Leslie LaFoy (34 page)

Charles Martens. God, he hadn't even given that bit of the mess so much as a passing thought. Jackson gave the older woman a quirked smile. “Would you believe me if I told you that what happened with Charles Martens doesn't matter to me?”

“Yes, I would, Mr. Stennett,” she assured him quietly. “However, you should know that it matters a great deal to Lindsay.”

Jackson grimaced and then looked up the stairs. Was that the reason she'd been so upset? Sweet Jesus and all the saints, he silently swore as he started up, taking the steps two at a time. If it was, he should have been up these stairs right on her heels. God, he was going to have to gush apologies right and left for being so incredibly thickheaded and then somehow make her understand that he didn't give a winged-rat's ass about Charles Martens.

“I'll finish picking up the litter on the stairs,” Mrs. Beechum called after him. She chuckled and added, “We'll be able to run the house for months on what Miss Agatha left behind.”

“Send every last piece of it to her,” he instructed without pausing. “Put in a note saying the beggars thought it was all too garish for their tastes.”

“With pleasure, Mr. Stennett!”

Jackson strode down the hallway, stopped at Lindsay's door, and quickly knocked. He heard movement from inside, but it didn't sound as though it was heading toward the door. He knocked again and this time there was only silence. Taking a deep breath and willing his heartbeat to slow, he said with all the gentleness he could summon, “Lindsay, please come out and talk to me.”

“Leave me alone, Jack,” she called from the other side. “I've had enough for one night.”

From the sound of her voice, she was on the far side of the room, near the windows. He stood there, his eyes nar-
rowed as he considered the door and his options. Letting Lindsay wallow and brood wasn't one of them. He turned on his heel, went to his room, strode across it, pulled back the tapestry and opened the door connecting their rooms.

“All right,” he declared, invading Lindsay's sanctuary, “I'll grant you that it's been a helluva long day on top of a couple others just like it, but—”

“I'm going to lock that door as soon as I find the key,” she declared, coming out of the window seat, her dress hem fluttering about her ankles, and her eyes blazing.

“That's probably a really good idea,” he countered, standing his ground. “But since it's open now and I'm through it already, we might as well talk.”

She whirled around, presenting him with a view of her back. Her arms hugging her midriff, she lifted her chin and said regally, “I suppose you want to know all the sordid details. Not that all that many have been left for the telling.”

He hadn't heard that tone in her voice since the first day they met, and he realized that it was the manner she fell into when she felt threatened and uncertain. Jack took another deep breath and then moved to the bench in front of her dressing table. “Sordid?” he said softly, sitting down. “In whose eyes, Lindsay?”

“The world's,” she stated, her manner unaffected by the change in his approach. “Do you want me to expand on what Henry already supplied or would you prefer to move directly on to the general analysis?”

“I figure the past is the past,” he said gently, “and you're entitled to keep it there, if that's the way you want it. It doesn't make any difference to me.”

She chuckled wryly, the sound of threatening tears bubbling along the edge of it. “Scandal is never relegated to the past in New York society, Jack,” she said with more fervor than he expected. “Remember the smile on Winifred's face when she accosted us on the walkway? She's smiled at me like that ever since I had the sorry misjudgment to get entangled with the not-so-honorable Charles Martins.”

He held to his course. “Lindsay, you don't have—”

“Yes, I do,” she snapped, turning to face him. “You have a right to know what people are thinking every time
they see us together in public. Your reputation is being tarnished by association.”

“They're assuming that we're lovers,” he supplied, thinking that these New Yorkers were people willing to take some mighty big leaps. Not that he particularly cared where they landed, beyond the fact that it obviously troubled Lindsay. Texas might not be paradise, but at least people there weren't quick to assume, judge, and condemn.

“Of course they think we're lovers,” Lindsay said, her shoulders sagging and the imperial edge easing out of her voice. “I've proven in the past that I have no moral virtue. To assume that I've found some in the intervening years wouldn't be the least bit probable.” She sighed and shook her head. “It's amazing how men presume that their advances will be welcomed. And I get very tired of the whispering behind my back. Keeping myself isolated offers distinct comforts.”

“So that's why you turned down Winifred's invitation to the gathering at the boathouse,” he said, remembering and understanding in a wholly new light. “Do you ever go out socially?”

“No.”

“But that pretty much guarantees that you're going to spend your life alone.”

“I don't mind being alone,” she assured him. “And maintaining celibacy isn't something with which I struggle, Jack. For the life of me, I can't see what there is to recommend the marriage bed.”

He hadn't expected her to address the issue so candidly, but since she'd opened the door, he figured he might as well walk boldly through it. “Then ol' Charles Martins, aside from being a first class bounder, was a lousy lover, wasn't he?”

“I wouldn't know,” she said, adopting her regal manner again. “I don't have anyone to measure him against.”

Slow and steady, Jack.
“You and I have taken a couple of steps down the road, Lindsay. How do I compare?”

She turned her back on him again. “This is a most unseemly conversation. I'm not the least bit comfortable with it, and if you were a true gentleman, you'd drop it.”

Breathless. His question had triggered memories of
their being together and they'd taken her breath away. Jack smiled and, preparing for the long haul, leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

“Well, I figure dinner pretty much established the fact that I'm not much of a gentleman,” he said, watching her intently as he deliberately defied her ultimatum. “As for you being uncomfortable with it, Lindsay … In the first place, you're the one who insisted on laying the cards on the table. And in the second place, it's not that the matter's too delicate for your sense of propriety, it's just that dealing with it requires you to admit that your emotions can't be neatly lined up in columns of black and white.”

Lindsay stood motionless and silent for a half-dozen long heartbeats. Then her shoulders slumped and, with a sigh, she reached back to massage her neck. Jack wanted to go to her, wanted to gently take the task of easing her tensions into his own hands. Tamping down the reckless impulse, he asked, “So how do I compare to Charles Martens?”

“You don't.”

“In a good way or in a bad way?” he pressed.

“In a good way,” she admitted. She went to the window seat and sat, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her lips pursed and a faraway look in her eyes.

Jackson waited, willing to sit there with her for as long as it took for her to sort through it all, willing to accept whatever she could find to give him.

Lindsay watched the memories play across her mind's eye, heard again all the words that had been spoken. It was all so very familiar; she'd relived the debacle a thousand times before. But this time remembering was different in one significant way; she didn't feel anything. No twisting sense of shame. No stab of regret. No wave of stinging humiliation. Nothing. It was almost as though she had opened a trunk of memories that belonged to someone else.

Would the dispassion go into the telling as well? she wondered. She'd never had the courage to speak to anyone about what had happened and how she'd felt about it. Did she have the courage to now?

Lindsay looked up to find Jack watching her, his eyes
dark and somber and infinitely patient. She knew in that instant that if there was ever a person who would listen and not judge, it was Jackson Stennett. And to think that she'd told Abigail that he was the spawn of Satan. She'd been wrong. Whatever else Jack was to her, he was also the best, most genuine friend she'd ever had. She could tell Jack anything.

“At the time, I thought I loved him,” she began. “In hindsight, I realize that I didn't.”

Jack nodded and gave her a smile that clearly said he'd already guessed that much on his own. Buoyed by his ease and acceptance, Lindsay started again, not truly planning what she was going to say, but trusting it to come out as it should.

“As Henry so gallantly mentioned, there were business considerations involved. My mother's only interest in Charles as a suitor lay in his family's wealth and prestige. She believed that no sacrifice was too great in the campaign to unite the MacPhaull fortune with that of the Terwilliger-Hampsteads. But as much as I'd like to lay the blame for it all at her feet, I can't. She pushed, Jack, but I didn't dig my heels in and refuse to do as I'd been told.”

“Why?”

“Such a simple question. The answer is anything but.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth as she contemplated how to go about the explanation. Deciding that there wasn't any particular right or wrong way, she shrugged and said, “You see, Charles lavished me with attention and gifts and it was so wonderful to feel special to someone, to think that he was going to take me away from this house, away from all the frustrations and ugliness.

“I let him seduce me, believing the promises, seeing only the rainbow I thought I was going to get, and thinking that I was gloriously in love and equally loved in return. And I was so naive and trusting.”

Lindsay smiled ruefully, wondering how she could have ever been so gullible. With a shrug, she went on, saying, “When he proposed to another, I thought I'd die of grief. Only it wasn't grief at all, Jack. It was nothing but wounded pride and humiliation. I'd been a complete fool and everyone in town knew it.”

“That's the thing about our first times, sweetheart,” he said gently, quietly, staring at the floor in front of him and remembering. “At that age, I think we're not so much in love with the person as we're in love with the notion of being in love. Everyone's made the mistake, including me. Falling out of it hurts like hell.” He smiled ruefully and added, “Makes you real cautious about ever trusting that much again.”

“But you did, didn't you?” she countered softly.

He started and looked up, his heart racing, to meet her gaze.

“I'm just guessing, Jack, but I think you were married once; that your wife and child died. I think it was very difficult for you to go see Jeb and Lucy that morning and that you struggled to hide the pain of your memories the entire time we were there.”

“Apparently I wasn't too good at it,” he observed with a tight smile.

“Why did you offer to go with me, Jack? Why did you put yourself through that ordeal?”

“Babies are a part of life,” he answered, then paused to swallow down the lump in his throat. “Avoiding them makes people wonder and ask questions. It's easier just to ride it out in silence than it is to try to explain what happened.”

“I understand, Jack, and I sincerely apologize for having broached the subject and opened the door to memories that hurt you. I wasn't thinking clearly or I wouldn't have. I knew that day that you were troubled by them.”

Telling himself that if Lindsay could dig deep to be honest with him, he couldn't do anything less for her. “Her name was Maria Arabella. I was eighteen. She was seventeen, and a miscalculation on a grand scale,” he said, staring blankly at the floor, remembering and regretting. “Like you, she was a lady and I should have had the good sense to keep my distance. But, as you know,” he added wryly, “I don't do all that well with resisting impulses.”

He exhaled hard and then took another deep breath to begin again. “She was beautiful and educated and when she danced … I wasn't the only man who wanted her and there were a lot of others who had better pedigrees and prospects
than I did. But I was determined to have her any way I could get her and so I seduced her, hoping that would force her into choosing me over all the others.

“There's no way around the fact that it was a low thing to do. In looking back with older eyes, I can see that it was unforgivable. But at the time … When she told me she was carrying my child, I was over the moon. I braved her father's wrath, ignored Billy's misgivings, and happily waltzed her right up the aisle of the church.”

He chewed the inside of his mouth for a minute and then made a
tsking
sound. “I was still shaking the rice out of my hair when I discovered that wanting and having are two different things, Lindsay. We were so different. In the rush of seduction, that didn't matter and neither of us cared. It did matter, though, in the days and months that followed. We were strangers living under the same roof, sharing the same bed. We were just starting to close the distance when …” He swallowed the knot in his throat. “When she died giving birth to our son.”

He stared off, his attention clearly focused on the past, the shadows of pain evident in his eyes. Her heart aching for him, Lindsay tried to bring him back to her, calling softly, “Jack?”

“The was nothing the doc could do to save either of them,” he went on sadly. “Matthew was born too early, too small. Maria knew before she went that he wasn't going to make it. She asked me to wait to bury her until Matthew could be placed in her arms in the same casket. She said he was too little to go alone, that he'd be frightened without her.”

Dear God, how had he endured that loss? How had he gone on living? Tears tightened her throat and then welled in her eyes. She struggled to keep them from spilling over her lashes, part of her sensing that he needed her to be strong and composed so he could share the burden, part of her struggling against the impulse to cross the room and gather him into her arms, to offer him whatever comfort he needed or wanted from her.

“I realized,” he said, “as I sat there on the bed beside her, that I had grown to love her and that it was too late. I couldn't bear to ask her if she'd grown to love me, too. I
was too afraid to hear that she didn't. In hindsight, I wish I'd found the courage. I'll wonder about that the rest of my life.”