For Love of the Duke(68)

“I swore to never again celebrate, not just the Christmastide season, Katherine, but anything. It seemed an insignificant sacrifice to make in terms of what I’d done.”

Katherine suspected she might look upon the holiday season with such seething resentment if she were to experience the kind of loss known by Jasper. If she were to lose her own husband…her throat worked reflexively at the tortured imaginings of a world without Jasper. In a short span of time, he’d come to mean so very much to her. Her eyes worked a path across his face. She detected the faint muscle that twitched at the corner of his eye. “You didn’t do anything, Jasper. Lydia’s death, it was not your fault.”

He dropped the branches. They fell with a soft thump into the snow. His mouth twisted in an empty smile. “I killed her because of my desires to continue the Bainbridge line.”

Katherine moved close and took his hands in hers. His body stiffened, and even through the fabric of their gloves, her skin warmed at the contact of his touch. She squeezed his hands. “It is illogical for you to blame yourself. Of course you would have had a family with Lydia.” A pained ache tugged at Katherine’s heart as the momentary dream of a babe flitted across her consciousness. She looked at their connected fingers. “You blame yourself because you love her.” Even now. “And would do anything to bring her back, but living a life devoid of all happiness will not do that, Jasper. It will only remind you of that horrid day of her death, and the dark days to follow. It doesn’t allow you to celebrate the years of joy you knew as her husband, and the love you carry in your heart, for her.”

Jasper pulled his hand free and flexed his fingers as though he’d been repulsed by her touch. “If I hadn’t gotten my child upon her, then…” His words ended on a harsh whisper.

Katherine tilted her head back and studied the thick grayish-white winter sky. Snowflakes danced and fluttered down, and she raised a finger to capture one of those elusive flakes. A fat snowflake landed upon her glove and quickly dissolved into a small bead of water. Here a moment, gone the next. So very delicate and fragile.

Katherine folded her arms and burrowed into the folds of her cloak. “You mustn’t blame yourself, Jasper.”



For years, Jasper had been besieged by nothing but despair at this time of year as it marked another passage in time of Lydia’s absence from this earth. Now, guilt of an altogether different kind filled him. At some point since he’d pulled Katherine from the Thames, the ache in his heart for the loss of Lydia had dulled, and lifted.

Katherine spoke and her words pulled him from the thick, quagmire of guilt he slogged through. “Do you know, I hate London,” she said.

Jasper hated London, but it hadn’t always been that way. There’d been a time when he’d been more comfortable in London at the height of a Season, than anywhere else.

“My family had a property in Hertfordshire. Mother found it too provincial and quite detested our visits there. Father enjoyed the hunting. And I,” she glanced over at him, “I enjoyed every aspect of it. Lush green, rolling hills. Magnificently tall trees made for great big swings. I would sit upon this wide, wooden swing and read Byron’s poems. They were so very romantic and beautiful and I loved them with an innocent heart. ” She painted such a beautiful, bucolic image, Jasper wanted to join in her memory of simpler times.

He said nothing in response, instead trying to follow along with her disjointed thoughts.

“As I told you before, Father gambled away everything.”

The muscles in Jasper’s stomach tightened at the reminder of her wastrel father’s ill-regard for a young Katherine and her family.

“He lost the cottage in Hertfordshire,” she said quietly. “The last night we lived in that cottage, I took one of Cook’s knives and etched my initials into the wood frame of my bedroom door.” A woeful smile curved her lips. “I wept from the moment I learned we would be forced to surrender the property in Hertfordshire until the day we departed, never to return.”

Jasper imagined his strong, beautiful Katherine, with a knife, carving away at her bedroom door as her shoulders shook from the force of her sobbing. His eyes slid closed. There was a special place in hell reserved for cowardly bastards who left their families destitute. And when Jasper joined Katherine’s father in the bowels of hell, he’d punish him for having ever reduced her to tears.

Jasper reached out and brushed the back of his knuckles across the satiny smoothness of her cheek.

His touch seemed to draw her from the pained remembrance of that moment. “Then the creditors collected my books.”