Page 2 of Better Love Next Time
A hand seized the back of her head, followed by the sickening crackle of her hair being torn from its roots. Not a surprise. No, she had expected it. The hand dragged her down the stone aisleand up two flights of service stairs. She lost one shoe in the servant quarters and the next up the rickety steps leading to the tower. The fortress opened and slammed with a boom. Dropped to the floor, she scrambled to the old trunk full of her childhood treasures and held on.
Her father struck her back with his riding crop. “You will say yes!”
Kitty clenched her fists against the agonizing burn.
“Say it!” The leather stringer lashed across her neck.
To consent to whom she would marry was the only power she had in this world. She’d die before she would give it away to a fat, old man. A man she didn’t love, a man who lived in a gloomy manse in the wilds of northern England where the sun never shone. Where dreams went to die.
If her dreams were going to die, she was going with them.
Her mouth hit the edge of the trunk, splitting open her lip and jarring her teeth. She fought the urge to writhe and cry and beg him to stop. Instead, she willed every screaming, throbbing fiber to hold still.
Her father’s breath grated in silence. “I will return in the morning, and so help me God, you will say yes.”
His uneven steps echoed across the old wood planks. The door slammed shut, and a key turned in the lock.
Gritting her teeth over the pain, Kitty opened the trunk and searched for something to defend herself with when he returned. Frayed books, a journal with three entries, her doll, Prudence, without hair and clothes. An empty bottle of her mother’s perfume. Her hand grazed a ribbon. Bringing it up, she fumbled to her side with a noiseless cry. Tied within the Prussian blue silk was a lock of Julian’s black hair.
Rain tapped a gentle rhythm on the stained glass as she looked to the ceiling, the rafters wavering through her tears. She closed her eyes and prayed for oblivion, and when she awoke atthe creak of the floorboard near the door, she realized she had fallen asleep. And everything was the same.
As footsteps rushed toward her, she clutched the lock of Julian’s hair, still in her hand, and braced for a kick. There was a thump at her side. A hand rolled her to her back. In the moonlight, Julian knelt beside her.
His dark eyes narrowed in disbelief. His arm scooped her waist, drawing her to her knees. He shed his coat, threaded her arms through the sleeves, and sat back on his haunches. And just stared.
She tucked her chin to the facing of his green frock coat, breathing in the scent of spice and oranges. “I said no. It… it didn’t go over well.”
“Christ, Kitty, I—” He scoured his face with both hands. “What now?”
“I don’t know, but I…”I would rather die.
Pulling her to her feet, he plied her chin and studied her face, her neck. By the muscles working his stubbled jaw, she looked as bad as she felt.
He secured each button of his coat about her, adjusting it on her slim shoulders. He rolled up her sleeves and halted at the Prussian blue ribbon peeking from her fist. Unfurling her fingers, he regarded the lock of his hair.
In his grimace, she saw the boy she had loved and let go. Let go and still loved.
The silence lengthened. In answer, somewhere outside the old manor’s stone walls, a robin warbled.
His gaze flicked to hers, the brown of his eyes black, the whites stark. “Youleft me.Youdid not wish to marryme. This—all this—is your doing.”
“It is,” she whispered. She had left him unwillingly. On a steel-grey day three years past filled with hope and the miracle created by their love.
“You made your feelings for me perfectly clear three years ago,” he said. “In a damn letter.”
“I did.” She could not tell Julian she had been forced to write the letter without risking a life most dear, and that she was really not supposed to be here, alive, at all.
He strode away with an oath. Raking a hand through his hair, he kicked a dilapidated crate, one they had used as children when they had played Henry VIII. Kitty had relished her role as Anne Boleyn. She had steadied herself on the crate, after a prayer and wishing everyone well, ready for the French executioner to do God’s will.
She looked to the narrow, arched windows and pictured the tangled shrubbery and unforgiving ground below. With a leap, it would all be over. She would cease to live in fear. Never have to pretend again. And she was so very tired of pretending she was the same girl she had been three years past, before that steel-grey day. Smiling. Laughing.
It was a mortal sin, to take that leap. Yet relief washed over her.
Her fingers were deft as she undid the buttons of Julian’s coat. “Please leave before Sir Jeffrey comes.”
“I don’t give a damn about your father.”
“I… I have decided it is best I marry Staverton.”
