Buch lesen: «Tempting Lucas»

CHAPTER ONE

SHE hadn’t been back to Belvoir in eleven years, not since the year that she’d lost the baby. At the very least the place could have looked as if it had missed her a fraction as much as she’d missed it—shown its age a little, the way she was sure she showed hers. But no. It rose out of the morning mist, as pale and beautiful today as it had been then, evoking not just the innocent pleasures of her childhood but the sharp unhappiness of unrequited love and lost dreams as well.

Wisteria still wound in mauve clusters around the pillars supporting the upper balconies, the way it had every spring since her grandmother had come there as a bride. Gauzy white curtains still swirled over the windows of the comer turrets, and the brass bell at the massive front entrance gleamed with the same golden brilliance.

How often, when they’d been children, had they rung that bell for the sheer mischief of it, and brought one or other of the servants running and scolding? But not today.

“Miss Emily!” Consuela, who’d served as general factotum at Belvoir since before Emily had been born, bared her yellow old teeth in a smile. “What a welcome sight you are! Madame will be so pleased to see you.”

“Humph!” her grandmother grumbled, scowling over the half-glasses perched on her patrician nose when Emily stepped into the morning room. “I suppose I should be grateful that they had the good grace to send you to badger me, Emily Jane. Of them all, you at least have the wit to keep me entertained. You may kiss me, child.”

Emily bent, touched her lips to the papery cheek, and clamped down viciously on the tears suddenly damming behind her eyes. “You’re looking well, Grand-mère.”

“And you lie graciously but badly,” Monique Lamartine said. “Having you here might prove even more diverting than I’d anticipated, provided you understand that I am not about to move out of my house no matter what sort of pressure you bring to bear on me. I lived here with your grandfather and I intend to lie beside him in my grave, though not quite as quickly as my son and daughters might like. The body is a little frailer but the mind...” She tapped her forehead. “It’s still sound, never doubt that, and I will continue to lead my life as I see fit. So you’re very welcome to visit for a while, Emily Jane, but when you decide to leave you will not be taking me with you.”

Emily murmured something innocuous and tried again to hide her dismay. Monique Lamartine rose in her memory tall and proud and invincible; this shrunken, enfeebled old lady with the stick propped next to her chair bore little resemblance to the woman she knew as Grandmother.

Consuela reappeared, wheeling before her a trolley laden with sterling and translucent Limoges china. A tiered silver cake stand of delicacies baked fresh that morning occupied pride of place on the lower shelf.

“Pour the tea, Emily Jane, and give yourself something to do until you’ve composed yourself,” Monique ordered tartly.

In all the years Emily had known her, her grandmother had preferred coffee, a rich, full-bodied French roast in keeping with her ancestry. “I didn’t know you drank tea, Grand-mère.”

“There are a lot of things you don’t know,” her grandmother retorted. “That tends to happen when you avoid a person for over ten years.”

Emily was thirty and long past the age, or so she’d thought, when anyone could make her flush and feel as awkward as a teenager. But her grandmother’s barbed observation found its mark. The telltale pink spread over her face despite her attempt to rationalize what she knew must seem like inexcusable neglect on her part.

“I haven’t avoided you! You were at my wedding, and we saw each other again at Suzanne’s, a few months after. We celebrated New Year’s together in San Francisco four years ago, and met at the family reunion in Charleston when Peter graduated from the academy. We’ve talked on the phone, I’ve written, and sent you postcards whenever I’ve gone traveling.”

The rest of her might have dwindled, but Monique’s scorn had lost none of its sting. “I don’t know how long it took you to memorize such an impressive list, Emily Jane, but let me assure you it was a waste of time. On all those occasions, we were surrounded by other relatives and, of necessity, confined to meaningless exchanges which neither one of us particularly enjoyed. Of course, there was, as there always has been, another option, one which would have allowed us the privacy to reinforce those ties formed when you were a girl, but you chose not to employ it. You have not set foot in my home since the summer you turned nineteen.”

Emily looked away as a different sort of shame overwhelmed her. “It wasn’t you I was avoiding, Grand-mère, it was this house, this place. I wouldn’t be here now—”

“If it weren’t for the fact that my children think I’m incapable of looking after myself, so they’ve bribed you to try to get me to see things their way because they know that, for all that you’ve neglected me so abysmally for far too long, you’re still my favorite. Well, it doesn’t say much for you, Emily Jane, does it, that I had to be half crippled by a stroke before you could bring yourself to put aside your own feelings and give a thought to mine?”

“I’m sorry, Grand-mère.”

Emily didn’t for a moment expect that such an answer would be found acceptable, which was why she almost missed the cup into which she was pouring fragrant Lapsang Souchong tea when her grandmother said quite gently, “I know you are, child, and I know why you found coming back here so painful. It was that Flynn boy from next door.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean, Grand-mère.”

Monique’s sympathy vanished in a flash. “Give me credit for having some intelligence, for pity’s sake! I saw the way you languished, the last summer you spent here, dreaming the hours away in the belvedere, hoping he’d show up, coming alive only when he deigned to spare you a moment’s attention.”

“Puppy love,” Emily said, regaining enough poise to pass a cup of tea to her grandmother without spilling a drop in the saucer. “All girls go through it.”

“Not all girls sneak out of the house after dark and return long after other respectable souls are asleep in their beds. Not all girls shut themselves away from the people around them, preferring to spend their time in seclusion, nor do they mark off the days in their diaries with quite the assiduous care with which you marked off yours, the last few weeks of that summer.”

“You read my diary?” Appalled, Emily stared at her grandmother.

“Certainly I read your diary,” Monique said, with shameless relish. “How else was I supposed to discover what was troubling you so deeply? You allowed that ... that rogue to rob you of your innocence, and then you worried yourself into a near breakdown wondering if you’d been left with child.”

“Left with child”. Such an old-fashioned, genteel way to characterize the disgrace an illegitimate pregnancy would have brought to the family. Given that that was exactly the predicament in which Emily had found herself, how was it that ultimately being left without child had such a destitute ring to it?

“Fortunately you were spared that,” Monique went on, blithely ignorant of the aftermath of that summer, “though even had you not been it would not have changed my love for you. You were always my special child.”

Emily’s eyes burned again with unshed tears. “Oh, Grand-mère!”

“I saw your face the day he came lollygagging over here and announced his engagement to that woman. Had your grandfather been alive, he’d have horse-whipped him. As it is, Lucas Flynn got his just deserts when not all his fancy medical training could save his wife and he had to bury her in some heathen African country. The pity of it is that whatever killed her didn’t carry him off too. The world does not need men like him.”

“I understand he’s a very fine doctor.”

Her grandmother let out the closest to a snort that she’d ever permit herself. “Not any more he isn’t! His doctoring days are over. Seems he lost his taste for medicine, or else his nerve. These days he’s a recluse, emerging into view only when conscience drives him to earn his keep around the house as a general handyman.”

In the short time since she’d arrived at Belvoir, Emily had weathered a range of emotions. She’d experienced nostalgia, shame, sadness and shock. To that list she now added dread. “What house? The last I heard, Lucas Flynn was running a clinic somewhere in Central Africa.”

“Then your information is sadly out of date,” Monique declared flatly. “Lucas Flynn is living next door with his grandmother. The neighborhood, I fear, has gone to the dogs since you were last here, Emily Jane.”

Her worst nightmare—having to face him again—had come to pass! Practically stammering with dismay, Emily asked, “But how—why is he here?”

“Because he’s a failure! What possible other reason could he have for letting his medical license lapse? And why else would his benighted grandmother feel compelled to make excuses for him every time she opens her mouth?”

“Excuses?” Emily repeated faintly. “Lucas Flynn was never the type to hide behind excuses, Grand-mère.”

“He is now,” Monique said with a satisfied little nod. “Spends half his time shut up in some university lab, peering into a microscope, and the other half recording his findings—except, as I just mentioned, when he deigns to mow the lawn or otherwise make himself useful next door. A bit of a come-down, wouldn’t you say, compared to his former grandiose laying-on-of-healing-hands plans?”

“There isn’t a university in April Water,” Emily said, still groping for the magic key that would release her from a dream that threatened to become worse long before it grew any better. Wasn’t confronting the shocking reality of her grandmother’s declining health enough, without this added complication?

“There are plenty in the San Francisco area,” Monique replied, then spoilt the possibility of reprieve by adding, “Not that he spends every waking hour there, what with all the fancy computer equipment he’s rumored to have had installed at Roscommon House. But why are we wasting breath on a man like him when we have more important matters to discuss, such as your marriage?”

She took Emily’s ringless left hand in hers. “Don’t make me drag the details out of you a syllable at a time, Emily Jane. I never expected it would last, of course, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in knowing how it ended.”

“We grew apart.” Emily shrugged, at a loss to know how to explain the lack of passion that had characterized her relationship with George.

“You were never together. Ambition and career advancement lured him to the altar and penance drove you.”

“That’s not fair, Grand-mère. George tried hard to be the sort of husband he thought I wanted. We both tried, but if anyone’s to blame for it all ending in divorce I am.”

Monique’s black eyes focused shrewdly on Emily’s face. “Why? Because you were married to one man and pining for another?”

How could her grandmother have known? Emily wondered. Was it written all over her face, as plain to see as if she’d actually committed adultery? “If you’re talking about the business with Lucas Flynn, Grand-mère—”

“Of course I am.”

“That all ended three years before I got engaged.” But the memory had remained vivid, embroidered to an unlikely magic by the passage of time. Had George sensed it? Was that what eventually had driven him into another woman’s arms and bed?

“I’m leaving you, Emily,” he’d announced over eggs Benedict, one rainy Sunday morning nearly eighteen months ago. “There’s someone else.”

“Do I know her?” Emily had asked, as politely as if they’d been discussing a fourth for bridge. Because, of course, Lucas had always been the third member of the party, even if his name never crossed her lips.

“No.” George had nudged his coffee-cup closer for a refill. “Just as well, probably. Less awkward all round.”

What had shocked Emily had not been that her marriage was coming to an abrupt and unexpected end, but that she had accepted the news with staggering equanimity. She’d added cream and two lumps of sugar to her husband’s coffee and, in the sort of tone that she might have murmured, “Have another croissant, dear” said, “I suppose you’d like a divorce.”

“Might as well. No immediate rush, of course, though I’d as soon not wait too long.”

“Do you miss him, Emily Jane?”

Emily blinked and looked at her grandmother in confusion. “Who? George?”

“If you thought I meant Lucas Flynn, then it’s small wonder your marriage failed. Even men like George Keller have their pride. Bad enough you were a melancholy bride, without compounding the sin and betraying yourself as a dissatisfied wife.”

“Perhaps if there’d been children—”

“It’s a blessing there weren’t!”

“But if there had been we might have felt we shared something worth saving.”

“In my day,” her grandmother observed with caustic insight, “a husband and wife took it upon themselves to make their marriage work. They didn’t expect innocent children to rescue it from its troubles.”

“But I think the lack of children made George feel inadequate. I think he blamed himself.”

“As he should. You come from select but hardy stock, Emily Jane. It’s hardly likely you’d have been unable to produce an heir had the opportunity presented itself.”

Was it? Emily had wondered many times since if the punishment for her short-lived, unhappy illegitimate pregnancy had been the absence of babies later on, when it would have been perfectly acceptable for her to bear them. “His new wife gave birth within six months of their getting married.”

“The hussy!” Monique hissed on an outraged breath. “They deserve each other!”

“George is a perfectly nice man, Grand-mère. He just wasn’t the right man for me.”

Her grandmother eyed her narrowly. “No, he wasn’t, any more than that rogue from next door was. Dare I hope, Emily Jane, that you’ve learned your lesson and will choose more judiciously in future?”

In light of her recent discoveries about Lucas, and their effect on her peace of mind, that was not a question Emily felt equal to answering honestly. However, she was spared having to lie because, when she glanced at her grandmother, she saw that, suddenly and quite completely, Monique had fallen asleep in her chair.

A fine wool shawl lay over the back of the sofa. Emily draped it carefully around her grandmother’s frail shoulders, then stole from the room.

Consuela met her in the hall. “She’s sleeping?”

Emily nodded. “Dropped off in a matter of seconds. Does that happen often?”

“More and more.” Consuela sighed and looked as if she might say something else, then pressed her lips tightly together.

“What is it, Consuela?”

“Nothing—nothing. You see, don’t you, that she’s...?”

“Old.” The word emerged bathed in guilt and sadness. Why had she waited so long to come back when there was so little time left for Monique?

Consuela’s hand on her arm was sympathetic. “It can’t be helped, sweet child. Neither of us is getting any younger.”

The truth of that became obvious over the next hour as Emily renewed her acquaintance with the house that held so many memories for her. Contrary to her first impression, the place was not as well kept as she’d thought. On the main floor, only the morning room, the small breakfast room and the kitchen were in daily use. The rest were closed off, their furnishings draped in dust sheets, and with cobwebs festooning the chandeliers. A light had burned out in the back hall and not been replaced, leaving the area dim even in the middle of the day.

“I’d have done it myself,” Consuela said apologetically, when she caught Emily installing a fresh light bulb, “but I’m not so good with heights any more.”

“Don’t even think about using this stepladder,” Emily scolded. “For heaven’s sake, Consuela, why hasn’t my grandmother brought in someone to give you extra help? It isn’t as if she can’t afford it.”

“She is proud, just as she’s always been. It grieves her to think we must call in strangers and let them see...” Consuela’s voice trembled slightly “... that we cannot manage as we once did.”

Emily could have wept anew with shame. “Come and talk to me while I prepare us all some lunch—and no, Consuela, don’t try to talk me out of it! I’m perfectly capable in a kitchen and you’ve carried this burden long enough by yourself. It’s past time my grandmother’s family took some of the responsibility on themselves.”

From the kitchen, she could see out to the sweep of lawn that once had been manicured to within an inch of its life. Now it ran unhindered into the untidy straggle of shrubbery lining the path to the river, reinforcing what was already apparent: the days were gone when Monique was mistress of all she surveyed. If she refused to leave Belvoir, someone would have to remain with her, to oversee the running of the estate as well as monitor her well-being. And there was little doubt who that someone would be.

Trying hard to be tactful, Emily brought up the subject that evening, during dinner. “Don’t you miss being closer to the people you love, Grand-mère?”

“Not enough that I’m willing to move, just to be near them,” Monique informed her.

“But if one of them was to live here at Belvoir, would you object?”

“That,” her grandmother declared, “would depend entirely on which one of my so-called loved ones you have in mind, Emily Jane.”

As if there’d ever been any question of the most suitable candidate! Who among the family had no personal ties elsewhere? Who, for that matter, was the only one who could get along with Monique for more than an hour at a time?

“I’ve been feeling that I need a change,” she said, and it wasn’t so far from the truth. “New England winters are long and cold, and Boston—”

“You have a business there. You told me once that you were very busy and very successful. Are you proposing to give it up, so that you can babysit a feeble old woman? Or is it my money you’re after?”

“I neither want nor need your money, Grand-mère, but I do think I’d like to have your company. I didn’t realize until this morning how much I’ve missed you.”

“If you’re asking if my door is open, Emily Jane, then let me remind you that it always has been. It was your choice to stay away, not mine.”

Emily touched her serviette to her mouth. “Well, if it’s all right with you, Grand-mère, I’d like to make up for lost time. May I come and live with you for a while?”

A tear splashed down Monique’s wrinkled cheek and fell into her soup. “You may,” she said, head lifted proudly to indicate that she wasn’t about to acknowledge such a maudlin display of weakness.

Later, after the dishes were cleared away and Consuela had brought in the tea tray, Monique selected a cigarette from the silver box at her elbow and nodded to Emily to light it for her. “What about your business, Emily Jane? Will you sell it, or is there someone who can manage it for you during your absence?”

“I have a friend who’s been interested in becoming a partner in Done To Perfection for about a year now. I think she’ll be more than happy to buy me out.”

“And you won’t miss it?”

“If I do, I can always open up another branch here, once I’m settled. I like to be busy, Grand-mère. Come to that, I like being my own boss and making a success of things.”

“Success is all very fine, child, but you can’t warm your feet on it when you go to bed. Your grandfather has been dead seventeen years but I’ve never become used to sleeping alone. I miss him every night.”

“Because you were happily married, that’s why, but I’m not interested in that sort of life.”

Choking a little as she inhaled, Monique peered through the smoke already wreathing her face. “It’s unnatural for a woman your age to be so indifferent to men, Emily Jane, and it leads me to suspect you’re hiding something. Is there, by chance, someone in your life that you don’t want me to know about?”

“Certainly not,” Emily said. But it was a lie. A new lie, scarcely more than a few hours old, to be sure, but a lie nonetheless. The back of her mind had been filled with his face, her heart with racing dread, ever since she’d learned that Lucas Flynn was widowed and living next door again.

Aware that her grandmother had fixed a very speculative gaze on her, Emily changed the subject. Pushing the ashtray a little closer to Monique’s elbow, she asked, “Does your doctor know you smoke, Grand-mère?”

“Naturally. He’s fool enough to think he has the right to know everything about me.”

“And he doesn’t object?”

“There’s a difference between a fool and an imbecile, child. He knows better than to intrude with his opinions where they’re not welcome.”

“But it can’t be good for you.”

“If your reason for wanting to live here is that you plan to try to rearrange the way I choose to lead my life, Emily Jane, I shall withdraw my permission and you may leave first thing in the morning,” Monique informed her acidly.

“I’m concerned for your health, that’s all.”

“When you reach my age, you’ll realize that there’s very little left that one can do for one’s health except enjoy what remains of it. Which I intend to do by living where and with whom I please, and smoking when and where I feel like it.” She puffed once or twice to underline her point and watched Emily through the veil of smoke curling up between them. “You look worn out, child. Don’t feel you have to stay up entertaining me.”

“I don’t want to leave you down here by yourself.”

“Why not? I’m used to it and I don’t need sleep the way I once did. You have your old room in the southwest turret. Consuela spent most of the last week getting it ready for you.”

Emily hid a yawn behind her hand. It had been a long day, made worse by the three hour time difference between Massachusetts and California. “If you’re sure you don’t mind, perhaps I will make an early night of it.”

“Go,” her grandmother ordered, rolling her eyes. “All this sudden attentive concern is beginning to annoy me.”

The memories had besieged her from the moment she’d set foot in the house, but they saved their most potent attack until the end of the day when she was at her most vulnerable. Exhausted not only from travel but also from a succession of small shocks one on top of the other, Emily felt, when she opened her bedroom door, as if she’d stepped into a huge time tunnel running in reverse, and was helpless to stop it.

Everything conspired against her. Her clothes hung in one half of the vast armoire, her lingerie in the lined mahogany drawers of the other half, leaving her nothing with which to distract herself. Velvet-napped towels lay draped over the edge of the huge claw-footed tub in the attached bathroom. The covers were turned back on the bed, a Thermos of hot chocolate sat on the nightstand.

On the surface, nothing had changed. The delicate painted panelling, the carved four-poster with its embroidered tester, the cheval glass looked exactly as they always had, as though to say there was no rewriting history. But, most of all, the smells were what peeled back the years: gardenia bath essence and starched cotton sheets dried in the warm Californian sun; patchouli and the musty gentility of antique silk draperies. They overlapped her senses and sent her swimming back to that other time.

The curved windows in the turret wall stood open to the sweet night air, luring her deeper into the time tunnel. The sheen of moonlight illuminated the bend in the river beyond which she knew rose Roscommon House. When she had been nineteen and in love with Lucas Flynn, she had kept vigil at this window and known the second he had gone to his room because his light would shine through the night, and she, foolish romantic that she’d been, had thought of it as a beacon lighting a path from her heart to his.

She had been wrong.

If she had known he was here again, she would not have come back. But she had not known, and now it was too late.

She stepped closer to the windows to pull down the blinds. Involuntarily, her gaze stole to the right and with an accuracy undulled by time found the break in the trees which, during the day, revealed the steeply pitched roof of Roscommon and the gable which housed Lucas’s room.

As if she’d activated a secret switch, a beam of light from his window suddenly pierced the darkness, as bright and golden as her hopes had been over eleven summers before.

She wanted to turn away. Even more, she wanted to stare at the sight and not care, not remember. But she was able to do neither. Remembrance flowed over her, merciless as a rogue wave sweeping its victim out to sea.

A breeze riffled past the gauzy white drapes and touched her skin. With a shudder, Emily pulled down the shades and shut out the sight of that light streaming through the darkness. Shut out the memories it brought with it.

She had been young then, barely out of school. Full of immature fantasies, no doubt, the way young women often were, but she’d grown up quickly, thanks to Lucas Flynn.

It didn’t matter where he was living now. He could move into the room next door to hers for all she cared. Parade up and down in front of her, showing off his big, male body, and doing his best to reduce her to drooling lust. But he wouldn’t succeed.

She’d never again give him the opportunity to flick her off as if she were just another summer insect buzzing around and annoying him. Nor would she allow him to spoil this special time with her beloved Grand-mère.

The mistakes had piled up, each more disastrous than its predecessor, that other summer. But she’d paid for them once, and dearly. She wasn’t going to let him make her pay again.

He shut down the computer just after midnight, knowing it was futile trying to annotate scientific data from his latest experiments when his thoughts repeatedly strayed to events from much earlier times, before medicine had become his ruling passion.

As a doctor, he’d accepted long ago the human mind’s amazing ability to connect telepathically with another, regardless of the time or distance separating them. Sydney, thoroughly rooted in reality as she was, had scoffed at the idea, claiming it was the learned response that came of being a doctor, but he’d seen it as an instinct that couldn’t be taught.

Either way, it all came down to the same thing now: when his grandmother had mentioned in passing that a member of Mrs. Lamartine’s family had come to take care of her he’d known with absolute if unsubstantiated certainty that the visitor at Belvoir was Emily Jane. And once he’d allowed the knowledge to take hold there’d been no going back to his work.

Instead, he stood at the window of his room and stared out. It was one of those perfect nights midway between winter and spring—cool and still.

In the garden below, the magnolia tree had shed its petals, which lay like abandoned saucers on the grass. The scent of heliotrope filtered up, a sweet, heady perfume that he’d dreamed about when he was in Africa where the smell of death had permeated everything. Overhead, the sky was dappled with moonlight, a sprinkling of stars hung so low that he could almost have reached up and grasped a handful.

He had made the right decision in coming back here. It was home, and as different from Africa as heaven was from hell. It defined his boyhood, his youth, and his emergence as a man, and held none of the misery of that godforsaken country on the other side of the world.

Tired suddenly, of himself and the memories that threatened to swamp him, Lucas rolled his head around to relieve the stiffness in his neck and shoulders. Four months ago he’d turned thirty-six. He was disillusioned about many things, saddened by others, but, damn it all and despite everything, in charge of what his life had become. He was under no obligation to relive the mistakes of his youth, particularly not as they related to Emily. The days when they had been friends were long gone and there was no reason for their lives to interweave again now, no reason for the even tenor of his life to be disturbed—if, indeed, she was the one visiting Belvoir.

The thought brought him a measure of peace. Before turning from the window, he inhaled deeply one last time, filling his lungs with the scents of heliotrope and spring. But something else had crept in to spoil the purity of the night, something faintly acrid floating on the air and leaving it not quite as sweet as it had been moments before.