Words Spoken True (28 page)

The candle guttered, and the flame drowned in the melted wax. Darkness fell around them, but neither of them moved as if they did not want to let loose of this moment.

Finally Blake said, “Thank you, Adriane.” He stood up at last and reached down for her hand. “There are still a few hours before the newsboys come for the papers.” He hesitated for a bare few seconds before he went on. “Come to bed.”

She went with him willingly, her fears of what he might expect of her vanishing just as the ghosts who had followed her to the kitchen had dissolved into nothing but harmless shadows as soon as he had come in the room.

She was ready to surrender totally to him, yet when they lay down on her bed together, he demanded nothing. She tried to awkwardly tell him that he could take what he wished.

He gently brushed his lips against her hair, pulled her close to him, and whispered, “When the time is right, there will be no taking. Only giving. But now we’ll sleep.”

And so she did. When she next woke, the grainy gray light of dawn was slipping through her window. Blake’s arms were still warm around her and she lay without moving for a moment as she absorbed the feel of him against her and listened to his soft, even breathing. She had never felt so safe.

She didn’t know why. She had no reason to feel safe. She had every reason to believe that life was fragile and easily stolen. Her father was gone. The
Tribune
, which had been the center of her life and her father’s for so many years, might soon be gone as well. Yet with Blake’s arms around her, she felt safe.

The questions she’d had yesterday didn’t matter. Her eyes went to the boxes of files that she could just make out in the dawning light. If there were answers there, she would never look for them. The past didn’t matter. Eloise Vandemere, whoever she was, didn’t matter. Even if Blake had loved her once, he loved Adriane now, and that was all the answer she needed.

She turned her head slowly to study his face while he slept, but he was not asleep. His eyes were open and waiting for hers. And she knew the time for giving had come.

“I won’t hurt you,” he whispered.

“I know,” she said softly and surrendered herself completely to him in every way.

B
lake’s fingers trembled as he fumbled with the ribbons on Adriane’s chemise. She was so beautiful, her skin so incredibly soft under his hand. All through the early morning hours, he had held her close, breathing in her fragrance and hardly daring to move for fear she might pull away from him.

Passion had flooded through him more than once, but he had refused to give in to his desire for her. He wanted there to be no bad memory of their first time together. So he would wait until she was ready. He had been prepared to wait however long it took, but then she had surprised him by turning those beautiful eyes on him in the dawning morning light. Eyes that wanted him to touch her even as she feared what that touch might bring. Innocent eyes full of trust.

He wanted to keep that trust alive, but what if his touch didn’t bring her the pleasure simply breathing in her scent brought him? That fear of failing her made him clumsy as he tried to undo her chemise. So clumsy in fact that after a moment she reached up and untied the ribbons herself.

He peeled the fabric away and stared at her with the wonder of a boy first aware of the differences between men and women. He could feel her looking at him as if worried he might find her lacking, and he whispered to her how very beautiful she was. She seemed to relax a bit then, and he ran his fingers over the softness of her skin.

When she pulled in her breath sharply, he looked into her eyes. If there was any question left in his mind that she might not really be ready, she answered it by lifting her lips up to his. As soon as their lips touched, the fire consumed them both.

Long after their passion was spent, he held her, not wanting to surrender their closeness. He’d known it would be like this with Adriane, had known from the start their bodies would join as easily as their minds, but he hadn’t expected the sheer joy of receiving her love to make his heart feel as if it might burst. He had to wait for it to calm its beating before he could whisper the words of love into her soft hair. Words that, wonder of wonders, she repeated as softly back into his own ears.

The folded issues of the
Tribune-Herald
waiting for the newsboys down in the pressroom were forgotten as the gray of dawn gave way to morning. There was nothing but the feel of Adriane’s body next to his with nothing separating them.

At last he pulled away from her to let his eyes soak in the delicious wonder of her body again. He tried to slide his eyes quickly over the ugly bruises still evident on her arms so anger wouldn’t spoil this time for either of them, but the bruises were there. Not looking at them didn’t make them disappear. Very lightly he ran his fingers across them.

“He’ll never hurt you again,” he said, softly brushing the purple and green splotches with his lips.

She wrapped her arms around him so that he couldn’t see the marks and looked him directly in the eye. “Forget about him. He’s part of the past.”

“I’m not sure it will be that easy.”

“No,” she agreed. “But if I can do it, so can you.”

“My past and yours are not the same,” he said.

She was quiet then, not asking any questions. He couldn’t even see the first question in her eyes, but he knew this was a time for an explanation, if not answers. He had none of those, for he had never been able to find good answers to his own questions about Eloise and whether there had been anything he might have done to save her.

“You want to know about Eloise,” he said.

She turned her eyes from him too quickly as she said, “No. Whoever she was, she’s not important.” She twisted away from him and started to get up. “I should go down and help Beck hand out the papers to the boys.”

“The boys have already come and gone.” Blake pulled her back down beside him.

She didn’t fight against him, but she did jerk the light cover over her up to her chin as if she had become uncomfortably aware of her lack of clothes. He helped her smooth out the corners and covered himself as well, even though he regretted the passing of the easy intimacy between them before he said, “Eloise has nothing to do with us.”

Adriane silently stared down at the cover, and although Blake wanted to tip her chin up until he could see into her eyes, instead he talked to the top of her head. “But I was wrong not to answer your question yesterday, even though it is true I don’t like to talk about Eloise.”

“Then don’t. I’d rather you didn’t.” Her grip on the cover tightened.

He had the feeling she was afraid of whatever he might tell her about Eloise. There was no changing what had just happened between them. He could understand how she didn’t want to hear something that would prove she’d made a mistake in giving herself to him so completely. He made himself begin talking, unsure of what she’d think after she knew about Eloise.

“I don’t know what Stanley told you about Eloise.” His muscles tensed as he said the man’s name, and he had to take a deep breath and force himself to relax before he went on. “It doesn’t matter. No one knows the truth about Eloise. Not even me, but I’ll tell you what I do know. Then you’ll have to decide who to believe.”

She finally raised her eyes to his. “That decision has already been made.”

“Some decisions have to be made over and over.” He pulled his eyes away from hers and stared up at a dark brown watermark on the ceiling. “That’s sort of the way it was with Eloise. I met her just after the Mexican War was over.”

“Were you in the war?”

“Not as a soldier, but I did carry stories from the battlefields to the papers in the East. We didn’t have the wire then and all the papers were in a race to be the first to get news of the big battles for their headlines. I was good at getting the stories through.”

“I can imagine,” she said a little dryly.

He glanced at her, but then fastened his eyes back on the blob that was beginning to take on the shape of a horse’s head. “At any rate, I came back to New York after the war and started covering the police beat and going to the odd social when Harper, the editor, twisted my arm. Nobody printed much of that kind of news then, but Harper’s wife liked seeing her name in print. So he would give the parties she went to little write-ups and stick them in when he needed a filler. It wasn’t long till all the ladies were clamoring for ink for their own gatherings.”

“So you had to go to more socials,” Adriane prompted when Blake stopped to catch his breath.

“Harper made it part of my job. And that’s how I met Eloise. After all the misery I’d seen in the war, Eloise was like the first spring flower at the end of a long winter.”

“Was she really pretty?” Adriane asked, her grasp on the cover tighter than ever.

“Pretty fit her.” He looked at Adriane. “Not beautiful like you.”

Adriane’s cheeks reddened, but her grip on the cover loosened.

For a second he wanted to stop the story and peel the cover away, but he forced himself to look at the dark smudge on the ceiling again and continue. “She took a fancy to me even though I wasn’t in her social circle. Who knows why? Anyway we became engaged. Secretly. She said she needed time to decide how best to tell her father about us, and I didn’t try to rush her since her father owned the paper where I worked. I wasn’t so dumb that I didn’t realize the whole thing might backfire on me. But I didn’t court her only to get a toehold on the paper the way people said when they found out.”

“You wanted a paper,” Adriane said.

“Oh yes,” Blake agreed without looking at her. “And I had no doubt I’d have one someday, but not like that. I wanted to earn it on my own.” He stopped talking again.

After a minute she asked, “What happened?”

“The expected. Vandemere found out about our secret engagement and put a stop to all Eloise’s silly games and my chivalrous romantic ideas.” Blake shifted uneasily as though something in the bedding had suddenly jabbed him. He had been so young and foolish then.

“Did you love her?”

“I thought I did at the time, but then after her father made her marry a man he considered much more suitable, I discovered that although my pride was sorely wounded, my heart survived intact. I never even noticed a crack.”

“You sound heartless,” she said, but she sounded relieved.

“You may think that’s even truer when you hear the rest of it.”

“There’s more?” she asked, her relief replaced with a hint of worry.

“A great deal more.” He was silent for a moment before he made himself continue. “The man her father chose for her, Lyle Davidson, was years older than Eloise, but he was wealthy and had the proper social standing. Unfortunately for Eloise, he was also insanely jealous. If she so much as smiled at another man at a dinner party, he’d go into a rage. Eloise would have to disappear from the social scene for weeks at a time while the bruises healed. It was like taking the sunlight away from a butterfly.”

“Didn’t her family know?”

“Her father knew.” Bitterness rose up in Blake even after so many years. He might not have loved Eloise, but he hadn’t wanted her hurt. “But Vandemere was campaigning to be elected mayor and he was running scared from any hint of scandal that one of the opposing newspapers might dig up. And it could be he did try to help her privately. I can’t say. All I know for sure is that she started finding ways to send me notes begging for my help.”

Blake paused, remembering his dismay when one of Eloise’s friends slipped him that first note. He’d heard the rumors about her marriage, but he hadn’t expected her to involve him. He hadn’t wanted to be involved.

“I suppose she thought I still loved her. And in her desperation, she imagined I was more courageous than I was.”

“What did she expect you to do?” Adriane asked.

She was so intent on his story that she half sat up, letting the forgotten cover slip to her waist. He made himself turn his eyes away from her and keep his mind on Eloise. A sort of sick shame filled him as it did every time he thought about how he had failed Eloise, and now he wanted to get up and leave the room while there was still hope Adriane wouldn’t hold him at fault. But in spite of his reluctance to tell the whole story, he kept pushing out the words.

“I’m not sure. She hinted at a duel once, but I wasn’t that chivalrous or foolish. I had never actually met Davidson, but I’d heard of his ability as a marksman. I sent notes back to her encouraging her to ask her father for help. I even sent one of her notes to me on to him.”

The blob on the ceiling suddenly took on the shape of a man’s face under a hat. “A couple of days after that, Harper called me into his office to say that though he hated it, he’d have to let me go. Then I received a polite letter from Vandemere strongly suggesting that if I would leave Eloise alone, he was sure she and her husband could work out any difficulties they might be experiencing. Somehow I became the villain of the piece.”

Adriane slipped her hand over his. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Blake’s heart skipped a beat at her touch, but he wouldn’t allow himself to look at her. He just kept staring at the dark shape of a man’s face as he continued. “It gets worse. In Eloise’s next note, she begged me to run away with her. She said she realized her love for me was worth any sacrifice, and she was prepared to go to California or anywhere as long as we were together.”

Blake closed his eyes a moment and saw the fancy scroll of Eloise’s handwriting. It was so like her. All flourish and no depth. After a moment he went on. “She had never even imagined that I might not love her anymore.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. She told me she’d meet me at a secluded cliff side not far from their summer home and we could plan our escape. I didn’t go.” Blake paused a moment before he pushed out the last words. “The next thing I heard, she was dead.”

“What happened?” Adriane asked.

“She fell off the cliff where we were supposed to meet. At least that’s what they told. When they discovered her packed case and a servant came forward to say he had carried messages to me, the police came round to have a word with me, but I’d just been hired by another paper and had spent the day with my new editor. There wasn’t much investigation after that, although rumors of all sorts made the rounds. They held a coroner’s inquest, but it was just a formality. Vandemere saw that it was declared an accident.”

“And was it an accident?” Adriane asked.

“I don’t think Lyle Davidson pushed her, if that’s what you mean, but no, I don’t think it was an accident. I think Eloise made the only escape she could, since no one would rescue her.”