That Other Katherine

by Linda Lael Miller

  "Katherine! Kaaathy!"

  It was Marianne.

  Katherine closed the journal, tucked it back into her skirt pocket, and clambered down from the tree. Her skill at this endeavor was a holdover from the life she'd lived on the other side of the crystal bridge. There, as a child, she'd been an inveterate tomboy.

  When Katherine reached the ground and turned to start toward her sister-in-law, she found the young woman staring at her, openmouthed.

  "Katherine, were you up in the boughs of that tree?" she asked incredulously.

  "You know I was," Katherine answered pleasantly. "You must have seen me."

  "But you never do things like that."

  Katherine smiled. "I do now."

  Chapter 7

  Katherine and Marianne had lunch on the screened porch, with Maria to keep them company. Katherine was preoccupied, as she had been the night before at dinner, and the journal, hidden away in her pocket, consumed her thoughts.

  When the new idea bobbed to the top of Katherine's mind, it startled her so much that she dropped her soup spoon with a clatter and even gave a little cry.

  "Excuse me, please," she blurted out, shoving back her chair and bolting to her feet.

  The other two women looked surprised at her behavior.

  "Katherine, are you all right?" Marianne inquired.

  She merely nodded hastily and dashed into the main part of the house. In a massive and very masculine study off the main entry way, she found what she was looking for: a desk, paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen.

  Sinking into a cushioned chair of the finest Moroccan leather, Katherine pulled several sheets of expensively made vellum stationery from the desk drawer. After arranging the paper on the mirror-bright surface, she opened the ink bottle, dipped her pen, and began to write.

  Excitement mounted within her as she penned one nonsensical sentence after another. Only when her hand became too tired to write did Katherine finally wipe the pen's nib clean and put the lid back on the ink.

  Without waiting for the pages to dry, she compared them to the flamboyant script in the journals. The letters on the loose papers were narrower, neater, and much smaller.

  She had retained something more of that other life than a tangle of memories, then. She had kept her own handwriting.

  Within a moment Katherine was so breathless that she dared not rise from the chair, lest her trembling knees refuse to hold her.

  She laid her head down on the desk and tried to gather her composure. The other Katherine was almost surely lying in that hospital bed in the Seattle of a hundred years hence, or perhaps she'd even died.

  Katherine had sympathy for Gavin's bride, but she also wanted this body, this man, and this life, even though the last tenant had botched things up royally.

  She began to shiver, feeling chilled even though the room was warm. Maybe the whole process would reverse itself. Maybe she would be wrenched away from Christopher and Gavin and the elegantly antique world she had come to love…

  Finally Katherine drew a deep breath and made herself sit up. She would take things one day at a time and deal with trouble when she came across it. In the meanwhile she planned to somehow, some way win Gavin back.

  During her first week at the Haven, Katherine read and reread all the diaries and letters, and she must have studied the tintypes and sepia photographs a million times. She tried on all the summer dresses that had arrived with her in the trunks and studied herself in the mirror.

  The second week brought a letter from Gavin. Katherine was disappointed if not surprised that it was addressed to Marianne. While the message carried warm wishes for his sister and inquiries about Christopher's progress, Katherine might not have existed at all.

  By the time twenty-one days had gone by, Katherine was riding all over the island on horseback. While she enjoyed her adventures, she also knew she was trying to outdistance her own doubts and injured feelings.

  After a month, Marianne announced plans for a garden party. Everyone in the Winslow social circle, both on the island and in Seattle, would be invited.

  Katherine went through her wardrobe, garment by garment, and prayed that Gavin would attend.

  In early August, five weeks after Marianne, Maria, Katherine, and Christopher had moved to the island for the summer, the party was held.

  Gavin sent word from Seattle that he was too busy to join in the festivities.

  Katherine attended the social event, smiling the whole time, barely able to breathe because her heart was in her throat. She spoke with warmth and graciousness to all the guests but was careful not to behave inappropriately, for she hoped to undo some of the damage the other Katherine had done.

  After the last guest had retired, Katherine locked herself in her room and wept because Gavin had stayed away.

  On a hot day at the end of August, when Maria went to visit friends on the far side of the island, taking Christopher along, Marianne journeyed to Seattle to attend a wedding. Katherine looked at the roiling charcoal clouds on the horizon and felt a sweet, dangerous anticipation.

  There was a storm coming, and Katherine loved storms.

  As night fell, the very earth seemed to rock with the force of the thunder. The wind howled around the house, and Katherine knew the water in the sound would be churning, the waves white-capped. Lightning outlined the old lighthouse Katherine had sketched so many times, and the housekeeper and caretaker hurried from room to room, securing the windows.

  Katherine's fascination with the natural panorama seemed to confound them, but they offered no comment. Despite her earlier efforts to let the old couple know that she regarded them as equals, they still saw themselves as servants.

  "Would you like me to bring you a brandy, Mrs. Winslow?" the housekeeper asked anxiously. She was a sturdy but compact woman with large blue eyes and white hair wound into a coronet on top of her head. "I know you always get a little nervous when the weather gets like this."

  "Nervous?" Katherine laughed. "Heavens, no—I'm not afraid of a little thunder and lightning."

  But she had been, Katherine realized. That was why Mrs. Hawkins was looking at her as though she was turning into a werewolf before her very eyes.

  Before the housekeeper could reply, the front door slammed and a voice as domineering as the thunder echoed through the house.

  "Marianne! Maria!"

  Gavin.

  It wounded Katherine that he hadn't called her name as well, but of course she shouldn't have been surprised. From the first, Gavin had allowed her not even the skimpiest illusion that he cared for her.

  At least he was consistent.

  Mr. Hawkins was busy building a blaze in the parlor fireplace, so his wife went to greet her grumpy master. When Gavin entered the room, he looked through Katherine as if she were invisible and went to stand on the hearth, warming his hands.

  The housekeeper and caretaker left immediately, and Katherine herself was edging toward the towering double doors when Gavin stopped her with a brusque, "Where is my son?"

  The very roof of the house shook with the force of two fronts colliding high in the sky, no more elemental than Gavin's formidable will meeting her own.

  "Our son is with Maria," Katherine answered evenly, wondering how she could love Dr. Winslow so much when he invariably made her yearn to strangle him. "They went visiting this afternoon, and I'm sure they're perfectly safe."

  Gavin assessed his wife with eyes as cold as a frozen steel blade. "You've been well?"

  Katherine was secretly thinking how fitting it would have been if he'd snarled and shown vampire teeth, but Gavin was as stunningly attractive as ever. The reflexive pitch and roll in her stomach was proof of that. "Very well."

  A blast of thunder rattled the windows, and his gaze narrowed as he stared at her. "I rather expected to find you cowering under the bed in fear, my dear," he said. "You were always terrified of storms."

  "You don't know me as well as you think you do," she responded crisply. For a
ll her light words, she had a dizzying fancy that some dangerous enchantment had settled over the big house with Gavin's arrival.

  "I know you all too well," Gavin corrected her, shedding his long coat and tossing it aside, then crossing to a teak-wood cabinet near the doors and pouring himself a brandy.

  Katherine decided to ignore the statement. "What brings you here, Dr. Winslow?" she asked, moving close to the fire because he had abandoned the space. "Did someone tell you I was happy? That would surely account for your hasty appearance and intractable mood." I'm getting the Victorian vernacular down pretty well, she congratulated herself.

  Gavin was frowning as he regarded her in the flickering glow of the lamps, his brandy like glowing amber in the firelight. "Since when do you use words like 'intractable'?"

  "You wouldn't believe it if I told you," Katherine replied. Invisible St. Elmo's fire danced and crackled in the room, and she sensed that Gavin was as aware of the dynamic charisma between them as she was.

  He took another sip of his brandy. "You'll be sorry to hear that your Jeffrey Beecham has lit out for greener pastures." The challenge was a quiet one, but nonetheless deadly.

  "Good," she said, with light assurance. "I won't miss him." She swallowed, summoning up all her courage. "But I have missed you, Gavin. Very much."

  His frigid gaze moved over her—she was wearing a cotton gown, a white background with small lavender flowers scattered over it—and her rich auburn hair was gathered up in a soft Gibson-girl style. When his Adam's apple moved, Katherine felt a certain tenderness toward him, as well as a captivation so powerful that she feared to think to what lengths it might drive her.

  "Do not insult me with the inference that you cherish any wifely sentiments toward me," he warned. For all his words, for all that she was standing half a room away, Katherine was woefully conscious of the hardness and heat of his body.

  She sighed. She'd never seduced a man before, or been seduced by one, for that matter, and she had no idea how to proceed. She only knew that she had been thrust into this century, and the company of this particular man, because his soul was mate to hers.

  "You want me, Gavin," she said simply. Quietly.

  He turned away and tossed his brandy, glass and all, onto the fire. The glass shattered and the blaze roared up the chimney, but Gavin paid it no apparent mind. He stood with his back to her, his hands braced against the mantelpiece.

  He hadn't given an inch of ground, and yet somehow Katherine knew she had the upper hand. "I'll bring you some dinner, if you'd like," she said in as normal a tone as she could manage. She'd been hoping and praying Gavin would come to the island all these weeks, and now he was here and she was more certain of her love for him than ever.

  He was silent for a long, long time, but Katherine was just as stubborn as he was, and she waited.

  "Bring the tray to my room," he said.

  Her heart rushed into her throat. She was both terrified and joyous as she hurried to the kitchen. By the time she climbed the back stairway and entered the master suite half an hour later, after she'd laboriously reheated the leftovers from supper, she was trembling.

  It wasn't fear of sharing her body with Gavin that scared her, although she had never been with a man in her life, despite having gone through the experience of childbirth. No, it was the possibility that he meant to reject her, to humiliate her, that frightened her so much.

  Balancing the tray on one hand, she opened the door and stepped into the bedroom that had been hers alone these past weeks.

  Gavin had built up the fire and was sitting in a wing-back chair, gazing solemnly at the flames. He'd taken off his coat and his collar, and his shirt gaped open to the middle of his chest.

  Katherine wished she could believe he was looking so rakishly handsome for her benefit, but it was more likely that he was completely unaware of the image he presented.

  She set the tray on the small round table beside his chair, and he didn't raise his eyes to her or acknowledge her in any way.

  She decided she'd read him wrong earlier and moved to the bureau, feeling both dejection and relief. "I'll sleep in one of the guest rooms," she said in a voice barely loud enough to compete with the storm outside and the crackling babble of the fire.

  "You're my wife," Gavin said gruffly, still without looking in her direction. "You will sleep in my bed."

  Chapter 8

  The light of the bedroom fire flickered over Gavin's rain-damp clothes, glimmered on the polished leather of his riding boots, lent a crimson halo to his ebony hair. Katherine was stricken by the joyous love she felt for this husband she'd won by accident; it was as though some ancient wrong had been finally righted, after a long and difficult struggle.

  Every tiny fiber in her body seemed to resonate, like the strings of some mellow old instrument that had been lifted from a musty trunk, tuned, and finally strummed with cherishing fingers.

  Gavin set his strong hands on the arms of the chair and thrust himself wearily to his feet. When he turned to face Katherine, he took on an aura made up of firelight and the violent, golden lightning that flashed beyond the terrace doors.

  Katherine could not read the expression on his face for the shadows that cloaked him, but she felt the barely leashed power in his body, sensed the distant tumult of the battle going on within his spirit. The conflict, she knew, was between the mightiest of human emotions, love, and its twin, hatred.

  For the first time since she'd landed in this place, she had hope of finding her way into Gavin's heart and making a lasting place for herself there.

  Fearful that anything she said might tilt the delicate balance the wrong way, she kept her silence. She lifted her chin and stared straight at his face to show him she wouldn't be intimidated. For all that, the separate impacts of his physical presence, the warriorlike strength of his spirit, the laser-powered reach of his mind, practically overwhelmed her.

  He took a step toward her, then another, reluctantly, as though resisting some elemental force every inch of the way.

  His hand came to rest on her shoulder, and she turned and lightly brushed his knuckles with her lips.

  "God help me," he whispered in the tone of one who expects no aid from any quarter, including heaven. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, and Katherine watched the play of muscles in his magnificent neck for a long moment, then softly kissed the hollow of his throat.

  She felt a shudder go through him, knew a sensation of homecoming that went far beyond the physical when he wrenched her against him. Her hair spilled down her back as he plunged splayed fingers beneath the little knot she'd pinned so carefully into place.

  He spread his free hand over the small of her back, pressing her curvy softness against an opposing hardness. When he assailed her with his demanding, masterful kiss, it seemed to Katherine that the elegant room had suddenly turned to a vacuum, like outer space. Only her connection with Gavin allowed her to breathe; when he withdrew, her last contact with the life force would be broken. She would shrivel to a cinder and then disappear entirely.

  Just when Katherine thought she couldn't accommodate another sensation, another dizzying emotion, without going into overload, Gavin thrust his tongue past her lips. It was symbolic of the conquering that would come later, she knew, and the sweet warning caused her knees to go weak.

  She uttered a desolate little cry when Gavin lifted her into his arms, never troubling to withdraw his mouth from hers, and carried her to the bed. Only when he'd laid her on the coverlet did he draw back so that he could look at her as he stripped her of her clothes.

  He made a slow ritual of that process, starting with her shoes. After rolling down each of her stockings, he kissed the tops of her insteps with light, fevered touches of his lips.

  He pushed up her skirts and petticoats to bare her knees, and Katherine bit down hard on her lower lip to keep from pleading with him to go ahead and take her.

  By the time she was completely naked, her skin glowed with per
spiration and her hips twisted on the mattress, betraying her, seeking some contact with him.

  He caressed one of her plump breasts as he began taking off his own clothes, and when he was finally bare, as she was, he stretched out over her, letting her feel his daunting manhood against her upper thigh.

  Now, she thought, as hot shivers of desire streaked through her. Now, finally, he'll take me. I'll be his.

  Instead, though, he slipped downward, his coarse chest hair chafing her breasts and stomach in an elementally pleasant way. When he took her nipple into his mouth, she cried out in helpless pleasure and arched against the steely strength of the body that spanned the length of her like a bridge over a flood-swollen stream.

  At the same time, thunder and rain slammed against the house, and Katherine had a vague sense that no matter how loudly she called out in response to his attentions, no one else on the planet would hear.

  She surrendered, completely and absolutely, reaching back to grip the underside of the headboard in desperate hands. Had she still possessed the faculties to speak, she would have begged, but she was far beyond that now. A storm had broken in her body and spirit, and she was at its mercy.

  Finally, finally, when she wanted to weep with the force of her need, Gavin entered her in a long, slow stroke. He was looking into her suddenly wide-open eyes as he took her, watching her responses in the faulty light of the fire.

  Katherine had never been so intimate with a man, not in her previous life, and in that other body she would probably have suffered pain. As it was, she felt only a tightness, then electricity as the tempest in her heart and soul gained momentum.

  She clutched wildly at Gavin's shoulders, unable to ask for what she needed because she didn't know its name.

  Fortunately, he seemed to know very well. He began to move within her, slowly, steadily, strongly, and while he moved, he nibbled at her lower lip, her neck, her earlobes, her jawline.

  Each stroke made Katherine more desperate for the next one. Her breath quickened, and her nipples were hard buttons against Gavin's chest, her legs like a fierce vise around his hips.