For Love of the Duke(47)
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.