The Lord Next Door

by Gayle Callen

“She…wanted more children?” David whispered the words, feeling the foundations of his childhood shake and reform all around him.

  The earl nodded forlornly. “She wouldn’t listen to me, and in the end, it killed her. And then like a foolish old man, I let my need for happiness outweigh a child’s need for stability. David, forgive me for not seeing how unhappy you were with Colette’s presence.”

  David could only nod. He’d spent years simmering under the weight of his anger toward his father, years of trying to repair the family name. And now he knew that his father had almost been destroyed by grief, and found comfort where he could. Colette had driven him away from his father, and David had let it happen.

  “Can you forgive me?” his father asked.

  David rose to his feet and crossed to the earl, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Perhaps we can forgive each other, Father.”

  The earl looked away and patted David’s hand.

  “Don’t stay here,” his father said. “Find Victoria.”

  David talked to the head groom, only to discover that Victoria had not summoned a carriage. But she certainly could have hired one. David questioned Anna again, who handed over the names of every person who had shown friendship to Victoria. It was a small list; it was sad to see that so few had understood Victoria’s true nature.

  Hell, he wouldn’t even be on her list, not with the way he’d behaved.

  He rode at breakneck speed to the Fogges’ residence first, interrupting a luncheon of the family of three.

  “Forgive my intrusion,” he said, “but have you seen Lady Thurlow today?”

  They hadn’t, and something of his urgency must have communicated itself, because Lady Fogge walked him to the door, wearing a worried expression.

  “My lord, surely she just forgot to tell you where she was going today.”

  “No, not even her mother or her lady’s maid knows where she is.”

  “She’ll be home soon.”

  “But I can’t wait for that.”

  “Is something terribly amiss?”

  He looked at the door, wanting to be gone, but not wanting to offend this woman who’d treated Victoria so kindly. “I fear my wife and I have had a misunderstanding, Lady Fogge. I must remedy it at once.”

  She smiled up at him, then patted his arm. “I’m certain you will. She is one to see and understand the truth.”

  “If only the same could be said about me,” he said grimly. “My thanks for your assistance.”

  “Do let me know that all is well with Lady Thurlow.”

  He went to Simon’s next, but Simon wasn’t at home. Damn, the man could have helped with the search. But then David didn’t need help when the list of Victoria’s friends was so small. Several of the gentlemen heads of the household were home when he barged in. David didn’t care what they thought as he asked about his wife. He saw several smirks, knew that he looked like a lovesick fool—

  And he didn’t care. Nothing mattered but the need to find Victoria, to make her see that she was all that mattered to him, not what other people thought of them.

  But no one had seen her. At Banstead House Victoria’s mother met him in the conservatory as if she’d waited at the windows to follow his progress home.

  “Did you find her?” Mrs. Shelby asked.

  David shook his head grimly.

  “This is all my fault,” she whispered. “I gave her counsel about your marriage, but I never thought it would affect her this way!”

  “Mrs. Shelby, don’t blame yourself. I’ll find Victoria,” he said forcefully, “and I’ll make her see—”

  “But do you love her?” she interrupted.

  He calmed himself. “Since we were children.”

  She wiped at her eyes. “Then go find her and make it right. Because she must have loved you since then as well.”

  “Where should I look?”

  “There was a place Victoria and her sisters would go when they wanted to be alone. I think they thought I never knew. They called it Willow Pond.”

  “Of course I know Willow Pond,” David said, disgusted with himself for not thinking of it first. “She wrote about it often. It’s in the far corner of your garden.”

  “She liked to think there—to dream,” the old woman finished quietly.

  “I promise you,” he said with passion, “that she won’t have to dream her happiness anymore.”

  Mrs. Shelby nodded and covered her mouth, and blinked her wet eyes. David left her there, striding outside and down through his garden. There was a small gate somewhere, rusted and never used, even by him. He remembered exactly where to climb the tall stone wall, and he dropped down to the ground on the far side. There were no sounds of gardeners come to chase him away, so he walked down the paths he’d once spied on from the nursery window.

  He ducked beneath the low branches of the willow tree and saw Victoria immediately. She sat on a small bench, facing an ornamental pond long gone green with overgrowth. Her hands rested in her lap, and she was humming. She didn’t hear him approach until twigs cracked beneath his feet.

  The humming stopped, and her violet eyes opened and looked at him as if she’d known it was he all the time. Her smile was tinged with sadness.

  “Hello, David. I was out for a walk and couldn’t resist coming here.”

  “I was worried about you, especially after those few lines you wrote in our journal. I confess to being overwhelmed by panic. I looked everywhere, including at any house I thought you might go to.”

  “I didn’t mean to worry you.” A soft smile curved her mouth as she glanced down at her lap. “That must have been an interesting sight.”

  He stepped closer and she hugged herself, so he stopped. “I looked like a great foolish beast, searching for my wife.”

  “They didn’t laugh at you,” she said with distress.

  “What harm could that do to me? All I cared about was what you thought of me, sweetheart.”

  She flinched at the endearment. What could be so wrong?

  “But you saw what I wrote in the journal,” she said in a sad voice. “I’ve been keeping a terrible secret. I knew I had to tell you, and that I had to do it in person, not by writing. That would have been the coward’s way out.”

  He sat down beside her on the bench. “Then tell me, and we’ll keep it together.”

  She sighed. “When you offered to marry me, you asked so little in return, only that I bring you no scandal. I failed you, David. I concealed an important fact about my family, all to spare my mother’s pain and my father’s memory.” Her tone dropped to a murmur. “You see, he killed himself. My sisters and mother and I found him hanged by the neck in our stables.”

  He stared at her, aghast at what she’d had to go through, furious with a father who would harm his family so. It made his relationship with his own father seem almost harmless.

  “My mother was near hysterics that anyone should know what he did, fearing that he would not be buried in consecrated ground.”

  It all was so clear now: Mrs. Shelby’s terrible sadness, the shadows in Victoria’s eyes. Her own father had betrayed them, rather than stand up for his mistakes and help his family. And David was no better, insisting that everything revolve around him and his family.

  “Victoria—”

  “No, I must finish it all, or I’ll never say it. We agreed not to tell a soul what we four knew. I could have borne this sin forever for my mother’s sake—until I fell in love with you.”

  She said the words he longed to hear, but without the joy.

  “I couldn’t let this secret keep being a shadow between us. I married you violating the tenet of honesty you hold dear, and I would not blame you if you renounced our marriage.”

  “Victoria, stop!” He tried to take her hands, but she pulled away from him.

  “Or if that would be too much of a scandal for you, I would gladly retire to the country, so that the ton will forget about me and not unearth the truth.”

  “
Victoria, I gave you every reason to imagine my reaction to be so poor. I am deeply ashamed of myself, that I proved so untrustworthy—and so unworthy of your love.”

  “No, no, don’t say that. I lied to you, about such an important thing! I chose my family over you.”

  “Do you think I blame you?” he demanded. “What was I to you at such a time? You had sworn an oath to your mother and sisters. It is my fault that later, as our friendship returned, that you didn’t feel you could tell me the truth. I made you think you had to be perfect, when God knows I wasn’t. I let so many things about my family’s past affect my life. And it was all for naught.”

  Her voice was cautious. “What do you mean?”

  “I was just a child, and thought I knew everything. I blamed my father for the deaths of my siblings, and for my mother’s death in the end.”

  “David, you were so young.”

  “Don’t excuse what I did. I began the ruin of my relationship with my father, when all along it was my mother who ignored her own health, my mother who needed to prove something by having more children.”

  She sighed and rested her hand on his knee. But he couldn’t stop now.

  “My father may not have been wise to have his mistress live with us, but he asks my forgiveness now, and it is a shame I could not grant it to him long ago. I didn’t tell him everything that Colette had done, of course.”

  “You mean the scandalous parties?”

  “That and…other things.”

  Victoria watched the struggle on his face, felt the pull of his emotions as if they were her own. She was so afraid to hope, so afraid that his words could not be true.

  “Tell me, David,” she whispered, taking his hand in hers and squeezing. “Let us have no more secrets.”

  “There have to be secrets between my father and me,” he said tiredly. “In his own way, he loved Colette. How can I tell him that she spent so much time trying to seduce me?”

  She inhaled sharply. “How old were you?”

  “Seventeen, when it started.”

  “You could have written to me. Maybe I could have helped.”

  His beloved face softened in amusement. “My sweet Victoria, I could tell no one. Thank God my father finally allowed me to go off to Oxford. I don’t know what I might have done to the woman, had she kept pressing herself on me.” He shuddered. “She thought I would tumble her in my mother’s bed. And my father wondered why I wouldn’t attend the woman’s funeral.”

  “I’m glad things are better between you and the earl,” she said.

  “They are—and it’s because of you.”

  David turned to face her, their knees pressed together, their hands clasped. “I spent my adulthood looking at the past out of a child’s eyes, instead of seeing that only I can decide how a scandal should affect me. And I hurt you in the process.”

  “David, do not berate yourself so.”

  “Of course you couldn’t trust me, when I gave you no reason to do so.”

  “Please don’t think my problems were because of you,” she said, looking away from him. “It’s taken me a long time to see that I really didn’t trust anyone, except my sisters. Watching your struggle with your father made me realize how angry I was with my mother for shielding us for so long from their financial problems. She was caught in a terrible situation not of her making, and I blamed her for it. You see, David, you and I are not so different after all.”

  “Are things better between you?” he asked quietly.

  “Yes.”

  A slow smile grew across his face. “Just as they are between my father and myself. So must we talk about them anymore?”

  She smiled, feeling the small budding of hope in her heart.

  “Ah, Victoria, sweetheart, you’ve endeared yourself to me with your very presence.”

  His tone was low and sincere, his words so very earnest.

  “When I married you,” he said, “I thought you were the answer to so many problems, as if you were an object created for my use, rather than a flesh and blood woman.”

  He gripped both of her hands now. His eyes, with their pale color she once thought so frozen, now seemed to burn with sincerity.

  “I used you,” he said.

  “But David, we both—”

  “Yes, yes, I know I rescued you from a terrible situation, but I don’t want you to feel like you owe me. Do you think you could love me, just for me?”

  She inhaled through a throat thick with tears. “Oh David, I have always loved you,” she whispered, trying to stop her tears, yet unable to. “From the time when you were just words and ideas and feelings, so full of energy and eagerness that I envied, to the man you are now, replete with so much goodness and courage that you would care for me and my family, regardless of our circumstances.”

  He closed his eyes, his face full of relief. “Victoria, I wasn’t good. I was selfish.”

  “You could have given me money and assuaged your guilt. But you gave of yourself.”

  “Because it was you,” he said, cupping her face. “You, the girl who listened to any crazy idea I had, who encouraged me when there was no one else to listen, the only one I felt comfortable talking to. You see the best in people, and that takes a bravery I admire. I may not have realized it at first, but I could not forget what we’d been to each other. I love you, Victoria. Promise me I won’t lose you.”

  “Oh David!”

  She threw her arms about him and he pulled her onto his lap, as if they both couldn’t get close enough to each other. The kiss they shared held no secrets, no worries, and was full of a trust they finally had in each other.

  Victoria broke the kiss first, resting her forehead against his and looking into his eyes. “I have one more requirement I didn’t list at the beginning of our marriage.”

  His lifted one eyebrow. “You do?”

  “My last and final wish is that I can sleep in your bed.”

  David groaned. “And I so value my privacy, too.”

  “Well, you must, because I’ve never even seen the inside of your room!”

  He laughed and held her close. “Victoria, anything I have is yours. You only have to speak the words.”

  “And if I write them?” she asked in a teasing voice.

  “Sweetheart, I cherish every written word we ever shared, but trust me, communication with our lips is far superior.”

  And he kissed her until she was breathless, and she believed his every word.

  Epilogue

  Dearest Victoria,

  As you lie there sleeping, I confess that I have spent another hour staring at our son. I keep counting his fingers and toes, marveling at his tiny fingernails, his little nose, his eyes so full of your inquisitiveness. I never thought I could be more blessed with our marriage, but this result of our love, this precious gift, is more than I could have ever hoped for.

  As I watched you grow big with our child, I could not speak my fears. I see now why you found it so much easier to write. I had not realized how my mother’s death would haunt me as you struggled to give birth. But I can breathe easier as I give thanks to God for your health and our son’s health. Perhaps we should not risk this again. Perhaps—

  But of course, my lusty wife, there will be other babies, and God willing, we will both enjoy them for many long years to come.

  And enjoy making babies, as well.

  Your well-loved husband,

  David

  About the Author

  After a detour through fitness instructing and computer programming, GAYLE CALLEN found the life she’d always dreamed of as a romance writer. This USA Today bestselling author has written ten historical romances for Avon Books, and her novels have won the Holt Medallion and the Laurel Wreath Award. Gayle lives in central New York with her three children, her dog Apollo, and her husband, Jim, the Romance Hero. Visit her website at www.gaylecallen.com.

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  By Gayle Callen

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  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE LORD NEXT DOOR. Copyright © 2005 by Gayle Kloecker Callen. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ePub edition May 2007 ISBN 9780061748677

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