Swan's Grace

by Linda Francis Lee

  She tried to keep her mind blank. Wanting to savor this cherished space of time, she tried to keep thoughts at bay. But as minutes ticked by, reality circled faster and faster with each word Grayson didn’t utter.

  Her heartbeat began to hammer, not from passion, but from growing despair. She had known it would come to this, but still it wounded her to the core.

  Finally she pulled out of his arms, fighting back hot, burning tears. And as he had that day in the foyer of Swan’s Grace, he let her go.

  Slowly he swung his feet over and planted them on the carpet. But he didn’t stand. He looked at her, his expression unreadable.

  The blankness made her want to weep, but it didn’t do her any good. Only strength helped. Only bravado. She had learned that long ago.

  “Now you understand why we can’t marry,” she stated, forcing the words to be strong. “Because the truth is, Niles Prescott didn’t make love to my mother, he made love to me.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The silence grew deafening as Grayson’s face became etched with something she couldn’t name—shock, anger, despair.

  She felt too hot despite the chill that clung to the room now that the fire had died. Her head swam and her body began a slow, deep shudder. She had to get away. But he surprised her when he caught her hand, staring at their intertwined fingers before he raised his chin and met her gaze.

  “What are you saying?” he asked, tension radiating in each syllable.

  “You heard me, Grayson,” she said quietly, hating the words.

  He shook his head slowly, as if he could deny what she had said. “You had relations with Niles Prescott? A man old enough to be your father?”

  She couldn’t move, much less speak.

  “Sophie, explain yourself.” His voice grew rough, strained.

  “Yes! All right, yes! I had relations with Niles Prescott.”

  He took hold of her arms. “Tell me that he raped you, and I’ll see that he pays.”

  Her face flushed red and she closed her eyes, seeing that night from long ago. Rape? Had Niles Prescott raped her? He had told her it was her fault. Wasn’t it?

  “No, it wasn’t rape,” she answered woodenly.

  His features grew incredulous. “Then why? Because you thought I had made love to Megan? Did you think to get back at me?”

  Her head jerked up. “No! Of course not!” But how to make him understand when she hardly understood herself how things had gone so wrong?

  “Then why would you lie with him?”

  She felt dizzy and weak. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, the passion-swollen lips, the tousled hair, the robe lying in a puddle on the floor. With shaking hands she retrieved the cashmere and pulled it around her.

  “Sophie, answer me.”

  “What do you want me to say? That I was a fool, that I made a mistake? I admit it—does that make you happy? Or do you want me to tell you how one day my mother was laughing and making plans, then the next she was dead from influenza?”

  A month before her eighteenth birthday, her mother was suddenly gone, her father stunned with grief and unreachable.

  “Or do you want to hear how Patrice showed up at my house to take care of my dying mother, only to end up as my father’s new wife little more than a month after she died?”

  Grayson’s eyes narrowed as he took in her words. “What does that have to do with Niles Prescott?”

  Her shoulders slumped as she remembered the days she had tried to see her father, trying to break through his grief, only to be kept away by Patrice. “It has nothing to do with him,” she whispered, turning to the window, “and everything.”

  How could she make Grayson understand that she had felt so alone? How the note she had thought was his had arrived when she needed him most. How frantically she had gone to him, only to find Megan there, her hands boldly caressing him.

  After she had fled that garret, she had gone to the music school to lose herself in her cello. Niles Prescott had been there, so kind, her mother’s friend, and he had held her while she cried. But Niles’s comfort had turned to something else.

  Sophie felt bile rise up inside her. The shame. The disbelief. The need to wake up from a bad dream, even all these years later.

  How many times had she asked herself why it had happened? But answers remained elusive. Had it happened because she was so inexperienced? Foolish? Desperate to be loved?

  But the explanations never mattered. All that mattered was that she had sex with that man. And then the crowning blow—he had given Megan the solo. In a matter of a single month, she lost everything. Her mother, her dream, and any chance that she could marry a respectable man.

  A series of wrong turns and mistakes had changed her life completely.

  “Nothing and everything?” Grayson demanded. “You think that’s explanation enough?”

  She met his eyes. “There’s nothing I can say that is going to change the reality. You want what every proper Victorian man wants. Expects. A perfect, virginal bride. Can you deny that?”

  He stared at her, but didn’t utter a word.

  With a spurt of breath to hold back tears, she knew what she had to do. With measured steps, she walked to the writing desk and pulled out pen and paper. Her hands shook as she quickly scrawled out the words.

  Grayson turned to stare at the window, and he seemed surprised when she returned to stand before him. The anger had fled and he looked like a sixteen-year-old boy, spurned and aching. Confused. She longed to reach out, to pull him close. But he was no longer a boy, he was a man, hard and exacting.

  “Sign this, Grayson,” she said.

  Mechanically, he read. His eyes narrowing, he looked back at her.

  “This terminates our betrothal,” he stated, as if he didn’t know what to believe, how to believe anything in a world that had turned upside down on him.

  “It’s best this way,” she said with a businesslike mien she didn’t feel, her heart tearing in two.

  He stared without seeing, but just when she realized he was going to rip the scrawled document in shreds, she added, “And I want Swan’s Grace back as part of the deal.”

  He lifted his head and looked at her. “What are you talking about?” he asked dangerously.

  “It’s mine, Grayson,” she said. “My father never should have signed it away.”

  It was then that the confusion and aching despair fled, replaced by a hardness that took her breath. Fury surged, heated and all-consuming. He looked at her as no one had ever looked at her before. In that second she realized that he had come to hate her. So purely, so quickly. Wasn’t that the way intense emotion changed? Never slowly, never over time.

  “Damn you,” he cursed. “That’s all you’ve cared about this whole time. Swan’s Grace.”

  Savagely he took the pen and paper from her. With furious strokes he wrote something on the bottom of the page. Then he signed his name. When he was finished, he tossed the pen down with a clatter, ink spattering the desk like blue-black tears.

  “There, you’ve gotten what you wanted. Your house back and your freedom.”

  Her freedom. She couldn’t speak over the despair closing her throat. She had been so mired in the battle that she had lost sight of what it was that she had truly set out to win. Freedom, yes. But freedom from the only man she had ever loved, and always had.

  The truth hit her like a tidal wave after months, if not years, of keeping it at bay. How could she afford to love a man who couldn’t love her in return? Because she knew, and deep down inside he knew as well, that he had spent a lifetime demanding perfection. For his father, for the Hawthorne name, and ultimately for himself—for the man he had grown up to be. More proof was the fact that he had turned Megan away.

  His silence and his signature on the paper screamed the truth.

  When the room remained quiet, he cursed one last time, then yanked his shirt back on. With angry movements, he dressed with precision, then headed for the door. But wh
en he came to the threshold he stopped and turned back, his dark eyes stark and empty, as if he had lost more than she knew.

  “Regardless of what you think, I never had any intention of caging you. I only wanted you to share my life.”

  Then he was gone, the door banging closed with finality, her broken heart breaking even more.

  Grayson slammed into Nightingale’s Gate. Brutus came around in a flash, his eyes wild for a confrontation. But at the sight of his employer’s brother, he got hold of himself.

  It wasn’t the first time that Grayson had to concede that his younger sibling was involved in the darker side of life. But it was that very fact that brought him there now.

  “I want you to find out everything you can about Sophie,” he stated without preamble when he strode into Lucas’s plush, second-floor office, Brutus racing along behind him like a lamenting mastiff.

  “Sorry, boss. He wouldn’t let me announce him.”

  One side of Lucas’s mouth quirked as he glanced between the two men. Then he waved his right-hand man away.

  “You really shouldn’t do that to him,” Lucas admonished with mock severity. “Brutus never knows how to deal with you. You never let him do his job as he sees fit.”

  “I’m not here to exchange pleasantries.”

  Lucas chuckled. “I can see that. You want me to dig into your betrothed’s past.”

  Grayson was still too… stunned, enraged… disappointed, to phrase his request in anything other than the bald truth. “Yes.”

  “Then I take it the marriage is on hold.”

  “Hell.” Grayson ran his hand through his hair, surprised by the stark truth. “The marriage is off.”

  He pressed his fingers to his temples. She had made love to another man—a truth that he had blindly wanted to deny, despite the fact that she had tried to tell him in so many different ways. He could only blame himself.

  “Don’t tell me the ever-proper Grayson Hawthorne found his bride-to-be wanting?”

  “Careful, little brother. I’m not in the mood for this.”

  “No,” he said in quiet contemplation, “I don’t suppose you are. Tell me specifically what you are looking for.”

  “Anything you can find. And while you’re at it, look into Niles Prescott.”

  Lucas raised a brow.

  “Don’t ask,” Grayson stated. “Just find out what you can about the man. I want to know where he is from, how he got his job.” He looked his brother in the eye. “I want to know everything, down to what he drinks in his morning tea.”

  “Care to tell me what this is all about?”

  “Let’s just say that I’m finally listening to what Sophie has been telling me all along. Something is different about her performances, and I intend to find out what it is before she goes onstage at the end of the month.”

  “Consider it done. Anything else?”

  “That’s it.”

  Every ounce of despair was pushed back, and he welcomed the raw rage that surged up and flickered through his veins. Rage he understood.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sophie didn’t want to think. With meticulous care, she sketched out plans for the music room, then threw herself into the project with determined energy. But regardless of her attempt to empty her mind, thoughts wouldn’t leave her alone.

  She had spent nearly five long years reweaving the cloth of her life. Four years of dedicated study at Germany’s prestigious music school, then another six months making a life for herself. She had found her entourage, gathering them around her with painstaking care, then creating a show that won fans over by the hundreds. But now with one pull the threads were coming apart.

  Grayson knew her secret.

  For years she had wanted desperately to undo those few hours that divided her life into before and after as sharply and as swiftly as a cleaver severed a whole into two halves. She was an adult; she knew she had to move beyond a foolish mistake. Over the years she had tried to tell herself it wasn’t her fault. But she couldn’t forget that she had gone to the music school, late and alone.

  And as long as she lived, she would never forget the look on Grayson’s face when he realized she wasn’t a virgin. The sense of betrayal. The disappointment.

  Her guilt mixed with a growing sense of anger. This newfound anger surprised her after years of little more than guilt and the need to put the past from her mind.

  She glanced out the foggy window and saw a man approaching. She leaped up from the chair. She hoped it was Grayson returning to talk things through.

  But when she looked closer, she saw it was Niles Prescott who strolled up the front walk of Swan’s Grace, his hat at a fashionable angle, just a hint of woolen muffler peeking out from beneath his fine camel coat, his walking stick hanging rakishly from his forearm. For the first time in five years she allowed the stinging bite of fury to surge up.

  She didn’t bother to wait until he knocked. She went to the foyer and whipped open the door.

  At the sight of her he raised a winged brow. “Does this mean you are going to let me inside this time?” he asked with a debonair smile, clearly not aware of the fury that seethed before him.

  “Yes,” she said tightly. “You couldn’t have arrived at a better time.”

  Seeming pleased with himself, he strolled into the house. When he turned back, he extended an envelope. But his hand stilled at the sound of the slamming door.

  “What is that?” she demanded.

  “It’s the first payment due you for the concert.” His smile grew hesitant at the look on her face. “But perhaps I should come back another day.”

  She snatched the envelope away. “I think not.” Instantly she looked inside, her heart pounding. Money. Please God, let it be enough to get us back to Europe.

  But the amount written out on the bank voucher was only half of what she needed.

  She felt sick and angry and furious. At Niles, at herself. At Grayson. In her heart she had known that Grayson needed someone virginal, had known that all along. But suspecting the truth and having it confirmed were two different things.

  Her breath hissed out of her.

  “I’ll just be going,” Niles said.

  She pinned him with her gaze. “Not yet. It’s time we talked.”

  “I have an appointment.”

  “It will have to wait. I’ve been running from this for five years. I’m tired of running. Tell me why.”

  “Why what?” The man shifted uncomfortably.

  “Why didn’t you give me the solo?”

  Niles’s shoulders lifted with righteous indignation. “You weren’t good enough.”

  “Liar.”

  His eyes widened.

  “I was good enough.”

  His surprise went out like the flame of a candle, and his lips thinned as if he, too, had been waiting for this moment. “You were wild and undisciplined. What kind of a girl shows up in the late hours of the night without a chaperon? A girl who has no morals, and certainly one who doesn’t deserve the prestigious solo in the Grand Debut.”

  “What kind of a man takes advantage of that girl?”

  Red flared in his cheeks.

  “I might have been wild and undisciplined,” she continued, “but I was innocent.”

  His brows set defensively. “I hear you aren’t so innocent now. The American public might not know much about you yet, but I do. I’ve heard about your concerts. You are outrageous, just as you were as a child. But I have kept that little secret to myself. Soon enough Boston will learn about the kind of concert you give. I’m interested to see what people will think when they witness firsthand what I sensed all along.”

  The words were like a blow. “You asked me to play just so I could fail?”

  He gave a harsh little laugh. “Maybe then Boston will forget how horrible Megan was when she performed.” His voice began to rise with each word he spoke. “Maybe then they’ll forget that you were supposed to have had the concert. Maybe then they’ll under
stand that you didn’t deserve it. You are no better than most girls, thinking they can get their way with pretty smiles and sweet words. Well, I showed you!”

  The truth that he had used her, then tossed her aside, hit her square in the chest.

  His eyes locked with hers, and he sneered. “And now you will show Boston that you don’t know the first thing about good music, especially not Bach.”

  Grayson left the courthouse and headed for his office in Swan’s Grace. He had to make up for lost time. More than one of his longtime clients had expressed concern that he was distracted. Never had he felt so out of control.

  But he stopped cold at the sight of a dray wagon at the curb.

  HAMMERMILL MOVERS. THE BEST IN THE BUSINESS.

  When he pushed through the front door he had to jump out of the way of two burly men carrying bookshelves. His bookshelves.

  “What the hell?” he muttered.

  He stopped the men. “What are you doing with that?”

  The front man grunted. “Moving it.”

  “Why?”

  The man shrugged. “Don’t know. Have to ask the boss lady that.” Then he continued on, carrying the walnut case from the library into his office, where the rest of the bookcases now stood.

  Grayson set out to find the boss lady.

  He found her standing in the doorway to the library. At the sound of his voice she turned to face him. They stared at each other, questions and words hanging unspoken in the air.

  He saw the devastation in her eyes, golden brown darkening until the flecks of green were obscured. She hesitated, and for a second he was sure she was going to say something. But at the very last minute she seemed to think better of it and turned away.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “I’m removing the furniture from the library.”

  His hand knotted at his side. “I can see that. The question is why?”

  “Because I am turning it into a music room—just as it was always supposed to be,” she answered, her tone brisk and businesslike. “I didn’t know where you wanted the furniture delivered. So I’m stacking it in your office until you decide. You can either help or get out of the way.”