Oh, my darling! Nicole wept silently, aching to touch him.
“No. Read it for yourself, if you don’t believe me, Pierce. Go on!” With a sweep of her hand, Louise sent the papers skittering over the tabletop. “As your friend, I care too much to let you walk blindly into the trap she’s set for you but if, when you find out why your precious Nicole really came to town, you can look me in the eye and tell me you still want to many her, I’ll not say another word.”
“You’ve said too much already,” he returned heavily. “You had no business invading Nicole’s privacy and you’ve accomplished nothing but to damage the friendship you claim to value so dearly.”
Nicole lifted her head and stole a glance at him. He looked frozen, formidable, his features carved from stone. The urge to touch him died, just as his love for her was dying right before her eyes.
He spoke again. “If that’s everything, Louise, I’d appreciate your leaving. Go home. There’s nothing here for you.”
The silence she left behind was unbearable, a great wall of glass about to shatter. When it did, Nicole knew its lethal shards would rip and tear at the fabric of everything lovely which she and Pierce had shared that day and leave it beyond any hope of repair.
“Pierce,” she whispered, “it isn’t the way Louise made it sound.”
“Is there any truth at all to the accusations she’s made?”
“Some. I am Tommy’s aunt.”
“I fail to see how you can be.”
“Arlene was my sister. Our mother gave us up for adoption when we were small. Louise is right. It’s all recorded here.” She touched the jumble of papers with the tip of her finger.
As if he couldn’t abide the sight of her, he paced into the living room and stared out of the windows. “Did you seriously think you could keep this a secret indefinitely?”
“No,” she exclaimed. “It was never my intention to do that.”
“Really! So when were you planning to reveal yourself?”
“Tonight,” she said, despising the desperation she heard in her voice. “I admit I’ve been putting it off, but I promised myself I’d tell you tonight at dinner.”
“Why then? Because I’d already made such a fool of myself that another blow to my pride wouldn’t kill me? Or did you really think that once you’d wrung a proposal out of me, I’d be too much the gentleman to renege on the offer?”
The first shard of pain found its mark. “Pierce, my relationship to Tommy has nothing to do with my feelings for you. You’ve got to believe that.”
His laughter drove another sliver into her heart. “Give me one good reason why I should believe you’d tell me the correct time, let alone the truth. You’ve lied to me from the day you set foot in my house and done it so well, I never suspected a thing.”
“I wanted to tell you right away,” she cried.
“What stopped you, sweetheart? Your perverted sense of honor? Your nonexistent moral code?”
“I was afraid! I thought you’d see me as a threat to your custodial rights and refuse to let me near him. I’m Tommy’s closest living relative, after all, and I didn’t know anything about the kind of man you are.”
“No, you didn’t, but you didn’t let that stop you from judging me and finding me wanting, did it?”
“You might have been jealous.” How pitiful the reasons sounded, aired in the clear light of day. How self-serving and mean-spirited! “You might have thought I’d try to take him away from you.”
“So you decided to become Mrs. Pierce Warner first. Pity Louise finessed your plan, isn’t it?”
“I already told you, I was going to tell you everything tonight. I would never have married you with this secret between us, Pierce, never.”
Desperate to make him understand the fear and grief that had driven her, she followed him into the living room. In the time since they’d come back to the cottage, the sky had grown ominously dark, adding an air of foreboding to an already somber scene.
Shivering despite the oppressive heat, she reached out to touch his shoulder, hoping to evoke something of the tenderness they’d shared earlier and in so doing, stir the embers of his sympathy, if not his understanding.
He didn’t shrug her off so much as freeze her out. He was worse than immovable, he was unreachable. “Liar,” he snarled, this man who, only an hour before, had told her he loved her and would cherish her the rest of his days.
“I am not lying now,” she wept. “And I never lied about loving you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Pierce.”
“Even if I decide that Tom is better off living with his grandparents in Arizona and that he’d visit us only once or twice a year? Would you still want me then, sweetheart?”
She couldn’t bear the mockery with which he uttered the endearment. “Is it so terrible for me to want both of you?” she cried, yanking on his arm and pulling him around to face her. “In my place, wouldn’t you? I went through most of my life not knowing I had a sister, then found her only to lose her again before I could see her, or hug her, or kiss her.”
For a moment, she thought she’d penetrated the shell of rejection with which he’d armored himself against her. Just briefly, he met her gaze searchingly, before he swung back to the window.
“No, Pierce!” she exclaimed. “I won’t let you turn away from me—from us! If my not wanting to chance losing contact with my sister’s son makes me a despicable person in your eyes, at least have the guts to tell me so to my face.”
“There’s a bad storm coming,” he said.
“I don’t care if the world’s about to end! I won’t let you shut me out like this. I don’t deserve it!”
“You don’t deserve? Where the hell do you get off thinking you deserve a damn thing?”
“Even a criminal is entitled to a fair hearing,” she replied, stung. “Or is it still Navy practice to hang a man from the yardarm before he’s had a chance to plead his case?”
He didn’t reply. He seemed to find the view more engrossing than anything she could offer in her own defense. It was as if, having disappointed him in this one thing, she lacked credibility in every other respect, too.
“I hadn’t figured you to be quite this petty,” she said, too numbed by the hopes already dashed to pieces to care that she might be courting disaster with what was left of her dreams.
He flinched as the barb struck home. “If that’s your opinion, I’m left to wonder why you were so ready to many me—oh, but I forgot! Your acceptance of my proposal had nothing to do with me and everything to do with what you hoped to gain from such a convenient alliance.”
“And you,” she retorted, stirred to anger by his withering scorn, “are nothing but a spoilt brat who’s decided to grab all his toys and go home because the game isn’t being played exactly according to the rules he’s set down. I made a mistake, I admit it, and I’m trying to set it right, but you aren’t prepared to be forgiving.”
Shaking her head, she turned back to the dining room. She’d fought to overcome her grief and disappointment over Arlene’s death and thought she’d emerged the stronger for it. But the crushing effect of this latest blow sapped all the sweetness she’d found in Pierce’s love and brought her face-to-face with her own frailty again.
“If what we feel for each other—the love we thought we shared—can’t weather this, we’d have been in serious trouble down the road, Pierce.”
“We’re in serious trouble anyway,” he said, and something in his tone sent alarm prickling over her.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Take a look.”
Swiftly, she crossed the room to stand beside him again.
“See that peninsula halfway across the lake?” He pointed at a spit of land which stuck out at right angles to the eastern shore about a mile away. The previously calm surface of the water had changed, whipped into a rush of whitecaps which pounded the tip of the land.
Half an hour ago, houseboats had plied the calm waters,
dinghies and runabouts had zipped back and forth between hidden coves and summer landings. Where were they now? “How could anyone survive out there?” she asked over the knot of fear in her throat.
“They couldn’t,” he said grimly. “That’s a full-blown gale we’re seeing, and it’s headed our way.”
The black line of cloud advanced toward the promontory on which the cottage stood, pushed at a furious rate by the wind already wreaking such havoc over the water.
“Oh, brother, this is bad!” Pierce scarcely breathed the words as the whitecaps churned into a froth of water that streaked the width of the lake, obliterating the spit and the far shore behind it.
And then, even as she watched, it suddenly whirled into a coiling mass and rose up into a perfectly formed funnel, exactly as if some giant straw had sucked it up toward the heavens.
The house was full of eerie shadows brought on by the premature twilight. Yet despite the lowering clouds, not a breath of wind stirred the leaves drooping limply from the trees. The world outside the cottage windows waited in unnatural stillness, as if the land was marshaling its troops to withstand the imminent onslaught approaching from the lake.
Out on the water, the funnel towered, gathering strength. Yet even when it began spinning toward the cottage, Nicole could barely tear her eyes away from the sight. It was awesome in its fury and the speed with which it ate up the distance.
“I think we’ll be safer waiting this out under the dining room table,” Pierce said, grabbing her wrist and pulling her away from the window as the two hundred foot pine that stood sentinel on the weather side of the cottage rippled with advance warning. “That’s a tornado you’re looking at and it could set this place on its beam end.”
Without ceremony, he hustled her out of the living room and under the dining table, stopping only long enough to open the back door before joining her. “To give the wind an exit,” he explained tersely when she asked.
They were barely settled when the noise began, a low keening that quickly rose to a scream.
“Here it comes,” Pierce said, and the din was like nothing Nicole had ever heard before, a horrible roaring, like a house going up in flames with a person trapped inside, shrieking for deliverance. At the same time, rain pelted against the north wall, rattling the windows in their frames.
Upstairs, one gave way before the onslaught, banging open and thumping against the wall. Almost immediately after, another in the living room flew wide and Pierce cursed. “The place will be flooded at this rate,” he muttered. “These old windows weren’t built to withstand this kind of attack. It’s a miracle they’ve stood up as long as they have.”
And meanwhile, the tornado continued to rage.
Nicole had never been afraid of the weather before. Even in Minnesota, where winter blizzards could cripple the entire state in the space of an hour, she had never known the utter helplessness that gripped her at that moment.
I’m going to die here, she thought, curling up against Pierce and burrowing her face into his shoulder. I’m never going see my parents or Tommy again.
Pierce couldn’t get away from her. There was scarcely room for the two of them under the table, even with his legs and feet sticking out at one end, and he had little choice but to slide his arm around her neck and cushion the back of her head with his hand.
“Hold on,” he said, and whether he meant hold on to her courage, or hold on to him, she neither knew nor cared. She simply clung to him, shaking, and thought if her time had come, there was no way she’d rather go than in his arms.
But there was something she needed to say to him first. “I never meant to hurt you,” she babbled, clutching a fistful of his shirtfront. “I didn’t expect to fall in love with you and if I’d known I would, I’d have spoken much sooner, but things got away from me, Pierce. Every time I made up my mind to tell you, I’d look at Tommy—at us—and see a family shaping happiness from tragedy, and I couldn’t bear to risk spoiling all that. But I love you with all my heart, I really do, and I want you to know that you’ve made these last days the most wonderful in my whole life.”
And because he was so close and she couldn’t help herself, she lifted her lips to his and kissed him. She hadn’t meant it to last or flare into untrammeled passion. She just wanted to seal the words in some way; to let him know that she spoke from the heart.
At first, he resisted her but then, suddenly, he was kissing her back, fiercely, as if the holocaust outside had generated a storm in him that blasted his antipathy into oblivion.
His hands tangled in her hair, his mouth crushed hers, and for a few sweet moments the old magic took hold, potent as ever—until he remembered himself and what she’d done.
He tore his mouth away then and said, “Stop acting as if you’re going to die,” and if she’d dared, she’d have looked up to see if the thread of amusement she thought she might have heard in his voice was reflected in his eyes.
“Aren’t we?” she quavered.
“No,” he said, poking his head out from under the table. “The worst is over and even if it weren’t, you’re not getting off that easily.”
A minute later, it was all over—their brief moment of intimacy, the howling, screaming wind—and nothing to show for either but the rain pounding on the roof, thunder rumbling menacingly and lightning streaking across the lake. Miraculously, the pine tree was still standing and so was the cottage, though how defied explanation.
“You can come out now,” Pierce said, wriggling away from her and going to inspect the damage. Rainwater driven through the open windows ran in channels along the old pine floor and dripped through the cracks between the ceiling beams.
“How can I help?” she asked, coming to stand beside him.
“There are towels upstairs on the shelf behind the bathroom door,” he said. “Throw half of them down here to me, and use the rest to start mopping up in the bedroom.”
The task kept them occupied for a further half hour, but finally the worst of the mess was cleaned up, the windows securely latched against another outburst, and there was nothing to distract either of them. They stood at opposite ends of the living room, staring at each other as warily as strangers stranded in a train station. Nicole thought that she’d rather have faced another tornado than the wild emotions churning the atmosphere.
Finally, he moved, shrugging his shoulders as though doing so would rid him of the irritation of her company. “I guess,” he said, going to a cabinet beside the fireplace and extracting a bottle of red wine, “we might as well make this as painless as possible. Would you like me to light a fire? The air’s a lot cooler in the wake of the tornado.”
“Aren’t we heading back to town?”
“In this storm?” The look he bent her way suggested only a moron would contemplate such a move. “Apart from the trees likely to come down, the road is probably flooded in a dozen places and quite impassable.”
As if to press home his point, a clap of thunder split the sky directly over the house, followed almost immediately by a brilliant flash of lightning and the distant sound of breaking glass.
“Sounds as if the place next door took a direct hit,” he observed. “Better line up some candles. We’ll be needing them before long. You’ll find a boxful in the top drawer of the small chest in the dining room.”
When she came back, he’d already set a match to the kindling in the hearth. “I brought wineglasses, too,” she said, and almost dropped the lot as another bellow of thunder ripped through the early night, and lightning arrowed over the sky, illuminating the lake.
He cast another dispassionate glance at her. “It’s only thunder,” he said scornfully. “It won’t bite you.”
“And you wouldn’t care if it did,” she replied, stung again by his indifference.
“Not particularly,” he said, filling the glasses and helping himself to one without bothering to offer her the other. “I can’t say your well-being is uppermost in my mind at the moment. I’m too busy
trying to figure out how I’m going to explain to Tom that the woman he thought was only his nanny is really his aunt, but that she was too big a coward to let him know before now.”
“And then there’s the matter of your own bruised ego to attend to,” she couldn’t help saying.
He glared at her. “Exactly what is that supposed to mean?”
She snatched up the other glass and took a healthy swig. Not a very nice way to treat what was undoubtedly a very fine bottle of wine, but what did such niceties matter at a time like this? “You’re so busy nursing your injured feelings, Pierce,” she accused, “that you’ve never once considered mine.”
He almost spluttered into his glass. “It doesn’t strike me that—”
“For instance,” she went on, undeterred, “do you have the faintest idea how I felt when I looked in the drawers in the bedroom upstairs and found clothes that had belonged to Arlene?”
“You had no business snooping in drawers,” he shot back.
“No,” she said. “I don’t suppose I had, nor would I have dreamed of doing so if you hadn’t mentioned that there were probably some of her things still here from the last time she visited. As it was, I couldn’t help myself. All I could think was that she was probably the last person to touch those things until I came along.”
A bubble of grief rose in her throat which she flushed away with another mouthful of wine. “I lifted out a sweater and smelled it—it held her scent, a trace of perfume, and there was a long blond hair caught in the button at the neck. And what struck me was that, although she’s been dead nearly four months, that hair still shone with life and it was as close as I was ever going to come to touching her again.”
“Stop it,” he said.
“Then I looked in the closet and there was a pair of sandals on the floor that must have been hers. Her feet and mine were exactly the same size. Isn’t that amazing? Those shoes fit me so perfectly that it was as if I’d worn them from the time they were new. And I thought, as I have so many times since I came to Morningside, that that was a discovery I should have been sharing with her. She was my sister, Pierce. My sister! And for most of her twenty-seven and a half years, I didn’t know she existed. How would you have felt, if that had happened to you?”
A Nanny in the Family Page 15