Page 70 of Better Love Next Time
“Oh,” she breathed. “How awful.”How awful for me. “I will be certain to offer my condolences anon.”
“You’re dismissed, Katherine.”
Turning slowly, she gritted back her tears in the event any of the few servants left saw her cry. She passed unseeing through the parlor and hall, the drawing room where a maid scurried from a worn settle where she had been dawdling.
Someone had placed a dead pheasant on her mother’s pianoforte. She threw it to the carpet. Once the pianoforte was gone, so would be the carpet. She sat on the stool upholstered with her mother’s embroidery. So many of her favorite memories were of her mother here. Her tapered fingers floating over the keys and smiling in utter joy. Teaching Kitty to play. So patient. So young, really. So full of life. So…
“Oh, Mother.” She draped herself over the mahogany cover and sobbed.
Every instrument was an individual with its own unique sound. Like a voice. And this pianoforte her father had sold for Easter, a gun, and a hunter, was her mother’s voice. Each key conjured beautiful memories of her curling black hair andgrey eyes and sultry voice. The laughter she secreted from her husband and gave to Kitty.
Kitty cracked open the cover and slammed her hands to the keys. That was the sound of her mother’s misery. The beatings. The color of her bruises and cacophony of her cries. Father Dunlevy had prayed with her, tried to soothe her mother’s weary soul, but to no avail. Had her mother committed the ultimate sin against God? No, it was just a terrible accident.
Seizing the stool with both hands, Kitty fled the music room and wound through the drafty, dusty chambers and dark passageways to the nursery over the chapel. She had never left the room with the cradle, crib, and narrow bed fit for a child. Most of the furnishings in the numerous chambers had been sold long ago, and those left untouched were for guests. But the nursery was far from her father and brother’s chambers. She could cry without detection. And she did, after locking the door, with her cheek laid against the stool cushion.
Would Julian believe she had forsaken him again when she did not arrive at the river tomorrow? Would he chastise himself for his forward behavior as she had months ago when he had kissed her at the graveside in the summer moonlight?
She wrote to Julian, and at dinner with Clara in the sitting room off the nursery, she worried for taking Clara into her confidence. Desperation made her decision.
When was it ever warm in March? Sweltering in his knitted waistcoat, Julian yanked it and his shirt over his head as he ran. Bare chested as he double backed toward the finish, he glanced at a sheet of clouds bearing down from the west.
He fought to relax his breathing and loosen his shoulders as his feet pounded in the soft going. His time was off, his mind unfocused. Actually, focused on a pair of lustful hazel eyes, a pink mouth, and soft hips bucking against him. When he had set Kitty off, her eyes had been round, stunned. If she spent any time considering what he had done and his erection that had been very obvious, she might never see him again.
He leapt for the rope hanging from the copper beech and missed it entirely, grabbing air and landing with a thud. Mud plastered to his hair, he scrambled up, hauled hand over hand to the top of the rope and leapt straight down to a crouched stance to gain time.
“Twenty-four minutes and forty seconds!” Nate announced as Julian passed.
Worse than he predicted.
Julian circled the house and entered the front door. Climbing the stairs, he kept a brisk pace, and when the thought seized him—the coming routine of therapies, bath and shave, choosing aluckysuit, waiting for Kitty, leaving alone—he halted and planted his hands at his thighs.
Can’t do it, can you boy?he heard his father say.
And Kitty:Don’t you dare care. Not now, not when you haven’t cared for 484 days.
Two hours later, Julian ripped the oars through the water in a cold rain. TheFairyheaved into the reeds, and Willy landed beside him for his treat. At the flash of red in the leafing woods, he stowed the oars and dragged the skiff farther ashore. Hope knocked at his chest, but he walked toward Kitty with casual strides regardless of the rain. He had almost rutted on his childhood friend. No doubt he had made himself a fool by admitting he adored her.
Kitty stepped close, her voluminous hood hiding all but her chin and pressed a letter at his hand.
Oh God, no. She was ending it. He had prepared a speech just for this scenario. Julian peered into the hood, ready to make more a fool of himself. Clara, Kitty’s governess, stared at him over her thin, curved nose.
“I was asked to deliver this to you,” she said.
Hope drained from him. Kitty couldn’t even refute him in person.
He stowed the letter in his coat and watched Clara leave. Rain splattered his face and formed puddles. Which he freely marched into.He found satisfaction in wrecking his boots. Cleaning them would occupy him for an hour at least. When he returned home, alone.
Georgiana, in a cap and banyan, stepped from the library as he entered Farendon’s reception hall. “Good day, old man. Back so soon from your vigil? What did you do?”
Julian kept walking and Georgiana followed on his heels. “Nothing.”
“But you must have?—”
Julian turned. “Georgie, if you mock me, I might strike a female for the first time in my life.”
Small miracles, his cousin apologized. “If you would like to talk someone…”
“I don’t.”
