Promise Me Tonight (30 page)

She didn’t know how much time passed as she stood there, held in the circle of his arms, her head nestled against his shoulder, simply breathing him in and out. In those dreadful first weeks after he had left, and then again when she had realized she was with child, she had dreamed of him like this. Holding her, comforting her.

But the hope of his returning to her and professing his undying love had been crushed when she had found out about the navy. Once the shock had worn off, a fierce burning anger and resentment had set in. Her fury had, in turn, been supplanted by grief and a bittersweet longing for what might have been.

As James continued to soothe her, murmuring endearments against her hair, stepping back into her life as if he had never gone away, Isabella’s rage returned in full force.
How dare he?
Her fingers itched to slap him. She wanted to rain down blows on his chest, inflict just a fraction of the hurt he had caused her. Instead she tore herself away from him.

“Get out,” she hissed, pointing at the nursery door.

If she hadn’t been so furious, she would have laughed at the dumbstruck look on James’s face. She stamped her foot. “I. Said. Get. Out.”

He looked at her in complete befuddlement. “What in God’s name is the matter with you? A moment ago you were soft and willing in my arms, and now you’re acting like some sort of virago.”

Isabella crossed her arms over her chest. “I remembered that you broke your promise to me, that’s what.”

“Technically, I didn’t break my promise.” He crossed his arms over his chest, mimicking her angry stance. “If you will recall, I promised you that I would not enlist in the army, and I didn’t. You never said anything about the navy.”

“That is complete rubbish! You knew perfectly well what I meant when I asked for that promise, and you just chose to ignore it.”

James released his arms and tapped a finger thoughtfully against his chin. “Hmmm,” he mused, “you know it’s rather like when you chose to invade my bedchamber, even though you knew perfectly well that you were acting against my express wishes.”

“The difference being that I acted to save your life,” Izzie hissed. “You tried to throw it away.”

“I know, but I didn’t. I’m alive, sweetheart, and I’m here now. Can’t we just start over?”

She looked up at him with huge, sad eyes. “I don’t know. No matter what you say, you broke your promise to me, and I don’t know if I can forgive you for that. How can I trust you again?”

A mottled flush crept up James’s neck and into his face, and he began to pace about the room like a caged beast. “If I can forgive you for seducing me, you should damned well be able to forgive me for breaking a promise that I didn’t really break in the first place,” he growled.

“But you haven’t,” Izzie cried. “You haven’t forgiven me. If you had, you wouldn’t keep throwing it back in my face.”

James stopped abruptly, one hand sliding up to massage the base of his neck. His hair was longer than he usually kept it, she noticed, and there were golden highlights from the months he had spent outdoors. The sight of those strong fingers sent a rush of longing through her, left her insides quivering and her knees feeling weak.

Isabella stumbled over to the chair by the cradle where she often sat and rocked Bride late into the night. She sank into it and gave in to the flow of tears that had begun to leak down her cheeks. “Go,” she choked out. “Please, just go. The longer you stay, the harder it will be when you leave. The days after you first left were torturous, but they were nothing compared to how I felt when I learned you had been wounded, when I thought I had lost you for good.” She began to cry in earnest. “Losing you a third time would kill me. So please, I am begging you, just go away.”

She buried her face in her hands and waited. For a long moment the room was silent, and then came the heavy fall of James’s footsteps. For a moment she thought he was walking toward her, that he was somehow going to make everything right between them, and then she remembered that he had to move past her to reach the door. Each step echoed loudly in the silence, and each one crushed her heart a little bit more. It was better this way, she told herself. This was what she wanted, what she’d asked for. It hurt, of course, that he could walk away so easily, but that had never been a problem for James.

Running away was what he did best, but this time she wasn’t going to chase after him. This time she was going to do what was best for all of them—for Bride, for James and, though it was difficult to admit, for her. She was going to do what she should have done long ago. . . .

She was going to give him up and let him go.

And then she realized he had stopped moving. Puzzled, she raised her head, only to see him drop to his knees before her, his face filled with remorse. The sight of the naked pain in his eyes didn’t leave her feeling vindicated.

That was the problem with trying to wound someone you loved, she supposed.

In the end, you were only hurting yourself.

She was breaking his heart, tearing him up inside. James felt every sob that broke from her throat like a fist in the gut. He lifted her hands from her tearstained face and tenderly wiped away the salty drops coursing down her cheeks. “Izzie, I am not going to leave you. Never again. I learned my lesson the hard way. When I thought I was going to die, I went through hell knowing I had never told you—”

He was cut off by what sounded like a thundering stampede of elephants making their way up the stairs. Huffing and puffing from their mad rush, still in their bonnets and spencers, Lady Sheffield, Lady Weston, and Olivia exploded through the door frame. Three pairs of eyes noted the tears on Isabella’s face, and then turned in unison to fix James with angry, accusing stares. As for him, his gaze fell to their hands: not a pistol in sight. There was a God, and he was on James’s side.

As he sat in the parlor facing his trio of accusers, feeling uncomfortably like a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, James was having second thoughts about his standing with the Almighty. After the women had burst into the nursery, they had clucked over Isabella, declared she was far too pale, and sent her off to rest in her room. He, on the other hand, had been marched downstairs to face “Torquemama” and her acolytes.

“Am I allowed the chance to defend myself, or am I to be sent straight to the rack?” he asked jokingly.

Lady Weston frowned. “Don’t be ridiculous. No one here is going to torture you.”

Lady Sheldon’s face fell.

“You have just given all of us something of a shock, turning up so unexpectedly. Not that I’m not delighted to see you, of course,” she hastened to add.

“Could have fooled me,” James muttered.

“And you look so well,” she continued. “You gave us quite a scare, you know.”

Obviously displeased with her sister’s kindness to the enemy, Lady Sheldon noted, “It was, in fact, the news of your injury that sent your wife into premature labor—”

“Kate!” Lady Weston elbowed her sister. “We can’t know that for sure, and in any case—”

“It was an extremely long and difficult labor,” Lady Sheldon went on. “Had the midwife been less competent, we could have easily lost them both.”

James buried his face in his hands. He would have preferred the rack to this hellish, emotional torture.

“Stop, Aunt Kate,” Olivia said softly. “We are not the only ones who have had a shock today.”

Personally, James was of the opinion that finding out he was a father trumped his unannounced arrival at Castle Haile by a hundredfold, but he kept it to himself.

“Fine,” Lady Sheldon huffed, “but I still want to know what he is doing here.”

Isabella had wondered the same thing.
Wasn’t it bloody obvious?
“I have come for my wife.”

“So now you have decided you want her?” demanded Lady Sheldon.

“Kate,” Lady Weston murmured in warning.

“No. Don’t ‘Kate’ me. He abandoned Isabella on their wedding day, and we have all been nursing her broken heart ever since. I need to make sure he won’t hurt her again, and I don’t really care if his feelings get hurt in the process.”

“Lady Sheldon, I have no intention of hurting Isabella. I never wanted to cause her any pain. In retrospect, I realize I should have handled things differently, but I can’t undo the past. And even if I could, I am not altogether certain that I would. Neither can I promise that Isabella will never be hurt again. We both have tempers, and it seems quite probable that we will disagree on any number of things over, oh, the next fifty years or so.”

Lady Sheldon tried to keep a straight face, but she couldn’t keep her lips from twitching up at the corners. A moment later she began to laugh out loud.

“What?” James, Olivia, and Lady Weston chorused in varying tones of annoyance, confusion, and bemusement.

“I was just thinking that if you are to be married for such a long time, my wedding present to you will be a second set of china.”

“Why? Does it wear out?” James wanted to know.

The general mirth in response to what had been an earnest question left him feeling somewhat miffed. He was a man, after all. Men didn’t know about things such as whether china wore out.

Lady Weston wiped at her eyes. “In most households, the answer would be no, but in your case . . . Knowing Izzie . . .” She started laughing again. “I predict that you and my daughter will go through a great deal of china.”

James nodded, though he still hadn’t a clue what they were talking about or why it was so bloody funny. Fortunately, they were distracted by the butler’s entrance into the room and the huge display of flowers he carried before him.

“Oh, Dimpsey, how gorgeous!” Lady Sheldon exclaimed.

Dimpsey?
The giant’s name was
Dimpsey
?

“Whom are they from?” asked Olivia.

“Me,” James answered, quite pleased with himself. “I have a present for Charlotte as well. Had I known there were more ladies in residence . . .” He shrugged.

“Seeing you alive and well is more than enough for me,” Lady Weston declared. “Although I wouldn’t mind a proper hug from my favorite son-in-law.”

“I am your only son-in-law,” James muttered, but he happily obliged. He glanced at Olivia over Lady Weston’s head and raised an eyebrow in silent question.

“I am sure I can find some way for you to make it up to me,” she pronounced cheerfully, grinning at him.

“Thank you, James.” Lady Sheldon’s voice was only slightly grudging. “The flowers are lovely, and bringing a gift for Charlotte is most thoughtful. Despite the inauspicious start to your marriage, I believe you will make Isabella a very fine husband.”

“Thank you, Lady Sheldon,” he said earnestly.

“If, of course, she deigns to forgive you,” she added blithely. “And call me Katherine, or Aunt Kate, if you like. We are family, after all.”

A sense of peace settled over James at her words. Partly because he felt something of the relief Hercules must have known when he wrestled the monstrous, three- headed Cerberus into submission, but mostly because Lady Sheldon—Aunt Kate, he reminded himself—had said a magical word: “family.”

Isabella would forgive him. She
had
to forgive him. He would sacrifice his pride and grovel if he had to; he would even crawl on his knees if necessary (though he really hoped it wouldn’t be), because no matter how fiercely he had fought against the idea of his own marriage and children, there was nothing more precious, nothing more sacred to James Sheffield than family.

God knew he hadn’t planned it, but it was too late for that. He had a family. And he was in love. With his wife. With his daughter. With the knowledge that, through them, he now belonged to as big and loving a family as he had ever dreamed. By some miracle, the innermost wishes of his heart had been granted.

Excusing himself on the pretext of needing to make sure his man had got settled in, James went off in search of Dimpsey, his new and entirely unexpected ally. He found the butler waiting for him just outside the room. Without a word spoken, the two men walked down the corridor until they were safely out of earshot of the parlor.

“I must thank you for bringing in the flowers when you did,” James said. “Your timing was nothing less than inspired.”

The butler shrugged his massive shoulders. “In a household full of women, men must stick together for survival.”

“Yes, how very true.” James nodded, beginning to wonder if Dimpsey wasn’t actually much smarter than he let on. “I say, do you know if my things have been brought in yet?”

“They have already been placed in a room for you, my lord. And I offered your man lodging in the main house, but he preferred to bed down in the quarters alongside the stables with the grooms.”

“Excellent, excellent. So, about this room I have been assigned to—how near is it to my wife’s chamber?”

The butler winked. “Directly across the hall, my lord.”

“Brilliant. Bless you, Dimpsey. You are a butler among butlers. I don’t suppose I could lure you away from Lady Sheldon’s employ? No, I didn’t think so. Now, if the ladies ask, my war injuries are acting up and I have gone to my room to rest.” He started for the stairs, and then stopped as he realized he had no idea where his room was. He turned around and saw Dimpsey waiting patiently by the base of the stairs.