She didn’t know what to say. She had been prepared, she thought, for any amount of anger, but somehow this calm indifference took her breath away.
When she didn’t answer, he moved farther out onto the patio, and recognition dragged at her heart. He looked exactly the same. Perhaps even more handsome. The bright winter sun drove spears of fire deep into his thick chestnut hair and lit the soft moss green of his eyes to an emerald sparkle.
But what had she expected? He was only twenty-seven. Three years could hardly have robbed him of his looks. Had she imagined that his broken heart would dig furrows of pain into his long face, hollowing out the line under his strong cheekbones?
Or had she merely hoped that those three years would render her immune to his too-potent sexual charm? If so, she’d been hopelessly naive. Just ten seconds in his presence, and already she could feel the low throb, the primitive drumbeat of desire that had tormented her for years.
“Let me take that.” He slid the suitcase from her fingers, and her hand fell uselessly to her side, but she didn’t move. For a long moment they stared at each other while snowflakes swirled around them, catching on the cotton of his sleeves, on the fiery brown of his hair.
She couldn’t imagine what her expression must be, but his was appraising, thoughtful. His eyes were narrowed, squinting against the sun speculatively, as if she was an unwieldy package that had been left at his doorstep by mistake. As if, now that she was here, he couldn’t quite figure out what to do with her.
When he finally spoke, it was with a hint of impatience.
“Well?” He gestured toward the still open door. “Are you coming in?”
She nodded slowly, not knowing what else to do, but she didn’t follow him as he walked briskly toward the house. She felt as coldly immobile as the marble statues that had once stood amid the greenery in Winterwalk’s conservatory.
Just as he reached the door, she called out to stop him. “Drew!”
He swiveled, surprised and clearly annoyed to see that she had not yet moved.
“Drew,” she said again, trying not to sound frantic. She had to clear this up before they went inside. He hadn’t asked why she was here, not even when he saw the suitcase. “Drew, I'm not really back.”
He tilted his head, raising his dark brows. “You're not?”
She flushed and awkwardly swept snowflakes from her lashes. “I mean, I'm not back for good.”
He didn’t speak. His body was rigid, unmoving.
“Do you understand what I mean?” She wound her gloved fingers together and pressed them against her stomach, where the familiar aching throb was still pounding its message through her veins. “I'm not coming back to—” To you, she almost said. To us. “To stay.”
“Of course not,” he said, his voice still reflecting nothing but impatience. “But I’d rather hear exactly why you are here in the comfort of a heated room. You're nicely bundled up for a long chat in the snow, but you may have noticed that I'm not.”
Yes, she’d noticed. His dark brown corduroy pants and fawn-colored shirt looked quite comfortable for working indoors, but he probably was freezing out here. The wind molded the fabric against his chest, outlining his muscular torso. Strangely, the middle button of his shirt had come undone, and she wondered if the snow was drifting through the opening.
Suddenly, before she could speak, there was a flurry of activity in the doorway, and a shockingly beautiful blonde in a stylish pink coat appeared at Drew’s side.
“Well, your lawyer didn’t like it one bit, Drew,” the woman said, apparently unaware that she had interrupted anything. Her tone was intimate, scolding and seductive all at once. “But he finally agreed to reschedule. Honestly, Drew, I think you've made everyone in Albany mad, canceling appointments like this, but I did it. Your day is clear.”
She ran long, pink-tipped fingers through Drew’s hair, brushing off a haze of snowflakes. “So, if you really don’t need me, I'm off for a facial.” Scooping up his hand, she ran the tips of his fingers along her cheek. “All this snow has simply parched my skin.”
Drew frowned, but the woman’s flow of honeyed verbiage didn’t slow. Looking up with a surprised expression, she appeared to notice Laura for the first time. “Hello,” she said silkily, letting Drew’s hand drop from her face but hanging on to it nonetheless. “I'm Ginger Belmont, Drew’s secretary. You must be Laura Nolan. I've seen your pictures upstairs, and of course there’s the famous marble head in the conservatory. Though you look older now, naturally. You were just a kid when you posed for that, weren’t you?”
“Ginger.” Drew broke in quietly but firmly, easing his hand away with a deliberate restraint. He didn’t look as if he found Ginger’s frothy chatter at all amusing. Laura would have hated to see that irritable look turned her way.
But the blonde wasn’t a bit chastened or perhaps she didn’t notice. She was eyeing Laura carefully. “You must be here to talk about the lease? Or dare I hope you've decided to sell?” Her voice dipped conspiratorially. “You just don’t know how eager Drew is to buy this place. He loves it here, don’t you, Drew?”
Ginger turned to him for confirmation, and suddenly noticing the open button, she gave a small, gasping laugh. “Oops,” she said with a charming moue of embarrassment, reaching out to slide the button through its hole expertly. “That’s better.” She patted Drew’s chest. “Well, I'll leave you two to go over things. Nice to meet you, Laura.”
And then, like a brightly colored bird that had landed only briefly before flitting away again, she was gone. But, on second thought, the bird image didn’t really fit, did it? Something bigger, perhaps. More dangerous. Laura felt slightly dazed, as if she had just been manhandled by an expert—sized up, roughed up and warned off.
The signs had been unmistakable. Ginger Belmont was more than a secretary to Drew. Much more. Her hands, her eyes, even her voice, had slithered all over him.
And that button. Only a complete fool could miss the implications of that button.
Suddenly Laura’s heart felt so tight she couldn’t breathe. She could hear, as if the echo had been trapped here at Winterwalk three years ago, the desolate, hopeless sound of her own tears, and Drew’s husky, troubled voice trying to calm her. “It’s all right,” he had said brokenly, his fingers closing the buttons on her blouse as rapidly as they could. “It’s all right, Laura, I swear it is.” He had pulled her shaking body to him fiercely, stroking her hair. “I love you, sweetheart, don’t you know that? Just let me hold you. The rest of it doesn’t matter.” As she sobbed into his chest, his voice over her head had grown harsh, as if he was forcing himself to believe his own words. “I can wait. Or, if I have to, I can live without it, Laura. I swear to God I can. I just can’t live without you.“
Laura had recognized the desperate chivalry with which he’d made that vow but she had known, even then, that it wasn’t true. How could a man live without sex? Especially a man like Drew, whose potent virility was, particularly at that moment, inarguable. She couldn’t even think of asking him to marry a woman whose fear of sex was so irrational and yet hopelessly insurmountable.
But still, seeing Ginger touch him so intimately, knowing that she was giving Drew all the pleasure Laura had never been able to offer him, filled Laura with an unaccountable fury. She watched the pink coat disappear around the back of the house, heard a motor start and rev away and felt a painful though unwarranted sense of betrayal.
“So,” she said, her voice thin and strangely unpleasant, “I see you decided celibacy wasn’t for you, after all.”
Drew’s face hardened, the line of his mouth tightening.
“Just following orders, ma'am,” he said, his tones clipped. His hands were folded into white-knuckled fists. “Isn’t that what you told me to do? To forget about you? To find a woman without hang-ups, a woman who could 'really' love me?”
“And does she?” Laura whispered, knowing her face was as pale as the snow at her feet. Why was she asking? Why coul
dn’t she stop caring? It wasn’t any of her business, not anymore. “Does she?”
His unblinking gaze was stony, merciless. “Does she what? Have hang-ups?”
“No.” Laura tried to will her voice to be stronger. “Does she love you?”
“You bet she does,” he answered roughly. He narrowed his eyes against a gust of wind, and it gave him a sudden look of cold cruelty. “Like a pro.”
2
LAURA'S REACTION took him by surprise. She didn’t say a word, but her lips clamped together tightly, and her eyes widened, her forehead puckering slightly at the inner edge of her brows. At the sight, something nearly forgotten, something tender and protective, stirred in his gut.
God, he knew that expression, her wounded doe look, the essence of mute pain. And suddenly he felt almost ashamed. Perhaps he’d been too rough. But when she had so cavalierly dismissed any hope he might have been harboring about her motives for returning to Winterwalk, some bitterness he’d thought long dead had surfaced. He’d wanted to lash out, to hurt her in return.
To be fair to himself, though, he had spoken no more than the truth. Ginger was, in a way, Laura’s own creation, and if Dr. Frankenstein didn’t enjoy viewing her monster, that damn sure wasn’t his fault.
He had done all a man could do to keep Laura from leaving. He had never forced her, never once implied that what she could give him wasn’t enough. Over the three years of their engagement, he had stood under a thousand cold showers for her, had held at bay, night after night, a desire so tormenting it would have turned a less determined man into a ravaging beast. And he had been willing to go on suffering for as long as it took. Forever, if necessary.
He had been, in short, a fool. Damn it, that was all he needed to be ashamed of. The faint flicker of tenderness iced over as he remembered the wild misery of that last morning, when he’d found her note, explaining that she and her mother had left Winterwalk for good. Setting him “free,” she’d called it, as if she was doing him a favor. God, what a stock cliché that was, and what a damned lie!
His fingers closed around the suitcase so tightly the leather creaked in protest. Free? All right, then, he was free to lose himself in the arms of a hundred Gingers if he wanted, at liberty to take without guilt whatever momentary release could be found in mindless sex. God damn it, he’d earned it.
The sun glinted off a dewy wetness along her lower lashes, and with effort he reined in his resentment. It was ridiculous getting steamed up like this after all these years. It was over, thank God—the years of gnawing frustration, and the three long years of betrayed anger that followed, too. Over. He mustn’t let the sight of her agitate him, stirring up the muck of complicated emotions that had finally settled to the bottom.
Taking a deep breath of frigid air, he lifted the suitcase again. “Let’s go in,” he said curtly, “before we freeze.”
This time she followed without protest, but he could sense her stiff discomfort as they entered the cavernous front hall. She walked gingerly, her soft boots making almost no sound as she crossed the checkerboard marble floor, as if she didn’t want anyone to know she was there.
Drew watched her, puzzled. Whose attention could she be afraid of attracting? She must know that Drew lived here alone, with only a few day servants, gardeners and workmen and such. Even Ginger was gone, at least for today.
Perhaps she merely felt strange, being here now that it was no longer her home. But he hadn’t changed anything—all the tapestries, Louis XVI chairs and Ming vases were in the same places they had always been. Winterwalk was as much museum as house, really, and he wouldn’t have dreamed of fiddling with it. Only his bedroom and his office had been touched.
And besides, Laura’s discomfort seemed deeper than interior decorating. It was as if her dislike of the house had intensified into— Into what? Hatred, he might have said, if it hadn’t sounded so melodramatic.
She stood in the center of the front hall for a long time, her eyes wide and somber as she swept her gaze over the long second-floor balcony that looked down on them. She tucked her collar high up under her chin and kept staring, barely breathing, as though she expected to see something, someone, emerge from one of the rooms along those corridors.
Her anxiety was palpable. Drew’s arms ached, tense with the stupid, instinctive urge to do what he would have done in the old days—take her into his arms, hold her, kiss her, warm her until he could feel her muscles relax. But that was impossible now. He just watched stonily, reminding himself that her moods weren’t his problem anymore.
Finally she brought her gaze back to him, seeming suddenly to remember he was there, and as if that had been his cue, he reached for her coat. She resisted momentarily, clutching the lapels with white knuckles.
“Laura,” he said softly. “You don’t need this anymore.”
His voice seemed to recall her to herself. With a sheepish smile, she loosened her grip. “Sorry,” she murmured, relinquishing coat, hat and scarf with stilted courtesy.
Somehow, then, he got her into the living room, where he settled her on the most comfortable armchair and poured her three fingers of brandy. “To take the chill off,” he said, nudging the glass against her limp hand.
Though he’d never known her to drink before, the offer obviously was welcome. Three or four sips later, her cheeks and lips had regained some color, and she actually relaxed enough to let her spine touch the back of the chair. Taking one more large swallow, then clearing her throat, she finally spoke.
“I need your help,” she said, her voice strained but apparently under fairly firm control. “I know I haven’t any right to ask, but I hope perhaps we can make a deal. You see, I don’t have anyone else to ask. Mother died a month ago—”
She stopped, her control wavering, and took another sip of brandy. Drew took advantage of the pause to speak.
“Yes, I heard,” he said. “I'm sorry.” At the time, Drew had privately suspected Laura would be much happier without the querulous, suspicious, demanding woman hovering over her, but he had long ago learned not to voice such blasphemy. Though Laura had been adopted as an infant, she had never spoken of Elizabeth Nolan—had probably never even thought of her—as anything but a real mother, and she had been an unfailingly loyal daughter.
“Then you know I really am alone now,” Laura went on, the stoicism in her face making the statement a fact, not a bid for pity. And it was true. Laura’s natural parents had died in a car crash just after she was born, and her adoptive father, sculptor Damian Nolan, had abandoned the family when she was only ten.
“It’s just that being alone makes it difficult for me to cope with—” she suddenly looked confused.
“With what?” he prompted her curiously. What practical skills did he possess for her to call on? He’d been blessed with a healthy inheritance, and since he’d known from childhood that his life would be spent managing the family’s complicated investments, his education had all been in business and finance. Could she need money? Help with her portfolio? No, Laura’s inheritance was as substantial as his, and somehow he couldn’t imagine her coming back to Winterwalk after all these years just for tips on blue chips.
“It’s awkward,” she said. “I don’t know how much you might have heard before. Mother tried to keep it quiet, but no one could keep a thing like this completely secret.” She looked at her brandy glass, swirling it nervously. “Had you ever heard that I used to—that I had a sleep disorder?”
Now it was Drew’s turn to be uncomfortable. Buying time, he slowly poured himself a brandy, wondering what his best answer would be. Of course he’d heard. Winterwalk servants constantly socialized with Springfields servants, and probably with workers on every other estate within gossiping distance. But once, when he had asked his sister about it, Stephanie had advised him never to mention it to Laura. Stephanie, though five years older than Laura, had been a close friend of hers, and she explained to Drew that Laura was embarrassed by her sleepwalking problem.
Anyway, Stephanie had assured him, it was really nothing. The doctor had checked it out and said that Laura would probably outgrow it. Because the rumors had soon stopped, Drew had vaguely assumed that was what had happened.
“I did hear something,” he equivocated. “Sometimes, apparently, you walked in your sleep. It’s a problem people often outgrow, isn’t it?”
“Well, I didn’t,” she said, putting her glass on the end table and standing abruptly. With a blindly urgent motion she strode to the window, tunneling her hand into the brocaded draperies. “It happened again last night.”
He frowned, bewildered by the tension in her voice. “Well, that’s not so terrible, is it? Lots of people sleepwalk—”
“Not the way I do,” she broke in, her voice thick and distorted. “You don’t understand. I don’t just walk in my sleep. I get up, I go downstairs, sometimes I even go outside. And then I take off my clothes.”
Drew set his glass down slowly. “You do what?“
Without letting go of the drapes, she turned to face him. “I take my clothes off.” Two high spots of color stained her cheeks, and her eyes were bright and feverish. “I’d never done it anywhere but at Winterwalk, never in my whole life. I was safe when I spent the night at a friend’s house, when I went on vacation, when I was away at college. It never happened anywhere but here, never. I thought that as long as I didn’t come home I would be safe.”
Suddenly releasing the drapes, she clasped her arms around her chest, clutching her upper arms so tightly her fingers were buried in the soft wool of her sleeves.
“But I was wrong. Last night, in Boston, in the middle of the night, I went out into the snow and began to take off my nightgown.”
With a growl of protest deep in his throat, Drew crossed the room to her.
“Laura...” But when he put his hands on her shoulders, she jerked away. He let his hands fall woodenly to his sides.
“No,” she whispered, refusing to look at him. “Just listen.” She bit her lower lip hard enough to leave two small ridges in the pink flesh. “I was all right. Just cold. And scared. Luckily I woke up before any real harm was done.” She was talking rapidly, compulsively. “But now I know it can happen anywhere. It will happen anywhere and everywhere! And there’s no one left to help me, to make sure I don’t hurt myself—to make sure that no one else finds me like that, sees me like that”
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