For the Love of Emma

by Lucy Gordon

  When the second knock came, she was already in bed. She pulled on a dressing gown to make her way sleepily across the floor. She thought it was Denis again, and as she opened the door she was already saying, “You can’t come here at this time of—” Then she stopped, staring, while her breath came quickly.

  “Can I come in?” Carlyle asked. She stood back in silence and closed the door behind him. They regarded each other. “Who did you think I was?” he asked. “Denis?”

  She found her voice. “He called on me earlier.”

  “I know. I saw him arrive and I waited to see how long he stayed.”

  “Barely half an hour,” she whispered. There was something in Carlyle’s face that she’d never seen there before, and it made her heart suddenly beat madly.

  “Yes, half an hour,” he repeated. “And I tell you this. If he’d stayed all night, I’d have gone away and never seen you again.”

  “There was never any question of that. Why are you here, Carlyle?”

  He looked at her a long moment in silence before saying, “I came to take you home.”

  “This is my home now.”

  “This will never be your home. Your home is with me, and Emma. If you want all this—” He indicated her books. “You can have it. You can do any job you want if it means that much to you.”

  “Carlyle, you don’t know what means a lot to me and what doesn’t.”

  He frowned. “That’s what they said.”

  “They?”

  “Emma and my mother.”

  “Are you here because they sent you?”

  “Yes—no—it’s something much more than that. It’s hard to explain. The only thing I’m clear about is that I want you back. The house isn’t a home without you.” He saw that her face was still unyielding, and knew he still hadn’t said the right thing. Alarm gripped him. He was The Great Fixer, whose silver tongue reduced rivals to furious silence. But only the right words would help him now, and he didn’t know what they were.

  “I don’t understand,” Briony said. “Denis left an hour ago. If you saw him, why did you wait so long before knocking?”

  And suddenly he knew what the words were. “I was afraid,” he said simply.

  “You? Afraid?”

  “It matters so much. If I get it wrong—and you don’t love me—”

  She couldn’t be sure she’d heard him right. Incredulously she whispered, “Love you?”

  “Emma says you do. She says you told her so. I thought she must have got it wrong, but she insisted that you’d said, ‘ever so and ever so.’ To her that means it must be true.” He looked at her, an urgent question in his eyes.

  “Oh, you fool,” she breathed. “You complete fool.”

  “I know I’m a fool,” he said with rare humility. “The only question is, what sort of a fool?”

  She answered in the only way she could, putting her arms around him and laying her lips on his in the first kiss of their mutual love. For a moment he seemed too stunned to react. But then life returned to his limbs and he seized her in a fierce embrace.

  “I love you,” he said again and again. “I’ve loved you for months, but I couldn’t find a way to tell you. You were so distant.”

  “I thought that was what you wanted. You kept reminding me that you were only doing it for Emma—that we had a bargain…”

  “Don’t you understand? I love you.” He stopped abruptly, for she had covered his mouth with her own. This was her kiss, her assertion of power, the moment when she claimed him.

  “I was trying to reassure you,” he said when he could breathe again. “I knew the bargain was important to you—”

  “To hell with the bargain!” she said fiercely against his mouth. “Do you think I married you for money and a career in business? Is that what you really thought?”

  “I don’t know what I think anymore. Nothing that I believed seems to be true.”

  “This is true,” she murmured, brushing her lips softly against his.

  “Yes,” he groaned. “This is true—only this—”

  “My love, why are we wasting time?”

  “You’re right,” he said, lifting her in his arms and kicking open the bedroom door. “We’ve years ahead for explanations. Let them wait. Briony—my darling—”

  It was like making love for the first time. The past didn’t count. All that mattered was now, discovering each other as lovers. The discovery was beautiful, warm with the sweetness of mutual giving and taking, and full of promise for their life together, now and forever.

  Afterward, lying wrapped in each other’s arms, they dozed in blissful content, then woke and discovered more bliss. “I can’t believe that you really love me,” she murmured.

  “Believe it,” he whispered, holding her body close to his.

  “But how, when?

  “It crept up on me. You were so beautiful coming down the aisle toward me. I’d only thought of you for Emma, but suddenly you were enchanting. But you’d been so reluctant to marry me—”

  “Only because of Sally.”

  “I didn’t know that. I thought I should tread carefully. Sometimes you seemed to be warming toward me, but then you’d drive me away again. When we made love I thought I had a chance, but nothing seemed to change afterward.”

  “I saw you looking at Helen’s picture that night, and one of Emma—”

  “Emma with you. It was you I was looking at.”

  “But you seemed troubled. I thought you felt guilty about Helen.”

  “I was saying goodbye to her. It took me too long to do that, but then there was you, and you filled my heart as no other woman had filled it since she died. I loved you so much Briony, and you wouldn’t give an inch.”

  “I wouldn’t? It was you—” But suddenly it wasn’t important anymore. She was laughing and he was laughing with her, and there was nothing in the world but their laughter and joy.

  “You kept making me think I had a chance,” he told her, “then snatching it away. The night of the party, when you lost your temper with me, you were magnificent, eyes flashing, bosom heaving, I don’t know why I didn’t pull you down onto the bed and take you there and then.”

  “Oh, I wish you had,” she sighed. “I wanted you so much. I’ve wanted you all this time, in every way.”

  He kissed her. “I was ready to murder Denis at Christmas.”

  “For that innocent little peck under the mistletoe?”

  “That innocent little peck nearly sent me off my head. I knew I loved you, but not how much, until I went crazy with jealousy. I discovered that I’m a very jealous, possessive man. You will come home with me tomorrow morning, won’t you? You can study business some other way, if you want to But not here, not away from me.”

  “Never away from you again, my love. As long as you want me.”

  “I do want you. But I also have to confess—”

  “What is it?”

  He grinned. “Emma as good as said that if I didn’t get you back I needn’t bother coming home.”

  The laughter welled up out of him and she joined in. “Oh, I’m going to love being her mother,” she said, wiping her eyes.

  “Why did you leave us? When Emma got better I thought everything was all right, but you couldn’t wait to get away—”

  “Because I thought you didn’t need me anymore. I couldn’t live with half measures. It hurt too much.”

  “I shall always need you, in every way,” he said softly, drawing her close to him again. “And I’ll prove it every day of my life. Come to me, my love…”

  Later he said quietly, “There’s something I have to tell you. I didn’t know about it myself until yesterday, when Emma told me. When she came round from the operation and said, ‘Mummy was there,’ she meant much more than we thought.”

  “She meant Helen,” Briony said. “I’ve always known that.”

  “Yes, she did. But she meant you, too. I don’t fully understand it, but wherever she was, you and Helen were bo
th there. She explained it to me last night. Oswald and Oswald. Mummy and Mummy. To her it’s all perfectly simple.”

  It was the last piece in place, the only thing she needed to hear to make her happiness complete. Briony drew her husband to her—now truly her husband—and gave passionate thanks from the depths of her heart.

  They returned home very early the next morning. Dawn was just breaking as the car drew to a halt, and the world was still asleep.

  Except for someone at the window above, who vanished as soon as Briony got out of the car and went flying down the stairs and hurled herself into two pairs of waiting arms.

  eISBN 978-14592-7719-9

  First North American Publication 1996.

  Copyright © 1996 by Lucy Gordon.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Hartequin Books S.A.

  ® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  Printed in U.S.A.