Heart of Gold (18 page)

Stopping at the foot of the bed, Shane’s left hand gripped the carved cherry wood post as if he needed something to steady himself against. “I came to apologize,” he said.

For breaking my heart? Faith wondered bleakly. Don’t bother. I should be used to it by now.

But when she met his gaze, it was his pain she felt, not her own. It hit her like a blast of cold wind, stunning her, confusing her.

“You could have been killed because of me,” he said, his voice thickening with the emotion he had worked so hard to suppress. His hand tightened on the bedpost until his knuckles turned white. “You’ll never know how sorry I am that happened.”

She would never know the regret he felt not only for her injuries but over what he had lost as well. The dream of a future with her had been within his grasp until reality had intruded in the form of Adam Strauss. Now Strauss was dead, but the reality was just as alive, just as harsh. He had chosen a lifestyle that didn’t allow for dreams.

“Is that why you’re leaving?” Faith whispered, her heart immediately taking hope. “Shane, I don’t blame you for what happened.”

It was clear, though, that he blamed himself. The guilt that etched lines into his handsome face was almost unbearable to see.

“Shane, I love you.”

He shook his head, not to deny her statement, but to keep her from elaborating on it. “Faith, don’t. It can’t work between us. I knew that from the start, and dammit to hell, I should have had sense enough to stay away from you.”

“You said you loved me.”

“That was a mistake.”

Well, he wasn’t mincing words, was he? Faith had no idea how she kept from crying out at the pain. It was as sharp as a knife in her chest. Getting shot didn’t even compare. She didn’t try to keep the tears from rising in her eyes. They flooded her field of vision and brimmed over the barrier of her thick dark lashes. Her throat tightened on a knot of them. That she managed to comment at all was a minor miracle. “I see.”

Shane damned himself to yet another eternity in hell as he took in the stricken look on Faith’s delicate heart-shaped face. For a man with a degree in literature he had a way with words that no doubt had the great poets rolling in their graves right about now.

Pushing himself away from the foot post, he moved to the chair that had been pulled up beside the bed. Sitting down, he leaned his forearms on his thighs and heaved a sigh. “No, you don’t see. I shouldn’t have let myself fall in love with you, Faith. It’s just not allowed.”

She wasn’t about to pretend she was sophisticated enough to understand the rules that governed men like Shane Callan. She wasn’t. She didn’t want to be sophisticated enough to understand a world that left no room for love. “You’re not allowed to be human?”

Since he knew he was all too human, Shane chose not to answer her question. “The job I do is important, Faith. It’s also very demanding and dangerous. I chose this way of life knowing the limitations, knowing the rules. I broke those rules, and now you’re the one paying the penalty.”

“But I told you, I don’t blame you for what happened.”

No, it wasn’t in Faith to lay blame, but that was beside the point as far as he was concerned. “Don’t you see, honey? Our worlds don’t exist on the same plane. What happened with Strauss only proved that.”

Finally giving in to the need to touch her, he reached out and gently closed his hand over the fist she clenched so tightly in her lap. “I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry you were hurt because of me. I should never have let it happen.”

“You’re talking as if I never had any say in the matter,” Faith said with a harsh laugh. The man was a rampaging chauvinist, going on about how he should have made this decision or that decision about what
she
did, as if she wasn’t capable of making a rational choice herself. “I’m a grown woman, Shane Callan. I make my own decisions.”

Raking a hand back through his black hair, Shane looked away from her. “Let it go, Faith. It just won’t work. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”

“But—”

“No, Faith.”

The look in his pewter gray eyes stilled the debate on her tongue. He wasn’t going to listen to her. The awful truth tolled inside her head like a death knell. Faith squeezed her own eyes shut against the pain, not opening them even when Shane’s fingers curved beneath her chin and his mouth brushed across hers. She didn’t watch him leave but listened to his footsteps as he rounded the foot of her bed and crossed the hardwood floor. When the door clicked shut behind him, she squeezed her hand tighter around the ring that burned like ice in her fist, and she cried.

She loved Shane Callan with her life, and he was leaving her.

TWELVE

H
E WAS DOING
the right thing, Shane told himself for the hundredth time as he wandered through the dark, silent house. He had touched Faith’s life only briefly, and look what had happened.

She had touched his life, and he would never be the same. Faith had given him a glimpse of joy, a sample of peace and contentment. Damn, but it hurt to have that slip through his hands! It had nearly killed him to walk out of her room that after noon, knowing she was hurting too. He would rather have taken her in his arms and kissed her tears away. But he was the reason she was in pain. Her life would be much better without him in it.

He leaned back against the door frame of the ballroom, a cigarette dangling from his lip, his whiskey flask in his hand. Hell, his life would be fine without the complication of a relationship; it had been for years. People didn’t try to get close to him. Even when he’d been young, he had always stood a little apart from the crowd. He was a loner. He had always accepted that.

Taking a pull on the flask, he thought about the future. A shudder ran through him that had nothing to do with the fine Irish liquor warming his belly. A few days ago he had sat on the beach with the sun on his face and the wind in his hair, his eye on the sweet serene woman beside him, his ears filled with the sounds of the sea and the laughter of a child. And he had let himself pretend that he could have that life. Now that image had faded, and all he saw once again was a bleak, gray plane. Shadows were his life, not sunshine, not rainbows.

He didn’t belong with Faith. Hers was a heart of gold; his was a heart of darkness.

Crossing the polished floor as silently as a cat, he went to the grand piano and flipped on the brass light. Shutting out all conscious thought about both the future and the past, he sat down and spread his long fingers across the cool ivory keys. Closing his eyes, he let his feelings flow directly from his soul to the keyboard.

Faith sat up in her bed, defying her doctor’s orders and nature as well. She was exhausted, but she couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t cry either. She had long since run out of tears. Rubbing her keepsake between her thumb and forefinger, she sat back against the pillows and stared unseeing into the shadows of her bedroom.

Shane would be leaving in the morning. Not because he didn’t love her, but because he
did
love her. He loved her and he was leaving her. Did that make any sense at all? Not to a woman, it didn’t. It especially didn’t make sense to Faith, who had always let her heart rule her head. But it made sense to Shane, and that was what she had to worry about.

She thought of the guilt and pain she had seen in his eyes, and her heart ached for him. Regardless of what she had told him, he blamed himself for what had happened to her, and some deep-seated, antiquated male sense of chivalry dictated that he let her go because of it. Men. Faith shook her head. No wonder the world was such a goofed-up place—men were in charge of it.

The question was. What could she do about Shane’s decision to leave? He had made her no promises. She had asked for none. What right did she have to try to hold him there?

Love.

Love gave her the right. If ever she’d known a man who needed love, it was Shane. Wary, cynical, spending his life in the shadows, he needed someone to reach out to him. That wasn’t simply Faith’s overactive sense of romanticism talking, it was the truth. She knew it with a certainty that radiated a sense of warmth throughout her entire being.

She loved Shane Callan. She hadn’t been looking for love when he’d barged into her life with his brooding black scowl and suspicious nature, but she’d found it nevertheless. Perhaps the fact that she hadn’t been expecting it made it all the more special. Certainly it made her realize what a gift that love was.

A gift so exceptional deserved to be kept and cherished. She couldn’t let Shane walk back into the shadows of a lonely existence without at least trying to make him understand, without at least trying to give him the love he so desperately needed in his life. As hardheaded as he was, he wouldn’t be easily convinced to accept it, but she had to try at least.

Moving to Anastasia and buying Keepsake had been a lifelong dream, but deep inside her Faith had nurtured another dream as well—to someday find a man to whom she could give the wealth of love she had stored up inside her, a man who would need her love and cherish her love and love her in return. She knew Shane was that man.

But what if she couldn’t change his mind?

The possibility he might reject her sent little jets of fear shooting along under the surface of her skin. After the years of rejection and indifference she had endured with William, she had no great desire to go through it again. And her feelings for William had been nothing compared to what she felt for Shane. If she laid her heart at his feet, and he still walked away …

Gamely she swallowed down the knot of panic that had lodged in her throat like a stone. No, she wasn’t going to consider the possibility of defeat. There was no point in it. If a person let fear stand in the way, she would never attain any dream, and if she’d ever had a dream worth reaching for, it was this one.

Squeezing her little gold heart, Faith lifted it and pressed a kiss to the keepsake for good luck. She eased herself out of bed, amazed at the amount of strength that simple action sapped from her. If getting out of bed left her breathless, following her dream was going to be a heck of a workout, she thought, as she stuffed her good arm into the sleeve of her ivory satin robe and awkwardly pulled the left side up to cover her injured shoulder.

Using the wall for support, she slowly made her way down the hall, music leading her as it had on a fateful night not so long ago. The first time she had heard Shane play had been her first glimpse of the man behind the stony facade, the man she had fallen in love with. The notes that now drifted to her softly through the still, dark house were just as revealing.

The piece he was playing was achingly tender, soft and sweet. And it filled her with hope. The longing in Shane’s music was real and strong. It reached out to her with a poignancy that brought tears to her eyes. This was not the music of a man who had coldly made the decision to walk away from love. This was the music of a man who wanted a dream but felt he couldn’t reach for it; who wanted a home but believed he couldn’t have one; who ached for love but let duty deny him of it.

Pausing to gather her strength, Faith leaned back against the wall and let the tears roll down her cheeks. They were tears for the beauty of Shane’s song, for the pain beneath it. Lord, please let me convince him, she prayed, her teeth digging into her full lower lip as a wave of emotion swept through her.

Ker-thump
.

The music stopped abruptly and silence hummed in the air.

Ker-thump
.

Faith held her breath as footsteps sounded faintly on the wood floor of the main hall. As they drew nearer, she caught the unmistakable sound of Shane grumbling. She pressed a fist to her mouth to stifle the giggle that threatened—a giggle that became a groan when she heard the soft creak of protest the fourth step of the grand staircase gave every time it was asked to bear weight.

Darn it all. Confronting Shane in her present condition wasn’t the most appealing idea she’d ever had, but she was determined, and confront him she would.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Shane muttered under his breath. He crept along the second-floor hall, walking on the balls of his feet so as not to make any sound that might scare off the ker-thumping “spook.” “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

Isn’t there?
The question came to him as clearly as if he had spoken it out loud.

No, he answered, only the slight hesitation in his step betraying his uncertainty. He ordered himself to drop the internal dialogue and concentrate on finding whoever or whatever it was clomping around in the middle of the night. It was probably Mr. Fitz. There was a weird old geezer if ever there was one. Ghosts? Bah, humbug.

What about Ellie?
that clear, unrelenting inner voice questioned.

Shane bit back a curse as he paused at the end of the hall, his hand tightening and relaxing, tightening and relaxing on the grip of his gun. Ellie’s dead.

And her ghost is haunting your soul. Ellie died, and you blamed yourself. You’ve carried her ghost inside you all these years. Now you’re blaming yourself for what happened to Faith. Will you let her ghost haunt you as well?

Faith isn’t dead, no thanks to me. She’ll be fine as soon as I get out of her life.

Will she?

The image of her crying flashed quickly through his mind. The memory was as bright and sharp as a bolt of lightning, and it cut him to the quick. But he pushed the image away and answered the question with a firm yes.

Will you?

The question hung suspended in his mind. He refused to answer it, and it refused to leave him.

Ker-thump
.

He breathed an unconscious sigh of relief as his attention focused once again on the mysterious noise. This time it sounded as if it had come from behind him. He could have sworn it had originated in this end of the hall. Damn, he thought, as he turned and headed back toward the stairs, his concentration wasn’t worth spit anymore. He was going to stay up there and find the source of this sound if it took the whole blasted night.

Flattening himself back against the wall, he narrowed his eyes, searching the shadows for any sign of movement. He saw nothing in the pale silver light that fell through the Palladian window. His hearing was sharp enough to pick up the slightest disturbance of the quiet. There were the sounds associated with an old house settling, like the creak of an elderly matriarch’s joints as age seeped into them. In the far distance was the indistinct whoosh of the sea surging against the shore. Nearer there was the unmistakable groan of a floorboard.

Shane’s even teeth flashed in the dark as a predatory smile tugged at his lips. Ghosts didn’t make the floors creak. Every muscle ready to spring to action, he moved along the wall with deceptive laziness. He had his quarry cornered. The sound had come from Captain Dugan’s suite, and there was only one way out—the door that was standing ajar before him.

The taste of victory was sweet, Shane reflected, as he slipped his hand around the polished brass knob and eased the door open. He had the bastard who’d been driving him nuts all these nights. And if it did turn out to be Jack Fitz, Shane was going to shake the old coot until his false teeth rattled. If it turned out to be a squirrel, he’d make a fur rug out of the little beast. If it turned out to be—

“Faith!”

How she kept from screaming, Faith didn’t know, but the sound seemed to get jammed crosswise in her throat. To have him suddenly behind her shouting her name, had her heart slamming against her breastbone. She wheeled wide-eyed, clutching her nightgown in a white-knuckled fist against her chest.

Shane flipped on the floor lamp that stood in the corner near the window. The scowl that took the place of surprise on his face was blacker than the night. “What the hell are you doing out of bed?”

“Oh,” Faith gasped, leaning heavily against the carved post at the foot of the enormous tester bed. She felt as limp and drained as a deflated balloon, but she wasn’t about to admit that to Shane. “Don’t bother apologizing for scaring me near to death!”

“Scaring you?” Shane said on a growl, his temper only burning hotter as he took in her pallor. She didn’t have any business climbing two stairs, let alone two flights of them! “I ought to give you the scare of your life. I ought to take you across my knee! You’re not supposed to be out of bed.”

“Pardon me for wanting to spare myself the job of filling in bullet holes in my walls,” she said dryly, shooting a pointed glance at his brand-new Smith and Wesson. “You can’t shoot Captain Dugan, you know. He’s been dead for nearly a hundred years already.”

He shoved the gun into his shoulder holster, feeling just a tad bit foolish for having pulled it in the first place. “Don’t change the subject,” he grumbled. “Dr. Moore let you come home on the condition you stay in bed.”

“Why should you care?” Faith asked, tilting her little chin up to the unmistakable angle of challenge. “You’re leaving in a few hours anyway.”

Shane’s shoulders sagged. He dragged a hand back through his hair, heaving a weary sigh as he glanced down at the floor. “Dammit, Faith, you know I care.”

“I know you’re leaving.”

“I have to.” Why did she have to make this harder than it already was, he wondered as he turned and stared out the window. The only thing he saw as he looked out was the reflection of a lonely man. “My life is back in Washington. What happened to you reminded me of that in a way nothing else could. I don’t belong here, Faith.”

“Fine,” she said, wincing as she forgot herself and tried to shrug. “Then I’m going with you.”

Shane wheeled and glared at her. “What?”

“You heard me. I’ll go downstairs and pack right now.”

“You can’t come to Washington with me.”

She arched a delicate brow in arrogant question. “No? Just you try and stop me, Shane Callan. It’s a free country. I can go to Washington if I want to.”

“Faith,” he said tightly, advancing on her, pointing a forefinger at her as if it were the barrel of a gun. “I’m warning you—”

“Warn me all you want,” she said with a sassy toss of her head. “I’m going.”

“What about the inn?”

“I’d rather be with you than the inn. Lord only knows why.”

Temper brought a rush of color to Shane’s high cheekbones and flared his nostrils. He jammed his hands on his hips just to keep from reaching out and shaking the infuriating little vixen. “Of all the damn, stubborn—”

“You’d better believe it, mister,” Faith said, her chin coming up another notch. “I’ve had it up to here with men manipulating my life. I will not let you walk away just because you think it’s best for me.
I
know what’s best for me.”