Bad Kitty Read online

  Kitty stared, not knowing whether to believe the old housekeeper or not. If that were true then Bram must be very upset. An image of the morning he had taken her virginity rose in Kitty’s thoughts and shame heated her cheeks when she recalled how she had taken his phallus in hand and guided him into her channel.

  She had not tricked him into marrying her. Quite the contrary. He had actually abducted her from her home in order to whisk her away to the vicar. There was absolutely no reason for her to feel guilty but Kitty wanted to turn and flee back to the sanctuary of her room.

  Instead, she cleared her throat. “Mrs. Bush, if that is the case, there is little that can be done about it now.”

  * * * * *

  Kitty gaped at Willingham Hall as her carriage rolled to a stop on the pavement. She swallowed thickly. She had seen grand estates before but the idea that this vast place belonged to her husband sent a tremor of terror through her.

  And if Mrs. Bush was correct, then every servant here knew she was the cause of the old duke’s death.

  She wondered how Bram would react when he saw her. Would he be angry? Would he also blame her for his father’s death?

  Or would he be happy that she had come?

  She inhaled as a footman rushed forward to help her down from the carriage.

  Other servants rushed to line up to greet her and guilt surged that she had not gone through the proper protocol. It was customary for all the servants to present themselves for introductions to a new family member—especially the new duchess.

  Circumstances, however, had not permitted it and she’d swept past the line with a curt nod of her head. The head butler escorted her into the manor and Kitty was forced to stifle a gasp when she took in the soaring ceilings, tapestries, marble, sculpture, polished wood and thick rugs. She could scarcely believe she was the mistress of all this.

  A frail old butler met her in the entryway. “Your Grace, I am called Hobbes and I am at your service.”

  “Thank you, Hobbes,” she said. “The journey was long and tiresome. I would very much like to see my husband.”

  “Follow me,” Hobbes said and led her up the seemingly never-ending staircase and down a maze of hallways. “The duke has been in the nursery since he arrived.”

  “The…nursery?”

  “His former nursery,” Hobbes explained.

  Kitty’s heart turned over hard. “Is he…alone?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  She quickened her pace and hoped the butler would do so as well but as they neared the door, her heart began to race. What if Bram sent her away? What if he was angry?

  Hobbes pushed open the door and held it as Kitty crossed the threshold. After she was inside, he closed the door behind her.

  Kitty’s gaze drank in the decidedly childish decorations, the small furniture. The toy soldiers and faded red wooden rocking horse. The fact that these things had belonged to Bram when he was a child touched something nostalgic inside her.

  There was nothing left from her own childhood, nothing much by which to remember her parents. Nothing like this.

  But where was Bram?

  “Bram?” she called, the intimacy of using his first name sending tendrils of heat rushing up her spine.

  She took several steps into the room and then she saw him. Red-faced and surprised, he sat staring from a rug in the corner of the room.

  Kitty rushed toward him.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded as he shot to his feet and made an attempt to compose himself.

  Kitty stopped. “Your father… Oh Bram, I’m so terribly sorry.”

  His face hardened. His eyes narrowed into vicious slits. “Why did you come here?”

  A cold chill traversed Kitty’s spine. “To… Because…I thought it was my place.” She took another step toward him, reaching, but when her fingers brushed the sleeve of his shirt he jolted, upsetting a child-sized chair.

  “Bram?”

  He stared, shaking.

  Intuitively Kitty knew his reaction was not due to her coming here. Closing the distance between them, she laid her palm on his arm. “Bram, you don’t have to be stoic. Your father has passed away. When my father died, I was heartbroken. I felt so lost and—”

  “I hated him.”

  Kitty’s breath froze in her lungs.

  “I hated him, Kitty. I am glad he’s dead.”

  Her first reaction was to urge him to forgive his father. She stifled it. Instead, she listened.

  “I hated him,” Bram said again. This time, his voice cracked.

  Kitty could scarcely believe this was the strong man who had carried her bodily to the vicar the day before and who had tumbled her like a milkmaid all night long. In the wake of his father’s death, he seemed vulnerable. Human.

  At once, she drew him into her arms. He jerked as if he might pull away and then he half collapsed, dragging her to the floor with him. Kitty scooted against the wall and pulled his head against her breasts. She threaded her fingers into his hair and held him there while he clung like a frightened child.

  “Did you… Were you able to make peace with him?” Kitty asked cautiously.

  “No,” he said, his voice muffled by her dress. “He was a cruel man. He destroyed anyone who ever dared to love him.”

  Kitty swallowed, letting one hand glide down to his shoulders—and then she recalled the raised welts on Bram’s back. Realization flooded her. Her impression that those scars had not been the result of sexual play was correct. Bram had been beaten. Severely. By his father?

  Her blood turned icy despite the warmth of her husband’s body. She slid her hand down his back. “Did he—”

  “Yes.”

  Her stomach lurched and she swallowed the burning bile back down. “When?”

  “I was twelve.”

  Kitty sucked in a breath. She did not want to hear any more.

  Bram’s arms tightened around her and she felt his shoulders tremble as he stifled a sob. “I wanted him dead. All my life I’ve wanted him to die and now…” His voice trailed off as he raised his head and looked into her eyes. “Now that he is no longer alive, it’s as if…as if I have become him.”

  Kitty shook her head. “No, Bram. You are not him.”

  “But the things in which I take pleasure…”

  “I cannot begin to comprehend how the mind works, but I know you do not take pleasure in inflicting pain on others. Had I not been…responsive…you would have stopped.”

  Bram searched her eyes. She was right. He would have stopped. Her desire to be dominated had driven him onward. Hell, it had driven him mad enough to wed her and he still had not yet found her threshold.

  “You are not him,” she reiterated. “You will never be him.”

  His heart warmed and, looking at her innocent face, her pink parted lips and her wide indigo eyes, he realized his feelings for her were more than admiration of her spirit and her will. He was falling in love with her.

  Was it possible?

  Her hand came up to cup his cheek and she gave him a tiny, almost imperceptible smile. “When I saw that you had gathered my belongings and had them brought to my room, I was overcome by your capacity for compassion.”

  “It was the least I could do for you.”

  Her eyes rimmed with dampness and then a single tear spilled down her pale cheek. Bram brushed it away with the pad of his thumb. “Thank you for coming here,” he whispered.

  “How could I not?” she asked, and that was all the impetus he needed.

  His mouth sought hers and she responded at once, opening for him, her tongue meeting and sparring with his, even as he dragged her the rest of the way down to the rug.

  Wild need reared within him and as he kissed her, he pulled up her skirt, freed his cock, drew her drawers to the side and plunged inside her sheath. She gasped into his mouth at the sudden invasion but spread for him, welcoming him, clinging as he assuaged his lust.

  * * * * *

  With Kitty’s s
upport, Bram handled the details involved in laying his father to rest in the Barclay mausoleum, where so many Barclays had been interred before him. And while the old duke was already becoming worm fodder in his coffin, Kitty had helped Bram to exorcise his ghost as well.

  Bram had never known another person’s true love before but when Kitty had come all the way to Willingham Hall to find him, he had been touched in a place inside that had never before been touched.

  She had come to him with nothing, and yet she had brought him everything. She had shown him how to let go of the past and she had taught him that he was not his father.

  At the end of the day, when he crawled into the bed beside her, when he sought refuge in her body, terror flooded him that he had put so much trust in another, that he had risked his heart.

  During the past few days she had offered her quiet assistance, delivering compassion with her body instead of with words, and although there was much for him to do at Willingham Hall, he could not stay away from her for long.

  His respite was her arms, her body, and he often found himself distracted with thoughts of taking her back to his own estate—to their sanctuary.

  He saw the desire in her eyes as well, unspoken and soft. She yearned for those things of which she’d had only a tiny taste. She needed it in order to free herself from the bonds of the teachings of society, where women were instructed not to heed the sexual urges of their bodies.

  But here, in his father’s house, it was neither the time nor the place for boudoir games.

  After he had sated himself inside her early one morning, he gave her nipple a firm tug. She sighed and he felt her channel clench around his cock.

  “I will take you home very soon. I give you my word,” he murmured as he kissed her a final time before arising to dress. “Would you like that?”

  “Very much,” she said as a sleepy smile claimed her lips.

  “Maybe later this afternoon we will embark for home.”

  Her dark eyes came alive. “Really?”

  “As duke, I can request the business come to me, can’t I?”

  “Yes, Your Grace,” she said with a giggle.

  He pinned her with a look of mock chagrin. “Bad, bad Kitty. Have you again forgotten how you are to refer to me?”

  A blush tinted her cheeks. “I haven’t forgotten,” she said softly, gazing up at him mischievously from under her golden lashes.

  “I shall remember that little transgression when we return home,” he said, before he went to bathe and dress.

  On his way to breakfast, he instructed Hobbes to have his and Kitty’s things readied for the return trip home.

  Kitty had opted to enjoy breakfast in bed but Bram had wanted to get an early start seeing to the accounts so they could return home as quickly as possible. As soon as he sat down at the table, a servant arrived with a covered tray and placed it in front of him. Another servant set out an array of juices and teas while yet another brought the morning papers fanned across a silver salver.

  Bram noticed one paper on top that he did not usually read. The London Truth. Where had he seen that name before?

  Curious, he picked it up and unfolded it and when he did, he stared at the headline, stunned.

  The Dastardly Earl of Wiltshire.

  Bram shook with anger as he scanned the article, which maintained he had ruined not only the Earl of Rochford’s daughter and refused marriage to her, but had also claimed a servant girl’s virginity and then had sent her packing. The article left nothing to the imagination and had been written with such venom, it made Bram wonder who could possibly hate him that much.

  His first thought was for Kitty’s reputation. To be certain, he had done some reprehensible things in his life but he had never, not ever, done anything that was not consensual. And the fact that someone would write such filth, such untruths—that someone would endanger Kitty’s character—caused fury to storm inside him.

  He looked back up the column to find the author’s name. Alistair Allenby.

  His appetite lost, Bram stood, gripping the paper so hard it crumpled in his hand. By the end of this day, he vowed, Allenby would either retract his vicious words or die.

  * * * * *

  Kitty had hoped to share the long carriage ride home with Bram. Instead the servants had told her that he had business in London and would be home as soon as possible.

  For some reason, as the carriage approached her new home, the feeling that something terrible was about to happen began to gnaw at her. Perhaps it was just that she knew she would have to face that hateful Mrs. Bush again.

  Mrs. Bush, however, occupied Kitty’s thoughts the least. Since his father’s death, Bram had become more open and easy with her. The difference in him was something wonderful, albeit frightening.

  When she had first met Bram, he had looked upon her with lust in his silvery eyes. But now, although the same lust burned there still, Kitty saw something else—a deeper connection, a tenderness, a wonder.

  She swallowed thickly as the carriage lurched to a stop. Did she dare to hope that it might be…love?

  Her stomach knotted and she could not repress the little smile that tugged at her lips.

  As she stepped out of the carriage, she gazed up at the gray stones that made up the home she now shared with her husband. Once so forbidding and ominous, these old walls now seemed welcoming.

  Her thoughts drifted to the room deep and hidden within these walls and she could not wait to return to its dark respite where the outside world did not exist—where she could bare her body and soul.

  She greeted the staff graciously but as she climbed the stairs to go to her room, all she could think about was donning the wicked jewelry Bram had given her so that he would know she was ready to return to that room, ready to give up all control.

  Her channel pulsed with desire as she thought of the delicious bite of the nipple clamps and the teasing slide of the silver chain between her legs. Bram would see the chain clasped around her neck, although sweet torture would be concealed under her clothes.

  She inhaled as she entered her rooms. Just the thought of it made her want to pleasure herself in anticipation of his return but she decided she would force herself to wait.

  Alice met her with a hasty curtsey. “Welcome home, Your Grace.”

  “Thank you, Alice,” Kitty said. “It is good to finally be home.”

  But as her gaze found Alice’s face, she noticed the young maid’s worried expression. “What’s the matter?”

  Alice bit her bottom lip. “You did not see the article in today’s London Truth?”

  Kitty’s heart plummeted. A cold chill swept over her limbs. “Which article?” But she knew very well which article.

  “Alistair Allenby wrote a scathing article about the duke. It was on the front page.”

  Blackness washed in front of Kitty’s eyes and she shook her head to keep from fainting. Her knees buckled and she sank into the nearest chair. Was that Bram’s business in London? Had he seen it?

  There was no doubt in Kitty’s mind that he had seen it. A man like Bram would soon discover that she was the poison pen behind Allenby’s article. She inhaled sharply.

  “Leave me, Alice,” she muttered.

  At once, the maid curtsied and disappeared.

  “Oh God, oh God,” Kitty said, burying her face in her hands. Bram would hate her. The letter of retraction had not arrived in time.

  Heart pounding, she shot to her feet and began to pace. What could she do to make things right? She had to do something to show him she had been wrong and that she was truly, truly sorry.

  Chapter Nine

  Bram’s horse was exhausted by the time he dismounted that night.

  What had Kitty been thinking? His heart twisted when he remembered how he had rode hell-bent for leather to protect her reputation this morning…

  Only to find out she was Alistair Allenby.

  Her publisher, William Gray, had been only too willing to give her
up, and even though Bram was furious with his wife, he was even angrier at that spineless Gray. It had not even taken any threats or coins to get him to talk.

  Bram inhaled. He had read Kitty’s numerous other contributions to The London Truth. With the exception of the horrid article about himself, her satire had been spot-on and her grasp of politics and social issues was impressive.

  The other thing Gray had given up was the desperate letter Kitty has obviously posted the same day she had left for Willingham Hall.

  Bram shut his eyes for an instant as the memory of her running toward the hedgerow rose in his thoughts. She had not been returning to her house to gather her meager belongings. She had been trying to get to the post office to mail the letter he had stuffed in his coat pocket and forgotten.

  Had she really thought him so callous?

  He strode into the house and shot up the stairs two at a time. Shame flooded him when he recalled how he had sent her home without a word. Of course, he had known she was Katrina Hartford and not some servant girl whom he could tumble at will. Even then, he had known he would do right by her.

  Hell, he had known that before he had taken her. He had known that first day when she shucked her dress and bent over his desk and begged to be spanked.

  Even given his own feelings for her, what was she to think when he took her virginity and then sent her home? His actions had confirmed all the gossip she had heard and if his reputation suffered because of Kitty’s article, then he deserved that and more.

  He twisted the knob and opened her door. “Kitty!”

  Her bed was made. Her room was neat as a pin.

  Kitty was nowhere in sight.

  Panic welled as he rushed through the library, the dining room, the conservatory. None of the servants had seen her since her arrival.

  And then realization sank in.

  Bram accessed the playroom through his study—and what he found took his breath.

  Kitty was spread and bent over the block, the silver chain meandering down her spine and through the cleft between her legs. She tensed when she heard him approach.

  “There you are,” he said as relief washed through him.