by Lisa Kleypas
Feeling guilty, for she had never gone through his desk, Lucy stared at the letters. The right thing to do would be to ignore the packet and pretend that she had never seen it. She flushed and then went white, casting a furtive glance around the room before she picked up the tempting stack of letters and slipped it into the pocket of her dress. She would just look through them quickly, just to find out who had written them. I’m his wife, she told herself. I have the right to know about these. There should be no secrets between us. And he certainly knows everything about me! Nevertheless, her conscience bothered her as she closed the drawer and resumed her search for the article. When she found it, she went back to the parlor and gave it to Damon, terribly aware of the bulge of letters in her pocket.
“Thank you,” Damon said, looking at her differently from before. Did he see the guilt on her face? Could he tell that she had discovered something in Heath’s desk? Perhaps his expression wasn’t different from before. It could have been that she was just imagining things. “If there is anything you need or anything I can do,” he said, “please ask.”
“I will,” Lucy replied, suddenly impatient to have him out of the house. It was shameless. But now that she had done something wrong, the least she was entitled to was the knowledge of what she had discovered. She could hardly wait to be alone and examine the letters in private.
When Damon had left and Lucy was alone, she pulled the curtain across the doorway of the parlor and sat down in a plump upholstered chair. Resting her head against the back of it, she sighed and closed her eyes for a second to ease their dry burning. She could hardly believe what she was doing. While her husband was helpless and ill upstairs, she was down here going through his private correspondence. I shouldn’t . . . I shouldn’t. But I have to know. Untying the string rapidly, she began to flip through the envelopes. All written by the same hand. All written by the same woman. Was it Raine?
No. Her shoulders sagged with relief as she pulled out the top letter and looked at the name at the bottom. Amy. That was the name of Heath’s half sister. The lines slanted up and down, penned in a careful, childish script that betrayed the writer’s youth. The first letter was dated more than a year ago, in June 1868. As Lucy scanned it, she discovered it was filled with Amy’s remarks and observations about the condition of the Price plantation and its residents. The name Clay—Heath’s half brother—was mentioned most often, and there was a brief reference to Raine, but nothing that described who Raine was. Impatiently Lucy slid the letter back into the envelope and reached for the next. She read letter after letter, her eyes lingering on certain phrases and sentences that jumped out at her.
Today Mother said that we couldn’t mention your name anymore. But Raine and I still talk about you in secret. Raine says she misses you, even after what happened between you.
Clay’s back hurts him a lot. He is sickly.
Mother is angry all the time. She says she should never have left England to marry Daddy. Now that he is gone, she wants to move back there. Poor Clay knows that she has to stay here because of him. Dr. Collins said Clay has to live where it’s warm.
Raine showed me the first flower you ever gave her. She pressed it in her Bible . . .
Raine and Clay had another fight ...
I like Raine sometimes, but she gets angry so quick. She wants nothing to do with Clay now. I think Mother is right about one thing. Raine’s not a good wife to him.
Lucy’s breath stopped as she reread the last sentence. Raine was Clay’s wife? Then she must have married him knowing that Heath loved her. But why would she have chosen Clay over Heath? For the plantation? For money? Perhaps because Heath was illegitimate. Yes, that must have been the reason.
I told Clay and Raine about your letter. Clay laughed when he found out you’re married to a Yankee woman. He said it was what you deserve. Raine was upset for a while, then she got mad. I think she still loves you. Why did you marry a Yankee woman? Does she have lots of money? There are lots of girls here who need husbands. I think you’d have been better off with one of them.
Raine doesn’t share a room with Clay anymore. She sleeps in the room you used whenever you came to visit.
I think Clay is dying . . .
Lucy’s absorbed silence was broken by the sound of Bess’s voice.
“Mrs. Rayne?”
“What is it?” Lucy asked, instantly ashamed to hear how sharp her voice was. But she felt like a thief who had been caught in the middle of a robbery, and irritation was the only way she could mask her guilt.
“Mr. Rayne is calling for you.”
Lucy shot up immediately. The letters fell from her lap to the floor in a rustling cascade. She threw them a harried glance.
“I’ll pick them up,” Bess said.
“No. No, I’ll do it later. Leave them there, please.” Pressing trembling fingertips to her mouth, Lucy hesitated, her eyes flickering to the staircase. Abruptly she was afraid. Why was he calling for her now? Was God giving her one more chance to hear Heath speak her name before—wildly she shook off the thought.
Bess’s expectant gaze spurred her into action. Lucy gritted her teeth, taking one step forward, and then another, and she found as she made her way up the steps that she had left her fear behind. A calm sort of blankness settled over her. Her heart had stopped in midbeat, suspended in the middle of her chest like a frozen pendulum.
The nurse, her expression solemn and compassionate, met Lucy at the bedroom door. “It’s worse now,” she said.
“I’ll see to him. Leave us alone, please.”
Heath stirred faintly and moaned as she approached the bed. “Lucy . . . I want Lucy . . .”
Tenderly she laid her palm against his bristled cheek. “I’m here.”
But he didn’t seem to know her touch, and he kept repeating her name. Lucy bent down low and spoke to him quietly, interrupting his litany with endearments and soothing words until he quieted. She kept her hand on his face, leaning over him until the muscles in her neck and back were screaming in protest. She was tired of everything, of running on nerves and being drained of hope. She was tired of being alone, and she wanted her husband back, and she was sick of enduring the ceaseless fear that she would never have him back.
Gradually Lucy lowered her head until it was cradled in her other arm. She closed her eyes to face a darkness splotched with multicolored lights. Remnants of the past floated by her as she slept and dreamed . . . Heath, laughing at her transparent wiles . . . making love to her . . . burying his head in her lap and uttering a drunken confession . . . smiling at her in the glow of candlelight . . . holding her when she cried. His arms seemed to fade away from her, and she fought to stay near him, but as he drifted deeper into the darkness she couldn’t find him. Alone, she whirled around in the blackness, sifting through the shadows in a futile effort to touch him. But he was gone. She had lost him. And she had never told him that she loved him . . .
Lucy opened her eyes with a gasp, her heart pounding. A nightmare. Blinking, she raised her head from her arm and looked at Heath. His lashes lay like dark fans on his pale skin. Reflexively, her hand curved more firmly against the side of his face. The pulse underneath his jaw beat steadily under her thumb. His skin felt cool.
Was she still dreaming? Was the fever really gone? She was shaking all over, unable to believe what was before her eyes. Checking him again, Lucy felt his quiet pulse, and the softness of breath against her fingertips, and the miraculous disappearance of the fever. She forgot her weariness and aching muscles as joy rushed through her. He was hers again.
Chapter 11
“Heath, what are you doing?” Lucy stopped short in the middle of the bedroom. She had gone to check on him as soon as she got home. It was a shock to see him out of bed and almost fully dressed for the first time in weeks. He turned to her as he buttoned his cuffs, casting a sardonic glance at her.
“Looks like I’m putting my clothes on, doesn’t it?”
“You’re not supposed to b
e out of bed.”
“I’ve been in that bed for two weeks. I’ve swallowed bottles of tonic, slept more than fourteen hours a day, and eaten every spoonful of the sickroom swill that’s been put before me. I think I deserve a few hours out of bed.”
Their eyes met, his glinting with cool determination, hers soft with cautious entreaty. Lucy saw that no amount of chiding, pleading, or persuasion would have any effect on him, and she lifted her hands in a gesture of helplessness.
“You always choose to test your limits. But this time it’s too soon—”
“This time the choice isn’t mine. I can’t play the invalid any longer. There are problems at the paper.”
“Mr. Redmond can take care of—”
“Damon came to visit yesterday while you were at your club meeting. He’s been having some difficulties lately”—Heath’s mouth twisted with self-disgust as he added—“mainly because he’s had to pull my weight as well as his. He’ll be here again today, for some suggestions on how he should work things out until I’m back.”
“I didn’t know he had visited yesterday,” she said, suddenly feeling the sting of exclusion.
“You didn’t have to,” Heath said softly.
She drew in a quiet, short breath of air. “Oh,” she said, and laughed shakily, trying to cover up the stab of hurt his words had caused. “You mean it’s your business. I didn’t mean to pry . . . You must feel as if I’ve been trying to keep you under my thumb.”
“I didn’t say that.”
But they both knew it was true. Slowly Lucy walked to the dressing table and sat down on the pretense of straightening her hair. Her eyebrows were nearly drawn together by the pucker that had formed between them. He must be nearly wild with his lack of freedom, of privacy. But could I have done anything differently the last few weeks? Could I have kept myself from being intrusive, worried, nagging? Only if she had loved him less. She had nearly lost him, and that had made her afraid to leave him alone for very long. It made her want to grab each moment she could with him, know his every thought, keep him all to herself. Unfettered, her possessiveness might someday turn her into a jealous shrew. She had to give him room, or risk turning him away from her.
Heath had once told her that the demands she made would be too overwhelming for some people to handle. She loved strongly. She needed strongly. Lucy couldn’t deny that it would be a long time before she felt secure enough to be comfortable with their relationship as it was. Her instinct was to take every opportunity she had to reinforce her hold over Heath, constantly searching for ways to strengthen their bond, when she should merely relax and allow him the freedom he needed.
She turned and looked at Heath, forcing herself to smile lightly. “Should I have another place set for dinner?”
He returned her smile, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “Please do.”
After he left the room, Lucy continued staring at the spot where he had stood. Heath Rayne, the Northeastern newspaper tycoon, looked and sounded very different from the man she had married. He was less playful now, more authoritative. The carefree air had been replaced by a formidable aura of power and responsibility. Even the sunny gold of his hair had darkened in the winter months to ash brown, making him look older than his twenty-seven years. The air of mystery around him had intensified. He was more compelling, more baffling, less accessible than ever.
Lucy sighed in frustration, acknowledging for the first time that there were differences in him, both outward and inward, that she would have to start accepting. Why had no one told her that men changed after courtship was over and the marriage had begun?
She had expected that Heath would have enjoyed being fussed over and cosseted while he recovered from his illness. The fact that her assumption was completely wrong served to prove once again how little she knew him. He had barely tolerated her coddling and her sympathy. There were times that she had to touch him or press a kiss to his cheek, just to reassure herself that he was all right, but he was outwardly unresponsive to her gestures of affection. Pale, quiet, and controlled, he had accepted his confinement to the bed with a surprising lack of argument, until now.
In response to Lucy’s private questions, Dr. Evans had said that Heath’s behavior was nothing out of the ordinary, and that it would take him several weeks to recover the health he had enjoyed before the illness. However, Lucy felt certain that the changes she saw in Heath, his enigmatic moods, his uncustomary quietness, were only partly a result of his physical condition. The other cause was something far more troubling. It seemed that he had come to some realization during his struggle with the fever, some self-recognition that bothered him exceedingly. He did not speak of it to her. Indeed, he seemed at times to be guarding against the possibility of mentioning it.
Raine. Though neither of them had ever mentioned her name to the other, her name hung in the silence between them, preventing the free exchanges they had once shared. Lucy didn’t know if Heath remembered anything about the delirium in which he had been trapped for so long. Did he know that he had mentioned Raine so often? Did he even suspect it of himself?
The suspicions that plagued Lucy were not eased by his apparent lack of interest in her. They occupied separate rooms, slept in separate beds each night, and though the time was long past when they could have resumed their former habit of sleeping together, Heath gave no indication that he would prefer a change in the current arrangements. All of the half-formed plans in Lucy’s mind for casually moving back into the master bedroom had dissolved over the past several days. She had let it go on for too long; now it would be difficult and awkward to return to Heath’s bed. Was there truly any need for her to have to seduce her way into the position that was already rightfully hers? Surely not. But why, then, was she half-afraid that she would be refused? She wasn’t certain. It was the coward’s way out, to wait until he mentioned something about wanting her again, but her confidence was bruised, and she didn’t want to risk greater damage.
Damon visited the house often to consult with Heath about the Examiner. If he noticed that things were not right between Lucy and Heath, he didn’t say a word. His concern was the newspaper, and currently that took precedence over everything else. Without Heath to keep them directed and motivated, the employees of the paper tended to be fractious and less careful about their work. Damon was a hard taskmaster, demanding, sarcastic, and impatient with others’ weaknesses. He freely admitted that he didn’t have Heath’s patience, nor his ability to play reporters off one another in order to extract their best efforts.
It was with great relief that everyone welcomed Heath back to the offices of the Examiner. As his familiar footsteps sounded on the floor of the editorial room, there was a chorus of greetings and a deluge of questions, which he fended off with raised hands and a familiar, confident grin.
“In my office. I’ll talk to you one at a time. Starting with the A’s and through to the Z’s . . . that is, if anyone around here has learned how to alphabetize yet.”
Damon raised a dark eyebrow as Heath passed by his desk. “I had expected a more ceremonious return.”
Heath stopped and looked down at him, his smile broadening marginally. “You think I should have made a speech?”
“Hardly. I’m just glad you decided to get your indolent self out of bed and get back to the business of publishing a newspaper. You haven’t exactly earned your keep the last few weeks.”
“After reading yesterday’s issue and seeing how you’ve been handling things in my absence, I decided it was time to come back.”
“You think you could have improved upon yesterday’s issue?” Damon inquired, with a condescending expression that would have made the rest of the Redmond clan proud.
“I damn well could have. I suffered from eyestrain after trying to find a mention of the Cincinnati Red Stockings anywhere in the paper.”
“I couldn’t see anything newsworthy in the fact that some ball club is going professional—”
“And going
on an eight-month tour from New York to the West Coast. I read all about it in the Journal—they’re starting a weekly baseball column.”
“Baseball’s going nowhere.”
“The hell it is. Baseball’s American. I’m going to have Bartlett write a page-one feature on the Red Stockings.”
“Next week it’ll be roller skating,” Damon grumbled.
“No matter what your highbrow opinions are, people like to read about sports.”
“Yet another theory on what people like to read. If you’re going to write about sports, let’s do something on cricket. The game of gentlemen.”
Heath grimaced in mock outrage. “Typical. Typical Bostonian for you. I don’t know how you kept the paper going without me.”
“If you want the truth, I enjoyed the peace and quiet while you were gone,” Damon informed him, and they scowled at each other, delighted that things were back to normal. The rest of the editorial room fairly crackled with new energy. Rayne and Redmond—there was nothing like working for the pair of them. Separately, either one of them would have taken the paper to an undesirable extreme. Without Damon’s influence, Heath would have been inclined to leap into creative disasters, and without Heath, Damon would have made it an unimaginative washout. But together, they ran a paper like no one else on Newspaper Row, with daring, innovative leaps and plenty of crispness and starch.
Exhausted by a long day and a drawn-out current events discussion, Lucy was unusually quiet during dinner. Heath, in turn, was preoccupied with matters concerning the Examiner. The result was a short and businesslike meal, after which Lucy retired to the parlor to read and Heath went to the library to work.