And because she’d never dared to believe he would come to London, she had no words for him, this man whose life meant more to her than even her own.
Her throat moved up and down as his hard, fiery stare slipped over her face, down lower. He paused at her daring décolletage, and then returned his gaze to hers. “Katherine,” he said, in the same, harsh tones he’d used when rescuing her from the Thames.
His words transported her back to that hellish day, a day that had brought him into her life, and for which she would have suffered that icy plunge again.
“Jasper,” she whispered.
Jasper’s neck burned from the bold stares directed upon him and Katherine. He ignored their whisperings of the Mad Duke. All the ton could go hang. They mattered not at all.
None of them did.
No one…
But her.
He reacquainted himself with each precious line of her heart-shaped face. He took in her rich brown hair, artfully arranged atop her head, with diamond teardrop-shaped combs holding back deliberately placed strands. Two loose tresses hung over her right shoulder, drawing his attention momentarily to the swell of her bosom. A vise-like pressure tightened about his heart as he mourned the loss of those tight brown ringlets. Gone was the young lady in ivory skirts with too many ruffles. In her place stood this boldly clad siren with her generously curved body and slim waist.
Jasper’s skin tingled at the sudden awareness of eyes upon his person. He stiffened, and glanced at a point beyond Katherine’s shoulder. His gaze locked on a tall, unfamiliar gentleman. And Jasper knew.
Knew with all the intuitiveness of a man hopelessly in love with his wife, that the golden-haired Michelangelo hovering nearby, with a flinty expression in his eyes was none other than Lord Stanhope.
Jasper’s fists curled into tight balls at his side. With a growl, he grasped Katherine by the hand, and tugged her forward. His bold actions were met with horrified gasps and increased whispers.
Katherine gasped and nearly stumbled. He righted her, and proceeded to guide her forward.
“Jasper, what are you doing?” she whispered at his side.
He gritted his teeth, unwilling to have this exchange. Not here. Not in front of the ton.
Not in front of Stanhope.
“Will you slow down,” she implored.
Jasper cursed, earning another flurry of whispers and ever-widening stares. But he slowed his stride. They made their way up the long staircase, through the corridor, out to the foyer.
When they remained free of Society’s impolite stares, Katherine dug her heels in. Her brows stitched into a single line. “Jasper, what are you about?”
Jasper took a deep breath. “Come with me, Katherine.” He really was creating quite a scene and she really did require her cloak…but he needed to be free of this crowded hell. His throat closed up choking off breath and he feared he’d suffocate from the attention fixed on him.
Her lips dipped in a frown. She folded her arms across her chest.
He closed his eyes a moment, and then opened them to find her standing there, an insolent brow arched. Jasper tried again. “Katherine, will you please come with me?” Come away with me.
She hesitated a moment. And for that seemingly infinitesimal moment, he suspected she intended to deny his request. His breath came faster. Then, she nodded slowly, and marched toward Lord and Lady Harrison’s front doors.
This time, Jasper hurried to catch his wife. She started for his black lacquer carriage, and accepted the hand of a nearby servant, who reached out to hand her up.
Jasper glared at the young man who dared touch her hand.
The servant paled to the color of his white, powdered wig, and then scurried off.
Jasper leapt into the carriage. His eyes struggled to adjust to the dimness of the space. When they did, they alighted upon Katherine seated in the far corner of his carriage. An unreadable expression on the face that had haunted his dreams.
The carriage rocked forward. And still they sat there in silence.
He’d thought of no one but her since she’d walked out of his life. After Guilford’s visit to Castle Blackwood, Jasper had ordered his horse saddled, and he’d ridden like the devil himself had been at his heels. He’d raced his poor mount, working him into a fine lather.
In his mad race to London, he’d considered what words he would say to Katherine. He would profess his love, and beg her to return with him. He imagined he’d have pretty compliments and recite sweet verse to convince her that she desired a life with him.
Instead, he’d arrived at his townhouse to find her gone. And the horror of imagining her with Stanhope had become all the more real for Jasper’s sudden arrival in London.
A vitriolic, violent jealousy had filled him until he’d wanted to stalk through the London streets like an untamed beast and pull open doors until he found Stanhope and destroyed the fiend.
Jasper gnashed his teeth. “Have you taken a lover, Katherine?” He winced. The steely, angry accusation would hardly convince Katherine to set aside her feelings for Stanhope and return to Castle Blackwood.
Katherine’s brows dipped. She leaned across the carriage, and the honeysuckle scent, so boldly hers, wafted about them, and filled his senses. “I. Beg. Your. Pardon?” Cool rage underlined those clipped words.
Jasper fished into the front of his jacket and withdrew a sheet he’d neatly torn from The Times. He handed it over to her.
Katherine hesitated a long while, and then accepted the paper. She skimmed it. Her gaze narrowed. And then she wrinkled the item into a ball and threw it at his chest. She touched her hands to her chest. “Do you believe this of me?”
Jasper glanced down momentarily at the rumpled words that had turned him into the kind of Mad Duke who stormed, uninvited, into a ball and dragged his wife from the ballroom, amidst a sea of curious stares. “I…oomph,” he grunted as she stuck a finger in his chest.
“I am not your mother, Jasper,” she said, her words, flat and emotionless.
“Stanhope?” Jasper forced the bastard’s name past his suddenly dry mouth.
Katherine must have seen something in his eyes, for her mouth softened, and she shook her head back and forth slowly, sadly. “Oh, Jasper,” she said. “Harry is a friend. Nothing more.”
Harry.
She referred to Stanhope by his Christian name.
“Gentlemen do not become friends with young ladies, Katherine,” he bit out.
“This one did,” she replied. “When I desperately needed one, Jasper.” She folded her arms to her chest, as though warming herself. “Is that why you’ve come? To determine if I’ve been unfaithful to you, Jasper? I have not.” Her gaze slid to the window, and she tugged back the velvet curtains to peer into the passing streets. “If that is why you’ve come, then be assured I’ve not taken a lover. Nor do I intend to. So you can return me to the townhouse and return to Castle Blackwood.”
His stomach flipped into itself. “Is that what you want, Katherine? For me to leave?”
If she said yes, it would shatter him.
Katherine dropped the curtain and it fluttered back into place. She turned a sad smile back at him. “Do you know what is so very odd, Jasper?” She didn’t wait for him to answer, but continued. “Since the Frost Fair, since we first met, I came to know you, better than even myself, I sometimes believe. I know the manner in which you grit your teeth and square your jaw when you’re irate. I know you despise any showing of emotion.” She shook her head, unhappily. “Yet, you should know me so little. You read words in the gossip column and believe me no better than your parents.”
“No,” the denial burst from him. Katherine couldn’t be further from the mark. He well knew she was nothing like his viperous mother and dastardly father.
Katherine held her palms up, almost beseechingly, and it threatened to rend him in two, this his proud Katherine humbled herself before him. “Then, why did you come, Jasper?”
“Because
I’m a bloody fool.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Her heart cracked at Jasper’s words. Her husband considered himself a bloody fool for coming to her.
The carriage rocked to a slow stop, and she started, realizing the carriage had arrived at her…his…their townhouse.
A servant rapped on the door, and she reached for the handle.
Jasper’s large, gloveless hand settled over hers.
A thrill coursed through her in remembrance of his touch, and she closed her eyes as a wave of longing filled her.
“Katherine,” he said hoarsely. He yanked his fingers back and her skin cooled from the loss of his skin upon hers. Jasper raked his hand through his hair. “I’m blundering this quite badly. Which can of course be explained by the fact that I’m a great big, bastard. I let you go,” he said arresting her gaze with his. “I let you go because I did not allow myself to accept the truth.”
Katherine angled her head. Her heart slowed and then picked up a too-quick rhythm in her chest. “What is that, Jasper?” she whispered.
The servant knocked. “Not now.” Jasper’s booming command bounced off the walls of the carriage. He returned his attention to Katherine. “You terrified me, Katherine. From the moment your hand touched mine as I pulled you from the Thames, our lives became inextricably intertwined in ways I fought.” Jasper sucked in a deep breath, as though he’d run a great distance. “I could not allow myself to believe I cared for you, because I could not bear the thought of losing you.”
As he’d lost Lydia.
And then Katherine had gone and left Jasper, too. Oh God, how had she left him? Even as it had been an attempt to protect herself, she’d wrought this great hurt upon him.
“Jasper,” she said brokenly. “I should have never left you.” She should have stayed and fought for him, even if it had been a ghost she’d been left to battle for Jasper’s heart.
He must have seen something in her eyes for he reached across the carriage and cupped her cheek in his hand, angling her face toward his. “You thought me incapable of loving you because of Lydia, but…” He closed his eyes a moment. When he opened them, her heart twisted at the raw emotion there. “But the truth is, Katherine, you had my heart since the moment your water-drenched ringlets broke the surface of the Thames.” He leaned across the seat and rested his brow against hers. “I saved you that day, Katherine. But the truth,” he shook his head gently back and forth, “the truth is you saved me.” His words washed over her, and emotion clogged her throat. “You made me to feel and dream and love again.”
Tears filled her eyes, until his dear face blurred before her. She blinked back the blasted droplets.
Then his words registered.
Love.
Another knock sounded on the carriage door.
“For the love of God, I said not now, man,” Jasper barked. He looked back at Katherine. “With my unwillingness to let you into my life and love you as you deserve to be loved, I drove you away. I’m asking you to forget Stanhope. Forget the gowns of vibrant shades. Forget this. Forget all of this, and come back to me. Please. I love you, Katherine.”
The faint muscle at the corner of his eye twitched, the one indication of how very much that speech had cost Jasper.
Love for him coursed through her, potent and powerful.
“Katherine…”
She leaned across the carriage seat and kissed him. Her lips found his in an achingly sweet meeting of two lovers who’d at last found each other. Katherine pulled away. She placed a kiss at the corner of his eye, where that muscle throbbed.
“Without you, none of this means anything, Jasper. Not the gowns. The mindless amusements.”
“And Stanhope?” he asked, his voice gruff.
She shook her head. “Has always been and will only ever be, a friend, Jasper.” She touched two fingers to his mouth. “You are all I want. All I need. I will give up everything I have, all I am for you. I love you.”
His throat bobbed up and down. “And you’ll never again leave me.”
Katherine knew he spoke of more than the mere parting of the now. She ran her finger over his lip. “And I will never again leave you,” she pledged.
“Oh, Katherine,” he whispered and gently pulled her onto his lap, folding his arms about her.
And there, in the confines of the carriage, as Jasper took her in his arms, Katherine realized how very wrong her sister Aldora and her friends had been.
Katherine didn’t need the heart of a duke.
She only needed the heart of this duke.
Epilogue
Hertfordshire, 9 months later
An endless scream ripped through the walls of the modest farmhouse.
Jasper sat perched at the edge of his seat, head buried in his hands. They should have remained in London. Instead, Katherine had insisted she see out the remainder of her confinement in Hertfordshire.
Jasper cursed, wishing he’d never purchased the country cottage her father had gambled away, because then they’d be in London where there were surely better midwives than…
“Ahh, God!”
He pressed the backs of his hands against his eye and fought the overwhelming urge to cast up the nonexistent accounts of his stomach.
A hand settled on his arm. “She’ll do fine, Bainbridge.”
Jasper’s bleary gaze shot up angrily at his brother-in-law, Lord Michael Knightly, and he prepared to tell the other man just what he thought of his empty words.
Knightly opened his mouth to speak when Katherine’s guttural moan reached through the door.
Jasper leapt to his feet and began to pace across the thin runner that ran along the hardwood floor.
For seven long hours, Katherine had labored to bring their child into this world. All the darkest nightmares that had haunted him, tortured him, tormented him, played out with her every moan, her every cry, her every groan, until he feared he’d go mad.
He should have never touched her. His seed was poison.
If she died, he could not carry on. It would destroy him.
Knightly reached over and placed a staying hand on his arm. “She is a strong woman. I promise you, she will be all right.”
Knightly spoke as a man whose wife had delivered first Lizzie, and more recently their second babe, a full-cheeked boy with thick black curls. He didn’t know the agony of holding one’s wife as she…
“For Christ’s sake,” Jasper hissed and strode to the chamber doors.
Another cry split the quiet of the cottage, just as he pressed the handle of the door.
The thick, graying doctor stood alongside Katherine’s mother and Aldora. The trio stared slack-jawed with shock at his appearance.
It was the doctor who spoke. “Your Grace, you should not…”
Jasper glared the older man into silence. He would have to drag his dead, lifeless fingers from this room before he again left Katherine’s bedside. “Get out,” he ordered everyone present. They exchanged a look.
“It is fine,” a far too-weak voice called from the bed.
His gaze sought Katherine’s, and his heart plummeted to his stomach. He dimly registered the bloody sawbones and the countess taking their leave. Then the door closed.
Katherine’s hair hung in damp, strands about her waist and shoulders while her cheeks remained flushed red from her exertions.
“What are you doing here?” she said with far more stoic calm than he’d have imagined possible considering the pain he’d heard in her earlier screams.
Then her face contorted, and she sucked in a long, slow breath, letting it out slowly.
Jasper strode over to her bedside. He pointed a finger at her. “I forbid you to die, Katherine. Do you hear me? I absolutely forbid it. You promised to never leave me.”
She bit her lower lip as another shudder of agony wracked her frame. With a slow, steady breath, she regained her composure. “I’m not going to leave you, Jasper. I’m too stubborn to die.”
He thoug
ht of her flailing, fighting figure as he’d pulled her out of the Thames River over a year ago. No, there was no stronger woman than his Katherine.
Jasper sank down to his knees beside her bed and captured her hand. “Promise me, Katherine. I…I need you to promise me.”
She touched her free hand to his head. “I will not die,” she said with such conviction, he dared to believe her. Katherine closed her eyes, and her fingers tightened hard about his hand.
Jasper winced from the strength of her grip.
“Jasper?”
“Yes, Katherine?”
“Will you please send for my mother and Aldora? I believe the babe is coming.”
His gut clenched, and he surged to his feet so quickly he nearly toppled backwards. He steadied himself, and raced to the door, knocking into a rose-inlaid side table.
Jasper wrenched the door open.
The doctor rushed inside, having clearly, and accurately, anticipated he would be needed.
“It should not be much longer, Your Grace,” the doctor assured him, even as Katherine’s mother and Aldora secured their spots alongside the bed. “If you’ll wait—”
“No,” Jasper bit out. “I’m not going anywhere.”
And he didn’t. He remained for the next thirty minutes as Katherine labored to bring their child into the world. He remained when her voice turned hoarse from the strength of her cries.
And he remained when his son came squalling and angry into the world, as fat as a cherub with a shock of brown curls atop his head.
And later, when no one remained but Katherine, Jasper, and their babe, Jasper lay curled up at his wife’s side, and studied the glassy-eyed boy with big-cheeks, who clutched at his finger.
Katherine leaned into Jasper, and angled her head up, looking at him through tired but contented eyes.
It Happened One Night: Six Scandalous Novels Page 61