Page 125 of The Scandalous Love of a Duke
The words were harsh and his tone was wounded. She moved and barred his exit. ‘John, what is it? Tell me.’
‘Katherine, please let me go.’
‘No. Not until you tell me about your dream.’
‘I am sure you do not really want to know.’ He moved to pass her.
She blocked his path again.
‘Katherine, just get out of the way…’ There was vulnerability in his voice, it was unusual for John. He was running because he did not want her to know how much his dreams disturbed him.
She hated being shut out. It was too dark for her to see his face clearly but her fingers lifted anyway and found his cheek. ‘Come back to bed and talk to me.’
‘So you can scold? For the life of me, I cannot see what I did to deserve your ire tonight. I spent the night defending you.’
She had upset him, then, and that was why he had retreated behind his cold façade earlier.
Her suspicions grew as her fingers fell from his face, sliding the length of his arm to capture his hand and tug him towards the bed. ‘Come on, John, come back to bed.’ She stepped back, trying to pull him with her, but he did not budge; her arm and his just stretched out. She tugged again. He moved.
She climbed on to the huge bed, still holding his fingers and attention.
The mattress sank as he sat. Then he rested back against the headboard.
‘Was it the same dream?’ Her question was cautious. She was still unsure of her ground with John. He could just as easily get up and walk out instead of answer.
His fingers let hers go, but they lifted to her cheek and then they were in her hair pulling her forward.
He kissed her. It wasn’t lustful. It was as though he were anchoring himself. When the kiss broke, he wrapped his arms about her. ‘I hate arguing with you, Katherine. Must we keep doing it? You are the one person I truly trust. I feel like I have no foundation when you are angry with me.’
‘Then if you trust me, tell me what your dream was about.’
She felt him shake his head.
‘This is me, John.’
‘I am not afraid.’ She heard a catch of emotion in his voice, a deep rumble, and the words seemed an answer to himself.
‘How long have you had this dream for?’ she dared.
Sighing, he looked up at the canopy of the bed. ‘Years. Sometimes it goes away for months and other times it haunts me every night.’
‘What is it about?’ She turned to face him, kneeling on the bedcovers, her bottom on her heels.
He sighed again, and one knee rose. Then a bent arm rested on top of his knee.
She said nothing, somehow knowing he was gathering courage, and drawing on the anonymity of the darkness.
‘I am a child, about ten years old. My mother has recently married Edward. They had fetched me from Eton in the middle of the night. We had fled halfway across the country to escape my grandfather. I do not remember seeing my mother before then. I had lived with them for two weeks. It felt like a dream. I am like any other child. Like any other family. I had begun believing it was real. Then one morning my grandfather appeared, angry as hell and spitting fire – if a man can achieve that when he has the presence of stone. I had not escaped him. He took me away, and they let me leave. In the dream, I am that boy who looks from my grandfather’s carriage, watching my mother run after it and cry out…’
She did not know what to say.
‘It is ridiculous, isn’t it? I know. A grown man with the fears of a child. But it never goes away, and when I wake up I feel like I did then, all over again, lost, alone and unloved.’
‘You were not unloved, they love you. All your family are fond of you, look how they rallied about you tonight.’
‘I know that,’ he whispered, his voice bitter, ‘in my head. But in my soul… No. My soul remembers all those empty years when my aunts and uncles tried to fill the gap my mother had left, and failed. She left a hole in me, and it remembers the old man’s coldness and nothing else. If you knew the things I did to please him, to make him like me, even if he would not love me. I was a pathetic child. And then he sent me away to sing in the chapel at Eton, out of sight and out of mind, to toughen up, truly alone.’
His arm dropped from his knee, and he reached to hold her hand.
