A Stranger at Castonbury(50)

Jamie turned his head to look at her, that half-smile on his lips. Half his face was lit by the fire and half cast in shadows. ‘My father thinks I should. He considers her very suitable.’

‘And you?’

‘How can I marry her, Catalina, when I am married to you?’

And there it was, said aloud at last. They were married. What were they to do about it? The words seemed to hover in the air between them, filling the tiny building.

Catalina tightened her fist around the blanket. ‘We aren’t really. I would never stand in the way of your life here.’

‘How could you not? Do you not remember Spain?’

‘Of course I remember.’ Catalina closed her eyes. She remembered it all, every moment with him. But that was so long ago, when they were different people. ‘But it’s all changed since then. I see that so clearly since I came to Castonbury. You need a wife who can be a part of that, as I’m sure Lydia could. There must be a way we could make it so.’

Jamie was quiet for a long moment. ‘You think I should marry Miss Westman?’

‘I think you must do what your family thinks is right,’ Catalina said, even as her heart ached to say the words. She wanted to cry out that no, she did not want him to marry Lydia! But she had been brought up the strict Spanish way, and that included doing the dutiful thing even when it was difficult. ‘I am sure our marriage cannot be legal here in England. It was such a rushed affair, and the chaplain is dead now. There is no one to remember it at all.’

‘No one but us,’ Jamie said quietly.

‘Yes. No one but us.’ Catalina turned to look at him. Her beautiful, brave, dashing Jamie. How she had missed him. How she missed him still, despite everything that was between them now. Family, duty. Alicia Walters. Everything that had happened in Spain.

‘Perhaps there is someone you prefer to Lydia,’ she said.

‘Oh? And who would that be? Which of the oh-so-many candidates for my hand would you recommend?’ he said wryly.

Catalina thought of Alicia’s hand on his arm, his smile as he looked down at her and stepped into the house. ‘Perhaps Miss Walters, now that she seems to have reappeared. I hear she did fit in very well at Castonbury.’

Jamie’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘Alicia?’

‘I saw you with her in town.’

He gave a humourless laugh. ‘Surely you know the tale of her tenure there at Castonbury?’

‘Yes, I have heard something of it.’

‘Then you know she could never go back there.’

‘You don’t seem angry with her,’ Catalina said.

Jamie shrugged, staring back into the fire. ‘I know that sometimes people do terrible things for what they suppose are the best of reasons.’

As he had done? Catalina longed to pull him around to face her, to break down that brittle facade that always seemed to enclose him now and demand he tell her exactly what he meant. That he tell her everything. But she feared he would turn away from her, close himself off for ever, as he had in Spain when he had told her only part of his work there.

‘I won’t marry Alicia,’ he said. He said nothing about Lydia. ‘She is assisting me with something, and then she will go away from here.’

‘And what will you do?’

‘I have no idea, Catalina,’ he said with another of those hollow laughs. ‘Right now I just want to sit here with you and listen to the rain, and forget.’

Catalina wanted that too. Just to be with Jamie, here in this strange little place. This small moment out of real time, just the two of them as it had once been.

She tucked a folded blanket behind her head as a pillow and slid down into the warm nest. Jamie laid his hand on her bare foot as it peeked from the hem of the blanket, and for a long time there was no sound between them, just the rain and the snap of the fire. The moments spread out like a wide river, slowly flowing between them with no beginning or end.

As the fire burned down, Jamie leaned forward to stir it to life again. The blanket wrapped around his torso slipped off one muscled shoulder and revealed to the light a delicate, terrible tracery of pale pink scars that echoed the one on his cheek.

Catalina felt like she couldn’t breathe at the sight of them. She wanted so much to lean closer to him, to press her lips to those scars. She ached to think how he must have suffered, and she wished that her kiss could erase those marks and make her life whole again.

Make both their lives whole again.