The Last Killiney (49 page)

She felt weakened and dizzy as the truth of it took hold, for locked in James’s arms was Paul.

Drawing in a sharp breath, Ravenna fell hard against the maid. Her knees begged to crumple beneath her. Her pulses raced, but Sarah held her firmly by the arm, whispered in her ear to be calm even as Paul gave a violent tug against James’s grip and broke himself free.

Swaying from the effort, his stocky frame straightened as he looked at Ravenna. That face she’d missed, his strong, rugged chin, his angular cheeks and his eyes, the color of the months of sea without him, that humble face she’d imagined a thousand times from memory stared at her as real and surely as James beside him. He was solid in a way her dreams couldn’t have made him, and when he said her name, the sound paralyzed her, made her insides whirl with pain and longing and unbearable bliss at the resonance, the physical feel of his tone.

He was alive!

With his hands poised at his narrow hips, he took a step toward her hesitantly. He wiped at his cheek with the back of his wrist. He gazed at Ravenna with fearful expectancy, waiting, dreading, but she couldn’t even form words for looking at him. Stunned and astonished, she could only think of how many nights she’d lain praying his death had been painless, picturing his lifeless body in her mind’s eye to drive home the fact again and again,
he’s dead, he’s never coming back and you’ll never hear his voice again
.

But he wasn’t dead. Instead, he caught her listless eyes with an asking look, his jaw shifting nervously the way it always did when he was unsure of himself.

“Ravenna,” he said, and his pale brows creased uncertainly, “Ravenna, I know you’ve been gettin’ along without me an’ that, but…”

Hearing the insecurity to his voice, she began to cry, gasping, letting the tears come over her with a vengeance, for how could he know what she’d been through without him?
You’re alive
,
she thought,
oh God, you’re alive
.

He came toward her then with unbalanced steps, his ordinary face made so beautiful by the love she saw in his expression. Soaked to the skin by the storm outside, his clothes were rumpled and frayed from traveling. His dark hair, drenched where it fell in his eyes, had grown long once more.
It needs to be cut
, she thought stupidly, but when he sank to his knees, she couldn’t move or even lift her hand to brush that hair back from his brow. She could only stare at him, sobbing as he buried his face in her stomach and wrapped his burly arms around her.

* * *

She cried for a long time, senselessly, violently, gasping in staggered breaths until she felt she’d used up the last of her soul. She bent over his kneeling form without thoughts or revelations, just this unleashing of grief as she wailed and shook, holding him to her, feeling him melt against her like an abandoned child until finally, reticently, he drew himself up and got to his feet.

Then she saw the scar. Running the length of his jaw from his right ear to the cleft in his chin, it was as if his neck had been slashed in a clean, meticulous line. She shuddered with the sight. Unable to keep herself from reaching out, she traced the trail of it through the shadow of his beard. But as the tears rose up inside her again, she couldn’t form words to ask, couldn’t guess what had made that scar or how he’d survived it.

Behind her, she heard the servants retreating. James whispered to Sarah, Megan moved in swishing strides up the main staircase, but there seemed only Paul standing before her, staring at her as she stared at him. Her throat was a rasp of crying as she slid her fingers up the front of his shirt. Unbuttoning it, feeling desperately inside for the tawny hair, she searched beneath until she’d found exactly what she’d feared she would—scars, left by gunshot and painfully thick, riddling his stomach and now-thin side.

He stood placidly while her hands moved over him. He gazed at her with weary eyes, but all she could see was that burning of his soul she remembered so well, ripping at her grief, tearing it asunder as the nearness of him, the overpowering presence he had made her head swim with a desolate passion.

Raising her hands to his stubbled face, she leaned closer. His shoulder-length hair slipped down between them when gently she touched her lips to his. Warm and unsure, he responded clumsily at first. He barely nuzzled her, as if he couldn’t allow himself to trust her affection. Then, in a slow and drugging caress, he began to kiss her, parting her lips, pulling her closer in a feverish embrace until she was drowning in the feel of his solidity.

When at last he slipped his cheek to hers, Ravenna was trembling in the shelter of his hug. “We’re all right now,” he told her reassuringly. “We’re together, we’re gonna be OK.”

Holding her near, those strong arms rocked her back and forth in a shuffling of boots, calming her, quieting her down. When at last she had, she heard James’s voice behind her. He was whispering to Sarah. Sarah whispered back.

Then Paul stroked away the hair from her face. Putting his mouth gently to hers for one last kiss, his gaze shone with reverence when he spoke. “You’re still mine, yeah?”

Staring at him in disbelief, letting her love for him well up in her heart, she lifted a trembling hand to show him the malachite ring on her finger.

Solemnly, he nodded. “You didn’t get the letters, did you? I sent three letters when I couldn’t get out of Mexico myself, I couldn’t sail with these fellahs, they’d too many men, and I—”

“Christian got the letters.” That image burned in her thoughts, the way he’d walked into the afternoon traffic with the rain coming down on his choirboy head. If only she’d looked at that letter in his hand, if only she’d seen its rain-smeared words in Paul’s messily written hand.

“And the watch?” he asked. Flash of anger in his eyes. “He’s lied about the watch as well?”

She pushed back the memory and the rage that went with it. “He said,” and she swallowed, trying hard to manage the words, “he said he never saw you, that he didn’t know anything about it or where you’d—”

“He knew,” Paul grumbled, shaking his head. “I gave him that watch because I knew he couldn’t stand t’keep it to himself. I thought when you saw it, you’d get the truth out of him, that maybe James would come lookin’ fer me.”

“In the same Indian village?” James’s words, from somewhere behind them. “You helped him escape and you knew he’d lie?”

“I’d
no idea
what she’d do without me. It took me five weeks t’get out of that godforsaken place, do you know that, Ravenna? Five weeks. You could’ve been tryin’ to top yourself every single day, for all I knew. I
had
to send him. I had t’take the chance he’d mistreat you or…”

His voice trailed off, for on the stairwell behind them came the clatter of shoes, Megan’s shoes. With her skirts hiked up and panic in her eyes, the girl hurried downstairs toward James and Sarah, and when she turned to Ravenna and pressed her hand, Ravenna felt a surge of dread.

“What is it?” James asked, searching the girl’s frightened face. “Where’s the baby as I told you?”

Megan didn’t answer right away. Instead, she broke into miserable tears, and Ravenna was petrified.
My son
, she thought,
something’s happened to Eli
.

Then she saw the blood on her hands. “It’s Lord Launceston,” Megan cried, tugging desperately on Ravenna’s fingers. “He’s ill, he’s
very
ill—”

Ravenna didn’t yield to her. At the mention of Christian, she stood there numbly and the fear she’d had for her child drained away and collected within her, merging and pooling with that hatred, too long dormant and flourishing in her heart for
him
, for Christian and what he’d done. She thought of his Indian stories, designed to make her convulse in tears. She thought of the glee with which he’d smashed Paul’s watch. The lies, the shame so full and blatant in Christian’s eyes, and all the while he’d known,
he’d known
that Paul lived.

As if from a distance, she watched passively as the girl struggled, as she pleaded for help, and still Ravenna felt nothing, only Paul’s weight against the front of her and that vengeance swearing in her battered soul. “So he’s ill,” she said finally. “So what.”

“But he’s
dyin’!
He hasn’t another moment if you don’t come to help, oh please you
must
come,
please
, m’lady—”

Ravenna turned away, toward Paul and his comfort. “I don’t care,” she said, slipping her fingers around his waist. Anything she should have felt or might have with such words as
death
and
Christian
had been crushed by the weight of Paul’s blue eyes, and pressing close to him, she ignored the girl’s babbling. The warmth of Paul’s throat seemed surreal, his hands a sedative, and folding against him in quiet surrender, she closed her eyes tight. “I didn’t want to marry him,” she murmured, sliding her hands up his broad, silky chest. “You believe me, don’t you? How could I have known you weren’t really dead?”

Far from accusing as she felt she deserved, his voice was gentle. “You couldn’t,” he said, stroking back her hair. “Whatever he’s done t’you, it’s my fault, not yours. I’m the fellah who got himself killed, remember? I’m the one who was daft enough to trust him.”

“But I
married
him—”

“Ravenna, what you do after I’m dead, it’s completely up to you. Don’t you remember me tellin’ you that? Isn’t that what you promised me before the voyage began, that you’d put me aside and get on with your life?”

She remembered that night at St. Paul’s Cathedral, the first kiss between them and the way he’d been so terribly nervous, awkward in letting his hands explore her. Thinking of it now, she started to cry, shivering as he held her tighter in his arms.

“Do you remember?” he asked.

She wanted to answer, opened her mouth to say yes, they’d agreed and all those months she’d tried so hard to do as he’d asked, but no sound came out. She nodded instead.

“You promised,” he said, “so all you’ve done is keep your promise to me, yeah? Whatever you’ve done with him.”

But Megan was tugging on Sarah now, begging in a small voice for someone, anyone, to help Lord Launceston, and hearing the girl’s dismal pleas, Paul gathered up Ravenna from his chest with a sigh. “All right, then,” he whispered, “let’s calm down and go see what he’s—”

“
No!”
She didn’t mean to, yet she blurted it out, paralyzed at the idea of being led to that bedroom, of seeing that hateful countenance which reminded her so much of how Paul had nearly, needlessly died. As Paul turned toward the stairs, she locked her hands around his big, burly arms. She held fast to him, desperate to keep him there.

Seeing the way she refused to go, Paul glanced at James. Grim and removed, James didn’t respond. He stood against the dark oak wall, hands in his pockets, head tipped back, and as Paul pried Ravenna’s fingers away, James merely watched, as if he’d expected everything that happened.

When finally he gave up and embraced her, Ravenna was crying, wanting and wishing in her blackened heart that Christian would suffer brutally, that he’d die upstairs before anyone could make them speak. “I won’t,” she murmured, feeling Paul’s lips touch a kiss to her forehead. “I can’t, I just can’t.”

Paul tried to soothe her, but like an oil slick of memories, Ravenna saw Christian’s wide, liquidous eyes, heard him say it again and again,
You’re so beautiful
, while the stroke of his finger slipped from her mouth.

Despise you, hate you, wish you were dead
.

But tearing her from it, Paul’s hands were warm all down her back. He pressed nearer still, and she couldn’t help listening to his voice, feeling its resonance where she buried her face against his neck. “He’s dying, Ravenna,” he said to her softly. “Whatever he’s done, it doesn’t matter now.”

“How can you say that?” She glanced up, pushed her fists into his ribs. “He
should
die for what he’s done to you!”

“Sweetheart, you’ve never wished anybody dead.”

“But he left
you
to die, didn’t he?”

“That’s right, and if anybody wants t’kill him, it should be me, shouldn’t it?” Paul looked at her knowingly, shaking his head. “Honey, I know what’s been going on here, James told me as much. I know how you love him—”

“Love him?”

“—And if you don’t go up there, he’ll die and that will be the end of it. God’s givin’ you your chance t’make peace with him. That’s more than some people ever get, after the last year without me you should know that.”

“But I hate him.” She gritted her teeth, sobbing with the anger, “I could never love him, not the way I love you.”

“Maybe not as much, but you do, you’re a pushover for misery the same as me, and if there’s ever been a miserable bastard, he’s it. I mean,
come on
, he’s the king of the miserable bastards, don’t you think?”

Resisting that tone he sought to persuade her with, she didn’t answer. She let the tears blur her vision until finally the charm faded from Paul’s haggard face and pain, for her, for both of them together, sharpened his voice to a husky whisper. “You’ve been through hell, haven’t you?”

When she nodded, he put his rugged chin to hers. Like a familiar reach of heaven, he covered her mouth with a tender kiss, and tracing the curve of her lips, warm and urgent and desperately loving, he crushed her to him, bent around her in a swirl of devotion until it seemed to Ravenna he’d infused in her the strength of his will, all the seas he’d crossed, the ropes he’d hauled on without regret. The caress of his lips was everything, and she didn’t care about Christian then. Nothing mattered but to have Paul’s hips beneath her hands, to pull him close, to feel his breath against her face as he drew back and looked at her with unfathomable love. “He’ll never hurt you again,” he whispered.

She was glowing with what he’d just done, but she managed to say it, to confirm that trust. “I know,” she mused.

“So will you talk to him for me?”