Willoughby 03 - A Rogue's Deadly Redemption (20 page)

Misbegotten shapes of memories more frustrating than helpful.

“This is rude, even for you, Robert. After all these years, you have nothing to say to me?”

“If I could remember you, I might find some appropriate words.” The sharp response came without thought.

Startled, Robert realized he’d grown tense. His body held rigid, ready to spring. Ready to do battle in some way. How could this woman inspire such a reaction in a few seconds?

“Are you such a coward you pretend not to know me?” She gave a bitter laugh. “Is that how you live with yourself? Or how you’ve attempted to beg into Lily’s life again? As though we have no history? As though you do not owe me an apology?”

“When I regain my memory, I shall endeavor to meet your request. Now if you’ll excuse me.” He didn’t like the wound-up feeling inside his gut. He needed to find Lily.

“Just when I believed you couldn’t disappoint more,” the woman tossed after him. “You can be certain of one thing—this will not plead your case with Lily. She left you, and I will do my best to ensure that she continues on her path, all the way to America.”

“America?”

“Robert, stop playing this ridiculous game.”

Knives of pain slashed through his head, throwing him off balance. Robert put a hand against the wall to steady him. “Robert?” Her voice was closer, more tentative. “Are you all right?”

Robert felt the press of her hand against his arm.

“Say
something
. Tell me to bugger off, just say
something
.”

He shook his head, causing another rush of agony. People moving, talking, around him, to him flashed in his head.

“Brothers.” His brothers. Yes. He
knew
them. He knew their faces, their voices. With a flood that threatened to bowl him over, his gut wrenched under the mountains of arguments, unspoken anger, and disillusionment that stood between them.

Cary was dead.

Sorrow enveloped him like a throng of angry bees.

“What about your brothers?” The woman crouched lower toward him. “What in blazes is wrong with you?”

Faces. Her face. Lily’s. Moments. Night. Their wedding. Their
life
.

Through the pain, names, places, things fell like a blizzard around him. With those came an explosion of emotions, dumping on top of each other, no separation, no sense or order. He stared at this woman’s face, as though it held the final pieces of the puzzle.

He
knew
her. But in a way that made no sense… Then pieces began to fit.

“Cordelia.”

That name surfaced truths that had been kept from him, pieces he hadn’t been able to make fit. He knew, he understood.

A small sound at the end of the hallway caught his ear, and he turned.

There Lily stood.

He could hear shaking in the way she gulped air. See the way her mouth hung open. Feel the agony of her stillness.

He had, once again, failed.

“You know her.”

In that moment, Lily’s nightmares, her fears coalesced into one giant fireball growing inside her belly. It seemed as if hours passed as she watched Robert raise his gaze to hers, waiting to see what answers it held. Regret? Love? Understanding? Pity?

Dismissal?

More than anything, she didn’t want to see the look he’d given her so often over the years. The inaccessible look that had declared her part of the wall hangings. That let her know that in his world, she mattered as little as the corridors he passed through.

His eyes raised. Her breath held.

Once their gazes clicked, her heart began to pound, but his eyes provided no relief. They were cloudy, sending out waves of overwhelming uncertainty. “No. Yes. I—”

He frowned, as if trying to drag the truth from the depths of his mind. “Your sister. She’s your sister.” He pinned her with questions in his eyes. “You told me of all your other siblings. Why not her?”

Cordelia stepped forward. “
Her
is right here in this room, if you don’t mind.”

“I—” Lily struggled to find answers to his questions that wouldn’t flay open the fear that had eaten her alive in the last few days. That wouldn’t expose her as the fraud she was, choosing to ignore the distrust that had simmered under every embrace they’d shared, every kiss, every moment she had attempted to hope for their future.

But it was there, and she could no longer pretend it wasn’t. Everything they had was built upon sand, blown away by simple words.

“Would someone tell me what is going on here?” Cordelia intruded with a huff in her voice.

“This isn’t about you.” Hearing her sister’s voice, seeing her face only intensified the knots tying her gut inside out.

It was
all
about Cordelia.

“So the sister he’s pretending not to know is another? You’ve stripped me from your life, and now you’re attempting to pretend I don’t exist at all? That is how you’ll build a life together?”

“Cordelia, he lost his memories in the accident. He doesn’t remember anything.”

“He knew my name.”

Yes, he had.

Or he’d never forgotten it.

Either way, it confirmed everything Lily believed about her place in his life. Either the first sight of Cordelia brought her right to the forefront of his memory or it had been enough to make him shirk his charade.

The truth of it didn’t really matter. Either answer meant she would always come second. Always come after her sister.

Always come last.

“Why didn’t you tell me
that
detail?” Cordelia wanted to know, and it took Lily a minute to realize she meant Robert’s memory loss.

“How is my husband your concern? Unless you planned to move in the moment I left. Is that why you came back to London, Cordelia? You never did tell me.” Lily’s pain was shifting, shaping into an ugly desire to inflict hurt, until these two people hurt as much as she did inside. Whether it made sense or not, she didn’t want to be alone in this moment, she didn’t want to be the only one whose insides were melting from the scalding truth.

She looked at Robert, who grasped his head as though it might roll off. But he said nothing. He was deeply inside his own world.

“I came here to be with my family,” Cordelia said. “If you haven’t forgotten, my husband died.”

“The man you married because of his age and wealth? I’d think you’d have been dancing a jig in his honor.” The sarcasm fell from her lips, anathema to who she was and yet it seemed to shove the pain deeper and deeper, separating her from it.

“You know nothing about me. Even less about Halton.” Cordelia flinched, then drew herself up, squared her shoulders. Moved into battle position. “You have clung to your childish grudges. Rather than fight, you are leaving. You wondered why no one paid you mind, why we never realized you were in the room?” Cordelia stalked closer. “Perhaps why Robert built his own life without you?” Another step until they stood eye to eye, trembling with mutual anger. “You’ve never demanded one thing from the people you love, you’ve just accepted what was given to you. As a woman who is very concerned with her own affairs, I understand all too well how easy it is to give less than someone deserves. You ask for less, you shall receive far less than that. Rather than stand up and demand to be treated with respect and attention, you escaped into your
books
.”

“That is not true!” Lily snapped back. Her hands fisted at her side. It wasn’t about escape… “How has this turned into something about me? How did this become about my failing?”

“You booked passage to America to run away, Lily. I returned—”

“You’re going to America?” Robert interrupted, brought out of whatever pain he was in.

Cordelia continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “—to London to see what could be mended in our family. But all you are interested in is running away.”

“When are you leaving?” Robert asked.

“She leaves in four days,” Cordelia told him. “I see she didn’t share that detail with you. While she lived this fairytale of pretend with you, she didn’t let you in on her actual plans.”

“Cordelia, enough,” Lily cried. She could see everything twisting, turning, voices on both sides coming at her until she couldn’t think. This was becoming more about Cordelia and less about whether or not anything that Robert had offered her, anything that they’d shared in the last few days was real.

But who was she fooling?

No one but herself. The answers were there. Right in front of her.

“I booked passage weeks ago. Before…before all of this.” She swept her arms out in a helpless gesture. “Before you, before the accident, before…”

“So you aren’t planning to be on that ship. You are not planning to go to America.”

“Would you care if I left?”

“How can you ask that?” As his tone rose, he clamped a hand to his head. “God damn it!”

“Because I am not the one you wanted.”

“You are the one I
choose
! Not her. I told you that I didn’t remember upstairs, and I didn’t. Not until a few minutes ago.”

She didn’t believe him. She couldn’t.

“Once again, I am
standing right here
,” Cordelia snapped.

“What else do you remember?” Lily asked.

“Oh, cut to the meat, would you, sister?” Cordelia stepped forward. “Ask the question you want an answer to.” She whirled toward Robert. “The night you came to our house—”

“The night you lied,” Robert shot back.

Lily sucked in her breath. He
remembered.

He met her gaze, pleading understanding she couldn’t find. “I am starting to regain memories. Bits and pieces, but some.”

“So, that night,” Cordelia continued, “whose letter did you answer? That is the crux of this thing, isn’t it? Who you wanted that night? Before the choice was taken from you.”

Everything ached.

Lily hadn’t known pain could feel so encompassing, that it could stretch to her toes and slither around her heart and constrict so tight, she thought she’d never breathe again.

The silence stretched after Cordelia’s question—which, God help her, she wanted an answer to. She wanted to know, to have Cordelia know, that Robert had chosen
her
. Not her sister.

It shouldn’t matter, not in light of the much bigger issue of his criminal activities, but it did.

She needed to know that not everything had been only her, always her.

Never him.

Robert stood in between them, one arm warding Cordelia off, the other clutching his head, as though he was the one thing keeping them from grappling on the floor.

And perhaps he was.

Lily’s fingers curled with the urge to yank her sister down by her beautifully coiffed hair.

As every second passed in silence, the tiny, fragile tentacles of the future Lily had been building in the last days began to crack. They left a gaping hole in her chest, vulnerable, open. The shards shattered and sliced her insides with the cruel, unyielding edge of a lesson learned.

It had happened before. She had allowed it to happen again.

“Robert, I deserve an answer.” Her voice had taken on an icy tinge opposite the hot fire inside her throat.

“I don’t…I don’t know.” Robert’s hand cupped his head and his fingers grew white from the effort he must have exerted. “I can’t make sense of anything. I know tidbits. Names. My home.” His head shot up. “Our wedding. I remember our wedding.”

“That is your grand memory of our marriage.” She recalled their wedding. It hadn’t been a hopeful day.

“Lily, I am
trying
. My head is splitting. Please, give me time. I don’t know what is happening, or why.”

They stood there, with ties of tension binding them to each other. The rubble inside of her began to mold into an unyielding, cold wall.

When she looked at him, she couldn’t see the man she loved. Only the husband she’d barely known remained.

“I can’t,” she whispered. To give him her heart again, to trust that he would choose her, want her…

She couldn’t trust him.

She turned away, down the hallway.

“Lily!” His voice melded with Cordelia’s as a final stab, as they both called her. She ignored them. Put one foot in front of the other. Breathed in. Breathed out. Her legs had grown weak, and she wasn’t sure how long she could hold herself up. The pain sharpened with every breath, with every effort to think.

***

Robert stood staring at the space his wife had left.

The sureness he felt of that—his wife—jumbled among blurred memories, confusion, uncertainty, flashes that felt like talons attempting to pull him under.

His heart ached—for her, for the overwhelming flood of feelings crashing down upon him without context to where they should land. He could see snippets, glimpses, enough to make him blink to clear his vision and then the image, the person would fade.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

The words held no warmth, and Robert lifted his battered head and met the gaze of the woman who remained.

Cordelia.

Her name sent his heart pounding, tensed his limbs until he fisted his hands to contain the pressure. But even as he tried to grasp how he knew her, to grab hold of the memories, they disappeared like sandcastles culled, shaved and nicked by the wind.

But he knew her.
He knew her.

“I have to go after Lily.”

“If you think you’ll be able to salvage something of your marriage, you’re a fool. She will be on that ship for America.”

“I won’t let that happen.” He turned to leave.

“Who did you come to see that morning, Robert?” Cordelia called after him. “When you find her, this will be the first question Lily wants an answer to, so you might as well practice upon me. Was it Lily’s letter you answered or mine?”

The air around them sparked with a history unspoken.

Things were trickling back, not whole memories, but strands he could piece enough together to know his entire life had fishtailed that morning.

He
wanted
the answer to be Lily, of course it had to be her. But even as the rest of the events of that day unfolded one bit at a time, that answer eluded him. He didn’t know.

He could feel the uncertainty tugging, yanking at him—a push-pull in his body that demanded action. But what? What emotion belonged here?

What
had
he felt for Lily’s sister?

“I deserve an answer.”

He turned his head, met her gaze. “Lily deserves it first.”

“
I
came first. You met her while you were courting
me
.”

“Be that as it may, I married
her
.”

With Lily, it was simple. Every time he’d been in her presence, it had been a constant lure toward her, a need to be near her warmth, to see her smile. A desperation to be the man who brought that smile to her face. It had lifted him up.

He’d felt joy when she was near, an emotion he’d had so little experience with he hadn’t recognized it.

He was drawn to Cordelia, but those emotions stirred did the opposite. Those emotions, the detachment, the challenge of never being good enough, those had been familiar.

“Whatever I wanted then doesn’t matter now.”

“Is she a whim now, then? Be a man for once in your life and leave her alone. Let her go to America as she plans.”

“As who plans?” The words were sharp and Cordelia turned.

“Adam.”

“Who plans to go to America?” Adam turned on Robert. “Is this your doing? Are you attempting to run away from whatever mess you have created? You knew this, Cordelia?” Adam demanded. “You never said a word?”

She threw up her hands. “It was not my secret to tell. I do declare, I cannot win in this family. I am accused no matter what my actions.”