“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.#p#分页标题#e#
“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.
Katherine edged away from him; she leaned up on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his.
Jasper’s muscles strained the fabric of his midnight black garments, and then he took her in his arms. His mouth slanted over hers again and again; fast, hard, and furious as he tasted her lips. Theirs was not a gentle exchange but a volatile explosion of passion to rival the most violent of summer thunderstorms.
She opened her mouth and allowed him entry. His tongue slid inside, possessive and searching and she met the bold thrust and parry of his kiss.
He folded his hand around her neck, and angled her head, so he could better plunge his expert tongue into the cavern of her mouth.
Katherine moaned and the life seeped down her legs, and down her feet, until she was reduced to nothingness in his arms. He caught her to him, and anchored her against his chest.
His kiss was what drove poets to memorialize their words upon a written page and drove women to sin, and young ladies to toss aside their good name and respectability. And she took his kiss. All of it.
A gasping cry escaped her as his hand cupped her breast, the breathless sound swallowed by his mouth. His mouth left hers, and she tangled her fingers into the thick strands of his black hair and tugged, in a desperate attempt to bring his lips back to hers.#p#分页标题#e#
Her efforts proved ineffectual and he continued his quest. He kissed a path down her temple, and to the sensitive flesh where her neck met her ear.
A breathless giggle escaped her.
Jasper pulled back and glanced up at her, questioningly.
“It tickled,” she said weakly, wanting to toss her head back and shout with frustration, desperate for him to continue.
Jasper touched the tip of his finger to that sensitive patch of flesh, and then lowered his lips again to the skin there.
“Oh, Jasper,” she whispered on a breathy laugh.
“You are certain you still wish to wed me?” he asked again. The faintest hint of uncertainty underlined that question and her heart flipped at the crack in the cold veneer he’d perfected these many years.