19. 1960
The spot by the river where Jasper and Catherine met on the sly was as rustic as it sounded.
Jasper had discovered it on one of his many walks through the forest, a habit he’d gotten into when he’d first moved to Colville and hadn’t known a single soul outside of his logging crew. The habit had stuck during the three years he’d continued in his post. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the other guys on the crew, but he had a hard time finding a common ground with them.
To be fair, he had a hard time finding common ground with anyone, but that wasn’t the barrier. The barrier was that the people he worked with were rough men, tired men—men who’d been forced to trade their strength and youth for a paycheck that, more often than not, fell short of a living wage. They drank and fucked like tomorrow could very easily be their last day on earth, preferring the shortsighted perks of the coarse-minded over the long-term benefits of a well-read mind.
“I had no idea you were such a snob.” Catherine laughed as she lay in his arms, sipping from a thermos filled with strong coffee and even stronger spirits. “How can you look down on men for drinking and fucking when it’s the same thing you literally just did?”
Jasper shook his head as he watched some of the whiskey-laced coffee slide down the side of Catherine’s lipstick-smeared mouth. She dashed a quick tongue out to catch the drop, but she missed a spot. Naturally, he had to finish the job she’d started, so it was a good five minutes before they were able to get back on topic. By then, he’d not only forgotten the question, but he was pretty sure he’d forgotten all the answers, too.
“How did you find this place, anyway?” Catherine asked with a crooked smile made all the more lopsided for the lipstick that was even more smeared now. “A cabin like this must belong to someone. What makes you so sure the owners won’t come back?”
Jasper cast a look around the dilapidated shack—he refused to buy into Catherine’s optimism and call it a cabin—and snorted. It had a roof and four walls, it was true. There was a bed and a fireplace and, thanks to Jasper’s painstaking efforts, enough chopped wood and supplies to survive for a few weeks, should the need arise. He’d also built a bookshelf where he kept the few books he actually owned. He dreaded the moment when Catherine’s curiosity took over her languid, feline sleepiness and she looked closer at his collection. He felt pretty sure she’d laugh outrageously over each of the titles he’d gathered over the years—all his favorites, and all books she was likely to eschew as romantic nonsense. Unless you counted Beth March succumbing to scarlet fever or Matthew Cuthbert being carried off by a heart attack, there wasn’t much death anywhere in those pages.
“The owners won’t come back because no one in their right mind would want to live here,” he explained when she cocked an inquisitive eyebrow at him.
“You would.”
He gave a small start.
She giggled. “You can’t fool me, Jasper. You’d give up everything to come live out here in the woods like a hermit, chopping wood and growing your food and refusing to have any communication with the outside world.” She paused before adding, “In fact, I’m curious why you haven’t done that already. You’re already nine-tenths a hermit. Why not take the final step?”
“I can’t,” he said simply.
Just as simply, she answered. “Why?”
Jasper sucked in a sharp breath, wondering—not for the first time—why this woman’s soft, sweet brevity so unnerved him. In anyone else, her ability to cut straight to the heart of the matter would send him running for the hills. In Catherine, he only felt himself to be at peace for the first time in his life.
She didn’t play games, his Catherine. She teased and taunted. She pulled him so far out of his comfort zone that he was pretty sure the only thing holding him up at this point was a wisp of a cloud that would disperse at the first strong wind. She made love easily and joyfully, and for no reason that Jasper could discern other than because she wanted to. But never, in all the time they’d been writing back and forth, had she been anything but herself.
So even though it pained him—even though his heart suddenly started beating as though it would grow wings and fly straight out of his chest—he told her the truth.
“My life isn’t my own,” he said. “It never has been.”
“What do you mean? Like the company you work for? Are you…indentured?”
“In a manner of speaking,” he admitted, scrubbing a hand over the rough landscape of his jaw. No matter how many times he shaved, his shadow seemed to reside at a permanent five o’clock. The trick came in handy when he needed to give off the air of a man who didn’t want to be bothered, but he sometimes wished he didn’t always look so weathered. He’d barely been able to hold on to any sort of childhood as it was.
“Do you owe them money or something?” Catherine persisted. “Because if you do—”
He interrupted her before she went any further down that particular road. “I have a family back home,” he admitted. “A big one.”
All at once, she sat up. As she did, the faded floral sheet that had been covering the upper half of her body slipped away. Jasper had to dig his fingernails into the palm of his opposite hand just to sit in the same room with such perfection.
The fact that she’d given herself to him—and without once showing a glimmer of regret—was bad enough. That she continued to do so despite the state of this cabin and Jasper’s personal situation was worse.
He didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve her.
“What do you mean, you have a family?” she asked, heedless of her nudity. “You mean…a wife? Kids?”
He released a silent laugh. “How old do you think I am, Catherine?”
“I don’t know…twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? It’s hard to tell.”
This time, his laugh made an actual sound, but there was no mirth in it. “I’m nineteen,” he said. “The same age as you.”
“Oh.” Her eyelids fluttered as she tugged the sheet back up around her body. Even though he could have gazed at her forever, he was grateful to have her shielded from view. He’d never been great at dealing with too much of a good thing.
“Does that mean you don’t have a secret wife and kids stashed away somewhere?” she added.
He unfolded himself from the bed and reached for his wallet. Pulling out a photograph weathered around the edges and with images that were already starting to fade away, he handed it to her.
“That’s my mom,” he said, indicating the tall, slim woman standing on the front steps of a dilapidated town house. “The five kids seated around her are my brothers and sisters.”
She looked over the photo for a moment that felt prolonged, even to a man accustomed to lengthy silences.
“Where’s your father?” she eventually asked.
He took the picture back from her and tucked it safely away again. “He died when I was twelve. She was still pregnant with Bobby—that’s the little boy at her feet—at the time.” He paused, unsure how to say the rest without making it sound like a bid for pity. “We did okay for a few months, what with the neighbors pitching in and my mom taking in laundry, but the money ran out faster than any of us expected. I had no choice but to leave school and go to work at the lumberyards.”
“At age twelve?” she asked, her eyes wide.
He ducked his head in silent assent—not exactly ashamed, but not unashamed, either. It was a strange position to be in, and one he’d inhabited for so long that he no longer knew any other way. His lack of formal education would always weigh on him, especially since school had been the one place where he’d felt truly at peace, but he was also proud of the man he’d become. A poor man, yes. A weary man, certainly.
But also a man who took care of his family. One who made sure that Bobby, Tina, Harriet, and the twins—Uli and Olly—never had to sacrifice anything they weren’t ready to give.
“I didn’t come to Colville until a few years ago,” he said, since Catherine didn’t seem disposed to fill the silence. “I’d been working the mills in Aberdeen for almost four years at the time, and the logging company here put out a call for lumberjacks. I didn’t want to leave, but they offered a signing bonus as well as hazard pay. So I lied about my age, packed up a few things, and came here. Half of everything I earn goes home. Half of everything I earn will always go home. It has to. There are too many people counting on me.”
“Your life isn’t your own,” she echoed.
He rolled his shoulder in an uncomfortable shrug. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. I like being outside and working with my hands. I enjoy the forest and how quiet it gets at night.” He smiled slightly over this next part. “And we’ve always had a well-stocked library here in town. That means more than all the rest.”
Catherine slid out of the bed, the sheet clutched to her body like a Roman toga. For the longest moment, Jasper feared that he’d said too much—revealed a truth so bleak that she had no choice but to flee—but all she did was make her way over to the bookshelves. He could make out the curve of her naked back as it fluttered through the fabric, his whole body aching at that expanse of skin, but he didn’t move.
Running her fingers lightly over the row of books, she peeked over her shoulder at him. “That’s why you read so much, isn’t it?” she asked, and in a voice so soft that something wild threatened to break out of him. “It’s your education. Your connection to the world.”
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
“I wish you’d tell me your favorite,” she said as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world for a man to reveal the inner workings of his heart. She examined the spines with a smile playing mischievously about the corners of her mouth. “Pride and Prejudice. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Wuthering Heights. This is quite the personal collection. Very…romantic.”
He held his breath, knowing from her light, teasing tone what was coming next. Coming from anyone else, he’d have fought back—fought against the idea that he could be so exposed and still function in a world that sought every day to wear him down. Coming from Catherine, he knew he could take anything she had to give.
At least, that was what he thought before she spoke up again.
“I brought the next book we’re going to read together,” she said, still with that teasing note in her voice. She sauntered slowly over to her bag and bent to retrieve it, aware the entire time of how exposed her body was. “But remember what I said—it’s going to shock you.”
The only shocking thing was how unshaken Jasper’s hand remained as he accepted the green clothbound book she held out to him.
“Tropic of Cancer,” he said aloud. He glanced sharply up. “Catherine! Where did you get this?”
If he hadn’t already been head over heels in love with her, the smile that curled her lips would have sealed his fate. It was equal parts mischievous and shy, daring and demure.
In other words, it was exactly like her.
“So you have heard of it,” she breathed. “I was hoping you had.”
“This book is illegal in the United States,” he said. He hadn’t yet opened the cover, fearful that the contents might burn him. He’d felt the way the first time Catherine had kissed him, and he wasn’t so sure he’d come away from that encounter unscarred, either. “You didn’t check this out from the library, did you?”
Her rich peal of laughter rang out, filling the cabin with the last thing needed to make it truly feel like home. “Of course not. Can you imagine me trying to sneak this past Mrs. Peters? She’d have palpitations just thinking about all those delicious Parisian orgies.”
“Then where did it come from?”
She slid onto the bed and lay back against the headboard, waggling her eyebrows as she went. “I have my sources.”
“You have underground literary sources? In Colville?”
She giggled. “Okay, I got it from Lonnie, but you can’t tell anyone. One of her brothers got a whole box on his last trip to Mexico and has been selling them out of his trunk for twenty bucks a pop.”
Jasper released a low whistle as he considered the book in his hand. That kind of money was a steep price to pay for a single book, but he couldn’t pretend not to be intrigued. There’d been a lot of scandal attached to this book since its publication in the thirties, most of which had to do with indecency laws and the corruption of minors. “And you bought a copy? For us?”
She took the book back and started lovingly flipping through the pages. “Well, I would’ve snagged one with or without you, but I thought it might be a fun thing for us to do together.”
“Catherine…”
She cast him a pair of innocent eyes. “What? It’s important to be well-read. Consider it the next step in your self-driven education.”
He tsked and shook his head, though not without a slight smile. Only Catherine could turn an innocent game of reading into something that threatened to upend his whole life.
“I take that to mean you’re in?” Catherine asked eagerly.
Obviously he was in. But what he said was, “Where did you come from, Catherine Martin? Who are you?”
She purred and stretched out on the bed, interpreting his questions in the most literal way possible. “I’m a nomad, Jasper. I come from everywhere and nowhere.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I’m exactly who I look like. A girl who’s spent her whole life doing what her father tells her to.” A slight grimace touched her lips. “Just like one of his obedient little soldiers.”
Jasper looked at the cabin around them, this nest of vice and virtue, the place that would forever hold his heart, and laughed.
“What?” Catherine demanded, sitting up. “What’s so funny?”
He climbed onto the bed with her. The moment his knees touched those sheets, the smell of her came rushing over him. “You’re nothing like one of your father’s soldiers,” he said as he brushed his lips over hers. “Everything you do is an act of defiance.”
“You’re only saying that because you want another act of defiance out of me before we leave.”
He shook his head, unwilling to let her turn this moment into one of her games. Threading his fingers through hers, he said, “I’ve never known anyone who flips the world upside down as easily as you. You read the books you’re not supposed to read. You make friends with the people you’re not supposed to befriend.” He blushed and stammered a little over the next one. “You seduce the men you’re not supposed to seduce.”
She squeezed his fingers in her own. “I do, don’t I?”
“Promise me you won’t ever let anyone make you feel like you owe them anything.” He spoke with a violence that was too heated, but since when was that new? Jasper always carried extra emotion wherever he went. It followed him and bound him at the same time. “Not me, not your parents, and definitely not men like William McBride.”
“Why, Jasper Holmes. That sounds an awful lot like jealousy.”
“It’s not.” He lifted her hand to his mouth and dropped a soft kiss onto each of her fingers. “I just know how the world works. It’s designed to grind people like you under its heel.”
“And what about people like you?” she countered, her gaze fixed on each movement of his lips. “What does it do to you?”
Jasper had the answer ready. “I was ground down the day I was born. The most I can hope for is to return to the earth exactly as I came into it.”