by Karen Ranney
He was right, the past was obscured, but she could still feel the pain of it, even now.
“I should find Margaret,” she said.
“Margaret will be occupied for a good quarter hour, Jeanne, which will give us time to talk.”
She didn’t want to talk. Every time they met, she revealed a little more of herself.
Her past had been hinted at but not exposed. He’d seen her scars, but she’d never told him that she’d used his name as a comfort, biting down on the sound of it to muffle her screams during the beatings. She’d told him of returning to Vallans, but she’d never disclosed that she’d been nearly starving. He knew she’d escaped France, but he didn’t know what that terrible journey had truly been like.
Nor did he know the greatest secret of all—that they’d had a child together.
Tell him. Tell him and then leave. Tell him what had happened all those years ago. Once she’d purged her conscience and unburdened her soul, she should ask him why he’d never come for her.
But the words wouldn’t come. She didn’t want to leave him. Or Margaret. The little girl had burrowed into her heart and remained there, firmly fixed.
She finally turned and faced him. Douglas stood in front of her, the sun illuminating his carefully expressionless features. However, she knew him well enough to know when he was angry.
His anger didn’t frighten her. Only the truth did.
“I have to leave,” she said, shocking herself. Yet it was easier, wasn’t it, to deny him rather than be refused? She would be the one to walk away.
“After we’ve talked about Paris.”
“No,” she said. She didn’t want to talk about the past. “If you would ask the coachman to take me back to your house, I’ll pack my belongings and leave.”
“I went to see you in Paris,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “I went to tell you my parents had come, but instead of you, Justine was there.”
She shook her head and held up one hand. Revelations would destroy her. The past was part of her, but the weakest, flimsiest part. She was held together with wishes and hopes and the barest breeze would shatter her. The last memory of them together should not be one of her weeping to him, begging him to understand.
“She told me you were with child.”
It was beginning, the endless questions, the look of contempt, and the horror.
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, wishing that there was another entity other than God to whom she might pray. The God of Sacré-Coeur was alternately vengeful and inattentive, flicking a finger in her direction as if to punish her for even being alive. She’d begun to think of him as a celestial Comte du Marchand, with powdered hair and a shiny golden suit sewn of sunbeams.
She opened her eyes and forced a smile to her face. “Are you so angry at me because I wouldn’t let you into my bed?” she demanded, turning on him. “Is that what this is all about?”
She strode toward him, and her smile broadened.
His expression altered, his frown changing to surprise.
“Very well, come tonight.” Halting a few feet from him, she smiled, deliberately taunting him. “Or now. Here.” Turning, she glanced at the expanse of his desk.
Walking toward it, she began untying the ribbons of her bonnet. She tossed it to a chair on the other side of the room and watched, uncaring, when it fell to the floor. She pushed his blotter out of the way and sat on the edge of his desk. Never moving her eyes from his, she began unfastening her bodice with both hands.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked. His tone was harsh, his voice raspy. She had succeeded in disconcerting him but she’d also deflected his questions.
“Readying myself for you, of course. Do you require that I remove all my clothes, Douglas, or should I just tip up my skirts? I like it when you kiss my breasts. But please don’t rip my chemise. I only have one.”
“Stop it, Jeanne.”
“Stop?” she asked, feigning dismay. Her fingers didn’t hesitate, however, opening her bodice until she separated the fabric, revealing her stays and below it her threadbare chemise. She felt daring and wicked, and thoroughly brazen. When she was a girl she had delighted in loving him, had done so in the bright light of morning. What she was experiencing now was less bravado than an almost desperate wish to forestall his questions.
“Do you not want me?” she asked.
“More than is wise,” he said, coming to stand in front of her. “If I didn’t, I would send you away. I would have sent you away long before now.”
The truth had a way of wounding her, but she pushed that thought away.
“Then perhaps we should simply rejoice in that, Douglas, and ignore everything else. It’s a harsh world, and there isn’t enough passion in it. Shouldn’t we feel blessed with what we have?”
She reached up with one hand and curled it around his neck.
“For a moment?” she asked. “Just a moment of forgetfulness.”
They had always been physically in tune with each other in a way that was magical and frightening. She wanted him to kiss her and make her forget. Perhaps in his arms they could revert to who they had been, and not the people they were now.
Make the years go away. Make the circumstances change. A command she didn’t voice to Douglas because God had already heard and ignored her. But if she had a wish granted it would be that they would each feel free enough to love, and brave enough to love as they had once.
He stretched out his hand and touched her face, a soft and exploring touch that made her heart ache.
Holding out his hand, he waited until she took it and then he helped her from the desk. She turned, wondering if he was repudiating her, and that’s when she saw the curio cabinet. Five feet long and easily that high, it was fronted with glass. Three shelves held an array of distinctive objects.
Walking to stand in front of it, she stared at the statues on the three shelves. Some were small, barely a hand span. Others were busts, and some were only sculptural fragments of reliefs.
And each of them looked like her.
“What are these?” she asked faintly.
For a long time he didn’t speak. When he did, his words came hesitantly. “A hobby of mine,” he said. He moved to stand beside her.
“Where are they from?”
“All over the world.”
The bust on the top shelf, a pale gray rendition of a young girl, had paint flecks on various places on the face.
“Phoenician?”
“Greek,” he said.
The hairstyle was a simple one, gathered at the back of the head with ringlets escaping at the temples. She’d worn her hair that way the morning she first met Douglas.
On the first shelf, a smaller statuette was posed in a contemplative state, her head tilted slightly as if hearing a sound from far away.
But it was the face of each statuette or bust that stripped the breath from her. Although the ages ranged from ancient to more modern, each face was slightly similar, the heroine almost fragile-looking. Jeanne had changed in the intervening years; her face had matured. But at one time, she’d had the same look about her.
She reached up and touched the glass, obscuring the face of one particularly poignant statue. The girl was dressed in a diaphanous garment, holding out one edge of her skirt with one hand, as if she heard the sound of flutes, or felt the wind and was just in the act of beginning to dance to it.
Jeanne had done that once, and when she’d stopped twirling and dancing to the breeze, she had found him standing there leaning against a tree, arms folded and a particularly intent look on his face. That day they had made love for the first time.
“You did remember,” she said, softly and with great difficulty. Her throat felt constricted, and the effort to speak was almost too much.
“Yes.”
She whirled, facing him. “Why?” she demanded. “Why would you do that? Why collect all those things that look like me?”
“Because those
memories were the most precious of my life.”
Perhaps God did grant some of her prayers.
Standing with her fingers interlocked, she willed herself to move. But she couldn’t. Not even when he reached out and touched her face, trailing a path from her temple to her chin with one soft and stroking finger.
“What happened to the child, Jeanne?” he asked.
Instead of answering him, she asked a question of her own. “Who is Margaret’s mother?”
The question evidently discomfited him, because he only stared wordlessly at her.
Reaching out, she placed her hand flat on his chest. “You see, Douglas? Questions can hurt us,” she said. “And the truth could destroy us.”
“So you would rather live with falsehoods instead?”
“Yes,” she told him honestly. “If not falsehoods, then let’s be guilty of the sin of omission. We shouldn’t tell each other everything. We shouldn’t reveal the contents of our hearts and souls to each other.”
“I have nothing to hide.”
“While I do,” she admitted freely. “But the convent has taught me to loathe self-abasement. So I won’t reveal everything I am or have done simply to confess.”
“I’m not certain I can accept your type of ignorance,” he said. “There are some truths that need to be voiced.”
She shook her head vehemently. “No, there aren’t. For example, would you feel better or worse to know that I was kept in my room at Vallans, that I was never allowed outside for six months? I sat at the window watching the sky and the earth, desperate for the touch of a leaf or a blade of grass, or the soft, velvety feel of a flower petal on my palm.I breathed in the air and longed for my freedom. That’s truth for you, Douglas, but knowing it doesn’t make life better, nor does it negate the past.”
Her gaze never veered from his face. “I used to weep when you didn’t come. The days passed, one after the other, and still you weren’t there. I thought that you must have been horrified at the thought of becoming a father. And yet you must have been somewhere else, already celebrating the birth of your first child. What a precocious lover you were. Tell me, did you leave any children behind in Nova Scotia?”
“Not that I know of,” he said, frowning at her.
“You were quite a rooster in France,” she said. “Margaret’s mother was French, was she not?”
She turned and walked in the other direction, pacing the length of the room. Nervous energy made her keep moving.
“You see, that’s the truth, and it hurts.” She smiled. “I don’t want the truth,” she said, shaking her head. “There are some things that should never be said, some confessions that should never be made.”
“And some that must be.”
She turned and looked at him. “Tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow, we’ll plan on wounding each other with words and memories.”
Reaching him again, she wound both hands on the back of his neck, interlocking her fingers tightly. “Give me today, Douglas, that’s all I ask.”
Tomorrow she would leave him, but first she’d tell him the truth he so obviously wanted. She’d tell him about leaving Vallans and going in search of the couple that had been given her child. She’d tell him the whole horrible story, one she recalled all too often in dreams. But first, give her this; she would ask nothing more of Fate or an inattentive God.
Gently and determinedly, she pulled his head down for a kiss. “Kiss me,” she murmured against his lips and slowly they opened. He tried to draw back, but she wouldn’t allow him. “Please,” she said. Perhaps he heard her soft whisper against his lips, or only felt her desperation. An instant later his kiss deepened as his arms wrapped around her and pulled her close to him.
There was something magical about Douglas’s kisses. They took her out of herself, transported her to a different place and time, and made her a different person. Pleasure swept through her, from the tips of her fingers to her toes. He was an opiate, and she was the poor demented fool who would sell her soul for a few moments of bliss.
He pulled away and began unfastening his waistcoat. Removing his coat, then his vest, he began opening his shirt, and all the while he never looked away, only stared at her solemnly. As if what they were about to do was something grave and momentous, more so than any time they’d ever loved.
These weeks with Douglas had taught her one thing above all, that she could never replace him in her mind or her heart. Every other man in her life would be measured against Douglas and be found wanting.
“This is neither the time nor the place, Jeanne,” he said softly, but even as he condemned her eagerness, he toed off his boots.
“No, it isn’t,” she agreed. “But your door has a lock on it, does it not?”
He nodded.
“Then lock it, Douglas. Let’s do something that isn’t wise or adult.” She stood and walked to where the sun made a brick-like pattern in the middle of the floor.
She held up her skirts and twirled in a circle, not feeling as lighthearted as she wished, but mimicking an action that she had performed as a girl. She wanted, for a few minutes at least, to replicate that time. Or at least pretend that there were not secrets, hurtful and crushing, between them.
“Please,” she said, dropping her skirts and placing her hands flat against the material. A second later she held them out, palms up. “Come and join me.”
He strode past her and for a moment she thought he was going to leave the room, but then she heard the click of the lock and turned to find him standing there unwrapping his stock.
This time he didn’t speak, didn’t try to argue her out of lust, and neither did she. Because at this moment there was no one else in the world other than him, and there were no circumstances more important than the touch of his hands on her naked body.
The memory of him had kept her sane and being with him now made her want to live. He was simply necessary to her, just as air, water, and food were necessary. He was the blood that flowed through her body, the heart that beat in her chest, her lungs, and her limbs. He was her unfinished sentence, her half laugh, an unformed thought. He was life itself.
He returned to her, standing in front of her, a conjurer with sorcery in his hands. He moved them down her body and her clothes loosened, and stroked them over her skin and she began to tremble.
Douglas was as fevered as she. Her fingers flew over his clothing, burrowing past folds of cloth to touch his chest, pulling at the loosened stock, his shirt, until she could touch him.
Her dress was over her head, thrown a few feet away. His nimble fingers loosened her stays, let them fall heavily to the floor.
Suddenly she was on the floor, Douglas leaning over her. There were no questions this time, no teasing rejoinders, only a hunger on his face that was no doubt mirrored on hers. Where before there had been patience, now they were wild for each other.
He lifted her, knelt between her naked thighs. Reaching up, she pulled on his arms.
“Now, Douglas,” she said, arching up beneath him. “Now, please.”
She had to have him inside her, had to feel complete and whole one last time.
He surged within her. The discomfort of his possession eased a moment later when he hesitated, allowing her to become accustomed to his size.
Wrapping her arms around his neck, she clenched her eyes shut. The sun blazed behind her lids, the warmth flushing her face. But her world had narrowed to become only him.
The pleasure centered where they joined, spread outward, and harnessed her breath. Her heart raced, her blood rushed through her body hot and fast. When he rose up, she followed, holding on to him tightly. When he surged within her, she bowed beneath him.
In that sunlit room, they loved. Not with finesse as much as passion and an eagerness and desperation to forget for just a little while. When it was done, when she drew her breath again in a calm manner, and when her heart slowed its frenetic beat, Jeanne felt tears come to her eyes. Tears of joy and loss, so equally mixed tha
t she couldn’t separate the emotions.
Chapter 28
D ouglas left her, standing and gathering up his clothing from where it was scattered over the floor. She lay there for a moment watching him. He was truly magnificent, with his muscled thighs and well-developed chest and arms.
He glanced at her but didn’t smile. Instead, his solemn look warned her that they’d only delayed the inevitable by their loving.
Sitting up, she began to dress. She had to leave. If she didn’t, there was every possibility she’d begin to weep, and crying would lead to confessions, and confessions would only lead to disaster. Tomorrow was time enough.
Her hair was askew, but instead of trying to tidy it up into a bun, she began to braid it. She’d tuck it up beneath her bonnet, a good enough style that would last until she reached her room.
Finally dressed, she grabbed her reticule and headed for the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Douglas asked from behind her.
“I have to leave,” she said. “Now. Please don’t try to stop me. Don’t ask me any questions, Douglas. Just let me leave.”
“I’ll tell the coachman to take you home,” he said tightly.
Home, what a simple word, but that’s what it had become. Without her being aware of it, she’d become accustomed to his house, the shape of it, the feeling of belonging inside it. She knew the staff and liked them, even Lassiter. The rooms were familiar; she knew the floor plan. But mostly, the occupants of Number Twelve Queen’s Place—Douglas and Margaret—had made it feel like home. Family.
How would she bear leaving them?
She hurriedly walked through the door, down the steps, and into the perfumed wonder that was his warehouse. Twice she had to stop because she couldn’t see and she impatiently wiped the tears away.
