Amanda McCabe - A Stranger at Castonbury

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 prickly under her bare feet and the air was cold and clammy from the rain, but she hardly noticed as she slowly walked across the tent. All she could see was Jamie.

He pushed the papers he was looking at back into their case as she stopped beside the table.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked. ‘Somewhere dangerous?’ She felt foolish even as she said the words. Of course he was going someplace dangerous—that was their lives in Spain now, and a man like Jamie, an English officer, was always at the very heart of it.

Yet she had a strange feeling there was more to this than the usual marching and shooting, more than the danger they faced every day. Her glance flickered to the hidden papers. ‘You are leaving the regiment?’

‘For a time.’ Jamie ran his hands over his face again, and Catalina had the sense that he wrestled with something deep inside, something he couldn’t or wouldn’t share with her. Somewhere she couldn’t yet follow.

She knelt beside him and took his hands tightly in hers. She could feel the scrapes and calluses of his hands, the warmth of his skin against hers. ‘I am your wife now,’ she said quietly. ‘You can share anything with me, Jamie, and it will be safe. I will follow you anywhere.’

‘Oh, Catalina.’ He smiled down at her, but she could still see that shadow in his eyes. He turned his hand in hers and raised her fingers to his lips for a lingering, tender kiss. ‘There are places where I would never let you follow me.’

Catalina curled her fingertips lightly around his cheek. His evening growth of dark beard tickled her palm and she smiled. ‘How would you stop me?’

Jamie smiled wryly against her hand. ‘I couldn’t, of course. No one is braver or more stubborn than you.’

‘Except for you?’

‘I can be stubborn indeed when it comes to keeping you safe.’ He held out her hand balanced on his and studied the way her fingers twined with his. ‘Would you not consider going to my family in England?’

Catalina fell back on her heels, so surprised by his words that she didn’t know what to say. ‘England? But … I have never been there. Your family wouldn’t know me.’ She would be a foreigner in an English home centuries old. Yes, she had found it within herself to leave her home and come here to be a nurse—but at least she knew Spain, knew the people. In England would she not be alone?

‘They would come to know you—and you would be safe there until I could join you.’

If he could join her there. The unspoken words hung heavy between them, and Catalina felt a bolt of pure fear. She had known Jamie would have to go at some time, that everything that was happening around them would part them. But not yet. Please God, not yet .

She pulled herself to her feet and sat down heavily on the other stool. Her hands fell from Jamie’s, and he leaned closer to her, his forearms braced on his knees. ‘What is happening, Jamie?’ she said. ‘What is in those papers?’

‘I’ve been requested to take on a secret assignment,’ Jamie said quietly.

‘Secret?’ Catalina said, confused. ‘What does that mean?’

‘I have done such tasks before, when a certain degree of … discretion is required. It turns out I am unfortunately rather good at subterfuge.’

‘What have they asked you to do this time?’

Jamie silently reached for the papers. ‘You must understand, I have told no one else about this. Utter secrecy is necessary. But you should know.’