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.#p#分页标题#e#
“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.#p#分页标题#e#
Katherine’s hair hung in damp, strands about her waist and shoulders while her cheeks remained flushed red from her exertions.