The Baron

by Sally Goldenbaum

  The girl offered her a smile; it was tentative at first, and then she relaxed as Halley held her hand.

  She was breathtaking, Halley thought. Like a portrait, with such lovely, creamy skin and those huge black eyes. Those eyes …

  Halley watched as Nell dropped her eyes down to concentrate for a minute on the bottom step. Thick lashes swept her pink cheeks, and then they lifted, and she looked at Halley again. They were familiar, those eyes. Could Nell have visited her library at one time? Not likely, but possible. Where, then? Halley looked up and saw Abbie and Stan both watching her with an expression she couldn’t quite read. She looked back at Nell. “Do you live near here, Nell?”

  “I live here.” Her voice was petal-soft, not boisterous or full of uncontrollable laughter like Halley’s nieces and nephews.

  “Here?” Halley lifted her brows and looked over the little girl’s shoulder at Abbie.

  Abbie’s smile had faded. “Nell is our grandchild, Halley. We thought Nick had told you.”

  “Grandchild?” The word registered slowly. Grandchild. Those deep, familiar, smoky eyes … She looked at Nell. She was still holding on to Halley’s hand, her head tilted slightly to one side as she watched Halley curiously.

  “Grandchild,” Halley whispered into the still air.

  “Yes.” Abbie rested one hand on Halley’s shoulder. “This is Nick’s daughter, Halley.”

  Later Halley couldn’t remember walking to the living room, but she knew Nell still held her hand, because when she sat down, Nell was there beside her and carefully climbed up to sit next to her on the love seat. Halley’s heart hammered wildly inside the thin wall of her chest, and she felt the sting of irrational tears building up behind her lids. She couldn’t deal with it all now, not with the fact that the man she loved had neglected to tell her there was this beautiful little girl in his life. If she was in his life. She lived here, she had said. No, Halley thought, fighting the painful emotions tearing at her stomach. Don’t try to piece it all together now, she told herself. Nell was sitting next to her, and she must attend to that.

  “How old are you, Nell?” Halley asked quietly.

  The innocent look on the little girl’s face calmed Halley, and her smile was warm and sincere as she watched Nell’s eyes smile back.

  “I’m four.”

  Four. She must have been born just before Anne died, Halley thought, a huge knot forming in her throat. She finally managed to find her voice and squeezed Nell’s hand gently. “I have a nephew and a niece who are both four. They’re twins, and I think they’d love to meet you sometime.”

  Nell’s eyes lit up. “Do they like horses?” she asked shyly.

  “I’m sure they do,” Halley said. She fingered the long, silky hair that fell down Nell’s back. Nick’s daughter, and he never once mentioned this beautiful, vulnerable little girl. The thought screamed at her, and she wanted to cover her ears to block out the noise.

  “Can they come see me?” She looked from Halley to Abbie and Stan, then back to Halley again.

  “Maybe someday. We’ll see, Nell.”

  Abbie and Stan filled in the conversation as best they could, dropping brief explanations when they could slip them in. Abbie looked crushed, Halley thought, as if Nick had somehow deceived her as well by keeping Nell a secret from Halley. By the time dinner was served, Halley knew Nell had always lived with Abbie and Stan and that she had a nanny. Although the words were never spoken, Halley knew instinctively that Nick was a virtual stranger in this little girl’s life. The thought twisted inside of her like a poisonous snake, and she sent most of her dinner back untouched.

  “Miss Finn—” Nell said as she put her fork down after dessert.

  “Halley. Please call me Halley.” Nell hadn’t left her side all evening. Halley was used to that; she loved children and they sensed it, and so they responded to her in kind. But tonight it was different. Nell’s closeness was slowly causing her heart to break, and she couldn’t have begun to explain it to anyone.

  “Halley,” Nell said with a small smile. “Will you come see my horse?”

  Halley looked at Abbie and Stan and realized the pressure the evening had caused for them. Abbie looked very tired, and she had lost the color in her cheeks long before the dessert was served. Perhaps a moment alone would be good for them. She smiled at Nell and lightly touched her cheek. “I would love to see your horse, darling, but then I must leave.”

  She thought she saw a flash of sadness in the little girl’s eyes, but it was gone quickly, replaced by the serious, polite look that she had come to expect.

  A short time later she kissed Nell good-bye and waved as she climbed the winding steps to join her nanny. The Melroses seemed almost relieved, she thought, when she refused their kind offer to stay and talk. She couldn’t talk just yet; she needed to be alone. So she said good-bye to them on the wide brick steps and drove off into the black night.

  What she felt, when she was finally able to give proper vent to her feelings in the aloneness of her small car, was not relief, but a sorrow of such incredible dimensions that she had to pull the car over to the shoulder of the road while her tears flowed unchecked down her face.

  For a long time Halley didn’t try to figure out why, or for whom, she was crying. She simply allowed the horrible pain within her to flow freely. Finally, when the tears had numbed her pain, and after a truck driver stopped to see if she was in trouble, she managed to pull her car back on the road and drive home. She forced her mind to clear, but the pain remained, and when Halley finally walked into her apartment an hour later, she was emotionally exhausted.

  “Halley you look like a wreck.” Rosie jumped up from the couch and clicked off the television. “My Lord in heaven, what’s the matter with you?”

  In seconds she had wrapped her arms around the shaking body of her best friend and pulled her down beside her on the sofa.

  “Rosie”—Halley’s voice was quivering, and she fought the tears she knew were seconds away from spilling forth—“what are you doing here?”

  “My TV is broken. I came by to watch my prime-time soaps, but I have a feeling, dear one, that you have one all your own.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude, Ros—” Her voice broke then, and she gave in to the comfort of Rosie’s arms and the shoulder that was there for her.

  “Shh, you don’t have to talk.” Rosie held her and gently rocked her back and forth.

  In bits and pieces Rosie learned about Nell, and about Nick leaving her to be raised by her aging grandparents … and a nanny.

  “How could I have loved him, Rosie? How could I have loved someone who would desert his own daughter?”

  Rosie had no answers. She and Halley had been raised the same way, with families that had a bottomless supply of love. They both had fathers who would grieve if they went more than a day or two without a call or a visit from each child. They had been nourished on hugs and laughter.

  Maybe the new day would bring some solutions, Rosie suggested, and finally convinced Halley to rest for a few hours.

  Rosie pulled the covers down, and Halley slid between them. “Thanks, Rosie. You’re a dear friend.”

  Rosie smiled wanly. “If only dear friends had magic potions to make true love run smoothly.”

  “It can’t be true love unless it’s honest, Rosie.”

  “I don’t know about that. I do know how much you love children and that this is probably the worst thing Nick could have kept from you. But, Halley, I also know that you love Nick Harrington in a way many people only dream about. It’s too enormous to be dissolved in the space of an evening. It has to mean something. It has to.”

  Rosie looked down, and Halley’s eyes were closed, but new tears fell slowly down her cheeks.

  Twelve

  When Halley didn’t answer her phone, Nick became distraught, but a phone call from Abbie Melrose upon his return from Chicago told him everything he needed to know.

  “Nicky, she didn’t know you had a da
ughter,” Abbie’s tired voice had said. “How could you not have told her that?”

  Because he would have had to say he deserted his daughter when she was two weeks old and went one whole year without ever seeing her; that’s why, he acknowledged. Then, when he did see her, it was as if he were a stranger who’d come to visit, a man she called Daddy but had no earthly idea why. Halley’s past would allow her no framework within which to understand that. The thoughts ran through his mind, but aloud he only said, “It was a dreadful mistake, Abbie. Where is Halley?”

  No one seemed to know. When he called the library, she had just gone out. When he called the cottage, no one answered. When he checked with Joe Finnegan at his shop, he suggested perhaps Nick wait a few days, then try to contact her again.

  • • •

  “Darlin’,” Joe said, hugging Halley close, “this isn’t like you to avoid the problem. You need to see Nick.”

  “Pop, it’s not a problem. It’s just over.” She buried her head in his shoulder and tried to absorb the strength she felt there.

  “Ah, and it’s far from over, Halley. Not when you still love him so.” He pulled her into his office and closed the door.

  “But who do I love, Pop? There’s a whole part of Nick he has never allowed me to see. Now he’s out there in front of me, this other Nick, and I don’t know who he is or what to do.”

  Her eyes were filled with sorrow, and Joe didn’t have an answer. “All I know, little one, is that the Nick I met was not a bad person. He’s a special sort. Maybe he had a few bad breaks. Maybe he even made some mistakes, but he wasn’t a bad fellow. That much I know as sure as there’s a God in heaven.”

  “Well, you’re right about one thing, Pop. I need to see Nick. I’ve never run away from anything before, and I won’t now.”

  “That’s my girl.” He hugged her briskly.

  “I need to see him, talk to him, and tell him,” she repeated.

  “Tell him what, Halley Elizabeth?”

  “I don’t know, Pop. I don’t know.”

  Halley thought Nick’s office would be the best place to meet—businesslike, no memories to play games with her emotions, privacy without being private—but when she stood in the lobby of the glass-fronted bank building and faced the shiny elevator that would take her up to the executive suites, she wasn’t so sure. The only thing she was sure of was that she was terrified.

  “Come on, Finnegan. This is your life here. Handle it.” She breathed deeply and shoved her emotions to the bottom of her soul while she tugged all her courage to the fore. She was fine until Nick’s secretary ushered her into his walnut-paneled office, then her knees started to buckle beneath her.

  “May I sit down?” she murmured, and slipped quickly into a chair next to his desk.

  Nick sat very still in his high-backed chair, his hands flat on the tooled leather arms, his eyes filled with sadness. He fought back the desire to swallow her in his embrace, to press her to him and never let go.

  Neither one of them spoke, and Halley concentrated on a narrow strip of inlaid wood that bordered the desk. Finally Nick leaned forward, his arms pressing heavily into the desk. “Halley, I’m sorry.”

  Halley lifted her gaze for the first time. He looked the same. Somehow she had thought maybe he would have changed because of the new knowledge she had about him. She’d convinced herself it would be all right because there’d be a stranger sitting in front of her, not the man she had so passionately loved.

  But it was the same Nick—the same thick black hair into which she had dug her fingers, the same lips she had kissed, the same body that had given her such incredible joy. All that was different were his lovely black eyes, which now looked tired and worried. She took off her glasses and dropped them into her purse.

  “That’s the game you play with your little niece, isn’t it?”

  His voice matched his eyes, but Halley didn’t know how to block that out. “Pardon?”

  “Taking your glasses off. You know, that ‘if I can’t see you, you can’t see me’ thing that little Quinn loves.”

  “Oh.” Halley managed a smile. Her facial muscles felt sore and unused. “Maybe meeting here wasn’t a good idea. Would you like to take a walk?”

  “There’s a park just across the street.” Nick was out of the chair and nearly to the door when she rose to join him.

  Outside, a crisp breeze scuttled clouds across a heavy, gray sky. Thunder and traffic noises filled in the stretches of silence, making Halley more comfortable. “This is much better,” she said as Nick led her across the busy street and down a tree-lined path.

  They walked side by side, not touching, but as aware of each other’s bodies as they would be if they were naked in bed.

  “Nothing’s better yet, but we can make it be. I love you, Halley, and I know you still love me, somewhere beneath it all,” he said matter-of-factly. “Don’t you think we ought to talk about it?”

  “I don’t know about the love, Nick,” Halley said slowly, her heart beginning to tear. “I love parts of you, but I don’t know what the other parts are. I don’t know if they’re stronger or weaker or what kind of havoc they can build between us.” When her voice traveled back on the breeze, it sounded like a bad tape recording, not at all filled with the misery she felt.

  “I understand that. And I know exactly what meeting Nell must have done to you.”

  “She’s so lovely, Nick. How … how could you possibly have—” Her voice broke.

  Nick stuffed his hands deep into his pockets, and his shoulders lifted slightly, then fell. “I won’t make excuses, Halley. I know in your eyes I did a terrible thing.”

  “Yes.”

  When he spoke again, his voice was deeper and far away as it painfully pulled things out of his past. “I was in no condition to be a parent back then. I had absolutely nothing to give an infant. No love. Nothing. I was an empty shell. She was one week old when Anne died. One week—” His voice grew louder, as if he were hearing it for the first time.

  “So you walked away. Gave all your responsibility— your flesh and blood, for God’s sake!—to a lovely couple far too old to be raising an infant.”

  “They provided—”

  “They provided a nanny, Nick, because they had to!” The thread of anger rising up in her felt good. Halley thought if she could just hang on to it, she wouldn’t drown. “You gave her up to the same kind of life you lived as a child—a series of nannies, no parent that she would ever know well. And the part she played in your life was so insignificant, you never even mentioned her to me.”

  Halley searched his face as she talked, and she saw the pain flash across his eyes. She desperately wanted him to come up with an answer that would make sense to her. She wanted him to tell her it all had been a dreadful mistake.

  Nick walked on, his head down, his jaw clenched, his eyes on the path in front of him. The mixture of emotions was so great, he didn’t trust himself to speak. The stakes were so heartbreakingly high.

  Halley looked up at the sky, and a raindrop fell onto her forehead. She looked down without wiping it away. “I can understand some of it, Nick. I know it must have been difficult when Nell’s mother died. For a while. What I can’t understand is how you could have stayed away from her later, denying her your love.” Her voice dropped until it was barely a whisper. “That’s what I can’t understand at all.”

  Nick tried to think through her words clearly but was having difficulty wading back into those muddy, murky waters. She was talking about emotions and decisions that were made by another person a life-time ago, before her, when the world was a hellhole, stripped of meaning.

  “Halley,” he said, his voice rough with emotion. “I can’t ask you to accept it, and I can’t give you answers to make it all go away. But I beg you to give us a chance. Halley, I want to marry you—”

  Halley felt her throat tighten and clog with tears. She prayed desperately that she wouldn’t cry. Not now. She needed what few wits she had l
eft to stay intact. “Nick, I can’t talk sensibly to you because I don’t know who you are. Do you understand that?” The tears stung viciously. “I feel like I need to start all over, figure out who you are. And I don’t know if I can do that, Nick.” She was crying in earnest, the tears running unchecked.

  They had circled the small park and were back at the entrance across from Nick’s offices.

  “Back where we started from,” Nick murmured. “At least that’s somewhere.” She turned quietly and walked back across the street.

  Halley threw all her energy into the piles of library work that had accumulated since the weekend. Work, work, work, she cried silently. The panacea of the soul. But who was she fooling? No, it wasn’t work at all that could help her limping soul. Damn!

  She tried not to think about Nick for a while, tried to let the wounds slowly heal, and then maybe she could think more clearly. But the effort was so great, she could barely keep her head up when she and Archie returned from a cemetery storytelling session the next week.

  “You look awful, Finnegan.”

  “Thanks, Arch.”

  “I mean it. And Mr. Nicholas Harrington the Third is conspicuous by his absence around here.”

  Halley nodded.

  “I actually miss the gentleman’s company.”

  “Me too.”

  “Then—?”

  “We’re too mismatched, Archie. Oil and water. He thinks differently.”

  Archie rubbed his rough beard and watched Halley with concern as she stood at the library’s back door. “Oil and water can make a spicy vinaigrette, my little one.”

  “I don’t think so, Archie. I really don’t think so.” She forced a smile to her face. “Don’t worry, Archie, I’ll get over this.”

  Archie looked at her out of eyes lined with the experience of life. “You do that, Finnegan, but make sure in the process that you let that Irish soul tell you a thing or two—and don’t make a damn mess out of things.”

  Halley looked at him for a long moment, then turned and walked slowly into the library.