Windswept (36 page)

“You’re evil. My father says so. You want to hurt everyone.”

Nora pounded her fist in the dirt. How could she reason with Dylan when his own father had planted lies in his head?

I can’t die today
, Nora shouted in her mind.
Jacob will never know the truth.
She would follow Sophie off the side of this cliff, adding her own pitiful cries to the mournful ones that preceded her, and Jacob would go on forever believing he was the tortured woman’s son. Only now he would have the guilt of Nora’s death to carry as well.

Dylan reached down and pulled her to her feet. Then, wrapping his arm around her waist, he half carried, half dragged her to the edge of the cliff.

Finding a burst of energy she didn’t know she possessed, Nora fought back. She scratched at his arm, and kicked wildly with her feet. “No, Dylan,” she cried. “Your father’s wrong.”

He wrenched her body around until she faced the emptiness of air stretching to a distant blue horizon. She swallowed hard and resisted looking to the bottom where the sea crashed against rocks that formed the base of the sheer cliff.

“You want to hurt Jacob,” Dylan said.

“No! I love Jacob.” Her pronouncement rang with truth in her ears as exhaustion caused her to fall limp in Dylan’s arms. Huge sobs racked her body. “I…I love him,” she said again.

Dylan’s arm under her breasts tightened more, and she fought for every breath. The blue Caribbean air swam before her eyes in waves of shimmering heat.

“You want to kill Jacob,” he shouted.

“Listen to me, Dylan,” she said through strangled breaths. “I love Jacob, and he loves me.”

“You are a liar,” he said. “I am the only one who loves Jacob. He will thank me. You are evil, Nora.” Her feet left the ground, and Dylan inched her closer to the edge.

Nora struggled to get a foothold, kicking clods of dirt with her toe and sending them skittering over the edge. “You will break Jacob’s heart if you let me fall.”

“She’s right, Dylan.”

Everything stopped. The world stopped spinning crazily in front of Nora’s eyes. Her lungs stopped struggling for air. Her limbs stopped their fruitless pursuit of freedom. She was suddenly a rag doll in Dylan’s clutches as he spun around toward the sound of another voice. Nora blinked her blurry eyes, hoping against hope…
Please let it be him. Jacob.

He was there, standing several feet away. He was panting. His eyes were wide with horror. But the hand he stretched out toward his brother was as steady as the cliff they all stood upon.

“Nora told you the truth,” he said. “You will break my heart if you let her fall.”

Dylan’s arms remained tight around Nora’s chest. “Nora is evil,” he said. “She must leave. She wants to hurt you, Jacob.”

Jacob advanced slowly. “No, she would never hurt me. She loves me, just as you do.”

Dylan backed up a step, and Jacob drew in a sharp breath. “Dylan, stop!”

Terrible tremors shook Dylan’s body. He teetered on the edge, and sobbed in Nora’s ear. “But Father said…”

She gritted her teeth and clung to him as if her strength could keep them both from going over the edge.
Please don’t let him fall. Please God
.

“Father was wrong,” Jacob said. He continued to speak, but Nora no longer heard his words. She only saw his actions. He leaped for his brother and grabbed his arm. They all three fell away from the edge of the cliff and rolled over twice in a heap of tangled arms and legs.

When they stopped against a boulder, Dylan crawled away from them and sat in a patch of tall grass, hugging his knees and crying like an infant. Jacob cradled Nora in his lap and wrapped his arms around her. Though neither of them spoke, he made soft cooing sounds against her hair. After a time, the wind cooled her face and dried her tears. And the strength of Jacob’s arms eventually calmed the shudders that made her body quake as though her limbs were attached to marionette wires.

“Can you make it back down?” he finally asked her.

She nodded, and he lifted her to her feet. Then he helped his brother off the ground. Letting Dylan go ahead, he supported Nora with an arm around her waist, and they began the slow journey down the mountain.

“You’re going to be fine, Miss Seabrook,” the doctor said. Whatever ointments he’d applied to her scrapes stung like hellfire, but she supposed he was right.

“How’s Dylan?” she asked.

“Confused. Upset. And I think maybe a little remorseful. It’s a trait we don’t often see in him, but perhaps I saw it today.” He smiled. “If you’re all right, I think I’ll go back to him now. Besides, there’s a gentleman outside your door waiting impatiently to see you.”

“Yes, let him come in.”

Jacob shook hands with the doctor in the hallway and then came in Nora’s room. He hadn’t changed clothes yet. Dirt and bits of vegetation clung to his skin and clothing, and his hair fell in unkempt sandy waves on his forehead and collar. He appeared almost as bedraggled as Nora assumed she did, but to her, he’d never looked more wonderful.

He sat on the edge of her bed, and she immediately gave in to the urge to brush a strand of hair off his forehead. He took her hand and kissed the palm.

“Well,” she said. “I finally got to see something of the island and put an end to this interminable stretch of boredom you imposed by confining me to the house.”

He stared at her for a long moment and then threw back his head and laughed. “And the worst part is, I owe you another damn apology for the way my brother behaved.”

She raised a finger and slipped it under his chin. “No, this time you don’t. Your rescue quite makes up for the abominable hospitality.”

He wrapped his hands around her shoulders. “Nora Seabrook, you are a treasure. It’s no wonder I…”

“You what?”

He looked away, but not before she saw a familiar shadow darken his eyes. “It’s no wonder I…thank whatever’s holy that I was able to bring you down off that mountain.”

“It’s been quite a day, hasn’t it?” she said.

“Indeed.” He kissed her forehead.

She took his hand and gave it a quick squeeze. “I’m afraid the worst is still to come.”

She withdrew the ragged documents from the pocket of her dress and gave them to him.

Chapter Twenty-two

Nora would always remember the sixty seconds it took for Jacob to realize the significance of the documents she handed him. In that short time, she watched him change from the man he’d always thought he was to the man he would become.

At first, wide, alert eyes and a parting of his lips in silent exclamation revealed his disbelief. Then a sudden flush of crimson to his face and neck, accompanied by the thrumming of a vein at his temple, suggested that he must be restraining a consuming anger. And last, a long, low sigh of grief and his directionless gaze away from the papers, told Nora how deeply his father’s wounds had pierced Jacob’s soul.

She waited for what seemed an eternity, for Jacob to look at her. She prayed she would see in his eyes one final reaction, the one that would release him forever from the chains of his mother’s madness. She prayed for relief to settle on his face like halcyon breezes after a storm. Laying her hand on his arm, she whispered, “Jacob…”

He grasped her hand and held it to his chest. His heart beat erratically against her palm, yet when he looked at her, his face was calm. “I’m free,” he said. “It’s over.” He lifted the documents from his lap. They crackled with age in his trembling hand, but he was careful not to tear them. “These papers, Nora. How did you…? Where…?”

She told him everything, and he drank in the details of her story like a man long denied water. Polly at the wash house, the strange lyrics, the pieces of the puzzle suddenly falling into place, the hidden drawer. And when she told him about her meeting with his father and his threats, his eyes glittered with dangerous intensity.

“He did it,” Jacob said through jaws clenched so tightly Nora wondered how she’d understood his words. “He convinced Dylan to take you to the cliff. My poor brother wouldn’t have done such a thing otherwise. Dylan doesn’t understand revenge. His anger is sudden and intense, but only flares to satisfy an immediate emotional craving.”

Nora knew it was true. Dylan as much as told her that Harrison was to blame. But she was grateful she didn’t have to tell Jacob in her own words of his father’s betrayal. “I’m sorry Jacob,” she said.

He stood up from her bed. His face was etched with taut creases. His lips were pressed in a tight line. “Are you certain you’re all right, Nora?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“There is something I have to do. I’ve ordered you a bath and a meal. I’ll find Polly and have her come to stay with you.”

“About Polly,” she said. “I’m worried about her. She’s afraid, Jacob, afraid your father will send her away.”

A scornful laugh came from deep in his throat. “She has no reason to fear my father, ever again. I’ll tell her so myself. And Dylan is in the cottage with Vincent. He can’t hurt you. I doubt he would again anyway.”

“I’m not worried.”

“I’ll take care of…what I have to do and then I’ll be back. You rest, Nora.”

“Yes, I will.”

He started for the door but turned and came back to her. “There are things I need to tell you…” He held the documents between them, shifting his gaze from them to her face. “I have to thank you…”

She smiled at him, realizing that while old burdens had been lifted, new ones sat upon his shoulders. “Jacob Proctor thanking
me
for something?” she teased. “My goodness, that is truly worth waiting for. I’ll definitely be here when you come back.”

A glimmer of uncertainty, as brief as the glow of a lightning bug, flashed in his eyes. It reminded Nora of a child on the first day of school whose uncertainty about the nature of this being called his teacher has made him awkward. In a way, Jacob was a child again, with new hopes and dreams and a new life to live. “Good,” he said simply. “Good.”

Then he folded the documents into his shirt pocket and left the room, and the uncertainty was gone. A fierce determination marked his stride as his footsteps echoed through the hallway toward Harrison Proctor’s library.

When Jacob entered the room, his father faced a window to the garden, leaving his back to the door. A quick, hot flash of anger gripped Jacob’s abdomen at the sight of those powerful shoulders and thick neck. He drew a breath of air to quench it. He could easily have stepped up to the old man in the wheelchair, a man he scarcely knew, and wrapped his hands around that neck. With barely a second thought he could have squeezed the breath out of him and ignored his choking pleas for mercy. He could have, but then he would have been no better than the tyrant he despised.

After a long moment, Harrison Proctor sensed the presence of someone else in the room. Gripping the wheels of his chair he slowly turned around. Upon seeing his son, his eyes reflected doubt and fear. It was a reaction Jacob had never seen before but which he now relished. The old man’s gaze then darted to the surface of his desk. A pistol rested on the tooled leather writing area within easy reach of Harrison’s grasp. Jacob had seen the weapon when he entered the room and he was certain his father had intended him to see it.

Always a master at ruling his domain, Harrison quickly hid his apprehension with a slight widening of his eyes. He cleared his throat in that authoritarian way he had, as if he were preparing to speak to a session of parliament. “Jacob, thank God you’ve come. We have a situation here. You’ve heard about Dylan? You know what he’s done?”

“I know what
you
have done,
Father
.”

“I? What sort of accusation is this? I’ve been worried beyond measure all afternoon about Miss Seabrook. Juditha only just informed me that the poor girl will recover from her ordeal. You have been told the details haven’t you? If not, I will tell you myself…”

“Don’t waste your breath. I wouldn’t give credence to so much as a syllable you uttered.”

Harrison lurched forward in his chair as if he would rise, but the result was only a wretched squeak from the overburdened wheels. “I will not tolerate such contempt from you!” he bellowed.

Jacob snorted his disgust. “Nor do I give a pence or a penny what you will or will not tolerate from this day forward.”

Harrison lowered his chin to his chest and massaged his brow with thick fingertips, a fine pretense of anguish, but one which did not fool his son. “I have already lost one son,” he said. “Must I lose another in a show of such disrespectful insolence?”

Jacob reached his father’s chair in three long strides and gripped the wooden arms. Harrison’s head snapped up, and he stared across charged inches of space into his son’s eyes. “I’ve heard enough of your cow dung, Father,” Jacob snarled into his face. “It will not serve you this day, except perhaps as fodder for your evening meal.”

Pain, a truly admirable semblance of the real thing, marked his father’s features. Jacob thought him better suited to a Shakespearean stage than a sprawling island estate.