For Love of the Duke (The Heart of a Duke Book 2) (17 page)

She sank into the nearest seat, an overstuffed King Louis chair.

Jasper glanced over his shoulder and ran a disinterested stare over her still form. “I courted her. I fell in love with her. The kind of love those foolish poets write of.”

Oh God, why did her heart crack in the manner it did? She swallowed past a swell of emotion in her throat.

He carried on. There was no need for questions or prodding on her part. Jasper had retreated to that place inside himself he’d dwelt since she’d first met him at the Frost Fair.

“She loved London, and I, once upon a lifetime ago, also loved London. I was so very comfortable, there.”

Something else she’d not known of him. She’d believed his absence from London these years had been because he’d detested the overcrowded, dirty, gossip-driven glittery world. No, his self-imposed exile had been motivated of his love for Lydia.

Katherine gripped the corners of her seat. It would appear they had even less in common than she’d ever believed.

Jasper gave his head the slightest shake. “The day I learned Lydia was with child, I insisted we retreat to my holdings in the country. And those eight months were the happiest of my life.”

Oh, God surely he could detect the loud cracking of her heart. Why? Why would the blasted organ splinter apart if she weren’t in love with him? She could not love him. Not this…stranger who still mourned his dead, paragon of a wife.

Jasper went on. “It was a Sunday when she felt a tightening pain. I insisted she rest. I sent round for a doctor but continued to carry on with the estates business while she suffered in the solitary confines of her own chambers.” His face contorted in such unguarded grief, Katherine dropped her gaze. “That is the kind of man you’d wed.”

“What happened?” Did that whisper belong to her?

His fiery gaze flew to hers. “Would you care for the details, Katherine?”

She shook her head quickly. “N…”

“The doctor summoned me.”

His eyes took on a faraway look of a man who’d come close to the fiery pits of hell and had been forever scorched by its flames. “Would you hear how she screamed for three long days, until her voice went hoarse and then silent from the bloody shouts of terror and agony that ravaged her throat?”

Katherine again shook her head. “No…” She cried, and surged to her feet, filled with an image of him beside his wife as she fought to birth their child.

“Or would you have me tell you of how with her last gasping breath she gave life to a small, blue babe?”

A muscle ticked in the corner of his eye, and his hard visage blurred before her. She dashed a hand across her eyes, realizing she cried for the agony he’d known, for the loss of his love, and for the tiny babe. Katherine angrily swiped at the mementos of despair; Jasper would not welcome her pity.

As she expected, his gaze momentarily fell to her tear-stained cheeks, and when he looked back at her, a stiff, macabre grin turned his lips.

“Or would you rather I tell you of how I held that babe, who struggled to breath for two days, sucking in raspy gasps for air?”

She closed her eyes at the heart-rending image he painted.

“Would you hear of how he turned into me, and then drew his last breath?”

Katherine struggled to swallow around the enormous lump of pain that clogged her throat. She forced her gaze to Jasper’s. He stood stock-still, the harsh angles of his face etched in grief, as though the moments of years past were as fresh as if they’d just transpired.

In that moment, confronting the depth of her feelings for this man, Katherine realized if she could bring back Lydia and that small, nameless babe, she’d relinquish him…even if that meant he’d never been there to save her at the Frost Fair. “I am so sorry, Jasper.” She willed him to hear the depth of sincerity in those five words.

His square jaw flexed. “You and Society, wonder if I killed my wife.” His long-legged stride closed the distance between them. He stopped at the foot of her chair, so she was forced to crane her head back to look at him. “And the truth is, I did, Katherine. I killed her as surely as if I’d put a pistol to her.”

Katherine surged to her feet. “You didn’t,” her voice shook with emotion. She reached a hand up and touched his cheek. As though the pain of his loss had not been great enough, he’d had to contend with Society’s jeering whispers and horrid accusations. The Mad Duke, they called him. His only madness had been in loving so very much.

He flinched at her touch, and she dropped it back to her side with humiliated rejection.

“Would you still wed me, Katherine? Would you wed me, knowing I’m a monster?”

She studied him; her heart squeezing.
Oh, Jasper
. He’d loved so very much, it had turned him into this black, empty shell of a man. She could no sooner turn and walk away from him than she could cut her hand from her own person. “I would,” she said softly.

Jasper’s eyes locked with hers; the dark black of his green irises moved over her face. Then, he dropped his brow to hers. “Then you are a fool,” he said on a harsh whisper.

Perhaps, she was. But the moment his hand had closed around her wrist, and he’d pulled her gasping and desperate from the frozen waters of the Thames, their lives had become irrevocably connected, and she’d become his, as he was hers.

She wrapped her arms around his massive frame and turned her cheek into his chest. Katherine detected the hard, rapid beat of his heart. It thumped hard against the wall of his chest, the muted beat muffled by her ear. His arms hung by his side, and then he raised them ever so slightly, as if to enfold her in his embrace. But then he let them fall back down.

Katherine edged away from him; she leaned up on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his.

Jasper’s muscles strained the fabric of his midnight black garments, and then he took her in his arms. His mouth slanted over hers again and again; fast, hard, and furious as he tasted her lips. Theirs was not a gentle exchange but a volatile explosion of passion to rival the most violent of summer thunderstorms.

She opened her mouth and allowed him entry. His tongue slid inside, possessive and searching and she met the bold thrust and parry of his kiss.

He folded his hand around her neck, and angled her head, so he could better plunge his expert tongue into the cavern of her mouth.

Katherine moaned and the life seeped down her legs, and down her feet, until she was reduced to nothingness in his arms. He caught her to him, and anchored her against his chest.

His kiss was what drove poets to memorialize their words upon a written page and drove women to sin, and young ladies to toss aside their good name and respectability. And she took his kiss. All of it.

A gasping cry escaped her as his hand cupped her breast, the breathless sound swallowed by his mouth. His mouth left hers, and she tangled her fingers into the thick strands of his black hair and tugged, in a desperate attempt to bring his lips back to hers.

Her efforts proved ineffectual and he continued his quest. He kissed a path down her temple, and to the sensitive flesh where her neck met her ear.

A breathless giggle escaped her.

Jasper pulled back and glanced up at her, questioningly.

“It tickled,” she said weakly, wanting to toss her head back and shout with frustration, desperate for him to continue.

Jasper touched the tip of his finger to that sensitive patch of flesh, and then lowered his lips again to the skin there.

“Oh, Jasper,” she whispered on a breathy laugh.

“You are certain you still wish to wed me?” he asked again. The faintest hint of uncertainty underlined that question and her heart flipped at the crack in the cold veneer he’d perfected these many years.

Was he mad? His hot touch fueled the dreams of him, and their future, a future where those kisses were not mere kisses, where he showed her the truth behind every last secret she’d wondered of between a man and woman.

She cupped his cheek, and leaned up. “There isn’t another man I’d rather wed.”

His gaze seared her, bore through hers with a staggering intensity, and with a foolishness more reserved for a naïve debutante, Katherine waited with suspended breath for him to utter like words.

The words however, did not come.

Instead…

He nodded curtly. “Very well. We shall wed within the week.”

Jasper stepped away from her, sketched a hasty bow, and stormed from the door as though a fire had been set to the parlor.

Katherine stared at the empty doorway long after he’d left. She folded her arms across her chest and hugged herself tight. Jasper could not be clearer than if he’d committed the words to paper, that his interest in her was of a practical nature. There were no intoxicating feelings and desperate longings where he was concerned—not for her. Perhaps all those volatile emotions had been buried with his Lydia.

Her nails dug into the exposed skin of her forearms.

Only…his kiss, his touch made her dare to dream, dare to believe that he would eventually come to care for her, as she cared for him.

A knock sounded at the door, and Katherine looked blankly at the entrance as her sister peeked her head in. A wide smile wreathed Anne’s porcelain fine cheeks. “Hullo.” She peered around the room as if to ascertain Katherine was alone. “May I come in?”

Katherine nodded, grateful for her twin’s presence.

Anne entered, and closed the door behind her. “Mother is livid.”

Katherine considered Mother’s vile charges when Jasper had arrived earlier. Mother should be ashamed, more than anything else.

Anne tugged Katherine over to the plush, powder-blue velvet upholstered sofa. “Sit,” she commanded as if speaking to a small child.

Katherine smiled weakly up at her sister. Though a handful of minutes older, Anne had never really
seemed
the older of the two. Always ready with a smile, Anne always landed them, in any number of troublesome situations. In this moment, however, with her serious expression and calm demeanor, she was very certainly the elder sister. “Well, when I proposed we find you a husband to save you from that horrid Mr. Ekstrom, I never once imagined you’d find someone who could be far worse.”

Katherine shook her head. “No, Anne. He’s…he’s…”

Anne’s brow wrinkled. “He’s what?”

Brave. Hurting. Strong. “He’s a good man,” she finished lamely.

Anne sat back in the folds of the sofa. “He’s a very severe gentleman. I should like my gentleman to smile a good deal and not be so serious like the duke.” A long sigh slipped past Anne’s bow-shaped lips. “I could never despise anyone who would save you in such a heroic manner as the duke did. But beyond that, there seems little to recommend him.” She wrinkled her nose. “Though that
is
a very high recommendation.”

One time when Katherine and Anne had been girls of just seven or eight years, they’d been traipsing through the woods of their father’s estate. They’d come upon a red fox; its front leg had been caught in a snare, and hopelessly broken and bloodied. The creature’s lip had pulled back as it snapped and snarled.

Katherine bit the inside of her cheek to keep from explaining that Jasper was that scared, hurt fox. She loved her sister and trusted her implicitly but still could not betray Jasper’s privacy in telling of his past.

“You mustn’t wed him unless you wish to,” Anne continued. “It shan’t be easy with the holiday nearly upon us, but we must find someone to rescue you from both Mr. Ekstrom and the Duke of…”

“I asked him to marry me, Anne.”

Her quietly spoken words brought her sister up short. Anne’s eyes widened in her face, giving her the look of a night owl. She opened her mouth, but Katherine interrupted her.

“I could not wed Mr. Ekstrom, and the duke, he will be good to me. He will allow me my freedoms and…” Her words trailed off, because beyond that, she wasn’t altogether certain what type of marriage they would have. There certainly would be none of the grand love he’d known with his last wife.

Anne drummed her finger over the arm of the sofa. “I must say when I dreamed of the heart of a duke for the both of us, I had a far different vision than you married to that beas…er, gentleman,” she amended when Katherine shot her a reproachful look.

And, sitting there, if Katherine were being entirely truthful, even with just herself, she could admit that she too had longed for something more than a marriage of convenience.

~16~

When Katherine’s father, the Earl of Wakefield had died, a heavy pall hung like the thickest rain cloud upon their household. Shortly after she’d learned of his sudden death, she’d been seated in his office, perched on the edge of a leather winged-back chair, with the ormolu clock atop the fireplace mantle tick-tocking a steady beat. She still remembered the emptiness of that dark day.

Standing at the center of that same room, Katherine considered how very like that day was to this, her wedding day. She stole a sideways peek up at Jasper. Attired in his customary black jacket, black breeches, stark white waistcoat, and gleaming black Hessians, with his too-long black strands of hair shoved back behind his ears, he put Katherine in mind of that fallen angel Lucifer, cast from the gates of Heaven.

His
shoulders stiffened, as if he felt her stare upon his person, but his gaze remained trained on the small vicar officiating the services.

Her gaze slid away, over to the spot her mother and Anne occupied upon the brown, Italian leather sofa. They sat, with like expressions of pained regret carved upon their faces.

“Madam,” Jasper bit out.

Katherine jumped, and heat flooded her cheeks as she realized the time had come to recite vows which would forever bind her to this dark, near stranger. Her mouth grew dry as the implications of this vow registered. In wedding Jasper, she’d forever be tied to him. The buried hopes she’d only just now acknowledged surfaced, with images of a gentleman who loved her and read poetry to her while their children played at their feet.

She sprung forward on her feet, feeling much like a bird poised for flight.