Once and Always (49 page)

He had his sleek yacht renamed the
Victoria
and coaxed her into sailing with him on the Thames. When Victoria commented that she enjoyed sailing on the Thames much more than on the ocean, Jason ordered another yacht to be built for her exclusive use, furnished entirely in pale blues and golds, for the comfort of Victoria and her friends. That piece of spectacular extravagance caused Miss Wilber to remark jealously to a group of friends at a ball, “One lives on tenterhooks wondering what Wakefield will buy her to surpass a yacht!”

Robert Collingwood raised his brows and grinned at the envious young woman. “The Thames, perhaps?”

To Jason, who had never before known the joy of being loved and admired not for what he possessed or for what he appeared to be but for what he really
was,
the quiet inner peace he felt was sheer bliss. At night, he could not hold her close enough or long enough. During the day, he took her on picnics and swam with her in the creek at Wakefield Park. When he was working, she was there on the perimeters of his mind, making him smile. He wanted to lay the world at her feet, but all Victoria seemed to want was him, and that knowledge filled him with profound tenderness. He donated a fortune to build a hospital near Wakefield—the Patrick Seaton Hospital—then he began arrangements for another one to be built in Portage, New York, also named for Victoria’s father.

On the one-month anniversary of their wedding, a message arrived that required Jason to travel to Portsmouth, where one of his ships had just put into port.

On the morning of his departure, he kissed Victoria goodbye on the steps of Wakefield Park with enough ardor to make her blush and the coachman smother a laugh.

“I wish you didn’t have to go,” Victoria said, pressing her face to his muscular chest, her arms around his waist. “Six days seems like forever, and I’ll be dreadfully lonely without you.”

“Charles will be here to keep you company, sweet,” he said, grinning at her and hiding his own reluctance to leave. “Mike Farrell is just down the road, and you can visit with him. Or you could always pay another visit to your great-grandmother. I’ll be home on Tuesday in time for supper.”

Victoria nodded and leaned up on her toes to kiss his smoothly shaven cheek.

With great determination, she kept herself as busy as possible during those six days, working at the orphanage and supervising her household, but the time still seemed to drag. The nights were even longer. She spent her evenings with Charles, who had come for a visit, but when he went up to bed, the clock seemed to stop.

On the night before Jason was expected to return, she wandered around her room, trying to avoid getting into her lonely bed. She walked into Jason’s suite, smiling at the contrast between his masculine, heavily carved, dark furnishings and her own room, which was done in the French style with gossamer silk draperies and bedhangings of rose and gold. Lovingly, she fingered the gold-inlaid backs of his brushes. Then she reluctantly returned to her own room and finally fell asleep.

She awakened at dawn the next day, her heart full of excitement, and began planning a special meal for Jason’s homecoming.

Dusk faded into twilight and finally into chilly, starlit darkness as she waited in the salon, listening for the sound of Jason’s coach in the drive. “He’s back, Uncle Charles!” she said delightedly, peering out the window at the coach lamps moving along the drive toward the house.

“That must be Mike Farrell. Jason won’t be here for at least another hour or two,” he said, smiling fondly at her as she began smoothing her skirts. “I know how long it takes to make his journey, and he’s already shaved off a day in order to get back tonight, rather than tomorrow.”

“I suppose you’re right, but it’s only half past seven, and I asked Captain Farrell to join us for supper at eight.” Her smile faded as the carriage drew up before the house, and she realized it wasn’t Jason’s luxurious traveling coach. “I think I’ll ask Mrs. Craddock to delay supper,” she was saying when Northrup appeared in the doorway of the salon, an odd, strained look upon his austere face.

“There is a gentleman here to see you, my lady,” he announced.

“A gentleman?” Victoria echoed blankly.

“A Mr. Andrew Bainbridge from America.”

Victoria reached weakly for the back of the nearest chair, her knuckles turning white as her grip tightened.

“Shall I show him in?”

She nodded jerkily, trying to get control over the violent surge of resentment quaking through her at the memory of his heartless rejection, praying she could face him without showing how she felt. So distracted with her own rampaging emotions was she that she never noticed the sudden pallor of Charles’s complexion or the way he slowly stood up and faced the door as if he were bracing to meet a firing squad.

An instant later, Andrew strode through the doorway, his steps long and brisk, his smiling, handsome face so endearingly familiar that Victoria’s heart cried out in protest against his betrayal.

He stopped in front of her, looking at the elegant young beauty standing before him in a seductive silk gown that clung to her ripened curves, her glorious hair tumbling riotously over her shoulders and trim back. “Tory,” he breathed, gazing into her deep blue eyes. Without warning, he reached out, pulling her almost roughly into his arms and burying his face in her fragrant hair. “I’d forgotten how beautiful you are,” he whispered raggedly, holding her more tightly to him.

“Obviously!” Victoria retorted, recovering from her stunned paralysis and flinging his arms away. She glared at him, amazed at his gall in daring to come here, let alone embrace her with a passion he’d never shown her before. “Apparently you forget people very easily,” she added tartly.

To her utter disbelief, Andrew chuckled. “You’re angry because it’s taken me two weeks longer to come for you than I wrote you in my letter it would take, is that it?” Without waiting for a reply, he continued, “My ship was blown off course a week after we sailed and we had to put in for repairs at one of the islands.” Placing his arm affectionately around Victoria’s stiff shoulders, he turned to Charles and put out his hand, grinning. “You must be Charles Fielding,” he said with unaffected friendliness. “I can’t thank you enough for looking after Victoria until I could come for her. Naturally, I’ll want to repay you for any expenses you have incurred on her behalf—including this delightful gown she’s wearing.”

He turned to Victoria. “I hate to rush you, Tory, but I’ve booked passage on a ship leaving in two days. The captain of the ship has already agreed to marry—”

“Letter?” Victoria interrupted, feeling violently dizzy. “What letter? You haven’t written me a single word since I left home.”

“I wrote you several letters,” he said, frowning. “As I explained to you in my last one, I kept writing to you in America because my meddling mother never sent your letters on to me, so I didn’t know you were here in England. Tory, I told you all this in my last letter—the one I sent you here in England by special messenger.”

“I did not receive any letter!” she persisted in rising tones of hysteria.

Anger thinned Andrew’s lips. “Before we leave, I intend to call upon a firm in London that was paid a small fortune to make certain my letters were delivered personally to you and your cousin the duke. I want to hear what they have to say for themselves!”

“They’ll say they delivered them to me,” Charles said flatly.

Wildly, Victoria shook her head, her mind already realizing what her heart couldn’t bear to believe. “No, you didn’t receive any letter, Uncle Charles. You’re mistaken. You’re thinking of the one I received from Andrew’s mother—the one telling me he was married.”

Andrew’s eyes blazed with anger when he saw the guilt on the older man’s face. He seized Victoria by the shoulders. “Tory, listen to me! I wrote you a dozen letters while I was in Europe, but I sent them to you in America. I did not learn of your parents’ death until I returned home two months ago. From the day your parents died, my mother stopped sending me your letters. When I came home, she told me your parents had died and that you had been whisked off to England by some wealthy cousin of yours who had offered you marriage. She said she had no idea where or how to find you here. I knew you better than to believe you would toss me over merely for some wealthy old cousin with a title. It took a while, but I finally located Dr. Morrison, and he told me the truth about your coming here and gave me your direction.

“When I told my mother I was coming here after you, she admitted the rest of her duplicity. She told me about the letter she wrote you saying I had married Madeline in Switzerland. Then she promptly had one of her ‘attacks.’ Except this one turned out to be real. I couldn’t leave her while she was teetering at death’s door, so I wrote you and your cousin, here—” He shot a murderous look at Charles. “—who for some reason did not tell you of my letters. In them, I explained what had happened, and I told each of you that I would come for you as soon as I possibly could.”

His voice softened as he cradled Victoria’s stricken face between his palms. “Tory,” he said with a tender smile, “you’ve been the love of my life since the day I saw you racing across our fields on that Indian pony of Rushing River’s. I’m not married, sweetheart.”

Victoria swallowed, trying to drag her voice past the aching lump in her throat. “I am.”

Andrew snatched his hands away from her face as if her skin burned him. “What did you say?” he demanded tightly.

“I said,” Victoria repeated in an agonized whisper as she stared at his beloved face, “I am. Married.”

Andrew’s body stiffened as if he were trying to withstand a physical blow. He glanced contemptuously at Charles. “To him? To this old man? You sold yourself for a few jewels and gowns, is that it?” he bit out furiously.

“No!” Victoria almost screamed, shaking with rage and pain and sorrow.

Charles spoke finally, his voice expressionless, his face blank. “Victoria is married to my nephew.”

“To your
son!”
Victoria hurled the words at him. She whirled around, hating Charles for his deceit, and hating Jason for collaborating with him.

Andrew’s hands clamped on her arms and she felt his anguish as if it were her own. “Why?” he said, giving her a shake. “Why!”

“The fault is mine,” Charles said tersely. He straightened to his full height, his eyes on Victoria, silently pleading for her understanding. “I have dreaded this moment of reckoning ever since Mr. Bainbridge’s letters arrived. Now that the time is here, it is worse than I ever imagined.”

“When did you receive those letters?” Victoria demanded, but in her heart she already knew the answer, and it was tearing her to pieces.

“The night of my attack.”

“Your
pretended
attack!” Victoria corrected, her voice shaking with bitterness and rage.

“Exactly so,” Charles confessed tightly, then turned to Andrew. “When I read that you were coming to take Victoria from us, I did the only thing I could think of—I feigned a heart attack, and I pleaded with her to marry my son so that she would have someone to look after her.”

“You bastard!” Andrew bit out between clenched teeth.

“I do not expect you to believe this, but I felt very sincerely that Victoria and my son would find great happiness together.”

Andrew tore his savage gaze from his foe and looked at Victoria. “Come home with me,” he implored desperately. “They can’t make you stay married to a man you don’t love. It can’t be legal—they coerced you into it. Tory, please! Come home with me, and I’ll find some way out of this. The ship leaves in two days. We’ll be married anyway. No one will ever know—”

“I can’t!” The words were ripped from her in a tormented whisper.

“Please—” he said.

Her eyes brimming with tears, Victoria shook her head. “I can’t,” she choked.

Andrew drew a long breath and slowly turned away.

The hand Victoria stretched out to him in silent, helpless appeal, fell to her side as he walked out of the room. Out of the house. Out of her life.

A minute ticked by in ominous silence, then another. Clutching the folds of her gown, Victoria twisted it until her knuckles whitened, while the image of Andrew’s anguished face seared itself into her mind. She remembered how she had felt when she first learned he was married, the torment of dragging herself through each day, trying to smile when she was dying inside.

Suddenly the churning pain and rage erupted inside of her and she whirled around on Charles in a frenzy of fury. “How could you!” she cried. “How could you do this to two people who never did a thing to hurt you! Did you see the look on his face? Do you know how much we’ve hurt him?
Do
you?”

“Yes,” Charles said hoarsely.

“Do you know how I felt all those weeks when I thought he had betrayed me and I had no one? I felt like a beggar in your house! Do you know how I felt, thinking I was marrying a man who didn’t want me, because I had no choice—” Her voice failed and she looked at him through eyes so blinded by the tears she was fighting to hold back that she couldn’t see the anguish in his.

“Victoria,” Charles rasped, “don’t blame Jason for this. He didn’t know I was pretending my attack, he didn’t know about the lett—”

“You’re lying!” Victoria burst out, her voice shaking.

“No, I swear it!”

Victoria’s head snapped up, her eyes glittering with outrage at this last insult to her intelligence. “If you think I’d believe another word either of you ever say—” She broke off, afraid of the deathly gray pallor of Charles’s haunted face, and ran from the room. She ran up the stairs, stumbling in her tear-blinded haste, and raced down the hall to her rooms. Once inside, she leaned against the closed door, her head thrown back, her teeth clamped together so tightly her jaws ached as she fought for control of her rioting emotions.

Andrew’s face, contorted with pain, appeared again before her tightly closed eyes and she moaned aloud with sick remorse.
“I’ve loved you since the day I saw you racing across our fields on that Indian pony. . . . Tory, please! Come home with me. . . .”