the spasms do not lead to apoplexy, then they are not worth regarding, and should be ignored.”

“I am curious about a guest of mine,” Gabriel said, recklessly abandoning the aunt in Tunbridge Wells. “I know that you, dear lady, are abreast of everyone in London . . . what can you tell me of Lord Beckham?”

She responded to his lowered voice and request for gossip like one of Kate’s dogs faced with a lump of cheese. “ Well ,” she said, “he’s a nephew of the Duke of Festicle, as you probably know.”

“Festicle?” Gabriel said, rolling the name over in his mind. “A suitable name.”

“Suitable?” Lady Dagobert asked dubiously. “I don’t follow, Your Highness.” Then she pronounced: “He’s not good ton . I don’t hold with that young man.”

Now they were at the heart of it. “My judgment is precisely the same,” he told her, ignoring the fact that he hadn’t actually met Beckham yet. “There is something of the voluptuary about him.”

“He’s a shabster,” the countess said, twitching her turban, which was in danger of plopping into her salmon. It was white satin with a diamond crescent that threatened to scratch Gabriel on the cheek every time she leaned close.

“Do tell me an instance or two of his perfidy,” Gabriel said, giving her the kind of smile that invited secrets.

“I wouldn’t let him near my daughter,” the countess said, poking her salmon with a knife. “He’s ruined more than one reputation, you know. Young ladies aren’t safe around the man.”

“A bad hat, as your Duke of York has it,” Gabriel suggested.

“Don’t know about his hat,” the countess said, pursuing her own train of thought. “But all these ladies—the ones whose reputation he ruined—apparently acted the jade around him. Now I’m not saying that we don’t have some young ladies who aren’t better than they should be.” She paused.

“It is so in all the world,” Gabriel said encouragingly.

“But if I were young and foolish, and prone to act the mopsie, which I never was,” the countess said, “it wouldn’t be with him, if you catch my meaning.”

“Precisely,” Gabriel said, nodding. “You are very perceptive, my lady.”

The countess blinked at him. “Continental flummery,” she pronounced. “I’ve had enough of this salmon.” She summoned a footman.

“More champagne,” Gabriel told the footman. He was curious to see whether Lady Arabella would actually collapse into the young lord’s arms.

After most of his guests had toddled out of the dining room (and those who couldn’t toddle were supported thence by footmen), he tracked down Beckham in the billiards room.

The man was lounging at the side of the room, watching Toloose defeat Dimsdale, or Algie, as Kate called him, with mathematical precision. It seemed that Toloose, if no one else, was untouched by the sea of champagne that had sloshed through the dining room.

There was a general stir as Gabriel entered the room, of course. The group watching the game began a twitching appraisal of their breeches and coats. As if a prince—or anyone else with a title, for that matter—cared if their breeches bunched around their rods. Toloose looked up from the table and snapped him a bow; Algie’s was deeper, and definitely unsteady. One had to hope that they weren’t playing for money.

Gabriel greeted all the gentlemen in turn. Lord Dewberry, bluff and hearty, chomping on his cigar; Henry’s Leo, Lord Wrothe, holding a glass of champagne, naturally, but looking none the worse for it; finally, Beckham.

Beckham, it turned out, was a man with no chin.