A Stranger at Castonbury

by Amanda McCabe

  The cold seemed to have seeped deep into her skin now, and she shivered.

  ‘Shopping?’ Jamie said. ‘Did you drop your parcels somewhere?’

  ‘No, I bought nothing,’ Catalina answered. ‘But you—what were you doing there? You said you were looking into a land purchase.’

  Would he tell her about meeting Alicia? About what he was really doing with her? He stared down at her for a long moment, his eyes again so flat and still, so unreadable. She thought for an instant he might answer her, but then he just shook his head and gave her a crooked little smile.

  ‘We need you inside this very minute, before you catch the ague,’ he said. ‘It would be terrible if you missed the wedding festivities.’

  Before she knew what he was doing, he bent and caught her under her knees to swing her up into his arms. She was so surprised by his sudden movement, and still so confused by the burst of cold rain and seeing him with Alicia, that she didn’t make a protest. Jamie’s body was so warm and alive under the wet layers of their clothes, she just wanted to curl close to him. So close she could disappear inside his heat and never be seen again.

  ‘Back to Castonbury?’ she murmured as he put her on his carriage seat and climbed up beside her.

  ‘Too far,’ he said. He led the horse onto a twisting pathway off the lane she hadn’t noticed before. When they could go no further, he tied up the horse under the shelter of a large tree and lifted her down again. She saw that he was limping a bit, his steps uneven on the muddy ground.

  ‘Put me down now,’ she insisted. ‘I can walk.’

  ‘In those ruined shoes? Certainly not. Now be still, woman, or you’ll tumble us both into the mud.’

  His arms tightened around her, and one look at his grimly determined face kept her silent. She let her head fall to his shoulder and just held on to him as he carried her.

  ‘There is a shelter of sorts in those trees not far from here,’ Jamie said. ‘They once used it in sheep-shearing season, if it’s still there. Not grand, but you can get warm there.’

  They walked on in silence, until they found that the shelter was indeed still there. It was a simple, square structure of weathered stone with pens outside for the sheep. There were no windows, but there was a chimney and even a small pile of firewood under a box. Jamie shoved open the rickety door with his shoulder and stepped inside.

  For a moment the sudden silence after the rain was deafening. The drops pattered softly on the old roof, but it was dry in the room.

  ‘It’s not much,’ Jamie said as he lowered her to her feet. ‘But it’s home for now. Can you stand?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Catalina said, trying not to let her teeth chatter. She leaned against the closed door as Jamie went to kneel by the stone hearth. It wasn’t much, just a small room with no furniture that smelled faintly of sheep, but it looked like a miraculous haven to her. Shelves rose up one wall, holding stacks of woollen blankets and pottery jugs.

  Catalina shivered and wrapped her arms around herself as she watched Jamie coax the first faint embers of the fire into real flames. They leapt higher, casting his damp skin and hair into a celestial golden light.

  She remembered how he had bowed over Alicia’s hand, how well they had looked together, and she wondered again what he had been doing there. What was really going on in his life? Had she ever really known him?

  Soon the fire was full of roaring life, the orange flames leaping high, cracking and snapping. Sweet-acrid smoke tinged the scent of the cold, damp air, curling around her as if it would draw her away from the door. Jamie looked at her over his shoulder. He didn’t smile now; his expression was strangely still and grim.

  He ran his hands through his wet hair and pushed the strands straight back from his face. The light danced over the angles of his aristocratic features, the sharpness of his cheekbones and nose, the strong line of his jaw. The scar on his cheek. He looked so austere in that flickering light, like a medieval monk or king. Austere and beautiful.

  Her heart ached with it.

  Catalina shivered again, and he pushed himself to his feet. As she watched he crossed the room to get a blanket from the shelf. He came back to her to tuck the rough wool around her shoulders. ‘You should come and sit by the fire,’ he said quietly.

  She let him slip his arm around her shoulders and lead her to the warm, welcoming circle of the blaze. He laid another blanket down on the rough floor for her to sit on.

  ‘You’re still shivering,’ he said.

  Catalina nodded. She was shaking—but not just from the rain. He was so near to her she was dizzy with it, longing to reach out and touch him, to feel the strong warm reality of him and know again that he was no dream.

  Jamie knelt beside her with a muttered oath and reached under her muddy hem for her foot. He placed it against his thigh and deftly slipped the buttons of her ruined boot from the stiffened leather.

  ‘Your clothes are wet through,’ he said, not looking up at her as he removed her other boot. ‘You should take them off and wrap up in more of those blankets. You’ll never get warm otherwise.’

  Take off her clothes? Be naked with him? Catalina almost laughed aloud hysterically. What sort of insane things would happen then, if she felt this way when he just touched her foot? It didn’t seem like a sensible idea.

  Of course it wasn’t as if he had never seen her unclothed before. He had taken off her clothes, kissed every inch of the skin he had bared....

  Catalina shivered again. She turned her head to stare into the flames. ‘What of you?’ she whispered. ‘You are also soaked through, Jamie.’

  ‘I’m used to it,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t care if you are used to it. I would hate it if you caught a cold and missed your brother’s wedding festivities because you chased me down in the rain,’ she said. He shook his head, and she raised her hand in a gesture that said she would brook no arguments. ‘I insist. We should both get out of our garments. It seems so foolish to sit here in them when we are both adults who have seen so much of the world. I will even turn my back—very proper.’

  Jamie burst out laughing. Catalina had never heard him laugh like that before, full out, nothing held back. It was a rich, glowing sound, brighter and deeper than any spiced wine on a cold night. It made Catalina feel warmer just hearing it, and she found herself actually giggling with him.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he gasped. ‘Very proper indeed.’ He sat back on his heels and braced his palms on his thighs as he laughed. ‘As if I don’t remember what you look like naked, Catalina. Your beautiful skin, the curve of your back. Do you still have that little freckle just behind...’

  ‘Stop!’ Catalina cried. Her sides ached from laughing. She wrapped her arms around her waist and shook her head, trying to catch her breath.

  Finally they were able to stop laughing, and somehow the tense atmosphere in the little room felt easier, lighter. Jamie leaned forward and rested his hands on the blanket on either side of her hips. He was so close she could smell the rain on his skin and see the drops of it sparkling in his hair.

  ‘When did we become so ridiculous, Catalina?’ he said. ‘So silly and prudish.’

  ‘I am not prudish,’ Catalina protested. ‘Of course I know we have seen each other before. I just think we should be...’

  Naked together again? Kissing, touching? Yes, all of those things—if only it was not all too late.

  ‘Should be what?’ he said.

  ‘Cautious,’ she answered, far more firmly than she felt.

  He studied her for a long, tense moment. Finally he nodded and pushed himself to his feet.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said. He turned to face the corner, his arms crossed over his chest. ‘There now, my back is turned.’

  Catalina slowly stood up and stepped closer to the fire, her own back turned to him. She unbuttoned and removed her spencer to spread it out on the hearth. She could hear nothing from Jamie except the soft sound of his breath mingled with the patter of rain on th
e walls outside. She eased the long sleeves of her dress down her arms, pulling at the high, gathered neckline until the wet, clinging muslin fell away. The fabric slithered down to a sodden pile at her feet until she stood in only her chemise and stockings. Her damp skin, bared to the warm air, prickled.

  ‘Now you,’ she said. After a long moment she heard the slide and rustle of Jamie’s clothes as he undressed. She closed her eyes tightly, but in that darkness it was even worse. She could see it all in her mind—that wet shirt falling away from Jamie’s chest, leaving him bare. The smooth, warm skin, the strong muscles of his chest and his shoulders flexing with his movement. His long, elegant hands loosening the front of his breeches, easing them away from his lean hips—oh, yes, she remembered it all. She could just imagine those breeches moving lower and lower....

  Catalina groaned and pressed her hands over her closed eyes. Jamie was right—they were ridiculous. It had been so long; she shouldn’t still want him this much.

  ‘Catalina, are you all right?’ Jamie said. She heard a soft whisper of sound, his footsteps on the floor, a rustle of cloth, and then a warm, dry blanket eased over her shoulders.

  ‘You’re still shaking,’ he said, so quiet and deep.

  Catalina swallowed hard and nodded. ‘The rain. When do you think it will end?’

  ‘Very soon. Don’t worry—I’m sure your charge, Miss Westman, is safe enough at Castonbury with my sister.’ Jamie stepped away from her, and Catalina opened her eyes to see that he knelt down to stir at the fire. ‘Come, sit closer, it will warm you.’

  Under the shelter of the blanket, Catalina wriggled out of the chemise and unfastened the velvet garters to roll down her damp stockings. Now she had only the blanket over her nakedness—and Jamie still wore his breeches. All her wild imaginings were for naught.

  Catalina almost laughed and she clapped her hand over her mouth. The other hand held her blanket closed at her throat.

  ‘Come, sit,’ Jamie said again. He pulled the blankets on the floor closer to the hearth.

  ‘I know Miss Westman is fine at Castonbury,’ Catalina said as she sat down. She tucked her legs up under her and watched the fire leap higher. ‘Your family has been very kind to her.’

  ‘They can be kind sometimes,’ Jamie said with a laugh. ‘We’re not always complete savages, no matter what the gossip says about us.’

  They could be kind when they had a purpose? Was that how Jamie truly thought? Was that what had happened in Spain? Catalina blurted out, ‘They want you to marry her, you know.’

  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.

  But she knew that wasn’t possible. She leaned back against the blankets and stared again into the fire. She listened to the lash of the rain and let the warmth of the smoke, the clean scent of Jamie’s cologne, wrap around her as he lay down beside her.

  ‘Tell me a story,’ she said, remembering how he had once told her tales of English knights and chivalry on the long, hot nights in Spain, and how she would tell him Spanish tales in return.

  Jamie laughed. ‘I don’t know any good tales I have not already told you. Not like you and the adventures of Don Quixote.’

  ‘I remember your stories of King Arthur. But I also liked your stories of Castonbury and your family,’ Catalina said. ‘It didn’t sound like a real place at all but a fairyland.’

  Jamie was quiet for a long moment. ‘It seemed like a fairyland to me too, when I was in Spain for so long. But I told you everything then. I have nothing new.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes indeed. You know of the pr
anks my siblings and I pulled, about my mother and what it was like when she was gone. I think I would rather hear about the don again.’

  Catalina thought about the stories she had been re-reading lately with Lydia. Don Quixote and his endless quest for a perfect world that always eluded him. For a life that could never be. ‘I cannot think of a story for right now.’

  ‘Then will you sing that song for me again, Catalina? The one you once taught me when we walked together in Spain,’ Jamie said softly. She felt the soft brush of his breath against her shoulder and realised he had moved even closer to her as they talked. She nodded, but she feared her voice would strangle in her throat at his nearness. She touched the tip of her tongue to her dry lips and slowly began to sing, wobbly and off-key.

  ‘Conde Niño, por amores es niño y pasó a la mar; va a dar aqua a su...’

  But she couldn’t finish. Jamie’s lips came down on hers, swallowing the song, her breath, her everything. She was surrounded only by him, by the heat and scent of him, the force of his passion that drew out her own desire all over again.

  With a low moan, her arms came around him tightly as she rolled to her back, drawing him down with her, onto her. She had tried so hard to force away her feelings for him, to shatter them into oblivion, but they wouldn’t leave. They burst free at his touch, like brilliant flashes of fireworks in a dark sky. She needed him now; her desire was a force as free and elemental as the storm outside.

  Jamie couldn’t be hers for ever, but he was hers right now. Just as she was, and always would be, his.

  Catalina impatiently pushed the blanket away from his body. It draped to his hips, leaving his chest bare for her seeking caress. He was everything she had remembered in her dreams, his skin like hot, smooth satin over lean muscle and bone, shifting and bunching under her touch. She ran her fingernails lightly along the long line of his back, to the swell of his buttocks and then up again to twine in his hair and hold him with her.

  He groaned as his tongue slid into her mouth, all a heated rush of breath and need. It wasn’t a careful, seductive kiss, but one rough with long-denied passion. Catalina’s hand threaded deeper into his hair, drawing him even closer, while her other hand slid over his shoulder to feel the pattern of those scars on her palm.