The Novels of Nora Roberts, Volume 3

by Nora Roberts

  She reached up, closed her fingers around the key on its chain, then dropped them—nervous now—to the wings on her breast. “He’s not what I planned for. He’s not what I was looking for.”

  He smiled then, kindly, and patted her hand. “Life’s full of surprises, isn’t it? Some of them are a real kick in the ass.” Then he leaned down and kissed her cheek. “I’ll see you again,” he said, and left her alone.

  The party rolled on a good two hours after the bride and groom were seen off in a shower of confetti—which Declan imagined he’d be finding in his lawn, his clothes, perhaps even his food for the next six months.

  The music stayed hot, and the guests stayed happy. In the early hours of the morning, some walked to their cars. Others were carried, and not all of them were children.

  Declan stood on the curve of his front steps and watched the last of them drive away. The sky in the east was paling, just a gentle lessening of the dark. Even as he stood, he saw a star go out.

  Morning was waking.

  “You must be tired,” Lena said from the gallery above him.

  “No.” He continued to look at the sky. “I should be, but I’m not.”

  “It’s going to take you a week to clean this place up.”

  “Nope. The General and her troops are coming over tomorrow to deal with it. I’m ordered to keep out of the way, and that’s one command I won’t have any trouble obeying. I didn’t think you’d stay.”

  “Neither did I.”

  He turned now, looked up at her. A kind of Romeo and Juliet pose, he thought, and hoped for a better ending. “Why did you?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t know what to do about you, Declan. I swear to God, I just don’t know. Men’ve never been any trouble for me. Maybe I’ve been trouble for them,” she said with a faint smile. “But you’re the first who’s given me any.”

  He started up to her. “None of them loved you.”

  “No, none of them loved me. Wanted me. Desired me, but that’s the easy part. You can be careless with wants. And I’ll tell you the truth. Sometimes, most times, I enjoyed that carelessness. Not just the sex, but the dance. The game. Whatever you want to call that courtship that’s no courtship at all. When the music stops, or the game’s over, there might be some bumps and bruises, but nobody’s really hurt.”

  “But this isn’t a game between the two of us.”

  “I’ve already hurt you.”

  “Bumps and bruises so far, Lena.” He stopped, face-to-face with her. “Bumps and bruises.”

  “When you look at me, what are you seeing? Someone, something else from before. You can’t run the living on the dead.”

  “I see you clear enough. But I see something else in both of us that shouldn’t be ignored or forgotten. Maybe something that needs to be put right before we can move on.”

  He reached in his pocket, pulled out Lucian’s watch. “I gave this to you once before, about a hundred years ago. It’s time you had it back.”

  Her fingers chilled at the idea of holding it. “If this is true, don’t you see it all ended in grief and death and tragedy? We can’t change what was. Why risk bringing it on again?”

  “Because we have to. Because we’re stronger this time.” He opened her hand, put the watch into her palm, closed her fingers over it. “Because if we don’t set it right, it never really ends.”

  “All right.” She slipped the watch into the pocket of the short jacket she’d put on. Then she unpinned the watch on her dress. “I gave this to you once before. Take it back.”

  When he took it, held it, the clock that had once stood inside the Hall began to bong.

  “Midnight,” he said with perfect calm. “It’ll strike twelve times.” And he looked down at the face of the enameled watch he held. “Midnight,” he repeated, showing it to her. “Look at yours.”

  Her fingers weren’t so steady when she pulled it out. “Jesus,” she breathed when she saw both hands straight up. “Why?”

  “We’re going to find out. I have to go inside.” He looked up, toward the third floor. “I have to go up to the nursery. The baby . . .”

  Even as he spoke, they heard the fretful cries.

  “Let’s just go. Declan, let’s just get in the car and drive away from here.”

  But he was already moving inside. “The baby’s crying. She’s hungry. She needs me. Lucian’s parents are sleeping. I always go upstairs early when he’s not home. I hate sitting with them in the parlor after dinner. I can feel the way she dislikes me.”

  His voice had changed, Lena realized as she followed him. There was a Cajun cadence to it. “Declan.”

  “Claudine will walk her, or change her, but my pretty Rosie needs her mama. I don’t like having her up on the third floor,” he said as he hurried down the corridor. “But Madame Josephine always gets her way. Not always,” he corrected, and there was a smile in his voice now. “If she always did, I’d be alligator bait ’stead of married to Lucian. He’ll be home tomorrow. I miss him so.”

  As he started up the stairs, his gait slowed, and Lena heard the rapid pace of his breath. “I have to go up.” It was his own voice now, with fear at the edges. “I have to go in. I have to see.”

  Gathering all her courage, Lena took his hand. “We’ll go in together.”

  His hand shook. The cold that permeated the air speared into the bone. Nausea rolled through his belly, rose up his throat. Clamping down against it, he shoved the door open.

  He stumbled, and even as Lena tried to catch him, fell to his knees.

  “He comes in. He’s drunk. I don’t want him coming up here, but he won’t go away. Everyone says, they say how he looks just like Lucian, but they don’t see his eyes. I have to make him go away, away from my baby. I wish Claudine hadn’t gone off to meet Jasper. I don’t like being alone up here with Julian. He scares me, but I don’t want him to see it.”

  His eyes were glazed, glassy smoke in a face that had gone pale as death. “Declan, oh God, Declan, come back.” She squeezed his hand until she felt bone rub against bone.

  “When he grabs at me, I get away.” His voice was breathless now. He still knelt, a rangy man with sun-streaked hair, wearing a tuxedo with the tie dangling loose. A man with a woman’s memories, a woman’s terror storming inside him.

  “But I can’t leave my baby. I get the poker from the fireplace. I’ll kill him if I have to. I’ll kill him if he touches me or my baby. Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

  As her knees seemed to melt away, Lena sank to the floor beside him, tried to wrap her arms around him.

  “He’s stronger than me. I scream and I scream, but nobody comes to help me. He’s drunk and he’s crazy. He’s crazy and he’s drunk. He knocks me down, and he rips at my clothes. I can’t get away. My baby’s crying, but I can’t get to her. I can’t stop him.”

  “Oh.” Shaking, Lena tried to hold him, rock him. “No. No, no, no.”

  “He rapes me.” Fire burned in the center of him. Pain, the pain, and the fear. Oh God, the fear. “I call for help. I call for you, but you’re not here.”

  His voice tore with tears. “You don’t come. I need you.”

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t.” It was all she could say as she clung to him.

  “He hurts me, but I fight him. I try to stop him, but he won’t stop. I’m so scared, I’m so scared, but even then I know he’s not doing this because he wants me. It’s because he hates you.”

  He turned his head, those storm-gray eyes drenched. “He hates you. And because I’m yours, he has to break me. The way he broke your toys when you were children. I beg him to stop, but he won’t. He tries to make me stop screaming, but I can’t stop. I can’t. His hands are around my throat.”

  It doubled him over, that hideous pressure, that shocking loss of air. “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. My baby’s crying for me, and I can’t breathe. He kills me. While my baby’s crying in her crib. Our baby. While he’s still inside me. He breaks me like a toy that belongs
to his brother.”

  He lifted his head, looked at her now. And when he spoke, his voice was so full of grief she wondered they both didn’t die of it. “You didn’t come. I called, but you didn’t come.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “She came.” Declan got rockily to his feet. “She came, and she saw what he had done to me. She looked down at me like I was a mess that had to be cleaned up before the neighbors came to call.”

  His eyes were dry now, and narrowed at the slamming of doors on the second floor. “Her house, her sons, and I was the bayou slut who’d trespassed. I watched her look down on me. It was like a dream, that watching. I saw her tell him to carry me out, down to the bedroom, while she cleaned up the blood, and the candle wax, and the broken crockery. He took my body out the gallery, but I watched her, watched her go over to my sweet baby, and I heard her mind wonder if it would be best just to smother the child. She considered it, and I believe if she’d tried, there was enough of me left that I could have struck her down like a lightning bolt.”

  He walked back to the door. “She thought I was weak, but she was wrong. They could kill me, but they couldn’t end me.”

  “Declan, that’s enough.”

  “No, not yet.” He walked down the steps, down the hall, opened the door to Abigail’s bedroom. “He laid me on the bed in here. And he wept. Not for me, but for himself. What would happen to him? His hand had defiled me, and killed me, but he thought only of himself. And does still. For he’s in this house, he and Josephine. Walking and waiting in their little hell.”

  He crossed over to the wall where the armoire had been, opened the door of it in his mind. “They took some of my clothes. I had the gown in here for the ball. I was so proud of it. I wanted to be beautiful for you. Make you proud of me. She dropped my watch, but didn’t notice. She had Julian wrap me up, and they carried me out, with the suitcase full of my things. They got old bricks to weigh me down, and they carried me away.

  “It was hard. Even though there was moonlight, even though it was cool, it was a hard walk carting all of that. Julian got sick, but she brooked no nonsense. They would say I ran off with another man. They would let the gossip spread that my baby was a bastard, fawned off on you as your own. She told Julian how it would be as they put the bricks over me, as they tied the cloak around me with rope, as they pushed me into the bayou.”

  He looked back at her. “You believed them.”

  “No.” Lena was weeping now. For him, for Abigail, for herself, for Lucian. “No.”

  “Not at first. You feared for me. You searched for me. You wept for me. I tried to reach you, but you wouldn’t let me in. You wouldn’t let me in because some part of you already believed their lies. I loved you. With all my heart, my soul, my body. I died for you.”

  “I couldn’t stop what happened to you. I wasn’t here to stop it.”

  “No, you weren’t here that night. And you were never really here again. Not for me, and not for our child. You broke your promise to me, the solemn vow you made to me in that bed the night she was born. More than death, that is what doomed us.”

  “How did I break my promise?”

  “You promised to love our child, to care for her always. I was always true to you, Lucian. You have to know.”

  “I do know.” She closed her hand over the watch in her pocket and felt the weight, the grief, the sorrow.

  “How could you leave her alone? How could you turn from her? You were all she had. You swore to me.”

  “I don’t know. I was weak. I wasn’t as brave or as true as you. Maybe . . . I think maybe you were the making of me, and when you were gone, I had nothing to hold me straight.”

  “You had Marie Rose.”

  “Perhaps I loved you too much, and her not enough. Forgive me. Forgive me for what I did, for what I didn’t do. I can’t go back and change it.” She drew out the watch, held it face up in her palm. “No matter how often time stops, it’s too late. If I could, I would never leave you. I’d take you and the baby away. I’d do anything to stop what happened to you.”

  “I loved you. And my heart ached every minute since they took me from you. Ached with grief, then with hope, and then with sorrow. You chose death, Lucian, rather than life. Still you choose loneliness rather than love. How can I forgive, when you can’t? Until you do, they’ve won, and the house that should’ve been ours still holds them. None of us will ever be free, until you choose.”

  He turned, opened the gallery doors and walked outside.

  The door slamming at her back made her jolt. It was, Lena thought, like a rude laugh aimed at someone else’s misery. Ignoring it, she stepped outside, took a deep breath.

  “Declan.”

  He was leaning on the baluster, staring out at the first hints of dawn. “Yeah. I’m trying to figure out if I need an exorcist, a psychiatrist, or if I should cash in and see about starring in a remake of The Three Faces of Eve.”

  He rolled his shoulders, as if trying to shrug off an irritating weight. “I think I’ll settle for a Bloody Mary.”

  Cautious, she stepped up behind him. “I’ll make us both one,” she began, and started to lay her hand on his back. He sidestepped, evading her touch, and left her standing there with her hand suspended.

  “I don’t need to be petted and stroked. Still a little raw here. Comes from getting raped and murdered, I guess.” Jamming his hands in his pockets, he strode down the steps.

  She waited a moment, struggling for balance, then walked down to join him in the kitchen. “Let me make them. I’m the professional.”

  “I can make my own goddamn drink.”

  It stung when he snatched the bottle of vodka out of her hand. Stung like a slap. “All right then, make your own goddamn drink. While you’re at it, you oughta think about living your own goddamn life.”

  She spun away, and when he grabbed her arm, she lashed out with her own slap. When her hand cracked across his cheek, the clock began to strike again, and the doors to slam.

  Cold settled gleefully into the bone.

  “You ever been raped?”

  She yanked her arm free. “No.”

  “Probably haven’t been strangled to death, either?” Forgoing the niceties, he took a long drink straight from the bottle. “Let me give you a clue. It tends to put you in a really foul mood.”

  Temper drained out of her. “Don’t drink like that, cher. You’ll only get sick.”

  “I’m already sick. I need a shower.”

  “Go on and take one. You’ll feel better for it. I’m going to make some tea. Just let me do this,” she snapped out before he could argue. “Maybe it’ll settle us both down some.”

  “Fine. Whatever.” He stomped up the stairs.

  She sat for a moment, just sat because her legs were still shaking. Then she took the watch out of her pocket, studied the face. The second hand ticked around and around. But the time never went beyond midnight.

  Putting it away again, she rose to brew the tea.

  She carried it up, along with the tidy triangles of toast. The sickbed meal her grandmother had made for her in childhood. He was sitting on the side of the bed, wearing a tattered pair of sweatpants. His hair was still wet. His skin was reddened from vicious scrubbing. She set the tray beside him.

  “Do you want me to go?”

  “No.” When she poured a mug of tea, he took it, tried to warm his hands. Despite the blasting heat of the shower, he still felt chilled.

  “I didn’t just see it, or remember it. I felt it. The fear, the pain, the violation. The humiliation. And more—like that isn’t bad enough—part of me was still me. That part, the big, tough guy part, was helpless, just helpless watching a terrified woman be raped and strangled. I can’t explain it.”

  “You don’t have to. I felt some of it. Not as strong, not as clear as you, but . . . When you looked at me, when she was looking at me out of your eyes, I felt such grief, such regret. Such guilt. Drink your tea now, sweethear
t.”

  He lifted the mug obediently. “It’s good. Pretty sweet.”

  “Sweet tea and toast. It’s good for you.” She crawled onto the bed behind him, knelt and began to knead at his shoulders. “She was stronger than he was. It’s not his fault so much. He was raised weak. But he loved her, Declan. I know that without a doubt. Even without knowing the terrible thing that happened to her, he blamed himself. For not being with her, not giving her enough of himself.”

  “He deserted the child.”

  There was such finality in his voice. “He did. Yes, he did,” Lena replied. “And though it was wrong of him, wrong to take his own life and leave their baby an orphan, she had a better life because of it. She was surrounded by people who loved her, who valued the memory of her mother. She would never have had that life here, in the Hall.”

  “She was entitled to it. He should have seen to it.”

  She laid her cheek on the top of his head. “You can’t forgive him.”

  “I can’t understand him.”

  “No, a man like you wouldn’t understand a man like him. Maybe I do, maybe I understand a man who’d run off with a woman rather than stand up to his parents. One who’d bring her back into a house full of resentment and shadows instead of making them a home. One who’d fall apart enough to drown himself rather than live with the hurt and raise his own child with the love and compassion that had been denied him. He wanted to be more than he was. With her, he would have been.

  “You shouldn’t despise him, Declan. You should pity him.”

  “Maybe. It’s hard. I’ve still got a lot of her despair inside me.” Abigail’s, he thought, and a good portion of his own.

  “Can you rest?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why don’t you try? I need to go change.” She slid off the bed, then lifted the tray and set it aside. “Try to sleep awhile. I won’t be long.”

  He didn’t try to stop her. It was probably best to be alone. He lay back, stared at the ceiling as the first birds began to sing.

  Abigail had been broken, he thought. Body and heart.

  He was feeling pretty much the same himself.