And Jasper despised himself for the uncertainty he detected in her usually spirited, warm brown eyes. Because the truth of it was Guilford had rescued the item, but Jasper had retained it for reasons he didn’t, couldn’t force himself to consider.
Her eyes, they returned to his. “You needn’t push me away, Jasper,” she said softly. “I love you.”
Jasper’s body jerked. Oh, God.
This he couldn’t stand. He could not crave her love. Could not want it. She would destroy him in ways Lydia hadn’t managed to.
Taking a steadying breath, Jasper squared his shoulders. “Katherine, ours is a marriage of convenience. I’ve told you before. I loved my wife and she is dead. I’ve nothing left to offer you, and I certainly don’t want your love.”
Katherine blanched and her whole body jerked as if he’d struck her a physical blow. The sight of her suffering struck him worse than a lash across the back.
Wind beat hard and cruel against the glass window panes, the spirits railing at him.
Katherine gave a jerky nod. “You needn’t leave your chambers, Jasper,” she said with a shocking strength to her words. She fetched a sheet and draped it about her slender frame. “I’ll l-leave.” This time her words broke, and his gut clenched.
Katherine marched back toward the door, more regal than any queen.
He wanted to reach for her. Halt her forward movement. Beg her forgiveness.
Katherine opened the door. It closed behind her with a soft, decisive click.
And he did none of those things.
He was a bloody bastard.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Katherine studied the familiar copy of Wordsworth’s latest works she and Jasper had sparred over. She fanned the now well-read pages, swallowing past the silly lump in her throat.
She didn’t have another drop to shed for Jasper. A knock sounded at the door, jerking Katherine from her reverie. “Enter,” she called quietly.
The door opened. Aldora hovered at the entrance. Her gaze went from Katherine, and then over to the small valise at the food of Katherine’s bed.
Katherine handed the book over to the maid Mary, who’d been so good as to serve as her de facto lady’s maid.
Mary placed it in the valise and looked around. “Is that all, Your…Lady Katherine?”
The unspoken question pertained to the mound of ivory and white satin gowns heaped upon the center of her bed. Katherine never wanted to see another white gown for the remainder of her days. “I do not require anything else, Mary. Please, do with them as you would.”
Mary nodded, and bobbed a curtsy.
Aldora advanced deeper into the room.
“That will be all, Mary,” Katherine said, dismissing the young servant.
The maid dropped her gaze to the wood floor and sketched another curtsy. She hurried from the room.
“Are you certain you want to leave?” Aldora asked when the door clicked shut. “He is your husband, Katherine.”
The gentle reminder brought tears to Katherine’s eyes. She swatted at them. “Bah, silly tears,” she muttered.
Aldora handed over a handkerchief.
Katherine accepted it and blew her nose noisily into the white fabric etched in Michael’s initials. She remembered the cruel words Jasper had hurled at her last evening, made all the more cruel for the truth to them. “Ours is a marriage of convenience, Aldora. I wed him to be free of Mr. Ekstrom and he wed me for…” For reasons she still didn’t fully understand. “I’m a bother to him. He’ll be grateful for my departure.” Her heart wrenched. She loved him. Would always love him.
Aldora took her hands. “I believe he must care for you in some way.” She gave her fingers a gentle squeeze. “The duke does not strike me as a gentleman to do something because he doesn’t want to. He wed you for a reason.”
Katherine shifted the conversation to a far safer topic. “If you’re too tired from your journeys and you’d rather wait until tomorrow to leave…”
Aldora sighed. “Michael has seen the carriage readied. Though I’d not imagined we’d spend Christmas traveling back to London.”
Nor had Katherine.
Tears blurred her vision yet again. She blew her nose noisily into the soiled linen.
“Does he know?” Aldora asked gently.
Katherine shook her head. “I will speak to him. He’ll be relieved, I’m sure of it.”
“No gentleman cares to be abandoned by his wife,” Aldora said with a wry twist to her words.
A frisson of guilt spiraled through Katherine, but she brushed it aside. Jasper couldn’t have been clearer in his feelings regarding their marriage.
And Katherine? Well, she found herself a bigger coward than she’d ever believed, because she could no longer share the same walls with Jasper and the ghost who would forever hold his heart. The pain of unrequited love would slowly destroy Katherine until she became the same empty shell of a person Jasper had become after his wife’s death.
Her eyes shifted to the reticule atop the pile of white and ivory gowns. She reached for the delicate purse, and made to place it inside the valise. Something gave her pause. She set it back down on the mountain of white.
“Michael said if you’re determined to journey with us to London, then we’d be wise to leave within the hour.”
Katherine nodded.
Her sister opened her mouth, as though prepared to say more, but then gave her head a sad little shake, and took her leave.
Katherine stared at the closed door a long moment.
She would leave within the hour. She’d resided within the walls of the castle not even a full week, and yet it felt as much a home as her childhood cottage in Hertfordshire.
Within the hour, she’d leave and Jasper would remain, and continue on the solitary existence he’d dwelt within for the past four years since Lydia’s death.
She rubbed a hand over her chest to ease the dull ache where her heart beat.
With a sigh, Katherine started toward the door.
The sooner she made her goodbyes, the sooner she could attempt to put back the small pieces of her broken heart and resume living.
A knock sounded on Jasper’s office door.
He frowned, and picked his head up from the ledgers. “Enter,” he barked. Jasper returned his focus to the neat column of numbers. “What is it, Wrinkleton?” he snapped. His servant knew not to enter the private sanctuary of Jasper’s office without good cause.
And Jasper had made it abundantly clear through the years—there were no good causes.
The delicate clearing of a throat, jerked his head up. Katherine stood with her arms folded behind her. She leaned against the door. “Jasper,” she said quietly.
Ink spilled from his pen, and he glanced down distractedly at the now mussed row of numbers, then back to his wife. Jasper dropped the pen down, and rose. “Katherine.”
His stomach twisted. He’d not seen her since last evening when she’d marched from his chambers draped in nothing but a white sheet. He’d tortured himself by sitting with his back against the walls separating them, the bitter sound of her tears reached to him through the plaster walls, until they’d faded from great, gasping sobs to small, shuddery gasps, and then nothing, indicating she’d at last slept.
Not Jasper.
In the end, though, his own fear of loving her had frozen him to the spot outside her chamber doors.
Rooted as he’d been to the door, he’d focused on the ormolu clock atop his fireplace as it had ticked away the minutes of the late morning hours, ushering in a new day.
Katherine caught her lower lip between her teeth as she was wont to do. She shifted on her heels but remained fixed at the entrance of the door, as though one wrong word from him and she’d take flight.
“What is—?”
“I’m leaving,” she blurted.
He blinked, certain he’d heard her wrong.
“I’m leaving,” she said again, this time stronger. Her gaze slid to
a point past his shoulder. “Michael has seen the carriage readied. I…we, leave within the hour.”
Jasper’s whole body froze. He feared if he moved in the slightest, he’d splinter into a million tiny pieces of fragmented nothingness. “Leaving,” he repeated, the one word utterance hollow to his own ears.
Katherine stepped away from the door and glided toward him. “I am so very grateful to you for everything, Jasper,” she said softly. “You wed me when you didn’t need to, or want to.”
Oh, God, I did. I did want to wed you Katherine. It is everything that came after the marriage I feared.
He struggled for the words that at one time in his youth he would have been able to call up. He would have known the pretty, flowery compliments, the gentle praise to keep her at his side. Only the four years he’d spent in hell had robbed him of his ability to do so.
Jasper sat back in his seat.
Katherine carried on in a rush. “I can never repay you for what you’ve done.” A wistful smile played about her lips, so he was forced to wonder at the secrets contained within the fragile expression of mirth. “Thank you.”
She would thank him? Thank him as though he’d helped her across a puddle, or held a parasol above her head, shielding her from the sun?
Pain twisted and turned inside him. “What if I say I do not want you to leave?”
Katherine flinched at the harshly spoken question, and he knew in that moment she would turn, walk out the door, and out of his life. Oh God, if my heart is dead, what is this sharp, jagged ache tearing at the organ?
“Come, Jasper. This is your home, and I’m merely an interloper here.”
You are no interloper. You are my wife.
Tell her you bloody fool. Tell her before she leaves.
He opened his mouth.
She angled her head, as if awaiting the unspoken words he could not dredge forth. Katherine gave her head a sad little shake.
Jasper surged to his feet so quickly, his winged back chair tipped backwards. “Where will you go?”
Katherine glanced momentarily at the fallen chair. Then back to him. Her shoulders lifted in a slight shrug. “I imagined I might make my home in your townhouse in London.” A pretty pink color filled her cheeks. “That is, if you’d permit me to make my home there. I’d rather not return to my mother’s…”
“It is yours,” he said hoarsely, coming out from behind his desk. It is all yours, Katherine.
“Thank you.”
He stopped in front of her. So formal. So very polite. How could they be so stoically calm with talk of her walking from the room, and out of his life?
“Is there anything else you require?” Jasper’s distant question may as well have belonged to a stranger.
She shook her head. “No, Jasper.” Katherine studied her hands a moment, and then crossed the small distance between them. She leaned up on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his.
He closed his eyes in an attempt to forever hold onto the scent of honeysuckle and lemon that clung to her. “I…I…” Love you. Tell me you love me, Katherine, even as undeserving as I am. “Be happy, Jasper,” she whispered, and then stepped away from him.
She dropped a curtsy and walked out of his office. Out of his life.
Jasper’s gaze fixed on the door. His throat moved up and down.
How could he ever be happy again when with her, she’d taken his every last remaining reason for dwelling on this earth?
He wandered over to the front of his office and pulled back the thick brocade curtains covering the windowpanes. He peered down at the snow-covered drive as footmen hurried back and forth with trunks and valises belonging to Katherine’s family.
He stood there, fixed to the spot, waiting for the moment Katherine stepped into that carriage.
He waited so long he convinced himself that he’d imagined the whole, hellish exchange.
Then she appeared. The green muslin cloak a bright flash of color in a stark, white horizon. He’d come to know her so well, he could detect her body’s every nuance. She stiffened, as though she knew he studied her. Her chin ticked up a notch, and then she drew her hood up, and stole from him the vision of her lush brown ringlets and warm brown eyes.
Jasper rested his forehead alongside the wall and shook it slowly back and forth.
Do not leave.
Please do not leave.
The quiet of the cool winter’s day magnified all sound and he detected the moment the carriage door opened and closed.
Jasper’s eyes snapped open and he scrambled back to the edge of the window in time to see the footman hand her up into the carriage.
He devoured the delicate span of her back, the bold tilt of her neck, and cherished his every last glimpse of her, until the door closed, and Michael Knightly’s black lacquer carriage rocked forward.
Jasper pressed his brow against the glass panes and peered after the slow-moving conveyance until it dissolved into nothing more than a faint mark in the horizon.
Once again, left—alone.
The walls he’d constructed around his heart, the ones Katherine had rattled from the moment he’d pulled her from the Thames fell firmly back into place, surrounding the wounded organ that beat within his chest. He embraced the hurt, fueled the bitter resentment tearing through him.
With a steely set to his jaw, he dropped the curtains back into place.
He’d stood mooning like a lovesick swain over his wife long enough.
Katherine had left.
And it was now time to move forward.
Part II
Spring 1815
“How does the meadow-flower its bloom unfold?
Because the lovely little flower is free
Down to its root, and in that freedom bold.”
—William Wordsworth
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Where Fear sate thus, a cherished visitant,
Was wanting yet the pure delight of love
By sound diffused, or by the breathing air,
Or by the silent looks of happy things,
Or flowing from the universal face
Of earth and sky…”
Katherine glanced up from the pages of her book and tried to blink back a sneeze. The fragrant cuckoo flowers and bluebells in full bloom of this floral sanctuary of Kensington gardens tickled her nose.
“Achoo!”
A white kerchief appeared over the page of her book.
She accepted the white scrap of linen. “Achoo!” and sneezed into the previously unsullied fabric. “Thank…” Katherine blinked, as the sudden, unexpected appearance of a mysterious kerchief registered.
Katherine spun about the wrought-iron bench.
“Your Grace,” an increasingly familiar Earl of Stanhope drawled.
She pointed her eyes skyward and snapped her volume closed. “Lord Stanhope.”
The tall, impossibly handsome rogue claimed the seat next to her. “Henry,” he corrected.
Katherine grunted and shifted in her seat. “This seat is not designed for two people, Harry.” Katherine handed back the soiled linen.
Harry heedlessly stuffed it back into the front of his jacket. His lips curved up in a partial grin. “You know I detest when you call me Harry.”
She did, which was why she’d taken to calling him Harry.
His smile said he knew as much. “Why do you insist on coming here? You can’t even tolerate the collection of scents in this godforsaken landscape.”
Katherine swatted his arm. “I adore this place.” This floral haven had become a kind of sanctuary in Society’s glittering world of falsity and unkindness.
The other, the reason she could not speak of, even to this man who’d become her only friend, was because it reminded her of those splendorous tapestries hung throughout Castle Blackwood. Even if the poignant beauty served to remind Katherine of Jasper and his love, Lydia, then Katherine would welcome even that fragile remembrance of her time there.
Harry flicked her nose. �
��Why so melancholy, Kat?”
She shook her head. “It is nothing,” she assured him.
They sat in companionable silence and stared out at the crimson orb as it rose above the horizon, bathing the gardens around them in a soft orange and red glow. Purple and pink clouds floated along the sky, better suited for floating cherubs than the dirty London town.
It was her birthday. She felt vastly older than her mere twenty years. Then, having ones heart so hopelessly and helplessly broken tended to age a lady. Tears blurred her vision.
The kerchief reappeared. “Consider it a birthday gift,” he murmured.
She accepted it with a wan smile and discreetly dabbed at her eyes. The pain of missing Jasper had not lessened in the months since she’d come to London.
He’d not come for her. A small sliver of her had thought perhaps she’d come to mean something to him and he’d not allow her to leave.
How hopelessly naïve she’d been. A person had but one heart to give. Jasper’s belonged to Lydia. And Katherine? Well, hers belonged to Jasper, now and forever.
“How do we intend to celebrate?” Harry murmured. He draped his broad, muscled arm along the back of her seat.
“We don’t,” she muttered.
“Egads, you’re in quite a foul mood today, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “I am.”
From the corner of her eye, she detected the grin on his lips. “Your duke?”
In the months since she’d first met Harry Falston, the 6th Earl of Stanhope, he’d come to know her well enough that they often knew what the other was thinking.
He drummed his fingertips along the back of her seat.
Katherine drew in a deep breath, inhaling the sweet scent of roses in bloom. “Achoo!”
Harry sighed and extracted another, clean, linen. He handed the monogrammed fabric over to Katherine. “Keep it,” he said. “As long as you insist on coming here, I shall have to continue to carry an endless supply of kerchiefs. My valet is growing quite irate at their mysterious disappearance.”
She managed a smile. “You are too good to me, Harry.”
It Happened One Night: Six Scandalous Novels Page 58