Tears filled her eyes and Katherine blinked back the salty drops of despair, humbled by the depth of her vileness. Knowing it was horrible and wrong, as she gazed up at Lydia, the true Duchess of Bainbridge, bitter jealousy flared inside Katherine for this dead woman who’d taken Jasper’s heart.
The rapid beating of her heart slowed. Katherine blinked, and took a staggering step backwards. “No,” she whispered into the quiet. Her heart resumed its cadence, and then steadily increased in an ever pounding rhythm until she slapped her hands over her ears to dull the loud thumpthumpthumpthump that echoed even within her head. “No,” she whispered again, shaking her head.
It could not be. Because if it were true, it would destroy her in ways the frozen River Thames never could have…
Her eyes slid closed. A fat, single teardrop squeezed past her clenched lids.
I love him.
The tear blazed a warm path down her cheek. She brushed the drop back but another only took its place, and another, and another.
She’d gone and fallen in love with a man whose heart forever belonged to another—to a woman without silly brown ringlets, and dull brown eyes. To a woman whose beauty inspired the great poets like Wordsworth and Byron to forever honor them within the verses of their sonnets.
And Katherine? Well, she would never be anything more than…more than…whatever she was. Her breath grew ragged.
I cannot bear this. With a great, gasping sob she spun on her heel and fled through the door.
All the air left her on a ‘whoosh’ as she collided with a wall.
She bounced backward and landed on her buttocks. Pain radiated up along the point of contact, and shot up her spine.
The blasted tears continued to fall as she gazed through blurry vision up at Jasper’s frowning countenance.
He loomed over her, a great big, unbendable oak of a man. “Katherine?” He held his hand out. “What is…?” She reached for him, just as his hand fell back to his side, and his words died.
Katherine gulped, and shoved herself awkwardly to her feet. She followed Jasper’s gaze across the portrait room. With the intensity of his stare, he threatened to bore a hole through that fragile canvas. Then his eyes drifted lower—to that blasted white covering. Her stomach flipped over itself.
“Jasper, I…”
His gaze swung angrily back toward hers. “What are you doing in here? I ordered this room closed off.”
The image of the smiling, loving-eyed Jasper flitted across her mind. She didn’t even need to glance back at the portrait; it would be forever etched in her mind. How very different than the vitriol that fairly dripped from the blacks of his eyes as he studied her.
Katherine ticked her chin up a notch. “I know, Jasper. I took the coverings down.”
“Why?”
Why, indeed?
She didn’t really have a suitable answer for him…or herself. Jasper preferred his life cloaked quite literally and figuratively in the shroud of the past. He’d wed her, but remained committed to their maintaining a coolly polite union. Unbidden, her gaze drifted to the point beyond her shoulder, to the 8th Duke of Bainbridge with his sneering lips, and flinty eyes and wondered if this was to be her future.
Only…
Her eyes drifted downward to the somber, young Jasper, remembering there would be no young boys or girls, somber or smiling.
“I’d not live in a museum, Jasper,” she said at last. Katherine gestured to the portraits carefully hung throughout the room. “You order the servants to cover tapestries and paintings. You lock off doors and have sheets draped across the entrance.” She shook her head, willing him to see. “This is no way to live, Jasper. You lived, whether you would have traded places with Lydia. You lived, and she…”
“Don’t,” he barked.
“Died,” she forced herself to continue.
An icy cool to rival the brewing snowstorm outside the thick windowpanes emanated from her husband’s stiffly held frame.
Realizing the aching directness of that one word, she held a hand out to him. “You lived,” she said again. And I, too, am alive. “So live, Jasper.” Katherine finished lamely. She wished she possessed the words of the great poets because then mayhap she could drag her husband back from the shadow of despair.
Jasper lowered his brow. “Tell me, what would you have me live for, Katherine?” She would have to be as deaf as an ancient dowager not to detect the slight mocking edge to that question.
“I’d have you live for you,” she replied, angling her head back ever so slightly to directly meet his gaze. Jasper’s happiness could never be inextricably intertwined with her own, the way it had been with his first wife.
The Jasper memorialized in the painting beckoned and she turned to face him. “I want you to be like that, Jasper.” Her softly spoken words filled the portrait room.
His entire body jerked as if he’d been struck. He shook his head. Once. Twice, and then again. “I can never again be that man, Katherine. The sooner you realize as much, the sooner we can carry on living our own lives.”
Part of her heart chipped off and dissolved within her chest. That was all he imagined for them—an existence where they carried on their separate existences.
Katherine gave a jerky nod. “If you’ll excuse me? I’ll leave you to your own affairs.” Before she did something utterly foolish, such as throw herself into his arms and humble herself with the words of love that hovered on her lips, she dipped a curtsy, and walked out with her head held high.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Katherine sat at the window-seat which overlooked the back expanse of Castle Blackwood. The rolling hills, covered in a thick, undisturbed blanket of snow reminded her of the days she’d been a girl racing, and rolling down the snow-covered hills of Hertfordshire in those very rare times when they were graced with snow.
“You squeezing me, Kat.”
Katherine loosened her hold upon Lizzie and placed a kiss upon her cheek. “I’m so sorry, dear Lizzie.” She rustled her chin atop her crown of soft curls. “You’re just so impossibly sweet, I’d gobble you up like Cook’s plum pudding at Christmas.” She smothered the small girl’s cheeks with kisses until the little girl gasped for breath.
Katherine relented, and with a smile shifted her attention back to the outside grounds.
“May I join you?”
She glanced back and smiled. “Of course, Aldora.”
Her sister walked over. She hovered at the edge of the window seat. From above her wire-rimmed spectacles, Aldora arched an inquisitive brow. “Do you intend to stare out the window all day? Or will you at last speak to me of what happened?”
Truth be told, Katherine would vastly prefer the whole staring out of the window business to the inevitable discussion her sister wished to have. With Lizzie in her arms, Katherine turned and set the small girl on her feet.
Lizzie toddled over and settled at her mother’s feet. Aldora leaned down and handed a small doll with golden curls and a long, flowing floral-patterned gown to Lizzie. The little girl proceeded to dance the doll about the floor.
Only the perfect golden ringlets upon the doll put Katherine in remembrance of Lydia’s glorious flaxen curls captured within her painting alongside Jasper.
“Kat,” Aldora prodded.
Katherine sighed and glanced down at her toes. “I don’t know what you’d have me say, Aldora?”
Did her sister want her to speak of her and Jasper’s chance meeting at the Frost Fair? Her marriage of convenience? Her husband’s impossible lack of regard for her?
“I’d have you start from the beginning,” Aldora said gently.
Katherine swallowed, and raised her gaze to Aldora’s. And as there could be no more better place to begin, Katherine said, “He saved me.” The seconds fell away to minutes, which might as well have given way to hours. Katherine lost track of the passage of time as she spoke of everything from that lone volume of Wordsworth, to Katherine’s outrageous proposal of mar
riage.
At some point, Aldora scooped up her daughter and rocked her to sleep.
Katherine studied the slumbering babe. A ball of emotion lodged in her throat. “I’ve a marriage of convenience, Aldora.” She waved her hand. “It is what I proposed—”
“But it is not what you desire,” Aldora interjected quietly. With her free hand, she pushed her spectacles farther back on the bridge of her nose.
Katherine shook her head back and forth. “No. It is not what I want.”
I want baby girls who play with dolls and sleep in my arms. I want a smiling portrait with a man who gazes at me like there is no other more beautiful than me. Not just any gentleman. Jasper. I want Jasper.
Aldora caught her lower lip between her teeth and worried the flesh. “I wanted you to wed for love, Katherine.”
She had, however inadvertent it may have been.
“A man who loved you in return,” Aldora continued.
Katherine surged to her feet and began to pace. “I did not have the luxury of patience in the matter of marriage. Mother—”
“Would not have spoken to Uncle about plans for a union without Michael’s knowledge,” Aldora said. She rose and carried Lizzie over to a plush, gold upholstered sofa. She lay the small girl down, and placed a calming hand along her back when she stirred.
Katherine shifted under the weight of that truth. Somewhere inside, she recognized the truth in her sister’s words. Mother would’ve wed Katherine off to Mr. Bertrand Ekstrom, but not without Michael’s agreement on such a union. After all, Michael saved them from certain ruin, and with his connection as the Marquess of St. James’ brother, Mother deferred to Aldora’s husband.
When Lizzie’s breath settled back into that smooth, steady cadence of sleep, Aldora turned back to Katherine. She crossed over, and rested a staying hand on Katherine’s shoulders, steadying her frenetic movements. “I believe your decision to wed the duke stemmed from more than your fear of wedding Mr. Ekstrom.” She wrinkled her nose. “Not that the thought of marriage to horrid Mr. Ekstrom wouldn’t be cause enough. But you could have wed anyone, Kat.”
An inelegant snort escaped Katherine. “I know what I am, Aldora. I’m no grand beauty.” It was a fact in which she’d been comfortable since she’d been a small girl not much older than Lizzie. There were Diamonds of the First Water…
And everyone else.
Katherine embraced the category of everyone else.
Aldora’s mouth set in a mutinous line. “Don’t be a ninny hammer, you are perfectly lovely.”
As an adoring older sister, she’d seemed to only see beauty in Katherine—even when the world had not.
Katherine directed her eyes to the ceiling. “I’ve brown hair.”
Her sister folded her arms across her chest and arched a brown eyebrow.
“Set in hopelessly tight ringlets,” Katherine went on. She waved a hand over Aldora. “You’ve not had tight, brown ringlets in a very long while.”
“That’s one of the many benefits of marriage,” Aldora muttered from under her breath. “Being free of Mother’s rather er…questionable fashion dictates.” She gave her head a shake and returned the conversation to the heart of the matter. “I’d have you be happy, Katherine.”
“I am happy.”
Aldora gave her a skeptical look through the thick frames of her lenses.
“Well, mayhap not altogether happy. Not in the same way you and Michael are. Rather in a…a…” Less loving, less bucolic way. “Less predictable way,” she settled for.
“Do you believe he’d ever harm you?”
“No,” the response burst from Katherine’s lips. She shook her head. “He would never hurt me.” She touched a hand to where her heart beat. Then, some pain was far greater than the physical kind.
“You love him,” Aldora said softly.
Katherine’s hand fell to her side. She swallowed hard, and looked away from the pity teeming in the brown irises of her sister’s kind-hearted eyes. “I…I…” Katherine buried her head in her hands and shook it back and forth. “I love him,” she breathed the word into existence. “It is the height of foolishness, and he is oftentimes boorish and rude.” But then there were the Shrewsbury cake and Wordsworth book moments when he showed him to be so very much more than the unyielding figure he presented to her and the world.
“But you love him regardless,” Aldora intoned, as only one who also loves truly can understand.
Katherine managed a jerky nod. She hugged her arms tight to her waist. “He can never love me, though,” she whispered.
“Of course he can,” Aldora said, with all the cocksure arrogance of an eldest sister.
Lydia’s smiling visage danced to the fore, yet again. Sadness filled Katherine’s being. She could not share the darkest, most pained secrets her husband harbored. “He can’t.” There would always be Lydia and the small babe he’d lost.
Aldora must have heard the truth in Katherine’s two-word utterance, for she passed a slow, searching gaze over Katherine’s face. Then, she crossed over and folded Katherine in her arms much the way she’d done when Katherine was a small girl who’d scraped her knee running through the hills of Hertfordshire.
Katherine accepted the warmth and support she’d so desperately missed since the day she’d wed and made the journey to Castle Blackwood.
Her sister raised her hand and stroked the back of her head. “Come, now. It is the eve of Christmas. There is no time for sadness on such a day.”
Katherine mustered her best attempt at a smile. “I should speak to Cook and see how the evening’s dinner plans are progressing.
Aldora bussed her on the cheek and returned to the sofa in which Lizzie still slumbered peacefully.
As Katherine made her way from the room she wondered if she’d ever been so blissfully innocent and untouched by the world’s hurts. She wound her way down the long stone corridors. The thin, red rug lining the hall muted the tread of her footsteps. She continued walking until she reached the recently decorated foyer.
Katherine paused to assess the completed work done by her, Wrinkleton, and the footmen. Lush, green boughs adorned with clusters of red holly berries and ivy sprigs brightened the cheerless space. Her gaze climbed up the high ceiling to the kissing bough she’d arranged with apples, papered flowers, and the small doll.
Before Aldora and her family left and returned to London, Katherine would instruct one of the servants to take down the arraignment and retrieve the small doll. Lizzie would love the tiny, little babe.
“Katherine,” a deep baritone drawled from beyond her shoulder.
She shrieked and spun around. An increasingly familiar heat flooded her cheeks. Her husband stood at the entrance of another corridor. “Forgive me, I didn’t hear you,” she murmured.
Jasper’s gloriously long legs closed the distance between them. He touched her chin. But otherwise remained as silent as the grave.
Her eyes slid closed. What game did he play with her? Could he not see his mere presence alone was destroying her? “What do you want, Jasper?” she asked, wearily. She did not want to carry on as they were, with his harsh outbursts and her fleeing like a naughty pup sent from the kitchens.
Jasper’s hand stilled, but he did not drop his arm back to his side. “It looks beautiful, Katherine.”
“What does?” she blurted.
With a sweeping gesture, he motioned to the holiday décor.
“Oh.” She fiddled with the fabric of her gown. “I didn’t believe you’d noticed, Jasper.”
I notice anything and everything where you’re concerned, Katherine.
Since that not too distant day ago when her high-pitched desperate cry reached his ears across the Thames River, he’d developed a keen sense of awareness of his wife.
Just as he’d known the harshly spoken words he’d hurled at her in the Portrait Room had wounded her.
Now, as she stood before him, with an uncharacteristic wariness in her usually cheer-fill
ed eyes, he confronted the change their short marriage wrought upon his wife. He’d thought himself content to live a solitary life, buried away in his castle. Until Katherine, he’d not realized the truth; he’d not been content, but rather he’d been hiding, embracing his sorrow as a kind of penance.
In just a few days, she’d torn down those protective white coverings throughout the castle and restored a sense of joyfulness to the cold, dank walls of the castle.
Katherine made to step around him. “If you’ll excuse me,” she murmured. “I should speak to Cook regarding dinner for the evening.”
Jasper matched her movement, effectively barring her escape.
She wrinkled her brow, and took an opposite step left. Jasper matched her movement, again.
Katherine looked up at him, imploringly. “Jasper, what do you want of me? You were so very clear in the Portrait Room. You desire nothing from me.”
Oh, how wrong his hopelessly alluring wife was. He desired too much from her. More than he deserved. More than he’d ever believed himself capable of.
“You’re under the bough,” he murmured in a gruff, husky whisper.
Katherine tipped her head.
Jasper raised his hand and curved it around the nape of her neck. Ever so gently, he tipped her head back so she might view the kissing bough above them. “We’re under the kissing bough,” he amended.
Her gaze locked on the piece. Then, her throat worked. She closed her eyes. “I don’t understand,” she whispered.
Jasper leaned down and placed his lips to her fast-beating pulse there.
Her eyes slid closed. Jasper moved his search upward to the corner of her lip. He placed a kiss upon her siren’s mouth, and continued on, kissing her cheek, the tip of her pert nose, her gloriously long, thick brown lashes.
“What are you doing?” Her voice broke on a breathy moan.
“Tell me to stop, Katherine. Tell me, and I will stop now, and leave.” It will kill me, but I shall do it because I’m helpless to deny you anything.
Katherine raised her fingers to his jaw. She stroked her knuckles across his skin. A muscle twitched at the corner of his eye. She met his gaze with a boldness better suited to a woman many years her senior. “I do not want you to stop, Jasper.”
It Happened One Night: Six Scandalous Novels Page 55