A Stranger at Castonbury. Amanda McCabe
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of being with Jamie. She opened her eyes to stare up at the canvas ceiling above them, breathing slowly and deeply until she could float back down to earth again. She smiled, feeling so wonderfully free. So perfectly where she should be.
Jamie wrapped his arm around her waist and hugged her close as she turned on her side with her back pressed to his chest. She ran her fingertips over his arm as she listened to the sound of his breath mingle with the night breeze outside.
‘Tell me a tale,’ she said softly.
Jamie chuckled sleepily. ‘What sort of tale?’
‘One of your home.’
‘I have told you about Castonbury already!’
Catalina laughed. ‘I want to hear it again. I want to know everything about you.’ Just as he knew her stories of her own life—her parents and their cold, correct home; her brother, lost fighting against a tyrannical king; her first marriage, so brief and so disappointing. She much preferred to hear about England and his family there.
Jamie laughed. ‘I don’t think you would want to know everything. You might not like me so much then.’
‘Never!’ Catalina protested. ‘Your home cannot be so awful. From what you have told me it sounds beautiful.’
‘Castonbury is beautiful, in its own terrible way.’ Jamie kissed her hair, but she could hear from the faraway note in his voice that he was somewhere else in his mind for the moment. ‘When I was a child I thought it was its own world, a playground for me and my siblings. We ran over the fields, fished and rowed on the lakes, played hide-and-seek behind the marble columns. Chased one another in front of gilded mirrors and under Waterford glass chandeliers and frescoed rotundas. We never realised how grand it all was.’
‘It sounds like a palace,’ Catalina murmured, trying to picture it all in her mind. Her own family’s home in Seville was ancient and filled with heirlooms from her relatives, but it was all crumbling and faded, past its grand days.
‘It was built to make everyone think that, to awe every visitor with how spectacular the Montague family has been. To make them think they have been transported to the villa of a Roman emperor.’
Jamie pressed a soft kiss to her bare shoulder. ‘It’s beautiful, but it is also deeply lonely.’
‘Is that why you left it? Why you came here?’
‘A person can so easily get lost at Castonbury and never find themselves at all. Perhaps that is why I came to Spain.’
‘To find yourself?’
‘To find you.’ Jamie turned her in his arms until she lay on her back, gazing up at him in the shadows. ‘Did you come here to find yourself?’
Catalina laughed. ‘I think I came here to escape. Bandaging wounds seemed much preferable to living as a proper Spanish widow, all swathed in black. My house never felt like a home either, not after my brother died.’
Her brother—he had been a brave man, willing to risk all for his belief in a constitution for Spain, a country free of tyranny and a better version of itself. Until he’d fallen foul of a king who wanted the exact opposite, and was willing to deal with the French to gain his ends. No, Seville had never been a home once he was gone.
‘So we have found a home in each other,’ Jamie said.
‘Yes,’ Catalina said, even as she shivered with a sudden jolt of fear. For however long this happiness lasted, it was perfect.
And then he kissed her, and everything else disappeared.
Jamie gently smoothed a lock of Catalina’s dark hair back from her face and watched her as she slept. A small smile curved her lips, as if she was in a good dream, and her cheeks were flushed a pretty pale pink.
She was so beautiful. A gift he had never looked for when he came to Spain. A gift he had never expected in his life. He feared to hold it too tightly, as if it would shatter like a fine-spun glass ornament, but he never wanted to lose it. All his life he had felt alone, even in the midst of a house crowded with family and servants. But now, as he held Catalina, that feeling vanished. He had spoken the truth to her—in moments like this he had an inkling of what home could mean.
So how could he tell her what he had been asked to do for the English government? How they had assigned him to help bring the Spanish king back to his throne. How could he tell her this after what had happened to her brother, and given what she herself believed?
Catalina murmured in her sleep, and Jamie held her close until she grew quiet again. He wished he could just hold her like this until every ugly thing vanished for her, until he could make her life perfect. But he knew he could not.
He would have to keep her safe the only way he knew how. Through his work.
Smoke billowed around her, acrid and choking, so thick she could see nothing. She could hear the crackle of flames, the crash of burning wood around her, but she was lost in that terrible cloud.
And she was alone. Catalina held out her hands, grasping for something, anything. ‘Jamie!’ she cried out. There was no answer, and as she stumbled forward she suddenly fell into a bottomless, endlessly dark pit. She was falling and falling….
Catalina sat straight up, her heart pounding. For an instant she wasn’t sure what was real and what she had dreamed, if those hazy, half-seen terrors were real. She drew in a deep breath of air scented with rain and Jamie’s cologne and then she remembered the wedding, the storm. Being held safe in Jamie’s arms.
She glanced to the other side of the bed. It was empty, but the sheets were still rumpled. As she ran her fingertips over the cool softness of the linen, she heard a soft rustle from across the tent. She looked over her shoulder to see Jamie sitting at the table with papers scattered in front of him, his back to her. His dark head was bent over the documents, and he wore his breeches but no shirt. The candlelight flickered and glowed over his smooth skin, carving the lean, muscled lines into hard marble.
For a moment Catalina just looked at him, drinking in every part of him as she remembered how his hands felt on her, how his body felt as it moved over hers. She suddenly had the terrible feeling that she wanted to seize on to this moment and never let it go, that she had to remember it always.
Suddenly Jamie seemed to sense that she watched him. His shoulders grew tense, and he turned to look at her. His pale grey eyes, those eyes that seemed to see everything, pierced into hers and she shivered at the intensity she saw in their depths.
But then he smiled, and it was almost as if a new light broke through the storm. ‘You should sleep a little longer,’ he said. ‘It’s a few hours yet until dawn.’
‘You should sleep too,’ Catalina said. ‘You have been working too hard lately, planning this push to Toulouse.’
Jamie shook his head and a lock of dark hair fell over his brow. He shook it back impatiently and looked back down at the papers before him. ‘The planning may be done now,’ he muttered.
A tiny sliver of ice seemed to touch Catalina’s heart at those quiet words. She reached for his discarded shirt at the foot of the bed and pulled it over her head. ‘What do you mean? Are we really moving out soon?’
‘Very soon,’ he said. He rubbed his hand over his jaw. ‘Within the next couple of days.’
‘But … the rain,’ Catalina said softly. She could still hear the storm outside, the water that flowed over the canvas of the tent. She knew what such sudden storms were like when they came to break the dry weather, how violent and swift they were. ‘We’ll have to cross the Bidasoa.’
‘I may not be with you by then,’ Jamie said, and his voice was so distant, so eerily, coolly calm. He hardly seemed like the passionate, maddened lover who had rolled with her across this very bed only an hour ago.
Still feeling cold, Catalina pushed back the sheets and slid out of bed. The faded old carpet felt