Heart of the Diamond (42 page)

She faced the window. Her eyes stared back at her, huge and skeletal. Small wonder Mina had been so frightened. Nicki wiped at her face with her hands, then pinched color into her cheeks. The last thing she wanted was for her appearance to detract from the confrontation to come. A vanquished general did not wish to reveal any weakness to his conqueror.

When Nicki heard the footsteps in the hall, and the murmur of voices, she moved away from the window. She would not cower in the shadows. They had treated her like a child.

Let them see how wrong they had been.

First came Angelica, followed by her father and then Blake. Nicki feared her back might break if she stood any straighter. She avoided Blake's gaze as he closed the door and leaned a shoulder against it in studied casualness. Instead, she turned her attention to Angelica.

“What on earth is all this about, Nicole? You have been disappearing all evening. What have you been up to now?”

Bitterness uncurled inside Nicki, yet she fought it down. “I assure you, Angelica, my activities are quite dull when compared to those shared by the three of you. I have been privy to an amazing tale and I could not wait to share it with all of you.”

With shoulders slumped, her father righted the chair Teddy had overturned and sank into the seat. Angelica hurried to stand behind him and rested her hand lightly on his back.

The silence stretched tighter. Nicki saw Blake cross his arms and tip one booted foot up to rest it against the other. No matter how they all attempted to hide it, she felt their alarm. And still no one spoke.

She looked at her father. “Stop me if you have heard the story. It is about a young man at college who set out to seduce the wife of a duke and was caught by her husband.” The words cut into her heart.

Knowing how Blake had tried repeatedly to please Barrett Dylan, only to fail with every effort, the thought that her father had held the ax that delivered the final blow to sever their relationship tormented her. No matter how justified her father might have been in his behavior, the damage had been permanent and irreversible. Blake's father had died with the rift still firmly in place.

She remembered her father telling her that Blake had suffered most of all. Now she understood.

“We thought it best to wait . . .” Angelica's voice drifted into silence.

“Did you not trust me? Am I so foolish and immature that you could not treat me as an equal? Of course not. If you had shared your tale with me, I might have been difficult. Keep little Nicki in the dark and biddable.”

“That wasn't the case at all, Nick. No one wanted to hurt you.”

“Hurt me?” Nicki laughed, but the sound was brittle and harsh, and her father winced. “Or yourselves?”

Blake spoke, his voice husky with some emotion Nicki could not define. “Those events are best left to the past, my dear. They hold no place in our future.”

She shook her head. “But they do, can you not see? They color everything as dark as night. I wanted to take away your bitterness, to welcome you into my family so that you could know their love as I had. You made me look the fool.”

“You are the only person in my life who made me believe I might come out of the darkness,” he said quietly.

“Yet you could not trust me with the truth? Did you think I would not understand? I do. I blame none of you for what happened. We are all human. What I cannot accept is that the three of you made a conscious decision to deceive me.” She looked at Blake and fought to maintain control. “You of all people should know what it is like to be protected from the truth. It is the ultimate betrayal.”

Pushing himself from the door, Blake advanced toward Nicki. Yet when she raised her hands sharply to ward him off, he halted several feet from her. “I would have told you in time. This marriage has come about so quickly, but we were becoming closer, were we not?”

“You would have told me in time? When would that have been, Blake? After the birth of our first child? Perhaps after our third? When would you have trusted me not to leave you?” She swiped angrily at her tears. “You should have learned from your father how time passes and it becomes so easy to maintain silence. Then we die and it is too late. I gave you my heart. I trusted you with everything I held most dear. But you gave only what you felt was safe.”

“I care for you, Nicole. More than you know . . .”

“No!” Pain surged upward from her chest bringing with it fury at her own naiveté. “I gave you my love!”

As Nicki's words reverberated off the walls, mocking her, chastising him, his fists clenched and he dropped his gaze to the carpet. Through her tear-blurred vision she saw her father with his elbows resting on his thighs, his head bent as he stared at his folded hands. Then she met Angelica's glittering gaze.

No, she did not blame Blake for loving her stepmother, and she doubted if she could ever feel she measured up to such a standard.

Blake took another step forward, then stopped to drag his fingers through his dark hair. “The wedding tomorrow . . .”

Her raised hand silenced him again. “If you force me to make a decision now . . .” She took a deep breath, then released it slowly. Her gaze raised to meet Blake's impenetrable grey eyes. Still he guarded his emotions, even after all this, and that fact shattered her heart. “You will have my answer in the morning. That is the most I can offer you now.”

A muscle flinched in his jaw. “I want us to be married. Please . . .”

She gripped her hands together tightly. How she loved him, but that love was one-sided. That she might have borne, but deceit . . .  “I do not know what I want. Can you not see? Everything I believed in is a lie. If you had just shared something of the truth, perhaps I could have understood the depth of your hostility toward my father. Perhaps I would not have been so hopeful that we could all be a family.” She glanced at her father, then to Angelica, shaking her head. “You all knew my hopes, yet you continued to let me go on playing the idiot. And I played it well, did I not?”

“You are hurting now and saying things you do not mean. I think you know we were only protecting you.” Angelica's voice rang with firm authority.

Dear Angelica, always in control of the situation. “Teddy said all along that I needed to know the reason for Blake's hatred, but he felt that one of you should tell me.”

Her father rubbed his face with his hands. “There just wasn't time, Nick.”

She nodded as she bit her lip to still its trembling. Her father sounded so lost and uncertain. How well she understood him—that innate sense that everything would work out if just left alone. “I told Teddy tonight that he no longer knew my heart. Now I wonder if perhaps he is not the only one who does.”

Blake reached for her, but when she cringed from his touch he dropped his hand to his side. “We will get through this, Nicole, I swear it.”

"Damn all of you for your secrets!”

Her words were met with silence.

“I am so tired. You shall have my answer soon." She brushed past Blake and escaped to the door. Sobs threatened to choke her, but she would not break down here. Nicki flung open the door and rushed into the hall. She heard the door slam against the wall from the force of her passing.

Solemn faces danced in her mind's vision and the fact that she caused them pain only deepened her own misery. Still, she wanted them to feel as forlorn and stricken as she.

No. No she did not. If she could have taken all their pain on herself she would. She loved them that much. Even Angelica. Dear Heaven, how had she come to this?

Nicki slowed her headlong rush at the stairs, reached out to clutch at the smooth mahogany banister. With a deep breath, she pulled herself up, first one step, then another. Tomorrow should have been the most glorious day of her life and she should be dancing up these stairs. Now she dreaded the arrival of the dawn.

If only she could sleep and awaken years from now with all this in the past. She stumbled on the top stair, recovered her balance and veered toward her room.

Her feet dragged along the floral carpeting, each step a supreme act of determination. Nicki paused outside her door. Josey. Where would she find the strength to face her aunt's questions?

She pushed open the door, pausing to survey the room. A lamp burned near the bed. The bedclothes were turned down invitingly. But Josey was not in the room.

After she closed the door, Nicki collapsed back against its smooth wood. What was she to do? So few options stood open to her. She could marry a man who did not love her, or she could marry a man she did not love. There it was. She had told Blake she could disappear, yet now, when she had a reason to go, she knew with a crushing certainty that such an action would destroy her.

Across the room, the dressing table drew her gaze. The music box her mother had given her beckoned, just as it always had in her most distressed moments. Nicki dropped onto the small stool and reached for the porcelain box with the tiny bewigged and ornately dressed lady adorning its top. She missed her mother so much.

Her fingers trembled as she picked up the music box and lifted the hinged lid. As delicate music filled the room, tears trickled down her cheeks. Here in the privacy of her own bedchamber, Nicki could allow them to fall unheeded. Gently she slipped her fingernail into a puckered space at the edge of the tufted velvet lining until the fabric lifted. She grasped the corner of a yellowed slip of folded paper and removed it from its hiding place, then returned the music box to the dressing table. The music wound down into silence.

A vague scent of lavender drifted from the page as she unfolded it, her hands gentle in deference to its fragility. The words had faded over time, but Nicki still experienced the same intense sadness at the sight of the delicate flourishes in Marguerite's handwriting.

Tonight, I learned that all I have loved is gone forever. Our marriage was a mistake, husband, for both of us. I leave you now to find my own peace. I know you will find yours with my passing. Go to her, as I go to him. Time moves too quickly to waste a single moment. We fulfilled our duty to everyone else. It is time to be true to ourselves. Marguerite.

Nicki's breath caught on a sob. She had never understood the words as a child, yet somehow they took on a sacred meaning now.
All I have loved is gone forever.
Such hopeless despair. But she said she went to
him
. To whom?

The answer eluded her, as it had each time she read the missive.

“I suspected Marguerite had taken her own life,” Nicki stiffened at the sound of her stepmother's voice, but did not turn around, “but there was no evidence. I know your father would have told me if he had known, so that means he did not. It seems you have kept secrets of your own, Nicole.”

She had not heard Angelica enter the room. “What purpose would it have served to share it with him? He was so happy to marry you. I had never seen him so happy.”

“I now understand a little better your animosity toward me.” With a whisper of silk skirts, Angelica moved to stand next to the dressing table. “You believe your mother killed herself because of your father's relationship with me.”

“She was so sad. Nothing I did could take away her pain, no matter how hard I tried. He could have changed that, but he chose not to. He chose you instead. And he broke her heart.”

Angelica reached out to trace the jagged edges of the velvet lining in the music box. “I could allow you to believe that, but it would be a discredit to your father and to you. Your mother never loved your father.” Nicki started to object. “No, let me finish. Marguerite's and Jonathon's fathers had made an agreement to join their families when their children were small. But she fell in love with another, and Jonathon loved me. He tried to convince his father to break the contract. I believe Marguerite tried with her own father, but to no avail. They were married and they were miserable. I, too, married. He was much older than I and left me a widow after only two years of marriage. I had no children of my own, no one to ease my loneliness. Except Jonathon. We risked great scandal to be together. I never meant to hurt your mother, Nicole. My love for your father was so strong—sometimes the depth of my emotion terrified me.”

With infinite care, Nicki placed the letter next to the music box. Her eyes burned from too many tears. When she looked at Angelica she saw with surprise that the woman had been crying as well. “What you did was wrong. You took my father away from her. There was no chance that they could ever find love with each other when my father found it with you!”

Though Nicki had never known her stepmother to shed a tear, Angelica's eyes glittered emerald through the moisture. “They never understood each other. Your mother held an ideal in her heart of the man she wanted. I knew that man, Nicole. His name was William, and he was a poet, a dreamer—so very different from your softhearted, down-to-earth father. All Jonathon has ever wanted is his family and his toy factory—and sharing the horses with you. He could never have been what Marguerite wanted him to be.”

“They had Mina and me. Why was that not enough?”

“You are still so naive, Nicole! Your mother refused your father entrance to her bedchamber after Mina was born. She told him he disgusted her. For any marriage to succeed, both parties have to want it to.” She drew a shivery breath. “Perhaps neither of them tried hard enough, but it does not matter now. Marguerite is gone. She is probably at peace for the first time since she was forced to marry a man she did not love. Your father is happy, and I like to think I have had something to do with that.”

Nicki shook her head in denial of the words that rang with too much truth. “You were not here, in this home. How can you know anything about my mother?”

“I admit I only heard your father's side, and I drew my conclusions from what he told me. I do not blame your mother. I put the blame on no one. It was a sad twist of fate that brought the two of them together, but look what came of their unhappy union. Two beautiful daughters! Your father is so proud of his girls.”