Tempestuous/Restless Heart (17 page)

“I’m better than I would have been if you hadn’t shown up,” Alex said, trying in vain to lighten the mood. She felt on the brink of shattering as she climbed out of the sports car and leaned back against the roof, stiff and trembling as she watched Christian round the front of the car.

“My God, Alex,” he whispered, his voice strained.

He pulled her gently into his arms, careful of how he handled her. He needed to hold her, to reassure himself that he had indeed gotten there in time. If he’d had any reservations left about wanting to be responsible for another person, they had vaporized the instant he’d seen Alex struggling to get free of the man who would have raped her. He wanted never to let her out of his sight again, never to let her out of his arms again.

“I could have killed him for putting his hands on you.”

“Me too,” Alex said, tears fighting their way out of her tightly closed eyes and soaking into Christian’s torn blue T-shirt. She let them come for a minute, let some of the pressure release. It seemed all right now that they were away from watchful eyes.

There was a peacefulness about the yard now. The sun had slid past its hottest point. A breeze stirred down through the woods, bringing a breath of fresh air and the lush scent of the forest. The calm of early evening hung around them, and Alex tried to absorb some of it into her, but she felt too dirty and too battered to accomplish it. Her skin crawled at the memory of what had happened and what had nearly happened.

“I hate that he touched me!” She snarled the words through her teeth, angry at the liberty Haskell had taken, at her inability to stop him, at the knowledge that the memory of those moments would stay with her forever.

“He won’t touch you again, darling. We’ll see to that.”

Alex shuddered at the thought of another trial. Memories of the last one were too fresh in her mind—the humiliation, the futility of fighting on her own, the broken faith of the people she had needed most. She couldn’t go through that again.

Christian easily read her mind. “I’ll be right there with you, love. I’ll be beside you every step of the way.” Bending his head down, he pressed a kiss to her temple.

“Ouch.”

Christian jerked back and sent her an accusatory look. “You
are
hurt.”

“So are you,” Alex pointed out, sniffing back the tears.

She raised her good arm and brushed a fingertip against an abrasion on his left cheekbone. He winced. Stepping back, she looked him over for further damage. Both knees had torn out of his faded jeans. There was blood splattered on his blue T-shirt, but it wasn’t his. His knuckles were raw where they had connected with Tully Haskell’s face.

Her own blouse had torn at one shoulder, and her jeans were dirty. Blood from a scrape on her knee had soaked a stain through the denim. “We should go to the house. Pearl will put some antiseptic on those scrapes for you. She’s thinking of turning the place into an infirmary.”

“In a minute. We need to talk.”

Alex tried to muster a nervous smile. “It can’t wait until we’re more presentable?”

“It’s waited long enough already.”

Taking her by the hand, he led her to the simple wooden bench that sat along the end of the barn and motioned for her to sit down. Alex lowered herself gingerly, her eyes on Christian as he paced back and forth in front of her. He looked like a man with a mission. Her heart pounded as she wondered whether that mission was good or bad.

In her mind there was a good chance that he would bow out of her life. Look what she’d embroiled him in! He had come looking for a woman to date, to have a few laughs with, and instead had gotten caught up in the web of her past, a past that showed no signs of fading away.

Finally, Christian stopped and turned to stare down at her, his eyes bluer than the summer sky above them. There was a tension in his chest that made breathing painful. He knew this was probably not the time or the place. He would have preferred a romantic setting. But what they had been through in the last twenty-four hours had shaken him to the core and spurred him now to say what was in his heart.

“I love you, Alex. Everything I said yesterday still holds true, but the fact of the matter is, I can’t stand to be away from you. I love you, and I want you to be my wife.”

He said it as if he expected her to put up a fight. Alex blinked at him, stunned.

“I want us to get married, buy a place of our own, and have a dozen children.”

He stared at her again, waiting for a rebuttal like a disputatious debate-team captain.

“Sounds like you’ve got it all planned out,” Alex said, watching him closely, awestruck by the determination that rolled off him like steam. People said clothes made the man, but even in tattered jeans Christian’s powerful personality radiated around him like an aura.

He ran a hand back through his hair and set his jaw at a stubborn angle. “I know you don’t want me trying to run your life, but you’re wrong, Alex. I do have a right to say whether or not you should take risks. Loving you gives me that right, because it’s no longer only your life you’re risking, it’s mine as well. Our lives are intertwined, now and forever, if I have anything to say about it. You may not like it, but there you have it.”

Alex sat for a long minute staring down at the road as cars drove past. She had come to Virginia thinking she would have no one to rely on but herself. The idea of a relationship had seemed remote, nonexistent really. Now this magnificent man was towering over her telling her he wanted her to be his wife. This untamable rake who had collected hearts all over the Western world was asking her to marry him.

“I—I don’t know what to say,” she murmured, her brows knitting in confusion as emotions swirled inside her like a tempest.

“Say you love me,” Christian whispered, his heart in his throat. He dropped to his knees in front of her, gritting his teeth as gravel bit into his scraped skin.

Alex caught her breath at the sudden vulnerability in his expression. How could he doubt she loved him? Her heart ached from loving him. “I do love you.”

“Then say you’ll marry me.” He hung on her silence, dying a little bit with every second that passed.

“I—I’m scared, Christian,” Alex said at last, the words tumbling out as the realization struck her.

Too many good things had gone bad on her. Too many dreams had ended in disappointment. Christian knelt before her, golden and tempting, too good to be true. She trembled from the desire to embrace him and from the fear that he would somehow vanish from her grasp as so many other things dear to her had.

“I’m scared.”

Christian took her hands in his. “Don’t be afraid to reach out for happiness, Alex. You deserve it. You deserve to be loved and cherished. Don’t deny yourself any longer because of the past. We have a future ahead of us.”

He was right. She’d let her past wield too much power over her. She’d paid penance for it and suffered and cried. It was time to let go, to put it all behind her and look to the future, a future with a man she loved, a man who believed in her.

Christian watched as a slow smile curved Alex’s lush mouth, and her eyes lit up with gold. He could actually feel his heart warm and expand in response. Leaning forward, he captured her smile with a tender kiss.

“Let’s go see Dr. Pearl,” he said, rising and drawing Alex up with him.

He draped an arm around her and held her close as they started toward the old farmhouse, toward their new life.

And in his heart of hearts he said,
Good-bye, Uncle Dicky, wherever you are.

The Restless
          
Heart

one

“AUNTIE DANIELLE, JEREMY SPIT ON MY
dessert!”

Danielle Hamilton quickly wiped a grimace of distaste from her face, lest Jeremy see it and catalog it away for future reference in his diabolical nine-year-old brain. Almost too exhausted to think, she leaned heavily against the white framed archway that led into the family room.

“Well, spit on his, Dahlia,” she suggested. What did she know about kids? Nothing. She’d had an easier time of it dealing with the Bushmen of Kenya. The Tibetan nomads had been less of a mystery to her. Even as a child, she had known nothing about kids; she’d been raised in a world of adults.

“I did spit on his,” declared eleven-year-old Dahlia Beauvais. “He ate it anyway.”

“Gross,” Danielle muttered as the doorbell rang. With a tremendous effort she pushed herself away from the door frame, sidestepping the carnage a plastic fighter jet had wreaked on a field of miniature soldiers.

“Hey, look out!” Tinks Beauvais shouted indignantly. The seven-year-old tomboy crouched behind a wing chair, poised to send a spaceship into the fray. “You’re in a war zone!”

“Tell me about it,” Danielle grumbled dryly.

North and South
revisited. And this time the South was winning. One world-renowned photographer from New Hampshire didn’t stand a chance against this quintet of seasoned veterans in the kids-versus-adults power-struggle game. She was seriously outnumbered. They also had an age advantage she didn’t care to dwell on. Their energy reserves were amazing. Hers were depleted. She was running on empty and the one person she had counted on to help her through this babysitting fiasco had been knocked out of commission on the first day of their mission.

She envied Butler. He was now lolling the hours away in the quiet seclusion of his quarters, happily numbed to the situation by a substantial dose of Darvon.

Lord, how the Beauvais children had rendered Butler immobile, she thought with a shudder. The indomitable Alistair Urquhart-Butler, who had run her father’s household for four decades. The man who had stood the test of time, who had outlasted Laird Hamilton’s five wives, and helped raise six Hamilton children, had finally been brought down by a roller skate. It was unthinkable. It was especially unthinkable because he had helped coerce her into coming to New Orleans in the first place.

“Aye, lass, I’ll go with you,” he’d said. “I’ll lend you a hand. You can count on me.”

All the counting she’d done on him so far was to count him out when he’d hit the polished pine floor with a bone-jarring thud.

As the doorbell sounded a second time, she glanced up, ignoring the intricate plaster moldings on the ceiling of the beautifully preserved Garden District home. Her interest was focused on an even higher plane. “Lord,” she muttered, “this had better be the nanny or we’re going to be looking at serious infractions of some of the major commandments.”

I could always plead temporary insanity, Danielle thought. In fact, it had to have been some kind of temporary insanity that had allowed her to agree to stay with Suzannah’s children in the first place. She usually made it a point to stay clear of children. She had to have been disoriented and confused or she never would have agreed to this. Suzannah had taken advantage of her jet lag. Her sister had pounced on her practically the minute she’d stepped off the plane that had returned her to the States after her yearlong project in Tibet.

“Oh, Danielle, won’t
you please
come stay with the children while Courtland and I go on vacation? They need a ‘family influence.’” Danielle mocked her sister’s plea as she continued down the hall toward the front door and her salvation. She gave a rude snort. “What they need is a drill sergeant.”

In the hall lay an exhausted heap of brown fur that had begun the day as a large enthusiastic dog of indeterminate background. Head on his paws, he was obviously reconsidering the wisdom of moving into the Beauvais house. Danielle was reasonably certain he didn’t belong there. The children had assured her he did, yet each called the poor animal by a different name. Suzannah hadn’t mentioned a dog.

Suzannah hadn’t mentioned a lot of things. In her haste to leave on her Caribbean vacation with her husband, Danielle’s half sister had failed to mention that her children were monsters. She had conveniently forgotten to tell Danielle that mere mention of the Beauvais house was enough to strike terror into the heart of nearly every nanny in New Orleans. After two days with her five nieces and nephews, Danielle doubted Mary Poppins would have been willing to take them on. The Beauvais children called for sterner stuff—the Marines, for instance.

She stepped over the dog and paused to take a deep breath and regroup her dwindling resources. It had taken nineteen phone calls to locate an agency willing to send a nanny to the Beauvais house. After being turned down by every place in town, she had resorted to going through the list again, disguising her voice and omitting the family name of the children. She didn’t want to do anything to scare this woman off. If she didn’t get reinforcements soon, she was going to have to buy a gun—for self-protection.

The ornate gilt-framed mirror that hung above the hall table told no pretty lies. Danielle groaned at her reflection. She hadn’t looked this bad after two months in the Amazonian jungle. She looked like thirty-nine had come and gone several times instead of just once. Her ash-blond hair that hung just past her shoulders looked like a rag mop. Two sleepless nights of sitting up with the baby had painted purple smudges beneath her gray eyes. She had inherited her mother’s classic bone structure—the world-famous Ingamar cheekbones, the slim straight nose, the sculpted chin. But what was currently arranged over it would have sent her mother, the renowned model Ingrid, into shock. Bags, shadows, and worry lines, a model’s nightmare.

Remnants of the lunchtime food fight between Tinks and Jeremy clung to her lavender silk T-shirt. There were two large paw prints on her khaki safari shorts. The Hermès sandals on her feet had been painted fluorescent orange by four-year-old Ambrose while she’d attempted to feed the baby strained beets.

“This woman is going to take one look at you and run,” Danielle muttered. Scrunching a handful of hair in her fist, she discovered a dried glob of beets. “No one with an ounce of sense would come near this place.”

Heaving a sigh, she pulled open the heavy oak door and her breathing stopped altogether at the sight of the person standing on the other side of the wrought-iron security door.

He was no Mary Poppins.