Samantha James (12 page)

A splinter of shock tore through her. Scalded inside, stricken, Anne nearly stumbled back beneath the onslaught of his gaze.

His statement stopped her cold. The ground seemed to cave away beneath her feet. Fraught with confusion, doubt swelled, then receded like the ebbing of the tide. No, she thought. She was mistaken. She couldn’t possibly have heard him right.

The moment of weakness passed. She flung up her chin, fixing him with a blistering stare.

“I do believe you’ve taken leave of your senses. I am your wife, Simon.
I
am your wife.
However much you dislike it. However much you did not wish it…”

Her voice trailed away, for he didn’t say anything. He just stood there, his features closed and taut. The very air between them seemed to thunder and pulse.

Then his eyes flickered. Something sped across his face. Something that made her face go bloodless. Her brain scrambled, as if to take hold of what he’d just said. Her mind still rebelled, but her heart…

Her gaze climbed high, colliding with his. She stared at him, stared until her eyes were glazed and tear-bright, her insides twisted into a sick knot.

“My God,” she said, her voice half stifled. She pressed tremulous fingers against her mouth. “My God! Do you mean to say that you—”

“Yes.
Yes
.”

Her mind balked. It was beyond comprehension. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t even breathe. Scalded by his harshness, she struggled for composure.

“Damn you,” she said unevenly. “Damn you!”

Hot, burning shame washed over her; in its wake surged a biting fury. She reacted without thought or care. Her hand shot out. She slapped him. She slapped him as hard as she could, relishing the sting of her palm across his cheek, the white mark on his skin.

His lips thinned, but he said nothing.

“Does Alec know?”

“Yes.” His tone was curt.

“You told my brother and not me?” Incredulous, she longed to slap him again!

It was as if a shade had been drawn over his eyes. His eyes revealed nothing of his thoughts. “I told him I would handle it. I felt it was something you should learn from me.”

“Did you now! And when—exactly—did you plan on telling me?”

A dull red flush crept up his neck.

Anne was sick, sick to every corner of her heart, clear to the depths of her soul. “Is this why you shut me out? Is this why you hate me?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

An almost hysterical laughter bubbled up inside her. “You bastard!” she burst out. “When did they die?”

Silence lapsed, a silence that was never-ending. “Five years ago,” he said finally.

“How?” She shook her head. “Were they sick? Ill?”

A muscle jumped in his cheek. “No.”

“How then?”

“I will answer your questions, Anne. But not here. Not now.”

She sensed the darkness in his mood, the darkness in his heart. She didn’t care. Anger vanquished all caution.

“No!” she said wildly. “I deserve to know. It’s my right to know—”

“What must I do, Anne? Beg? Plead?” He spread wide his hands. “I will. Indeed, it seems I must. I beg of you, not now!” He didn’t wait for an answer but swung away.

Her mind recorded the square set of his shoulders, the rigid lines of his back. By now he’d reached the edge of the garden.

Anne had gone rigid. Helpless fury burned inside her. Damn him, she thought raggedly. Damn him to hell!

“Simon!” she almost screamed. “Simon!”

If he heard, he gave no sign of it. The lines of his back were rigidly immobile. He did what he was so adept at doing.

He walked away.

Anne didn’t go down to dinner. Audrey, her maid, brought her a supper tray. Anne refused it. The thought of food made her physically ill.

A knock sounded a short time later. She pretended she didn’t hear.

The door swung wide. Simon stepped inside.

Anne huddled on the window seat, her knees drawn tight to her chest. Outside a heavy gray drizzle had begun to fall.

When she saw who her visitor was, her lips thinned into a straight line. Deliberately she averted her face.

“Go away,” she said coldly.

He didn’t. She could hear his soft footfalls on the carpet.

She looked at him, her eyes ablaze. “Didn’t you hear? I don’t want you here. I don’t want to see you. Surely you understand when someone says they wish to be alone!” She took a certain relish in hurling his own words back at him. Ah, but it was bravado, sheer and simple. Inside, Anne’s composure dangled by a thread.

He stopped before her.

“Very well then,” she announced. “It appears I shall have to go elsewhere.” She tugged at her skirts, swinging her legs to the floor.

Simon studied her. “Anne, I know that you—”

“No!” she burst out. “You don’t know. You don’t know anything! You know nothing of me! What I think, what I want, what I feel! What my favorite color is, whether I prefer coffee or tea—”

“Tea. Two lumps of sugar, an ample dollop of cream.”

She was so outraged, so indignant, her color was as high as the angle of her chin. And somehow, Simon just couldn’t help it. He simply could not.

One side of his mouth curled up in a glimmer of a smile.

“Och, don’t you dare laugh at me!”

“Your Scots is showing, Anne.”

She shot up from the cushions. But Simon was there before her, strong hands curling around her shoulders.

She tried to push her way past him. He wouldn’t let her. She was ever moving. Ever changing. So passionate. So full of life. Like the color of her eyes, he thought, changing with the light, with her moods. So damned expressive.
Too
damned expressive.

She wasn’t one to hide what was in her mind, her heart. Her anguish lay nakedly vivid, her eyes shadowed and dark and shimmering with tears.

“Anne,” he said softly. “
Anne.
”

She burst into great, wrenching sobs.

Her desolation caught at his insides. His conscience stabbed at him. Some nameless emotion surged in his breast. He couldn’t have turned his back on her if the world had stopped spinning this very moment. And he didn’t. His arms crept around her, bringing her close. He held her shaking body tight against his form, her head notched beneath his chin, aware of her tears seeping into the hollow of his throat.

What was he to say? How could he explain? He deserved her wrath, not her understanding. He deserved her rage, not her compassion. The words had slipped out unthinkingly, before he could catch them, before he could stop them.

She should never have learned about Ellie and the boys in such a manner. The blame was solely his. Lord, but he was a fool!

His mouth rested on the baby-soft skin of her temple. Her hands lay coiled against his chest. She was leaning against him. He wondered fleetingly if she was even aware of it.

“Forgive me, Anne. I should never have said what I did.”

He drew back, his eyes roving her face. Tears glistened on the ends of her lashes.

Framing her face in his hands, he skimmed the dampness from her cheeks, running his thumb across the fullness of her lower lip.

He pulled her tight against him once more. “Christ, I’ve been an ass,” he muttered.

“An astute observation.” Her tone was muffled against the front of his shirt. Simon knew the exact moment she recaptured her control. He felt the deep, jagged breath she drew. Soft, plump breasts brushed against his chest as she inhaled, then exhaled. His belly tightened. He put it from his mind, for that was dangerous territory where neither his mind—nor his hands!—dared trespass.

Slowly, she drew back. Her eyes caught his.

“Simon,” she said, a slight quaver in her tone, “I swear I do not mean to make you hurt. But there’s so much I don’t understand. So much I don’t know. So much I
need
to know.” She hesitated, then laid a tentative hand on his forearm. “Your wife, Simon.” She gave a tiny little shake of her head. “I—I don’t even know her name.”

Simon went utterly still inside. Her eyes sought his, wide and liquid, her regard unwavering. He recognized it for what it was, an entreaty.

His gaze shifted to the small, white hand curled beseechingly on his sleeve, then slid back to her face. A vague sense of unreality slipped over him, a weary bleakness. Very gently, he disengaged himself, moving to stand before the window, where he stared out into the thin curtain of mist.

He did not turn. “Eleanor,” he said finally. “I called her Ellie.”

He sensed Anne’s nearness, even before he saw her from the corner of his eye. She stood to his left, hovering less than a step away.

“And your sons? There were two?”

The pitch of his voice was very low. “Joshua was the elder. He was four.”

“And the younger?”

Emotion tightened his entire body. He fought a halfhearted battle against it, only to give in, for what was the use?

His hand lifted to the window. Slowly his fingers splayed wide against the foggy pane.

A sad, aching remnant of a smile touched his lips.

“Jack,” he said softly. “His name was Jack.”

Anne stared at him. A half-formed suspicion spun through her mind. She sucked in a star
tled breath. Oh, but it was all beginning to make sense. To fall into place…

Anne had no conscious recollection of moving. One moment she was behind him, the next beside him. She longed to touch him, but somehow she didn’t quite dare.

“Tell me what happened,” she said quietly.

Silence drifted. For the longest time, he said nothing. His eyes grazed hers, then slid away.

“The day of your arrival,” he said. “Do you recall the manuscript pages you found in the library?”

As if she could ever forget! “You’re a collector?”

“I was,” he corrected. “From a very young age my parents instilled in me a love of all things written. When I was seven, my father gave me my first journal. I wrote in it daily. Quite faithfully, especially for one so young. My father had a small collection—I began my own a year later, when my mother gave me a diary penned by a general in the war against the Colonies. By the time I was in my twenties, my collection was rather extensive. Prose, poetry, books in Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon. It was quite varied, actually—correspondence, a vicar’s sermons, personal memoirs, even a book of magical spells. I was quite passionate about it. To me they were implements of history, the chance to learn about the characters and attitude of our predecessors and the world in which they lived.
It was a love I hoped to pass on to my children.”

There was a faraway look in his eyes. It was almost as if she could see him slipping back through the pages of time.

“It was clear that Joshua would ever be the more studious of the boys. On his bureau was a book of rhymes. Every night when he climbed into bed, he insisted that Ellie or I read to him. He would not sleep until we did.”

Ellie
. There was no question he’d loved her deeply. There was a resonance, a tenderness in the way he said her name.

“Joshua recited each and every rhyme by heart. He’d even begun to read a little—and he had only just turned four.”

“And Jack? What was he like?”

There was a heartbeat of silence. Something painfully acute sped across his features, something that made her throat constrict.

“Jack was a year younger than Joshua,” Simon said slowly. “He was…oh, I don’t mean to sound trite! but Jack was the happiest child in the world. He rarely cried, even as an infant. And Ellie always used to say that he did not smile, he beamed. I swear, it was true! He was always moving, always exploring.” He paused, then said quietly, “They were beautiful little boys.”

“I can only imagine,” Anne murmured. Vivid in her mind was a family bound by love and
laughter and life, much like her own. And she couldn’t help but think of Caro and John, Jack and Izzie.

“You mentioned your collection,” she said.

He nodded. “I’d just purchased the last, final pages from an illuminated manuscript, a fourteenth-century Gospel. I’d been trying to track it down for several years. I even made the trip to Ireland, to the monastery where it was completed. The workmanship was unlike anything else in my collection. We’d gone to the village to fetch it—the vicar had collected it for me when he was in London. I remember holding the pages in my hand, basking in my good fortune. The vellum was so fragile, yet the colors were so vibrant. Hundreds of years old, and it was mine, my most valued—and valuable—acquisition to date.

“It was my intent to wait until the next day to fetch it. I couldn’t. I was eager to see it, so we left home in the afternoon. We stayed for supper with the vicar, so it was early evening when we set out again for Rosewood. Ellie wanted to take the barouche, for it was the warmest day of spring thus far in the year, and so we did. She was laughing when we left the church. She had the most wonderful laugh, full and pure and sweet. ‘I suppose you’re feeling rather pleased with yourself,’ she said.

“And I was. It was such a glorious day. Life was good. Life was more than good, I thought.

God had granted us two sons thus far, strong, sturdy boys I was certain would grow tall and hale and hearty. I was ecstatic over my find; my precious pages were safely stowed in a satchel tucked under the seat. Joshua and Jack were playing in the back of the barouche. The weather was divine. Oh, there were a few clouds when we left the village. Nothing to be troubled about, I assured myself.”

There was a spatter of rain against the window. Simon’s eyes were fixed on some far distant point. Anne was aware of the long, deep breath that Simon took.

“We turned onto the road that climbed from the village. Thunderheads began to creep in from the north. I urged the horses onward a little faster. At the top of the hill, Ellie glimpsed my frown. I didn’t want to worry her. I assured her we’d be home long before the storm hit.”

“But you weren’t?” Anne guessed.

“No,” he said very quietly. “It approached at an alarming rate. Ellie had gathered the boys around her. She sang to them, so they wouldn’t be afraid. The sun”—he shook his head—“it seemed to vanish in a heartbeat. The clouds closed in…so very quickly! Ellie and the boys were shivering. A stinging wind had begun to blast. By then we were racing, racing the clouds, racing the wind. The bank of clouds swirled, almost directly overhead. There was a huge
flash of lightning. Ellie jumped. Joshua saw it. His eyes were huge. And Jack…Though he was younger, he was fearless. He wasn’t even frightened.”