The Scandalous Love of a Duke (36 page)

He looked at Katherine. Her head rested on the white pillow, her skin was paler, if that were possible. She’d lost a lot of blood.

Loose blonde curls framed her face and her light brown eyelashes rested on her pale cheeks. She’d been bathed and dressed in a nightgown.

She’d have scars to remind them both of this, scars which would remind him he’d failed her.

He moved a chair beside her bed as his mother told him all the doctor had said.

The child seemed unharmed and Katherine was to have fluid whenever she roused. It all washed over him. He just wished her to open her eyes and speak.

Sitting, he took up his vigil. “You may go, Mama, I’ll stay.”

“You need not sit with her alone, John.” Edward had probably already reported John’s earlier tantrum.

“I would prefer it, Mama, she probably cannot hear me but there are things I wish to say.”

His mother nodded then, and leant to press a kiss on his forehead, her fingers brushing his cheek. “She’ll get well.”
If there was any justice in the world…
He was not convinced.

He looked at Katherine. The door clicked shut.

John gripped Katherine’s fingers, which had been resting on the covers. His thumb stroking across her palm, he pictured the colour of her eyes, fiery with anger and then bright with need in the light of the tower room.
Katherine.
“I’m sorry. I’ll not hold you away again. I am going to change.
Live
and help me change…”

He closed his eyes and leant on the bed, pressing her cold fingers against his brow as he prayed, making a deal with God. He’d give up everything, anything, for her.

~

“John, you have to eat. Katherine would tell you the same,” his mother pressed.

“I am not hungry.” John’s eyes stayed on Katherine. He’d spent hours during the night pleading and begging with God to let her wake, to let her live. Nothing had changed.

There was a knock.

“Enter,” his mother called.

“I’ve brought you some plum cake and coffee, John.” It was Mary. “I knew you would refuse to come down.” She set the tray she carried on a chest at the bedside. “Has she changed?”

“Her colour is better.” He glanced up, but only for an instant.

Mary smiled. Sympathy and concern in her eyes. “Phillip is downstairs, he only just received Papa’s note. He wishes to see her.”

John looked back again. “Send him up.”

As Mary left, John squeezed Katherine’s fingers gently, then let go and stood. He moved to poor some coffee. That he was glad of, it would keep him awake.

Phillip looked shocked and pale when he came in. “I only just heard… How did it happen?” He took the chair John had vacated, lifting Katherine’s fingers, and then he kissed them, his hand shaking.

“I’ll leave you alone,” John’s mother said.

John was looking at Phillip when the door shut. “Do you want anything…” John indicated the tray.

Phillip shook his head. “Just tell me how?”

John explained Wareham’s past and then told Phillip about the note, and where and how he’d found Katherine. Then he spoke of her injury.

“What was she doing there?”

“My mother and aunt left her at an orphanage she’d decided to sponsor. The groom accompanying her was tricked into leaving her alone. Wareham must have been following her. I should have realised he might go after Katherine.” His coffee cup was empty. John set it down. “I cannot bear the thought of losing her. I don’t even care what happens to Wareham… let him rot in a jail.”

“She’s a fighter,” Phillip responded. “She will survive, if only to make your life hell for putting her through this.”

A laugh cracked from John’s throat, a broken sound of pain. Instantly Katherine groaned and moved to sit up, her hand slipping from Phillip’s.

Within a moment, John was beside the bed, leaning past Phillip and resting his fingers on her clavicle, gently pressing her back. “Katherine stay still, you have been hurt.”

When she lay back on the pillow, his hand dropped to take hers. Her fingers tightened about his grip and his heart beat harder with relief, and hope, and love, as his thumb brushed her hand.

Her eyelids flickered open.

“Katherine.” He smiled, but then it slipped as he remembered the last time they’d spoken and all that had happened since.
What must she think of me?

“My shoulder hurts.”

“I know, darling. The bullet hit you. You have stitches. It tore right through your shoulder. You will need to take it easy for a long while.”

He could see her memory returning, flashing behind her eyes. “Where am I?”

“Home.
Safe.
Wareham is gone and Phillip is here.”

Tears glittered in her eyes as she looked beyond John for her brother. Of course she wished to see her brother over
him
. Phillip had never let her down.

“Katherine,” Phillip leant forwards, John straightened and stepped back, letting her hand go once more so Phillip might take it.

She reached out. “Phillip.”

“John and I have let you down. I knew about Wareham, too, Kate, he’d been stealing from John. We should have told you…” Foolish that Phillip had no hesitation in honesty and apology with his sister, when John thought himself stronger and had been unable to speak to her with any honesty for months. When he had finally done so, he’d walked out rather than hear her advice. He’d never liked being challenged; it was another scar his grandfather had cut.

I am arrogant
. He did not deserve this open-hearted woman.

John saw her hold Phillip’s hand tighter. “Mr Wareham said he is my father. Do you think he is? Why would he—”
Good God, that would make them cousins… It—

“He lied.” There was anger in Phillip’s response as he silenced both Katherine and John’s thoughts. “He can only have said it to be cruel. Do not believe it.”

Phillip knew who her father was
,
John would swear it. His voice had held too much conviction. John watched them. Certain he was right. But Phillip had always said no one knew.

John glanced at Katherine, frowning. She’d not noticed Phillip’s odd reaction.

“I must go, Kate, I’m sorry.” Phillip stood and then leant to kiss Katherine’s forehead. “I’ll come back soon. Do as John says and rest.”

John moved out of the way, but he was dumbfounded by Phillip’s sudden haste. He’d not long come.

Phillip said goodbye, shaking John’s hand, then his heels echoed on the wooden floor, as John turned to Katherine, unsure what to do or say.

“I’m sorry, John.” Just like her brother the expression of emotion came easily to her. She cried then.

He sat beside her and held her hand, while his other wiped her tears away. “You have nothing to be sorry for.” He lifted her hand, kissed it and then pressed the back against his cheek.

“I should have known you dismissed him for a reason, but I felt sorry for him. I didn’t think…” She started crying again.

His thumb stroked her hand. “It is not your fault. You asked me at The Place, and here, and I did not tell you. I did not wish to. You are my escape. I came to you in Ashford to get away from my arguments with Wareham, and my duties.”

Unable to look at her, John’s head bowed with the weight of guilt and he held the back of her fingers to his forehead. “I used you, I suppose, Katherine, terribly. It is I who am sorry, sorrier than I can ever say.” He looked back up and faced the blue eyes which had enchanted him from the moment of their first reunion.

“I should have told you why I laid him off when you asked me. What you said the night before last was right, my life is like a Chinese cabinet with a hundred different drawers, I open and shut them depending on where I am and who I am with and what face or knowledge I am to display to the world. I do not put you away and forget you, but yes, I have tried to hide you in a drawer in my life. You are precious to me. You have been from the beginning. I did not want to share what we have with anyone else, so I hid it. But I heard what you said.” Her eyes implied she did not believe him. “I promise you, Katherine.”

“I went to an orphanage—”

“I know.”

“I liked it.” Her eyes lifted to the canopy above the bed. “I am going to work there, in the day when you are not here.” She glanced back at him. “The children have so much love to give, John, and they need someone to give it back.”

Because you think me incapable of it.
Had he destroyed his marriage? He sighed and rose, still unable to discuss his feelings easily, he was
unchanged
. He had to change.

“You ought to eat and drink something. You lost a lot of blood.”

She nodded and he moved to ring the bell.

“Don’t leave.”

He looked back. His desertion the other night had truly hurt her. “I am only going to ring for a maid.” Her eyes filled with tears again.

I have to change.

He pulled the cord, then came back to the bed and sat beside her, holding her hand once more. “Can you no longer love me, Katherine? Have I killed what you felt for me?”

A little choking sound came from her throat as she tried to sit up and then winced.

“Shall I fetch you some laudanum?”

“No, I just wish to sit upright.”

He fetched more cushions from chairs about the room to prop behind her back, then carefully helped her sit. “Better?”

“Yes. Why did you not come home yesterday?”

He sat down.
Be honest, John, change.
“Because I was avoiding this conversation, I knew you were right and I am too arrogant to simply admit it. I am a fool…”

She smiled at his self-mocking tone before wincing from pain. “I wish you would be like this outside the house.”

Well there was going to be his biggest challenge. “If I must be different outside the house to keep your love, Katherine, and to make you happy, I shall be.” She just looked at him.

“You do not believe me, do you?”

She shook her head. “You have promised before.”

“And not changed… I shall this time, and you must recover. So I can prove it to you.”

~

John had spent two days with her, making sure she ate and drank, while Katherine made sure he ate and drank, too.

He’d slept beside her, refusing to leave, even when his mother or Mary offered to stay with her in his stead.

She was glad.

She needed him. She felt vulnerable, all shaky inside, and she could not stop thinking of being tied on that bed every time she shut her eyes. In her sleep she heard Mr Wareham say he was her father over and over.

John had been holding her when she’d woken from one dream. She’d been crying. He’d said nothing as his warmth and the solidity of his chest had calmed her fears.

His desertion the day it had happened had affected them both though, it had changed things, and although they were together, they were not. There was a ravine between them again. She dare not trust what he’d said about changing, and he seemed to be wary, knowing she no longer trusted him.

She clung to the time they had now, knowing it was rare, knowing it would not last. Here, in private, he was everything she wished him to be. This privacy, this John, was precious.

When the morning of the third day came, the doctor agreed to her attempting to get out of bed and John left her so she might wash and change.

It felt awful to be without him. It felt like it was an end.

~

Katherine’s absence rankled inside John like a canker. But he’d agreed to let his mother help her dress, and left her.

When he returned, she was paler.

Walking to where she lay against the pillows, atop the bed, he said, “I’ll carry you.”

“I can walk. It is my shoulder that’s wounded not my legs.”

He smiled, noting with a feeling of warmth that if she was berating him she was feeling better. “Very well, but you will take my arm, and you are only going as far as your sitting room today.” She gave him a half-smile, which clearly accused him of being domineering, but conceded, sliding to the edge of the bed, while lifting her hand.

He took it, but her fingers gripped over-tightly as she rose. “My head is spinning.”

“Let me carry you.”

“No.” Her determined gaze met his.

“Very well.” Swallowing back his irritation and his need to cosset her, he braced her fingers on his arm. He liked it when she turned to him for comfort. He did not like it when she turned away. And here was a lesson to him. Is this not what Katherine had complained of the night of the last ball? She liked him turning to her, too. “Ready?”

She nodded but her smile stiffened.

“It hurts?”

“Like the devil,” she whispered.

“Do you want to take another dose of laudanum when you are settled?”

“No,” she answered with revulsion, “it makes me feel sick and too sleepy and I fear what it does to the child.”

John’s mother intervened in their
tête-à-tête
“Get settled then, and I’ll get you some sweet tea. Mary can read to you, too, and that will distract you.”

John walked Katherine into the other room and saw her into a chair, then stepped back and let his mother and Mary fuss, begrudging their presence. He’d become too used to being alone with Katherine, he was not ready to share her with others yet.

“May I see, Kate, Mama?”

John turned.

Georgiana, one of his much younger sisters, stood at the sitting room door.

At his mother’s and Katherine’s agreement, she came in, carrying a rolled sheet of paper.

“Mama said you were poorly, Kate. We drew you a picture to make you feel better.” John watched his mother’s gaze soften, and Katherine’s too.

“That is very sweet of you, Georgie,” his mother said as his young sister handed the paper to Katherine.

“It is lovely,” Katherine exclaimed, as she unrolled it, “thank you Georgie, and thank your sisters.”

“David wanted me to bring the spider he found and put in a jar this morning, but I told him you would not want it.”

Laughing lightly, Katherine shook her head. “You’re right, I would not. You may tell him I appreciate the thought, but I do not like spiders.”

John laughed and it brought Georgiana’s attention to him. Stiffening her spine, she curtsied, looking meek and nervous, and then she hurriedly disappeared.