Lady Isabella's Scandalous Marriage (34 page)

Mac’s heart warmed. It had been a sad day, watching Isabella say good-bye to her father, but the fear and worry had left Lady Scranton’s face. Isabella glanced up, saw Mac, and sent him a smile.

“There,” Mac said to Ian in a low voice. “I’m sorry it took a tragedy to do it, but Isabella has been reunited with her family. Sins forgiven. Even if we are never truly man and wife again, seeing her as she is now, with her arms around the people she loves, is enough for me.”

Ian looked at Mac in silence for a long time. “No, it isn’t,” he said.

He walked away from Mac and made for Beth and her welcoming smile.

Mac thought about Ian’s words as they concluded their visit to Kent and returned to London. Louisa elected to stay with their mother and get her settled, not wanting to leave Lady Scranton alone too soon. Isabella had already asked them to travel with her when she went back to Kilmorgan for the Christmas season. Lady Scranton at first had been reluctant, but Mac had been at his most jovial and talked her into it. Isabella had given him a smile of gratitude for that too.

But Ian was right. Gratitude was not enough.

Exposing his soft underbelly was not something Mac was used to doing. Mac had thought he’d done it already, telling her about the terrible time he’d spent in Italy after he’d decided to give up drink. He realized now that he’d told her that to not only gain her sympathy, but prove that he took their marriage seriously. He hadn’t actually showed her the entire wreck of a man that was Mac Mackenzie. Isabella might cheerfully grind her elegant, high-heeled boot into that wreck and walk away from him, but he had to take that chance.

Thinking about her slender ankles in those high-heeled boots did not help. Nor did thinking of her in nothing
but
the high-heeled boots.

He was visualizing this pleasant possibility while mixing paints in his studio one day when he heard Isabella walk in. He glanced up from his paint table, and his heart gave the excited twinge it always did when he saw her. She’d dressed today in a black gown trimmed with intricate loops of black braid, her red hair and green eyes startling color against this darkness.

“Mac,” Isabella said abruptly. “Did you keep the letter I sent you?”

With effort Mac turned his attention back to his paints. “Letter?”

“The letter I sent you the night I left.”

Ah. That letter.
Mac kept kneading paint globs to hide his nervous start. “Why would you imagine I still have it?”

“I don’t know whether you do. That is why I have to ask.”

“You sound like Ian.”

“Ian knows how to make people answer him.”

Mac laid down his palette knife. “Touché. All right, then. Come with me.”

He led her down the stairs to his bedroom. It still was his bedroom; he hadn’t slept with Isabella since the night her father died.

Mac opened the wardrobe and extracted the small box that Bellamy had saved from the half-burned house, knowing that Mac kept his most treasured keepsakes in it. He set the box on a console table and opened it. A well-creased letter lay on the bottom, worn with time and reading. Mac extracted it and held it out to Isabella.

“This appears to be it.”

“Will you read it to me?” she asked.

His false cheerfulness died. “Why?”

“I’d like to remember what I wrote.”

Why the hell should she want that? Was she demanding, like Ian, that he expose his soul? Perhaps, but Mac felt as closed-off from her as ever as he unfolded the paper.

The words she’d written had burned into his heart like fine lines etched into metal. Mac didn’t truly need to read the letter, because he’d memorized every damned word of it. But he dutifully began.

“Dearest Mac
.
”

Isabella shifted slightly, and Mac cleared his throat.

By the time he finished, Mac no longer looked at the letter but at her. Isabella turned away, lashes shielding her eyes. She moved to the window, a slender, graceful figure in soot black.

Outside on the street, carriages clattered by, coachmen whistled, and people called out to one another. Inside all was stillness. Mac glanced back at the letter, and saw the words he’d read over and over until he knew each by heart, each one stabbing him to the quick.

“Why did you keep it?” Isabella asked without looking at him.

Mac swallowed. “Who knows? I’ve tried to make myself burn it, but always I fold it up and put it back into the box.”

Isabella turned and silently held out her hand for the paper. After a tense moment, Mac took it to her.

She unfolded it and skimmed the words. Her mouth tightened as she finished, and then in one short jerk, she tore the paper in half. Before Mac could protest, she moved swiftly to the stove and tossed the letter inside.

Mac was beside her, grabbing her wrist, but too late. “What are you doing?”

Isabella looked at him in surprise. “Why would you not want me to burn it?”

“Because that letter told me how you felt. Your true feelings, in black and white. I needed to know them.”

“Those were my feelings
then
. They are not my feelings now.”

The fire crackled as the last of the paper died away. Damn it, the letter had been his lifeline. It had been a reminder of why he’d pushed aside whiskey and wild living, why he’d chosen to reform.

“I read it for comfort,” he said. “On the worst nights, when I was tempted to drink to ease the pain, I’d read it over again. And I’d tell you, in my head, that I was working to change—for you. That you didn’t need to worry, I wouldn’t let myself burn out. I would come back to you a new man.”

“How on earth did that comfort you?”

“The letter kept me sober, love. I needed it to.”

Was this the naked exposure? Foolish Mac, who’d used a hurtful letter as a prop to get him through the nights?

A part of him was crying out, the terrified boy who’d been caught and beaten when his father had found his copy-books covered with drawings instead of lessons. Mac had been forbidden with threats of more beatings to indulge in art, but try as he might, Mac hadn’t been able to stop.

The pictures had poured out of him—birds outside the window, the stream where he fished, his brothers, his mother, even his father. Mac had lived in the shadows of Hart and Cameron, both so much older, both tall, athletic, smart. But the art was his own.

The old duke had considered Mac’s need to paint weak and unmanly. When Mac had started taking mistresses at age fifteen, his father had not hidden his relief.
I thought you’d be one of those unnaturals, boy. You stick with cunny and breasts and kill any man who tries to convince you otherwise.

The old duke would have hated Mac now, his son so in love with a woman that he’d changed his whole life for her.

Women are like tar,
his father had been fond of saying.
Useful in their own way, but they’ll mire you fast if you’re not careful. They entice with their bodies then bind you with their little tantrums and tears. Take them to your bed and enjoy them, marry the one with the right connections, but above all, keep them in their place.

Isabella had never clung, never played games with tantrums and tears. She was a woman, not a girl, and could have brought his father to his knees with one scornful look.

I need that letter,
the whimpering boy inside him cried.

Or did he? For one thing, every word of the damn thing was seared into his memory. For another, he’d done it: Mac had stopped living in a frenzy. He’d lived the wild life, he now knew, because he feared that he’d have to face his true self if he ever ceased drinking, painting, running,
always running away.

“What are your feelings now?” Mac asked her.

Isabella kept her gaze averted. “I was harsh three years ago,” she said. “I was tired and miserable and angry and afraid. I kicked you away because I couldn’t face what I needed to while I was distracted with you.”

“I
distracted
you, did I?” Mac wanted to laugh. “A kind word for it.”

“You needed me to forgive you. You demanded it, and I no longer had the strength.”

“I had no business demanding anything of you. I told you that before, remember? I humbly apologized, and I still do. I mean it.”

“I know.” Isabella finally looked at him, and he saw anxiety in her eyes, as though she worried that he wouldn’t forgive
her
. “I did forgive you. I knew about everything you did after I left you. Ian reported to me—and when Ian makes a report, you can be sure I hear every detail.”

They both smiled a little. Ian had the kind of mind that could remember a list of numbers three months after he’d seen it, or every word of a conversation from the previous week even when no one had thought him listening.

“So, where are we now?” Mac asked. “I’m a responsible teetotaler who’s adopted a child, but you married a carousing, carefree, wild cad. Will you even like the Mac Mackenzie I’ve become?”

Isabella reached for his hand. “You . . . I don’t know how to put this, but you’re the
real
you now, I think. You’ve lost all the things you hid behind. As though you’re naked and unafraid.”

Mac squeezed her fingers. “I could be naked, if you like. It’s warm enough in here.”

“But there are things about the other Mac I still love,” Isabella went on. “I love your humor, your ability to render things harmless by laughing at them. I love your charm. When you were playing with the band on the street corner, you rose to the occasion with aplomb and made your friends look like idiots for ridiculing people. I was so proud to be your wife that night.”

Mac kissed her fingers. “You know, the sergeant said I was welcome to canvass with them any time. Then you can show me again how proud you are of me.”

“And I love how you turn anything we talk of into a game of seduction.”

“Now, that is good to know.”

“It makes me feel wanted and loved.” Isabella covered his paint-smeared hand with both of hers. “I’m willing to try to be your wife again.”

Mac’s heart thumped so hard he could barely breathe. Never mind the damn letter. Having Isabella herself was hundred times better. “What do you mean by that? Exactly. Be precise. Be as precise as Ian would be. I don’t want to misunderstand. Misunderstanding would make me hope, and I can’t live on false hope.”

Isabella stilled his lips with her fingertips. “I mean that I’m willing to try to live as your wife, to see how we rub along. No more games. Just life.”

“Try.” Mac kissed her fingers before she lowered them. “Only try? Not—
yes, Mac, please reverse the separation and we’ll live happily ever after
?”

“No hurrying. Living together as man and wife. If we both truly have changed, if we are able to settle down and trot along happily together, then we summon Mr. Gordon and have him attend to the legal matters.”

While part of Mac rejoiced at her words, another part chafed in impatience. He wanted this done, finished, so that the gnawing in his belly could go away, and he wouldn’t wake up in terror that she’d be gone again.