The Darkest of Shadows (51 page)

“Oh, Lilly.” Lawrence gripped my hand in his.

I swallowed painfully. “I fell asleep. They told me not to go, they said it was stupid, but I didn’t listen. I was warned. It was my choice to leave, my decision to put them all in danger.” My gaze met his, and I waited for the horror to show on his face, but it didn’t. “The car ran off the road and hit a tree. The passenger side caught the full impact and both Harry and Rowan were killed instantly.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” Lawrence said the same words that everyone else had been telling me for the last five years, but strangely, him saying them had a much greater impact on me.

“My choice,” I reminded him. “If I’d listened, if I’d stopped to think about what I was doing rather than just wanting the easy option, then they’d all still be alive.” I shrugged. “My decision, my act, my fault.”

He moved up the bed so that he leaned against the bed head; then he pulled me into his arms.

“I woke up in the hospital the next day. I had a broken collarbone, three broken ribs, and a severe concussion. I was five months pregnant,” I added sadly. “Four days later, I miscarried a baby girl. Her name was Charlotte.”

His arms tightened around me, and he kissed the top of my head while I sobbed quietly in his arms.

“A week later I buried my husband, my son, and my baby daughter.”

He held me while I cried. We lay there for a long time; neither of us spoke, the pain for me was too great to do anything but cry. I had never spoken the story aloud, and I found that although it hurt—it hurt an enormous amount—it also felt like a weight had been lifted from me by voicing it all aloud.

“I wanted to go with them,” I continued later. “I loved them so much. Harry was the love of my life. He was the kindest, most gentle man that I knew, and he loved me so much. But he left me behind. He and Rowan left me, they took my baby girl, and they all left me. All I had was the pain.

“My doctor gave me drugs, but all they did was make me worse. I couldn’t function, I couldn’t think or reason, I was like a walking zombie. I guess that’s when everyone decided I was crazy. They sent me to a shrink and then to a support group.” I sighed at the memory. “I had to listen to other people talk about their loss and their depression and how much they hurt. I didn’t want to talk to them, I didn’t want to talk to my shrink, all I wanted was to join my family—or to forget they ever existed.”

“Did you ever try and join them?” Lawrence asked quietly.

“Did I ever try to kill myself?” I knew what he was asking. “No. Because I believed that I deserved the pain I was feeling. I had killed my family, and I couldn’t kill myself, because that would be cutting my sentence short.” I paused. “But then one of the women in the support group, she did. Her daughter died of cancer, and she couldn’t cope. She threw herself off a cliff. She ended her pain, but she didn’t cause the cancer, so it was her right to be allowed to cease to feel anything anymore.”

“Do you still believe that?”

“I’m not sure what I believe now,” I admitted. “You have confused the way I feel about a lot of things.”

“In a good way?”

“Possibly.” I honestly wasn’t sure. “When I couldn’t take away the pain, I decided that the only thing that I could do was to forget that life ever existed. I shut away the Lilly who had been married and had children and I became someone different. I had no past, and I had no future. I knew no one, I cared for no one, and I would never, ever, ever love anyone again, because of one thing I was absolutely sure: I could not survive the death of someone I loved again.”

“That’s when you left Australia?”

“I packed up everything, left no forwarding details, and moved to England. My family couldn’t understand. They thought I was crazy, more crazy than normal. They tried to get me to go back to my shrink, they wanted to send me to a home, to a crazy people’s home.” I shuddered at the memory. “But I wasn’t crazy. I was just scared and doing the only thing I could to get through each day.”

“What happened?”

That had been a horrible few weeks for me. “I was lucky in the end that my doctor agreed with me and not them,” I told him. “He warned them against forcing me into a home and suggested that we give this a go, and as long as I promised to keep in touch with Reed, then they would let me try it my way for a while. So I flew as far away as I could. I got a job with Patrick at Cartright & Nagel and found that I could manage. I spoke to Reed every day, and I think that helped us both. She finally got used to the idea of me being away, and I eventually learned to function among the rest of society.”

“I imagine it wouldn’t have been easy,” Lawrence admitted. “That was a huge leap. You have such strength and courage, it sometimes astounds me.”

“It wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever done, but neither was it the hardest,” I told him. “I wasn’t comfortable around people for a long while, but they eventually got used to me. Some were more persistent than others, but they gradually accepted that I wanted to be left alone, that I didn’t want to know about their lives, and they would never know about mine. I didn’t date. I didn’t do work functions, unless Patrick made me, which was never a fun experience. I approached everything with a transient attitude, short term, temporary, nothing was concrete for me. I had to be able to walk away. It couldn’t be real. I convinced myself that everything was just a game, and it wasn’t me. I kept everyone at a distance, most especially men.”

“All except Patrick,” Lawrence corrected.

“Originally him, too,” I corrected. “I accepted the job because I knew that Patrick was married. It was only a few months later that I found out he was getting a divorce. I would never have taken the job if I had known that. The fact that we did end up sleeping together wasn’t technically an accident, but it definitely wasn’t planned from the outset.”

“What happened?”

“I’m not exactly sure, but I think at some point my body recognized that I needed to touch another human,” I admitted. “I didn’t care for him, no more than as a friend, which I told him right from the start. But I was so careful in everything that I did that I never touched people, not emotionally, not physically, and after three years I needed to be touched.”

Lawrence was silent for a moment. “Do you know that it has been proven that a young baby will die if it isn’t held enough in the first few months of its life?” he said, with sadness in his voice. “Everyone needs to be touched, Lilly. Don’t be ashamed of that.”

“I trusted Patrick.”

“He’s a good man.”

“He deserves better than what I could offer him. That’s what I told him when we talked in London. Patrick loves with everything on the surface, no secrets, no barriers, but I couldn’t offer him that, and he couldn’t understand why. Love to him is simple. I’m not simple, and a relationship between us would never have worked.”

“Something I’m immensely grateful for.” Lawrence kissed the side of my neck.

“I never wanted my relationship with Patrick to be out in the open,” I explained. “It wasn’t something that I was ashamed of, but I knew that other people wouldn’t understand, and they would read more into the situation than actually existed.”

“That first time I met you, were you sleeping with Patrick then?”

“No.” I shook my head. “That didn’t happen till a few weeks later.”

“But you were sleeping with him at the Awards night?”

“Yeah.” Then I asked my own question. “Did you buy Cartright & Nagel just to get me in your bed?”

Lawrence’s arms tightened around me. “Part of it, definitely, but I never would have followed through with it if the business deal hadn’t been worth it.”

“Did you really expect me to say yes?”

“Honestly?” he answered. “Yes. You have to remember the sort of women I was used to dealing with. No one said no to me, Lilly,” he reminded me. “Any other woman would have jumped at the chance to share my bed.”

“But not me.” I laughed quietly. “That must have been a shock to you.”

“You have no idea how much my ego deflated that day,” he huffed.

“Do you understand why I acted to way I did?”

“I do now, but only because I understand you, I know you. Back then I assumed too much. I knew a little about you, but not enough to predict how you would react.”

“Hmmm.”

“Why did you finally accept?” he asked.

“Because you gave me a way to escape Patrick,” I explained. “I had already made the decision to leave, I was going to move away, but I found that I really didn’t want to. I liked London, and I didn’t want to relocate, and then you found me in the park and made me an offer that sounded perfect. A trial. If I didn’t like it, or you, then I walked away. Surprisingly, I found myself agreeing.”

“I’m so glad that you did.”

“So am I.” I threaded my fingers through his as they rested over my stomach. “I don’t know how it happened,” I admitted. “I certainly made every effort to not fall in love with you. It crept up on me. I knew that I cared for you, and I convinced myself that I was allowed to have that much, but I would never have admitted that I loved you. I would never have allowed myself that.”

“What made you realize?” he asked. “Was it something Isobel said?”

“Not really, but it was in that moment that I realized I was actually in love with you,” I told him. “She isn’t a bad person; she is just trying to be the wrong sort of person. She thinks that she should be like all the other women who throw themselves at you, the sort of person that you once thought I was. I tried to explain to her that she can never compare in a field like that, because there will always be someone prettier, someone new who comes along. If she wanted to stand out in your world, if she really wanted to know Nicholas, then she should try to be herself. Nicholas would never let her know who he really is, unless he could respect her, and as it was, there wasn’t much to respect about the image that she was portraying.”

“You’re going to start a new trend of independent, extraordinary women,” he predicted.

I shrugged. “I doubt that.” I wasn’t sure that Isobel was strong enough to break away from the stereotypical society bride. “She couldn’t understand that I didn’t care what you were, she can’t see the difference between what you are and who you are,” I explained. “I told her that I didn’t care what you did, what influence you have, what power you had, that I loved the mind inside the body, I loved the person no one else knew. If you lost it all tomorrow, I would still love the man, not the private jet.” I snuggled closer to him. “It took me a minute to even realize what I had said. It all came out so easily, probably because I was in shock about Dad, but it just spilled out, and then when I realized I’d actually admitted that I loved you, I broke down and ran.”

“I followed you.” He kissed my shoulder.

I smiled. “I noticed.”

“How do you feel about loving me now?”

I searched through my heart and mind and rationalized the truth. “It hurts less today than it did a week ago.”

He didn’t take offense to the word “hurt.” He understood what I meant, and it was OK. “Do you think that it might continue to hurt less each day?”

“I think that it will hurt a lot more to walk away from you, which is my only other option, so I think that I will learn to deal with the fear and just hold onto you all the more tighter.”

“What is it that you fear?”

“Losing you. That you will leave me like Harry did.”

“Harry didn’t leave you, Lilly,” Lawrence corrected. “He was taken from you; it was his time, and there is a whole lot of difference between the two. I won’t ever leave you. I can’t promise that my time won’t also come up, but that is God’s will, and neither of us can fight against it.”

“Just thinking about it makes my blood run cold,” I admitted.

“What can I do to help?”

“Nothing.” This was my problem. “I just have to learn to deal with it. To compartmentalize it, so that I can push the fear away, forget about it enough that it doesn’t dominate my every waking moment. I can’t promise that it will ever go away. I’m pretty sure I’ll always fear losing you, but I can try to work around the fear, so that it’s not a part of our everyday lives.”

“OK.”

“There’s something else that you should know, too,” I said. I wasn’t sure how he would feel about this; I wasn’t sure I had the right to even ask. “You need to understand this, so that you can work out if you can live with what I’m going to tell you.”

He breathed in a deep breath. “I can live with a lot Lilly, but not having you in my life is not one of them. Tell me what you need.”

OK. “I love you.” I told him. “And I love Reed and Duncan, and I love her boys, but I will never
be
them. I will never be in the happy family group. I loved Harry; I still love him. I didn’t fall out of love with him, he just left. I have a husband, Lawrence, a wonderful man, and I won’t replace him.”

“What do you mean?” Lawrence’s voice was even, but still I detected a certain stiffness to it.

“Harry was and always will remain my husband, and I love him. The old Lilly is still married to him and still loves him.” I tightened my hold on his hand. “The new Lilly loves you and wants to be with you always, but that Lilly can’t get married, because it would feel like she was betraying Harry.”

I sighed. “I’m sorry that this probably sounds stupid, and you haven’t even asked me to marry you, and you might not have even thought about it, but I just wanted you to understand before it was too late that it would never be an option.”

“You love Harry,” he acknowledged.

“The Lilly that existed before, the one that was married and had a child and lived in Newcastle with her family, she loves Harry,” I corrected.

“And that Lilly still exists inside you?”

I nodded. “She always will, to a certain extent.”

“And that’s not the Lilly who loves me?”

How could I explain this to him better? “Are you the same person that you were twenty years ago?” I asked him. “The man who loves me, the man who sits here today, is he the same person that walked onto the grounds of Harvard University all those years ago?”

“No.”

“Could that man have handled a half-crazy woman who complicated his life?” I queried. “Would he have held on as tightly as you have, or would he have walked away?”