Guilty Series (61 page)

“Even you must see that a woman like that cannot be your daughter's governess. When word gets out that she is living in your household—”

“I still do not see why you are concerning yourself with my mistress.”

“Cheval killed himself two years ago. Starved himself to death, I understand, after she left him.”

Dylan's grip tightened around his wineglass. He knew better than anyone the desperation that could drive a man to suicide, but that was hardly Grace's fault. Everyone had a choice.

“Cheval was always an unstable sort of fellow,” Ian went on, “with no money. When he died in Vienna, his creditors took everything, including all the works in his studio. But several months ago, three paintings that had not been among his effects were discovered, when the Comte d'Augene died.”

“So?”

“They were found in d'Augene's private art collection at Toulouse. His mother is English, you know. She has put her son's entire collection up for auction at Christie's. No one even knew these three Chevals existed, for there were no sketches with them, no record in his workbooks of them at all. They are being sold individually, and each will no doubt go for a very high sum. They should, for they are magnificent. I have seen them.”

“By God, Ian, can you never come to the point? Tell me in specific terms what the hell you are talking about, or I shall throttle you, brother! What do Cheval's paintings have to do with me or my daughter?”

Ian rose and walked over to a writing desk along one wall of the drawing room. From the single drawer, he pulled out a pamphlet and brought it to Dylan, placing it in his hands. A Christie's folio of the upcoming auction. “Page nineteen.”

Dylan opened the pamphlet, flipping past sketches of Louis XVI flatware, Elizabethan tapestries, and Roman pottery. On page nineteen was an engraving of a painting to be auctioned, one of three nudes by Cheval to be sold. The first description read,
The Girl with Green Eyes on a Bed.

Grace. She was half-reclining on a bed, her weight on her hip and her arm, her hair hanging down. She was fully nude, her face so full of life and laughter that any man would climb into bed after her. He turned the page and found two more nudes of her.
The Girl with Green Eyes in a Bath. On a Swing.

By now, Dylan knew her body so well. Images of her breasts and legs and buttocks, her pretty feet, and her hair, long and spilling over her shoulder, flashed through his mind. Here, in an auctioneer's folio for men to bid on. Now Dylan knew just what had made his brother stare at her so intently the day before, when Ian was never rude enough to stare. He'd been imagining her body like this.

Dylan's head roared. His heart wrenched. His eyes saw.

He looked up, and he wanted to hurl himself at his brother and beat him to a bloody pulp for even seeing Grace's body like this.

Ian sensed what he felt. He stared back at Dylan steadily, and Dylan closed his eyes for a moment, trying to get control of himself. This was not Ian's fault. Any man who had seen this would stare at her the same way if she was sitting across from him.

Oddly enough, it was not only her body, produced like this for public view, that enraged him, that caused the whine in his head to scream and his heart to be ripped out of his chest. No, it was her face. Her beautiful face showing an expression he had never seen.

He felt himself splintering into pieces. His hands shook, and the pamphlet fell to the floor, right side up. He leaned forward, his forearms on his knees, staring between them at her face. No wonder Cheval had been one of the great masters of his generation. His hand and eye had been true to his art, faithful to what he'd seen: the love and adoration for him in a young woman's face.

I loved my husband.

Now he knew how much. Love, the essence of it caught on canvas, frozen in time forever. Now available for any man to see, to lust after, to have for himself, if only in his imagination. Magnificent, Ian said they were, and Dylan could see why. Someday, they would be hung in museums for people to gawk at. Grace on public display, giving every man the look of love that should be his but was not his.

“My God,” Ian muttered. “You love this woman.”

Dylan was smothering. Rage was erupting inside him. His reason was dissolving. He had to go, walk, move, he didn't care where. He could not sit here one moment longer.

He snatched up the pamphlet, stood up, and shook back his hair. He walked away from Ian, out of his childhood home, out into the fresh air, taking deep, gulping breaths. He got on his horse and he rode, as fast and as hard as he could. He did not know where he was going. All he knew was that he had never seen Grace look at him with all that love in her face. Not once.

D
ylan did not come to the cottage that night. Grace waited there for hours, but he did not come. He was not back the next morning, and she concluded he had stayed the night with his brother. They must have had a great deal of business to discuss.

It was late afternoon by the time he came home. Isabel was down at the farm with Molly, and she was bedding out geraniums in a sunny patch of the garden when he arrived. She did not know he had returned until his wide-shouldered shadow crossed the patch of dirt in which she was working.

“Finally!” she exclaimed in relief as she turned toward him and stood up, brushing dirt from her hands. “I was getting worried about you.”

She looked at him, and the moment she saw his face, she knew. He was ending it.

Her heart rejected it entirely, but her head knew. It was inevitable. She'd always known. Grace felt herself shaking inside, and she wrapped her arms around herself so she would not come apart. She tried to tell herself she was mistaken.

“I want you to leave,” he said. “Now. Today.”

No mistake.

She lowered her gaze to a bundle of papers in his hand, and she watched as he dropped them into the empty basket beside the pots of geraniums. Papers and banknotes. Something else landed on top of them, something small and heavy. A key. “Why?” she said, trying to think, but her wits were muddled, thick like tar.

“I have a lodge in Wales I inherited from my mother. It's a few miles outside Oxwich, in Swansea. It's yours. The deed is here, with my signature. A manservant and his wife see to the place, and there is a letter with my seal that tells them you are the new owner and will be living there from now on. There is a billet of passage across the Bristol Channel in here, and five hundred pounds. I have sent an express to my agents in Oxwich, and they will have the other five hundred pounds deposited in an account for you by the time you arrive. The place has a…has a garden, I think.”

The catch in his voice almost broke her. She drew in a deep breath and did the hardest thing she had ever done. Harder than leaving her husband. Harder than seeing her sisters' faces. She looked into Dylan's black, black eyes. “Why are you doing this? Why? Is it about our quarrel yesterday? If that is so—” She broke off, hearing a wobble entering her voice, sensing she was about to say things that were desperate, ask the pitiful questions of a cast-off mistress. She would not. This was not about their quarrel. She held his gaze and waited for an answer.

She was not to get it. He was the one who looked away, bending to pick up the basket. With his free hand, he straightened the papers and pulled the ten-pound notes into a neat stack. “If you need anything—” He paused, his hands stilled, and Grace felt herself beginning to panic.

“You have your cottage,” he said, amending whatever he had been about to say. He shoved the basket toward her and said, “Here. Go.”

She did not take the basket he shoved at her, and he simply set it back down on the turf. She had known he could be cold, but not as cold as this, to be so abrupt, to refuse to explain.

“I knew it would be over between us one day,” she heard herself say. “I just did not expect it to be so soon.” Her throat closed painfully, and she could not say anything more. He was setting her aside as he would any mistress. What was there to say?

This was the same man who had made love to her as if he worshiped her, who could smile and make a woman believe anything, who wrote music that was as beautiful and full of love as something not made by God could be. A man who could go to a whore without a thought, but loathe himself for it because it made his daughter cry. A man who could make her laugh and make her want to live, a man who could demolish her with only a few words and then look at her as if she were a total stranger. “You were going to shoot yourself,” she said. “Why didn't I let you?”

Unable to bear looking at him a moment longer, she turned her back and looked down at the geraniums she had just planted. She knew that all her life, she would remember that exact shade of red. “You bastard. Oh, God,” she choked, “you bastard. Why now? Why this way? With no explanation?”

Seconds went by, and he did not reply. She turned around and found that he was gone.

Grace sank to her knees in the dirt. She wanted so badly to weep, but the pain was too sharp for tears. Her sobs were dry, like hot, desert air through her lungs. She could still not believe what he had just done to her.

She had to get control of herself. What if Isabel came home and saw her this way? It took everything she had, but Grace forced herself to stop.

After a moment, she picked up the basket and rose to her feet. She stared down at the key that lay on top of the pile of papers, and she picked it up. It was a perfectly ordinary latchkey, but she studied it as if it were the most important thing in the world. As she held up the key in the sunlight, a strange sort of detachment came over her, almost as if she were watching herself in a dream. Numbness filled her limbs and Cornish common sense filled her head. Her hand curled around the key, and she put it in her pocket. She told herself that at least she had a place to go, and she tried not to think about how bleak that seemed.

She rifled through the deed and accompanying papers, papers with her name on them, and she looked at the tidy pile of notes. She wished she could go after him, throw it all in his face and call him a bastard again.

She did not do that. She took the papers, the sealed letter, and the key. That was what they had agreed to, and if he wanted to end their bargain early, she would be stupid to refuse it. She had to leave here, and where else was there to go?

Grace looked at the money. She would take only what had been defined in their agreement. Grace pulled out two ten-pound notes to pay for the clothes she had bought, and tucked the rest of the money in her pocket. She carried the basket of papers into the house.

She took the two ten-pound notes to his piano, wanting to put them somewhere he would find them. His folio was propped up on the music stand, and she opened it. She would put the money in here with the completed pages of his symphony. He'd be sure to find it there.

Grace started to get up, but then she caught sight of the title written at the top of the page, and she paused.

Inamorata.
A woman who was a man's lover. This symphony was about her, she realized. About their affair. She flipped through the pages and counted four movements. She knew his symphonies were always four movements. She pulled out the final sheet, and she saw the proof at the bottom of the page, written in his hand.
Finis.

He had finished the symphony, so he had ended the affair. Of course. She had known from the beginning that it would come to this. Artists and their art. Composers and their music. They were all the same. The work came first. First, last, and always, the painting or the symphony was everything.

That was when she began to cry. She felt the tears rolling down her face, blurring the notes of sheet music in her hand and smudging the ink. She dropped the page, heedless of where it landed, shoved back the bench, and picked up the basket of papers from the floor. She called for Osgoode and, bless the man, he did not say a word about the tears staining her face or the incoherency of her words as she asked him to send for the carriage. He did not even change expression.
He must be accustomed to crying women asking for carriages,
she thought as she turned away and ran for her room. Galling to think how many times the butler must have seen this sight before.

She packed heedlessly, shoving her clothes into her valise without bothering to fold them, her only thought to get away from here. She put in her scrapbooks, threw the deed, the key, and the money on top, buckled the valise, and was running for the waiting carriage. She did not take one look back. When the carriage passed by her cottage on the road into the village, she could not bear to look at it, and she turned her face away.

It was only after she was at the inn in Cullen-quay, waiting for the post coach that would come the following day, that she realized she had not said good-bye to Isabel. She would write the child a letter, for there was no going back now. One could never go back. One did not get to do things over. That night, Grace lay in the hard bed of her room at the inn and cried herself to sleep for the first time in years. When was she going to learn the most important lesson about life? There were no second chances at anything, not even love.

 

By the time Dylan arrived back at Nightingale's Gate, it was twilight, but he did not go to the house. Instead, he left his horse at the stables with a groom and went for a walk. Twilight turned to dark, but still Dylan did not return to the house. During the hours that followed, he did not know how many miles he walked, but he went to every place he could think of that they had been, relived everything he could remember that they had done. He walked down to their favorite picnic spot along the shore. He went to the mills, inhaling the scent of pear oil until it made him physically sick. He lay on a patch of turf and looked at stars.

He went inside the cottage, lay on the mattress, and tortured himself with memories of all the things that had happened between them in this room. He tried to sleep without her. It didn't work, but he lay there a long time.