she could not blackmail him into loving her by offering their son as bait. No. She would have to let Jamie go and trust Nathaniel to be the sort of father she imagined he would be. Then she would need to step back. The realisation brought her arms in an involuntary protest around the small sleeping body and she dozed with him snuggled in beside her until the morning.
She would tell him as soon as she saw him next.
* * *
Nathaniel was waiting for her by his carriage outside the school in Holborn two mornings later and it seemed to her as if he had been there a while.
‘I want to talk to you.’ He did not bother with the niceties of greeting, cold grey eyes levelled at her with more than a hint of anger.
‘Here?’
‘Perhaps the park opposite? Could you accompany me for a walk?’
A tight request, just holding on to politeness.
‘Very well.’
She was unsettled by his demeanour. She had sworn to herself she would give him the truth about Jamie and yet now the thought of actually broaching such a topic made her feel sick. Today he looked nothing like the man she had made love to in the high passes of Languedoc. No, today plain fury seemed to radiate from him.
A few words and her life might be completely different and torn apart. Jamming her teeth together, she did not say a thing, watching him as he shepherded her behind a small green hedge and turned.
‘Why did you take so long to return to England? From what I have been able to gather it was almost two years before you came back.’
Her eyes snapped up to his. Something had changed. He knew of Jamie. She could see it in his face and in his stillness. He always had that, a crouching sense of both calm and danger. His silence had its own voice, too. She had known this moment would come, of course, through four long years of imaginings. How often had she sat in the dead of night and wondered how this secret would be told.
‘Hawk implied you had a child in France.’
Not like this. Not like this. Not asked with anger. Not out in the open where anyone might interrupt and the time to explain was not on her side. She cursed Stephen Hawkhurst for imparting the information.
‘Was there a child from our union, Sandrine?’
Ah, so easy to simply lie given his uncertainty, but she found she could not.
‘There was. There is,’ she amended and heard breathlessness in every syllable. ‘Jamie is three years old and will be four at the end of next month. He was born in Paris at the end of July in 1847.’ All the facts for him to place together, the answer hanging in any interpretation he wanted.
The quiet continued for one moment and then for two.
‘He is mine.’
Cassie had never heard such a tone from Lord Lindsay; the hope was audible as was the shock, but it was the simple yearning that got to her.
‘Ours.’ She could not say more, the tears in her eyes welling with the relief of her admission.
‘And Lebansart?’
The ugly name crept in to all that should have been beautiful. ‘He never touched me in that way.’
Emotion was etched into every hard line of Nathaniel’s face. ‘It certainly looked like he wanted to from where I stood.’
‘The names I gave him put paid to that. He was too keen to use the information I had recited to think of anything else. He left with his men ten minutes after you last saw him.’
‘Did he hurt you?’
Turning her face away, she was glad not to see the question in his eyes. ‘James Nathanael Colbert Northrup is our son’s name. I could not think of another way to make sure you would know you were his father if anything was to happen to me.’
He breathed out loudly, a tremor in the sound, all other thoughts washed away. She was pleased for it.
‘When can I see him?’
Cassie was quiet. She was, after all, not certain just what sort of a part Nathaniel wanted to play in his son’s life. Or what kind of a role she might be placed into.
‘Does he know about me?’
‘He thinks that his father died in France. I thought that, too.’
With a curse, his glance took in the far horizon. Allowing himself time to take in the enormity of all that she had told him before he needed to give an answer, she supposed.
‘Why was he born in Paris?’
A different tack. Beneath such a question other queries lingered.
‘My uncle’s best friend had a house there and allowed me the use of it. He sent servants to help me settle.’
‘You did not think to come back to England?’
Shaking her head, she took his hand. ‘I wanted to have Jamie first. I wanted to have our baby without the pressure of all that would transpire in London had I come home alone. I was sick for most of the pregnancy and I did not trust a sea journey. I also believed that I could find you in Paris and explain.’
His grey eyes sharpened. ‘Did you know you were pregnant before Perpignan?’
Looking straight at him, she nodded.
His anger was immediate. ‘You knew and yet you still left?’
‘Much has happened since we were young, Nathaniel. Good things and bad. But Jamie is one of the good things and that is where our focus must lie.’
Relief filled her when he nodded. A relationship held by the smallest of threads, the past between them a broken maze of trust. Sandrine Mercier and Nathanael Colbert had been vastly different people from Cassandra Northrup and Nathaniel Lindsay. But each of them in their own way was now trying to find a direction.
‘Where does this leave us, then?’ She heard the tiredness in his words.
‘If we were to be friends it might be a start.’
* * *
Friends?
Nathaniel mulled over the word, hating the limitations upon it, yet at a loss to demand more. She had borne him a son in a place far from home. Jamie. James. The word budded within him like a prayer answered.
But it was Cassandra whom he needed to think about now. In France they’d experienced lust and passion and avidity as they had made their way through the high mountain passes. Now she needed friendship. It was what she was asking of him, this quieter calm after a storm. Friendship, an emotion he held no experience of with a woman. Did it preclude touching? He moved back, for the expression on her face looked as uncertain as his, eyes shaded equally in worry and hope.
Taking a breath, he smiled as he saw her hand shake when she pushed back the curls that had escaped from
