by Diana Palmer
“What a great haul,” Lillian enthused, breaking into her thoughts. “You sold three-fourths of them. The rest we’ll keep on display for a few weeks and see how they do.”
“I’m delighted,” Tira said, and meant it. “It’s all going to benefit the outreach program at St. Mark’s.”
“They’ll be very happy with it, I’m sure.”
Tira was walking around the gallery with the manager. Most of the crowd had left and a few stragglers were making their way to the door. She noticed the bust of Simon had a Sold sign on it, and her heart jumped.
“Who bought it?” Tira asked curtly. “It wasn’t Jill Sinclair, was it?”
“No,” Lillian assured her. “I’m not sure who bought it, but I can check, if you like.”
“No, that’s not necessary,” Tira said, clamping down hard on her curiosity. “I don’t care who bought it. I only wanted it out of my sight. I don’t care if I never see Simon Hart again!”
Lillian sighed worriedly, but she smiled when Tira glanced toward her and offered coffee.
Simon watched the late-night news broadcast from his easy chair, nursing a whiskey sour, his second in half an hour. He’d taken Jill home and adroitly avoided her coquettish invitation to stay the night. After what he’d learned from Harry Beck, he had to be by himself to think things out.
There was a brief mention of Tira’s showing at the gallery and how much money had been raised for charity. He held his breath, but nothing was said about her suicide attempt. He only hoped the newspapers would be equally willing to put the matter aside.
He sipped his drink and remembered unwillingly all the horrible things he’d thought about and said to Tira over John. How she must have suffered through that mockery of a marriage, and how horrible if she’d loved John. She must have had her illusions shattered. She was the injured party. But Simon had taken John’s side and punished her as if she was guilty for John’s death. He’d deliberately put her out of his life, forbidding her to come close, even to touch him.
He closed his eyes in anguish. She would never let him near her again, no matter how he apologized. He’d said too much, done too much. She’d loved him, and he’d savaged her. And it had all been for nothing. She’d been innocent.
He finished his drink with dead eyes. Regrets seemed to pile up in the loneliness of the night. He glanced toward the Christmas tree his enthusiastic housekeeper had set up by the window, and dreaded the whole holiday season. He’d spend Christmas alone. Tira, at least, would have the despised Charles Percy for company.
He wondered why she didn’t marry the damned man. They seemed to live in each other’s pockets. He remembered that Charles had always been her champion, bolstering her up, protecting her. Charles had been her friend when Simon had turned his back on her, so how could he blame her for preferring the younger man?
He put his glass down and got to his feet. He felt every year of his age. He was almost forty and he had nothing to show for his own life. The child he might have had was gone, along with Melia, who’d never loved him. He’d lived on illusions of love for a long time, when the reality of love had ached for him and he’d turned his back.
If he’d let Tira love him…
He groaned aloud. He might as well put that hope to rest right now. She’d hate him forever and he had only himself to blame. Perhaps he deserved her hatred. God knew, he’d hurt her enough.
He went to bed, to lie awake all night with the memory of Tira’s wounded eyes and drawn face to haunt him.
Chapter Five
Simon was not in a good mood the next morning when he went into work. Mrs. Mackey, his middle-aged secretary, stopped him at the door of his office with an urgent message to call the governor’s office as soon as he came in. He knew what it was about and he groaned inwardly. He didn’t want to be attorney general, but he knew for a fact that Wally was going to offer it to him. Wallace Bingley was a hard man to refuse, and he was a very popular governor as well as a friend. Both Simon and Tira had been actively involved in his gubernatorial campaign.
“All right, Mrs. Mack,” he murmured, smiling as he used her nickname, “get him for me.”
She grinned, because she knew, too, what was going on.
Minutes later, the call was put through to his office.
“Hi, Wally,” Simon said. “What can I do for you?”
“You know the answer to that already,” came the wry response. “Will you or won’t you?”
“I’d like a week or so to think about it,” Simon said seriously. “It’s a part of my life I hadn’t planned to take up again. I don’t like living in a goldfish bowl and I hear it’s open season on attorneys general in Texas.”
Wallace chuckled. “You don’t have as many political enemies as he does, and you’re craftier, too. All right, think about it. Take the rest of the month. But two weeks is all you’ve got. After the holidays, his resignation takes effect, and I have to appoint someone.”
“I promise to let you know by then,” Simon assured him.
“Now, to better things. Are you coming to the Starks’s Christmas party?”
“I’d have liked to, but my brothers are throwing a party down in Jacobsville and I more or less promised to show up.”
“Speaking of the ‘fearsome four,’ how are they?”
“Desperate.” Simon chuckled. “Corrigan phoned day before yesterday and announced that Dorie thinks she’s pregnant. If she is, the boys are going to have to find a new victim to make biscuits for them.”
“Why don’t they hire a cook?”
“They can’t keep one. You know why,” Simon replied dryly.
“I guess I do. He hasn’t changed.”
“He never will,” Simon agreed, referring to his brother Leopold, who was mischievous and sometimes outrageous in his treatment of housekeepers. Unlike the other two of the three remaining Hart bachelor brothers, Callaghan and Reynard, Leopold was a live wire.
“How’s Tira?” Wallace asked unexpectedly. “I hear her showing was a huge success.”
The mention of it was uncomfortable. It reminded him all too vividly of the mistakes he’d made with Tira. “I suppose she’s fine,” Simon said through his teeth.
“Er, well, sorry, I forgot. The publicity must have been hard on both of you. Not that anybody takes it seriously. It certainly won’t hurt your political chances, if that’s why you’re hesitating to accept the position.”
“It wasn’t. I’ll talk to you soon, Wally, and thanks for the offer.”
“I hope you’ll accept. I could use you.”
“I’ll let you know.”
He said goodbye and hung up, glaring out the window as he recalled what he’d learned about Tira so unexpectedly. It hurt him to talk about her now. It would take a long time for her to forgive him, if she ever did.
If only there was some way that he could talk to her, persuade her to listen to him. He’d tried phoning from home early this very morning. As soon as she’d heard his voice, she’d hung up, and the answering machine had been turned on when he tried again. There was no point in leaving a message. She was determined to wipe him right out of her life, apparently. He felt so disheartened he didn’t know what to try next.
And then he remembered Sherry Walker, a mutual friend of his and Tira’s in the past who loved opera and had season tickets in the aisle right next to his, in the dress circle. He knew that Sherry had broken a leg skiing just recently and had said that she wasn’t leaving the house until it healed completely. Perhaps, he told himself, there was a way to get Tira to talk to him after all.
The letdown after the showing made Tira miserable. She had nothing to do just now, with the holiday season in full swing, and she had no one to buy a present for except Mrs. Lester and Charles. She went from store to colorfully decorated store and watched mothers and fathers with their children and choked on her own pain. She wouldn’t have children or the big family she’d always craved. She’d live and die alone.
As she sto
od at a toy store window, watching the electric train sets flashing around a display of papier mâché mountains and small buildings, she wondered what it would be like to have children to buy those trains for.
A lone, salty tear ran down her cold-flushed cheek and even as she caught it on her knuckles, she felt a sudden pervasive warmth at her back.
Her heart jumped even before she looked up. She always knew when Simon was anywhere nearby. It was a sort of unwanted radar and just lately it was more painful than ever.
“Nice, aren’t they?” he asked quietly. “When I was a boy, my father bought my brothers and me a set of ‘O’ scale Lionel trains. We used to sit and run them by the hour in the dark, with all the little buildings lighted, and imagine little people living there.” He turned, resplendant in a charcoal-gray cashmere overcoat over his navy blue suit. His white shirt was spotless, like the patterned navy-and-white tie he wore with it. He looked devastating. And he was still wearing the hated prosthesis.
“Isn’t this a little out of your way?” she asked tautly.
“I like toy stores. Apparently so do you.” He searched what he could see of her averted face. Her glorious hair was in a long braid today and she was wearing a green silk pantsuit several shades darker than her eyes under her long black leather coat.
“Toys are for children,” she said coldly.
He frowned slightly. “Don’t you like children?”
She clenched her teeth and stared at the train. “What would be the point?” she asked. “I won’t have any. If you’ll excuse me…”
He moved in front of her, blocking the way. “Doesn’t Charles want a family?”
It was a pointed question, and probably taunting. Charles’s brother was still in the hospital and no better, and from what Charles had been told, he might not get better. There was a lot of damage to Gene’s heart. Charles would be taking care of Nessa, whom he loved, but Simon knew nothing about that.
“I’ve never asked Charles how he feels about children,” she said carelessly.
“Shouldn’t you? It’s an issue that needs to be resolved before two people make a firm commitment to each other.”
Was he deliberately trying to lacerate her feelings? She wouldn’t put it past him now. “Simon, none of this is any of your business,” she said in a choked tone. “Now will you please let me go?” she asked on a nervous laugh. “I have shopping to do.”
His good hand reached out to lightly touch her shoulder, but she jerked back from him as if he had a communicable disease.
“Don’t!” she said sharply. “Don’t ever do that!”
He withdrew his hand, scowling down at her. She was white in the face and barely able to breathe from the look of her.
“Just…leave me alone, okay?” She choked, and darted past him and into the thick of the holiday crowd on the sidewalk. She couldn’t bear to let her weakness for him show. Every time he touched her, she felt vibrations all the way to her toes and she couldn’t hide it. Fortunately she was away before he noticed that it wasn’t revulsion that had torn her from his side. She was spared a little of her pride.
Simon watched her go with welling sadness. It could have been so different, he thought, if he’d been less judgmental, if he’d ever bothered to ask her side of her brief marriage. But he hadn’t. He’d condemned her on the spot, and kept pushing her away for years. How could he expect to get back on any sort of friendly footing with her easily? It was going to take a long time, and from what he’d just seen, his was an uphill climb all the way. He went back to his office so dejected that Mrs. Mack asked if he needed some aspirin.
Tira brushed off the chance meeting with Simon as a coincidence and was cheered by an unexpected call from an old friend, who offered her a ticket to Turandot, her favorite opera, the next evening.
She accepted with pure pleasure. It would do her good to get out of the house and do something she enjoyed.
She put on a pretty black designer dress with diamanté straps and covered it with her flashy velvet wrap. She didn’t look half bad for an old girl, she told her reflection in the mirror. But then, she had nobody to dress up for, so what did it matter?
She hired a cab to take her downtown because finding a parking space for the visiting opera performance would be a nightmare. She stepped out of the cab into a crowd of other music lovers and some of her painful loneliness drifted away in the excitement of the performance.
The seat she’d been given was in the dress circle. She remembered so many nights being here with Simon, but his reserved seat, thank God, was empty. If she’d thought there was a chance of his being here, she’d never have come. But she knew that Simon had taken Jill to see this performance already. It was unlikely that he’d want to sit through it again.
There was a drumroll. The theater went dark. The curtain started to rise. The orchestra began to play the overture. She relaxed with her small evening bag in her lap and smiled as she anticipated a joyful experience.
And then everything went suddenly wrong. There was a movement to her left and when she turned her head, there was Simon, dashing in dark evening clothes, sitting down right beside her.
He gave her a deliberately careless glance and a curt nod and then turned his attention back to the stage.
Tira’s hands clenched on the evening bag. Simon’s shoulder brushed against hers as he shifted in his seat and she felt the touch as if it were fire all the way down her body. It had never been so bad before. She’d walked with him, talked with him, shared seats at benefits and auctions and operas and plays with him, and even though his presence had been a bittersweet delight, it had never been so physically painful to her in the past. She wanted to turn and find his mouth with her lips, she wanted to press her body to his and feel his cheek against her own. The longing so was poignant that she shivered with it.
“Cold?” he whispered.
She clenched her jaw. “Not at all,” she muttered, sliding further into her velvet wrap.
His good arm went, unobtrusively, over the back of her seat and rested there. She froze in place, barely daring to move, to breathe. It was just like the afternoon in front of the toy store. Did he know that it was torture for her to be close to him? Probably he did. He’d found a new way to get to her, to make her pay for all the terrible things he thought she’d done. She closed her eyes and groaned silently.
The opera, beautiful as it was, was forgotten. She was so miserable that she sat stiffly and heard none of it. All she could think about was how to escape.
She started to get up and Simon’s big hand caught her shoulder a little too firmly.
“Stay where you are,” he said gruffly.
She hesitated, but only for an instant. She was desperate to escape now. “I have to go to the necessary room, if you don’t mind,” she bit off near his ear.
“Oh.”
He sighed heavily and moved his arm, turning to allow her to get past him. She apologized all the way down the row. Once she made it to the aisle, she felt safe. She didn’t look back as she made her way gracefully and quickly to the back of the theater and into the lobby.
It was easy to dart out the door and hail a cab. This time of night, they were always a few of them cruising nearby. She climbed into the first one that stopped, gave him her address, and sat back with a relieved sigh. She’d done it. She was safe.
She went home more miserable than ever, changed into her nightgown and a silky white robe and let her hair down with a long sigh. She couldn’t blame her friend, Sherry, for the fiasco. How could anyone have known that Simon would decide to see the opera a second time on this particular night? But it was a cruel blow of fate. Tira had looked forward to a performance that Simon’s presence had ruined for her.
She made coffee, despite the late hour, and was sitting down in the living room to drink it when the doorbell rang.
It might be Charles, she decided. She hadn’t heard from him today, and he could have stopped by to tell her about Gene. She went to the front
door and opened it without thinking.
Simon was standing there with a furious expression on his face.
She tried to close the door, but one big well-shod foot was inside it before she could even move. He let himself in and closed the door behind him.
“Well, come in, then,” she said curtly, her green eyes sparkling with bad temper as she pulled her robe closer around her.
He stared at her with open curiosity. He’d never seen her in night clothing before. The white robe emphasized her creamy skin, and the lace of her gown came barely high enough to cover the soft mounds of her breasts. With her red-gold hair loose in a glorious tangle around her shoulders, she was a picture to take a man’s breath away.
“Why did you run?” he asked softly.
Her face colored gently. “I wasn’t expecting you to be there,” she said, and it came out almost as an accusation. “You’ve already seen the performance once.”
“Yes, with Jill,” he added deliberately, watching her face closely.
She averted her eyes. He looked so good in an evening jacket, she thought miserably. His dark, wavy hair was faintly damp, as if the threatening clouds had let some rain fall. His pale gray eyes were watchful, disturbing. He’d never looked at her this way before, like a predator with its prey. It made her nervous.
“Do you want some coffee?” she asked to break the tense silence.
“If you don’t put arsenic in it.”
She glanced at him. “Don’t tempt me.”
She led him into the kitchen, got down a cup and poured a cup of coffee for him. She didn’t offer cream and sugar, because she knew he took neither.
He turned a chair around and straddled it before he picked up the cup and sipped the hot coffee, staring at her disconcertingly over the rim.
With open curiosity, she glanced at the prosthesis hand, which was resting on the back of the chair.