Her Forbidden Bridegroom

by Susan Fox

  “Besides which, I’m feeling very bitter and very bitchy right now, and if I stay around much longer, I think we’re all in danger of discovering what abominable manners I’m capable of.”

  Lorna’s insides were churning with a volatile mix of pain and fury, and such agonizing regret for her spiteful words that she was nauseous. She hadn’t known she was capable of such venom and the discovery caused her the deepest shame of her life. What little pride she had left was all that kept her from giving in to the confusing need to apologize and make amends. Doris might deserve her venom, but Lorna’s main shame was that she’d lowered herself to give Doris a taste of it.

  And of course, Mitch had witnessed it and heard every evil word. She’d been aware of his stony presence beside her the entire time and she didn’t dare peek now to see his reaction. Was his iron silence responsible for the crashing roar in her ears and the sick dread that was going over her in waves?

  Surely that was the reason for her impulse to apologize. It couldn’t possibly be because of her unwilling compassion for the haunted shock in Doris’s eyes and the way her mother appeared to sway.

  Lorna got out a choked, “I’ll just go get my things and wash up,” before she walked out of the kitchen into the hall, taking a few moments to get her handbag from the den before she found a downstairs bathroom and locked herself in.

  Her shaking legs buckled and she dropped her handbag to go to her knees in front of the pedestal sink, pressing her forehead against the cool porcelain while she took deep breaths and tried to cope with the awful things she’d said.

  “God forgive me, God forgive me,” she panted soundlessly, so deeply submerged in guilt that she was smothered by it.

  Until now, she’d been the one wronged, the one who bore no blame. But the bit of vengeance she’d taken on Doris had somehow put a stain on her soul that was eating her tender conscience alive.

  Bitter tears of confusion boiled up from it all, and she reached up defiantly to turn on the cold water tap. She couldn’t go to pieces here, of all places, so she pulled herself up and bent over the sink, dashing her hot face with cold water as she made the monumental effort to compose herself until she could make good her escape.

  “Mitch, if you can’t get her to stay today, you must get her to come to the barbecue,” Doris whispered urgently the moment Lorna was out of earshot.

  “I gave my word she wouldn’t have to see you today. Why are you here?”

  “I’ve obviously upset her.”

  Something in the way Doris ignored his question alerted him. “You care about that?”

  His question registered on the distress in her eyes and he watched as his unshakable stepmother began to twist her elegant hands together in an uncharacteristic sign of upset. The fact that the gesture was one he’d seen Lorna do—with the same distracted finger-bending twists—underscored the trait and made it appear familial.

  In the silence, they both heard the snap of the bathroom door latch down the hall, then the telling click of the lock. The sound appeared to further rattle Doris and she pressed him again.

  “Please, Mitch. Find some way to keep her here today. At least until Kendra gets home. There’s something—”

  “I think she’s had enough of this charade. I know I have.”

  Mitch’s harsh tone dealt Doris a new shock. The stepson she’d respected and admired and had come to love as a trusted friend had never looked at her like that.

  Despite their relatively close age—he was only eight years or so younger than she was—he’d never treated her as anything less than his father’s wife, and therefore he’d accorded her all the respect and deference he might have if she’d been twenty years his elder.

  But his stony look now and the laser probe of his hard gaze was something only a bit less intimidating than that of an employer pulling rank on an employee who’d stepped so far out of line that they were in danger of being fired.

  Doris had feared seeing that look from his late father and now that Ben was gone, she’d feared to see it in Mitch. Because she had so much ugliness and selfishness to hide, she’d always been terrified of discovery, alert to any signal that her biggest failings had been discovered. And, as she’d been with his father, she’d always been terrified to lose not only Mitch’s respect but also his affection and loyalty.

  But now her greatest personal fear was coming to pass, and even though she knew that what was ahead was inevitable, she was still struggling to somehow hold back the disaster until she could find some way to begin making amends. She’d worried that it was only a matter of time until someone with means and motivation looked into the past, but she’d hoped to somehow continue to live her charmed life in relative peace.

  Then Kendra herself had innocently set something in motion, and now Lorna had unwittingly advanced the process. The sense of justice that had secretly flayed Doris’s soul for years recognized the rightness of Lorna being the one to unknowingly bring this all to fruition, but her fear of losing everything she held dear made her want to somehow escape one last time.

  Lorna was the key to it all, and now that Doris had finally found the courage to approach her, it looked as if her last chance to make amends was over before she could truly begin. She’d bungled this badly.

  Mitch’s stern voice got her attention again and made her realize she’d slipped away into her panicked thoughts and missed what he’d been saying. “What?”

  “I said, what have you done?”

  What have you done? Doris reeled with the question.

  What have you done?

  The small word “you” pinned the wrong completely on her, precisely where it belonged, unerringly landing it like a bomb on a target. Doris reached for Mitch’s big hands and squeezed them madly as she tried to start.

  “I…I made some mistakes, Mitch.” She stopped and tears began to slide in hot trails down her beautiful face. “Oh God, no. Not mistakes…

  “No.” She shook her head adamantly. “A mistake is buying a dress that’s the wrong color, or when you misspell a word and have to erase or start over. What I did was no mistake.”

  Mitch held Doris’s cold hands and felt something inside him clench. Doris got control of herself then and looked up at him, the look in her eyes as haunted as any he’d ever seen.

  “It was a sin, Mitch. A sin. What I did to Lorna Farrell sixteen years ago was a sin. I thought it was the right thing to do at the time, I thought it was the only way I could keep Kendra and somehow escape that nightmare, but I never should have done it, Mitch. Never.”

  A coldness went over him. Sixteen years ago, Lorna would have been eight years old. And when Lorna’d been eight, her adoptive parents had been killed.

  “I’m so tired of being afraid someone will find out. First your father when he was alive, and now you and Kendra. But I finally have the courage to tell the two of you about it, Mitch. I deserve whatever happens next.”

  The truth struck him then. “Lorna knows it all, doesn’t she?”

  Doris’s tears came harder then and she struggled to speak. “She knows some of it, but she doesn’t know why. Maybe it would give her a little comfort to know why, and maybe I’m tired of living with the guilt and I want someone to forgive me, I don’t know anymore. But I do know that if Lorna leaves here today she’ll never come back and she’ll never let me near her again. Help me make her stay, I must talk to her. Please, Mitch. It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask of you.”

  Doris was too distraught to notice the movement just outside the kitchen in the hall. Kendra had gotten home and stood in the doorway, her teary gaze fixed on her mother. John stood in silent disapproval just behind her.

  When Kendra spoke, Doris jerked and glanced fearfully toward her youngest daughter. “It’ll be all right, Mama. If Mitch can’t get Lorna to stay, I will. She’ll listen to you, I know she will.”

  The magnitude of what Kendra was saying impacted Mitch and he suddenly realized what was going on. When Kendra’s gaze lift
ed to his, he suddenly saw a worldliness and a knowledge that told him his naïve little stepsister was not half as naïve and innocent of the ways of the world as he’d believed.

  The anger that made him feel would likely not hold a candle to the outrage Lorna would feel. And yes, he agreed now that Lorna should stay. It would be best to get everything out in the open once and for all.

  Mitch released Doris and strode to the hall, not sparing his stepsister a glance as he passed her and she rushed to her mother. When he reached the small bathroom, the door was open and the light was off. There was no sign of Lorna in the den. She wasn’t the kind of person who wandered around in other people’s houses, so he went out the front door then around the side of the house.

  He found her sitting with her Stetson and handbag at the far back corner of the veranda. She wouldn’t have been visible from the front when Kendra and John had arrived, but she’d probably heard John’s car.

  The Kelpie pups had found her but, as if they were alert to her quiet mood, they’d crowded around her in silent sympathy, content to just let her sit with her arms loosely around them and her fingers gently rubbing their soft coats.

  Lorna looked up at him, then away. “I behaved badly in there. I apologize.”

  “Doris admitted some surprising things after you went out. Both she and Kendra have some confessions to make and a lot of explaining to do if you’re ready to hear them out.” He’d been blunt to spare her the suspense, but he’d expected her to refuse and to demand that he take her back to San Antonio. He’d do it without question if she chose that because he thought she was owed that much.

  But she nodded somberly and looked down at the puppies. “Now that I’ve been thinking about it all, I realize something was going on. I’m just not sure I want to know what it was. I doubt any of it matters now.”

  Mitch picked up one of the pups and sat down next to her. “It might matter very much. Doris says you know about it, but you don’t know why. Looks like it’s been eating her a while. If you’ve wanted answers for things, this might be the time.”

  “I won’t put up with having her play on my sympathy, and I don’t want to hear a litany of excuses,” she said, still weary in the aftermath of her own emotional upset and terrified of more. “I’ve discovered I’m not quite the paragon of compassion and tolerance and proper behavior that I thought I was.”

  “You don’t have to be.”

  Lorna looked at him briefly to see the truth of that then turned her attention back to the pups while she struggled with the tantalizing question of how much she wanted to know. The risk of even more emotional turmoil was too high for her to immediately rush right back in and ask for more.

  It was a long time before she could bring herself to give Doris another chance.

  By the time Lorna and Mitch joined Kendra and Doris in the living room, John was just leaving. Lorna knew her boss well enough to know he was angry. Possibly furious. Kendra looked distressed, but neither Kendra nor John referred to the tension between them beyond his announcement that he was going back to San Antonio. His surprising offer of a ride made Lorna feel even more uneasy about what was going on.

  Mitch spoke up. “I can fly Lorna home when she’s ready.”

  John managed a polite goodbye to them all, but he was reserved with Kendra to the point of rudeness before he went out the door and they all went into the living room to find places to sit.

  Lorna had kept hold of her handbag and Stetson, quietly declining an offer to put them away until she was ready to leave. There was something about all this that made her feel she should be prepared to flee, and something unsettling that made her want to keep familiar possessions close by. Now that she’d agreed to this, the tension on Doris’s and Kendra’s faces made her even more uneasy. They both looked as if they’d been crying, and Lorna tried to ignore that.

  She turned down the offer of an iced tea, wanting to get this over with. Mitch sat near her on the sofa, and Doris and Kendra chose wing chairs on the other side of the huge glass-topped coffee table.

  Doris gently cleared her throat and looked at Lorna. This time she made eye contact, and Lorna was unwillingly touched by the impression of shame she read in Doris.

  The details and events Doris outlined about her adolescence were surprisingly blunt and told without much emotion, and when she told the details of her actions as an adult, she was unsparing of herself and her motives.

  Doris had grown up poor, with an alcoholic mother and a father who’d slapped them both around. Starved for a bit of tenderness and love, she’d been too naïve to realize she’d gotten pregnant from a single sexual encounter with a neighbor boy in the back seat of his car. She’d been months into her pregnancy when her mother’s suspicions and a hasty trip to a doctor had confirmed the truth.

  Young Doris’s life had gotten desperately worse after that, until a beating from her father had landed her in a charity hospital. Robert and Erma Farrell found out about her situation, and in exchange for allowing them to adopt Lorna, they’d paid all her expenses, including rent on a tiny apartment and a generous allowance until Doris was through high school.

  Terrified to be on her own in the world, Doris had married the first boy who’d asked when she was eighteen. But the abuse she’d thought she’d escaped returned with a vengeance and escalated with her young husband. After enduring six years of it, she’d tried to seek a divorce when her husband’s abuse began to include Kendra.

  By the time Lorna’s adoptive parents had been killed, Doris had been in a vicious custody battle for her youngest daughter, and she’d been too terrified her ex-husband would find out about Lorna and use it against her to even consider reclaiming her. And even after she’d won custody of Kendra and they were safe, she’d been poor, so she’d taken comfort in the notion that beautiful little Lorna had surely been adopted by an intact family.

  She’d worked hard to make a good life for herself and Kendra, then met Ben Ellery and fell in love. Ben had been an honorable man with high standards of right and wrong, duty and family.

  She’d been so afraid of losing her grand opportunity for love and an escape from lack for her and Kendra that she’d worried Ben would disapprove of the fact that she’d given up a child. She’d been certain he wouldn’t forgive her if he knew she’d sacrificed one daughter to save the other when she’d also failed to look for her orphaned child and reclaim her once her life improved.

  Particularly since she’d never sought Ben’s help when they’d decided to marry. It would been a simple matter for a man with his money and influence, but Doris had been too afraid of jeopardizing her new rich life to ask. And the longer she’d waited, the more impossible it became.

  So she’d kept silent until that day five years ago in the restaurant when, in front of both Ben and Mitch, Lorna’s former friend had introduced her as the child Doris had given up. Panicked, Doris had denied it and though Ben had initially shown signs of doubting her, he’d soon relented and taken Doris at her word.

  It had been another reprieve for Doris until that past Friday when Mitch had discovered Lorna’s friendship with Kendra.

  Doris had been frustrated by Lorna’s refusal to accept money. In some ways, it had been her way of somehow giving Lorna a financial compensation for the past. Then she’d been shocked by Kendra’s suggestion to Mitch about dating Lorna, but she’d seen the potential in taking Kendra’s idea seriously.

  It was just after she’d persuaded Mitch to go along with the dating scheme that she’d begun to let herself wonder what Lorna was like. If Lorna didn’t want money, what could she want?

  That was also when she’d caught on to what Kendra was trying to do and realized that perhaps bringing Lorna closer to their family and somehow mending things with her was not only inevitable but something she wanted to do.

  Which was why Doris had come home today earlier than expected. She’d meant to begin the process directly, but then she’d handled it poorly and now admitted she’d prob
ably done far more harm than good.

  Lorna didn’t comment on that. As if to spare Lorna the pressure of doing so, Kendra made a start at her own explanation and dropped a bombshell.

  She started with that day in the restaurant five years ago. Kendra had been having lunch with her family but had excused herself to go speak to friend in another part of the restaurant. On her way back to their table, she’d got near enough to overhear what was going on and had slipped behind a large fernery to hear the rest.

  She’d sensed her mother’s upset was too deep for the claim of a long-lost child to be a lie. Kendra had pondered the incident those next years, then used her own money to look into the claim after Ben’s death a year ago.

  Once she’d become convinced Lorna might truly be her sister, Kendra had arranged to meet John Owen at a party in hope of dating him so she could meet Lorna. The happy consequence of that was that she’d fallen in love with John.

  Impatient with waiting for an accidental meeting between Lorna and Mitch that she could exploit, Kendra arranged for Mitch to pick her up in John’s office where he’d be sure to meet Lorna. If Lorna could be drawn close to Doris through Mitch, Kendra was certain Doris wouldn’t be able to resist accepting Lorna at long last.

  After all, Doris had been a wonderful mother to her, and Kendra hadn’t been able to accept that her mother could refuse her own child. And the more Kendra had found out about Lorna’s upbringing, the more guilt she’d felt for being the child who’d had an easy, charmed life.

  When the confessions were finished, Lorna was too drained to react. The things that had caused her a lifetime of hurt and abandonment had been explained, yet both Doris and Kendra had used that lifetime of hurt and abandonment to manipulate her.

  No one spoke as Lorna sat silently and tried to absorb it all. She glanced Mitch’s way and saw his stony expression. He disapproved of what Doris and Kendra had done, there was no mistaking the dark turbulence in his eyes. She wished her own feelings and thoughts about it all could be that clear-cut.