Guilty Passion

by Bright, Laurey;

  “Not at all.” But he took a good look at the young man.

  “It’s all right,” Rennie assured him. “Kevin is perfectly safe. Daddy knows him.”

  Kevin, Celeste thought, didn’t seem too thrilled about the description, but he folded Rennie into his arms like a piece of precious china, and she wafted across the floor with a satisfied smile on her lips.

  “Dance, Celeste?” Ethan stood up rather abruptly. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked Grant perfunctorily.

  “Not at all.” Grant gave Celeste an absentminded smile and went on talking with one of the other men across the table.

  Celeste hesitated, but Ethan was at her side now. She got up and went into his arms.

  “Perfect,” he murmured. And at once she was back on the island, lying with him in the darkness with the stars spilling across the sky, and the waves washing on the shore. She shivered and, raising her head, whispered, “What?”

  He had eyes like the sea at night, she thought, like the clear, silky water just before the last of the daylight faded away.

  He said, “Your dress—it’s perfect. Like sunrise on the beach at Sheerwind.”

  “I. . . thank you.” She licked her lips. She couldn’t stop looking at him, at his eyes. Sunrise on the beach. . . she knew he was remembering, too.

  Someone collided with her back, and she managed to drag her eyes from Ethan’s, even as he pulled her closer. “Sorry,” he said in her ear. “I wasn’t paying attention to where we’re going.”

  The lights suddenly dimmed as the band began a slow, dreamy number. Ethan’s breath stirred her hair against her temple.

  Rennie and Kevin passed them. Rennie’s arms were hooked around the young man’s neck, and he had a besotted expression on his face.

  Ethan’s eyes followed them, and Celeste said, “Is she trying to make you jealous?”

  “She couldn’t,” he said succinctly, “even if she wanted to.”

  “Oh, I think she wants to,” Celeste said drily.

  He looked down at her. “Do you, now?”

  “You must know enough about women to be aware that she’s trying to. . . keep your attention.”

  “Over the past several months,” Ethan said, “I’ve begun to think I don’t know the first thing about them. I’ve never actually been a womaniser, whatever you might think.”

  How had they got into this conversation? Celeste asked herself, beginning to panic. It was much too dangerous.

  “Does it matter what I think?” she said, prepared to dismiss the subject.

  But Ethan had stopped dead in the middle of the floor. Other couples glided around them, and coloured lights washed across the room in waves. “Yes, it matters,” he said. “And—Oh, the hell with game playing!” he added disgustedly. “As a matter of fact, the only one who was supposed to be jealous was you!”

  “Me?” she said in amazement. And then, before she could stop herself, she blurted out, “Well, I am!”

  She sounded to her own astonished ears like a hurt, angry child. Trying to retrieve some dignity, she babbled, “I mean. . . I don’t mean that! Just that Rennie’s very pretty, and young, and I’ll be thirty in less than two years. . . . She’s a nice girl. Of course I envy h—”

  She was stopped by Ethan’s mouth on hers, his lips moving with hard, sweet passion. And then he said, “We’re getting out of here.”

  As he led her across the floor, she protested, “Ethan, we can’t! You’re with Rennie, and—”

  “And you’re with Grant,” he said. “But there’s nothing important between you two, is there?”

  He glanced back at her as he led her through the crowd, and when she didn’t answer he scowled and stopped, turning to face her. “Is there?”

  Celeste shook her head.

  “Right,” he said, satisfied. “I’ll deal with it.”

  He scooped up her bag from the table and said, “Grant, will you excuse Celeste, please. I’m taking her home. We have some unfinished business to discuss.”

  Grant stood up, rather bewildered, and raised his brows questioningly at Celeste.

  “I’m your partner,” she said. “If you don’t want me to. . .”

  “I don’t mind, if you want to go with Ethan.” He cast a curious look at the other man. “It appears,” he said, “that this unfinished business has acquired some unexpected urgency.” Looking at Celeste again, he said, “It’s entirely up to you.”

  His eyes quizzed her, and she smiled rather shakily. If he thought she was being coerced, he would do something about it. She knew that. But it would create an unpleasant scene in front of his colleagues, and he would hate it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve enjoyed myself. Thank you, Grant.” She gave a meaningless smile to his friends at the table.

  “Well, the evening’s almost over anyway,” he said, and kissed her cheek. “Take care of her,” he said mildly to Ethan.

  Ethan met his warning gaze and nodded. “I intend to.”

  He spoke to Rennie on the way out, detaching her from Kevin long enough to murmur something to her that made her throw a laughing glance of curiosity at Celeste and fling her arms about Ethan in a quick hug.

  “That child’s a menace,” Ethan said, as he hustled Celeste outside.

  “She’s not really a child.”

  “She is to me. I’ve been a sort of honorary uncle to her since she was knee-high to a grasshopper.”

  “I wondered when you came in if she was the friend you’ve been staying with.”

  “She is.” He laughed. “Along with her parents and her kid brother. Her father was the friend I was referring to.”

  He waved down a cab going by with a lighted sign, and helped her in. “Your place?” he asked.

  Celeste nodded, suddenly unable to speak. What exactly did he expect once they got there? An invitation to her bed? Unfinished business, he had said. All the doubts and fears that his reentry into her life had awakened, began crowding in on her.

  When they got there, he took the key from her shaking fingers to open the door. In the sitting room, she walked around switching on lamps, and asked him, “Do you want coffee? Something else?”

  “Nothing. We have to talk. Can we sit down?”

  She nodded, and sank into the nearest armchair. He stood there for a moment, and then reached down and gently pulled her up, and moved to the sofa. “Here,” he said, “if you don’t mind. I don’t fancy shouting at you across the room.”

  “It’s only a small room. And if you’re going to shout at me. . .”

  He had his arm about her, loosely, but his hand was firm on her shoulder. “Figure of speech,” he said soothingly. “It’s the last thing I want, believe me.”

  “That’s the trouble,” she said. “I’m not sure if I can.” She raised her head to look at him steadily.

  “Believe me?” he said slowly. His arm came away from her and rested on the back of the sofa. “Why shouldn’t you?”

  As she hesitated, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, he said, “Go on. Tell me.”

  She took a deep breath. “Since you’ve been here, you’ve been. . . friendly, affectionate, even. Gentle.”

  “I’ve tried.”

  “Yes, well, I can’t help wondering if it’s just a ploy in some complicated game you’re playing with me. Cat and mouse, perhaps.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you blame me for what happened to Alec, and you have some twisted idea of revenge. . . don’t you?” She met his eyes bravely, determined to face the truth.

  He sighed. “My tactics seem to have backfired.”

  “Tactics?”

  “You don’t trust me.”

  Celeste shook her head.

  He said, “Perhaps I should have just dispensed with being clever, and—”

  He reached for her, his eyes
purposeful, but she pushed against him violently and jumped to her feet. “No!”

  He hunched forward, passing a hand over his face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought. . . I don’t know what I thought. When I came back to Sheerwind, I expected you to be there. When you weren’t, I didn’t know what to do, what to think. The only thing that made sense was that you didn’t care. . . that making love to me meant absolutely nothing to you. It was even, maybe, some form of getting back at me for the way I had treated you—a kind of revenge.”

  Celeste said, “Revenge? But it was you who wanted revenge!”

  “You’re so sure of that,” he said. “How do you know what I wanted?”

  “I’d seen the letter—Alec’s last letter. And what you wrote on it.”

  “And?”

  “Ethan, I beg you to tell me the truth, just this once.”

  “I don’t recall,” he said, “that I’ve lied to you.”

  “Haven’t you? Not in words, perhaps.” She looked at him intensely, trying to gauge the effect of her question. “Did you follow me to complete your. . . punishment of me, for Alec’s sake? To make me pay?”

  He stood up and said hoarsely, “No! I came because. . . the truth is I can’t stay away from you. I couldn’t stay on Sheerwind without you. Every time I turned around, I remembered you being there. Every time the shadows moved at the edge of the path to the beach, I thought I’d see you come out of the trees. When I walked on the beach the sea was whispering your name, all along the sand. Celeste. . .” He closed his eyes. “Celeste, please come to me.”

  “I don’t dare,” she said, her mind fiercely keeping some control over her wilful heart.

  He frowned at her, his face taut. “I love you,” he said. “And you—”

  She cried, “I can’t! I daren’t. You’ll destroy me, Ethan.”

  “No! I swear that isn’t what I want.”

  “Even if you don’t,” she said sadly, “we can’t escape from Alec’s shadow. You still believe everything that he said, don’t you? In your heart. Oh, I don’t blame you. The letters that he sent, for years on end. . . I can see how they must have been so convincing. Because you were right about what was between the lines.”

  “Celeste!” Ethan said. “I know now he was telling me the literal truth. None of it was your fault.”

  She cried, “That’s what he said! That I was too young and selfish and stupid to know what I was doing. And the truth is—”

  “The truth is,” Ethan said, reaching out to grasp her shoulders, “that you weren’t doing anything. Not consciously, not unconsciously, not at all. I know that, Celeste, I do. I know that my poor brother was a sick, lost soul, that he projected all his fears about his inability to do the work that he loved, and losing out to younger men in that area, onto you and his marriage. You were his scapegoat for an enormous feeling of failure and futility, and I think at the last he recognised that and was sorry for it. In a twisted way, he even tried to make amends.”

  “By killing himself?” She shivered.

  “You were not to blame for that,” he said. “Or any of it. In that last letter, he hinted that he wanted me to make it up to you, put things right. He said to me once, that you were like a butterfly that he wanted to catch and keep to himself. What he did was what butterfly collectors always do. Suffocate the object of their desire and kill it, so that they can admire it forever. But then it isn’t a butterfly anymore, just a dead, dusty specimen. He had begun to realise, I think, what he was doing to you. Steven had seen it. When I saw him last, he said something in passing that made me rethink a lot of things.”

  “What?”

  “That when he first knew you, he’d never met anyone so quenched. An odd word, I thought. It fitted the woman I met after Alec died. I would never have described you that way before. I had to face then the possibility that Alec had done that to you. What he said in his letter—that he wanted to wear you like a gage—that was very revealing, when you think about it. He wanted to flaunt you as a challenge to other men, didn’t he? And yet if one of them took you from him, it would have confirmed his deepest fears. You were a symbol of everything that he was afraid of losing, all his feelings of inadequacy. And he tried to make you responsible for all of it.”

  “Oh,” she said, sagging with relief. “If you understand that. . .”

  “I do. Believe me. I don’t love Alec any less for discovering he wasn’t the almost perfect being that I always thought. I seem to have had a prolonged case of childish hero worship. I think the suspicion was growing on me that I was wrong about you—and therefore wrong about Alec—very soon after I got you to Sheerwind. The more I got to know you, the more my heart kept telling me that the picture I had built up of you from Alec’s letters, and from justifying my own feelings and actions to myself, was false. I admit that at first I had some half-baked idea of forcing a kind of confession from you, making you face your own guilt. Mostly, looking back at it, as a way of assuaging my own, just as cutting myself off from you completely had been. I’d always felt like hell about that episode while I was staying with you. Which was another reason why I was only too ready to think it must have been all your doing, something you indulged in regularly with any passing male. It was convenient for me,” he said, his mouth twisting with self-disgust, “to persuade myself that you deliberately led me into temptation. What a smug, judgemental bastard I’ve been!” he added.

  “I don’t blame you,” Celeste said, and moved forward to lay her head against his chest.

  His arm came about her, holding her. “You’re very forgiving,” he said. “Far more than I ever was. It was ages before I could get my head straight and forgive you for running out on me after I’d asked you to wait, and told you I loved you.”

  “Told me?” She raised her head, but he dropped a quick, fierce kiss on her lips and then went on. “If that night meant nothing to you, if you could walk away from it with a cold little thank-you letter, then maybe Alec was right. Maybe you were a manipulative bitch, after all. And if I followed, I’d be inviting you to make me your tame lapdog forever, make me as miserable as you’d made him. As I thought you had.”

  “It wasn’t that! I was terrified that it would be just the same as with Alec, only worse, because. . . because I’d never felt as deeply for him,” she finished. “And you’d be punishing me twice over—for what you thought I’d done to him, and because you despised me at the same time that you wanted me. I knew you felt guilty. It seemed an impossibly risky basis for a relationship. Eventually we’d destroy each other.” She caught at the lapels of his jacket. “And you hadn’t said you loved me. Never!”

  “I did! When I called you the next day! The last thing that I said to you was, ‘I love you.’”

  “I didn’t catch it. I was already putting down the phone.”

  He stared. Then he said a word that made her blink. “Sorry!” he muttered. “Of all the stupid. . . how could I be such a fool! But I do love you. I knew that night on the island that I loved you, even though I’d been fighting it for so long. And I thought you loved me. I believed in you utterly then, without understanding anything about Alec and you. I knew in my bones that you couldn’t be the person he had portrayed in his letters. Then, when I thought you’d walked out just as though I didn’t matter, it threw me right back to square one. I decided I’d allowed you to fool me, that you weren’t worth anything. Only. . . your ghost was always there, haunting the place. And, rationalise as I might, I could never quite convince my heart. Then after talking to Steven, I saw there was another meaning to Alec’s last letter. Things began to fall into place. And I realised something else. When I was staying at your house that time, he was testing us—our loyalty to him. Remember how he kept throwing us together at every opportunity? It wasn’t natural. He was torturing himself with possibilities. He must have been torn apart, wondering. . . . It was twisted, and somehow incredibly sa
d.”

  “Poor Alec.” Celeste shivered in his arms, and they tightened about her.

  “If you can forgive me,” he said, “if you can believe that I’ll never doubt you again—and I swear that’s over—I want us to be together forever. I want to marry you, Celeste. Please say yes. Please.”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at first as though he hadn’t heard. Then he said, “Just like that?”

  “What more do you want?” she asked reasonably.

  “More? No more! It’s enough. It’s plenty! It’s a hell of a lot more than I had any right to even hope for! I’ll get a licence tomorrow. Wear that dress for me when you marry me. . . would you, please?”

  She nodded.

  “And you don’t mind getting married quickly?” he asked anxiously.

  “I couldn’t bear to wait.”

  “I don’t deserve you,” he said with something like awe. “I know I don’t, but I’m so thankful that you’re willing to have me.” He kissed her as though he was performing an act of worship, and then kissed her again, quite differently.

  It would never last, she thought, before thought ceased altogether, but she was rather enjoying all this unwonted humility. It was so unlike him.

  It lasted though, until their wedding day. There were few guests, and afterwards Aunt Ellie served them a magnificent meal. For once she decided the occasion warranted a late night, and it was midnight before Ethan and Celeste were dismissed and were able to go back to Celeste’s house.

  “I can’t believe this,” Ethan said, putting her on her feet after sweeping her into his arms to cross the doorstep. “I thought I’d have to beg you, convince you that I’ll never treat you badly again, that I can keep my insane jealousy in check, that I’ll never, never be suspicious. I came to Auckland prepared to woo you, persuade you what a reasonable human being I really am, and then when I heard you were going to that ball with Grant Morrison I practically forced Rennie’s father to buy me a ticket, just so I could watch the two of you. Do you know, I almost had myself convinced that if he meant something to you, if I thought he’d make you a better husband—he probably would, too—I’d walk away.”