Chapter Fifteen
“K atherine, I’ll agree to the divorce.”
“What?” Caught halfway between drowsiness and dream, Kitty lifted her head, certain she’d misheard. “What did you say?”
He sat up, buttoning his breeches and then reaching for his shirt to cover the red streaks crisscrossing his back courtesy of her nails. “I said that I’ll do it. I will agree to the divorce. Why do you look surprised?” he asked, the coldness in his voice all the more slicing given the way he’d just made her burn. “This is what you want. What you’ve been asking for. What you’ve been begging for.”
“I’ve never begged a day in my life.” She stood upright as the haze cleared from her mind and indignation—followed closely by hurt—took its place. Drawing her bodice closed, she scowled up at him as he rose to his feet and pulled on his ebony riding coat. “Where is this coming from?”
“Where is this coming from?” he repeated, his brows soaring. “ You , Katherine. It’s coming from you. How many times have you stormed into my study? How many doors have you slammed on your way out?”
She did like to slam doors, Kitty admitted. It was the sound they made as she quit the room. A perfect punctuation mark on a dramatic exit. But that didn’t mean—
“I wish for you to be happy, Katherine. That’s what I want.” Fully dressed, he towered over her, every single inch the domineering Marquess of Kentwood while she felt dowdy and disheveled in comparison, a pauper masquerading as a princess. “If this is what it takes, then so be it. You know as well as I that a divorce will be difficult to obtain and likely ruin your reputation, but I’ll ensure that you shall want for nothing. You can have Radcliffe Park if you’d like it, along with Hill House in London. The household as well.”
Dimly, Kitty registered that she was stepping on a grape. The fruit was squished between her toes. Just as William was squishing her heart beneath his heel. “I don’t want Radcliffe Park!” she cried, holding her dress closed with one hand while she flung the other out into the air. “I don’t want Hill House. They don’t matter. Not really. I want... I want...”
“Yes?” William said, a peculiar light in his eye as he took a step toward her. “What do you want, Kitty? What do you really want? Because all I want is you. I’ve made that clear from the beginning.”
Her throat worked convulsively. “I want . . .”
“Only when Ambrose was vulnerable with me and I with him, only when we trusted each other with our innermost thoughts and feelings, did our garden start to grow and blossom into the love that we have today.”
“I want a weekly allowance. Double what I have now. And a driver at my beck and call.”
William’s gaze dimmed. His shoulders sagged. “Whatever you’d like.”
Was that it, she thought with an irrational surge of anger as he collected their plates and began to fold up the picnic blanket. Was that as hard as he was going to fight her? As he was going to fight for them? And damn her pride. Damn it. But if he couldn’t tell her that he loved her, couldn’t he at least fight harder?
He has been , a small voice of reason intruded. He has been fighting. All along. Perhaps he’s tired. Perhaps you both are. Perhaps... perhaps there’s nothing left to fight for.
“I don’t believe that,” she whispered. “I can’t.”
“Are you coming?” The basket under his arm, William jerked his chin toward the path. “I’ll send word to my solicitor this afternoon. It will likely take him several weeks to get everything in order before a petition can be sent.”
“No, I am going to walk through the orchards for a while.” Somehow it was worse that they weren’t fighting. Or yelling. That there were no doors to slam. No angry tears to cry. It made it more permanent somehow. More solemn. And she could have said something. She willed herself to say something. Anything that would stop him. That would make him reconsider. But he was right. This was what she’d asked for. Again and again. She should have been happy. Ecstatic, even. Instead, she didn’t know if she’d ever felt so miserable. Still, she managed a smile as she raised her chin and held onto her stubbornness and her damned pride as if her life depended upon it. “I’ll see you for dinner.”
“Be careful walking back.”
Her smile turned brittle at the edges. “I will be.”
*
The sun was nearly setting by the time Kitty returned to the manor. She hadn’t meant to stay so long in the orchards, but wandering through the long, flowering rows had given her the clarity—and the courage—that she’d been so desperately lacking when William had caught her off guard with his announcement.
Because it did take courage to be vulnerable with the person who had the power to hurt you the most. If she kept her guard up, if she kept part of her heart shielded, then William couldn’t destroy all of it. It was a trick she’d learned growing up with a father who could give her a tin necklace one moment and a clip on the jaw the next. But the problem with shielding part of your heart was that that part stayed in the shadows. Without the sun, it never had the opportunity to grow. Without the sun, it could never bloom into something truly beautiful. Eventually, it would wither. Eventually, it would die. And whatever chance she and William might have had of creating a life together would die along with it.
“Stevens.” Her husband’s valet was the first servant she encountered when she entered the house via a side door, her steps muffled by a thick runner and her hands strategically placed over her chest to disguise the state of her bodice. “Where is my husband?”
The valet stopped short, his beady eyes narrowing to thin slits in the dimly lit hall. “I fail to see how Lord Kentwood’s location is of your concern.”
He knew , she thought. Somehow, Stevens knew about the divorce. Either William had told him—which she doubted, knowing her husband’s penchant for privacy—or the little toad had read the correspondence intended for the solicitor. Regardless, she wasn’t about to let him treat her in such a condescending manner. She was still William’s wife. And if she had her way, she always would be.
“If you won’t tell me, then I’ll find him myself.” She tried to go past the valet, but he blocked her path and she stopped short, staring at him incredulously. “Move out of the way, Stevens.”
“The servants’ stairway is behind you,” the valet sneered. “Best start getting acquainted with it now, as that’s all you’ll be using once Lord Kentwood is finally rid of you. It took him long enough, but at last he’s come to his senses.”
Kitty’s jaw dropped. She knew that Stevens had never liked her, but she hadn’t known his dislike had extended so far into hate. “You cannot speak to me like that!”
Stevens merely crossed his arms. “When you go, don’t forget your disgusting little street urchin. A bitch should leave with all of its fleas.”
This time Kitty didn’t think, she just reacted. Not in defense of herself, but of Jack. She had grown up with a man’s cruel taunts ringing in her ear.
Jack wouldn’t.
A slap was a woman’s traditional weapon, but she knew from personal experience that a curled fist driven into the kidney hurt worse. Stevens grunted and leaned forward when she punched him. She tried to squeeze past but he stuck out his foot and she tripped, landing hard on her hands and knees, the carpet absorbing the worst of her fall. In a flash, she was a child again. Running from a monster in the dark. Except this time, she wasn’t helpless. This time, she had more to fight for than herself.
“Get off me!” she shouted when he grabbed her ankle, his fingers digging painfully into bone. She tried to kick but he heaved himself on top of her legs, pinning her to the floor. And when he clamped his hands around her hips an old, familiar greasy sickness rose in her throat.
“He never should have married you,” Stevens panted as he crawled his way up her body, using his weight as leverage. She cried out when he slammed his elbow into her back, her arms buckling from the pressure. “You aren’t even fit to be his mistress, let alone bear the Colborne name. You’re a common guttersnipe that reached too far above her station and now— aargh! ” The valet’s voice cut short on a gargled yelp and Kitty sucked in a wheezing breath when he was thrown sideways into the wall with such force that a painting came crashing down on his head and he slumped, unconscious, to the ground.
“ Katherine. Are you all right?” William scooped her right up off the floor, holding her cradled against his chest as if she weighed no more than a sack of feather down. Without so much as a glance at the valet who had loyally served him for more than a decade, he carried Kitty straight into his study, closed the door with a kick of his heel, and laid her gently on a sumptuously upholstered sofa that enveloped her in the sweet, earthy scent of leather.
“I am fine.” She considered, briefly, playing the damsel in distress. Flinging a hand across her temple, making a few pitiful noises, and hinting that a brand-new piece of jewelry would surely mend whatever ailed her. But taking a situation and twisting it to her advantage was what the old Kitty would have done. And while she didn’t consider herself completely reformed, she was trying to be better. “Stevens got the worst of it. We should probably send for a doctor.”
“Stevens is a dead man,” William said with flat, quiet calm.
“He didn’t hurt me.” To prove her point, she sat up, bringing her knees to her chest. Aside from a dull throbbing between her shoulder blades, she did feel shockingly fine. But she didn’t want to consider what might have happened had her husband not arrived when he did.
“He put his hands on you.” Banked fury flashed in William’s gaze. “He touched you.”
“Then demote him to a footman, or sack him entirely. I don’t care.” To Kitty’s surprise, she truly didn’t. Stevens wasn’t important. But William was. “I was on my way in from the orchards. I was looking for you.”
William sat heavily in a chair opposite the sofa and scrubbed a hand down his face. “If you want to know if I’ve written off to the solicitor—”
“No, I don’t. Well, yes I do,” she corrected with an errant turn of her wrist. “Because you’ll need to call the letter back. Or send another on its heels. Whatever is most efficient.”
“What should this second letter say?” he asked, his countenance unreadable.
“That there will be no divorce.” Kitty took a deep breath. “Ever.”
A light flickered in William’s gaze, then was quickly extinguished as he sagged back in the chair and stared past her at the wall, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “You needn’t play any more games, Katherine. I’m giving you what you want.”
“What I want... what I really want...” When her voice quavered, she borrowed one of Jack’s more creative favorite curses before plowing determinedly ahead. “It’s you, William. It’s been you since the first night we met and it will continue to be you until I draw my last breath. I don’t want a divorce. I don’t want to run. I want to stay right here, with you. Well, not always right here ,” she amended. “I should like to return to London for the Season when I can wear color again. Black really is the worst shade for my complexion, and—”
“Kitty?”
“Hmm?”
“Be quiet.” In one fluid motion, he was off the chair, she was standing wrapped in his arms, and their mouths were together in a kiss that she would have happily let lead to more had he not abruptly stopped and put his hands on her shoulders, forcing distance between them. “I can’t... I don’t know if...”
She spread her hands open on his chest, feeling the beat of his heart as her own ached at the pain she saw in his eyes. “It wasn’t your fault, William. What happened to Alessandra and my father, it wasn’t your fault. Their deaths are not your burden to bear. I should have told you that a long time ago.”
A shudder went through him. “I don’t deserve—”
“You do,” she interrupted. “You do deserve to be loved, William. You do deserve to love. You only have to give yourself permission. And if you cannot speak the words aloud, I don’t need to have them. Words are just words. You’ve shown me your love in any manner of ways. I simply didn’t want to see it.”
He cupped her chin, his thumb stroking her cheek. “You need the words, Katherine,” he said huskily. “Every intelligent, strong, and beautiful woman should hear how loved she is. How treasured she is. How valued she is. I fell in love with you that night in the moonlight, and I have loved you every day, every hour, every second since. I love you so much that I was ready to let you go, even though it would have destroyed me. I love you, Lady Katherine Colborne, Marchioness of Kentwood. I should have said it sooner.”
“It was worth the wait.” Smiling through a sheen of joyful tears, Kitty rose up on her toes and kissed her husband.