Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
Katie paused, uncertain. Meeting him here for a few minutes was one thing, but going into a cottage with him? No. That was one step too far, even for her.
The door opened. “Katie! I knew you’d come.” Jasper’s grin was triumphant, and his blue eyes shone as he hurried toward her.
“I was just passing by and was curious if you really came here every day at three.”
He laughed. “Putting me through my paces, are you?”
She shrugged.
“Let me help you down. I’ve brought a few delicacies in the house and—”
“I am not going into the cottage with you Jasper.”
He frowned. “Whyever not?”
“The reason I came to see you—other than curiosity—was because you are correct, we can’t talk in the middle of the path. But now that I am here why don’t you tell me why you are so keen to see me?”
For a few seconds, he was flummoxed, and Katie could almost hear the clanking of gears as his brain shifted directions. But Jasper would always come about when it came to getting what he wanted.
“I cannot stop thinking about you—even though I know it is… wicked. The truth is, Katie, that my heart has never gotten over you.”
Katie suspected that was about as far from the truth as a person could get, but she maintained a straight face and continued to listen although he looked expectant—as if he anticipated a similar declaration from her.
Katie wanted to shame him—to string him along and build his hopes—but she could not lie about loving him back—that would shame her worse than him.
When it became clear that she would not speak, he went on. “When I heard you had married Dulverton and were so close to Elm Hall, I could not resist coming to see you.” As he had the other day, he wrapped a hand around her ankle.
When she did not pull away, his expression grew bolder. “I know you cannot be happy with him. He is a cold-hearted man—inhumanly so—and it makes me ill to think of him putting his cold, emotionless hands on you.”
Katie burned to tell him that Dulverton was anything but passionless and cold but—once again—she kept that to herself. Jasper did not deserve to know anything important about her.
He took her silence as approval. “I know what it is like to live with somebody you don’t love. You have no idea how liberating it is to live on the Continent—away from the crushing, cloying rules we of the ton impose upon ourselves. How you would flourish in a city like Naples, Katie!”
Katie couldn’t stop staring, repelled but morbidly fascinated. Was he really asking her to run away with him?
“Won’t you come inside and sit with me for a while?
” He began rubbing up her calf and she jerked away.
He chuckled, but it sounded strained. “So skittish. I won’t hurt you, sweetling.
Don’t you recall how much fun we had together?
Those wonderful afternoons in our cozy little bower?
” He gestured to the cottage behind him.
“That old musty gamekeeper lodge was not nearly so pleasant as this private nest. Remember the pleasure we shared in that cramped little bed? We could have that again, my darling.”
That long-ago summer came rushing back as clearly as if it had been last week.
The choking, overwhelming sickness of both body and soul as she’d waited for Jasper to come back and make good on his promise.
And then the crushing humiliation when she saw Jasper standing beside his new wife.
She had run and run and run but still could not get free of the horrible sight.
She’d gone to her aunt’s small stable and saddled the poor old gig horse her aunt kept.
The horse had sensed her wildness and had galloped with the hectic speed she had not been able to achieve with her two legs.
She hadn’t been nearly as experienced a rider back then, and when the stone wall loomed up in front of her the poor, terrified horse had twisted and reared, throwing Katie to the ground.
And in the blink of an eye one of her problems had been solved.
“Katie, my dear?” Jasper said. “What is wrong? You have gone as white as a—”
Katie jerked the reins causing Robin to shove Jasper to one side as he leapt forward.
The moment she broke contact with his hand the suffocating sensation ceased. She turned her startled mount and held him in check, the poor creature dancing side to side wondering what madness had come over his mistress.
Jasper was glaring up at her. “What the hell is wrong with you? You almost knocked me off my feet!”
“I cannot do this.” She felt as if she were waking from a fever dream. What had she been thinking? What a mad, reckless, and foolish and—and dangerous notion she’d been nurturing!
“What’s that?” Jasper demanded, striding toward her, his movements angry and aggressive.
“Just leave me alone, Jasper. I don’t want to see you again!” She urged Robin down the path.
“Wait—stop!” He waved his arms, as if to block her way.
Katie did not stop Robin, and Jasper had to leap out of the way at the last moment as she thundered past.
“You bitch! You almost—”
A low-hanging branch tore her hat from her head, and she cried out. But not even the pain could stop her.
Katie fled not just from Jasper and his rage, but from the disaster she had almost made of her life.
***
Gerrit crouched down to admire the massive accretion of belemnites. “I do not think you’ll be able to get much more out,” he said to Mr. Scott, who had been painstakingly working on the fossils for several weeks.
Mr. Scott grimaced. “If I could just move that boulder, I’m sure there is more beneath that could be salvaged.”
“Perhaps, but already this is going to prove problematic to transport.” Gerrit stood up and fixed the younger man with an approving look. “You have unearthed a spectacular sample, Mr. Scott.”
“Do you think we’ll be able to remove what I’ve exposed in one piece?” the younger man asked, pushing back his hat to scratch his head, his worried gaze on the fossil.
“As to that, we will certainly give it—” Gerrit turned at the sound of horse hooves, a smile pulling at his lips when he saw who it was.
“I will make arrangements to organize a group of men to lift it,” he said absently, his gaze still on Kathryn, whose face was excessively red.
Where on earth was her hat? “Excuse me,” he said, not waiting to hear the other man’s response before striding to the shaded area where they generally picketed the horses to allow them to graze.
He reached Kathryn just as she was unhooking her knee from the saddle.
“Here, let me help you,” he said, reaching up and taking her by the waist and then letting her slide down his torso.
It was a blatant way to enjoy her body, even if she was still clothed, and she usually gave one of her charming gurgles of laughter when he behaved so naughtily.
But not today.
“Thank you,” she said in a breathy voice. Her face, he noticed now that he was closer, looked flushed rather than burnt by the sun.
“Is something wrong?”
“No, no, I just wanted to get here. I’ve already wasted so much of the day.”
Was her smile… forced? Gerrit wished like hell he was better at reading emotions. “You forgot your hat, Kathryn.”
She lifted a hand to the top of her head. “Oh. How thoughtless of me. I was so eager to get here, you see—”
“You have plenty of time. I’ve arranged with Cranston to eat here again tonight so we can work until it is almost dark.”
She brightened. “Oh, good.”
“I keep a spare hat in the tent,” he said. “It is old and not pretty—”
“It will be fine, thank you.”
He nodded and she followed him to the tent where he located the hat and set it on her head, where it promptly fell down to her nose.
“Oh,” he said stupidly. “I should have thought—”
She laughed and lifted it up. “I can make it fit,” she assured him.
Gerrit watched dubiously as she shifted her hair around, removing a pin here and adding one there until the hat was no longer covering her eyes. Somehow, she managed to make even an ill-fitting man’s hat look fetching.
“How is that?” she asked, her cat eyes sliding up to meet his.
“Good,” he said, sounding like a dolt to his own ears.
She tucked some loose hair beneath the brim while her green eyes slid toward where Mr. Scott was now pacing around his find. “Is he still—”
“He is finished. Although he would like to move that boulder.”
“Why doesn’t he?”
“The piece is already too large to transport. If there is more, as we suspect, it will have to come out separately.”
“You said this would go to the British Museum?”
“Correct. They are one of the few establishments that can do justice to such a piece.”
“It will make a stunning display.”
Gerrit thought so, too.
“Oh, did you look at that section I mentioned last night at dinner?”
“I did look at it, first thing this morning.”
“What do you think it is? It is terribly damaged, but I did not think it was an ammonite.”
“You are correct. I believe it is a nautiloid fragment. That piece is extremely small, and most people would have mistaken it for an ammonite fragment. You have a good eye for this work,” he said, not exaggerating.
She gave him a shy smile. “Thank you… Gerrit.”
Hearing his name on her lips in the middle of the day pleased but unnerved him, and he could only nod and offer her his arm. “Come and I will show you how I made that deduction.”
***
They rode home in the moonlight.
“What a beautiful sky,” Katie said, trying not to recall her frantic ride down this very path earlier that day.
“Yes. Very beautiful.”
Katie turned at her husband’s odd tone and found him looking at her.
“You aren’t even looking at the sky,” she chided in a foolishly breathless voice.
He merely regarded her with an intense, almost brooding, stare.
“You are making me shy,” she said a moment later.
He turned away. “I apologize for staring.”
“What?” Katie shook her head. “No—you don’t have to apologize. It is true that I feel shy, but I—I like it.”
He turned back to her. “You like it when I stare at you?”
“Yes,” she said, her face hot in the cool night air. “I like it a great deal. I only mentioned it to explain why I was becoming so red and fidgeting like a child.”
“You look silver in the moonlight, not red.”
“I am relieved to hear it,” she said, flustered by his caressing tone. “Tell me, why do you sound so surprised that I would enjoy your eyes on me? Gaining a man’s attention is the entire point of a London Season, after all.”
He turned away, his lips tightening and his jaw firming in a way that usually presaged a cool silence. But this time, he surprised her. “My first wife disliked it when I stared at her. She said it was freakish.”
Katie flinched at the word freakish. “Surely she did not use that word?”
“She used precisely that word.”
“Oh, Gerrit—” Katie stopped, biting her lip.
“Oh, Gerrit?” he repeated. “That sounded like a prelude to something more.”
“It was,” Katie admitted. “But I—I don’t know how to put it in words. Not yet.”
“I will wait patiently until you do.” His stern mouth curved up slightly and he turned to face her. “And enjoy looking at you in the meantime.”
She gave a startled laugh, his compliment and smile all the more intoxicating for how rare they were.
“I am very fond of your laugh, Kathryn.”
“It is nice to have things to laugh about.”
“Why have you not had reason to laugh? I am not the most perceptive of men, but I believe I’ve noticed a—a sadness, for lack of a better word—in your eyes at times.”
Katie’s chest tightened at the dangerous turn in the conversation. Talking about the shadows in her eyes would lead to that wretched summer five years ago. And until she told Gerrit the truth about that—
“You do not need to confide in me, Kathryn. I did not mean to sour the mood.”
“The mood isn’t sour,” she hastened to assure him. “You are right that I am sometimes melancholic. Although far less so these past few weeks.”
Did she imagine the dark stain on his cheeks at her words?
Katie cleared her throat. “As for my oh, Gerrit,” she said, moving the conversation toward safer ground.
“I was lamenting that people often say the most hurtful things to those they are the closest to.” Hy’s face rose up in her mind, but Katie shook it away.
This was about Gerrit, not about her. Besides, Katie deserved what Hy said to her.
Gerrit did not deserve being called a freak.
“Your first wife said something that shaped the way you perceive yourself. If she’d said something pleasant, that would be one thing.
But to say your attention was freakish? That is not only cruel, but also wrong. ”
“I am glad to hear you do not mind my attention, Kathryn.” She was about to correct him—to remind him that she’d said she liked it—but he was not finished. “Because I find it difficult to look at anyone or anything else when you are near.”
“That—that is a lovely thing to say,” Katie said, stunned by how good his words made her feel.
He was watching her again, wearing the look she’d once thought of as critical and arrogant, but which she now knew meant he was thinking deeply about something. How glad she was that she’d never thrown angry words at him about his expression during those early days.
Tell him that. This was what you wanted—to talk—so talk.
“During the early weeks of our marriage, I mistook your resting expression for arrogance and conceit and thought your gaze held only censure,” Katie blurted. “But I now realize your face is sternest when you are pondering something.”
His eyebrows rose. “I am glad you no longer think that. It is true that I take pride in myself, but I hoped it stopped short of arrogance.” His lips twisted slightly. “But perhaps I am wrong.”
“No. No, I don’t think so.”
“Good. Because your opinion is the only one that matters.”
Katie laughed. “Now that just might be a bit arrogant.”
He chuckled and Katie almost fell off her horse. “I like the sound of your laugh.”
Once again, he looked startled. Katie was beginning to think that nobody had ever given Gerrit even the mildest of compliments. At least no lover.
“Thank you,” he said a bit stiffly. “I, too, have not had much in my life to make me laugh.” He paused and gave her one of those heavy-lidded looks that felt like a physical caress. “Until lately.”