Cry for Passion (37 page)

“The Queen’s Bench just ruled that a husband has the right to capture his wife and forcibly detain her in his home. I ask you, my Lord Chancellor,” Jack stridently challenged; this was Rose’s last legal hope, “does an English subject have such a right . . . of his own motion, whether it be his wife or anyone else . . . to imprison another English subject?”

Chapter 44

“I loved you, Rose, the first moment I saw you.”

Rose saw in Jonathon’s eyes the love he had felt on a warm summer day.

“Your hair shone like newly minted gold.” Gold glinted in the hair of the pale ghost who peered into the window of their lives. “You were such a loving woman. Even angry as you were with your brothers, you were so gentle. I knew then I wanted you to bear my children.”

In the summer of their courtship she had been blinded by the sun.

But now the rain obliterated the sun.

“You wanted me to bear your sons,” Rose flatly corrected him.

A half-dozen boisterous boys, just like her brothers.

“I have four sisters,” he unexpectedly divulged.

But Rose already knew that: Monthly she had invited his family to dinner.

“I had five brothers.”

Rose had not known he had brothers.

More secrets.

“They were stillborn,” Jonathon explained, eyes bleak with their loss. “My mother came from a family of women. She was not fashioned to carry male children.”

Rose fought the crippling pain, facing the truth.

It had hurt not knowing, but it hurt far more knowing.

“And so you married me,” she managed, “because I come from a fertile family of men.”

Jonathon closed his eyes against the pain he caused; dark shadow hollowed his cheeks. “You’ve never heard them, have you?”

Rain like tears dribbled down the face of the pale ghost.

“Heard what?” Rose asked.

“Their laughter.”

The laughter of the children he could not sire.

“You never heard, either, Jonathon,” Rose said.

Jonathon opened the dark lashes she had once tried to count: Puzzlement clouded his sky blue eyes. “What?”

“My tears.”

He searched her gaze. “Did you cry for our unborn children, Rose?”

Rose could no longer deny the truth. “I cried because you didn’t love me, Jonathon.”

“I’ve ached for you every night these last eleven years,” he said.

Rose crossed her arms over her stomach to contain her pain. “Then why did you let me lie alone in the darkness, crying out for you?”

“Because you love me,” he said simply.

Rose struggled to hold down the realization that was blossoming inside her: Truth would not be suppressed; it clawed at her insides like a living beast. “And so you deliberately withheld your love.”

“Yes.”

“You forced me to sleep alone,” Rose reiterated, wanting him to deny what was suddenly so clear, “so I would take a lover.”

Her pain was reflected inside his eyes. “Yes.”

Silently he waited for her to put together the pieces he could not fit.

“You wanted me to get pregnant with another man’s child,” Rose concluded.

The child Jonathon could no longer give her, but which he still wanted from her body.

Jonathon did not deny it, because he couldn’t.

“Yes,” he said.

For one moment Rose couldn’t breathe for the raw pain that ripped through her. “And you think that is love, Jonathon?”

Her pain flashed inside his eyes. “Do you think I enjoy the thought of you lying in Jack Lodoun’s arms?”

“Fucking Jack Lodoun, you mean,” Rose said unsteadily.

Hurting. Raging.

Both the hurt and the anger seeking an outlet.

“Yes.” Her rage flashed inside his eyes, sharing the emotions he had caused—her love, her pain. “Fucking Jack Lodoun.”

Fucking rang out over the hiss of gas and the drum of rain.

The gentle ghost stared on, a silent witness.

How do you know, Mrs. Clarring, that passion isn’t just a splendid fuck? Jack had asked.

Rose now knew the answer.

But there were many things of which she was still ignorant.

“How did you learn that I was wearing a Dutch cap?”

“You overpaid the doctor.” The gun on the table darkly gleamed like the hour hand on Big Ben, waiting to shoot forward. “He sent the refund—and a copy of the bill—to my office.”

The memory of throaty laughter danced on raindrops.

The gynecologist’s scrawl had been a three—his wife’s first impression—instead of a four.

Rose had paid in cash, so she had not provided her address.

The newspaper article inside The Globe, she remembered, had mentioned Jonathon was employed by the London Stock Exchange.

“And you received it when?” Rose asked.

How long did it take to plan and execute the abduction of a wife?

“Monday,” he said, unaware that each word hit her with the force of a hammered nail.

Fleetingly she wondered what she been doing while he planned to destroy her life.

“In the morning post?” she quizzed.

While she breakfasted.

“Yes.”

She had been abducted at four in the evening.

“So it took you . . . how many hours . . . to find the type of men who would do what you wanted them to do?”

“We use a security firm at the office.”

How convenient it was to be a man, working among other men.

“Did you love me, Jonathon,” Rose asked, throat tight, “when you hired two men to abduct me?”

“A husband cannot abduct his wife.”

As attested by the constable who had walked out of Jonathon’s house, while Rose remained a prisoner inside.

The pain of the dual betrayal—the law and her husband—whipped through her.

“You watched them seize me,” she forced out the words.

“They didn’t hurt you.”

“I have bruises, Jonathon.”

“I instructed them to be gentle.”

The pain shock had dulled surged through Rose.

The bruising fingers. The strain of being lifted up by her arms.

The jarring reality of being betrayed by the man she loved.

“You don’t think I didn’t hurt here, Jonathon?” Rose pressed fisted fingers against her breast that Jack had suckled, but which Jonathon had viewed only as an organ to nurse his sons. “I thought you were going to commit me to an insane asylum.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” Jonathon denied.

Jonathon forgave Rose; Rose would never forgive Jonathon.

“What you did was far worse.”

He had taken something from her that could never be replaced.

“You knew I wanted a child,” he said.

The cry of a twenty-one-year-old boy who had dreamed of a family.

“You knew I wanted to be loved,” she returned.

The cry of a twenty-one-year-old girl who had laughed with happiness.

“And I will love you every night of your life,” Jonathon said earnestly, “if only you give me a child.”

With purple-blue eyes.

“What if it had been I, Jonathon, who was sterile?” Rose remembered Jonathon’s pregnant secretary. “Would you still love me?”

The uncertainty that flowered inside his eyes hurt him almost as much as it did her.

“Did you ever, for one moment,” Rose asked, “love me instead of the children you thought I would give you?”

“Did you ever, for one moment,” Jonathon riposted, “love me enough to give me the children I wanted?”

For one fleeting second Rose heard the faint wail of an unborn baby.

“No,” she said.

The pain inside his eyes matched the pain she felt.

“Let me go, Jonathon.”

Please.

But she would never again say please to this man who had betrayed her on every level a man could betray a woman.

“I can’t, Rose.”

“Why not?” she asked, suddenly not certain she wanted to know the answer.

“Contraceptives aren’t foolproof.” For one brief moment self-loathing equaled the determination inside Jonathon’s eyes. “Someday, Rose, you will get pregnant. As long as I am your husband, I will have legal custody of your child.”

It should not be possible to feel even more estranged from her husband: It was.

“We could have adopted, Jonathon.”

There were so many orphaned children who needed love.

“I want your child,” he repeated. “I want to feel its heart beat inside your stomach.”

“Because you love me,” she said bitterly.

“Yes.”

But this wasn’t love.

Rose needed to understand the man her husband had become.

“It must have hurt, Jonathon, to have seen my name in the newspaper.”

Flickering shadow darkened his face. “I knew you would someday take a lover.”

Knowing the pain it would cause her. Knowing the pain it would cause him.

“Will not your associates at work ridicule you, Jonathon?” she asked, tears scalding her eyes.

Had she ever touched this man?

“I am a valuable asset at the London Stock Exchange.”

“Will they not laugh behind your back,” she asked, “knowing that the only way you can keep your wife is by imprisoning her?”

“They already laugh behind my back,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion, “married for twelve years with no children.”

“Is that why you want a child so badly that you raped me,” Rose asked, “so men won’t laugh at you?”

“I’ve never touched you against your will,” he instantly denied.

Still he did not understand what he had done.

“You would force me to bear a child, Jonathon,” Rose said, invisible fingers squeezing her heart and her lungs. “That is the worst violation a woman can endure.”

“You love me!” he suddenly cried, unable to shed the twenty-one-year-old boy.

“I will always love the happiness we shared, but I do not love the man who abducted and raped me.”

“You could be pregnant.”

“No.”

“You don’t know that.”

Rose stepped forward toward the shattered segments of the past. “There is a pill inside my reticule, Jonathon, that will bring on my monthly courses.”

His head snapped back. “You would do that?”

Rose took another step forward.

The pain had to end.

“Yes,” she said.

“You would deprive me of my right to be a father?”

Jonathon’s rights. But not Rose’s rights.

“Sometimes, Jonathon”—Rose took a third step forward—“when I lay alone at night, listening to the sound of passing carriages, I hated the mumps.”

Smiling blue eyes flashed through her mind’s eyes; they did not match the eyes of the man who stared up at her.

The twenty-one-year-old girl reflected inside the window cried at the loss.

“Other nights, Jonathon”—hard wood bit into her lower abdomen; the shattered vase laid scattered between them—“I hated you.”

The emotion Jack’s flesh had held at bay—telling him she had blamed herself for Jonathon’s pain—reared upward in all of its ugliness.

Rose had read that hatred was the other side of love: The books lied.

Hatred was the other side of guilt.

“You didn’t love me.” The vicious cycle of emotion burned a trail down her esophagus. “Every night I blamed myself for wanting to be loved. So I hated you. And then I hated myself.”

Her heart pounded inside her chest. It was so loud it echoed in her ears.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

“I will not go through that again.” The pounding of her heart vibrated the wood that pressed into her abdomen. “The pain will end tonight, Jonathon.”

“Then end it, Rose.” His pale, sensitive face was somber. Blurred skin and metal flashed between them. “For both our sakes. Pick up the pistol and end it now.”

A carousel of voices flashed round her mind.

Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband . . . so long as ye both shall live?

You were always the bravest of my children.

I suggest you murder him . . . because no barrister can win you a divorce.

The betrayal she had felt at being seized assaulted her anew. It was chased by the rage of being raped with a doctor’s speculum.

The gentle tears of the twenty-one-year-old girl who peered through the patio door were in stark contrast to the violent emotions that thrummed through thirty-three-year-old Rose: The twenty-one-year-old girl would always love the man who had made her laugh with happiness.

But Rose was no longer twenty-one.

She thought of Jack, and the simple intimacy of watching him brush his teeth. She thought of Jonathon, and the eleven years he had forced her to eat and sleep alone.

Simply so he could have the child he wanted.

Rose picked up the pistol, fingers curving around an ivory grip, middle finger instinctively sliding through a metal loop.

The gun was lighter than she had expected: It fit her hand as if it had been made specially for her.

Thud . . . thud . . . thud pounded her heart.

“I will never let you go, Rose.”

Rose read the truth of his statement inside his eyes.

“I will follow you wherever you go. I will seize you when you least expect it.

“I will have your child,” Jonathon promised. “Because I will always love you.”

Thud. Thud. Thud.

“And you will always love me.”

Thud. Thud. Thud.

“The only way we will ever be free of our love, Rose, is if you pull the trigger.”

Rose saw again the marble statue of the woman bearing Bacchus’s head.

She understood now why the woman had decapitated the god.

The wine and the ecstasy had to end.

In the end, that is what matters: That you do the right thing. Regardless of the consequences.

Rose pulled the trigger.

Chapter 45

The first shot stopped the rain. The second shot stopped Jack’s heart. The third shot flung the black-haired butler who barred the doorway backward.

The fourth shot catapulted Jack forward.

The fifth shot slammed open a closed door.

The sixth shot stopped him short.

Gray smoke coiled around glinting gold.

Rose’s hair. Rose’s shots.

Jagged glass framed her head and black wool-clad shoulders. Over a straggling topknot, he saw Jonathon Clarring.

Jonathon Clarring, Jack realized, did not see him.

“The girl you loved, Jonathon, is dead,” Rose said calmly, as if she did not hold a smoking pistol.