Page 112 of The Scandalous Love of a Duke
‘With no one to love me?’
‘With a family who could give you food and clothing and a roof. Things would have been very different for you if she had lived. She would have had to keep working and not many employers would welcome a woman with a naturally born child to keep. You and she would have probably ended up in the workhouse.’
Katherine climbed off him and moved to sit beside him. His arm came about her and she curled into his side, her hand resting on his chest, while one leg slid over his. She wished to climb into his security. But he was only secure in this room, tucked away from the servants and society. She had become a part of his secret-self. She had not really broken down any of his walls.
His fingers slipped through her hair. ‘There is nothing sinful about you, or your behaviour, Katherine, nothing. Everyone feels attractions, you were young and growing from a girl to a woman, of course you would feel something for boys?—’
‘Not boys,’ she corrected. ‘Just you.’
There was a slight sound of humour in his throat. ‘Then I am very flattered, and a very lucky man to have discovered such devotion, and you cannot think yourself sinful, only in love. I knew it in the summer and I took advantage of it. It was wrong of me. But you saw the world I came from last night and?—’
‘And you knew no better…’
‘I did know better, but I chose to grasp something which was precious. I should have done it honourably, Katherine, I should have courted you from the first?—’
‘A bastard, dairymaid’s daughter?—’
‘A beautiful woman, with a heart of gold who loved me, when I do not deserve to be loved. A woman who I knew was precious from the moment I saw her at my grandfather’s funeral, when I did not even recognise her… Katherine?’ He realised she was crying. He kissed the crown of her head and wiped her tears away. ‘I love you. If I am honest I probably loved you instantly that day I met you in the road, or perhaps it was that first moment when I saw you at the funeral.’
‘I do believe you love me,’ Katherine said through her sobs, ‘but at the moment I believe it with my head not my heart, John. My heart is too used to being unloved, and insignificant.’
‘You are not insignificant now either, you are a duchess, and is that not a measure of how much I love you?’
She breathed deeply, wondering how he had ended up comforting her, when she had begun comforting him.
‘We are a pair, aren’t we?’ he whispered to the air. ‘Both hungry for love and unsure of it. I think we were meant to be together. I wish I had known it before I went abroad.’ She felt him looking up at the ceiling beyond the canopy of the bed and thought he wished to say something more, but he did not.
Instead his fingers tilted up her chin and then he was kissing her gently, and a moment later he pressed her back down onto the bed and came over her and made love to her once more.
A sense of complete devotion filled her as he did so. She forgot about everything beyond his bed and his room. Here, they were happy.
39
A gentle knock struck on the connecting door leading to Katherine’s rooms.
She woke, curled on her side, with John’s weight at her back.
She felt sick.
‘Stay there,’ he said.
He climbed off the bed and she heard him moving about the room but did not turn for fear the sickness would run away with her.
‘Come in!’
As the door opened, John appeared on her side of the bed.
He wore a red silk dressing gown and bore a porcelain chamber pot, which he put down on a chest beside the bed.
‘Your Grace, I was asked to bring Her Grace’s tray early.’
‘Bring it over here, Esther, please. Thank you.’
John took the tray from the maid’s hands.
She lowered in a deep curtsy. ‘Is there anything else, Your Grace?’
‘Nothing, thank you, Esther. That will be all.’
