With a sigh, she leaned back against him. He pulled off her riding hat and she rested her head on his chest. Still, she did not understand. “How could you have thought about me and yet not thought to return?”
“I don’t know how to explain. It’s not a this or that kind of thing.” Jamie leaned to the side. He took her chin in his hand and tilted her face up. “I apologize for being gone so long, Cat. I am full of shame that I did not write. From the depths of my being, I apologize.”
“Thank you.” Her voice was a bare whisper. She’d been waiting for this moment for years. Why, then, did it feel so empty? No, not empty. Aching. Raw.
“I want us to be married.” His eyes searched hers. Emotion bracketed the firm line of his mouth. “I would like the future we once dreamed of together. With children, and travel, and a long life together.”
“It’s not so simple.” She turned in his arms so she faced him.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. It’s just…too much has happened between us. You hurt me terribly. We hurt each other terribly.”
“I’d like to put the past behind us. To perhaps start over.”
She looked at him a long time. “Start over?”
“Yes, like your families.” With a wide sweep of his arm he indicated the path back to the cottage. “I think we should both vow to forgive each other.”
“How?” She recognized the coldness around her heart. She did not know if she could ever forgive him.
“What’s done is done. In many ways, it is dead.”
“It is hardly dead,” she scoffed. “It is braided into our past. We don’t get to pick and choose which memories shape us more than others.”
“But neither should we dwell on the worst of them. There were plenty of happy moments as well, both before our wedding and after.”
He made it sound impossibly simple. “How am I to trust you not to hurt me again?”
His shoulders dropped with a heavy sigh. “I am not going to spend five years traveling the world again, Cat. I can promise you that.”
“But you could still leave me. You could go to London, or take a mistress, or retreat into the far corners of your mind.”
“I don’t want any of those things.”
“But what if you simply want to feel this way because it is more convenient? After all, you do require an heir.”
He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and bent to whisper against her cheek. “I have wanted you since you were sixteen and came to my mother’s picnic, twirling your new parasol. You must believe that.”
He wanted her, but did he still love her?
She pushed the thought aside and considered the shaded notch in the forest. Green, green, everything inconceivably green. Living things bustled with the business of living, no matter that winter lay around the corner.
What was their secret? How did the earth sleep so soundly through the cold of winter and never fail to arrive fresh and hopeful the next spring?
Cat leaned forward and placed the flowered, braided wreath atop her head. She had to tell Jamie the entire truth, to make him understand.
She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. He watched her, waited. She cleared her throat, found only the simplest words. “I was with child.”
He froze. He was stone. He was ice. He was solid oak.
“A few weeks after you left, I discovered I was increasing.”
“My God, Cat.” The words were as much sigh as sound. “What… Why…?”
“It was not meant to be.” Her throat hurt. She could say no more, so she shrugged.
The green glen held its breath. Everything hushed around them. Pressure built in her chest. Cat undid the top button of her riding jacket. She took a deep breath.
This memory was not one that would just disappear. A baby had grown within her womb. A life had flourished. Had been lost.
“A child.” Jamie brushed his hand over his face. He appeared pale, stricken. “How did I not know this?”
How did he not know this? She wanted to laugh. He’d been gone.
“Why did no one inform me?” he pressed again. Something wild lit his eyes. She knew that feeling. The tangle of beauty and loss and confusion.
“It was early, and I did not make the news known.” She had feared word of the babe would bring Jamie home, when his wife could not. And in the next breath, she had feared even a child would not make him return.
He reached out to touch her. His hand hovered over her knee, then pulled back. “Was there pain?”
“Some.” The heartbreak had been worse. The feeling of being emptied out, the unnameable grief. Even now, tears prickled her eyes with their sharp thorns. She blinked them away.
“Do you think…? Could my absence have caused…” He cleared his throat.
“I was never ill. The doctor said I should have been ill, had the babe been healthy.”
She could only glance at him beneath her lashes. “I’ve never told anyone, Jamie. Not even my brother.”