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He flushed. “That was different. And you were hardly defenseless. You about emasculated me with that kick.”
She brushed provocatively against him. “Had I only known.” She giggled. “But I wasn’t exactly defenseless that time either. He received a fist to the face in response. It was the last time he struck me.”
“Learned his lesson, did he?”
“I walked out. It was when he learned about Jeremy and the baby. ”
Aidan went completely still, her last word dropping like a weight in the quiet room. Repeating with the echo of complete shock. His hand unconsciously found her stomach. Brushed the flatness of it, imagining it stretched and heavy with pregnancy. Envisioning her caught in the throes of childbirth. Images battering him of her and Jeremy together. Impossible to ignore after he’d just experienced her reckless passion for himself.
“Baby? You have a child?”
“Had.” She stared long and hard at some invisible distant point, anguish as raw upon her features as pleasure had been only moments before. “He lived for only a few days,” she said, interpreting his silence as approval to continue. “I’d not even enough coins to bury him.” She sniffled in the darkness. “He lies in a pauper’s grave. I try to . . . to tell myself at least he’s not alone. He rests among souls as lost and lonely as he.”
Aidan closed his eyes against the heartbreak in her voice. Damning the thrice-cursed Jeremy to hell even as his stomach curdled, his fragile peace cracking along a thousand fault lines.
“I worry every day I’ll forget him. That some morning I’ll open my eyes and the memory of his face, his little wrinkled fingers, his need for me will be gone. And I’ll be truly alone in the world.”
Why did every syllable congeal his blood to icy sluggishness? This was Cat. She was courageous. Defiant. Displayed the will of a lion, yet conveyed a vulnerability generating unfamiliar knight-errant tendencies in him. Her sins meant less than nothing. He’d told her that. Believed it.
His hand slid away as his head buzzed with questions.
“Aidan?” she asked tentatively.
He couldn’t answer, still trapped between acceptance of Cat’s tarnished past and shock at the existence of a child. A concrete and very real symbol of that past.
Her breath caught in her throat, her body going still. “You bloody great hypocrite,” she murmured in the same sultry sexy voice used only moments earlier as a wanton invitation. “I should have known.”
She catapulted from his bed, dragging the blanket with her. Wrapping herself in its folds like some quivering vengeful Roman goddess, finger pointed in wrathful accusation. “ ‘You’re a marvel, Cat,’ ” she mocked. “‘I won’t let you fall.’ So my bedding another is fine. But bearing his child puts me beyond the pale? How dare you!” Her jeers came ugly and hoarse with fury. “You strung me along like some stupid, senseless female until I trusted you not to judge me. Until I thought maybe—just maybe—you’d understand, but you’re like all the rest. How many women have you gulled into your bed with a honeyed tongue then left when you’d had your fill? How many of your children lie buried in forgotten graves? Answer me that.”
For a split second, his mind retraced a string of nameless, faceless women whose sole memorable feature was their willing compliance in his artful seduction. Flinched from the thought that somewhere out there a child might cry for a father he’d never known.
He crushed the thought. “No. It couldn’t happen. Wouldn’t. And I’d know if it had.”
But Cat’s scarred face and bruised soul told him it could and did happen all too frequently.
She fumbled with the blanket, her hands shaking as badly as her voice. “I’ve been a fool twice over. And that makes what we’ve done here my folly. Not yours. So I can forgive your seduction. What I can’t forgive is your betrayal.”
Unable to speak or move or defend against the truth, he merely lay there in stony silence, left alone with a whirl of questions, and a gnawing emptiness where his heart ought to be.
Cat’s rage carried her back to her rooms. Through a clumsy, hurried dressing into petticoat and gown whose buttons seemed suddenly overlarge, the fabric harsh against flesh still tender from lovemaking. Stuffing her hair into a loose roll and pinning it with a set of silver and bone combs she’d unearthed from one of the trunks, she sank among the crates and barrels, wishing she could turn to uncaring wood and stone like the trinkets and treasures surrounding her.
She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, refusing to give in to the humiliation and anger squeezing her throat. Searing her cheeks. If she cried, she’d never stop. Simply drown in a river of stupid tears taking her nowhere. She knew that from bitter experience.
The world didn’t change to suit your dreams. It was your dreams that had to change to suit the world. Another of Geordie’s maxims. Thoughts of the dwarfish little thief brought a fresh ache to a throat sore and throbbing.
“Cat, open up.” Followed by a soft tap at the door. “We need to talk.”
“I think we’ve said all that needs saying.”
The door opened, a slice of Aidan’s face appearing in the crack. He’d dressed. She caught the white of his shirt, and a boot slid into the opening, wedging the door open. “Someone will hear. Let me in.”
“Afraid they’ll reveal your lechery to Miss Osborne and she’ll call off the wedding?” A new realization brought her quivering to her feet. “Or is it that you think if you don’t play nice, I’ll stop translating.” She nodded. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
Discarding his conciliatory pose, Aidan stepped into the room. Closed the door behind him, leaning back against it as if she might flee. His clothes looked as if he’d flung them on in haste, and his uncombed auburn hair stuck out in elflocks. “Don’t be daft.”
She tilted her chin to meet the annoyance flickering in his eyes. “So now what? Do you lock me in again, Kilronan? Tempt me with proper clothes and coal for my fire as if I were a stray you could toss a bone?”
“Kilronan again, is it?”
