Guilty Series (62 page)

He planted those geraniums of hers by moonlight because she'd left them there outside their pots on top of a patch of dirt. He could have called for the gardeners, but they were asleep, and as Grace had once told him, servants work hard and need their sleep.

He could not shut out of his mind that look on her face in the paintings, and how jealousy was eating him alive because of how much she had loved another man. She would never love him like that. How could she?

There were some who would find this entire situation very amusing. How his enemies would laugh if they knew, and what a good joke it was. Dylan Moore jealous of another man, a dead man at that. As he shoved geraniums into the dirt, he realized that he had never known jealousy because he had never cared enough to get that worked up over another person. That was the bitter truth. He had never cared more about another person than he cared about himself and the music he made.

You don't know what love is.

Grace had been right about that. Michaela; he'd fancied that was love. The girl who had refused him had made a nice, tidy reason to explain why he'd never given his heart away, but really, that hadn't been it at all.

He flayed himself for what he had done, trying to figure out why he had just thrown away the closest thing to love he'd ever known. Six hours of wandering around the Devonshire countryside without purchase, and still, he did not know why. The look in her eyes. No, he would not think about her eyes.

It was just before dawn when he went back to the house. He went upstairs. He took a look in Grace's room, but found nothing there to see. All her things were gone.

He went to Isabel's room and peeked inside. He lifted the lamp high enough to see that she was asleep. To his surprise, he saw that Molly was in the bed with her, holding her tight, and he realized his daughter had cried herself to sleep, comforted by her nanny. Music and hurting others. His greatest gifts.

He went downstairs to the piano and sat down. He opened his folio, which was propped up on the music stand, and the moment he did, two ten-pound notes fluttered out and landed in his lap. He stared at them, and it took him a moment to understand why they were there. She was paying back the money with which she had bought her clothes.

Grace,
he thought, staring down at the money.
Why didn't you tell me about him?
If he had known…if he had known. But he had known. She
had
told him.

I loved my husband.

He just hadn't been listening. He had not wanted to know, had not wanted to think that any man before him could be more important. The enormity of his own ego was something he had never thought much about, but he thought about it now, of how he had allowed that and his own selfishness to hurt the most wonderful, most vibrant person he had ever known. He loathed himself.

“Papa?”

He looked up to find his daughter beside him. He hadn't even heard her come in. “What are you doing down here at this hour?”

“You woke me up with the lamp when you came in.”

“You need to be back in bed,” he told her and stood up. He lifted his daughter in his arms and started out of the room.

“Why, Papa?” she asked against his neck.

He was saved from answering by Molly, who was coming down the stairs, a lit lamp in her hand and a frantic expression on her face. “Oh, sir,” she gasped, “I'm sorry. I woke up and she was gone. I'm so sorry.”

She thought she was about to get the sack. Dylan looked over his daughter's head into the nanny's frightened face, and he said, “It's all right, Molly. It's all right. Just help me get her back in bed.”

The servant followed him as he carried Isabel up the stairs. The child said nothing more as he laid her in bed, but if he thought it was because she had decided to let the matter drop, he was mistaken.

“Why did you send her away, Papa?”

He froze, the edge of the counterpane in his hand, and looked down into his daughter's face.
Don't cry,
he thought, looking at the awful glisten in her eyes.
Don't cry anymore or I'll come apart.

Here was another person he had not thought about before doing what he wanted to do. He had not thought of how painful it would be for his child to lose her mother, and then her governess, a woman who had also become her friend. No, he had not thought of anyone but himself. What he felt. How he hurt. He watched his daughter's tears spill over onto a face already puffy from crying, and they brought him to his knees beside the bed.

Now I know, Grace. Now I know what love is.

“You made her leave.”

He did not deny it. He could not, even though it came from the one so vulnerable, who adored him so much, who wanted him to be a knight on a white steed. He brushed tears away with his fingertips. “Yes.”

“Why, Papa?” she cried. “Why?”

Dylan stalled. “I thought you did not like Grace very much.”

“Is that why you sent her away?” She looked at him as if he were a hopeless pudding-head. “I didn't like her at first, but that was ages ago. I told you how governesses are, but she didn't let me walk all over her. And she wasn't stupid or silly, and I started to like her. Even though she's in charge of me, she doesn't treat me like a little girl. She treats me like a person. That's why I like her.” Isabel sat up and grabbed his face between her hands. “
You
like her, Papa. Molly said so. I heard her tell Mrs. Blake.”

From somewhere behind him, Molly sniffed.
Christ, almighty,
he thought,
is every female in this house going to cry?

He pulled Isabel's wrists down and held her hands in his. He tried to find solid ground, but Grace was gone. He had no solid ground. “You overhear too many things.”

“You like her and you sent her away.”

“Why did you quarrel with her all the time?” he countered, letting go of her hands to pull the sheets up over her and tuck them around her body.

“She wants me to be good, and I know I have to be good, and it's hard.” Isabel wriggled. “Papa, you're tucking me in too tight.”

“I'm sorry.”

She looked at him. “You understand what I mean, don't you, about being good?”

“Yes, sweeting,” he said. “I understand.”

“So why did you send her away?”

He looked at her helplessly. “I don't know.”

“Sometimes I do things and don't know why. Everybody does, don't you think? You just have to fix it.”

Fix it. Of course. Oh, to be eight years old and believe again that anything could be fixed, no matter how broken it was.

“You have to get her back,” Isabel told him. “I had it all planned.”

“Planned?”

She nodded. “I was thinking if you liked her, you could marry her, and then I'd have a mother. But you hurt her and made her cry and she left.”

Shame consumed him. How many women had cried because of him? Too many, he knew. Far too many.

“You'll have to apologize,” Isabel told him, “and that's always hard. Take flowers, too. That's what I do, and she always forgives me.”

Apologies and flowers. How many times had he used those techniques with women? Dozens. How shallow they were. Easy, cheap, and shallow because he had never really cared whether they worked or not. Dylan leaned forward and kissed Isabel's forehead. “Go to sleep.”

He pulled the covers up to her chin and left the nursery. He went downstairs and, because there was nowhere else to go, he sat down at the piano and began to play whatever came into his head. It was the only thing he knew to do. There were no other distractions left.

He could not go back to days of opiates and hashish, gambling and women. All the women. He could not go back. He was out in the open now, raw and exposed with nowhere to run and a daughter who depended on him. He stopped playing.

“Grace,” he said in despair, “how am I supposed to raise her without you to help me? I don't know how to be a father.”

There were so many things he didn't know. He didn't know himself, but Grace knew him. She had understood him from the very first moment. He looked at his folio on the stand. He stared at the symphony named for her. For the most generous heart he had ever hurt, for the girl with green eyes. Eyes that would haunt him for the rest of his life because of all the love in them that was not for him.

He loved her. He knew that now. Too late.

You bastard,
she had said. And he was. He lowered his face into his hands. There was nothing he could say to get her back, nothing he could do to get what he wanted.

But perhaps there was something he could do for her. To give her what she really wanted. Dylan got up. Dawn was breaking, and he had a great deal to do.

Within two hours, he was back at Plumfield, insisting to the butler that Ian be woken at once and he didn't care if it was seven o'clock in the morning.

A few minutes later, Ian entered the drawing room in his dressing gown. “Dylan, what are you doing here?”

“I need something.” He looked his brother in the eye. “I need the services of a diplomat.”

G
race tried to like living in Wales. As weeks went by, she tried not to compare it to Devonshire. Her cottage was small but cozy, nestled in a rocky cliff by the sea. It had a garden and a thatched roof. It even had furniture, something she had not expected. If she was thrifty, she could live for a long time on the thousand pounds Dylan had given her.

Best not to think of Dylan. Grace stopped snipping the dead flowers off the rosebush in her garden and closed her eyes, trying to force him out of her mind. He would not go. He was there, like a shadow over everything she did, like an open wound that would not heal. When she had left Etienne, she had never looked back, for in her heart she had left him long before she'd packed her things and departed. Dylan was different—she looked back dozens of times a day. It hurt every single time.

It was September now, and a chilly wind was in the air today. Two months since she had left Nightingale's Gate. It seemed like years. Never had days and nights been so long.

She should hate him. She tried, but hate was such a hard emotion to sustain. Especially when there were so many things about him that she loved. His creativity, his energy, the way he listened to what she said and remembered it, his love for his daughter and the way he had met that responsibility. She missed his charm, the way he could make her laugh, the way he had taken her side completely in her feud with her family. She missed his kisses; in fact she missed him so terribly that she ached with it. If she hated him, it would be so much easier to bear what he had done.

Grace gave up deadheading roses. It was silly to be doing it now, when she should be letting the last ones set hips, but she had needed something to do. Perhaps she should go for a walk instead.

She glanced back at the green, misty hills behind her, and up at the sky. It was going to rain again. It seemed to rain every day in Wales. She shoved the pruning scissors into the pocket of her apron and started up the hill. Yes, she decided, a walk would be better. What did a little rain matter?

A carriage came into view along the road and turned down the lane toward her cottage. Surprised, Grace watched as the closed traveling coach circled to her front door and pulled to a stop. She turned and retraced her steps down the hill, watching as the coachman opened the door and a man stepped down, a tall, thin man with fair hair.

She took a tentative step down the hill. “James?” she cried and began to run to the coach, staring at her brother as she approached. “James, it is you!”

Her brother stared back at her as she halted in front of him. He took in the threadbare maroon dress, work apron, and white kerchief tied round her hair. Some nuance of feeling touched his face, a hint of regret, something she had not seen the last time they'd met. “Grace.”

“Oh, James, I cannot believe it!” They had not parted on good terms a year ago, but in her loneliness, she was glad to see her brother, more glad than she would have thought possible. She held out her hand, and more astonishing, he took it.

“How did you find me?” she asked.

“I received a visit from a friend of yours, a Sir Ian Moore.”

“What?” she cried, more astonished than before. “Why on earth would His Excellency come to see you?”

“It is a rather long story.” He gestured to the cottage. “Perhaps we should go inside?”

“Of course!” She led him into the cottage and into her small parlor. She reached for the poker and started to stoke the fire, but her brother took it from her hand and did it for her.

“Would you like tea?” she asked, and he shook his head. She sat down on her small settee, and her brother took the opposite chair.

“How are you, Grace?” James asked her.

“Well enough,” she answered, looking into eyes as green as her own. “But quite bewildered, I confess. What are you doing here?”

“As I said, I received a visit in Stillmouth from Sir Ian. He came at his brother's request, and that prompted my trip here.”

“What?” Something wobbled inside her, threw her off kilter, and she swallowed hard. Dylan had sent Sir Ian to her brother? She told herself she didn't care.

“Sir Ian and his brother were both very concerned for your well-being. You were governess to Mr. Moore's daughter?” her brother asked, a tiny hint of disapproval there. How could there not be, given her brother's fastidious nature and Dylan's wicked reputation?

“Yes, I was.” She could not believe Dylan was concerned about her. Why should he be? Dylan had no interest in her any longer, and she could not fathom why on earth he would send Sir Ian to go to James about her. “Did Sir Ian indicate how Isabel fares?” she asked, stalling as she tried to get her bearings.