Page 83 of All I Want for Christmas… Is You
“Happy Christmas, Lady Katharine.”
She poured tea into his cup, poured some into her own, found some leftover little cakes that the cook had made the day before yesterday. They were stale and crumbly and should have been thrown out for the birds, but in the wee hours of Christmas morning, nothing had ever tasted better.
From out in the hall, a clock chimed. Two o’clock in the morning.
“So I’m off at dawn,” Mr. O’ Flaherty said. “And you, Lady Katharine?”
She looked down into her tea, as though the few leaf-bits in the bottom of her cup would yield an answer. Something profound, something holy had happened here tonight. What would she do with the gift of rebirth, of hope, that had been given to her? She’d spent years bitterly lamenting the unfairness of life and the fickle cruelty of men; never would she have thought to hold the mirror up to herself and look at what was reflected back at her and acknowledge the true source of that bitterness. And never, oh dear lord, never, would she have thought to put into words what she’d seen and share that shame with another person. But there was something about this man that saw through all pretension; something about him that felt safe, something about him that encouraged her to peel the blankets from her cowardly soul and present it to him in all its naked honesty.
“I guess I’ll start by making a list of the people I may have hurt,” she said, her face warmed by the steam rising from her cup. “And then I’m going to make my apologies, beg their forgiveness, and try to be a better person.”
He smiled gently.
She kept looking into her cup. “I would never have thought to do that, you know. And before tonight, I most certainly wouldn’t have. But you came and I had that ... that dream.” Again, she thought of the voice in her dream, how it had been so close that it could have arisen from her very soul, and she felt the press of tears all over again. “The fault isn’t with other people. It’s with me.”
She felt Mr. O’ Flaherty’s warm, dark eyes on her, his quiet acceptance of all that she was, warts and all, without judgment. Shame welled up inside of her, a sense of sorrow and regret that was so strong that it pushed the tears into her sinuses, there to threaten her eyes until she had to hastily blink them back so that he would not see them. “Juliet and Amy never did anything to me to make me hate them so—except marry the men I expected to have.”
“You would marry for expectation, and not love?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
He looked at her and smiled. “No.”
She sniffed back the tears, trying not to cry.
“Sometimes, Katharine—” he had called her by her Christian name, and the warmth of his voice, his words, slipped deeper into those cracks in her heart that had opened and were now causing her all sorts of pain—“we don’t get the things we expect, the things we think are promised to us—and we’re not meant to.” He eyed her levelly from above his cup. “The things we most want are not always the things we most need.”
She nodded, thinking of the hollow triumph she had felt when she and Mama had deliberately tried to hurt Lord Gareth’s wife, Juliet, with words. Words borne of hurt and loss, words that had felt good at the time she’d nastily spoken them but had, much later, lodged in her conscience like indigestion that wouldn’t pass and weighed it down with shame. A tear slipped down her cheek. Words that hurt others were like that, weren’t they? They tasted good going down. But once there, they just made you feel ... well, sick.
“You are a wise man, Mr. O’ Flaherty.”
He smiled and took another sip of his tea, patiently waiting for her to continue.
“I have some apologies to make,” she continued quietly. “Starting with Juliet de Montforte. And then I’m going to do everything I can to help you get your home back.”
He reached out and took her hand, laying his fingers over hers where it rested on the scarred, stained old table. Katharine looked at that strong hand. She ought to pull away, but she didn’t. There was something about this man that comforted and steadied her. Something that filled those cracks in her heart with a warm balm, with understanding and kindness, healing and forgiveness. No, he was not the other man born on Christmas, but there was still something very special about him, something that not only accepted her for who she was, but encouraged her to be all that she could be.
“I will feel better for having made those apologies, won’t I?”
“I’d lay money on it.” He grinned. “If I had any.”
She smiled, pulled her fingers from his to retrieve her reticule and slid it across the table to him. “Perhaps this will keep you fed and sheltered for at least a little while. It’s not much, but it’s all I have.”
His eyes darkened with gratitude. “You don’t have to do that, Lady Katharine.”
She looked down. “I know. But I want to.”
“Thank you,” he murmured, quietly accepting her gift and then taking her hand once more. “I will never forget your kindnesses toward me.”
“And what of you, Mr. O’ Flaherty? Where will you go?”
“Back down to London, I imagine.” He rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. The gesture was one of friendship, but nevertheless it made Katharine aware of the warmth of his skin, the feel of his fingertip and the strength of his hand. She let him twine his fingers around hers in quiet solidarity. There was more than just physical strength to this man. His root core was one of strength as well, more than likely earned the hard way through the general wear and tear of life and all that it threw at a person. “I was never meant to be a highwayman and truth be told, I was certainly not much good at it. No, I’ll ride back down to London and try again to reclaim what is supposedly mine. And if not ... well, perhaps I can figure out a way to get back into the army.”
They sat there together, the tea growing cold in their cups, the storm beginning to blow itself out beyond the dark window that looked out over the downs.
“I think I will miss you, Mr. O’ Flaherty,” Katherine said so quietly that she wasn’t even sure that she’d said it. “I’ve only known you for a short time, but you have impacted my life in a way that nobody else ever has. You’ve found and softened the hard edges of my heart. You’ve given me hope that there’s more to the rest of my life than what I’d envisioned. Thank you for that, sir.”
“Don’t thank me, Lady Katharine.”
