Come Near Me (14 page)

Sherry remembered Lady Jasper’s
declaration—perhaps her warning—that Edmund held her in some
affection other than brotherly concern or platonic friendship.
Which was above everything silly, because Edmund was Adam’s friend,
and had been before she had even met him. Friends didn’t betray
friends. Richard Brimley had never been a friend. “You could
consent to being my escort at Lady Winston’s masked ball, I
suppose, since my husband calls such affairs silly and refuses to
attend. But first you’d have to help me decide on a costume. I had
thought to wear a simple domino. You know—a cloak and half mask.
But I feel a sudden urge to lose myself in a small fantasy. Do you
have any suggestions?”

“A masked ball?” Edmund’s grin took years off
his face, making him seem no older than Geoffrey. “Oh, I can think
of several ideas for costumes. If you’ll allow it, I’ll send
something around for you by tomorrow morning. It will be my gift,
to thank you for your kind invitation.”

Sherry considered his words. She’d spoken
impulsively and already regretted her invitation. Edmund seemed
much too eager, and she had no idea if Adam planned to attend Lady
Winston’s ball with her just that she couldn’t bear the thought of
seeing him right then, talking to him. “I don’t know that it would
be proper for me to accept such a generous gift,” she said,
lowering her parasol to cover her sudden confusion. Edmund was such
a dear man, but she couldn’t be attracted to him, no matter how
kind he was when she was so in need of kindness. She couldn’t be
attracted to anyone. Could she?

“I’ll send Daventry the bill, then. I’m sure
he wouldn’t mind,” Edmund said cheerfully. “Not only that, but I’ll
find a costume for Lord Dagenham as well. I’m quite sure I can
convince him to join us. In fact, I believe I shall insist upon it.
Much better than a simple ride in the park. The boy needs some
fun.”

Mention of Geoff—so kind, Edmund was, so
endlessly thoughtful—served to dissolve the last of Sherry’s
misgivings, and the matter was settled before the carriage pulled
up in front of the mansion in Grosvenor Square.

~ ~ ~

Adam knocked on the closed door separating
his bedchamber from Sherry’s. Just that spring it had been the door
connecting their two rooms; a door that had never been closed,
giving him a view of her bed, that never had been slept in through
all of the Spring Season. Separating. Connecting. It was all a
matter of one’s viewpoint.

Sherry opened the door herself, a
silver-backed brush in her hand, her eyes looking at him without
rancor, without passion, without any emotion at all. In fact, it
was as if she were looking straight through him.

He’d gone out this afternoon in his curricle,
looking for her. In the park. Along the main thoroughfares. But
there had been no sign of Edmund Burnell’s carriage. Where had she
been? What had she been doing? Why did he think he might still have
the right to ask those questions?

“Geoff and I missed you at dinner this
evening, and I thought I’d stop by and see how you are feeling. May
I come in?” he asked, his hands bunched into fists at his side,
because otherwise he would have taken hold of her, held her, tried
to shake her into some sort of reaction. Any sort of reaction.

She just looked at him for another long
moment, nodded, then turned, walked back to sit in front of her
dressing table, and began brushing her hair.

He followed her to the dressing table,
standing behind her, longing to put his hands on her shoulders,
aching to bend down, kiss the top of her head. “I’ve come to
apologize, of course,” he said stiffly after a few moments, then
winced as he heard his own voice, the empty words.

“I accept your apology, Adam,” Sherry said
with unshakable calm as he watched her reflection in the mirror,
watched her tip her head, pulling the brush through her long curls.
“We’ve both made mistakes. I think that’s clear now.”

“Yes. That’s very clear now, Sherry.”

“For a long time it wasn’t. Not to me. Not to
you.”

“I suppose not.”

What else could he say? What else could he
do? He stepped to one side of the low bench and dropped to one
knee. “Sherry, don’t do this. Please. I’d cut off both my arms if
it would help.”

Sherry put down the brush, but still didn’t
turn to look at him. “You didn’t believe me, Adam. You all but
leapt at the chance not to believe me. And not all that much has
changed, has it? You still believe that I’m at least partly
responsible for Geoff’s accident. I am, you know. That was the lie
I told, saying I didn’t know where Geoff was that day, not giving
you time to find him, dissuade him from his recklessness. Because I
did know. I knew he’d gone off to race. So it doesn’t matter what
you chose not to believe or forgive. The lie, or the truth. Either
way, I’m responsible.”

“No.” Adam took her hands in his, held them
tightly, winced inwardly when he felt how icy-cold they were. “All
the scales have dropped from my eyes now, darling. I’m seeing
clearly now, and for the first time in my life. I’m responsible,
Sherry. For
all
of it. Your only mistake was in loving me
when I didn’t deserve your love. Geoff, out to disobey me after I’d
tried to run his life, made his own decision, then dragged you into
lying for him. And I
wanted
to believe what I saw, for my
sins. Lord knows I couldn’t believe in my own happiness. We were
living a dream, darling, you and I, and I knew it. The dream was
too perfect, a fantasy that had nothing to do with really living
our lives, really loving each other. Somewhere, deep inside of me,
I knew it had to end. I believe you sensed it, too. The dream had
to end.”

“And it did,” Sherry said, pulling her hands
free of him as she rose, walked to look out the window overlooking
Grosvenor Square. She looked so fragile as she stood there,
achingly beautiful, sadly vulnerable. “How gratifying for you to be
proved right, Adam, one way or another. Yes. I knew the dream
couldn’t last. I had already seen it slipping away once we’d left
London and gone back to Daventry Court. You’d married a child and
begun to regret it. Why else do you think I played with Geoff,
played with those terrible races, if not to gain back your
attention any way that I could?”

“Sweet Jesus,” Adam mumbled under his breath,
whether as a curse or in prayer he didn’t know. He’d worked this
all out in his head, through all of a drunken night and a long,
sobering day, but hearing Sherry say the words rocked him all over
again. “I don’t deserve anything but your disgust, Sherry, but I
want to try again. Begin again. We can’t pretend the past didn’t
happen, either of us. We can’t blink our eyes or snap our fingers
and have all the hurt go away, all the terrible words, the unhappy
months—”

“Geoff’s accident?”

He nodded, sighing. “Yes. That, too. But I do
love you, Sherry. More now than ever. It’s a real love, darling,
not a dream, a fantasy. If you believe nothing else, please believe
that. Give me time to show you I mean what I say.”

She was silent for a long time. Adam suffered
through several levels of Hell during that silence, would have
offered his soul to anyone who could make his words sound more
believable, help to soften Sherry’s heart.

“It may be too late. I can’t feel anything,
Adam,” she said at last, her voice low, almost a whisper. She
turned, looked at him, her eyes dry, distant. “I believed I loved
you. But I don’t know now if I really did, if what I felt was
really love. I don’t know that I’ll ever feel anything again.”

He took a quick step toward her, but she held
out her hand, the defensive gesture stopping him with the power of
his own guilty conscience, his shame for how badly he’d treated
her, how shabbily he’d served their love.

“I won’t touch you, Sherry. I promise. Not
until you want me to touch you, to hold you. Just let me be near
you, here in London, once we’ve gone back to Daventry Court for
Christmas. Let me court you, as I should have courted you from the
beginning. Slowly, giving you time, time I didn’t allow you.
Everything happened in such a rush, much too quickly. There’s so
much we know about each other, and so much more we don’t know, have
never taken the time to learn. I think I can make you feel again,
darling, earn your love again. Because I’ll never believe you
didn’t love me. I can’t believe that, Sherry, and still want to
take another breath. Just, please, darling, give me that chance.
Give us both that chance.”

“For the child,” Sherry whispered, her hands
going protectively to her belly. “I’ll do it, Adam, but not for us.
I doubt either of us deserves a second chance. Only for the
child.”

“The—the child?” Adam sat down on the
dressing-table bench, his knees suddenly not strong enough to keep
him upright. This was too much, and he didn’t know how to react if
he couldn’t hold her, kiss her, know that she was as happy about
the idea of a pregnancy as he was. “Sherry? There’s to be a child?
You’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure, and have been for more than a
month,” she said, her voice at last taking on some emotion,
although it was not the one he’d longed to hear. “And, before you
ask, Adam, it is yours. Now, if you’ll excuse me? I’m tired, and I
want to go to bed. If you want, you can begin courting me, as you
call it, in the morning. Thursday night, however, Edmund is
escorting Geoff and me to the masked ball at Lady Winston’s. Good
night, Adam.”

Adam stood, a flash of anger shooting through
him as he remembered Chollie’s warning that the handsome, likable
Edmund Burnell was “irresistible” to the ladies. Who could be more
vulnerable to the man’s charms than his own unhappy wife? He shook
his head. “No, madam, Edmund is
not
escorting you to Lady
Winston’s. He may
join
us at the ball.”

“Whatever you wish, Adam. I really don’t
care. Although I must say that ordering me about is a strange way
of courting me,” Sherry said, shrugging, her indifference maddening
him, frustrating him beyond his own comprehension.

Adam opened his mouth, to apologize yet
again, but something stopped him. Pride. It stuck in his throat,
stuck hard, so that he was unable to swallow it one more time He’d
come to Sherry, the penitent, on his knees. He’d damn near crawled
to her. Now she was dangling a child in front of him and at the
same time waving Edmund Burnell beneath his nose.

“Pleasant dreams, Sherry,” he said
shortly.

He then turned on his heels and left the
chamber, quietly closing the door behind him, leaning against it,
trying to recapture his breath, ease his heart back into its usual
slow, steady beat. It would be another long night, but a sober one.
He hoped he would live through it.

Before...

Don’t let your heart depend on things

that ornament life in a fleeting way!

—
Johann von Schiller

S
herry had never thought
much about her appearance, or thought much of that appearance when
she did happen to catch her reflection in a mirror. She was a
girl-child, which meant she already had one stroke against her
according to her papa. Her mama, not one for looking at anything
other than her own misery and ways to alleviate it, had let Sherry
grow rather on her own, leaving her only daughter to the mercies of
Mrs. Forrest, who was not the most humorous of women. She certainly
had not been the sort of woman to encourage vanity of any sort.

Sherry had built her own life as she grew,
befriending whom she liked, and she liked almost everyone. Her
friends ranged from the lowest scullery maid to the stiff, powdered
ladies forced to sit in her mama’s drawing room as all the husbands
went tearing around the countryside, chasing helpless vermin. She
welcomed everyone who was nice to her and paid little attention to
herself as being anything more than the daughter of the house.

She lived a carefree life, unfettered by ambitious
parents, and had grown to her nineteenth year without giving much
thought to the effort involved, or to what would happen the morning
after the night she last laid her head on her pillow and drifted
off to dreamless sleep.

She’d thought about a Season, but never seriously,
especially once her mama had done her flit with Henry Carpenter the
previous summer. She’d thought about marriage, about babies. But,
again, never seriously. She most certainly had never spent a
sleepless night thinking about one particular man. She hadn’t given
more than a moment’s thought to how she looked to a man, if she
might appeal to a man in that way.

That’s what Mrs. Forrest had called it—that way.
When Sherry had once pressed her further, asking her precisely what
way
that
way was, the older woman had given the longest
sermon in her life, one filled with words like “duty’ and “progeny”
and “they can’t help themselves, base creatures that they are.”

All of which meant less than nothing to Sherry now,
as she paced the bank of the stream, watching her skirts kick in
front of her with every step, feeling her blood running strangely
hot in her veins as her stomach fluttered, rather pleasurably, with
nerves.

She was a child. No, a woman. A young woman? Yes.
That was it. She was a young woman, a young lady. Nineteen. Not yet
on the shelf, but close enough to it to be able to see her
spinsters cap lying there, waiting for her. There were neighbors
back in Surrey who’d already been married for three years, had
already been mothers for two of them. Someone had looked at them in
that
way.

Why hadn’t she paid more attention? She’d always
wandered off when talk of handsome young men and balls and
engagements made her yawn behind her hand. She hadn’t been ready
for such conversation, had no interest in it, frankly. She most
certainly didn’t believe herself ready for marriage, and for
sitting in a drawing room gossiping about fashions and paint pots
and other people’s unhappiness while her husband devoted himself to
a pack of hounds and falling asleep in his pudding after drinking
his dinner. She was much too involved in being Charlotte Victor;
student of the world closest to her, reasonably devoted daughter,
and eager child in search of what Mrs. Forrest had termed
“simpleminded pleasures.”