She would leave within the hour. She’d resided within the walls of the castle not even a full week, and yet it felt as much a home as her childhood cottage in Hertfordshire.
Within the hour, she’d leave and Jasper would remain, and continue on the solitary existence he’d dwelt within for the past four years since Lydia’s death.
She rubbed a hand over her chest to ease the dull ache where her heart beat.
With a sigh, Katherine started toward the door.
The sooner she made her goodbyes, the sooner she could attempt to put back the small pieces of her broken heart and resume living.
A knock sounded on Jasper’s office door.
He frowned, and picked his head up from the ledgers. “Enter,” he barked. Jasper returned his focus to the neat column of numbers. “What is it, Wrinkleton?” he snapped. His servant knew not to enter the private sanctuary of Jasper’s office without good cause.
And Jasper had made it abundantly clear through the years—there were no good causes.
The delicate clearing of a throat, jerked his head up. Katherine stood with her arms folded behind her. She leaned against the door. “Jasper,” she said quietly.
Ink spilled from his pen, and he glanced down distractedly at the now mussed row of numbers, then back to his wife. Jasper dropped the pen down, and rose. “Katherine.”
His stomach twisted. He’d not seen her since last evening when she’d marched from his chambers draped in nothing but a white sheet. He’d tortured himself by sitting with his back against the walls separating them, the bitter sound of her tears reached to him through the plaster walls, until they’d faded from great, gasping sobs to small, shuddery gasps, and then nothing, indicating she’d at last slept.
Not Jasper.
In the end, though, his own fear of loving her had frozen him to the spot outside her chamber doors.
Rooted as he’d been to the door, he’d focused on the ormolu clock atop his fireplace as it had ticked away the minutes of the late morning hours, ushering in a new day.
Katherine caught her lower lip between her teeth as she was wont to do. She shifted on her heels but remained fixed at the entrance of the door, as though one wrong word from him and she’d take flight.
“What is—?”
“I’m leaving,” she blurted.
He blinked, certain he’d heard her wrong.
“I’m leaving,” she said again, this time stronger. Her gaze slid to a point past his shoulder. “Michael has seen the carriage readied. I…we, leave within the hour.”
Jasper’s whole body froze. He feared if he moved in the slightest, he’d splinter into a million tiny pieces of fragmented nothingness. “Leaving,” he repeated, the one word utterance hollow to his own ears.
Katherine stepped away from the door and glided toward him. “I am so very grateful to you for everything, Jasper,” she said softly. “You wed me when you didn’t need to, or want to.”
Oh, God, I did. I did want to wed you Katherine. It is everything that came after the marriage I feared.
He struggled for the words that at one time in his youth he would have been able to call up. He would have known the pretty, flowery compliments, the gentle praise to keep her at his side. Only the four years he’d spent in hell had robbed him of his ability to do so.
Jasper sat back in his seat.
Katherine carried on in a rush. “I can never repay you for what you’ve done.” A wistful smile played about her lips, so he was forced to wonder at the secrets contained within the fragile expression of mirth. “Thank you.”
She would thank him? Thank him as though he’d helped her across a puddle, or held a parasol above her head, shielding her from the sun?
Pain twisted and turned inside him. “What if I say I do not want you to leave?”
Katherine flinched at the harshly spoken question, and he knew in that moment she would turn, walk out the door, and out of his life. Oh God, if my heart is dead, what is this sharp, jagged ache tearing at the organ?
“Come, Jasper. This is your home, and I’m merely an interloper here.”
You are no interloper. You are my wife.
Tell her you bloody fool. Tell her before she leaves.
He opened his mouth.
She angled her head, as if awaiting the unspoken words he could not dredge forth. Katherine gave her head a sad little shake.
Jasper surged to his feet so quickly, his winged back chair tipped backwards. “Where will you go?”
Katherine glanced momentarily at the fallen chair. Then back to him. Her shoulders lifted in a slight shrug. “I imagined I might make my home in your townhouse in London.” A pretty pink color filled her cheeks. “That is, if you’d permit me to make my home there. I’d rather not return to my mother’s…”