Seven Wicked Nights (60 page)

Finally, the crowd departed in a parade of carts and he cornered Cat by the fireplace. “Where are the men?”

She threw him a look. “There are none.”

“None?”

“I’ve offered the cottages to widows and their children.”

“I see.” He kept his tone neutral. Truly, he did not particularly care if there were men living in these homes. There was another group of cottages, farther from the village but closer to the fields, which were also empty should he employ more laborers. He simply wished Cat had explained this to him privately. “Why did you not tell me of your plans?”

“When would I have done that?” Irritation flashed in her blue eyes. “I didn’t know where to find you.”

“I don’t wish—”

“I’ll not let you stand in my way, Jamie.”

He held up his hands. “I didn’t say—”

“These families have nowhere else to go. Take this cottage, for example. Mrs. Warner was reduced to stealing silk handkerchiefs to feed her children and landed in gaol. They are free now and need a new chance.”

“But—”

“You cannot come home after five years’ absence and think to take back control of everything.”

Jamie raised a brow. It was not like Cat to interrupt. Why was she so upset? He’d hardly threatened to end her project. In fact, now that he’d reflected on it, he thought her rather clever. She was wise to offer these families a means of work. And she’d inspired him with her improvements. He would see all the estate cottages refurbished for safety, especially the chimneys. It didn’t take much to start a fire raging through the village.

A part of him felt proud of her. And a tad guilty. The Cat he had known was more interested in the latest fashions than charity work. He could only assume it was loneliness that had prompted her to do so much for others.

He simply wished she had
told
him first.

“I’ve not come to argue, Cat. I have no quarrel with your project. I think allowing these families a new start is a wonderful idea.”

Relief crossed her face.

“In fact, I finally conjured an apology for you.” He smiled, hoping to set her at ease.

She held his gaze, taking time to consider her reply. “I suppose I could hear you out.”

Jamie cleared his throat. Much depended on this conversation, and he found himself oddly anxious. “Let’s ride first.”

Chapter Six

C
AT FOLLOWED HER HUSBAND
out of the village and onto the small lane. Regardless of the gray clouds overhead and mist clinging to the trees, the day felt warm and bright. She had worked hard, had made something beautiful in the village. She had brought a future to those who would not otherwise have one.

To top it off, her husband was going to apologize. Finally.

Her contentment abated step by step as she realized where Jamie was taking her. She knew this path through the flooded western field. It led to the hidden glen where they once used to meet. Flushed with excitement, giddy with first love, they had sneaked away to the glen to touch, to gossip, to dream. Those days seemed so long ago, the idyll of youth, the glory of ignorance.

How innocent they had been. How foolishly hopeful.

Jamie led the way onto the narrow path through the trees, then pulled his mount to a stop in the small meadow. Memories whipped at her like the gusts of wind trapped in the narrow valley. Cat briefly glanced around before studying her hands. She did not want to be here. She looked up to tell Jamie she wanted to talk somewhere else. Anywhere else. But he was there at her side, and his hands were on her waist, lifting her down.

She was suspended in the air for a breathless moment. His blue gaze caught hers. Something took flight in her chest, beating its impossible wings. Something that held the soaring, reaching quality of hope.

Disoriented, she placed her hands on Jamie’s shoulders. He lowered her slowly, a kind of embrace. Her feet touched the earth, but he did not remove his hands from her waist.

She did not step away, as she had that startling moment at the ladder. Was that only yesterday? Time bounced in dizzying circles. Age seventeen felt closer than the week prior.

She should maintain distance from the man who had dashed her soul against the rocks of heartbreak. She knew she should. Her heart thumped with insistence about this.

But she didn’t want to. Hope was a ridiculous thing.

“Do you remember our spot?” Light shone in Jamie’s blue eyes.

Cat bit back a smile and shook her head at him. “Of course I do. I am surprised you remember.”

“I am not so forgetful as that.” He did not take his gaze from hers as he trailed his hands up her sides. He explored the shape of her waist, her ribs, nearly touched the sides of her breasts.

She shivered everywhere, a leaf on a tree trembling in the wind.

No. She stepped back. No, she was not some small thing to be blown this way or that by the whims of her husband. She was solid. She was the tree itself. She was not dangling in the air, ready to fall with the change of the weather. She had sent her roots deep into the earth.

“You said something about an apology?” she asked.

He did not react to the harshness in her tone. His lips spread into a smile. “Patience, dear Catherine.”

A twig snapped beneath his boot as he closed the space she had taken. She could feel the heat of him. Five years was an ache to a body that knew what it was missing.

He leaned forward, but paused, his lips inches from hers. “Might I kiss you?”

He was going to make her answer.

She opened her mouth to say no, but he placed one finger over her lips.

“I want to kiss you, Cat.” His voice rumbled from deep in his chest, unguarded and unhurried. “More than anything. Please.”

She would make her own fate. She lifted her heels, arched onto her toes. The edge of his mouth was soft and warm beneath her lips. He smelled of earth, and spice, and the musk of man. Desire burned through her, left her raw and full of want.

With a smooth glide, she slid her lips across his, a tease of a kiss. She was tempted to part her lips, to take more, to finish what they had started last night.

Before she could act on that impulse, she dropped back to the earth and stepped away.

His eyes were hot on her, his cheeks hollow with hunger. He looked like he would protest, as would any starving man. But he took a large breath instead. Fed his hunger with the sighs of the green plants around them, or the whisper of memory, or some other thing she could not fathom.

He took her hand and twined his fingers around hers, as he used to do. Then he pulled her deeper into the glen, to the large oak tree at the far side. Some years earlier, he’d carved both their initials—JM + CC—in the rough bark of the trunk.

They stood together, hand in hand, solemnly facing the old tree as if the oak were the vicar reading their wedding vows. The leaves shook and rustled overhead.

“What a mess we made of things,” he murmured.

“Yes.” Jamie’s hand had shaken that morning at the altar. Now, it was steady in hers.

“We lost something we didn’t even know how to value.” He slanted her a glance from the corner of his eyes, slung his next words straight at her heart. “I truly did love you.”

Her chin jerked down in a nod and sorrow grabbed hold of her, twisted her features into the useless, ugly face of regret. Letting go of his hand, she bent and tugged at a stem of purple mallow.

The flower stalk left a trail of green on her riding gloves. She pulled off her gloves and dug her bare hands into the yellow hawkbit hiding in the thick autumn grass. A few leaves, tinged with brown, had already fallen. “I loved you too, Jamie.” She spoke the words to the earth, to the leaves.

“We talk about the past.” His voice was solid and without embarrassment. It drew her eyes up to where he leaned against the oak tree.

“Five years
is
in the past.”

“Do you think it is lost?” He did not ask if she still loved him. She was glad for that, for she feared the answer, and the vulnerability it would bring to her heart.

“Some part of it is lost, yes. We can never go back to being the same people.”

“But we are the same people.” The edges of his lips tilted up. “I thought we established that last night.”

Cat didn’t reply. She sat on the grass and gathered more flowers, then braided the yellow hawkbit and purple mallow together. One bit twisted around the other until they were solidly bound. Together, the flowers made an entirely new creation. She ought to make a wreath for her hair, something pretty and cheerful. “After you left, I would come here to cry.”

Jamie’s boots appeared by the hem of her skirts. When he dropped to her side, she let him haul her into his arms. “I feel terrible that I ever hurt you like that, Cat.”

Cat closed her eyes and felt the warmth of his body, the living energy thrumming beneath his skin. She had missed this man. Had mourned his absence. “I know I hurt you as well. I have regretted my actions terribly. But I did apologize at once.” His hand lay on her leg, by her knee. He had removed his gloves and his fingers looked long and tan, colored by a foreign sun. “I feel like you chose every day to be away from me, Jamie. Every day you woke up and decided not to come home.”

“It wasn’t like that.” His sigh came from deep in his chest.

“What was it like, then?”

“Traveling wasn’t so much a choice as it was a habit. It just became what I did. I was always on the move to the next port, the next adventure. Once I was gone, it was simply easier to stay away. I didn’t know how to come back and face everything.”

A puny excuse if she’d ever heard one. As if drawn by a magnet, her anger centered on his hand, there by her knee. She leaned forward, ostensibly to reach a patch of mallow, but truly to remove his offensive, tanned appendage from her person. “Did you even think of me? Of what my life must be like?”

His hand slipped from her leg. “All the time.”

“Why did you never write?”

She could feel the shift of his body as he subtly drew away from her as well. “I did get reports on you.”

Reports? “So you sent your spies to watch me? What did they tell you?”

“That you seldom returned to London. That you were quiet.”

“Lonely.” She hadn’t had the heart to go back to London. Not after the scandal she’d caused.

“I never wanted you to be lonely.” Sadness marked his voice. He pulled her back against his chest. “I thought about you all the time.”

Cat started to push away from him again, but he stilled her motions with the band of his arm. “Please, let me hold you.”

With a sigh, she leaned back against him. He pulled off her riding hat and she rested her head on his chest. Still, she did not understand. “How could you have thought about me and yet not thought to return?”

“I don’t know how to explain. It’s not a this or that kind of thing.” Jamie leaned to the side. He took her chin in his hand and tilted her face up. “I apologize for being gone so long, Cat. I am full of shame that I did not write. From the depths of my being, I apologize.”

“Thank you.” Her voice was a bare whisper. She’d been waiting for this moment for years. Why, then, did it feel so empty? No, not empty. Aching. Raw.

“I want us to be married.” His eyes searched hers. Emotion bracketed the firm line of his mouth. “I would like the future we once dreamed of together. With children, and travel, and a long life together.”

“It’s not so simple.” She turned in his arms so she faced him.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. It’s just…too much has happened between us. You hurt me terribly. We hurt
each other
terribly.”

“I’d like to put the past behind us. To perhaps start over.”

She looked at him a long time. “Start over?”

“Yes, like your families.” With a wide sweep of his arm he indicated the path back to the cottage. “I think we should both vow to forgive each other.”

“How?” She recognized the coldness around her heart. She did not know if she could ever forgive him.

“What’s done is done. In many ways, it is dead.”

“It is hardly dead,” she scoffed. “It is braided into our past. We don’t get to pick and choose which memories shape us more than others.”

“But neither should we dwell on the worst of them. There were plenty of happy moments as well, both before our wedding and after.”

He made it sound impossibly simple. “How am I to trust you not to hurt me again?”

His shoulders dropped with a heavy sigh. “I am not going to spend five years traveling the world again, Cat. I can promise you that.”

“But you could still leave me. You could go to London, or take a mistress, or retreat into the far corners of your mind.”

“I don’t want any of those things.”

“But what if you simply want to feel this way because it is more convenient? After all, you do require an heir.”

He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and bent to whisper against her cheek. “I have wanted you since you were sixteen and came to my mother’s picnic, twirling your new parasol. You must believe that.”

He wanted her, but did he still love her?

She pushed the thought aside and considered the shaded notch in the forest. Green, green, everything inconceivably green. Living things bustled with the business of living, no matter that winter lay around the corner.