Page 22 of Whiskers and Wiles

“I—” He was right. She’d been a damned fool at supper. “You aggravate me so!” she shouted, shoving at him.

She was surprised that she actually managed to hit him in the chest with some force. Waldorf caught her wrist as she did and held it.

“I have had my doubts over the years about whether I was in the wrong in Oxford, whether you were being true with me when you said your association with Headland was a lie and those letters were false,” he said in a low voice, causing Kat’s heart to suddenly beat so fast she was afraid it might leap directly out of her chest. “But now you admit to flirting with the man deliberately to aggravate me. What am I to believe now, Kat?”

Tears stung at Kat’s eyes before she was aware of them. That only made her angry. The very last thing she wanted was to dissolve into an ordinary ninny over a man, or over the mistakes of her past.

“There is not now and there never was anything between me and Lord Headland,” she said, trying her hardest to keep her voice firm and even. “Those letters were a deliberate concoctionby Lord Headland, planted in my room by Mary, who was paid to tell you I was conducting an affair with that odious man.”

“And you have proof of that?” Waldorf sounded as though he might actually want that proof, want it to exist and for the whole thing to be proven a lie.

“You should not require proof from me, you louse,” Kat shouted, attempting to smack Waldorf with her other hand, since he held her right wrist firmly. “You should have loved me enough to know I would never lie to you or be false with you.”

He caught her other wrist as well, and Kat let out the slightest whimper, as if she were defeated in every way. It was all so frustrating. She knew the truth, knew it like she knew the sun would rise and set. Waldorf should have known it as well. He should have known she could never betray him the way he thought she had. But it seemed the onus was always on the lady to prove that she was innocent, and that men would rather have believed women were all whores and shrews than warriors battling on the disadvantaged side in a battle that had raged since time began.

“I was young and foolish,” Waldorf said, stunning Kat out of her tumbling thoughts.

She caught her breath and lifted her head from where she’d lowered it in an attempt to find his eyes in the dark. She could just barely make them out.

“I doubted my conclusions and my actions from the moment I stepped outside the door of that boarding house,” he went on, his voice low and heavy with regret.

“Then why did you not come back inside and discuss the matter further with me?” Kat demanded breathlessly. “Why did you not come back the next day, or write to me at any point in the last twenty years.”

“Pride,” Waldorf answered simply. “I was too proud to admit I might have been wrong.”

At least he was honest in his answer.

But then he had to add, “You did not exactly comport yourself well after that, you know. I might have been reasoned with in time, but no sooner had I made up my mind that I should make amends when I heard stories of you carousing with every sort of man here in London. How many lovers have you had since we parted ways?”

“How many mistresses have you had?” Kat demanded in return. She had had lovers in the intervening years, either as part of her work for Queen Matilda or just because she fancied a dalliance. It was precisely what a man would do.

Her heart had only ever belonged to Waldorf, though.

“Neither of us are young and green anymore, Waldorf,” she went on. “Neither of us should have expected the other to remain true to a memory. One that was crushed mercilessly, might I remind you. You are no more innocent in matters of life than I am.”

“I loved you,” Waldorf said, a surprising amount of passion in his voice.

Kat’s heart flipped and her stomach filled with butterflies. She had not heard Waldorf say he loved her in twenty years. She hated hearing it in the past tense.

“I never stopped loving you,” she told him in return. “But I hate you as well.”

A heavy silence fell in the carriage. Kat barely noticed that they’d begun to move again. She lost the ability to notice anything else at all when Waldorf swept his hands from her wrists, up her arms, to clasp her face, then pulled her close to him and slanted his mouth over hers.

In an instant, it was as if the royal fireworks had been ignited inside the carriage. Waldorf kissed her as a man would who finally had the woman of his heart back in his arms. Hewas insistent and passionate, leaning into Kat to press her back against the seat.

Kat knew she should have resisted. She should have resisted with everything in her and kneed Waldorf in the balls, as she’d done to Lord Headland all those years ago. But she didn’t want to. She wanted to revel in the familiar taste of the man she loved. She wanted to breathe him in, clasp him tightly, and fan the flames that had burned down to smoldering embers between them.

She wanted to regain the confidence and the power he’d stolen from her by rejecting her when she needed him the most.

With strength she summoned up from the deepest part of herself, she grasped onto Waldorf’s coat and pushed him. She did not push him away, however. She thrust him back against the carriage seat, muscled herself so that she straddled him, and took control of their kiss as though it were a struggle of life and death.

Waldorf made a sound of carnal surrender and grasped Kat’s waist as she punished his mouth with her kiss. She took what she wanted, reveling in the bulge that grew against her thigh as she bit his lip and sucked on his tongue. She wanted to brutalize him as much as she wanted to satisfy him. The feelings in her heart and in her loins were too big to be denied.

“Yes, my darling,” Waldorf gasped when she leaned back enough to sweep her hands down between them, fumbling for the fastenings of his breeches. She intended to take what she wanted from him, and she would enjoy every second of it. “Yes,” he sighed in agreement.

She had just managed to unfasten one side of his falls and to tug at her own skirts to free her legs when the carriage lurched to a stop.

“The Oxford Society Club, my lord,” the driver called down to them.

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