For Love of the Duke (The Heart of a Duke Book 2) (37 page)

The servant knocked. “Not now.” Jasper’s booming command bounced off the walls of the carriage. He returned his attention to Katherine. “You terrified me, Katherine. From the moment your hand touched mine as I pulled you from the Thames, our lives became inextricably intertwined in ways I fought.” Jasper sucked in a deep breath, as though he’d run a great distance. “I could not allow myself to believe I cared for you, because I could not bear the thought of losing you.”

As he’d lost Lydia.

And then Katherine had gone and left Jasper, too. Oh God, how had she left him? Even as it had been an attempt to protect herself, she’d wrought this great hurt upon him.

“Jasper,” she said brokenly. “I should have never left you.” She should have stayed and fought for him, even if it had been a ghost she’d been left to battle for Jasper’s heart.

He must have seen something in her eyes for he reached across the carriage and cupped her cheek in his hand, angling her face toward his. “You thought me incapable of loving you because of Lydia, but…” He closed his eyes a moment. When he opened them, her heart twisted at the raw emotion there. “But the truth is, Katherine, you had my heart since the moment your water-drenched ringlets broke the surface of the Thames.” He leaned across the seat and rested his brow against hers. “I saved you that day, Katherine. But the truth,” he shook his head gently back and forth, “the truth is you saved me.” His words washed over her, and emotion clogged her throat. “You made me to feel and dream and love again.”

Tears filled her eyes, until his dear face blurred before her. She blinked back the blasted droplets.

Then his words registered.

Love
.

Another knock sounded on the carriage door.

“For the love of God, I said not now, man,” Jasper barked. He looked back at Katherine. “With my unwillingness to let you into my life and love you as you deserve to be loved, I drove you away. I’m asking you to forget Stanhope. Forget the gowns of vibrant shades. Forget this. Forget all of this, and come back to me. Please. I love you, Katherine.”

The faint muscle at the corner of his eye twitched, the one indication of how very much that speech had cost Jasper.

Love for him coursed through her, potent and powerful.

“Katherine…”

She leaned across the carriage seat and kissed him. Her lips found his in an achingly sweet meeting of two lovers who’d at last found each other. Katherine pulled away. She placed a kiss at the corner of his eye, where that muscle throbbed.

“Without you, none of this means anything, Jasper. Not the gowns. The mindless amusements.”

“And Stanhope?” he asked, his voice gruff.

She shook her head. “Has always been and will only ever be, a friend, Jasper.” She touched two fingers to his mouth. “You are all I want. All I need. I will give up everything I have, all I am for you. I love you."

His throat bobbed up and down. “And you’ll never again leave me.”

Katherine knew he spoke of more than the mere parting of the now. She ran her finger over his lip. “And I will never again leave you,” she pledged.

“Oh, Katherine,” he whispered and gently pulled her onto his lap, folding his arms about her.

And there, in the confines of the carriage, as Jasper took her in his arms, Katherine realized how very wrong her sister Aldora and her friends had been.

Katherine didn’t need the heart of a duke.

She only needed the heart of
this
duke.

Epilogue

Hertfordshire

9 months later

An endless scream ripped through the walls of the modest farmhouse.

Jasper sat perched at the edge of his seat, head buried in his hands. They should have remained in London. Instead, Katherine had insisted she see out the remainder of her confinement in Hertfordshire.

Jasper cursed, wishing he’d never purchased the country cottage her father had gambled away, because then they’d be in London where there were surely better midwives than…

“Ahh, God!”

He pressed the backs of his hands against his eye and fought the overwhelming urge to cast up the nonexistent accounts of his stomach.

A hand settled on his arm. “She’ll do fine, Bainbridge.”

Jasper’s bleary gaze shot up angrily at his brother-in-law, Lord Michael Knightly, and he prepared to tell the other man just what he thought of his empty words.

Knightly opened his mouth to speak when Katherine’s guttural moan reached through the door.

Jasper leapt to his feet and began to pace across the thin runner that ran along the hardwood floor.

For seven long hours, Katherine had labored to bring their child into this world. All the darkest nightmares that had haunted him, tortured him, tormented him, played out with her every moan, her every cry, her every groan, until he feared he’d go mad.

He should have never touched her. His seed was poison.

If she died, he could not carry on. It would destroy him.

Knightly reached over and placed a staying hand on his arm. “She is a strong woman. I promise you, she will be all right.”

Knightly spoke as a man whose wife had delivered first Lizzie, and more recently their second babe, a full-cheeked boy with thick black curls. He didn’t know the agony of holding one’s wife as she…

“For Christ’s sake,” Jasper hissed and strode to the chamber doors.

Another cry split the quiet of the cottage, just as he pressed the handle of the door.

The thick, graying doctor stood alongside Katherine’s mother and Aldora. The trio stared slack-jawed with shock at his appearance.

It was the doctor who spoke. “Your Grace, you should not…”

Jasper glared the older man into silence. He would have to drag his dead, lifeless fingers from this room before he again left Katherine’s bedside. “Get out,” he ordered everyone present. They exchanged a look.

“It is fine,” a far too-weak voice called from the bed.

His gaze sought Katherine’s, and his heart plummeted to his stomach. He dimly registered the bloody sawbones and the countess taking their leave. Then the door closed.

Katherine’s hair hung in damp, strands about her waist and shoulders while her cheeks remained flushed red from her exertions.

“What are you doing here?” she said with far more stoic calm than he’d have imagined possible considering the pain he’d heard in her earlier screams.

Then her face contorted, and she sucked in a long, slow breath, letting it out slowly.

Jasper strode over to her bedside. He pointed a finger at her. “I forbid you to die, Katherine. Do you hear me? I absolutely forbid it. You promised to never leave me.”

She bit her lower lip as another shudder of agony wracked her frame. With a slow, steady breath, she regained her composure. “I’m not going to leave you, Jasper. I’m too stubborn to die.”

He thought of her flailing, fighting figure as he’d pulled her out of the Thames River over a year ago. No, there was no stronger woman than his Katherine.

Jasper sank down to his knees beside her bed and captured her hand. “Promise me, Katherine. I…I need you to promise me.”

She touched her free hand to his head. “I will not die,” she said with such conviction, he dared to believe her. Katherine closed her eyes, and her fingers tightened hard about his hand.

Jasper winced from the strength of her grip.

“Jasper?”

“Yes, Katherine?”

“Will you please send for my mother and Aldora? I believe the babe is coming.”

His gut clenched, and he surged to his feet so quickly he nearly toppled backwards. He steadied himself, and raced to the door, knocking into a rose-inlaid side table.

Jasper wrenched the door open.

The doctor rushed inside, having clearly, and accurately, anticipated he would be needed.

“It should not be much longer, Your Grace,” the doctor assured him, even as Katherine’s mother and Aldora secured their spots alongside the bed. “If you’ll wait—”

“No,” Jasper bit out. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And he didn’t. He remained for the next thirty minutes as Katherine labored to bring their child into the world. He remained when her voice turned hoarse from the strength of her cries.

And he remained when his son came squalling and angry into the world, as fat as a cherub with a shock of brown curls atop his head.

And later, when no one remained but Katherine, Jasper, and their babe, Jasper lay curled up at his wife’s side, and studied the glassy-eyed boy with big-cheeks, who clutched at his finger.

Katherine leaned into Jasper, and angled her head up, looking at him through tired but contented eyes.

“Are you happy?” she whispered.

Jasper smiled. For the first time, in forever… “I am.”

The End

Author’s Note

In the years between 1309 to 1814, the Thames River froze 23 times, in a period noted as a Little Ice Age. The Frost Fairs, a kind of Christmas market and circus, took place during this Little Ice Age. One could purchase food and drink, such as tea and coffee, but alcohol tended to be the main beverage purchased at the Frost Fairs. In addition, bowling, bull-baiting, sledging, and various other activities took place upon the ice.

The Frost Fair also served as an economic benefit to English merchants and vendors who relied upon the Thames River to transport goods and supplies. Unable to ship goods due to the severe ice, the English merchants were able to rent space and sell goods upon the Thames.

In February 1814, The Times reported that no lives were lost on the parts of weak ice on the Thames River at this particular Frost Fair, but that several individuals were immersed when the ice gave way.

Lady Katherine Adamson, though fictional, was intended to be one of those retrieved with some difficulty from the frozen waters.

Biography

Christi Caldwell is the USA Today bestselling author of historical romance novels set in the Regency era. Christi blames Judith McNaught's "Whitney, My Love," for luring her into the world of historical romance. While sitting in her graduate school apartment at the University of Connecticut, Christi decided to set aside her notes and try her hand at writing romance. She believes the most perfect heroes and heroines have imperfections and rather enjoys tormenting them before crafting a well-deserved happily ever after!

When Christi isn’t writing the stories of flawed heroes and heroines, she can be found in her Southern Connecticut home chasing around her feisty six-year-old son, and caring for twin princesses-in-training!

Visit
www.christicaldwellauthor.com
to learn more about what Christi is working on, or join her on Facebook at Christi Caldwell Author, and Twitter @ChristiCaldwell

Other Books by Christi Caldwell

“Winning a Lady’s Heart”

A Danby Novella

Author's Note: This is a novella that was originally available in A Summons From The Castle (The Regency Christmas Summons Collection). It is being published as an individual novella.

For Lady Alexandra, being the source of a cold, calculated wager is bad enough...but when it is waged by Nathaniel Michael Winters, 5th Earl of Pembroke, the man she's in love with, it results in a broken heart, the scandal of the season, and a summons from her grandfather--the Duke of Danby.

To escape Society's gossip, she hurries to her meeting with the duke, determined to put memories of the earl far behind. Except the duke has other plans for Alexandra...plans which include the 5th Earl of Pembroke!