The Matchmaker (6 page)

He turned his head and glanced back the way Julia
had gone,
then
looked after Cyrus again. His hands continued to flex and clench steadily. A faint breeze
stirred the trees, and a pattern of dappling sunlight
shifted briefly over his face. His eyes reflected nothing
in the light, like the windows of an empty house.

It was late that night when Cyrus returned home from
the poker game at Noel Stanton's house, and he wasn't in the best of moods. He'd been on edge since Julia had left
him in the park, and his luck with cards had been so abnormally bad that Noel had chided him on his lack of
concentration—cheerfully, since he'd been winning ev
ery cent Cyrus lost.

Cyrus didn't care, except that it might have been
another sign of his changing luck in other ways and it
made him uneasy.

He let himself into the house and locked the door
behind him, frowning when a soberly dressed man came
silently into the hall. "I've told you not to wait up for
me," Cyrus said.

"Yes, sir."
The butler's face was impassive as usual. "A package came for you tonight, sir.
On your desk."

"A package?
From whom?"

"I couldn't say, sir. Someone rang the bell and left the
box on the doorstep. Your name was written on the box,
but nothing else."

Cyrus nodded.
"All right.
Go to bed, Stork."

"Yes, sir."

Cyrus crossed the hall to his study and went in. A
lamp had been left burning for him, and in the light of it
the wooden box on his desk gleamed darkly. He frowned
as he stared down at it, surprised to see his name hadn't
just been written on the box, it had been burned
carefully into the wood.

There was no latch on the box; the well-fitted lid simply lifted off. Cyrus set it aside, surprised again to
find a gold-handled cane inside. Real gold, he realized as he held it in his hands. This was old, he could feel it. The
handle was ornate, but the design was subtle and
exquisitely made, and the cane itself was heavy.

He saw the slip of paper a moment later, and laid the
cane on his desk with unconscious care before reaching
into the box for what he hoped would be a note
explaining the curious gift. It wasn't exactly a note, however, merely a single sentence written in the same fine hand that had burned his name into the box.

Your father wanted you to have this.

Cyrus's first thought was that this had to be somebody's idea of a joke, because Tate Fortune had never used a cane in his life, even in his last years when age
had taken its toll....

His father?

Very slowly, Cyrus sat down in the chair behind the desk and stared at the slip of paper. Then he looked at
the cane, and he was conscious of nothing except shock.

His real father?

Julia managed to remain very close to home during the
next few days, even though she risked Adrian's suspicion
by doing so. Despite his own busy schedule, he always
seemed to know if she'd gone out and often where she
had been. Any variation from her usual routine was a
virtual guarantee he would spark an explosion of questions, accusations, and cruelty. Ironically, he was most
suspicious when she didn't go
out,
apparently believing
she was more likely to betray him in his own house.

Normally, she spent no more time in the house than
necessary unless it was literally too painful to get dressed,
keeping herself as busy as possible so she wouldn't have time to think, to dread. She tried to make certain she was either very much in the public eye or else indisputably in
the company of other women, so Adrian had no grounds for
suspicion.

The tactics made her feel the constant tug of an
invisible leash, and they weren't always successful since
he was sometimes completely irrational, but it was the best way she'd found to cope with an impossible situa
tion.

After what had happened in the park, however, she
didn't dare go out. She knew that hiding in the house was only a temporary postponement, but she needed the time to try to shore up her splintering emotional barri
ers. Luckily, Adrian had decided they would give a
party—a large party—the following weekend, so Julia
was able to claim preparation for it as an excuse to
remain at the house.

In truth, there was a great deal for her to do, and since
the visible evidence of her work greeted Adrian when he
came home late each afternoon, he could hardly deny she'd been taking care of all the arrangements involved
in hosting a large social event—especially since she
made it a point to greet him with numerous questions
regarding his preferences. It was another tactic she'd
found to be generally effective; by focusing his attention
on mundane details that he had absolutely no interest in, she could induce him at times to release the pressure
inside him in small spurts of temper rather than devas
tating explosions.

"For God's sake, Julia, I don't care what you serve!"

She kept her voice brisk. "If you mean to discuss
politics either during or after dinner, Adrian, then what
we serve for the meal is quite important.'

They were standing in the foyer, alone after a maid
had bustled by with her arms full of linen, and Adrian glared down at Julia. His hat had been tossed aside the moment he came into the house; his blond hair was plastered to his scalp with perspiration, and a nerve beside his hard mouth pulsed visibly. He looked hot and frustrated; his duties as mayor were more difficult than
he'd expected. The strains of office coupled with the
intolerable heat wave gripping Richmond made his
temper more ragged than Julia ever had seen it. At least
for the moment it was just annoyance, not irrational
rage.

"Why's it important?" he snapped, loosening his tie with a jerky movement.

"In this heat, serving something too rich will just put them to sleep or make them hideously uncomfortable. No one will feel like talking, especially about politics."

"Then serve something mild and chilled—use your head, Julia." He shrugged out of his coat, scowling. "Is my bath ready?"

"Yes."

She remained where she was, watching him ascend the stairs until he was out of sight. Only then did she swallow hard and slump a little as some of the tension left her. Perhaps this would be a good night. She wasn't sure yet, and wouldn't feel completely safe until he was asleep. He could still shout for her and demand she help
him bathe, she knew. It was one of the little humiliations
he enjoyed inflicting, forcing her to handle his naked body in the most intimate manner possible. The first time he'd made her
touch
him, she had been unable to hide her loathing and distaste, and she still carried the scars of his resulting fury. Since then she had learned to do as he wished without revealing any of her emotions, to detach the part of
herself
that felt ill and shamed and degraded.

Sometimes she wondered why she didn't go mad.
Sometimes she thought it had already happened.

In the first weeks of their marriage, when Adrian's propensity toward violence had become all too dreadfully obvious, she'd been unable to hide her own shock and fear. Cowering in pain and terror from his blows, flinching from what he said to her and what he demanded of her, she had begged him to stop hurting her.

It made her nauseated now to remember, but she had. If
anything, her pleading had only made him more violent.

When she had tried to fight his anger with her own
and at least to make an attempt to defend herself, he'd
nearly killed her, and when she had withdrawn into a
frozen silence, it had been even worse. Gradually,
locked into a ghastly cycle of abuse with no escape, she'd
learned how to survive it. She had mastered all the little
tactics designed to keep him calm, had sacrificed her
independence, her pride, and her self-respect. She had
learned that when there was no stopping him, the only
thing to do was endure. The rest of the time she simply
behaved as though nothing out of the ordinary had ever
happened between them, as if their marriage was a
normal one.

God help all women, she thought
,
if hers was a normal marriage.

He had only once struck her face, knocking her to the floor, and the resulting swollen bruise had made it
impossible for her to be seen for nearly two weeks. After
that he was more careful, even in his rages.
Careful
enough to mark her where only he would see.
Whether
he feared public censure or simply valued his favored
position in the society in which they lived, she could not
guess, but it was clear he intended to keep his bedroom brutality secret.

"Julia?"

She looked around with a start,
then
smiled when she saw her sister. "How was the picnic?"

"Hot," Lissa said, stripping off her gloves as she crossed the foyer. "Whatever possessed Mark to think
today would be a good day to sit out in the sweltering
heat, I'll never know. He and the other men could at
least take off their coats and roll up their sleeves, but Susie, Helen, Monica, and I nearly smothered."

Julia frowned as she studied her sister's flushed face.
"You should go up and get out of your stays, then take a
nice, cool bath."

"That's what I intend to do. Is Adrian home?"

"Yes, he's bathing. We'll have something light and
simple for supper and a quiet evening."

"I imagine Adrian will work in his study?" Lissa asked,
starting up the stairs.

"He didn't say."

"In that case, I'll ask him at supper to give me another chess lesson tonight."

Julia kept her smile in place until Lissa was out of
sight, then turned slowly and went toward the hallway
that would take her to the kitchen. Lissa knew only one
side of Adrian, had seen only the charming face he wore
publicly. From the very first he had deliberately set out
to make her adore him—and he'd succeeded.

She had gone away to school immediately after the
wedding, and Adrian had been very careful to do
nothing to upset Lissa's favorable image of him when she came home to visit for holidays and the summer break.
When she was staying with them he was on his best,
most charming behavior and, at least until this visit, had controlled himself and hadn't hurt Julia badly enough to force her to keep to her bed. Julia still didn't know what had set him off the night of the dance, and she hadn't
dared ask. He certainly hadn't volunteered the information, and he'd long passed the point of apologizing for
what he'd done to her, but it had been Adrian who had ordered her the next morning to remain in bed.

"I'll tell Lissa it's the heat," he had said, smearing
ointment over the raw welts on her back. He always did
that, and Julia thought it was because he enjoyed
touching the marks he'd made on her flesh. "I'll tell her
not to disturb you. And if she does come in here, tell her you're feeling exhausted and want to be left alone. Do you understand, Julia?"

"Yes." She understood only too well. And when her
sister had visited her briefly, she'd been able to smile
and say that it was only the heat, she'd be better in a day
or so, and Lissa wasn't to worry. She had been careful to
make certain Lissa saw nothing to betray the lie.

It would have been a dreadful shock if she had. Lissa
thought Adrian was perfect. It was another of his deliberate little torments directed at Julia: weaving his charming spell
so completely around innocent Lissa. Julia had considered
telling Lissa the truth, but couldn't bring herself to do so.
It was not to spare Adrian, but Lissa... and perhaps
Julia herself.

Julia had had her own illusions shattered, and that
wound had been the deepest of all; she didn't want to see
the pain of it in her sister's eyes. See the dreadful
knowledge of what a man could do to a woman. Teach
Lissa what fear really was and teach her how terribly vulnerable she could be. And there was another reason she made certain Lissa suspected nothing—because of
what Adrian had promised to do. There was no place
Julia could go, no one she could turn to with even a faint
hope of protecting her sister.
Or herself.
She had no
money of her own, no friends who would take her and
Lissa in if Julia dared to leave her husband.

And who would believe what she'd suffered at his
hands? The scars on her body were faint, the result of
her wedding night and those first few weeks when his rage had been totally out of control. Since then, he had used the strap or his hands and left no permanent marks on her. Not visible ones, at least.