by Nora Roberts
“Believe me, it’s not worth it. Get the scissors, will you? Let’s get the baby open.” She leaned down to study. “No return address.”
“Ah, a secret admirer.” Tongue caught in her teeth, Lea attacked the packing tape. “Oh,” she said, deflating when she opened the lid. “It’s just books.”
“God. Oh my God. Carolyn Keene.” She was down on her knees, rummaging. “Nancy Drew—it looks like the complete set. And first editions. Look, look. It’s The Clue of the Leaning Chimney, The Hidden Staircase.” All at once she clutched the books to her breasts and began to weep.
“Honey, oh, honey, did you hurt yourself? Let me help you to bed.”
“No.” She pressed Password to Larkspur Lane against her cheek. “They’re from Jed.”
“I see,” Lea said carefully, and sat back on her heels.
“He went to all this trouble just to be sweet. Why is he being so sweet? Look, a few days ago he sent me this bracelet.” She held out her arm and continued babbling even when Lea oohed and aahed over it. “And that silly cow, and the watercolor. Why is he doing this? What’s wrong with him?”
“Love sickness would be my guess.”
Dora sniffled and rubbed tears away with the sleeve of her robe. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Honey, don’t you know when you’re being romanced?” Lea picked up a book, turned it over, shook her head. “I myself might prefer a slightly different style, but this certainly seems to have punched your buttons.”
“He’s just feeling sorry for me. And guilty.” She hitched back tears, blinked them away. “Isn’t he?”
“Honey, the man I saw haunting that hospital wasn’t there out of guilt.” She reached over to tuck her sister’s hair behind her ear. “Are you going to give him a break?”
She laid a book on her lap, running her hands gently over the cover. “Before I was shot, I broke things off with him. I told him to move out. He hurt me, Lea. I don’t want him to hurt me again.”
“I can’t tell you what to do, but it seems awfully unfair to make him keep suffering.” She kissed Dora’s forehead, then rose to answer the knock on the door. “Hi, Jed.” Lea smiled and kissed him as well. “Your surprise hit the mark. She’s in there right now crying over the books.”
He stepped back automatically, but Lea took his hand and pulled him inside. “Look who’s here.”
“Hi.” Dora brushed at tears and managed a shaky smile. “These are great.” Her eyes overflowed again. “Really great.”
“Their value’s going to plummet if they’re water-damaged,” he warned her.
“You’re right. But I always get sentimental over first editions.”
“I was just on my way out.” Lea grabbed her coat, but neither of them paid any attention to her departure.
“I don’t know what to say.” She continued to press The Hidden Staircase like a beloved child to her breast.
“Say thanks,” he suggested.
“Thanks. But, Jed—”
“Listen, I’ve got the go-ahead to spring you for a while. You up for a drive?”
“Are you kidding?” She scrambled to her feet. “Outside? All the way outside and not to the hospital?”
“Get your coat, Conroy.”
“I can’t believe it,” she said a few minutes later as she slid luxuriously down in the seat of Jed’s car. “No nurses. No looming thermometers or blood-pressure cuffs.”
“How’s the shoulder doing?”
“It’s sore.” She opened the window just to feel the rush of air on her face and missed the way his fingers tightened on the wheel. “They make me do this physical therapy, which is—to put it mildly—unpleasant. But it’s effective.” She jockeyed her elbow to a right angle to prove it. “Not bad, huh?”
“That’s great.” There was such restrained violence in the statement she lifted a brow.
“Everything all right at work?”
“It’s fine. You were right all along. I shouldn’t have left.”
“You just needed some time.” She touched his arm, letting her hand fall away when he jerked. It was time, she thought, to clear the air. “Jed, I know that we were in a difficult position before—well, before I was hurt. I know I was unkind.”
“Don’t.” He didn’t think he could bear it. “You were right. Everything you said was right. I didn’t want you to get too close, and I made certain you couldn’t. You were one of the main reasons I went back on the job, but I didn’t share it with you because I would have had to admit that it mattered. That what you thought of me mattered. It was deliberate.”
She rolled up the window again, shutting out the wind. “There’s no point in raking it up again.”
“I guess it would sound pretty convenient if I told you that I was going to ask you to forgive me, that I’d have been willing to beg for another chance, before you got hurt.” He shot her a look, caught her wide-eyed stare then scowled back through the windshield in disgust. “Yeah, that’s what I thought you’d say.”
“I’m not sure,” she said cautiously, “what another chance might entail.”
He was going to try to show her. He pulled up in the driveway, set the brake, then rounded the hood to help her out. Because she was staring at his house, she moved wrong and bumped her arm against the car door.
“Damn.” Her gasp of helpless pain broke him.
“I can’t stand to see you hurt.” Shielding her arm, he gathered her close. “I just can’t stand it. It rips at me, Dora, every time I think of it. Every time I remember what it was like to see you on the floor, to have your blood on my hands.” He began to tremble, all those honed muscles quivering like plucked strings. “I thought you were dead. I looked at you and I thought you were dead.”
“Don’t.” She soothed automatically. “I’m all right now.”
“I didn’t prevent it,” he said fiercely. “I was too late.”
“But you weren’t. You saved my life. He’d have killed me. He wanted to, as much as he wanted the painting. You stopped him.”
“It isn’t enough.” Fighting for control, he gentled his grip on her and stepped back.
“It suits me pretty well, Jed.” She lifted a hand to his cheek. He grasped at it, pressed it hard to his lips.
“Just give me a minute.” He stood there a moment, with the air cool and crisp, whispering through denuded trees and sleeping winter grass. “You shouldn’t be standing out in the cold.”
“It feels great.”
“I want you to come inside. I want to finish this inside.”
“All right.” Though she no longer felt weak, she let him support her as they went up the walk. She thought he needed to.
But it was he who was unsteady as he unlocked the door, opened it, led her inside. His nerves jumped as she let out a quiet gasp of pleasure.
She stepped onto the welcoming Bokhara rug. “You’ve put things back.”
“Some.” He watched the way she ran her fingertips over the rosewood table, the curved back of a chair, the way she smiled at the fussy gilded mirror. “My landlord kicked me out, so I took a few things out of storage.”
“The right things.” She walked on into the front parlor. He’d put back a curvy pin-striped settee, a lovely Tiffany lamp on a satinwood table. There was a fire burning low in the hearth. She felt both a surge of pleasure and grief. “You’re moving back in.”
“That depends.” He slipped her coat carefully off her shoulders, laid it on the arm of the settee. “I came back here last week. It wasn’t the same. I could see you walking up the stairs, sitting on my window seat, looking out the kitchen window. You changed the house,” he said as she turned slowly to face him. “You changed me. I want to move back in, and make it work. If you’ll come with me.”
Dora didn’t think the sudden dizziness had anything to do with her healing injuries. “I think I want to sit down.” She lowered herself to the striped cushions and took two careful breaths. “You’re going to move back here? You want to move back
here?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“And you want me to live with you?”
“If that’s the best I can get.” He took a small box out of his pocket and pushed it into her hands. “I’d like it better if you’d marry me.”
“Can I—” Her voice came out in a squeak. “Can I have some water?”
Frustrated, he dragged a hand through his hair. “Damn it, Conroy—sure.” He bit back on temper and a terrible fit of nerves. “Sure, I’ll get it.”
She waited until he was out of the room before she worked up the courage to open the box. She was glad she had because her mouth fell open. She was still staring dumbfounded at the ring when he came back in carrying a Baccarat tumbler filled with lukewarm tap water.
“Thanks.” She took the glass, drank deeply. “It’s a whopper.”
Disgusted with himself, he fumbled out a cigarette. “I guess it’s overstated.”
“Oh no. There isn’t a diamond in the world that’s overstated.” She laid the box in her lap, but kept a hand possessively around it. “Jed, I think these past few weeks have been as hard on you as they have on me. I might not have appreciated that, but—”
“I love you, Dora.”
That stopped her cold. Before she could gather her wits, he was beside her on the settee, crunching several bones in her hand. “Goddamn it, don’t ask me for another glass of water. If you don’t want to answer yet, I’ll wait. I just want a chance to make you love me again.”
“Is that what all this has been about? The presents and the phone calls? You were trying to undermine my defenses when I was down.”
He looked down at their joined hands. “That about sizes it up.”
She nodded, then rose to walk to the window. She’d want tulips out there in the spring, she thought. And lots of sunny daffodils.
“Good job,” she said quietly. “Damn good job, Skimmerhorn. It was the books that really did it, though. How could I possibly hold out against a complete set of first-edition Nancy Drew?” She looked down at the bold square-cut diamond still in her hand. “You exploited my weaknesses for nostalgia, romance and material gain.”
“I’m not such a bad deal.” Nerves screaming, he came up behind her to touch a hand to her hair. “I’ve got some flaws, sure, but I’m loaded.”
Her lips curved. “That approach might have worked once, but I’m pretty well set myself, since I’ll be awarded a fat finder’s fee on the Monet. I might be greedy, Skimmerhorn, but I have my standards.”
“I’m crazy about you.”
“That’s better.”
“You’re the only woman I’ve ever wanted to spend my life with.” He brushed a light kiss at the curve of her shoulder and throat and made her sigh. “The only woman I’ve ever loved, or want to love.”
“That’s excellent.”
“I don’t think I can live without you, Dora.”
Tears burned her throat, thickening her voice. “Direct hit.”
“So does that mean you’re going to fall in love with me again?”
“What makes you think I ever stopped?”
The hand he had in her hair fisted and made her wince. “And the marriage thing? You’ll give it a shot?”
She grinned into the sunlight. It might not have been the world’s most romantic proposal, but it suited her. It suited her just fine.
“We’ll need lace at the curtains, Jed. And I have a Chippendale bench that’s waiting to sit in front of that fire.”
He turned her around, brushing her hair back so that his hands could frame her face. He only had to see her eyes for the nerves to vanish. “Kids?”
“Three.”
“Good number.” Overwhelmed, he rested his brow against hers. “There’s a bed upstairs, in the master suite. I think it’s a George the Third.”
“Four-poster?”
“Tester. Stay here with me tonight.”
She laughed her way into the kiss. “I thought you’d never ask.”
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
TRUE BETRAYALS
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1995 by Nora Roberts
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
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ISBN: 1-101-14614-1
A JOVE BOOK®
Jove Books first published by The Jove Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
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Jove and the “J” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
Electronic edition: May, 2002
To
Phyllis Grann
and
Leslie Gelbman
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER
ONE
WHEN SHE PULLED THE LETTER FROM HER MAILBOX, KELSEY HAD NO warning it was from a dead woman. The creamy stationery, the neatly handwritten name and address, and the Virginia postmark seemed ordinary enough. So ordinary she had simply stacked it with her other mail on the old Belker table under her living-room window while she slipped out of her shoes.
She went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. She would sip it slowly, she told herself, before she opened her mail. She didn’t need the drink to face the slim letter, or the junk mail, the bills, the cheery postcard from a friend enjoying a quick trip to the Caribbean.
It was the packet from her attorney that had shaken her. The packet she knew contained her divorce decree. The legal paper that would change her from Kelsey Monroe back to Kelsey Byden, from married woman to single, from half of a couple to a divorcée.
It was foolish to think that way, and she knew it. She hadn’t been married to Wade in anything but the most technical, legal sense for two years, almost as long as they’d been husband and wife.
But the paper made it all so final, so much more so than the arguments and tears, the separation, the lawyers’ fees and legal maneuvers.
Till death do us part, she thought grimly, and sipped some wine. What a crock. If that were true she’d be dead at twenty-six. And she was alive—alive and well and back in the murky dating pool of singles.
She shuddered at the thought.
She supposed Wade would be out celebrating with his bright and spiffy-looking associate in the advertising agency. The associate he had had an affair with, the liaison th
at he told his stunned and furious wife had nothing to do with her or with their marriage.
Funny, Kelsey hadn’t thought of it that way. Maybe she didn’t feel she’d had to die, or kill Wade, in order to part, but she’d taken the rest of her marriage vows seriously. And forsaking all others had been at the top of the list.
No, she felt the perky and petite Lari with the aerobically sculpted body and cheerleader smile had had everything to do with her.
No second chances had been given. His slip, as Wade had termed it, was never to be repeated. She had moved out of their lovely town house in Georgetown on the spot, leaving behind everything they had accumulated during the marriage.
It had been humiliating to run home to her father and stepmother, but there were degrees of pride. Just as there were degrees of love. And her love had snapped off like a light the instant she’d found Wade cozied up in the Atlanta hotel suite with Lari.
Surprise, she thought with a sneer. Well, there’d been three very surprised people when she’d walked into that suite with a garment bag and the foolishly romantic intention of spending the weekend leg of Wade’s business trip with him.
Perhaps she was rigid, unforgiving, hard-hearted, all the things Wade had accused her of being when she’d refused to budge on her demand for a divorce. But, Kelsey assured herself, she was also right.
She topped off her wine and walked back into the living room of the immaculate Bethesda apartment. There was not a single chair or candlestick in the sun-washed room that had stood in Georgetown. Clean break. That’s what she had wanted, that’s what she’d gotten. The cool colors and museum prints that surrounded her now were hers exclusively.
Stalling, she switched on the stereo, engaged the CD changer, and filled the room with Beethoven’s Pathétique. Her taste for the classics had been passed down from her father. It was one of the many things they shared. Indeed, they shared a love of knowledge, and Kelsey knew she’d been in danger of becoming a professional student before she’d taken her first serious job with Monroe Associates.
Even then she’d been compelled to take classes, in subjects ranging from anthropology to zoology. Wade had laughed at her, apparently intrigued and amused by her restless shuffling from course to course and job to job.