Pillow Chase

by Jeanie London

  Never one to miss an opportunity, Troy fastened his arms around her, pulling her close. “And I love you, Mrs. Knight.”

  Feeling the familiarity of his body against hers was exactly what she needed most right now, and she vowed that she wasn’t ever going to rely on proximity again to feel close to her husband. Not ever again. “Lucky me.”

  Dropping a kiss onto the top of her head, he steered her toward the stairs. “Don’t take any guff. I won’t be far if you need me.”

  “I know.” And she did. He’d be there to support her no matter what. She only had to let him.

  As sure as she was of Troy’s support, she was equally unsure of her grandfather’s response, so she anchored her mood with her husband’s love to get her through the meeting ahead.

  Using her key, she let them into the house, pausing inside the entryway. “It’s not time for dinner, so I’m guessing Grandfather will be in his study. I don’t have a clue where my parents are.”

  “I’ll find them. But don’t take too long.” He flashed her a grin that made his green eyes sparkle. “I’ve still got a prize to claim.”

  “I won’t forget.”

  She couldn’t possibly. One decision and lots of sex toys had made a difference. No more running and hiding. She would face what was ahead, whatever that might be.

  After kissing his cheek, she hurried down the hallway toward her grandfather’s study, rapped on the door and stepped inside when he invited her in.

  He stood at the window again, leaning heavily on his cane, and she wondered if his leg bothered him today, an occurrence affected by both weather and activity. When he glanced at her, he didn’t look surprised, just met her gaze with a grave expression of his own.

  “I wondered if you’d be back,” he said.

  “You did?”

  He nodded, his dark gaze inscrutable. “I know you, Miranda. You’re intelligent and determined. You understand what’s going on with people, the things they don’t always say. You’re a lot like me, if you don’t mind me saying. But even so, I couldn’t grasp how you might handle this situation.”

  She only nodded, not minding the comparison. So many people called him grim and severe, and while he was definitely those things, he had many other qualities to balance them out, qualities she’d come to hold in high regard as he’d generously shared them through her lifetime.

  “I’ve placed you in a difficult position,” he said. “Your sister, too. I’ve forced you to make decisions when I couldn’t anticipate what choices you’d make.”

  Did that mean he cared what choices they made? She wanted to ask why he was prepared to alienate even more family members by backing them all into corners, but diplomacy and restraint won out. “You’re asking Victoria to give up her family.”

  “No, I’m asking her to not dig up a past that has no place in the future.”

  “She just wants to understand.”

  “That’s your sister.” To her surprise, she heard no censure in his voice, and if she didn’t know better, she’d have thought he sounded approving. “Curious and fascinated by everyone and everything around her. She’s a lot like your grandmother was, along with headstrong, committed to her causes and so loving she’s always a joy to be around.”

  Miranda exhaled a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. That he’d actually brought up her grandmother seemed surprising alone, but that his opinion of Victoria sounded nothing like a criticism came as an even greater surprise.

  She wasn’t sure how to reply. His words belied his expression. His dark eyes revealed so much she didn’t understand, and she could only guess at his mood, pensive and defeated.

  Yesterday he’d seemed old, but this…this was somehow so much more. This was as if the weight of eighty years had slammed him in his chest, cutting off air and making him wither around his edges.

  “Grandfather, are you—”

  “I placed my daughters in the same situation, Miranda.”

  The words fell heavily between them. A truth that even unspoken held power. She felt guilty for standing here, for making him face truths that were clearly a burden, and she would have spared him if she could, would have told him not to relive such a painful experience for her benefit.

  But she couldn’t. This was not about him. It had never been only about him. His decisions had affected his daughters’ lives, had dripped like poison into the next generation.

  This wasn’t about her, either. Miranda had to stand her ground no matter how much it hurt. Her grandfather needed to talk because she needed to understand how to help him fix things. For Victoria. For their mother. And, yes, Miranda realized, for herself, too.

  So she could look herself in the mirror and know she hadn’t hidden from the problem. She’d tackled it head on and done her best. No matter what happened next.

  “Please help me understand why, Grandfather. I don’t understand why any of this is happening.” Bracing her hands on the back of a wing chair, she suddenly felt too restless to sit, and too unsteady to stand without support.

  But she sounded calm and resolute, and that was a start.

  “My daughters were so young. I made their choices for them. But you and your sister are grown women. I can’t choose for you. I guessed your sister would go full steam ahead with her plans and live with the consequences. But I wondered what you’d do.”

  “Victoria stopped searching.”

  He inclined his snowy white head, his eyes never leaving hers. “I know. She called me. But I promise that won’t be the end of this. She won’t back down. As we speak, she’s figuring out some way to outmaneuver me.”

  He was right. He might have cut off the past for Victoria, but he hadn’t taken away the future. She would respond in the morning’s newspaper by announcing her double wedding with Laura Granger. She had outmaneuvered him, and not without cost. But Victoria was willing to pay that price because she had the courage to fight for what she wanted—her family back together.

  While Miranda might not understand how her sister could marry a stranger, she did understand love. Love could help someone overcome her obstacles. Love could help someone grow.

  Love had helped her find the courage to stop running and hiding.

  “Victoria is respecting your wishes, Grandfather. She’s stopped searching for answers about our grandmother. She’d rather make you happy than answer her questions.”

  “And you?”

  That dark gaze bore into her, but Miranda met it evenly. “No, not me.”

  “What is the point of all this? I know you, Miranda. You don’t act without a reason.”

  She’d said exactly the same thing about him and mentally formed the words before speaking them aloud, committing to them. “Victoria, Laura and I believe our mothers miss each other. We want to give them a chance to get together again if that’s what they want. Whatever took place in the past shouldn’t keep apart people who love each other.”

  After a deep breath to steel her resolve, Miranda explained about Tyler Tripp’s video and the events that had fueled her epiphanies this week.

  “Watching Victoria with Laura made me realize how far she and I have grown apart, and not just us, but this entire family. Grandfather, I’ve never had any use for Laura, that’s no secret, but when I opened my eyes and took a closer look, I saw she’s not so different from Victoria and me. This grand opening has forced us to look at each other with fresh eyes and a better understanding of how our family situation has impacted us.”

  How one man’s expectations had affected his family.

  “I think Mother deserves a chance to make peace with her sister if that’s what she wants. I’ll handle dealing with the Grangers to make her happy. Who knows, if I keep an open mind about them I might even be surprised.”

  His gaze never wavered, and for the life of her, Miranda couldn’t get a read on his reaction. Nothing but a silence that fell so heavy she couldn’t even hear their breathing.

  They’d reached stalemate. He wasn’t
going to make this easy, wasn’t going to pick up where she’d left off and offer a solution. She’d originally come to him for that purpose, for guidance on how to deal with the past.

  He hadn’t given it to her. He’d lied instead. And now she had to ask if he’d been running from ugly emotions, too, hiding from his own painful truths.

  She suspected the answer, and understood.

  “Will you let us give Mother the chance to get together with her sister or will you force her to choose between you and Victoria?”

  His grip tightened on the cane as if he was bracing himself. “I’ll lose her if I force her to choose.”

  The conviction in his voice belied his expression, a drawn, overwhelmed look that suddenly frightened her. If he already knew he’d lose, then why had he called Victoria?

  “Can’t we leave the past in the past?” she asked. “What is so horrible about this family being together? Please tell me so I can understand, so I can help.”

  And to Miranda’s horror, his stoic demeanor, that familiar, strong presence seemed to crumble before her very eyes. Suddenly he just looked old, and defeated.

  She quickly went to him. “Please come sit.”

  He allowed her to assist him to the chair behind his desk, which drove home how right she was to worry. Kneeling before him, she asked, “Shall I call Rutger?”

  He shook his head. “Not if you want your explanation.”

  “Are you up to it?”

  His expression softened, not a smile, never a smile, but some hint of irony that suggested if he’d been up to explaining, he would have long ago.

  She touched the cane he still held, thumbed the silver headpiece, the symbol she’d seen her whole life that had taken on such unexpected meaning. “Does it have to do with this?”

  “How much did you find out?”

  “Only that this symbol is the one a French artist used as a signature on a painting. An artist named Jean-Luc Roussell.”

  The little color he had drained away, leaving Miranda with the wild thought that she would be responsible for giving him that heart attack.

  Propping the cane against the desk, she reached out to take his unsteady hands, to reassure him, “I haven’t said anything to anyone, Grandfather. Except for Troy. He’s been helping me make sense of the whole situation.”

  “So you know.”

  “Only enough to guess at the rest…Was Jean-Luc Roussell my great-grandfather?”

  He nodded.

  “So it’s true. Laure Roussell was Mireille Marceaux.”

  Every fiber of her being wanted to understand how a woman who’d fought for the French Resistance and married an American politician had wound up living a secret double life as an erotic artist, but when he didn’t reply, she went to the bar to pour him a glass of water.

  Her grandfather looked so frail that she thought her heart would break, and she hated being responsible for adding to his grief. For one terrible moment, she wished she’d kept her mouth shut and hadn’t brought the past crashing down on all their heads.

  But logically Miranda knew this was only a knee-jerk reaction to an emotionally difficult situation. A habit she’d developed from a lot of years spent avoiding conflicts.

  Retreat had seemed so much easier. And in some ways it had been. But the simple fact was that one could only assume so much responsibility. This situation went a lot further back than she did. And if she had to replay the course of events that led her to this study, she would make the same choices again.

  She’d learned from the experience.

  Playing life safe wasn’t the only way to play, wasn’t always the best way. Victoria had taught her that. Some things were worth fighting for, worth dealing with the consequences.

  Bringing her family together was one of those things.

  She placed the water glass on his desk, but her grandfather ignored it, reached for his cane and pushed heavily to his feet. Moving back to the window, he stared outside.

  “Laure Roussell was your grandmother,” he said quietly. “And she was a magnificent woman…”

  He told her the story of how he’d met a courageous young Resistance fighter when he’d been dropped behind enemy lines in occupied France. A select group of officers had been specially trained to mobilize the rebel forces in preparation for the Normandy Invasion, and he’d been assigned to make contact with a woman named Laure Roussell, who commanded a large faction in a strategically critical region.

  He’d made that contact, and had gone underground with the Resistance. For nearly a year, he and Laure had fought together under extreme conditions, sabotaging the enemy’s lines of transportation to cut off their supplies and arms.

  Until the enemy caught up with them.

  Miranda already knew the story about how her grandfather had been imprisoned in a concentration camp, long months spent as a prisoner of war, enduring physical torture while he watched his men brutalized and executed. She knew his leg injury had been a result, a wound he’d carried all his adult life to make sure he never forgot.

  But she hadn’t known the men in that camp hadn’t been his, or that their torture had been the enemy’s efforts to locate and crush her grandmother’s rebel forces.

  Neither he nor any of the rebels had betrayed anything at all about Commander Roussell. They were loyal to her and the cause, and Miranda’s grandfather had loved her.

  “She continued the work after our imprisonment,” he said, his voice distant, emotion carefully concealed behind a veil of years. “She received my orders and led her people in a critical raid so our forces could infiltrate. She carried out my mission objective. Our government honored her with a medal.”

  Miranda hadn’t known that, either.

  “We’d been married in a small church in her hometown before my capture. After my escape from the concentration camp, I was smuggled into England for rehabilitation. When the war was over, she joined me.”

  Miranda tried to make sense of these events, already knew something must have gone tragically wrong, or else how had her grandmother traveled from Laure Roussell, French Resistance fighter to Laura Russell, political wife and loving mother, to Mireille Marceaux, renowned painter?

  These were logic leaps she couldn’t make, and she waited for the explanation, waited while her grandfather stared out the window as if he could see back to a time and place where he’d allowed himself to live and feel.

  And hurt.

  When it became evident that he’d gotten lost in his memories, she asked, “If she was honored for her service to our country, why did she change her name?”

  “Because I asked her to,” he said simply. “She loved me enough to sacrifice who she was to become who I needed her to be—the perfect wife and mother.” He held up the cane. “She gave me this. She placed her heritage in my hands and trusted me to care for it.”

  The sight of his fierce grip on the Roussell family device made Miranda ache in a way she’d never ached before. She still didn’t understand, but she knew he felt he hadn’t lived up to her trust, that he’d failed the woman he loved and had been bearing the weight of that failure for too long.

  “She campaigned by my side, involved herself in all the right causes to further my political career and reflect well on our family. Even my parents and grandparents were impressed with her, and they weren’t easily impressed. I barely lived up to their expectations.”

  Miranda found it hard to imagine her grandfather not meeting anyone’s expectations. He exemplified a principle-fighting overachiever way beyond anyone she’d ever known, but as she had only vague recollections of her great-grandparents, she could only guess at how high the family expectations had been. Too high, she guessed.

  Far too high.

  “She loved me and our girls enough to sacrifice herself to live the life I’d chosen for us. God, how she loved our girls.”

  He bowed his head and, even in profile, Miranda could see pain etch sharp grooves on his face, the way he closed his eyes and inhal
ed as if looking for strength. She was reminded of the young man he’d once been in the picture Victoria had shown her.

  A man who hadn’t smiled. Had he ever smiled?

  She didn’t know. The only thing she knew right now was that this family’s expectations had claimed too much from all of them. The members of each generation had tried to meet those too-high expectations or had rebelled against them, but each generation had given up parts of their souls along the way.

  Miranda understood what had compelled her grandmother to live life behind a mask. She’d obviously loved her husband and daughters enough to put aside the passionate woman she was, except for the secret moments when she allowed herself to live with her whole heart and soul. Like Victoria, she’d apparently understood that without living life to the fullest, the soul withered until one no longer had the ability to smile.

  She wondered when her grandfather had last smiled.

  Too long ago.

  And she hadn’t understood until this very second that she’d been striving to live up to those expectations, too, struggling and sacrificing to achieve a perfection that didn’t exist because life wasn’t perfect, couldn’t be perfect.

  Miranda watched her grandfather, her heart aching because he’d never allowed himself to simply be a man with strengths and flaws, a man who could laugh and cry, a man who could let himself be loved. She wanted to go to him, place her arms around him and give him a hug, so he knew he wasn’t alone.

  But one simply didn’t hug her grandfather, and before she could decide what to do, he said, “She was the perfect wife and mother. The perfect daughter-in-law. The perfect hostess. And I was content with that. I never questioned what the cost would be. My passionate, strong wife suddenly contained in the box of the life I was comfortable leading.”

  Another person who’d lost so much precious time because of this family’s obsession with perfection.

  “What happened?” she asked softly.

  “She died.”

  He fell silent for so long that she wondered if he’d retreated so deep in self-reflection that he’d forgotten she was even here.

  But then he straightened and when he spoke his voice was stronger, harder. “I received the call right here in this study. It was the last weekend of the month when Laure always traveled into the city for her monthly Women’s Club meeting. She’d been on her way home. The girls had come home for a school break and my mother had been putting them to bed when the phone rang. The officer told me there’d been an accident. The driver in the other car had been drunk. He passed out, crossed the lane and hit her head-on. They both died instantly.”