“You look half dead from malnourishment,” Leo went on with a scowl. “What’s the matter with you? Why aren’t you eating?”
“Ramsay,” Merripen murmured, evidently deciding a boundary had been crossed.
Catherine shot up from her chair and glared at Leo. “You’re a bully, and a hypocrite, and you have no right to criticize my appearance, so … so…” She cast about wildly for the right phrase. “Bugger you!” And she stormed from the parlor, her skirts rustling angrily.
Merripen and Win watched with open mouths.
“Where did you learn that word?” Leo demanded, hard on her heels.
“From you,” she said vehemently over her shoulder.
“Do you even know what it means?”
“No, and I don’t care. Stay away from me!”
As Catherine stormed through the house, and Leo went after her, it occurred to him that he had been craving an argument with her, any kind of interaction.
She went outside and partway around the house, and soon they found themselves in the kitchen garden. The air was pungent with the smell of sun-warmed herbs.
“Marks,” he said in exasperation. “I’ll chase you through the parsley if you insist, but we may as well stop and have it out right here.”
She whirled to face him, bright flags of color high on her cheeks. “There’s nothing to discuss. You’ve hardly said a word to me in days, and then you make offensive personal remarks—”
“I didn’t mean to be offensive. I merely said—”
“I am not scrawny, you despicable oaf! Am I less than a person to you, that you dare to treat me with such contempt? You are the most—”
“I’m sorry.”
Catherine fell silent, her breath coming hard.
“I shouldn’t have spoken to you that way,” Leo said gruffly. “And you are not less than a person to me, you’re a person whose well-being I care about. I would be angry with anyone who didn’t treat you well—which in this case happens to be you. You’re not taking care of yourself.”
“Neither are you.”
Leo parted his lips to reply, but he couldn’t think of an effective rebuttal. He opened and closed his mouth again.
“Every day you work yourself into exhaustion,” Catherine said. “You’ve dropped half a stone, at least.”
“The new farms need irrigation systems. I’m the one best suited to design and implement them.”
“You don’t have to dig trenches and move rocks.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
Leo stared at her, considering whether or not to tell her the truth. He decided to be blunt. “Because working to the point of exhaustion is the only way I can keep from coming to you at night and seducing you.”
Catherine gave him a round-eyed glance. Her mouth opened and closed in the same way his had just a moment earlier.
Leo stared back at her with a mixture of wary amusement and growing heat. He could no longer deny that he found nothing in the world more entertaining than talking to her. Or just being near her. Cantankerous, stubborn, fascinating creature … completely unlike his past lovers. And at times like this, she had all the cuddlesome appeal of a feral hedgehog.
But she challenged him, met him as an equal, in a way that no other woman ever had. He wanted her beyond reason.
“You couldn’t seduce me,” Catherine said testily.
They were both motionless, their gazes locked.
“You deny the attraction between us?” Leo’s voice was pitched deeper than usual. He saw a shiver run through her before she set her jaw in determination.
“I deny that one’s rational will can be undermined by physical sensation,” she said. “One’s brain is always in charge.”
Leo couldn’t prevent the mocking smile that rose to his lips. “Good God, Marks. Obviously you’ve never participated in the act, or you would know that the major organ in charge is not the brain. In fact, the brain ceases working altogether.”
“I find it easy to believe that a man’s would.”
“A woman’s brain is no less primitive than a man’s, especially when it comes to physical distraction.”
“I’m sure you’d like to think so.”
“Shall I prove it to you?”
Catherine’s delicate mouth twisted skeptically. But then, as if she couldn’t resist, she asked, “How?”
Taking her arm, Leo drew her to a more secluded area of the kitchen garden, behind a pair of pergolas covered with scarlet runner beans. They stood next to a glass forcing house, which was used to compel plants into flower before they might have otherwise. A forcing house allowed a gardener to grow plants and flowers irrespective of the prevailing weather.
Leo glanced at their surroundings to make certain they were not being observed. “Here’s a challenge for your higher brain function. First, I’ll kiss you. Directly afterward, I’ll ask you a simple question. If you answer correctly, I’ll concede the argument.”
Catherine frowned and looked away from him. “This is ridiculous,” she said to no one in particular.
“You certainly have the right to refuse,” Leo told her. “Of course, I’ll take that as a forfeiture.”
Folding her arms across her chest, Catherine gazed at him with narrowed eyes. “One kiss?”
Leo spread his hands palm up, as if to demonstrate that he had nothing to hide. His gaze never left her. “One kiss, one question.”
Slowly her arms loosened and lowered. She stood before him uncertainly.
Leo hadn’t actually expected her to agree to the challenge. He felt his heart begin to beat in concentrated thumps. As he stepped closer to her, anticipation tightened his insides into knots.
“May I?” he asked, reaching for her spectacles, easing them from her face.
She blinked but didn’t resist.
Leo folded the spectacles and tucked them in his coat pocket. Very gently he tilted her face upward with both hands. He had made her nervous. Good, he thought darkly.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
She nodded within the careful bracket of his palms, her lips trembling.
Leo brought his mouth lightly to hers, kissing her with careful, undemanding pressure. Her lips were cool and sweet. Teasing them apart, he deepened the kiss. His arms slid around her, bringing her fully against him. She was slender but compact, her body as supple as a cat’s. He felt her begin to mold against him, a slow and helpless relaxing. Concentrating on her mouth, he explored her with tender fire, searching with his tongue until he felt the vibration of her soft moan between their lips.
Lifting his head, Leo looked into her flushed face. He was so mesmerized by the drowsy green-gray of her eyes that it was a struggle to remember what he’d meant to ask her.
“The question,” he reminded himself aloud, and shook his head to clear it. “Here it is. A farmer has twelve sheep. All but seven die. How many are left?”
“Five,” she said promptly.
“Seven.” A grin spread across his face as he watched her puzzle it out.
Catherine scowled. “That was a trick. Ask me another one.”
“That wasn’t the bargain,” he said.
“Another one,” she insisted.
A husky laugh escaped him. “God, you’re stubborn. All right.” He reached for her and lowered his head, and she stiffened.
“What are you doing?”
“One kiss, one question,” he reminded her.
Catherine looked martyred. But she yielded to him, her head tilting back as he pulled her against him once more. This time he was not so tentative. His kiss was firm and urgent, his tongue sinking into the sweet, warm interior of her mouth. Her arms lifted around his neck, her fingers groping delicately in his hair.
Leo went dizzy with desire and pleasure. He couldn’t pull her body close enough, he needed parts of her he couldn’t reach. His hands shook with the need to find the sweet pale skin beneath the heavy fabric of her bodice. He kept trying to feel more of her, kiss her more deeply, and instinctively she tried to help him, sucking on his tongue with a little sound of pleasure. The hair on the back of his neck lifted as a chill of delight climbed up his spine to the base of his skull.
He broke the kiss, gasping.
“Ask me a question,” she reminded him thickly.
Leo could barely remember his own name. All he wanted to concentrate on was the way she fit against him. But somehow he obliged her. “Some months have thirty-one days, some have thirty. How many months have twenty-eight days?”
A perplexed furrow appeared between her fine brows. “One.”
“All of them,” came his gentle reply. He tried to look sympathetic as he saw her incredulous outrage.
“Ask me another one,” Catherine said, furious and determined.
Leo shook his head, breathless with laughter. “I can’t think of any more. My brain is deprived of blood. Accept it, Marks, you lost the—”
She grabbed the lapels of his coat and dragged him back to her, and Leo’s mouth fastened on hers before he knew what he was doing. The amusement vanished. Staggering forward with her in his arms, he put out one hand to brace himself against the glass forcing house. And he possessed her lips with rough, wholehearted ardor, reveling at the feel of her body arching against his. He was dying of lust, his flesh heavy and aching with the need to take her. He kissed her without restraint, sucking, almost gnawing, stroking the inside of her mouth in ways almost too delicious to bear.
Before he lost all semblance of self-control, Leo tore his lips from hers and held her tightly against his chest.
Another question, he thought dimly, and forced what was left of his mind to come up with something.
His voice was hoarse, as if he’d just tried to breathe in fire. “How many animals of each species did Moses take into the ark?”
Her answer was muffled in his coat. “Two.”
“None,” Leo managed to say. “It was Noah, not Moses.”
But he no longer found the game amusing, and Catherine no longer seemed to care about winning. They stood together, gripped tight and close. Their bodies cast a single shadow that stretched along a garden path.
“We’ll call it a draw,” Leo muttered.
Catherine shook her head. “No, you were right,” she said faintly. “I can’t think at all.”
They waited a little longer, while she leaned into the wild rhythm of his heart. They were both in a daze, mutually occupied with a question that couldn’t be asked. An answer that couldn’t be given.
Letting out an unsteady sigh, Leo eased her away. He winced as the fabric of his trousers chafed his aroused flesh. Thank God the cut of his coat was long enough to conceal the problem. Extracting her spectacles from his pocket, he replaced them carefully on her nose.
He offered his arm in wordless invitation—a truce—and Catherine took it.
“What does ‘bugger’ mean?” she asked unevenly, as he led her out of the kitchen garden.
“If I told you,” he said, “it would lead to improper thoughts. And I know how you hate those.”
Leo spent much of the next day at a stream on the west side of the estate, determining the best site for a waterwheel and marking the area. The wheel would be approximately sixteen feet in diameter, equipped with a row of buckets that would empty into a trough from which the water would course along a series of wooden flumes. Leo estimated that the system would irrigate approximately one hundred and fifty acres, or ten generously sized tenant farms.
After laying out plots with the tenants and laborers, hammering wooden stakes into the ground, and wading through a cold, muddy stream, Leo rode back to Ramsay House. It was late afternoon, the sun a condensed yellow, the meadows still and breezeless. Leo was tired, sweat-soaked, and annoyed from battling gadflies. Wryly he thought that all the romantic poets who waxed rhapsodic about being out in nature had certainly never been involved in an irrigation project.
His boots were so caked with mud that he went to the kitchen entrance, left them by the door, and went inside in his stocking feet. The cook and a maid were busy slicing apples and rolling dough, while Win and Beatrix sat at the worktable, polishing silver.
“Hello, Leo,” Beatrix said cheerfully.
“Heavens, what a sight you are,” Win exclaimed.
Leo smiled at both of them, then wrinkled his nose as he detected a bitter stench in the air. “I didn’t think it was possible for any odor to eclipse mine at the moment. What is it? Metal polish?”
“No, actually it’s…” Win looked guarded. “Well, it’s a kind of dye.”
“For cloth?”
“For hair,” Beatrix said. “You see, Miss Marks wants to darken her hair before the ball, but she was afraid of using dye from the apothecary, since he got it so wrong last time. So Cook suggested a recipe that her own mother used. You boil walnut shells and cassia bark together with vinegar and—”
“Why is Marks dyeing her hair?” Leo asked, striving to keep his tone ordinary, even as his soul revolted against the idea. That beautiful hair, gleaming gold and pale amber, covered with a dull, dark stain.
Win replied cautiously. “I believe she wishes to be less … visible … at the ball, with so many guests in attendance. I didn’t press her for answers, as I felt she was entitled to her privacy. Leo, please don’t distress her by mentioning it.”
“Does no one find it odd that we have a servant who insists on disguising herself?” Leo asked. “Is this family so bloody eccentric that we accept any manner of strangeness without even asking questions?”
“It’s not all that strange,” Beatrix said. “Many animals change their colors. Cuttlefish, for example, or certain species of frogs, and of course chameleons—”
“Excuse me,” Leo said through clenched teeth. He left the kitchen with purposeful strides, while Win and Beatrix stared after him.
“I was leading to some very interesting facts about chameleons,” Beatrix said.
“Bea, darling,” Win murmured, “perhaps you’d better go out to the stables and find Cam.”
Catherine sat at her dressing table, contemplating her own tense reflection in the looking glass. Several articles were neatly arranged in front of her: folded toweling, a comb, a pitcher and basin, and a pot filled with a strained dark sludge that looked like boot blacking. She had painted a single lock of hair with the stuff, and was waiting for it to take effect, to see what color had been imparted. After her last disaster with colorant, when her hair had turned green, she was taking no chances.