“Sophie! Open this door!”
“No,” came the answer from the other side. “Not yet. I need to think.”
He could hear her pacing the floorboards. “You can damn well think while I’m in the room, and after you explain to me what this is about.”
She didn’t answer. Alex raised his fist to pound some more, but stopped midswing, a horrible thought occurring to him.
“Sophie?” he called through the wood. His voice sounding a great deal less confident than it had a minute ago. “I…you don’t owe me anything, you know.”
She stopped pacing, so he forged ahead. “What I mean is, while I should like to think that you care for me, and perhaps might one day love me in return, I didn’t tell you of my own feelings with any expectation that you return them.” Hope, yes. Lots and lots of hope. And perhaps even a touch of suspicion, but not a definite expectation.
“That isn’t it,” she replied, and he could tell she was standing on just the other side of the wood.
“Well then, what the bloody hell is it?” Alex roared, losing patience.
She moved away from the door.
“Sophie, will you open this door, or I will have Mansten bring the key? Either way, I—”
“Who is Mansten?”
“The butler,” Alex ground out. “Either way, I am coming in, the choice is yours.”
He heard the lock slide on the door. “That’s no choice at all,” Sophie muttered as he shouldered his way past her to stand in the center of the room.
“Tell me what is going on here,” he demanded.
Sophie closed the door and turned to look at him. “I don’t know how to explain it, Alex.”
He leveled one long cold stare at her. “I just informed you that I love you, to which your reaction was to look horrified, run away, and lock yourself in our room. ‘I don’t know how to explain it, Alex’ is not an acceptable response.”
Sophie winced. That had been more than a little badly done. “I am so sorry,” she murmured guiltily. “I panicked.”
“Shall we go through your entire repertoire of lame excuses to night?”
“I said I was sorry and I meant it,” she said a little indignantly. “You have every right to be hurt and angry with me, but don’t throw my apology away as if it means nothing.”
“I accept your apology,” he said in a slightly more conciliatory voice. “It’s the reason for its necessity I find hard to swallow.”
“Well, I did panic,” she pointed out reasonably. A deaf and blind man would have been hard pressed to argue with that.
Alex ground his teeth together in frustration. “Why did you panic?”
Sophie grimaced in the manner of someone desperately trying to find the right words, and failing in the endeavor.
“Is the prospect of my love so disagreeable?” Alex asked.
“No!” she burst out. Suddenly all the words she was searching for seem to come to her at once, only she found it immensely difficult to get them out in the right order. “It isn’t your love or my love I fear, it’s the combination that scares me. If you just loved me, or I just loved you, everything would be fine. Well, not fine exactly, one of us would be fairly miserable,” she conceded. “But now, one or both of us will be so much worse than miserable. I’m not sure what that might be, but dead might be a reasonable assumption, or at least grievously wounded—”
“Sophie, stop. You’re not making any sense.”
She threw her hands up in defeat. “Well, I told you I couldn’t explain it, didn’t I?”
Alex walked over to stand in front of her. He searched her face with his eyes, then crushed her to his chest. “So, you do love me?”
She could hear the smile in his voice, and knew he wasn’t asking a question. Groaning, she leaned into his embrace, and spoke into his shirt. “Caught that part, did you?”
“It did seem the most pertinent.”
She immediately pulled back from him. “Well, it’s not,” she informed him. “That we love each other is what matters.”
“You are right of course,” he conceded happily.
“You’re missing the point!” she cried, pushing herself away from him entirely. “This is disastrous!”
Alex considered snatching her back into his arms, but thought it might be best to wait until they worked through what ever was bothering her. He didn’t want her to think he would ever take her concerns lightly.
Of course, she wouldn’t be able to see the loopy grin on his face if he held her, and that should be taken into consideration. She loved him.
He was hard-pressed to find anything but the greatest of joy in the moment.
“Sophie, come here.”
“No,” she stated resolutely, taking another step back. “Not until you listen to what I have to say.”
Alex gave a sigh of resignation. “Very well, explain to me why our having fallen in love spells certain doom.”
She scowled at him. “If you’re not going to take this seriously—”
He held his hands up in a conciliatory gesture. “I am sorry, you are right, and I am listening.” He schooled his face into a reasonably sincere expression. It was damned hard work.
She eyed him warily.
“Please, Sophie, talk to me.”
She searched his face for a moment longer, then nodded. “Have you not stopped to consider,” she began, “how very odd a great many of my experiences have been….”
As she spoke, Alex found he no longer had to concentrate to keep from smiling. He could scarcely believe what he was hearing. Sophie had gone her whole life in what Alex could only imagine would be a state of constant anxiety. Never being able to enjoy a bit of good fortune without wondering what calamity must follow. Always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Alex didn’t believe in fate. He firmly believed that, outside of birth and death, life was what you made of it. But Sophie clearly held to a system of checks and balances he found baffling and cruel.
“How can you live like this?” he asked in sad wonder. “Believing that every good thing that happens to you comes with a price?”
“I’ve never concerned myself with the little things,” Sophie explained. “Everyone has good days and bad days. I’m not unique in that. It’s the really monstrous events that require my attention.”
“You aren’t allowed something wonderful for free, is that it?”
“Yes, but you needn’t sound so appalled. It works both ways. More often than not, the terrible occurs first, and then I know I have the wonderful to look forward to.”
Well, that was something, he supposed. A very little something.
“Except for death,” she amended with a grimace. “Death plays by a set of rules I am not privy to.”
Rules, costs, balances. It was mind boggling.
“Who put this notion into your head?” he demanded. He rather thought it might have been that Mr. Wang. Any man foolish enough to let a rash and headstrong child (and he just knew Sophie had been rash and headstrong as a child) play with knives was likely stupid enough to fill her ears with the sort of tripe an imaginative girl (and she was still imaginative) would sop up like a sponge. Besides, Mr. Wang was the only suspect Alex had besides Mrs. Summers, and he was rather inclined to think well of Sophie’s matchmaking chaperone.
“I don’t suppose it occurred to you that I might have figured it out on my own,” she replied.
It had, actually, but he hoped it was otherwise. He was looking forward to taking up the issue with the thoughtless bastard responsible.
“Well, I did,” Sophie continued without waiting for his response. “But it’s universally accepted as fact.”
“Define ‘universal.’”
“Oh, my father, Mrs. Summers, Mr. Wang, and a few others who have known me for a while.”
Well, he could pummel Mr. Wang, at any rate. He’d have to see how old her father was.
“I know you don’t believe it Alex, but—”
“What I bel
ieve is not an issue at present,” he stated with a swiftness that amazed her.
He was willing to put aside his own beliefs in order to better understand her own. The selflessness of that small act humbled her.
“Unless I am mistaken,” he continued, “and please correct me if I am, you believe that falling in love comes with a price of misfortune equal to its worth. Am I correct?”
“Yes!” she cried, relieved that he appeared to comprehend how serious the matter was to her. “And because this is the best thing, the absolute best thing that could ever happen to me, or anyone, imagine what the cost will be! I don’t know that I could afford it. Something must be done.”
Alex didn’t care for the sound of that.
He closed the distance between them in two long strides. Cupping her face between his strong hands, he leaned down until their foreheads rested against each other.
“What are you proposing, Sophie? Will you leave me?” The question came out rather strangled.
She flinched. “I don’t know,” she choked out.
He brushed his thumbs along her temples. “I love you. I love you with my heart, my body, my every breath. If I lost you, my life would be nothing, an endless waking nightmare. You said you loved me too. Is it not the same for you?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“And if you walked away from this, what would be a sufficient compensation for that kind of pain, Sophie? What could make up for the loss of what we have?”
She was silent for a moment, lost in thought. “Nothing,” she finally whispered with a touch of surprise in her voice. “Nothing could make up for losing you.”
“So why go?”
She didn’t appear to hear him. Her head turned to the side and her eyes darted back and forth across the room unseeingly. She was still mulling over what he had said. “It couldn’t be balanced,” she said with growing wonder. “It couldn’t even itself out.”
“Perhaps love is like life and death,” he suggested. “Maybe it has its own rules.”
“Maybe, I—” As quickly as her face had begun to lighten, it dimmed.
“What?” Alex prompted urgently. Dammit, they’d been so close. “What is it?”
“It can balance out if I stay,” she whimpered in disappointment. “If I stay…I could lose you.”
Alex groaned. She was not going to lose him. Anymore than he planned on losing her.
“I don’t know what to do, Alex.”
“I know darling, I know, but we’ll figure something out. Just—”
Alex’s head snapped up suddenly. “What is the average life span for a gently reared British woman?”
She blinked at him. “What? What are you—?”
He dropped her face and began pacing the room. “Never mind, doesn’t matter, let us say fifty for now. Sound reasonable?”
“I suppose….”
“Right. Fifty. And you are now, five-and-twenty, correct?”
“Yes,” she said slowly, having no idea where the conversation might be headed.
“Excellent. That gives you a quarter-century to live, give or take a couple months. With your history you’re bound to live right up to the average, wouldn’t you say?”
“I suppose so.”
“Excellent. Excellent. That, in turn, gives you twelve years, six months with me, and twelve years, six months without.”
He stopped and at looked at her expectantly. She just stared back.
“As I see it, Sophie, you have two options. You could stay and give me the pleasure of making you deliriously happy for the next twelve and a half years, believing there could be twelve and half years of heartache to pay for it. Or, you can forgo the happiness altogether and spend the next five-and-twenty years alone and miserable, with the knowledge that you have made me miserable as well.”
She still didn’t speak, but she no longer looked quite so confused.
“Can you think of an alternative, Sophie?”
Finally she swallowed and spoke. “You could leave me,” she answered.
“That is not going to happen. Besides, the results for you would be the same, wouldn’t they?”
She nodded, looking torn.
“Stay,” he urged, taking a step towards her.
She searched his face with her eyes, and then searched her own heart. What he said made sense. A decade and more of bliss followed by a decade of misery was a damn sight better than a lifetime of pain with nothing to show for it.
“Stay, Sophie,” he pleaded taking another step. Then another. “Give me the twelve years.”
A small smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, before blooming into a full-fledged grin.
“And six months,” she reminded him.
He gathered her into his arms. “And six months,” he agreed.
Epilogue
Two months later
Sophie sat on the stone garden bench and tilted her face to the sun. If Mrs. Summers could see her now, no doubt she’d launch into a diatribe regarding the perils of freckling. But her friend was busy inside the Rockeforte country manor happily chatting with Mr. Wang and the visiting Mr. Fletcher.
With Alex busy attending the estate business he had neglected over the last few months, Sophie had taken the opportunity for a little quiet solitude to think over the last few weeks of her life.
She was happy. Absolutely, blissfully happy. But she was hard-pressed not to dwell on the fact that it might very well prove temporary.
“Why the sigh, Sophie?”
She turned to find Mr. Wang standing not three feet behind her. “You move like a cat,” she said without rancor. She had never noticed that before.
“Old habit,” the man replied. “I could teach you, if you like.”
Sophie smiled at him and waved for him to take a seat next to her. “I would, although it might be best not to mention it to Alex. He seems determined not to like you, I’m afraid,” she said honestly.
Mr. Wang just chuckled softly. “He holds me responsible for some notion you have about things going terribly wrong in twelve years.”
“And four months. He mentioned that, did he?”
“He did. I am surprised at you, Sophie, to hold to such silliness.”
Sophie was taken aback. “You’ve never called it that before.”
“I hadn’t thought it necessary. I assumed you knew all that talk of luck and misfortune was merely for fun.”
“How can you say that?” she demanded. “Knowing everything that has happened?”
“How can I not, knowing how it all happened? You are a willful and sometimes rash young woman with a propensity for finding trouble. That tiger came after you because you had recently come from the butcher’s. You got lost in that jungle because you wandered off to inspect an interesting bloom, rather than stay with your guide as you should have, and—”
“Even if what you say is true, though I reserve the right to disagree, how do you explain my narrow escapes?”
“By pointing out that although you are a troublesome young woman, you are also rather clever and levelheaded when the occasion requires it. If you had panicked, that tiger would have pounced on you before I could intervene, and you came across that jungle tribe by following running water with the knowledge that it was your best chance of reaching civilization.”
Sophie thought about that for a very long time. What Mr. Wang was implying threatened a concept she had held as irrefutable truth for most of her life. It was not something she could simply accept out of hand.
“It doesn’t explain everything,” she finally said in a soft voice.
“No, but then we are all subject to the whims of fate now and again. You are not alone in that.”
Mr. Wang stood up and tugged gently at the hem of his coat to straighten it. “Think on what I’ve said. Neither your father, nor Mrs. Summers, nor myself ever meant our little jests about your luck to be anything more than that, little jests.”
Sophie nodded, silently agreeing to consider the matter fur
ther, but unable to promise more than that.
Mr. Wang must have understood her reticence. “If you find you cannot bring yourself to see the matter differently, at least consider this. You do not have twelve years and four months with Alex, you have five-and-twenty years…half your life with him, and half without, hmm?”
And with that revelation he took himself off, following the gravel path deeper into the garden.
Sophie sat stunned for a moment.
He was right.
Five-and-twenty years.
They had five-and-twenty years!
She shot up and headed toward the house at a dead run.
She had to tell Alex!
Then she had to go back and thank Mr. Wang properly. He’d given them five-and-twenty years.
And he’d given her hope.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My sincere thanks to my agent, Emmanuelle Alspaugh, and editor, Leah Hultenschmidt, without whom this book would not have been possible.
Copyright
A LEISURE BOOK®
October 2008
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Copyright © 2008 by Alissa Johnson
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E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-0551-3
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