“I fear you are wrong on that score, my lady.”
Katherine’s small, lithe frame stilled. Then, her arms fell to her side and hung there, awkwardly. “I don’t…” He took a step toward her. She wet her lips and went on. “I don’t…”
“You don’t what?” he said on a silken whisper. “Believe it?”
She glanced over her shoulder toward the closed door, and Jasper suspected she considered her escape. Good, Katherine, that is wise. You should turn on your heel and run as far and fast as your slippers will carry you from my miserable self. You’d have been fortunate to have any other gentleman rescue you that day at the Frost Fair.
Katherine looked back at him. “No, Jasper,” she said at last, with that same misplaced faith in him. “I don’t believe you killed your wife.”
“Oh, you would be wrong, my lady.” He reached a hand up, and captured one of those tight brown ringlets between his thumb and forefinger.
Katherine winced, as if his nearness caused her physical distress.
“Should I tell you of the blood and the screams?” he hissed.
Katherine swatted his hand away. “Stop it,” she commanded. She clamped her hands over her ears. “I do not believe you. If you do not want to wed me, then you should say as much. You shouldn’t tell these…these…great, horrific lies.” Her voice shook under the weight of her fear. It lit her eyes, and caused her lean limbs to tremble.
He circled her wrists with his hands and gently removed them from her ears. “They aren’t lies,” Jasper went on. If she wanted to wed him, then she should know what kind of monster she’d take for a husband.
Katherine’s breath came fast and heavy, as though she’d just run a good a distance. If she were wise, she would run a good distance away from this room, away from him.
She yanked her hands back, and for a brief moment he thought she might flee. He should have known better of his bold-spirited, indomitable Katherine.
She folded her arms across her chest, and tapped her foot in a fast, staccato rhythm upon the wood floor. “Well, then. Tell me the details, Jasper. I want to know. I deserve to know.”
Yes, she did. All of it.
“I loved my wife,” he said without preamble.
Katherine’s lips parted ever so slightly, and then she seemed to remember herself, and snapped them closed.
“Would you care to hear the details, Katherine?” he taunted.
Katherine’s heart froze. She reminded herself to breathe.
I loved my wife.
Of course he had. Jasper’s retreat from Society, and the private manner in which he lived his life alluded to a love for the woman who’d been his wife. But there had been no details, nothing more than suppositions—until now. The knowing somehow made the agony of his indifference all the more painful.
Did she care for the details? Why she’d rather have the lashes upon her lids plucked one at a time than hear of his love for the paragon of a woman who’d been his wife. It was selfish and wrong…but she could no more stop the ugly sentiments than she could stop from breathing.
Instead she said, “Yes, Jasper. Tell me the details.” Because I’m a glutton for pain and suffering.
“Her name was Lydia and she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen; her hair was the color of spun gold, and her eyes like the deepest, clearest blue seas.” He wandered back to the window, his carriage proudly erect and unmoving.
As he stared down into the streets below, silent and unspeaking, her heart spasmed. The image he so poetically painted of his wife, nay, Lydia—was one of a woman who’d inspired romantic words from this now cold, unfeeling Jasper. Lydia, the grand beauty, and surely a diamond of the first water. Not like Katherine with her silly brown ringlets and dull brown eyes, who would never inspire any grand sentiments in a gentleman.
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.