by Brenda Joyce
“Mother!” Hadrian cried.
Isobel had a will of iron—she always had. She willed her heart to beat, she willed herself to stand still and strong and tall. But she could not will the blood to her face, which was deathly pale. Nor could she drag her gaze from Hadrian Stone.
He, too, stared.
Hadrian, their son, was standing. He looked from the one to the other, from his mother, frozen and ghostly white, to his father, sitting in shock at the table. It was Stone who recovered first. “Is this a joke?” he asked coldly.
“I have sudden, urgent business to attend to,” Hadrian said, and then he was gone, slamming the doors behind him.
Stone stood. “Is this some kind of rotten joke?”
Isobel blinked. This was no dream. The man she had once loved with all of her heart and soul—the man she still loved—stood before her in the flesh. He was older, his hair was no longer a lustrous chestnut but threaded with gray, and there were many new wrinkles about his eyes and mouth, but he was still tall, still muscular in build, and he still enthralled her instantly with his male magnetism. He was still the most handsome man she had ever seen, and he always would be. Her entire body quivered in response to him, just as her heart pounded frantically and erratically.
He kicked back his chair. “I had no intention of ever laying eyes upon you again,” he said in hard tones. “But apparently our son decided otherwise.”
Isobel jerked. It was suddenly apparent—and it struck her like a cold, steel-edged slashing knife—that he hated her. His eyes burned with hatred. He stood there looking at her as if she were the lowest sort of vermin. Pain ripped through her, nearly knocking her from her feet. Dear God, how could such love have changed to such hate?
And how, oh how, how could she face him when he felt like this?
She found more strength than she knew she had. She straightened her shoulders, she lifted her chin. When she spoke, her voice barely trembled. “Apparently.”
She glided towards the table. She did not look at him, although she could feel his burning eyes upon her. She had never been vain, but now she felt her fifty years, and she felt sick to know that, while she had taken one look at him and melted with hot, turbulent desire, he stared at her with nothing but hatred, seeing nothing but an old woman. She reached for the teapot, and began refilling his cup before filling her own.
He grabbed her wrist from across the table. She cried out as he hauled her forward so that their faces almost touched. “Good God!” he shouted. “After all you’ve done—after all you’ve done—you see me and you pour me tea?!”
Tears filled her eyes as she gazed back into his furiously angry gaze. “Unhand me.”
He did so, instantly.
“It is not like you to behave like a brute.” She was amazed at how calm her voice was, when inside she felt like she was dying.
“If I am behaving like a brute, it is because you have made me into one.”
“Francis always blamed me for his weakness, too.”
He froze. His face went white. Then, his jaw so tight that hollows formed beneath his cheeks, he said, “I am sorry.”
He was nothing like Francis, he could never be like Francis, and Isobel knew it. “So am I,” she said softly.
His head whipped up. His eyes blazed. “Being sorry now is a little bit late!”
Isobel stepped backwards.
He hurled himself around the table and she thought that he would grab her again. But he did not, he just stood there before her, shaking in rage. “Just what the hell are you sorry about, Isobel?”
The tears came then, filling up her eyes. “I am sorry for everything.”
“For everything?” He was sarcastic. “For lying, for being deceitful, for being nothing more than a self-serving bitch?”
She reeled away from him. “Oh, God!”
He grabbed her. There was immense power in his hands, but he did not hurt her. He shook her once. “I loved a woman who did not exist! Who never existed! I loved a lie! I loved a lovely lie!”
She wept. “Why are you doing this? Why are you hurting me like this? Why do you hate me so?”
“You denied me my son and you dare to ask me why I hate you?”
She tried to focus on him through the flood of tears. “I did it because I was afraid. I was so afraid!”
“Afraid?” He became still. “Afraid of what? Of Francis?”
“No! I mean, of course I was afraid of Francis. He hated me for running the estates so well, and then he hated Hadrian for not being his son, and for reminding him of his impotency. He needed only the slightest excuse to hurt me. Hadrian was like you, though, even as a little boy. He was brave. He tried to protect me so many times!” She sobbed.
“I would have protected you!” Now he shook her hard. “God damn it, I would have protected you both! I would have taken you both away from here!”
“That is what I was afraid of,” she wept. “I knew you would come if I told you of Hadrian. I knew you would come to claim your son. Just as I knew it was wrong to deny you the truth. But, Hadrian! Dear God, try and understand! Leaving you and returning to Clayborough was the hardest thing I have ever done. It was a miracle that I did so. A tenuous miracle. Somehow I survived each day without you. When I learned I was pregnant with your child, it gave me the will to live and to fight again. I didn’t tell you the truth because if you came, you would destroy the existence I had just barely managed to attain. I knew if I ever laid eyes on you again I would willingly leave Clayborough and my husband, I would willingly violate my honor and my own integrity, to run away with my child and you. And if I did that, I would hate myself for the rest of my life.”
He released her. He ran a shaking hand through his hair, staring at her wide-eyed. “Jesus. So much damn nobility. Self-sacrificing nobility!”
“If I had taken Hadrian and gone to you, I would have not just hated myself. In time, I would have hated you, too,” she whispered.
He froze. Then he walked away from her. She watched him, the tears streaming freely down her face now, her shoulders shaking. But she did not make a sound.
When he turned to look at her, his own eyes were wet with unshed tears. But the anger was gone. “Life is never black or white, is it?” he asked sadly. “So many damned shades of grey. Why did you have to be the woman you are, Isobel? But then,” his laugh was bitter, “it is that woman that I fell in love with.”
“I chose to be apart from you, loving you, rather than be with you, hating you.”
He absorbed that with great gravity. “I would not have been able to endure your hatred, either.”
“Do you understand, then?” she cried.
“Yes, I understand self-respect,” he said very heavily.
She collapsed on the nearest chair with overwhelming relief. “And,” she whispered, daring to look at him, “and can you forgive me?”
“I don’t know.”
She was crushed.
“How bad was it for Hadrian?” He had to know. “Did you sacrifice him to your damned nobility, too?”
“No!” She cried. “Francis never loved him, but I more than made up for it. Francis hit him a few times, but I soon made him stop with blackmail—the same blackmail that made Francis accept him as his son. I threatened to reveal to the world the entire truth about Francis—his nature, his drunkenness, his preference for boys, and how he had to be rescued by his wife from his debts. It was that last that assured his silence about Hadrian not being his son—Francis could not bear for the world to know how inept he was. Hadrian did not have a father’s love, but I tried to make up for that. You have met him, you have seen the fine man he has turned into. Look at how strong he is. You can be proud of him, Hadrian, you should be proud of him. He is like you in every way.”
“But he grew up suffering.”
Briefly, Isobel closed her eyes. “He suffered. He suffered a vast hurt that has haunted him to this day. The hurt of being unloved. The hurt of being despised by one parent. I pr
otected him as best I could. Perhaps I was selfish. Perhaps you are right, I am self-serving. Perhaps I chose wrongly. I have wondered so many times if I did make the right choice. You would have given him love. But our relationship would not have survived if I had turned my back on my marriage and my life. Would that have made Hadrian a happier child?”
It was impossible to speculate upon the myriad possibilities, Hadrian realized. He watched Isobel cry silently into a handkerchief. It was a relief to no longer be angry. In its place, he felt curiously numb. He watched the outline of her small, shaking shoulders and her delicate hands as she held the linen to her face. A fabulously large sapphire glinted from her fourth finger. He noted that she no longer wore her wedding rings.
She raised her face, lifting her gaze to his.
His breath caught. There was no numbness now. Isobel was no longer a girl of twenty, but she had aged magnificently. Her face had not changed. Oh, there were deeper lines around her mouth, and a few crow’s feet about her eyes, her hair was much paler now than it had been, almost platinum, but her features were as exquisite as ever. He was stunned to find himself staring at her, filled with the kind of raw desire he hadn’t felt for any other woman in thirty years, that he had only felt when with her.
Her eyes widened.
He clenched his fists hard as the surge of lust swept him. Their gazes met cautiously. He saw that she knew. And he saw something else—the bright wild hope in her gaze.
“You are still beautiful, Isobel,” he said carefully.
“I am old.”
“You don’t look old.”
“Don’t do this.”
He approached her. “Don’t do what?”
“Don’t do this!” She tried to dodge his hands but they closed quickly on her arms and she was pulled up against him.
He shuddered violently at the contact. Every bit of her was slender and soft, feminine and familiar. She stared up at him, pinned in his embrace, her eyes as vivid and lovely as he remembered.
“Don’t do this,” she said again.
“Why not? This hasn’t changed, has it? We still want each other. I want you.”
Tears filled her eyes. “But I love you,” she whispered.
He froze. Then he stopped thinking. His embrace tightened, his mouth came down on hers. Suddenly all the years that had passed vanished; yesterday and today became one. He was no longer sixty, but thirty, and the woman he held in his arms was a girl. They might have been embracing on the deck of his clipper ship, the Sea Dragon, or on the shores of Virginia. Time had ceased to exist. All that existed, for him, was Isobel, and the enormity of his love for her, which had never died.
His hands slid over her, remembering. His mouth moved slowly on hers. He stopped when he realized that he was tasting her salty tears. “Don’t cry,” he murmured, holding her tightly. “Don’t cry, Isobel.”
She wept harder. “I love you, Hadrian. I can’t do this. Not with you hating me.” But she clung so hard to the lapels of his fine suit jacket that the threads ripped.
“I don’t hate you,” he cried. “How could I ever hate you? I have spent my entire life loving you.” And remembering his son’s words, he said, “Even an American can be loyal.”
She laughed, crying. “You mean it? You do not hate me? You can forgive me?”
“Isn’t there a saying,” he asked softly, holding her splendid face in his large hands, “that love heals all wounds?”
Now she really laughed, clasping his hands with hers as he held her face. “That is ‘time heals all wounds,’ I think.”
“Then for us it is love,” he said simply. His grip tightened as a new and frightening thought occurred to him—what if the past could repeat itself? What if she still felt some miserable sense of loyalty to Clayborough or the dead duke? “You are going to marry me this time, Isobel.”
“Yes,” she cried wildly. “Yes, yes, yes!”
“It wasn’t a question,” he said, sudden tears blinding him.
“I know!” And she flung her arms around him.
It took Nicole only a moment to realize where she was. She blinked, raising herself up on one arm and staring at the fat poster of the heavily draped, canopied bed. Remembrance rushed in upon her. Abruptly she fell back on the pillows.
Yesterday Hadrian had dragged her forcefully from Cobley House. Yesterday they had made love in his coach, with no inclination on her part to resist. Yesterday her anger had fled in the wake of her love, which just wouldn’t die. And yesterday she had broken down in his arms, finally giving vent to her heartbreak.
Cautiously, Nicole sat up. She was naked, but she did not recall undressing or climbing into bed. Indeed, the last thing she remembered was sobbing wildly in Hadrian’s arms in the Clayborough coach. His embrace had been so tender.
Her heart quickened.
She seemed to remember telling him that she loved him, too. She fervently hoped she had not, that it had only been a dream.
Dear Lord, what was she going to do now?
An image of the gorgeous Holland Dubois rose up in her mind.
Nicole rose from the bed and slipped on a robe. She washed her face and brushed her teeth, trying to concentrate on the task at hand. She could not. The memories continued to beckon her, larger than life. Nicole stood very still in the bathroom, gripping the marble-topped vanity. She was fully awake now, and it was impossible not be aware of what she had been avoiding all that past week. During her stay at Cobley House she had been like a zombie, unthinking and unfeeling. Now she could think and she could feel. She was afraid to analyze her emotions too closely. Yet they were there, unavoidable, a bit tender and a bit raw. It still hurt to think of Hadrian and Holland. Yet she did not seem to feel too bad. Her heart was miraculously intact.
What was she going to do about Holland? What could she do? Had Hadrian really been so kind and caring yesterday? Or had that, too, been a dream?
Nicole’s grip on the vanity tightened. She wanted to see her husband. She felt compelled to see him. She must find out if she had imagined all that softness and compassion and caring she had seen in his eyes. Suddenly that was what was important, and she didn’t give a fig about anything else.
She willed that it had not been a dream. She willed it so hard that it had to be the truth.
Nicole moved swiftly across the bedroom. She knew she should not go out of her suite in her current state of deshabille, but now she was propelled forward by a force she could not identify. She entered the sitting room. She was about to move into the hallway when she saw the gift-wrapped box.
She stopped. It was a large rectangular parcel, leaning up against the wall. It looked as if it had been carelessly placed there and forgotten. Nicole knew it was for her. Just as she knew it was from Hadrian. As if drawn to a magnet, she approached the package. And then once it was in her hands she tore it open like a demon possessed.
The first thing she saw beneath the green tissue paper was doeskin. She blinked, pulling out a pair of riding breeches. She pulled out another pair, and another. There were half a dozen in all, each a different color—cream and tan, gray and brown, and hunter green. She held the last pair up, the garment jet black. She did not have to try on a single pair to know that the breeches would fit her perfectly.
Nicole was moved to tears. She clutched the ebony pants to her face. What did this mean? Oh, what did this mean?
Abruptly she tossed the breeches aside, frantically rifling through the garments and tissue for a card. She found one. It only said: “To my dear wife.” Hadrian had scrawled his name illegibly below.
She hugged the tiny card to her breast. To my dear wife. He had written “to my dear wife.” He had not been merely polite, she was certain. Just as she was certain she had seen caring and compassion in his gaze yesterday.
He cared.
Nicole leapt to her feet. Nothing was going to stop her from finding him now.
She ran down the corridor, ignoring the busy maids she passed, who paused in the
ir chores to blink at her attire before offering her their chipper good mornings. Nicole fled down the stairs, rapidly becoming out of breath. Her heart was thundering. Anticipation filled her. She must find Hadrian immediately!
One the ground floor she ignored the doormen, whom she really did not even see, and hurried towards his study. Voices coming from the music room drew her attention. Happy voices, a man and a woman’s. Nicole skidded to a stop. The tone they shared was conspiratorial, intimate. The man’s voice almost sounded like Hadrian’s, and for a second, Nicole thought the worst even as she knew her suspicion could not be correct. She flung open the door.
For an instant she stared at the Dowager Duchess being intimately embraced by a man. Isobel and her lover both turned to look at her. Hot color flooded Nicole’s face. “Excuse me!” she cried, backing away. “I am so sorry!”
She slammed the door shut and stood outside of it, panting. Whatever was going on? Did it matter? She must find her husband, she must!
He was not in his study. Now running, Nicole turned around and raced back up the stairs.
When Hadrian closed the music room doors on his parents, he was feeling more than a little bit guilty and very anxious. He was no longer sure that he had done the right thing. It was clear to him that they both still loved each other, but he was not a romantic, he knew better than that, yet he had been acting like one in trying to bring them together. In reality, so much water had passed under the bridge, it was doubtful that they would be able to recover what they had once had.
As he strode up the hall, he glanced at his pocket watch, not for the first time. It would soon be ten. His heart tightened. Nicole had been sleeping for almost twenty-four hours and he was growing very alarmed. Last night he had checked on her three times, each time becoming more anxious. She slept like one dead. That morning at six she had still been coma-like. At eight she had been stirring. Yet she was still not up.
Taking the back stairs because it was quicker, he decided to wake her up. And as he approached her suite, he began to tremble. He felt as if their next encounter would determine the course of their entire marriage, he felt it in every marrow of his being. He knew such a feeling was ridiculous. But he could not shake his certainty.