Willoughby 03 - A Rogue's Deadly Redemption (15 page)

But none of that was true.

“Lily, your silence is quite foreboding. You had best start explaining some of what’s happened.” Blythe’s tone had grown soft, but firm. “I’m worried about you. I know you left Robert. I know he was injured. But beyond that…”

“He can’t remember his life. Our life.”

Blythe blinked. “What does that mean?”

Lily shoved a piece of cheese in her mouth to give her a few minutes to think. “He thinks he might have loved me, that’s what it means.”

She hadn’t meant to start
there
.

“Explain.”

“That isn’t the worst of it.”

“All right.” The words were slow.

“He may not remember anything, but I don’t even know who he was. What he was. There were men, and they were looking for Robert. Scary men. They took me to see—Oh my God. I can’t believe I forgot—” She stopped. “Captain Keenan.”

Blythe shook her head as though it hurt. “Stop. I am completely lost. What does Captain Keenan have to do with this?”

“Does he have a brother? Perhaps one who really, really looks like him?” And talked like him. And turned at the mention of his brother’s address.

Lily didn’t want to offer such devastating news if she was wrong.

“He was an only child, I believe. But what does he have to do with Robert? And what did you mean by scary men took you?” Blythe lifted her napkin from her lap and set it on the table. “I’m going to send for Adam and Michael. Whatever is going on, they need to hear it.”

“Blythe—”

She shook her head. “No, my darling. I don’t know what your husband has gotten you into, but it will end now. Do not move.”

She hurried out the door, and Lily slumped in her chair.

Beyond her confusion at everything, she couldn’t stop thinking about Robert.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the kiss.

It had been so long, and his arms around her, his lips on hers had felt like heaven.

She had been right to leave. She couldn’t let him drag her into his world, whatever that world was. She couldn’t allow herself to unbox her heart, only to have him stomp on it again.

She spotted the paper at Adam’s place at the table. It had been an uncommon week, one free of mention. For as eventful as it was, very little had been written about Robert’s condition. His accident. It was odd.

She unfolded the paper to see if today would be any different. A gasp pulled from her throat at the headline halfway down the page.

Lord found murdered.

The name jumped out at her. Cary. Oh my God, it was Robert’s brother. After everything they’d been through yesterday… Fear jumped into her throat. Did this have something to do with what had happened to them yesterday?

She had to see him. She couldn’t let him handle this alone.

She had left a man who literally lived in blankness. A man who, if he couldn’t find his way out of that blankness, could be in a tremendous amount of danger.

Lily glanced at the door. She should wait for Blythe to return with Adam and Michael and the family meeting about the state of her life to commence.

If she did, Adam and Michael would take over. Adam would lock her in her room before letting her anywhere near Robert.

Robert seemed to think she was important to him. He thought he
loved
her.

While the logical part of her realized it was false, that she was being stupid, she believed he needed her. There was this fragile, little thread growing, wondering.

What if she had come first?

Either way, she couldn’t let him face his brother’s murder alone. She stood up from the table and hurried down the corridor, grabbed a cloak and slipped out the front door before anyone noticed.

On the porch steps, she stopped. Memory washed over her.

She had started her relationship with Robert by secret glances and conversations when no one was paying mind.

She wasn’t sure what it meant that she was doing the same now.

Robert stood in the doorway of the study—his study—and stared. He’d walked the entire house with Edwin, learning the rooms, seeing it for what he knew wasn’t the first time but nothing felt familiar.

What he did feel was Lily’s presence in every room. In the furnishings, the wall colors and papers, the way those colors matched with the furniture.

Somehow even the artwork, different pieces, by different artists, blended into one symbol of the woman he knew had chosen it all.

God help him, memory or not, but he doubted he had the ability to put together a house like this.

But not this room.

“I told you, I’ve looked in here,” Edwin said.

“You also said you’d searched the entire house. Yet here we are empty-handed.”

Edwin made a rude grunt.

“Have I ever fired you?”

“You wouldn’t survive one day without me.” Edwin moved inside.

Robert followed suit. His body hummed. If any evidence of his activities existed in this house, it was here. He didn’t know why he knew, but he did. This room was sparse—the desk, the chairs, and the table under the window functional but not showpieces by any means. The walls were lined in wood panels, creating a dark, cave-like feel. One lonely light stood sentry on the corner of his desk, as if lighting the way into the darkness.

When he stepped inside, the doorway separated him from everything else—the house, the outside world.

From Lily.

The lack of her presence in here was glaring. Obvious. He had created a place to escape her.

He walked to the fireplace, which hadn’t been lit.

“I’ll get it. I am here to do your bidding, after all,” Edwin said.

“I can manage one fire.” Robert bent to pick up wood, and felt the painful stretch of muscles still healing. He was beginning to wonder what it might feel like without the sharp reminders of pain in his shoulders, his neck, everywhere he moved.

Once the fire was lit, he sat at his desk. Put his hands on the wood, felt the bite of its hard, cold surface against his fingers. He looked at the doorway, with the corridor in full view.

It was a stark contrast, his wood-paneled cave with the cheery, friendly greens of the walls, the striped wall hangings. The flowers.

Her.

This house held a clear separation everywhere, as though lines had been drawn to position the players on either side of a battlefield. The man Robert had been, memory intact, opposite the wife who’d felt she had no alternative but to move out.

Who had drawn the first battle lines, he wondered? How long had they been there? Was she coming back?

If he wanted to see her, how would he find her? He had no idea where she’d gone.

Robert shook it off. Maybe it was for the best for now.

He came around the desk and found the drawers and papers strewn on the floor. “Did you do this?”

Edwin snorted. “Do not insult me.”

Had it been Lily? The men? Robert grabbed the drawers and set them in their slots, then shuffled the papers into a stack and dropped them on the desk.

“Edwin, you don’t have to stay.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Edwin, kindly get out.”

Edwin cocked his head. “Are you sure you don’t recall your memories? You sound remarkably like the horse’s arse I work for.”

“Some things don’t change.”

It’s who you are, memory intact or not.
Lily’s words whispered in his ear. Robert wanted to push against those words, prove them untrue. He didn’t much care for the man he was discovering himself to have been.

“You’ll stay here, not leave again without me?”

“Yes, Mother.” The needle prick in his heart was sharp, fast.

“Remind me why I don’t just let them kill you?” Edwin muttered as he walked to the door. There was no bite to his words, though, and Robert smiled at the wave of affection he felt for the burly, gruff “valet.”

With Edwin gone, he had a moment to sit back, close his eyes. Sleep was a stone’s throw away, and he ached to succumb to it.

Instead, he shook his head to clear the webs, and put a hand on the stack of papers before him. He read each leaf of parchment, each letter, each ledger. The only indication of time passing was the tightness wrapping around his neck, so he lifted a hand to rub it. Glanced up at the window, noticed how the light that hid from the room in corners had filtered, changed.

He couldn’t look at another number, so he shoved the ledgers into a drawer and turned to the drawers that hadn’t been ransacked on the other side. He opened the top one.

His heart slammed. Sketches.

Of banknotes.

He lifted them out, one after another. Then a bound book. Another. Under those was a box made of cherry wood. He lifted it out, noted its heaviness in his hand. A quick unlatching revealed charcoals, paints, brushes and other things an artist would have.

He swallowed. The tools of a forger.

He set the box aside and picked up a handful of the sketches. They were clear attempts at drawing money. Different angles and strokes, different weights for shading.

What had compelled him toward this? He couldn’t understand why his life had turned this direction. What had happened? He dropped the papers, wishing he’d never seen them. Wishing Edwin had been wrong. Then he noticed under the offending banknote drawings lay more sketches.

Faces mostly. An old, craggy man with dimmed eyes and a time-weathered, forced smile. Another was a young lad, his cheeks grimy, his grin cheeky, and a fire in his eyes that promised trouble to come.

A young woman, not beautiful but intriguing in the hollows of her cheeks, the press of her lips. Her bare shoulders, the hint of her bosom and a dull expectation that showed experience, knowledge.

There were more, at least ten, of similar style—a damn good style, at that. Where the shame had bowed his neck, pride infused his spine.

He’d drawn these. He had found ways to show haunting emotions, to show the grim faces that spoke of the less optimistic side of life.

He was an
artist
.

That may be overshadowed by the criminal intent he ascribed that gift toward, but he had a talent. He drew. He sketched.

He had some bloody value.

He picked up the sketches and began to study the strokes, the lines, the fascination of the subjects.

They did nothing however to prick his memories to life.

He set them aside and picked up the sketch book. The first few pages were unfinished drawings, lines, thoughts incomplete.

Then she was there.

Page after page. Her profile. The curve of her back as she walked away. The curl of her legs under her as she read a book in a chair. He recognized that chair. He’d seen it in the other room.

Longing began to sweep through him to see Lily sitting there. To compare the curves and shadows in the view he’d had of her as her husband to the woman she was now.

Other sketches were of her face. Her eyes. The line of her neck.

Then one of joy. Her smile, even on the page, was infectious and he felt the corners of his mouth turn. It was the only sketch in which Lily smiled. None of the others portrayed her as happy.

The book was filled with such sketches. He picked up the next book and found more. A few other drawings mixed in, but most of them were Lily.

“Robert?”

He snapped his head up.

As if summoned by his desire to see her, there she stood.

“You’re back.”

She stayed in the doorway. “I… Yes.”

When she didn’t move, he cocked his head. “Are you going to come in?”

She glanced about the room with reluctance. Robert thought back to the invisible lines he’d felt throughout the house. He set the drawings down and stood up. “Please.”

She took a tentative step in and studied the room as though she hadn’t been in it before. “It’s dark in here.”

She felt so far away. He stepped closer. “I didn’t know if you were coming back.”

“I wasn’t.”

“What changed?”

She walked past him to the window, nudged the curtains over a bit to allow in a few flickers of light. The air in the room had grown still, a pond of water that rippled with her every move. Like water, it stirred the air around them and drew them closer.

“I couldn’t leave you to deal with this alone.” She turned to face him.

“Deal with what?”

Her eyes widened. “Oh my God, you don’t know.”

Fear spiked inside. “Know what? Did something else happen?”

She moved toward him. “It’s Cary. Your brother.”

Robert breathed her in, his body aware of her every move. “He was killed, I know.”

She frowned. “You know? But…” She placed a hand on his arm, and the heat from her touch shot straight through him.

God, she was here to offer comfort and all he could think about was wrapping his arms around her.

He covered her hand with his own. “I know he’s dead, Lily. I care that he’s gone, and I want to stop the bastards that killed him. But I don’t
know
him. He’s a stranger. Do you understand? I’m not heartless.”

“I know you aren’t.”

“Do you?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Was I heartless before? The man you left?”

Her brows furrowed. “That was different. I didn’t come here to discuss that. I wanted to offer you my sympathies, be here if you needed… for whatever you need.”

Her gaze slipped from his and veered to the desk just behind him. She cocked her head, frowned. “What is that?”

He stepped aside, waved a hand at them. “See for yourself.” Anticipation wound through him. Did she know about these? What would she think? How would it make her feel?

She’d run away after he had kissed her. For some reason, he wanted to convince her that whatever she thought was wrong.

As she got close enough to see what the sketches were, she stopped. Her gaze never left them.

“What is that?” she asked again, a small crack in her voice. She reached out and picked up the book he’d left open to one of the sketches of her.

Her hand came to rest on the page, her fingers caressing the drawing. “Did you…did you do this?”

“And the rest of them, I think.”

“The rest?”

He moved until he stood close enough to feel the heat from her body. The inches between them sparked, and he leaned in. Putting his hand on the page, their fingers touched before she slid hers back.

He pushed the page over. “There.” And again. “And there.” He pushed two more, then another, and another.

She dropped her hand over his. “Stop. When did you draw all of these? How? How did you do this in the time since I’ve seen you?” Her brows were drawn together, her eyes stricken.

He shook his head. Her hand was warm and then she again retreated. “Not now. Before.”

“Before?”

“I found those in one of the drawers, Lily. I drew them before the accident.”

She slammed the book shut, almost catching his hand if he hadn’t yanked it out. “No. He wouldn’t have.”

“He? You mean me.”

“Yes, I mean you. But not you. Him. The old you. He would never have drawn these. Not of me.”

“But he did.”

She dropped the book on the desk. “He would have had no reason to draw them. We never spent time together. We led separate lives, as evidenced by whatever activities he was involved in. He didn’t want me. He didn’t notice me.” Her voice broke. “Not anymore.”

Robert grabbed her shoulders. “
I
noticed you. The proof is right there. I wasn’t a casual observer. It wasn’t an artist drawing a subject, Lily. Look at these.” He picked up the other book, and in that moment noticed the drawings of the banknotes.

His skin went cold, and he shoved those drawings under a few others. He brushed off the thought that she should see those. Instead, he opened the book to show her. “The lines of your face. Five drawings of your eyes. Three of the separate curves of your cheeks. This entire book is filled with just how much I noticed you.”

The drawings of her eyes captured their shape, their depth, and yet the emotion shimmering in them now captured him more. The book was the only thing between them.

Robert set it aside. He considered it a plus when Lily didn’t bolt for the door. His hand that rested on her shoulder drifted downward until it ran over the skin of her wrist. There, he wrapped his fingers around and laced them with hers. Tugged her to him.

When she didn’t stop him, he wasted no time and captured her lips with his. The soft intake of her breath spurred him to wrap his other hand around her waist, drawing her body against his. The softness of her lips gave way under his persistence.

Joy, need, desire and relief exploded inside of him. Her mouth opened and he sought more, pulled more from her until he felt her body begin to sag against him.