Invincible

by Joan Johnston

  “Mother?” Max said.

  “What happened?”

  “You fainted,” Kristin said. “How are you feeling?”

  “I guess I fainted with relief that the danger was over. I’m feeling better now. Can you help me up, Max?”

  “Mother, I think—”

  “I’m fine, Max,” she said in a voice forceful enough to prove she was fine. “Please take me home.”

  She would make a point of taking Flick out of the way when they arrived at the mansion on Berkeley Square, so Kristin and Max would have time—and privacy—to discuss Max’s long overdue proposal.

  32

  When they arrived back at Berkeley Square, Bella said, “Max, would you please help me up to my room.”

  She could see he wanted to go with Kristin, to make another plea to her to marry him. She wanted a chance to talk to him first. “Please, Max.”

  She watched him hesitate before duty—she was sure it was duty and not love—caused him to put an arm around her to assist her upstairs. “Come along, Flick,” she said. “Give your mother a chance to relax and change her clothes.”

  Emily was waiting in Bella’s room when she got there. “Would you wait just a moment, while I change?” she said to Max.

  He looked longingly at the door but said, “All right, Mother.”

  She headed into the adjoining dressing room with Flick and Emily and changed out of the Chanel suit she’d worn to Wimbledon into a fashionable blue silk robe.

  “I heard what happened at Wimbledon, Your Grace,” Emily said. “It’s all over the telly.”

  “I’m fine. We’re all fine. There’s no need to worry.”

  “You should rest, Your Grace,” Emily admonished.

  Bella was going to refuse, but she realized she was trembling with fatigue. She had to take care of herself. Her heart was strong enough to keep her alive only if she took care of it. “Very well. You may help me into bed.”

  Max was standing by the windows when Bella came out of the dressing room. She allowed Emily to help her into bed while Flick plumped up the pillows behind her.

  When she was settled, Emily asked, “Is there anything else you need, Your Grace?”

  “No, thank you, Emily. That will be all.” As Emily turned to leave, Bella called Flick to her side and said, “Would you mind checking on your mother? Then come back and tell me how she is?”

  “Sure, Gram,” Flick said, loping out the door on Emily’s heels.

  Once they were alone, Bella adjusted the covers around her robe, waiting for Max to give her his attention. But he never did. Finally she said, “I have a confession to make, Max.”

  He turned to her at last and said, “I already know you didn’t really faint, Mother.”

  She looked surprised. “How did you know?”

  “I’ve held unconscious bodies before. You weren’t anywhere near a dead weight. And you hesitated just long enough before falling to be sure I’d catch you before you hit the ground.”

  “Fascinating. That sort of discourse suggests you really are a spy.”

  “Was a spy,” he corrected. “I’m quitting, as soon as I’m sure Veronica and Irina have been delivered to the proper authorities, and I know whether Steffan was involved in their plot to assassinate the president.”

  Bella didn’t know where to start. She was silent so long Max asked, “Is that all, Mother?”

  Bella wanted to paint her actions in the best light. But she was pretty sure no matter how she explained herself, Max was going to be upset. Finally, she just met his gaze and said, “I’m afraid I’ve interfered terribly in your life.”

  “I doubt it,” Max said with the beginning of a smile.

  “I need to talk to you about Kristin.”

  “I’d rather you stay out of my personal business, Mother.”

  “I’m afraid it’s a bit too late for that.”

  “What have you done?”

  “I was only trying to help,” she said, excusing herself before she explained herself.

  “Right. I asked what you’ve done.”

  Bella saw in his eyes a look that would not be denied. So she laid her confession before him. “I offered Kristin the Blackthorne Rubies if she would come to London and play in the exhibition match with you.”

  Max looked like he’d been poleaxed. “You did what?”

  “She accepted my offer. And won the rubies.”

  “What on earth would possess you to do such a thing?”

  Bella gave a small shrug. “I thought if you two spent time together you’d work out whatever differences separated you ten years ago. I wanted you to meet your daughter. And I hoped you would want to propose to Kristin and—”

  “I did propose. She refused!” Max said indignantly. “Sorry you wasted your precious jewels trying to get me a wife,” he added sarcastically.

  “She refused them.”

  “What?”

  “Kristin only accepted my proposition in the first place because she needed money. She wouldn’t accept the rubies. And she promised to pay me back every penny I’d promised to loan her.”

  Max frowned. “Why wouldn’t she take the rubies?”

  “You’ll have to ask her that.” Bella reached into the pocket of her robe and took out the black velvet bag that contained the priceless jewels. She held the bag out to Max and said, “Since Kristin wouldn’t take these, I’m giving them to you. Maybe you can get her to accept them.”

  “Why do you think she’d take them from me, when she wouldn’t take them from you?”

  “Perhaps because you’ll be offering them as a gift to your bride, whom you love,” Bella said. Her hand was starting to tremble again. She managed to hold the velvet bag steady as Max crossed the room and sat on the edge of her bed. She dropped it into his outstretched hand. “I hope you and Kristin have a long and happy life together.”

  “She hasn’t accepted me, Mother.”

  “She will, Max. Because she loves you.” Then she did what she hadn’t done in the hallway at Wimbledon. She reached out and touched her fingertips to his cheek. It was the closest she’d come to a gesture of love to one of her children in many a year. “Now go and find her.”

  Max remained frozen like a wild thing under her hand for another moment, as though savoring the love she was bestowing with this simple caress, then jerked free and rose, as though he were breaking chains to escape. But he didn’t leave. Instead, he shot her a piercing look with Benedict-blue eyes. And slowly sat back down on the bed.

  “What were you doing at The Seasons, Mother? What was that invitation to the five of us all about?”

  For an instant, Bella was terrified. Had Max somehow found out about her heart specialist in Virginia? Did he know she was dying? She would never be able to continue her matchmaking if her children knew the truth. And if Max had found out, he would tell the rest of them.

  Bella’s heart was racing so hard it hurt. “It’s been so long since we were all together, I thought…it would be nice.”

  Such a simple answer. Absolutely true. And yet, not the entire truth. Would her son accept it?

  Max hesitated so long that she thought perhaps her secret had been discovered. Then he shifted the rubies from one hand to the other and stood again. “I just wondered,” he said, looking down at her. “We all wondered why…”

  “It was nothing nefarious. I had no evil intentions,” she said, defining the word as Flick might have done. “Just a desire to see my children. Is that so strange?”

  “Yes, Mother, it was,” Max said. “But it was still a good idea. I miss seeing my siblings all in one place.”

  “Well,” she said, revealing a wealth of emotion in the single word. “Maybe I’ll try again next year.”

  He grinned. “If you do, I’ll come.”

  Bella felt a sudden ache in her throat, felt the sting of tears in her eyes. “I’ll be looking forward to it. Now, get out of here. You have a lovely woman waiting for you.”

  Max left th
e room without looking back, closing the door silently behind him.

  She’d done her best. She believed Max and Kristin loved each other. Hopefully, her son would find the right words to woo her to be his wife.

  33

  Kristin had just sent Flick from the room and gone into the bathroom to check on her bath when she heard a knock on the door. As she opened it, she said, “Flick, I told you—”

  “It’s me,” Max said.

  He was still wearing his sweaty, grass-stained tennis clothes. She’d changed out of her tennis dress into a white terry-cloth robe. But the curls on her neck were still damp with sweat. And she smelled like she’d just played two athletic sets of tennis. “What do you want, Max? I’ve got the water running in the tub for a bath.”

  “I want to talk.”

  She hesitated, then stood back to let him in and closed the door behind him. “I guess we’re done now with everything we needed to do,” she said. “The match is over, and our most likely suspects are in custody.”

  “We never had a chance to celebrate our win,” he said as he held out his hand.

  She put her hand in his and he drew her into his arms for a hug. “Congratulations, K. We won.”

  “And scandalized the tennis world by taking off with out our honorary trophy,” she said with a wan smile.

  He looked into her eyes and said, “That isn’t why I came in here.”

  “Oh? Why did you come, Max?”

  He looked into her eyes and said, “I love you, K. I want to spend my life with you. Will you marry me?”

  Kristin laid her head on his shoulder, her face turned away from his to give herself time to think. She supposed she was saying something simply by staying close to him, rather than pulling herself free. But she really hadn’t yet made up her mind, and she wanted to be held by him, in case this was the very last time she was ever going to find herself in his embrace.

  “What can I say to convince you to marry me?” His voice was hoarse and she could hear the emotion in it.

  “I do love you, Max,” she said. “So much it hurts.”

  He stepped back, separating them, and held her head between his large hands. “Then what’s holding you back?”

  “You can’t quit your job, Max. You love it. Someday you’d hate me because you’d miss it. And I can’t quit mine for the same reason. There’s just no compromise that works for us.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” a child’s voice interrupted.

  “Flick?” both adults said at the same time.

  Flick came crawling out from under Kristin’s bed.

  Kristin gawked at her. “What on earth are you doing under there?”

  “I thought you were afraid of bogeymen under the bed,” Max said.

  “I’m not afraid of bogeymen,” Flick said as her father took her arms and pulled her upright and set her on her feet. “Or demons in closets or outside the windows.”

  “Then what in the world—”

  “I had to do something to get the two of you together,” she said disgustedly. “I can’t believe you didn’t figure out the solution to your insoluble problem,” she said crossly. “Insoluble means there is no solution. But there’s a perfectly good solution to your dilemma staring you right in the face.”

  She balled her small hands into fists and stuck them on her hips. “A dilemma is a problem with difficult or undesirable choices,” she explained, as though they were ignorant of the word.

  She turned to Kristin and said, “Gramps and I figured it out together a million years ago. I’ve been giving you all the hints I can, but I guess the two of you are too dense to work it out on your own.”

  Flick turned to Max and said, “I mean the two of you are thickheaded or extremely ignorant as opposed to having a high mass per unit volume. So I’m going to tell you the answer.”

  “Listen, young lady—” Max began.

  “You can both teach at the Lassiter Tennis Academy,” Flick said. “That way, I can go to Miami Country Day School and come home every night for dinner.”

  She looked expectantly from one parent to the other. “Well?” she said, suddenly unsure, both hope and fear staring out at them from her Benedict-blue eyes. “What do you think?”

  Kristin turned to look at Max, feeling suddenly buoyant. What a simple solution to their insoluble dilemma. “Well, Max?”

  His lips slowly curved into a smile. “Sounds like a good idea to me.”

  “Me, too,” Kristin agreed.

  Max went down on one knee in front of Kristin. “K, I love you. Will you marry me?”

  From the corner of her eye, Kristin saw Flick with her lower lip clamped in her teeth. She smiled down at Max and said, “Yes, I will.”

  He reached into his pocket and came out with a ruby ring with a square-cut stone so large it made her gasp.

  “Max, what is that?”

  His lips quirked. “Would you believe one of the Blackthorne Rubies? Give me your hand, Princess.”

  When Kristin held out her left hand, it was shaking.

  Max slid the ring onto her finger, then stood and pulled her into his arms.

  “Hey,” Flick said, “Don’t forget about me!”

  They opened the circle to include Flick, who hugged them both tight as they leaned in to kiss each other.

  “Wait until Gram hears about this,” Flick said, grinning up at them. “She’s going to be really glad.”

  Max and Kristin both laughed.

  Kristin didn’t think life could be any better, didn’t think the future could look any rosier.

  “Hey, Mom,” Flick said. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  Kristin frowned. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Dad, do you want to tell her, or should I?”

  “Tell her what, Flick?” Max said, now looking as worried as Kristin felt.

  Flick put her hands on her hips and said, “If Mom doesn’t turn off the water in the bathroom pretty soon, the tub is going to overflow.”

  Kristin took one look at Max’s stunned face and felt a giggle escape. Max took one look at her and guffawed. The two of them fell into each other’s arms, laughing so hard they had to hang on tight to stay on their feet.

  Flick shook her head at her incomprehensible parents. She just didn’t understand their behavior sometimes. At least, with her help—and Gram’s, of course—they’d managed to find their way to each other.

  Her parents were kissing now, completely oblivious to her. And kissing. And kissing. With no end in sight.

  “Well,” she said at last. “If nobody else is going to do it, I will.”

  Neither of them responded. They just kept on kissing.

  Lacking mindful attention to me and everything around them, she thought. Completely oblivious. Although abstracted fit just as well. They were totally preoccupied with each other. She walked completely around them and they didn’t even notice her.

  Yep. That’s what they were all right. Obliviously distracted.

  Flick grinned, then headed for the bathroom to turn off the overflowing bath water.

  Epilogue

  She should never have doubted the duchess could do what she’d set out to do, Emily thought as she viewed the tableau before her from her seat high up in the stands. There sat Harry Lassiter in his wheelchair on the sidelines of a Har-Tru tennis court at the Lassiter Academy. Flick stood by his side, talking animatedly—no doubt using big words—to her grandfather.

  Kristin and Max had been husband and wife since a ceremony in London the day after the Gentlemen’s Singles Championship match at Wimbledon. Steffan had been Max’s best man, having been cleared of all involvement in his mother’s plot with Veronica to assassinate the president. The plot had been confirmed by emails exchanged between Irina and Veronica which they’d attempted to erase—unsuccessfully—from the hard drives of their computers.

  The newlyweds stood at the back of opposite ends of the court. Each was shouting instructions to a student as the youths sl
ammed a ball back and forth with amazing speed and accuracy.

  “Down the line,” Kristin instructed her student.

  “Crosscourt!” Max advised his. And then, “Too short.”

  “Move in! Move! Drop shot!” Kristin said.

  Kristin’s player hit the ball with perfect touch, so it stopped dead on Max’s side of the net before the player Max was coaching got anywhere near it. Emily could hear Max saying to his player, “You have to push off with that back foot. And finish your swing! He couldn’t have hit that shot if you hadn’t left your ball so short. It’s all about footwork and follow-through.”

  Emily would have thought Kristin would be complimenting her player for his terrific shot. Which she did, for the first five seconds. Then she said, “You can’t drop the ball and stand there like a stone. You need to get yourself positioned for whatever return might come back at you. Everyone isn’t going to miss. Follow the ball toward the net.”

  “They look happy, don’t they?” the duchess said from her seat beside Emily. “I know Flick is happy.” The duchess smiled and said, “She told me so this morning. In fact, she’s deliriously happy. She was quick to inform me she didn’t mean the first definition of the word—mentally disturbed. She meant the second—frenzied excitement.”

  Emily smiled. The child was a delight. She viewed the scene below them and agreed, “Yes, Your Grace, they do look happy.” But people weren’t puppets. They couldn’t be made to do anything they didn’t want to do. In this case, Kristin and Max had a previous relationship and a child together. It made sense that they would end up living happily ever after.

  However, later today, she and the duchess were taking a plane from Miami to Hong Kong, where Her Grace planned to try out her matchmaking skills with a son who had no known attachments with a specific woman. How was the duchess going to succeed with Riley, when there was no woman waiting in the wings with whom he had a previous relationship and a child?

  Emily thought the trip was ill-conceived, and dangerous, considering how taxing it would be to fly, even first class, from Miami to Hong Kong. But she’d had no success trying to talk the duchess out of her plan.