A Heart of a Duke Collection: Volume 1-A Regency Bundle

by Christi Caldwell

  “Guests,” she mumbled beneath her breath.

  Yes, the solid, click of her boot-heels upon the hard, stone floor would be vastly preferable.

  A maid peeked out from one of the doors, and then must have seen something dark in Katherine’s expression, for she ducked back into whatever room she’d been tending. Katherine didn’t even know how many rooms or what manner of rooms existed within these cheerless, dank walls.

  She increased her pace. And this is what he’d turned her into? A frowning, scowling, boot-wearing, fast-moving duchess, who inspired fear in her staff.

  With a quiet curse, Katherine spun back around, and walked several paces. She paused inside the doorway.

  A parlor.

  She wrinkled her nose. A rather garishly gold parlor.

  Her gaze landed upon the maid who polished a small porcelain figurine. The maid gulped and fell into a deep curtsy. “Your Grace,” she said softly.

  “I’m sorry,” Katherine blurted.

  The young maid cocked her head, frozen in the dip of her curtsy. “Your Grace?”

  Katherine waved her hand. “For…for…being unpleasant. It was not my intention.” The girl angled her head further. “To be unpleasant, that is.”

  The maid’s mouth fell open wide, like the trout she and Aldora used to fish from father’s well-stocked lakes. Well, his one-time well-stocked lakes. The fish were one of the first items to go upon Father’s gambling debts.

  “Have a good day…?”

  “Mary,” the young woman blurted. “My name is Mary.”

  A perfectly suitable Christmastide name. An unspoken reminder that this was a joyous time of year; a time of beginnings and hope and birth. “It is a lovely name,” she said with a smile.

  The maid beamed. “Why, thank you, Your Grace,”

  “Lady Katherine,” she corrected. If she wasn’t to receive guests and her family was not welcomed, then the friendship of a maid would be welcome.

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” the maid held her hands up in shocked protest.

  “Of course you can. It’s merely a name,” and I’m hardly a wife, in the true sense. Why with just a slip of paper, an unconsummated marriage could be annulled. Not so very easily, but still, it could be severed, and… “Of course you can,” Katherine said again.

  Mary smiled, and curtsied again.

  “Good day, Mary.”

  “Good day, Your…Lady Katherine.” Katherine turned and took her leave, and continued to make her quiet path through the house, this time less fury to her footsteps.

  She ran her fingers over the wallpaper, done in dressed stone, a somber, dark remodeling done at some point to match the foreboding darkness of Castle Blackwood. Katherine paused in the corridor and traced the fabric fauxed to look like stone. How very real it seemed, how very much like the thick blocks that were used to construct this castle many, many years past. And yet…she layered her palm to the wall, aware the texture of the smooth fabric was at odds with the image presented to those who walked by these walls.

  From the corner of her eye, she detected the white sheet draped across a door.

  Then, no one passed through these halls.

  There are to be no guests.

  Katherine removed her hand from the fabric and hugged her arms to her chest. No one had visited this castle since her husband shut himself away from the world and ordered draperies hung upon doors and over objects reminding him of all he’d lost.

  Suddenly, a vicious, potent loathing of that wholly pure white sheet filled her. She’d be glad to never see a reminder of the color white.

  Her feet carried her onward, toward the drapery. Katherine tilted her neck back and stared up at the covering. She grasped it between her fingers and tugged it free. It danced down in heavy, noisy flutters, unleashing a soft breeze.

  Katherine glanced around, but the corridor remained eerily silent. Who would be here after all? Certainly not Jasper, who’d not come after her. And why should he? Katherine was nothing to him.

  Nothing at all.

  With a stony set to her lips, she pressed the handle, half expecting it to be locked. The door opened and she stepped inside.

  An ivory silk wallpaper striped in thick gold bands lined the portrait room. Katherine hesitated, but an enigmatic pull lured her deeper into the generous space.

  With a slowness of step, Katherine moved down the row of lords and ladies and children forever memorialized within these hallowed walls. Paintings of long ago, of ladies in modest, somber tunics, and gentleman with thick, well-trimmed beards and serious frowns.

  Katherine paused beside a portrait of a stunning couple with a small boy at their feet. The brittle set to the woman’s red lips bespoke of anything but happiness. One of her hands rested upon the sleeve of a familiar-looking, great big bear of a man with a broad nose and blackness in his emerald green eyes. The gentleman’s hand lay possessively upon the shoulder of a somber, angry-looking boy. Katherine stepped closer. Oh, God. Her heart tugged, and she focused on the boy’s young, but harshly noble, features.

  Jasper and his parents.

  My parents were cold, selfish individuals. It was a match based on their mutually distinguished positions in Society.

  She shivered, and the cold inside had little to do with the chill of the dark, closed-off room and everything to do with Jasper’s miserable childhood.

  Katherine’s father had left her family in financial ruin. He’d left them desolate and seen them stripped of all their worldly possessions. As a young girl, she’d known the cloying fear of their desperate circumstances. But never once had there been a shortage of love in their oftentimes noisy, usually chaotic, household. Katherine shared a bond with her twin sister Anne, and a deep love for Aldora and her young brother Benedict. Even Mother with her social aspirations for her children had shown affection toward her daughters and son through the years.

  So very different than the world forever captured upon canvas by a too-knowing, intuitive painter. An artist who’d accurately immortalized the resentment, the loneliness, the hurt, of a boy who could be no more than nine or ten years of age.

  She closed her eyes.

  Oh, Jasper. Is it a wonder you’ve this rigid shell about you?

  Unable to bear looking on the remembrance of his past, Katherine turned to go, when her eyes snagged upon another of those single white sheets.

  She wet her lips, but could no sooner leave without ripping that covering down than she could turn Aldora out for the holiday.

  Directly opposite the unhappy rendering of Jasper’s family, hung the covered portrait. Katherine made the very long walk to that sheet, and in a single pull, delicately tugged it from the top of the mahogany frame, inlaid with gold, narrow bandings.

  Her heart thudded hard against the wall of her chest, and her breath caught on a shuddery gasp.

  For all the misery and vitriol captured in Jasper’s parents’ renderings, this painting depicted the very opposite—joy, unfettered love, tranquility.

  The golden beauty, stood with the tips of her long, elegant fingers resting upon Jasper’s sapphire blue coat sleeves. Only this Jasper, this Jasper was nothing like the cynical boy of nine or ten years. His gentle, loving stare forever fixed upon his wife’s perfect, heart-shaped face. The woman, no—Lydia, gazed up at Jasper with such unadulterated love, Katherine felt like the worst sort of interloper. It was as though the artist snuck upon an intimate exchange and forever committed it to the canvas. Their locked gazes depicted two who shared a secret that none of the mere mortals looking on were privy to.

  Katherine rubbed her chest, in an attempt to dislodge the odd knot formed in her chest. Her efforts proved futile.

  This moment, this was why Jasper stared at Katherine and the rest of the world with icy disdain. This was why he frowned and snarled and snapped like an injured animal. Because how could one know this…this…splendor, and ever survive after having it so cruelly plucked from their grasp?

  Katherine bent down
and picked up the thick, shockingly heavy white sheet filled with a wholly selfish, and horrible urge to toss the covering back upon the mahogany frame.

  Because then she wouldn’t have to see it, and know just why Jasper could and would never love her.

  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 25

  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, Ka
therine 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 marriage.

  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.”