“I will get out of the way permanently,” he said tightly, “just as soon as I find new office space. In the meantime I have clients to attend, and I have little choice but to work out of Swan’s Grace until that time. I’d appreciate it if for once you’d maintain some semblance of normalcy and allow me at the very least not to lose what remaining clients I have. Advising them in an office crowded with bookshelves set about every which way does not instill confidence.”
He went in search of the movers, but the men had already trundled into their wagon and were rolling away. Glowering, Grayson stormed into his office, but he didn’t get very far for all the bookshelves.
“Damn you, Sophie!” he bellowed.
But when he looked back and found her standing there, obstinately unmoving, arms crossed on her chest, he muttered a curse, climbed over a stack of law volumes, and made his way to his leather chair. He was going to regain control of his life if it killed him.
The next day he returned and found Margaret, Deandra, and Henry standing in the foyer, having just arrived from their travels, their suitcases in disarray on the floor around them.
“What is going on?” he asked with tight precision.
The three whirled around, and he could see the worry on their faces.
“We’re not sure,” Deandra answered for them. “We just got back, and Sophie has hardly said a word. No sooner did we walk into the house than she came down the stairs as quietly as you please, then took to the library like a woman obsessed.”
“You’d better talk to her, Dea,” Henry said.
“No, you talk to her. You’re always good with her when she is like this.”
“But this is different. She’s so… single-minded and resolute. Though about what, I have no idea.”
“True,” Deandra and Margaret murmured.
“I’ll talk to her,” Grayson stated, striding forward.
But he stopped in his tracks when he entered the room.
Sophie stood on a small ladder in the empty library, a bucket on the floor and a paintbrush in her hand. But it wasn’t paint that she smoothed on the bright red walls. After a second he realized it was water. She was soaking the painted wallpaper.
Henry came up beside him, the two men staring at the woman before them.
Sophie didn’t turn around.
Finally Henry cleared his throat and called out to her. She turned back, nearly toppling from the ladder, and probably would have had Grayson not lunged forward and caught her, the wet paintbrush landing against his worsted wool jacket with a splat. Held in his arms, their faces so close, she stared at him for one long moment, then pushed at his shoulders.
“Put me down,” she stated.
Grayson did as he was told, the climate of the room as cold and frigid as a bleak winter day.
“What happened in the short time we were gone?” Henry wanted to know.
Sophie looked at him, the water-soaked paintbrush still in her hand, before she slowly looked at Grayson and smiled dryly. “We finally came to an agreement about the direction of our futures.”
She tossed the brush into the bucket with a splash, pulled on a pair of strange-looking gloves, then peeled up an edge of the wallpaper with a workman’s tool. Then she pulled hard, the paper coming away with a yank.
“Look at that; it works.”
Muttering a curse, Grayson turned on his heel and slammed into his office.
It was much the same after that. Day after day she tore the library apart bit by bit, peeling off the paper and prying off the newly installed walnut wainscoting. In time, there would be little left besides four stark walls and the hardwood floor. And when she wasn’t working on the library, she was practicing the cello.
Despite his fury, every time the music began Grayson found himself sitting back, the tall shelves and books cluttered around him as he listened. Since the first time he had seen her play, she amazed him. But now her talent mesmerized him, making it hard to turn away. How many times had he climbed back over the books to stand in the foyer, needing to see her play?
Most string musicians were neat and disciplined, conveyors of music, almost invisible so the music could stand out. But it was Sophie a person noticed. Her body moved against the instrument, seeming to bend the notes to her will. As if she had something to prove.
It was stunning to watch, drawing him in, wrapping around him, making him wonder if he could possibly live without her.
After a lifetime of understanding that he couldn’t afford to be weak, what did it say about him if he needed someone so badly?
A week after Sophie told Grayson about her past, a packet arrived from the courthouse. Inside she found the deed to Swan’s Grace. Grayson was as good as his word and had reverted the title to her name. But nothing was included regarding the dissolution of their betrothal.
What did it mean? That he was having second thoughts, or that it simply took longer to dissolve an engagement than to transfer title to a house?
But more than that, which reason did she hope it was?
It was late in the afternoon, Grayson had already left for the day, and she stared at the document as she sat at his desk. She also stared at a pile of bills that needed to be paid.
When she had asked for Swan’s Grace back, she hadn’t thought about paying the bills. Her life was circling faster and faster in the wrong direction. She could hardly think by the time she went through each invoice for the umpteenth time. And yet again, she knew she didn’t have enough to pay them.
“Knock, knock.”
Sophie barely heard the words. She stared at the hand-scrawled notices from the gas and coal companies. Not to mention the grocery account which Grayson had established at a market nearby. She cursed herself for not thinking about such monumental details as paying bills.
“Sophie.”
As though coming out of a trance, she snapped her head up and found Deandra standing in front of the desk, squeezed precariously between two bookcases. Henry had shoehorned himself into one of the plush leather chairs.
Sophie searched for a smile. “Hello.”
“You look like you saw a ghost,” Henry mused.
Deandra considered her, tapping her long fingernails against her cheek. “Something is wrong, Sophie. Tell us.”
She forced a laugh. “It’s silly, really. It’s just that things haven’t gone as well here as I had hoped.” She shrugged her shoulders with a nonchalance she didn’t feel. “But I’ll be fine.”
“This is ridiculous,” Deandra stated. “It is clear this place has caused you nothing but misery. You’ve gotten out of the betrothal. You’ve regained the title to the house. You can return to Europe anytime you want. I see no reason why we should stay any longer.”
“I couldn’t have said it better,” Henry chimed in, leaping up, bumping a stack of books that tumbled to the floor, and rubbing his hands together with glee. “Give that Niles Prescott his money back and let’s head for Monaco.”
“If we start packing now,” Deandra said, “we can catch the first ship out on the tide tomorrow morning.”
Sophie’s temples throbbed, her pulse racing. What could she say? How could she tell them the truth?
“Henry,” Deandra continued, “go up and get Margaret. She’s good at taking care of travel arrangements.” Dea turned to Sophie. “Margaret can find out the rate at the shipping office. To save time, just give her a blank bank voucher to fill out there.”
With that, the dam finally burst. “I can’t give her a voucher!”
Henry froze half out of the chair. Deandra crossed her arms, her eyes narrowing.
“What do you mean, you can’t give Margaret a voucher?” Dea asked in much too calm tones.
Sophie’s hands curled into futile fists at her sides. But she had gone too far to turn back now. Raising her chin, she looked at the two people who had been more a part of her life than anyone else had in years. “I can’t give Margaret a bank voucher because… there is no money in the bank on whi
ch to draw.”
“Then give her coin,” Henry stated, as if it were all so simple.
But Deandra didn’t say a word, and it was clear in her eyes that she understood the truth.
“There is no coin left, is there?” Dea stated.
“Not enough. But there will be soon,” Sophie added hurriedly. “You know as well as I do of the amounts that are due us.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” Deandra asked, her tone eerily neutral.
Sophie’s shoulders slumped. “I didn’t know how.”
Deandra shook her head and turned to leave. That was when Sophie saw Grayson.
Her body flinched at the sight of him standing in the doorway, so tall, as always taking her breath away.
Embarrassment flared in her breast. How much more humiliation did she have to endure?
“You have no money?” he asked, his voice low.
With those words, all that she had tried to hold together burst inside her.
“No!” she blurted out, this time defiantly. “I don’t have any money, I can’t pay these bills, and until I play the concert at the Music Hall I won’t have enough to get us back to Europe. I admit it. I’ve made a mess of things. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
He looked at her hard. “I take no joy in your problems.”
He strode into the room, barely affording a glance to the narrow path he had to maneuver. “If you will excuse us,” he said to Deandra and Henry. “Sophie and I have some financial matters to discuss.”
They left the room, and Sophie had the fleeting thought that they would flee upstairs to pack. But her attention shifted when Grayson walked to his desk and looked through the bills that lay in a heap on top of the ledger.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“I am determining how much money is owed.”
“Those bills are mine, as is Swan’s Grace.”
“It won’t be for long if you can’t pay your bills.”
“I will pay them!”
“When?”
“Just as soon as I’m paid.”
He glanced at the invoices. “Not soon enough.” He took up the ledger and snapped it shut, the bills inside. “I’ll take care of this in the morning.”
She hated the relief that swam through her veins. “I’ll pay you back. Every penny. For those bills. For this house.” She scrambled for a pen and paper, scrawling a few words across the sheet. “Here. A contract promising to repay every cent.”
He took it slowly, staring at her before dropping his gaze to read. When he looked back he raised a brow. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough of contracts for a while?”
Red singed her cheeks. But he only crumpled the single page and tossed it into the trash bin. “Consider it as payment for a debt I already owed.”
She narrowed her eyes and tilted her head in a mixture of confusion and hurt she wanted to deny. “What debt is that?”
“Money for the baskets you sent.”
If he had struck her he couldn’t have hurt her more. “I didn’t send them so that you would owe me.”
“It doesn’t matter why you sent them, only that you did. Now I have found a way to repay you. Let’s just say the debt is clear.”
And then he would be through with her. He didn’t have to say the words for his meaning to be understood.
Anger washed over her in scalding waves. “You’re saying that just to punish me.”
“Punish you for what?”
“For Niles. But I can do that quite well enough on my own,” she stated, hating the bitter taste on her tongue. “You can’t forgive me because I’m not a virgin. But you said yourself that you aren’t a virgin either.”
She watched his eyes narrow.
“You might have turned Megan away, Grayson, but have you turned every woman away?”
His expression went hard.
“Have you?” she demanded.
“No,” he answered tightly.
“Then why is it okay for you but not for me?”
“Because I’m a man!”
The words shimmered through the room, settling between them.
“And that makes it okay?” she asked softly.
“Yes. No. God, I don’t know. It’s different for a man.”
“Why?”
He raked his hands through his hair. “You ask too many questions, Sophie. You want to change the way people think until it meets what you want. Well, you can’t just change the world.”
She shook her head as the anger drained out of her, and it was all she could do not to laugh her despair. “I always thought of you as brave. Fighting against your father’s unfairness. Championing an awkward little girl who everyone else thought odd. That is what I loved about you most. Your bravery.”
His jaw tightened.
“I knew that you had become a proper gentleman, fitting into a society that had always rejected me. I saw that the night I returned for my father’s surprise birthday party. Until then I guess I always held a small bit of hope that eventually, if I could succeed, prove that I was talented, you would be able to accept me for who I had become. If you couldn’t, who could?” She tilted her head and looked at him. “I think I still held a glimmer of that hope until I saw the look in your eyes when you realized I wasn’t a virgin.”
“Don’t turn this around on me, Sophie. You’re the one who wanted out of the betrothal. You’re the one who cared only about Swan’s Grace. I simply gave you what you wanted.”
“No, Grayson. I gave you what you wanted. A way out of a betrothal to a woman you no longer wanted without losing your honor. Convenient, huh?”
They stared at each other for long moments before she turned on her heel and quit the room.
Chapter Twenty
Emmaline saw Richard nearly every day.
For a few stolen hours during the afternoon, she felt young again, as if she had recaptured youth, emotion rediscovered. She no longer felt as if her life were over.
Richard was like a drug. Once begun, it was hard to stop. Every day she told herself she wouldn’t see him again. But then she’d give in, telling herself she would stop tomorrow.
They met at quiet, out-of-the-way places. Places that were easy to get to, but far enough away that they wouldn’t be seen by friends or family. Fishing piers. Distant parks. Forgotten squares.
The weather was beginning to warm, flowers threatening to bloom, trees starting to turn a bright, tender green. But on days that still held a strong bite of cold, Richard wrapped his coat around her shoulders, his hands lingering, warming her in a way that had little to do with the added material.
They talked and laughed. He looked at her. Just looked for long minutes, his heart in his eyes, until one day when he ran his finger along her chin, down to her hand.
“You can leave Bradford,” he said, lacing his fingers with hers.
Guilt flared at the thought that she wanted to.
“I have money now. I can support you, Em.”
“This is not about money, Richard.”
“Then what?”
What was it about? she wondered. Certainly not honor, she thought with a cringe of guilt.
For years she had turned a blind eye to Bradford’s dealings with their sons. She especially hated the way he treated Grayson, though she had believed that her husband, even in his harshness, was teaching Grayson about honor. She believed in honor.
She hated lying, and she hated lying to her sons most of all. Yet somehow even that didn’t make her stop seeing Richard now.
She hated to think that she had no honor.
However, it didn’t seem as simple as that—though no doubt every wrongdoer consoled himself with that phrase. But she was not having relations with Richard, she told herself in the middle of the night when she lay alone in her huge, plush, and empty bed.
She put from her mind the fact that meeting a man not her husband for any reason would ruin her. Despite that, she couldn’t deny the deep fluttering of al
most forgotten feelings that made her breath catch and her heart beat too hard. A mere accidental brush of Richard’s hand against hers made her lips part and her knees grow weak.
And she knew he felt it, too. She could see how much he wanted her. The way he danced around her, a brush, a touch, coming close, then whisking away. Making her want him more.
But she was a married woman.
She reminded herself of that daily. Though it was hard to keep that fact in her mind when her husband turned her away and barely noticed she was there.
And when Richard met her at a quiet teahouse in the South End weeks after he had reappeared in her life, whispering in her ear that he wanted to make love to her, her mind screamed no.
But her heart yearned for his love.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sophie woke the next morning and hurried through her ablutions. Once dressed, she dashed to Deandra’s room. But it was empty, the bed neatly made, none of the usual boas or feathered mules tossed about in disarray.
Dread started to pound inside her as she went to Margaret’s room and found it quiet and still, the assistant’s desk clear of the normal stacks of correspondence and files. Then she went to Henry’s, only to find it the same way. Neat as a pin, with not a hint of his flowery cologne or dapper suits. And other than Margaret, none of them were known to leave their beds, much less their rooms, before noon.
Reeling, Sophie came downstairs, steeling herself against the sight of her entourage packed and ready to depart, their luggage stacked on the foyer floor. But the black-and-white marble was as empty as the rooms had been, and there wasn’t a person in sight.
With her skirts puffing around her, she sank to the bottom step, distressed over the fact that they hadn’t even said goodbye. Though it was foolish to feel so hurt. She had understood all along that her relationship with these people had revolved around money. They would be her friends if she paid their way. That was what an entourage was. She was a fool to have come to feel anything else for these people. But she had. She had grown to love Margaret like a sister, and even Dea had become something of a mother to her.
And Henry. A rueful smile threatened at the thought of the little man. He had become like a brother or a cherished friend, always trying his best to say the right thing and very rarely succeeding.
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