“And the place we … you grew up in was beautiful,” Jesse said, her gaze distant. “Hills and lakes and streams.”
“It was beautiful,” he agreed. “Everything a child could wish for. Avery and I—”
“Avery?”
“My brother.” His throat was tight and harsh around the word. “We played many a dashing game in the meadows and hills. As much time as we could away from the Hall.”
Jesse was quiet for a moment, flexing her fingers between her knees. “That was what I did,” she said, “after Gary came.” She looked up. “What were you running from, David? What were your parents like?”
How much did she remember, and how much guess? “We were a wealthy, privileged family with little else to recommend us,” he said lightly, making a jest of it. “My father was a silent and distant man who married as his parents willed, and lived his life among his books. He had no use for children. My mother—was a paragon of duty. She raised us to understand our destiny as breeders of future peers and upholders of the family honor. And I, as heir, was the one of whom she demanded obedience and unquestioning compliance with my carefully planned future.”
“It was a different world then,” Jesse said. “A different age. But some things had to be the same. Your mother …” She paused, staring at her clasped hands. “She must have loved you.”
She spoke so hopefully, as if she wished he’d known such happiness. “Do you fancy that love was a necessary ingredient in the bearing and raising of the dynasty’s next generation?” he asked. “My mother surely wouldn’t have agreed with that policy. She had a better method. She trained us from earliest infancy to be self-reliant and not bother her with our juvenile needs and fears. We were not, after all, as ordinary children. We were aristocrats of an ancient and noble line, unbroken for centuries.”
Jesse glanced at him, brows drawn. “You mean you weren’t allowed to be children, you and … Avery.”
As you were not, he thought. Yet you had faith in your mother’s love, however flawed it was.
“Ah, but we had something better,” he said aloud, “as my mother so often pointed out to us. Duty and honor.” He rose and paced a few feet away. “What need for pleasure or maudlin sentiment? Duty and honor last forever.”
“But you found ways to play. You said you were able to escape, have fun. You had a brother.”
He didn’t wish to speak of Avery. He didn’t want to feel again what he’d felt confronting Gary in his hotel room, that gut-wrenching tangle of guilt and pity and hatred that had no part in his plans.
“I wanted a brother or sister when I was younger,” Jesse said. “But after my father left—”
“You thought it was better that you didn’t.” David gazed at the lake, at the reflection of drifting clouds on the nearly still surface.
“Tell me about your brother,” she said.
He couldn’t avoid the subject. If she didn’t flinch at Avery’s name in spite of her hatred for Gary, there was little chance she’d react badly to David’s censored tale. And it might lay the groundwork for his ultimate revelation.
“Avery was five years younger than I,” he said. “When he was small, my mother doted on him. She’d not yet decided that I was … not all she expected in the heir, and didn’t demand as much of him. But when I turned eleven, she began to mold him into the son she truly wanted.”
“She … stopped loving him?”
“She taught him to rely on no one but himself. But it was a lesson he never learned. When our mother denied us pleasure, I made certain to grow up quickly and find my own. I was fortunate because I didn’t care about my mother’s lack of affection or my father’s distance. They were of no importance to me. There was much more of the world to interest me than Parkmere Hall, and I discovered it soon enough.”
“You rebelled.”
“I simply felt no desire to obey my mother’s dictates or take on responsibilities I never asked to bear.” He laughed. “How sad for my mother that I became the ne’er-do-well she tried so hard to prevent.”
He heard her get up and move about restlessly. “You must have been very unhappy.”
“Unhappy? I found a way out once I reached the age of moderate independence. I was very good at earning my own income at the gaming tables, when my mother withheld my allowance.”
“But you said that Avery was different,” she said. “What happened to him?”
“He seemed to require the tender affections my mother couldn’t give him. He was quite tedious in his efforts to please her. He set himself an impossible task, and suffered for it.”
“But he had you,” she said. “Someone to look up to.”
Ah, yes. The bold elder brother. Lancelot. The knight who never feared to slay dragons. Avery had been timid away from the Hall until he’d realized only manly stoicism would win Mother’s approval. Then he’d flung himself into their games with a full heart, playing Arthur but watching his “first knight” for any sign of brotherly approbation. Watching with something very like worship.
For a time they’d been close. David hadn’t thought of those days in centuries, and he took no satisfaction in it now.
When had it ended? Had Avery believed he could win the parental favor David had failed to earn? He was not the heir, but he could have had everything else. If he had been good enough. Dutiful enough. Was that when the first break between them had occurred?
Or was it when David realized his younger brother had become a dead bore, prosing on about proper behavior just like their mother? When David recognized that Avery was a burden, not a companion, too young to join him in his quests for sensual oblivion?
Was he to admit this to Jesse, that he’d abandoned his brother in the end, as he’d abandoned duty to his name and abandoned Sophie years later? He was painting himself a villain, not the hero he wished to appear in Jesse’s eyes. He’d admitted to being a ne’er-do-well and a gamester. Why did he feel the need to purge himself of a past he had no reason to resurrect?
“Yes,” he said after a long silence. “Avery had me.”
“Then neither one of you was without love,” Jesse said. She came up beside him, a softness in her eyes. “In a way, you lost your family, too. You never really had parents at all.”
Could she find sympathy for him when she’d suffered so much? How much had he truly suffered? His childhood miseries were long behind him.
“That’s why you joined the army,” she said. “To escape. The same reason I worked for the Peace Corps after I got out of college. So I wouldn’t have to come back here and face … all this.”
Her voice was small and held a note of shame he couldn’t bear. He turned to her and took her arms in a firm but gentle clasp.
“You give yourself far too little credit, Jesse,” he said. “If you worked for peace, it was scarcely a selfish motive. Mine was not so noble. I wanted to leave the Hall, get as far away as possible, and the war presented the perfect opportunity.”
“And you also left … because your father died,” she said slowly. “You grieved for him, in spite of everything.”
He stiffened and almost let her go. She could know that only from her memories as Sophie, and in that life he’d never seen any indication that Sophie perceived so much. But Jesse didn’t elaborate, only searched his eyes too deeply.
In her steady gaze he saw reflected scenes of the day he’d ridden off to war. His mother ordering him not to go, never backing down an inch, never offering compromise. Sophie sobbing in his arms, not for the last or most terrible time, begging him not to leave her so soon after their one sweet loving.
And Avery, his lips suspiciously stiff, reminding David of his responsibilities, that he was viscount now, that if he left, the consequences must be on his own head. Avery’s curse had rung in David’s ears long after he’d ridden away. But he’d dismissed Avery as the jealous boy he appeared to be—jealous because Avery had chosen to bind himself to the Hall and his own misery, while David had chosen freedom.
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br /> But he hadn’t hated Avery then. After he’d come home for a hasty marriage to Sophie, after Mother had died, after Elizabeth had gone as well and he’d returned to the Peninsula—he’d left the Hall and his wife in Avery’s care.
Avery had been the first to hate.
“I think you did care what your mother thought of you,” Jesse said. “I think you wanted her love, and your father’s attention. But you didn’t know how to get it. You could never be good enough to make them love you, so you went the opposite direction. And when that didn’t work, you pretended it wasn’t important.” She disengaged herself from his weakened hold and stroked his arm in a gesture of consolation that he felt like fire searing him to the bone. “You … finally just gave up.”
David was afraid that any sudden movement, any hasty response, would shatter something unexpectedly fragile within him. “Do I seem such a coward to you?” he asked, unable to keep the bitterness from his words.
“No. Oh, no. I think I … understand you better than before. We’re more alike than I realized, even though it wasn’t exactly the same for me. My mother … loved me.” She massaged her throat, rubbing at the ache David knew would be there, as it was in his own. “But sometimes I couldn’t deal with her drinking. The way she changed from day to day. The way I couldn’t seem to help her.”
She shook her head to forestall David’s incipient protest. “Then Gary came, and I spent more and more time away … until she died, and I wasn’t there to save …”
He didn’t consciously plan to take her in his arms. He didn’t even know she was crying until she was against him and he heard the catch of her breath and felt the moisture of her tears. She pressed her face into the collar of his uniform and clutched at his back, making no sound other than the soft gasps of her weeping.
Sophie had wept often. When they’d first married, he’d responded to her tears. But he’d become jaded and impatient, unwilling to cater to her seemingly bottomless need for comfort.
With Jesse he felt fiercely protective. And ashamed. Ashamed because Jesse had been Sophie, and he’d failed her. Because he hadn’t been able to love Sophie, not as he should have.
Once, perhaps, he’d known what love was. But he’d chosen to let the ability die out of him. It was too much work, too confining, too demanding of what he was not strong or wise or good enough to give.
Jesse lifted her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, scrubbing at her face with her knuckles. “I don’t usually do this.”
No. She wouldn’t. An unbearable tenderness washed through David. “Do you think I begrudge you, Jesse?”
She sniffed. “It’s … embarrassing.”
He held her a little apart from him and smiled. “If I had a handkerchief, I’d gladly lend it to you. As it is …”
He bent his head and kissed the high curve of her cheekbone, catching the salt of a tear on the tip of his tongue. He found another tear trapped in the lashes of her left eye, two at the edge of her jaw and one more nestled in the corner of her lips.
One by one he disposed of her tears, entranced by the velvet texture of her skin and the scent of her hair and the subtle alteration in her breathing from distress to excitement.
It wasn’t seduction he’d had in mind. If she’d raised a hand to ward him off, he would have stopped. But she leaned into him, giving him his way, and his body began to hum with the desire he’d so long suppressed.
There was no good reason to do so any longer. This closeness was what they both wanted. Mutual solace, a forgetting of sadness and pain. Would it be so terrible to surrender? Would he be risking so much?
Be damned to the consequences.
He touched his mouth to hers. Her fingers dug into the back of his jacket, and her lips parted. Her breasts pushed against his ribs as she fitted her body to the hollows of his own.
The kiss intensified, David’s tongue slipping inside her mouth to savor her warmth and the passion he’d sensed so close beneath the surface. Her forays were more hesitant, but their very innocence excited him all the more.
It hadn’t been like this in Al’s study. This time she was fully as eager as he. And he couldn’t remember a single instance, in a life of countless amorous adventures, when he’d ever felt so astonished by his own response. So consumed with an urgent hunger to know and be known to the very core of his being.
Jesse moaned, a sound of erotic challenge that drove him to the brink. A fraction of his mind cast about for a place to lie with her, near enough that the mood would not be broken. To take her in the cabin, where the memories were so oppressive, would be cruelty. But a soft bed of leaves under the trees, with his jacket as a cushion for her bare skin.…
“I think we’d better go home.”
After a stunned moment he realized she was pulling away—releasing his jacket, stepping back, stealing the heat and ardor they had created between them. Her skin was flushed, but she was carefully averting her face.
Rejecting him.
His body raged while his mind tried to make sense of her behavior. He couldn’t have spoken if he’d wanted to. She walked toward the fence, pausing once as if to make certain he followed.
It no longer seemed an adequate explanation that she was simply inexperienced, guarded, and afraid of what might happen between them. She’d said she trusted him, and proven her words. Whatever her reasons for ending the kiss, she’d done it deliberately, coolly, almost without emotion. As if it meant nothing.
She must know what she did to him. By withholding herself now, she punished him. But wouldn’t be seeking revenge. She still didn’t know enough about their mutual past.
Not yet.
“Are you coming?” she called, crouching beside the fence.
He moved stiffly to join her, helped her through the opening, sat beside her in her vehicle. They returned to her cottage in silence. She unlocked the door, ushered him in, and retreated into her bedchamber.
Leaving would have been the wisest course. If he’d felt only anger and frustration, the decision would be easy. Rebellion, running from what he could not have, came naturally to him.
What he felt was hurt. He was appalled by it, by the knowledge that after two centuries he could experience the aching misery, the desolation he’d endured as a boy and until today had put from his mind.
But his desires weren’t those of a child. He could deal with her rejection. He could confront it rather than retreat. She must still need him, or she’d have sent him away.
So he waited in the cottage with the stillness he’d learned in limbo, his thoughts blank, refusing to feel anything at all. He was thoroughly prepared when Jesse emerged from her room.
She paused in the doorway, and he saw that she’d changed her garments from sturdy trousers and blouse to the loose-fitting shirt he’d seen her wear to bed. Her slender legs and feet were bare beneath. Her hair was free about her shoulders.
She looked like a woman who wanted to be taken to bed.
His heart skipped a beat, and he didn’t dare to move. She wet her lips and remained where she was.
“I—” She cleared her throat. “I didn’t want … it to happen there. At the resort. There were just too many memories.”
Could he understand her aright? “What would have happened?” he asked hoarsely.
Her cheeks reddened. “Maybe I … misunderstood,” she said. “Can you … I mean … is it even possible—”
It would have been most ungentlemanly to leave her floundering. David transported himself across the space between them in the blink of an eye and made himself solid again.
“What are you offering, Jesse?”
She stared at the tarnished buttons of his jacket. “Do I have to explain?”
He lifted a tendril of her hair with his finger. “You know I want you.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Were you in any doubt of the reality of my kiss?”
“No.”
He took a moment to look at her, to savor the sight of
her womanly body and the sensation of his own inexpressible joy. “I’m here for you, Jesse. Do you want me?”
She lifted her gaze to his. “I didn’t believe this could happen.”
“That you could desire a ghost?” He stroked her cheek with his palm. “But it’s not new between us. Anything is possible.”
“I’m beginning … to think you’re right.”
“Then if you want me—if you want me, Jesse, I have the ability to be with you now. In every way.”
He molded his hand to the shape of her breast, felt the hardness of her nipple, its readiness for his caresses. By God, he could lie with her, even if it sapped every ounce of his energy. He didn’t give a damn.
Jesse closed her eyes and arched against the doorframe. “I do … want you,” she said. “I want …”
But she didn’t finish. David pulled her close, kissed the curve of her neck, and lifted her into his arms.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
So that was all it took, Jesse thought incoherently, for the walls to come tumbling down.
She wasn’t quite sure when the fatal crack had appeared, or when she’d made the decision. Maybe it wasn’t really a decision at all. It wouldn’t have been if she’d followed her gut and let matters proceed at the resort. There’d been nothing reasoned about her response to David’s kiss, or what her body was telling her to do.
But the resort had too many resident ghosts of its own. And what she’d felt in David’s arms—knowing he was with her, truly with her, through the pain and sorrow of facing her past—was too wonderful to let go.
Wonderful. New. Overwhelming. And undeniable. She’d felt David’s withdrawal, his anger when she’d pulled away. But explanations were beyond her. It took every bit of her courage to bring him home and follow through, as if she were a practiced seductress and not a near-virgin with laughably little experience.
Here, in the home she’d built, she had a measure of security. She wasn’t giving up every vestige of control. So she told herself.
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