Chapter 37 #3
Catherine laughed and almost snorted. “Like most men, Jamie.”
“No, no, I didn’t mean it that way. I mean I have sisters. Lots of them. Seven. All younger. All unmarried. They are the dearest people in the world to me, present company excepted.”
“Seven? And all unmarried. Your poor mother.”
“My poor mother? She isn’t going to do a thing to get them married. It’s going to be up to me.”
“Well, then I don’t understand why you’re wasting your time here. You have work to do, Your Grace.”
“But I promised myself I would do my best to get married first, so I might have some useful experience to impart to my sisters. You know, how to catch a man and all that rot.”
“How do you catch a man?”
“Well, first you catch his best friend and then refuse the friend. Next, you appear half-naked—”
“Jamie!”
“—in the dressing room of a modiste’s shop. Then you follow a man and jump on him in an alley and kiss him in such a way as he has never been kissed before—”
“Perhaps we should alter the course of this conversation, friend.” She laid heavy emphasis on the last word.
“Yes, friend.” Too late, James realized he should have checked himself. He had turned the exchange into flirtation, and Catherine didn’t want that. “Tell me more about your husband.”
Her eyes shifted to a distant point over his shoulder.
“He was older than I was. Fifteen years. He was quiet. But he absorbed everything, heard everything, paid attention to everything. And when he spoke on a matter, people listened.”
“He was respected.”
“Yes. Before he died, I wanted him to buy a knighthood. I thought it would help our daughters. But he refused. He said, Katie, if a man thinks more of me because of a Sir in front of my name, I will think less of that man.”
“He called you Katie.”
“Yes, he did. And Mary and Harry still call me Mama Katie.”
“And Roger Siddons called you Cath.”
Catherine colored. “All the folk I know from my time on the stage call me Cath.”
“But you told me to call you Kate.”
“Yes. I wanted you to have your own name for me, quite apart from those others.”
James smiled.
“You share it with only one other person,” she said.
“Oh?”
“A blacksmith’s boy from the Midlands.”
“Oh.”
“Whom I last saw thirty years ago and who’s dead in the wars these twenty-seven years. The Flanders Campaign.”
“What was his name?”
“Jamie Hill.” She studied his reaction.
“Good name.” He drank some wine.
She looked down at the table and whispered, “I’d still like to call you Jamie.”
He leaned forward. “I would like for you to, Kate. But only if the association is a happy one for you.”
She looked up and met his eyes. “It is. It helps me remember a time when things were simpler. When I was simpler.”
He felt this was good. Very good. He was entirely willing to share the names Kate and Jamie with a dead blacksmith’s boy since the boy made her feel innocent. Anything that helped her see what they had could be the pure and right ideal she longed for.
He cleared his throat. “Well, a difficulty presents itself. I don’t have daughters to prove to you I love women—”
“But you have sisters.”
“Pshaw! A weak substitute. And no one could say I was respected. And I have not rejected my title. I am not sure how I am going to get you to marry me.”
“Well, Edward married a wounded woman. I am not that anymore. Perhaps I need to be wooed differently, now.”
“How?”
Catherine smiled shyly in a way he had never seen before. “I think today was a good start.”
They stood in front of the door to her bedchamber. She took the key from her reticule and opened the door.
“I’m in the room down this way in case you need me,” James said.
She nodded. He thought she might kiss him, but she did not. She went into the room and closed the door. He waited until he heard the key turn.
In the morning, he made a point of being outside her door when she came out, and she smiled when she saw him.
They hired a horse and a trap and went out into the surrounding countryside to picnic.
She seemed more lighthearted today than he had ever seen her. And she was less guarded than yesterday. She touched his hand gently to get his attention. She brushed a crumb stuck in a stray whisker on his chin after he had eaten a cheese sandwich.
“Not my clean-shaven Jamie today.”
“That’s what happens when you leave your valet in London,” he grumbled.
“I’ll shave you tomorrow.”
“You?”
“Yes, I learned from a backstage dresser at the Theatre-Royal. You’ll be in good hands.”
That night again, she slipped into her own room alone, with no kiss, no sign of longing.
He had thought this chasteness between them would only last a day. Damn.
She woke early. Just before waking, James had been there, hovering on the edges of her consciousness.
But he had not been touching her as in previous dreams. He had been fully dressed in a garden, grinning at her.
She had a warm feeling, she wanted to see him immediately, but she did not feel an ache, a throb, a hunger that could not be denied.
She dressed and went downstairs to ask for a basin of hot water and linen and soap and all the other required items for shaving. Arms full, she went and knocked on his door. She felt calm and assured. She felt . . . herself in a way she hadn’t for years.
“I borrowed the razor from the innkeeper, but I think it will do. Sit there, Jamie, in front of the window. Take off your shirt. It’s the only one you have, and I don’t want to get water and soap all over it.”
He took off his shirt, and she drew in a sharp breath.
The triangle of muscle that came off his shoulders and crowned the tops of his arms. The fine, golden hair on his forearms, almost matching the color of his skin, hard to see unless it glinted in the sun.
The smooth skin of his chest. The beautiful smell of him.
It’s a body, Kate, just like any other body. Her pulse settled.
She set to work, softening his whiskers with the hot water and soap, then turning his head this way and that, scraping his jaw, his chin, and, very carefully, his top lip, taking care around the groove between his nose and mouth. She wiped the soap from his face.
“There.” She stepped back. She had done it. She had been physically close to him and his body. She had felt an appreciation but not an uncontrollable wildness.
James touched his face. “That’s very good. Not quite up to Enfield’s standards but very good. You can have a job as assistant valet to the Duke of Middlewich.”
Catherine curtsied and affected the accent of her girlhood. “Will that be all Your Grace is needing this morning?”
He put his shirt on. “If we are going to stay in Canterbury longer, I think I will need some clothes.”
“Are we planning to stay in Canterbury longer?”
“Would you like to stay?”
“I don’t know what we’ll do here. Surely, we might despair of finding more sights to see, but I am afraid to leave when things are going so well.”
“You think things are going well?”
“Yes.” She smiled. “You took your shirt off. And I kept my hands to myself. It was a good test.”
“Shall I take it off again?” He went as if to lift it over his head.
“No! I mean, no, thank you. Lead me not into temptation, Your Grace.”
“You have taught me a lot about women, Kate.”
She wiped the razor clean. “In what sense?”
“I think my chest is as important to you as yours is to me.”
“Why do you think women love to go to museums and look at the marble Greek gods there? We do not have brothels, like the men.”
“You go to ogle, eh?”
“Well, not me. I am a respectable widow. With a friend who is willing to take his shirt off for me, if I ask nicely.”
“Me?”
She threw a towel at him. “Yes, you. Now, let’s go eat breakfast.”
They went to breakfast and then to St. Augustine’s Abbey. At dinner that night, Catherine discovered the innkeeper had a tall eighteen-year-old son who was roughly the same size as James. She asked to buy the son’s best shirt.
“Now this shirt and cravat you are wearing can be laundered while you wear the new one,” Catherine said over the dining table.
“But my trousers. And my waistcoat and coat! And my hose is dreadful.”
“Do you want to go back to London? Or shall we send to London for your clothes?”
“No! You think things are going well. So do I. We’ll stay. And if we send to London, it will just bring Enfield down our heads. He would arrive, full of indignation, with my trunks.”
“Yes, that wouldn’t do, would it? The coat and waistcoat can be sponged and pressed tomorrow, and we will have your trousers and hose laundered at the same time as the shirt. You will stay in bed tomorrow until the trousers are dry.”
“Will I stay in bed alone with no clothes on, Kate?” James smiled and winked.
Catherine pretended a frown in answer. “A friend might come and sit in the same room as you and converse. Or read. Or play cards.”
“Tomorrow will be the fourth day of our friendship.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think we might become closer friends, in time?”
Catherine turned her head and looked at him sideways. “As close as you and my son-in-law?”
“Well, I was thinking perhaps a good deal closer than that.”
Catherine became serious. “I think your notion that we be friends, that we talk as friends, has been a very good one. I am finding myself capable of managing my feelings. Especially those of a carnal nature.”
“You . . . you don’t look on me as a nephew, do you?”
“Jamie, you know my problem is quite the opposite. What made you say that?”
“Something Thomas said last month. About our Christmas at Sommerleigh.”
“Well, I was pretending, as were you, at Christmas. Here I am not pretending. I am trying.”
“Good. I don’t want you to pretend.”
“And I don’t want you to pretend, either.”
“Yes, you do, Catherine. For now. And that’s fine.”
“What are you pretending?”
“I’m pretending I don’t want to take you upstairs and rip your clothes off.”
Catherine had a moment of unbridled desire when her nipples hardened under her dress, her pearl throbbed, her heart raced, she grew dizzy.