A Stranger at Castonbury(9)

But then he smiled, and it was almost as if a new light broke through the storm. ‘You should sleep a little longer,’ he said. ‘It’s a few hours yet until dawn.’

‘You should sleep too,’ Catalina said. ‘You have been working too hard lately, planning this push to Toulouse.’

Jamie shook his head and a lock of dark hair fell over his brow. He shook it back impatiently and looked back down at the papers before him. ‘The planning may be done now,’ he muttered.

A tiny sliver of ice seemed to touch Catalina’s heart at those quiet words. She reached for his discarded shirt at the foot of the bed and pulled it over her head. ‘What do you mean? Are we really moving out soon?’

‘Very soon,’ he said. He rubbed his hand over his jaw. ‘Within the next couple of days.’

‘But...the rain,’ Catalina said softly. She could still hear the storm outside, the water that flowed over the canvas of the tent. She knew what such sudden storms were like when they came to break the dry weather, how violent and swift they were. ‘We’ll have to cross the Bidasoa.’

‘I may not be with you by then,’ Jamie said, and his voice was so distant, so eerily, coolly calm. He hardly seemed like the passionate, maddened lover who had rolled with her across this very bed only an hour ago.

Still feeling cold, Catalina pushed back the sheets and slid out of bed. The faded old carpet felt prickly under her bare feet and the air was cold and clammy from the rain, but she hardly noticed as she slowly walked across the tent. All she could see was Jamie.

He pushed the papers he was looking at back into their case as she stopped beside the table.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked. ‘Somewhere dangerous?’ She felt foolish even as she said the words. Of course he was going someplace dangerous—that was their lives in Spain now, and a man like Jamie, an English officer, was always at the very heart of it.

Yet she had a strange feeling there was more to this than the usual marching and shooting, more than the danger they faced every day. Her glance flickered to the hidden papers. ‘You are leaving the regiment?’

‘For a time.’ Jamie ran his hands over his face again, and Catalina had the sense that he wrestled with something deep inside, something he couldn’t or wouldn’t share with her. Somewhere she couldn’t yet follow.

She knelt beside him and took his hands tightly in hers. She could feel the scrapes and calluses of his hands, the warmth of his skin against hers. ‘I am your wife now,’ she said quietly. ‘You can share anything with me, Jamie, and it will be safe. I will follow you anywhere.’

‘Oh, Catalina.’ He smiled down at her, but she could still see that shadow in his eyes. He turned his hand in hers and raised her fingers to his lips for a lingering, tender kiss. ‘There are places where I would never let you follow me.’

Catalina curled her fingertips lightly around his cheek. His evening growth of dark beard tickled her palm and she smiled. ‘How would you stop me?’

Jamie smiled wryly against her hand. ‘I couldn’t, of course. No one is braver or more stubborn than you.’

‘Except for you?’

‘I can be stubborn indeed when it comes to keeping you safe.’ He held out her hand balanced on his and studied the way her fingers twined with his. ‘Would you not consider going to my family in England?’

Catalina fell back on her heels, so surprised by his words that she didn’t know what to say. ‘England? But...I have never been there. Your family wouldn’t know me.’ She would be a foreigner in an English home centuries old. Yes, she had found it within herself to leave her home and come here to be a nurse—but at least she knew Spain, knew the people. In England would she not be alone?

‘They would come to know you—and you would be safe there until I could join you.’

If he could join her there. The unspoken words hung heavy between them, and Catalina felt a bolt of pure fear. She had known Jamie would have to go at some time, that everything that was happening around them would part them. But not yet. Please God, not yet.

She pulled herself to her feet and sat down heavily on the other stool. Her hands fell from Jamie’s, and he leaned closer to her, his forearms braced on his knees. ‘What is happening, Jamie?’ she said. ‘What is in those papers?’

‘I’ve been requested to take on a secret assignment,’ Jamie said quietly.

‘Secret?’ Catalina said, confused. ‘What does that mean?’