With a smooth glide, she slid her lips across his, a tease of a kiss. She was tempted to part her lips, to take more, to finish what they had started last night.
Before she could act on that impulse, she dropped back to the earth and stepped away.
His eyes were hot on her, his cheeks hollow with hunger. He looked like he would protest, as would any starving man. But he took a large breath instead. Fed his hunger with the sighs of the green plants around them, or the whisper of memory, or some other thing she could not fathom.
He took her hand and twined his fingers around hers, as he used to do. Then he pulled her deeper into the glen, to the large oak tree at the far side. Some years earlier, he’d carved both their initials—JM + CC—in the rough bark of the trunk.
They stood together, hand in hand, solemnly facing the old tree as if the oak were the vicar reading their wedding vows. The leaves shook and rustled overhead.
“What a mess we made of things,” he murmured.
“Yes.” Jamie’s hand had shaken that morning at the altar. Now, it was steady in hers.
“We lost something we didn’t even know how to value.” He slanted her a glance from the corner of his eyes, slung his next words straight at her heart. “I truly did love you.”
Her chin jerked down in a nod and sorrow grabbed hold of her, twisted her features into the useless, ugly face of regret. Letting go of his hand, she bent and tugged at a stem of purple mallow.
The flower stalk left a trail of green on her riding gloves. She pulled off her gloves and dug her bare hands into the yellow hawkbit hiding in the thick autumn grass. A few leaves, tinged with brown, had already fallen. “I loved you too, Jamie.” She spoke the words to the earth, to the leaves.
“We talk about the past.” His voice was solid and without embarrassment. It drew her eyes up to where he leaned against the oak tree.
“Five years is in the past.”
“Do you think it is lost?” He did not ask if she still loved him. She was glad for that, for she feared the answer, and the vulnerability it would bring to her heart.
“Some part of it is lost, yes. We can never go back to being the same people.”
“But we are the same people.” The edges of his lips tilted up. “I thought we established that last night.”
Cat didn’t reply. She sat on the grass and gathered more flowers, then braided the yellow hawkbit and purple mallow together. One bit twisted around the other until they were solidly bound. Together, the flowers made an entirely new creation. She ought to make a wreath for her hair, something pretty and cheerful. “After you left, I would come here to cry.”
Jamie’s boots appeared by the hem of her skirts. When he dropped to her side, she let him haul her into his arms. “I feel terrible that I ever hurt you like that, Cat.”
Cat closed her eyes and felt the warmth of his body, the living energy thrumming beneath his skin. She had missed this man. Had mourned his absence. “I know I hurt you as well. I have regretted my actions terribly. But I did apologize at once.” His hand lay on her leg, by her knee. He had removed his gloves and his fingers looked long and tan, colored by a foreign sun. “I feel like you chose every day to be away from me, Jamie. Every day you woke up and decided not to come home.”
“It wasn’t like that.” His sigh came from deep in his chest.
“What was it like, then?”
“Traveling wasn’t so much a choice as it was a habit. It just became what I did. I was always on the move to the next port, the next adventure. Once I was gone, it was simply easier to stay away. I didn’t know how to come back and face everything.”
A puny excuse if she’d ever heard one. As if drawn by a magnet, her anger centered on his hand, there by her knee. She leaned forward, ostensibly to reach a patch of mallow, but truly to remove his offensive, tanned appendage from her person. “Did you even think of me? Of what my life must be like?”
His hand slipped from her leg. “All the time.”
“Why did you never write?”
She could feel the shift of his body as he subtly drew away from her as well. “I did get reports on you.”
Reports? “So you sent your spies to watch me? What did they tell you?”
“That you seldom returned to London. That you were quiet.”
“Lonely.” She hadn’t had the heart to go back to London. Not after the scandal she’d caused.
“I never wanted you to be lonely.” Sadness marked his voice. He pulled her back against his chest. “I thought about you all the time.”
Cat started to push away from him again, but he stilled her motions with the band of his arm. “Please, let me hold you.”