A Kiss to Remember (36 page)

As he turned away, gently cradling Lottie’s head against his shoulder, Laura was struck by a rush of unbearable tenderness. Would he carry their own children just so? Would he tuck them into their beds and kiss their rosy cheeks before leaving them to their dreams each night?

Laura had no way of knowing if he would. But she had to give him the chance. Her hand brushed her stomach. Not just for his sake, or even her own, but for the sake of their unborn child.

“Sterling,” she said, lifting her chin high.

“Yes?” he replied, turning in the doorway.

“After you tuck Lottie in, may I have a word with you in the study?”

Wariness darkened his eyes for the first time that night, giving Laura a pang of regret. But she couldn’t afford to waver. If she waited until he came to her bedchamber to try to talk to him, there would be no words.

“Very well. I’ll be back shortly.”

Laura slipped into the study to wait for him. She hadn’t breached Sterling’s sanctuary since the evening they’d quarreled over her birthday gift. The fireplace was dark and cold so she lit the lamp sitting on the corner of the desk. She sank down in the wing chair in front of the desk, tapping her slippered feet impatiently.

The moments seemed to crawl by. She finally rose and made a restless circuit of the room. The lamp was doing little to banish the oppressive gloom.

“Perhaps he has some candles tucked away somewhere,” she muttered.

She poked around on the bookshelves, but failed to locate anything but two candle stubs and an empty tin-derbox. She would simply have to brave the monstrous desk. She intended to perch on the very edge of Sterling’s chair, but instead found herself sinking deep into the seductive comfort of its burnished leather.

So this was how it felt to be duke, she thought, surveying the room from an entirely new perspective.

Perhaps when Sterling came in, she should make
him
sit on the other side of the desk. Then she could lean back in the chair, tuck a cheroot in the corner of her mouth, and explain that she’d had quite enough of his brooding and he was simply going to have to forgive her for being such a ninny.

Laughing softly at her own foolishness, Laura began to search through the desk drawers. Soon the bottom left-hand drawer was her only remaining hope. She tugged on its mahogany knob, but the drawer stuck, as if it hadn’t been opened for a while. Gritting her teeth, Laura gave it a mighty yank.

The drawer slid free from its moorings, filling the air with the unmistakable fragrance of orange blossoms.

When Sterling pushed open
the study door, he found Laura standing behind the desk, clutching a fistful of papers to her breast.

Alarmed by the tears streaming down her cheeks, he started toward her. “What is it, Laura? Did someone say something cruel to you tonight? Because if they did, I swear I’ll—”

Before he could reach for her, she slapped the papers against his chest. “You never opened them,” she said, her voice low and fierce. “You never read a single word.”

As Sterling gazed into her anguished eyes, a killing frost began to creep through his heart. He didn’t have to examine the papers to realize what they were. He could smell them.

He gently, but firmly, removed his mother’s letters from Laura’s grasp and dropped them back into the drawer, pushing it shut with his foot. “She had nothing to say that I cared to hear.”

“How can you know that when you refused to listen?” Before Sterling could stop her, Laura had yanked open the drawer again and began to pull out handfuls of his mother’s letters. She tossed them on the desk until they were piled so high they started to spill over onto the floor. “Every week for the last six years of her life, this woman poured out her heart to you. The very
least
you could do was listen.”

Sterling could feel his temper rising. “I don’t wish to discuss this with you, Laura. Not now and not ever.”

“Well, that’s just too bad, isn’t it? Because I’m not some unwanted piece of correspondence you can stuff into a drawer. You can’t make me disappear just by ignoring me. If you could, I would have vanished the minute we set foot in this accursed house.” Laura tore open one of the letters, her hands shaking violently. “‘My dearest son,’” she read.

“Stop it, Laura. You don’t want to do this.”

She shot him a defiant look. “‘Winter is coming and the days are growing shorter, but I begin and end each one of them with thoughts of you. I think of how you might be passing these brittle autumn days and wonder if you are happy.’”

Sterling propped his hip on the edge of the desk and folded his arms over his chest. “If my happiness was of such import to her, I don’t think she would have been so eager to sell me to the highest bidder.”

Laura broke the seal on another letter. “‘My dearest Sterling, I dreamed of you again last night, not as the boy I remember but as a man whose handsome countenance and fine character made my heart thrill with pride.’”

He snorted. “My, that was a dream, wasn’t it? Had
she encountered the reality, she would have been keenly disappointed.”

Ignoring him, Laura unfolded another letter. “‘My darling son,’” she read. “‘Please forgive my atrocious penmanship. The laudanum I’m taking to dull the pain seems to befuddle the hand as well as the mind.’”

Sterling straightened. “Don’t, Laura,” he said softly. “I’m warning you …”

Although fresh tears began to trickle down her cheeks, her voice remained ruthlessly steady. “‘Don’t waste any of your pity on me. It is not such a terrible thing that I should die, only that I should die without seeing your precious face one last time.’”

“Damn it to hell, woman, you haven’t the right!” Sterling snatched the letter from her hands, crumpled it into a ball, and hurled it into the fireplace. “She wasn’t your mother. She was mine!”

Laura pointed a trembling finger at the hearth. “And those were her last words to you. Are you certain you want to just throw them away as if they were so much garbage?”

“And why not? That’s what she did to me, wasn’t it?”

“What about your father? I’ve never been able to understand why you blame her and not him.”

“Because she was the one who was supposed to love me!” Sterling roared.

They stared at each other for a long moment, both trembling and breathing hard. Then Sterling strode to the window and stood gazing out at the night, appalled by his lapse of control.

When he spoke again, his voice was crisp and cool. “My father barely tolerated my company. He would have sold me to a band of passing Gypsies for thirty
pieces of silver if it would have bought him a bottle of fresh port or another hour at the gaming tables.” Sterling slowly turned to face Laura. “He might have been the one who sold me, but she was the one who let him. I can’t understand it. And I can’t forgive her for something I can’t understand.”

Laura scooped up a handful of the letters and held them out to him, her expression pleading. “But don’t you see? These might help you understand. If you read them, then perhaps you’ll be able to comprehend how powerless your father made her feel, how he convinced her that your uncle could give you a future that she never could. Then after the deed was done and she realized it had all been a terrible mistake, your father refused to let her have any contact with you. He tore up the letters she wrote to you before she could post them. He persuaded her that you were better off without her, that she no longer had a place in your life. It took her years to find the courage to write you again.”

“My father has been dead for over ten years now. Yet in all that time, she never once tried to see me.”

“Would you have received her?” Laura asked, lifting her chin.

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Neither did she. And I don’t think she could have borne it if you had turned her away.” Laura drew nearer to him. “Even if she had tried to stop your father from letting Granville Harlow adopt you, what power did she have? She had no legal power. She had no moral authority. She was only a woman trapped in a man’s world—a world created by men just like you and your father.”

“I’m not like my father,” Sterling bit off.

Laura drew in a deep breath. “You may be right. According to Diana, you’re growing more and more like your uncle every day.”

Sterling sank down against the windowsill, letting out a bitter snort of laughter.
“Et tu, Brute?”

“Your mother made a terrible mistake, Sterling. And she spent the rest of her life paying for it.”

“Did she? Or did I?” He raked a hand through his hair. “I’ve yet to tell another living soul this, but do you know the one thing she did that I’ll never forgive?”

Laura shook her head.

“After I realized what she and my father had done and I was getting ready to walk out the door with my uncle that day, she knelt down and held out her arms to me. It was the last time I would ever see her, yet I walked right past her without so much as a word.” Although Laura stood only a hand’s length from him now, Sterling gazed down at the carpet, refusing to look at her. “I have relived that moment in a thousand dreams, but they always end the same. I walk past her open arms, then I wake up to the sound of her crying.” He lifted his head, meeting Laura’s eyes squarely. “That’s the one thing I will never forgive.
Never.”

“But who is it you can’t forgive, Sterling? Her?” Laura reached up to touch his cheek. “Or yourself?”

He caught her wrist and gently drew her hand away from his face. “I don’t really see that it makes any difference.”

Leaving her standing there, he returned to the desk and began to rake the letters back into the drawer.

Laura watched him, her face pale and set. “Have you ever asked yourself why you kept your mother’s letters if you never intended to read them?”

Steling didn’t answer her. He simply scooped up the letters that had fallen to the floor and tossed them carelessly on top of the others.

“The Devil of Devonbrooke might not be able to forgive her,” Laura said, “but I’ll wager Nicholas Radcliffe could.”

“There is no Nicholas Radcliffe. He was nothing but a figment of your imagination.”

“Are you so sure about that? Perhaps he was the man you might have become if you had grown up at Arden Manor, confident in your mother’s love. Perhaps he was the man you could still be if you could only find some small crumb of mercy in your heart—for her, for yourself.” Laura swallowed, fresh tears welling in her eyes. “For me?”

Although Sterling knew instinctively that it was the last time she would swallow her pride and plead for his forgiveness, the last time she would cry for him, he dropped the last of the letters into the drawer and firmly shut it.

Laura closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were dry. “You broke your mother’s heart,” she said softly. “I’m not going to let you break mine.”

After she was gone, Sterling swung his chair around, no longer able to bear the sight of the door she had just walked out of. His glance fell on the one letter he had missed, the letter lying crumpled and all alone on the fireplace grate.

He ought to light a fire, he thought savagely. Ought to toss the whole lot of them into the flames and watch them burn. Biting off an oath, he reached into the fireplace and plucked the letter from the cold ashes.

He slid open the drawer, determined to seal it away
with the others. But something stayed his hand. It might have been an elusive whiff of orange blossoms or the shock of seeing the deterioration of his mother’s gently looping script in the last days of her life.

Sterling’s own hands trembled as he slowly uncrumpled the letter, smoothing it on the blotter] before him. It was dated January 28, 1815—only five days before his mother had died.

His mother’s voice was so clear she might have been standing just over his shoulder. Sterling pinched the bridge of his nose, thankful that his uncle had caned all the tears out of him long ago.

Sterling laughed in spite of himself. “You sent me an angel, all right, Mama. An avenging one.”