To Taste The Wine

by Fern Michaels

  Tingari shrugged, but her expression told Chelsea she knew something.

  “Tell me, dammit! I need to know! Did you mean he’s going to die?” Chelsea was aghast to hear the hope in her tone, but honest enough to acknowledge it as such. “Tell me!”

  “I have thrown his stones.” She took another puff on the foul cigar, evidently taking great pleasure from it.

  “And you’ve thrown my stones, too, haven’t you? That’s why you said I need a baby.”

  “Why does Mitjitji speak with Tingari? Things bad when Boss Kane takes you to your room?”

  “They never go well, but today was beyond insult. What did my stones say?”

  Tingari looked silently at her mistress. “They say you need a baby.”

  “Do you throw stones for yourself?” Now there was a reaction in Tingari—anger. “No! Tingari never do that. I am a woman of magic and Dreamtime. It is forbidden to me to throw my stones.” A tragic expression filled those ebony eyes, and Chelsea knew Tingari was lying. She had thrown her own stones and was frightened of what she had seen.

  Chapter 15

  Chelsea slapped the reins on the bay’s broad rump as she steered the buggy down the road toward Clonmerra. Her heart pounded even louder than the hooves of the bay, and today the abominable red dust went unnoticed. She could think of nothing at this moment except Quaid’s reaction to her arrival. Dear God, what would he think of her? Married less than a month and already beating a path to his door. A baby. Quaid’s baby. Tingari had said it, and so it must be true. A baby to hold and to love; Quaid’s baby.

  Over the past days she had contemplated what an ugly thing she was planning to do to Quaid. She felt like a thief, stealing something from him, taking his seed to produce a child and depriving him of the knowledge and the pleasure of recognizing that child as his own.

  Quaid Tanner walked hatless across the distance from the winery to the storage shed. He had given his instructions to Jack Mundey, his foreman, to run the sheep to pasture. For the thousandth time, he wished he could keep his mind on what he was doing. For some reason today, Chelsea was uppermost in his thoughts. Where was she? What was she doing? Was she happy now that she had what she wanted? Had Harlow ever discovered what had become of Martha and did he know about Quaid’s part in the ploy? Harlow should have come to the realization that Martha wouldn’t be back.

  He remembered the expression of gratitude on Martha’s poor battered face as she hurried up the gangplank of the ship that would take her to England. He suffered no misgivings; he would help Martha again if he had to, and Harlow Kane be damned. The Kane family was now history as far as he was concerned, and his relationship with Chelsea over. He must accept it and live with it.

  In the view of the world he was a married man. He had no right to want Chelsea so desperately to expect her to sacrifice respectability and social acceptance to live as his mistress. This wasn’t England or Europe; this was Australia, an isolated continent of sparse population, where social ethics and personal morals were mercilessly scrutinized.

  Slinging a case of bottles onto his shoulder, Quaid eased the shed door shut behind him. As he shifted the case for a better grip, his foot rolled on a stone and made him do a crazy dance. The sound of laughter startled him. Chelsea! Damn, was he so lovesick he was imagining her here? When the trilling laugh erupted a second time, the case of bottles fell with a loud crash, shards of glass shooting in all directions.

  “You’re hell on anything breakable, Quaid,” she teased, walking toward him. “I’ve missed you. You’ll never know how much.”

  “I was just thinking about you. I suppose you came to find out if Martha reached the ship safely. Well, she left with a smile, if that’s what you wanted to hear.”

  “It’s what I wanted to hear. What were you thinking about me, Quaid? Tell me.”

  He felt foolish standing there in the hot sun surrounded by broken glass, but he knew this moment would never come again. “I was thinking how much I missed you,” he told her, the expression in his eyes revealing more than words could ever say. “I was wishing I could have offered you marriage and respectability. Wishing I weren’t so imprisoned by my past.”

  “We’re all prisoners of our past, aren’t we,” Chelsea said softly. She lowered her face, unable to meet his gaze, misery washing over her in great beating waves. “I keep remembering everything, every word since I first met you. It’s the only thing that keeps you alive for me when I can’t be with you. I hated you when I thought you didn’t love me, that I was just an amusing pastime for you. Then, when you warned me not to marry Harlow, I thought it was because you were jealous and just wanted to keep me dangling. I was haunted by my past. I thought you didn’t believe I was good enough to marry. I hated you for that, but I loved you, too. And when I found out you already had a wife … only then did I realize I could believe those things I saw in your eyes and what you made me feel when you touched me. And I loved you, more than ever. Don’t hate me for marrying Harlow. I saw a chance for life to be different for me, a chance to be accepted and have the security I’ve never had.”

  Quaid stepped closer to her, putting his hands on her shoulders, willing her to lift her face and look into his soul. “I don’t hate you, Chelsea. Good God, it would be so much simpler if I could!” His voice was deep, choked with emotion.

  When she lifted her face, she saw tears glistening. “I wanted to be married. It was my one chance to escape my past. In this world a woman needs a husband, or else she has nothing. Can you understand? Please, understand.”

  Quaid crushed her to him, burying his lips in the silk of her hair. “Oh, Chelsea, there’s so much I can tell you, so much I’ve never told anyone. My back was to the wall. If I’d asked you to marry me, we would have had each other but little else. Clonmerra would be gone, everything would be gone. And perhaps I’d be forced to pay for a crime I didn’t commit. So you see, love, I had nothing to offer you. There would always be the fear that any moment it could all be torn away. I love you too much to do that to you. Even if I had to lose you to Harlow Kane, I wanted more for you than I could offer.”

  Chelsea saw the raw emotions in Quaid’s eyes, heard the grief in his voice, felt the rigidity of his shoulders beneath her fingers. Questions flew through her brain, but she knew without doubt that when he answered her, she would be hearing the truth.

  He took her up to the house, sitting her down on the porch steps, seating himself on the step below her where he could watch her face. A soft breeze was blowing, cool and dry, a portent of the coming winter. It wasn’t until she placed her hand tenderly on his shoulder that he found the courage to tell her.

  “We were two brothers, born and raised here on Clonmerra. We attended school at the academy in the outskirts of Sydney. Two boys, Luke and Quaid. Our father was already up in years when we were born, and after Mother died he thought of nothing but returning to Ireland and his family’s estate. We were eighteen when we left Australia, and we finished our education in England. When we came down from Oxford I took a position with a wine importer; my brother, who had a head for numbers, was offered a seat at the bank. Our father believed young men should earn their keep with gainful employment. Most everything he owned was far away in Australia, and Clonmerra was lying fallow. So you see, he had little to offer us. It was my uncle who had inherited the Tanner family fortune. Father was a younger brother.”

  He was silent for a long time, looking into his past, gathering his thoughts. It was Chelsea’s pressure against his shoulder that prompted him to begin again.

  “I don’t think I ever had any illusions about my brother. He’d always preferred scheming to working, and he had a taste for high living. He was married by then, to a beautiful but ambitious woman. He and Madeline were having marital problems, and my brother was finding consolation in the arms of a little doxie who lived down by the wharf. I’m still uncertain of the details, but one night he sent a message for me to meet him in a rooming house on the East End. From tha
t moment, my life has never been the same.”

  There was grief and anguish in his eyes when he looked up into Chelsea’s face. For an instant she thought he’d be unable to continue, but she also realized his desperate need to unburden himself, to have her understand. She waited, tenderly brushing back the thick dark hair from his tanned brow. When he began again, his voice was softer, hardly more than a murmur.

  “I went to the rooming house and found my brother nearly out of his mind. He’d been with his mistress that night, and he’d had a good deal to drink. For whatever reason, they’d argued and he’d knocked her around. He admitted to me that he’d beaten her in his drunken rage, but what happened next was something he’d never intended. Somehow, because of one of his blows, she hit her head. She was dead, and he’d killed her. Neighbors had heard the fighting, and so had the nightwatch walking the beat. He barely escaped.”

  Quaid was like a man putting down a heavy burden, slowly, carefully, still aching from carrying the load for such a long time. When he began talking again, his words came in quick bursts, as though he couldn’t wait to be rid of his secret.

  “When my brother sent the message to me, he’d also sent one to his wife. He planned to return here, to Australia, but he needed money, and he wanted Madeline to leave England with him. He knew the police would learn who had killed the woman; my brother was no stranger in the neighborhood, and it was well known that he visited her regularly. He even confessed that several people had seen him with her that night. He was a frightened man, Chelsea, afraid for his life. He needed money, and he needed it quickly; that was to be my part in it, to provide it. Christ, he was my brother! How could I refuse? How could I just stand by and watch justice take its course and live with myself while my brother rotted in jail or went to the gallows? I had to do it!”

  Chelsea’s touch calmed him. He buried his face in his hands. “What I tell you next will prove I’m as much of a coward as my brother ever was. Madeline arrived. I could see immediately that she’d never go to Australia with him. She was frightened for herself, for what being married to a criminal would do to her life. I’d returned by then with the money and had also booked passage for two on a freighter that was leaving port that very night. So help me God, Chelsea, and may He forgive me, all the while I was getting the money and booking passage, all I could think of was that if my brother didn’t get away from the police, Clonmerra and everything else would be lost to the Tanner family forever. Since my brother had no legal heirs, Clonmerra and the abandoned opal mine would be returned to the Tanner estate, going directly to my uncle’s heirs, who didn’t give a damn about it. Clonmerra, the only place in the world where I felt I belonged. The only thing in the world that mattered to me.”

  He groaned then, an awful sound of remorse and agony. “When I returned to the rooming house, my brother was very agitated. He was crying, and he couldn’t bear to look at me. Under the circumstances I didn’t think it strange. Madeline, too, was nervous as a cat. I remember seeing her glancing at the door from time to time. It wasn’t long before I knew why. I heard a commotion on the floor below—men’s voices. Instinct told me it was the police. I only knew I had to get my brother out of there to safety. The window and a run across the rooftops was the only way out. Without even thinking, I pushed my brother out the window onto the ledge. He was yelling the whole time, resisting me, but I forced him. Then it was as if he had a change of heart—suddenly we were scrambling across the slippery tiles, trying to make our way to the next street. But it didn’t work. I knew it wasn’t going to work when I heard the bobbies blowing their whistles and the sound of footsteps on the pavement below. We took cover in the shadow of the chimneys, scared half out of our minds.

  “Suddenly, my brother wanted to go back. I couldn’t understand it; all we had to do was wait our chance. ‘I have to go back,’ he told me. ‘I can’t live with myself if I don’t. I have to set things right!’ When I still didn’t understand, that’s when he told me that Madeline had gone to the police while I went to get the money. She told them that I had contacted my brother and asked him to meet me at the rooming house, that I had confessed to him that I had killed the woman. It was me the police had come for, not my brother! They had blamed me!

  “I wasn’t thinking, nothing was making sense. Below, in the street, the police were shouting for us to come down. It was my name they were calling, Chelsea. My name! Luke Tanner! Not Quaid, Luke!”

  Chelsea drew in her breath, afraid to hear what was to come next. The man she loved was telling her he wasn’t who she thought he was—that when they made love the name she whispered wasn’t his!

  “I was mad—out of my mind. I couldn’t accept what my brother was trying to do to me. He and his wife had tried to accuse me of a crime he’d committed. I attacked him, struggling with him on the ledge of the roof. He got away from me, and I ran after him to the other side. That was when … when he fell.”

  His shoulders shook with grief; he turned to bury his head in the comfort of Chelsea’s lap. She stroked his head, soothing him, tears streaming down her own cheeks, knowing what this terrible confession was costing him.

  “I vaulted down onto a neighboring roof and from there onto the top of a shed. I was able to get to my brother before the police had a chance to make it around the corner and come chasing up the alley. Chelsea, it was horrible. He must have fallen head down!” He pushed his face into his hands, struggling to wipe the vision of his brother from his mind. “There he lay, head bashed in, the oldest son, Quaid Tanner, heir to Clonmerra. He’d betrayed me, and now he was dead, leaving me to clear my name. And he’d taken with him any hope of my ever seeing Clonmerra again. That was when I did it. God help me, Chelsea, in some way I’ve paid for this action every day of my life since. I exchanged wallets and identification. Such a simple thing, taking no more than a second. By then, the bobbies were coming up the alley, and whatever I had done I’d have to live with it. That’s how I inherited Clonmerra and my brother’s wife to go along with it. Madeline’s a greedy creature; she was more than willing to go along with the scheme since she knew a dead husband with outstanding debts could offer her nothing, but a man with a secret is only too willing to pay blood money on a quarterly basis. To all intents and purposes, I became Quaid Tanner. No one here in Australia ever realized the difference, since my brother and I were so much alike in appearance and so many years had passed.

  “Now do you see? Now do you know why I couldn’t have you for my own? I love you, Chelsea! I’ve loved you from the first moment I saw you. I’m a man haunted by his past; a man who doesn’t even answer to his own name. A coward who lives a lie because he burned to make Clonmerra his own.” He looked up into her face, saw the tears of compassion streaming from her eyes. His heart melted. “Don’t cry for me, Chelsea, don’t ever cry for me. I never wanted to make you unhappy, I only wanted to make you understand.”

  “I do understand,” she whispered, her lips quivering, “and I love you. I loved you yesterday, I love you now, and I’ll love you forever.” She collapsed into his arms, falling into his lap, winding her arms around him, holding him close. She would keep his secret, protect him and Clonmerra. What was done was done, and nothing could erase the past. Luke, no Quaid—she must never think of him by his real name—had at last given her the real reason why he couldn’t marry her. To all the world he was Quaid Tanner in order to save Clonmerra, and Quaid was a married man.

  He held her, his arms hard around her, his dark head bent to hers. A great welling constricted his chest, and he knew it to be an overwhelming grief. “Dear God, Chelsea,” he said, “what have we done?”

  It was a poignant moment, the two of them holding each other in the bright sunshine; but night had fallen in their hearts. Lies and charades had come between them, endless shadows from their pasts, and now they would be paying the price for all eternity. “Tell me,” he urged softly, “I want to hear you say it again.”

  Chelsea shook her head. “No, not here,
love. Take me to your bed, that’s where I’ll show you my love.”

  Alone in the dim shadows of his room, they held each other tenderly, each realizing the fragility of the other, wanting to soothe away the pain. Always before they had tried to express their love through a touch, a kiss, a passion. Today it was not enough, and Chelsea reached up to hold her love’s head between her hands, tilting his face until his eyes met hers. “I have loved you in many ways, my darling, and so often the words threatened to spill from my lips, but always I bit them back. No longer. I love you … Luke. With all my heart. I want you to touch me, make love to me. But most of all, I want you to tell me, too.”

  The sound of his own name spoken from her lips filled him with unspeakable joy. At least here, alone together, they could lay the dead to rest and open themselves to the light instead of hiding in the threatening shadows of the past.

  “I do love you,” he confessed, his eyes cloudy with emotion. “And this is our first love, our only love. Everything that came before this was between two other people. This is our first time.”

  His mouth descended upon hers, sealing his words, branding them upon her lips. She held herself against him, feeling her body slide full length beneath him, winding her arms about his neck to make him her loving captive. They had never kissed with such tenderness and longing. Passion was a thing apart from this moment between them. They were creating a warm, safe world for the two of them to share, a world where expressions of love were said like prayers. He took her gently, never taking his eyes from her lovely face, watching in wonder when at the moment of rapture she looked up at him, mouthing the words that blazed in her heart.

  When he took his own release, the sound of her name tore from his throat, and there was such emotion and love in the sound, as though for him no other name existed.