“You lectured me. As you always did.” The old impatience colored her voice. Even as Jamie had courted her those many years ago, even as they had flirted and played and fallen in love, he had treated her like a younger neighbor. She’d been the innocent girl in need of guidance, and he the worldly man who would provide it.
His shook his head, as if denying her memories. “I allowed you to be free with your actions, Cat. You wanted a Season and I humored you. I watched you dance and flirt with other men, even after we were wed.”
Her breath caught in her throat. Shame, anger, embarrassment, she could not tell what she felt. Did not care to examine it. She inhaled sharply. “You talk as if I was loose—”
“I just wanted you for myself! Good Lord, Cat, I waited for two years to marry you. I know it was not your doing, with your father putting off your first Season, then your aunt falling ill. But I waited, and—” He looked down at his hand, flexed and unflexed his fingers in a tight fist. When he looked up again, his eyes were sad. “Honestly, Cat, I gave you everything. I don’t know what more you could want from me.”
“I am sorry, Jamie. I am a thousand times sorry for my actions that night. But I cannot undo the past.” She could not look at him, her handsome, half-dressed husband. The man she had won and lost. She scanned the room and her gaze landed upon the new objects on his bookshelf. Some kind of mask and an odd statue. “You have been all over the world while I’ve been here, atoning for my mistake. Still, it is not enough.”
He said nothing.
“I cannot continue like this, Jamie.” Her words sounded hollow, empty. Fitting, for that was how she felt.
“What are you saying?”
Cat adjusted the sash on her dressing robe. Pulled herself together. She would once and for all close the door on this man who had broken her heart. “I’m saying I cannot give you an heir, not with such animosity between us. In fact, I think we should apply for an annulment.”
“WHAT?” JAMIE STIFFENED. Certainly he’d misheard.
“I think we should apply for an annulment,” his wife repeated. “You would be free to marry and beget your heir with someone else.”
She was mad. Madness dressed in provocative green silk.
“We cannot get an annulment, Cat. I am not impotent. You are not a virgin.” The words tasted like ash in his mouth.
“I might as well be.” She had fire to her now. She dropped her arms and lifted her chin. “I’ve hardly experienced the marital bed. And that was years ago.”
“They would have to examine me.” Jamie tried to loosen his jaw. “I would have to prove that I cannot raise my victory flag.”
She arched an impertinent brow. “That shouldn’t be hard.”
“Oh, it gets hard, all right. You, of all people, should know.”
“Should I?”
“You talk as if you’ve forgotten.”
“What was there to forget? A few nights, that was all.”
He launched two steps toward her. “I don’t believe you.”
She straightened at his approach, all haughty pride. “Don’t believe what? That you could be so easy to forget?”
He closed the rest of the distance between them, his blood a fire of anger and desire. And possession. He would never give her up. “You are my wife.”
“Barely. I am not the same woman you once knew. And you are not the same man.”
“I am not so different, Cat.” He was shockingly the same, in fact. His travels had changed him around the edges, but the core of him had solidified. Like he had stepped completely into his own skin.
“I do not know, Forster. I find I do not know you at all.” Her eyes trailed over his chest, then flicked away. There was desire in her gaze. She could not hide it.
“You’ve known me practically my entire life.”
She wouldn’t look at him. He took her shoulders and turned her around so she faced the large mirror on his bedroom wall. He swept her hair to the side and stood close behind her. She was lightness to his darkness. Delicacy to his heft and bone. She was perfect.
“See there? That is us. You and me. Cat and Jamie.”
She shook her head and tried to struggle out of his arms. “You do not even know me—”
He held onto her. “I have not forgotten anything about you.”
Her gaze snapped to his in the mirror. The wildness in her blue eyes slammed into him. His Cat. His wife. His lover.
Everything pulsed through him, hard. The ache and the fire and the madness he had carried for years. It pulsed through his blood and became a buzzing in his ears.
He dipped his head and nuzzled the sensitive skin at the back of her neck. Her spine arched helplessly against his mouth as he knew it would.
She smelled of roses, and warm skin, and woman. And she felt so damn good in his arms.
“You have not forgotten me, either.” Her skin was hot beneath his mouth. She shivered as he trailed kisses beneath her ear, then caught the sensitive lobe between his teeth.
God, he had missed her. He was a fool to have stayed away so long.
He lowered both his hands to cup her breasts and brushed his thumbs across her nipples. She dropped her head back against his shoulder, the sound of her breath heavy in the room.