Because he wasn’t perfect at all.
“And now you sit by while the woman who will soon bear the Hawthorne name prepares to scandalize Boston with a concert that isn’t fit for a burlesque show, much less the prestigious environs of the Music Hall. She’s no better than you!”
Grayson had stood mutely through the diatribe, but at this he reacted. “You will not say another word about Sophie,” he bit out, only the shred of some invisible band holding him back.
“I will say what I please, and bastard or no, you still bear the Hawthorne name, and you’d better put a stop to this concert or you will rue the day that you were born.”
Bradford turned on his heel and practically ran Sophie down as he stormed past her.
Dear God, how hadn’t she guessed?
Slowly Sophie turned to Grayson. She didn’t know what she expected, but not the harshness she saw in his eyes. Or was it tears?
Her heart broke for him, for this man who had become strong and formidable in an attempt to hide what he saw as weakness, to hide his love for a man who didn’t return the sentiment. And now he knew why.
“You didn’t know,” she whispered, praying that he would somehow cross the room to her.
He didn’t move. He stared at her, his feelings inscrutable behind a dark, implacable mask. Her heart missed a beat when she noticed the tautness of his jaw and the twitch of muscle just below his temple. He might hate her for not being a virgin, but she couldn’t turn away from him.
“Bradford Hawthorne is wrong,” she stated. “You are a wonderful man, a fine man.”
But still he remained like stone, his expression as flat and smooth as a hard, impenetrable wall, just as she had seen him a thousand times before. This time, however, she saw that the dark fury in his eyes was not fury at all, but devastation. Suddenly she saw it so clearly.
In that moment all the heated words that had flown between them died away. Like her, he cared so much, too much, but he didn’t want others to know that he did. He hid his vulnerability behind a wall he had built around himself, much like hers, holding at bay anyone who came near his heart.
How had she not recognized the very traits she had learned to wrap around herself to survive?
He had said once that he wanted her to save him. She realized now, with heartbreaking certainty, that he wanted her to save him from himself. Grayson wanted the love of a man who wasn’t his father, and thought that if he were perfect enough he could finally win his approval. He believed he needed to be perfect, and he needed her to be perfect, too.
Without uttering a word, Grayson started out of the room. But she stepped in his way. He hardly seemed to exert any effort as he set her aside and continued on toward the front door.
“Regardless of what Bradford Hawthorne thinks, you are perfect, Grayson. You’re perfect just as you are.”
He stopped but didn’t look back.
The reprieve encouraged her, and she hurried on with honesty, complete and unvarnished.
“I love you, Grayson, as I have loved little else in my life. I have loved you since I was four years old and you defended me for the first time.” She willed him to turn back, but he didn’t move. “I just never thought you could truly love me in return.” She forced a laugh into the brittle air. “After all that happened when my mother died, I didn’t believe such a perfect man could love a woman who was anything but. Then I became what I believed I was. Wild and without virtue, luring men with provocative ways.”
His sigh echoed against the walls. “We’re a pair, you and I. Me, trying to be perfect. You, doing everything you can to prove that you aren’t. You were right all along. We aren’t meant to be together. In the end we would only destroy each other.”
Then he strode out the door, leaving Sophie to stand alone, fighting to breathe.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Grayson returned to his room at the Hotel Vendome. He refused to think about what had just happened. He no longer recognized the life he had lived or the world he had so painstakingly built.
Everything he depended on had slipped away into something he no longer understood. Sophie. His mother. The man he had always believed to be his father.
Instead he learned that he was the illegitimate son of a man who would seduce a woman. A man without honor. A man whose blood flowed through his veins.
A knock sounded on the door, but he ignored it. He stared out the grimy window at the streets below without seeing.
The knock came again, this time harder.
Still he ignored it.
“Grayson, open this door.”
He closed his eyes against the sound of his mother’s voice, pressing his forehead to the cool glass pane.
“Grayson, please.”
He pushed away from the window and strode across the room. Opening the door, he found his mother standing in the hallway.
“I don’t think this is a good time for us to talk,” he stated coldly.
She strode past him into the room without being asked; then she turned back, her soft gray-blue eyes glittering. “I think it is.”
“I’m not interested in discussing your meetings with another man.”
Her lips thinned. “Neither am I. That is for my husband and me to discuss, not my son. What I will do is make certain you don’t find yourself in the same trap. I see you forcing Sophie into the same position I was forced into years ago.”
His eyes narrowed. “I think you should leave.”
“I will not. I will not stand by any longer, as I have done my whole life, and do nothing. Don’t force Sophie into a mold. She can make you proud as a wife; she can make you happy, if you just give her a chance.”
“Too late. Sophie and I are no longer betrothed. The contracts have been voided.”
“Because of the way she performs?” she demanded.
“How did you know about that?”
“Your father told me.”
He turned sharply away and strode to the window. “He is not my father.”
Emmaline went very still.
“Yes, I know that Bradford Hawthorne isn’t my father.”
“He told you?”
“In no uncertain terms.”
She sighed, and though Grayson wasn’t looking at her, he could feel something essential seep out of her with that shaky breath.
“Oh, Grayson.”
Then silence. Bone-deep silence.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, then drew a deep breath. “But my past doesn’t change the fact that I love you. Very much. I wouldn’t give you up for the world. And I didn’t.”
“No, she didn’t.”
They both turned toward the sound of the voice and found Richard Smythe standing in the doorway.
Emmaline gasped. Grayson felt fury race through his body, and something else. He stared at the man who was his flesh and blood. It was like looking into a mirror. He even recognized the arrogant tilt of the man’s chin.
Grayson wasn’t sure if he was sickened or intrigued. This was his father—a man who had seduced his mother, then left her.
“Leave,” Grayson said, his tone filled with barely contained fury.
“Hear me out,” the man said arrogantly, sounding just like him, before adding, “Please.”
Grayson’s hand curled into a fist at his side, but when he didn’t reply, Richard proceeded. “I loved your mother very much. I love her still. But I didn’t know she was with child when I left.” He drew in his breath slowly. “I can’t tell you the shock I felt when I saw you hours ago. Dear God, I had a son.”
Grayson cursed, and Emmaline began to weep.
It was then that Richard turned to Emmaline. “But I also realized while I stood there that even if I had known you were with child, I no doubt would have left anyway. Perhaps sooner.”
Grayson felt shock reverberate through the room, followed by a bitter sting from the words. He hated that he felt anything.
“You were right when you spoke of honor,” Richard con
tinued. “And it has taken me over thirty years to realize that I have lived my life without it. I love you, Emmaline. I want to spend my life with you, honorably, not in tawdry hotels, not through stolen meetings. And I want to come to know my son.”
“But I don’t want to know you.”
Grayson’s words shimmered through the room, and he felt his mother’s questioning gaze. He didn’t want to know this man. He realized that other than a start of curiosity, he felt nothing for him. He only wanted him gone.
As if his mother understood, she turned back to Richard. “If you are serious about doing anything for me,” she said, “then you will leave again. There is no place for you in our lives.”
“But Em—”
“No.” She said the word with force. “I have to find a future on my own. And you missed your chance to have a son.”
“Then you’re going back to Bradford?”
“I don’t know what the future holds. I only know that I have to figure it out on my own. I’ve sent a note to my son Lucas. I plan to move to Nightingale’s Gate.”
“You’re what?” Grayson asked, stunned.
“It’s time I found a life for myself. I can’t continue to live under Bradford Hawthorne’s despotic thumb.” She returned her attention to Richard. “It’s time you leave.”
“Don’t decide yet. Take some time and think about it.”
“She told you to get out.”
The men eyed each other, one wistful, the other hard and cold.
But eventually, reluctantly, Richard walked from the room.
Grayson watched the door shut, staring at it for a long while, trying to understand what he felt.
“I did send the note to Lucas.”
His mother’s voice broke into his thoughts. Her voice was strong, a strength that Grayson had rarely, if ever, heard in her.
“I’ll make decisions about my future from Nightingale’s Gate. But know that Richard Smythe is my past. I realized that fact in the hotel room before you arrived. Though there is one thing I already know I have to do, something I should have done long ago. I should have stood up to Bradford Hawthorne. He has always been hardest on you. But that was because from the beginning you were always so perfect. Your looks. Your personality. Your success. You did everything easily.”
She started to reach out to him, but her fingers only fluttered back to her side.
“When Bradford sent you out on your own,” she continued, “you could have become a failure and blamed your family. Instead you became a success and credited the very man who would have ruined you if he could have. You’ve always tried to be better, even when you already were better than the rest.” She reached out again, and this time she touched his arm. “I love Matthew and Lucas with all my heart. And each of them has their own wonderful qualities. But it was you who succeeded in the ways that Bradford wanted from the sons of his blood. Bradford Hawthorne hated you for that. And he hated you even more when Lucas disappointed him and then Matthew got tangled up in that scandal. He has ridden you relentlessly for a lifetime. But you never crumpled under the pressure. You succeeded.”
He stared at her hand touching his arm. “Did you love my father?”
“In my own way, I have always loved Bradford.”
“I’m talking about Smythe, my real father.”
“Bradford Hawthorne is your real father, flawed and harsh, no doubt. But Richard Smythe had little to do with the wonderful man you have become.”
“But he is my blood. Did you ever love him?” The night sky beckoned, bright and sparkling with a million stars. “I don’t know anymore. I thought I did. But in hindsight I’m not so sure. He appeared in my life and understood my hopes and dreams. He seemed to care about me at a time when Bradford Hawthorne cared only about the money I brought to him. I realize now that at the time I was young and alone and frightened. And I needed someone.”
She looked at him helplessly, as if she understood the inadequacy of her answer.
“I needed someone to hold me,” she continued, “to make me feel like someone in the world cared for me. There are times in our lives when all of us need somebody.”
She looked at him, her eyes boring into him as if she willed him to understand.
“I think it is the same with Sophie,” she said. She hesitated for a moment before she continued. “She has been alone and afraid many times. My heart cries for the young girl who had to deal with the death of her mother when her father took up with her mother’s nurse. When I was alone and afraid, I turned to Richard. But Sophie dealt with it by running away.” She shook her head. “Little Sophie. How she adored you. Do you remember the night that horrid Megan played the talking machine with Sophie’s words?”
Grayson’s spine straightened.
She looked at her son sadly. “I remember that night. The children all gathered around the gramophone while the parents were in the parlor down the hall. But I heard, and I remember those words. She loved you. Almost painfully, I always thought. And because of that I’ve never understood why, when she needed someone so desperately, she would run away instead of going to you.”
The words caught him by surprise, slicing through his anger like a knife.
“Oh, but I did see where you lived!”
Sophie’s words. She had gone to him.
She had gone to him, he realized in a blinding instant, because she had needed him.
She had lost her mother, and in all ways that counted, her father. She had come to him, but found him with Megan. So she had turned to the only other thing in her life that gave her comfort. Her music. Late at night, alone in the Music Hall. And Niles had found her there.
Understanding nearly brought Grayson to his knees. Sophie had needed him, and though it had been unintentional, he had failed her. When Niles Prescott found her that night, he hadn’t simply taken her virginity; he had then given her debut concert to someone else. He had taken her innocence; then he had taken her confidence as well.
Grayson remembered those first months in the garret, feeling lost and adrift. But he’d had Sophie’s baskets and her words on a gramophone to wrap around him until he found his way.
He understood in that second that Sophie had lost herself, lost her ability to believe she had any worth. No innocence, the one thing girls were taught they had to give a husband. No talent, the one thing her mother had taught her mattered in a world that thought she was an odd, ugly duckling. And she’d had nowhere to turn but to faceless strangers who didn’t already have expectations of who she was. By fleeing, she created the chance to start over. To wipe the slate clean. To become someone new, someone who wasn’t that girl who, in her eyes, had failed so miserably.
And he understood in that moment that she hadn’t willfully tossed her old life away. It had been taken from her.
In that second he felt free—of his past, of Sophie’s. It didn’t matter that Bradford would never be pleased by what he did. He could only do his best, as he always had. There was honor in that.
“But that’s behind us,” Emmaline continued, though Grayson hardly heard. “We all have pasts, son, and those pasts shouldn’t stand in the way of the future.”
Without warning, Grayson pulled his mother into a fierce hug. “I love you, Mother.”
Emmaline couldn’t have been more surprised. “What did I say?”
“Nothing and everything.” Just as Sophie had once said. “I’ll explain later. For now, I have to find Sophie.”
She had hurt long enough. And he wouldn’t let her hurt anymore, because yet again he hadn’t been there for her when she needed him. Sophie who had saved him, Sophie who had always been there for him.
Now he would be there for her.
He would help her believe again. He would show her that someone in the world cared for her—just as she was.
Sophie stood quietly, staring at the shambles that was supposed to have been her music room. She would have smiled at the appropriateness of something that so adequately represen
ted her life if she’d had the ability to do anything besides stand there, numb.
Deandra, Margaret, and Henry were frantic all around her. But she had blocked them from her mind. The concert was in an hour, and she stood in her robe. Her hair was done, her makeup perfect, but she couldn’t seem to move herself beyond that.
She was barely aware when the front door burst open, barely heard the footsteps pounding in the foyer until she felt someone next to her.
“Sophie, you’re going to be late.”
Grayson’s voice wrapped around her, and with effort she turned to find him there. So tall, so handsome. Her hero for as long as she could remember. Everything she had ever wanted in life. This man who had said that she would only ruin him. Why had things gone so wrong?
“Come on, Sophie,” he said gently. “Let’s go upstairs so you can dress.”
She felt his strong fingers curl around her hand.
“You have a concert to perform.”
“No.” She pried herself away from him. “I can’t do it.”
“Of course you can, sweetheart.”
A spurt of anger flared. “Don’t call me that! I’m not your sweetheart. And I’m not good enough to give the concert.”
He took her by the shoulders and held her firmly in front of him. “You are good enough. I’ve heard you play.”
“And now you’ve read that horrid file on me and know all about my performances. I’m all about shocking people and titillating their senses. I’ve made a career out of the outrageous.” She dashed her hand angrily across her forehead to fight back futile tears. “But tonight I wanted to do it right. Tonight I wanted to play Bach.” She closed her eyes. “And I wanted them to like me. For once I wanted to fit in.” As quickly as it came, the defiance seeped out of her, leaving her spent. She looked up at him through the tears that couldn’t be held back any longer. “For one fleeting moment I wanted Boston’s ugly duckling to play with the grace of a swan.”
Grayson framed her face with his hands. “Oh, Sophie, you have always been a swan. You have always had the ability to translate people’s passion into music. You have always been better than the rest of us, and that makes us uncomfortable. But that doesn’t make you an ugly anything.”
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