Wedding of the Season (16 page)

“I’m not disputing that. But you don’t really want to marry him.” Something sparked in Julia’s eyes, something cold and dark that made Beatrix shiver, despite the bright sunshine. “I married Yardley because my parents assured me it was the right thing to do. I knew it wasn’t, and I did it anyway. Don’t make my mistake. Listen to your heart, Trix, not your head.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “When you wrote and told me you were engaged, I thought you’d gotten over Will. But you haven’t.”

“Yes, I have. I care deeply for Aidan. I do!” she insisted when Julia made a sound of disbelief. “And he cares for me just as much, which is why he disapproves of some of the things you do,” she added, going on the offensive. “He’s concerned because you’re my family and soon you’ll be family to him, too.”

“Saints preserve us,” Julia muttered. “And I don’t need his concern or yours,” she added, her voice rising again. “And I’ll be damned if I’ll be lectured to by you on his behalf!”

Beatrix’s wonderful day was now utterly ruined. “You need someone’s concern, since you’re so wholly unconcerned about yourself!”

“You loved Will with a passion,” Julia went on, disregarding any attempt to turn the conversation toward herself, “and when you didn’t go with him to Egypt, it was as if he took your whole world with him. You didn’t know who you were anymore, or what you wanted. You’ve been trying to get your bearings ever since.”

Beatrix’s anger faded a bit with those words, and she wriggled in her seat as shades of last night’s doubts and uncertainties came back to her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know how much you want to be married, how much you want children, and I know you were becoming scared you’d never be able to have those things. When you became engaged to Trathen, I thought you’d at last found happiness again. But Trix, you’re not happy.”

Beatrix decided she’d heard enough. “I don’t have to listen to this. You say you don’t want to be lectured to? Well, neither do I!” With that, she swung her legs to the side of the motorcar, stepped onto the running board, and jumped to the ground.

“Where are you going?” Julia asked, watching her circle to the rear of the Mercedes.

“Off on my own!” she shot back, and grabbed her canvas bag from the open boot. “You know, I was in a jolly good mood when I woke up this morning,” she added wrathfully as she turned and began marching away. “Thank you for ruining it!”

“If you’re not happy,” Julia called after her, “marrying Trathen and having his children won’t make you so.”

“Perhaps you should spend a bit more time worrying about your own happiness, Julie,” she shot back over her shoulder, “and stop worrying about mine.”

Julia said something, but she couldn’t hear what it was, and she kept walking, blinking back tears of fury as she made her way down the steep hill toward Phoebe’s Cove. “Why the devil is everyone so cross today?”

Chapter Nine

B
eatrix dropped her canvas bag off the cliff edge to land in the sand below, and then descended the ladder to Phoebe’s Cove. “I’m unhappy?” she muttered through clenched teeth, picking up her bag again and marching toward the nearest of the caves that ringed the cove. “That’s rich, coming from Julie!”

She entered the cave, took off her hat, and tossed it aside, then slipped out of her clothes, Julia’s words still ringing in her ears. “I’m a tragedy?”

She pulled on her navy-blue taffeta knickerbockers and reached for the matching tunic. She did up the front, careful to fasten all the buttons, right up to the top of the white sailor collar, for she didn’t want sun marks on the neckline of her evening gown that evening. Being that she was alone, she disregarded the customary bathing stockings and lace-up bathing shoes, for the feel of the warm sand between her toes might soothe her frayed nerves and the seething resentment she felt toward Julia at this moment.

After belting the tunic with its bright red sash, she grabbed her ruffled white muslin bathing cap and left the cave. As she headed for the water, however, the usual delight of warm sand on her bare feet went unnoticed.

“I don’t know what I want?” Beatrix splashed into the water, but when the water was up to her thighs, she stopped, scowling out at the ocean. “That’s not true. I know precisely what I want.”

“Do you?”

The deep male voice behind her caused her to jump, dropping her cap in the water. She didn’t retrieve it; instead, she turned and found the man she was trying so hard to forget only two dozen feet away. He was sitting on the rocks by the mouth to the pixy’s cave, leaning back with his weight on his arms.

“You again?” she cried, vexed that her day was going from bad to worse, though she supposed she ought to be grateful that at least he had his shirt on. “Good God, you are the proverbial bad penny!”

He stood up. “Is Trathen what you want, Trix? Really?”

“I’m going to marry him, aren’t I?”

“I can’t think why. You don’t love him.”

Beatrix froze, her stomach clenching into a sick knot at those words. Was it so obvious? She opened her mouth to protest, but he spoke before she did.

“Oh, you want to love him,” he said and started walking toward her. “You want to be the sort of woman he wants, so you try to read the books he approves, you act as if you like caviar, when you really don’t, and you pretend it’s all right to go on an estate tour when you really want Florence. Yes,” he added at her sound of outrage. “I overheard. I couldn’t help it. You and Julia were shouting at each other as if you were squabbling little girls all over again.”

“Do you follow me around, eavesdropping on me?” she cried, even though she knew there was no possible way he could have done that.

He stopped a few feet from the water’s edge, and a smile curved one corner of his mouth. “I hate to say this, but I was here first.”

The ramifications of what he must have heard penetrated her consciousness, and she felt sick. “Go away.”

“Are you going to answer my question?”

“Was there a question? I thought you were making a speech.”

“Why do you pretend an estate tour is an acceptable honeymoon, when it isn’t what you want?”

“Ah, I should live by Will’s selfish credo, then? Do only what I want and be damned to everyone else?”

“This isn’t about being selfish, it’s about being honest. I know you, Trix, I know you down to your chubby pink toes.”

Her toes curled into the sand beneath the water. “I don’t have chubby toes!”

“Yes, you do, and they’re adorable toes, but that’s not my point. My point is that you don’t really want him. Oh, you want what he represents. You want the life he’s offering you, the same one you wanted with me, the same one you’ve idolized since you were a little girl playing with dolls in the nursery—dukes and castles and happy-ever-after, but it’s not real. You’re trying to trick yourself into thinking it is. You’re trying so hard, you’re choking down caviar and lemonade, trying to believe you like them.”

“I like lemonade! I do,” she insisted at his sound of skepticism. “What, when you leave, I’m frozen in place without you, unchanged by the passing years? It so happens there are many things I’ve learned to like without you.”

“Caviar, too?”

She opened her mouth, but she couldn’t dispute him on that. She was still trying to figure out why Aidan liked something that tasted like salty, wet sand. She pressed her lips together and looked away.

“See?” he said in the wake of her silence. “He hates that Daimler of yours. How long before he persuades you to give it up and you start trying to tell yourself you never really liked motoring all that much in the first place?”

“Aidan might prefer a carriage to a motorcar, but he would never forbid me to have anything that made me happy.”

He didn’t seem inclined to debate the point. “Tell me something,” he said instead. “Why did you ever fall in love with me?”

She blinked, startled by such an abrupt turn in the conversation. “What do you mean?”

“I mean Trathen is everything I’m not. He cares about his titles, and his estates, and all the same things you seem to care about. He’s nothing like me. So if you love him and he’s what you really want, what on earth inspired you to ever fall in love with me?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, desperate to make light of it. “The mad idiocy of youth?”

“That’s not it.”

“Oh really? What, then? Since you seem to possess more insight into my character, my heart, and my mind than I do, why did I fall in love with you all those years ago?”

“Because secretly, under all the respectable dutiful-daughter rubbish your father tried to stuff you with, you crave excitement and challenge, even danger. You don’t always like it, mind you, and you balk sometimes, but inside, you crave it. It’s like that cliff when we were children.”

“Stop talking about that!”

“You stand up there, and you’re staring down and you’re dizzy with excitement because you’ve just seen me jump off, and you want to do it, too. You lick your lips and you want it so bad you can taste it. But then you start to think too much. You remember your father said you couldn’t go up on Angel’s Head, and what if you fell and got hurt, and before you know it, you’re sitting down, saying you’re just going to admire the view. But inside you’re berating yourself because you lost the nerve to jump.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh yes, you do. You wanted to go to Egypt until it became a reality, and all the ramifications of defying your father and leaving home hit you in the face.”

“This is absurd. I used to defy Papa to come meet you at midnight, didn’t I?”

“Only after we were engaged. That way, if we got caught, he couldn’t be all that disappointed in you. You let me kiss your neck and unbutton your dress, but only so far. Three buttons was the crossing line, if I remember it right—”

“Stop it!” she cried, slamming her hands over her ears. “You have no right to say these things to me.”

“I’ll stop when you look me in the eye and tell me you’re going to marry that man because you’re in love with him. Come on. Say it.”

“I—” She stopped. God help her, she couldn’t lie to Will. She just couldn’t do it. “I don’t have to say anything to you,” she said instead. She started out of the water, veering to the right so that she could go around him when she reached the shore.

“See? You can’t say it because you don’t feel it. Trathen’s a very sensible choice for any woman who wants to be married. Very safe, very sensible. I know you won’t believe this, but if—” He broke off and looked away.

She stopped, unable to resist waiting to hear whatever he was going to say.

“If marrying Trathen would make you happy,” he said at last, returning his gaze to her face, “I wouldn’t say anything. But Julie’s right. You’re not happy, and with him, you’ll never be.”

She shook her head, denying it, hating him for saying it. “That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is. Because you don’t love him, and you’re the sort of woman who can’t ever be truly happy marrying a man you don’t love.”

She inhaled a sharp breath, but the words to deny it caught in her throat.

“Some women can,” he went on before she could recover enough to speak, “but not you. It just isn’t in you.”

She forced herself to say something. “Or maybe your male pride just can’t accept the idea that I might be able to love someone besides you.”

He shook his head. “You don’t love him, and I can prove it.”

“This should be interesting,” she said, and folded her arms, readying herself for whatever outrageous thing he said next. “Go on. I’m waiting with bated breath for this so-called proof.”

His gaze locked with hers. “You don’t look at him the way you used to look at me.”

“That’s it?” She bent down and reached for her sodden cap, which was floating in the water nearby. “That’s your proof?”

“As far back as I can remember, whenever you used to look at me, your face would light up as if someone had lit a candle inside you. Your face doesn’t light up like that when you look at him.”

Pain shimmered through her at the reminder of the lovesick girl she used to be. Her cheeks burned with humiliation at the memory, and she struggled to fire off a sufficiently scathing reply. “Of all the conceit!” she scoffed, slapping her cap atop her head. “If that’s what you call evidence—”

“Your smile’s different, too.”

“What?” Water from her soaking wet cap was running down her cheeks, and she rubbed her face, cursing herself for being so at sixes and sevens that she hadn’t even wrung the blasted thing out before putting it on her head. “Nonsense!”

He ignored that, of course. “And then there’s the way you say his name.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think you’re crazy, I truly do. Too much sun in Egypt, I think.”

“I’m not crazy, and I know exactly what I’m talking about. You don’t say his name the way you used to say my name.” He took a step toward her and then another. “Your voice is different.”

Beatrix felt a pang of alarm as she watched him come closer, but she decided not to make any attempt to duck past him and run. She lifted her chin, rubbed water away from her face again, and stood her ground, striving to maintain her dignity, though that was a difficult thing for a woman to do when her sopping wet cap was getting water in her eyes and her bathing dress was glued to her body like a second skin. “That is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Silly, is it?” He reached the shore, but to her dismay, he didn’t stop. Instead, he came striding into the water, boots and all, and as Beatrix watched him approach, her anger and dismay began dissolving into panic. By the time he reached her, her heart was pounding so hard in her chest, she was sure he could hear it even over the sound of the waves crashing on the rocks at the edge of the cove.

His gaze roamed over her wet, upturned face, and he smiled, clearly finding her appearance amusing, but when he spoke there was no laughter in his tone. “Whenever you said my name, there was always this soft little wobbly catch in your voice, like a hiccup, as if my name were two syllables instead of one.” He paused, and a fleeting shadow crossed his face that might have been regret. “It’s gone now, of course, but it was there once.”

She swallowed hard, hating him for reminding her of the way she’d once felt about him.

His lashes lowered, then lifted. “I don’t hear that little wobble when you say his name.”

She forced herself to speak. “Wobble, indeed! You have a vivid and convenient imagination. You hear what you want to hear.”

“Whenever I heard that, I felt it was as if you were so happy and excited to see me that you wanted to throw your arms around my neck and kiss me senseless—”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“—but you knew you couldn’t,” he continued, ignoring her interruption. “Young ladies don’t do that sort of thing. It’s not proper. It’s not dignified. And your father would have had apoplexy, of course. So you had to suppress what you felt, but you couldn’t hide it from me. I always knew.” He leaned closer, that faint smile still curving one corner of his mouth. “I could always tell how you felt about me,” he said softly, “by the look in your eyes and the smile on your face, and the wobbly little way you always said my name.”

She didn’t want to hear any more. It was too humiliating, too painful, too damned embarrassing. But pride kept her from showing it. “Awfully meager evidence, in my opinion,” she said, and once again started past him, deciding it was time for a strategic retreat.

But he wouldn’t let her get away yet. “Wait,” he said, and grasped her arms. “I have one other very important piece of evidence, one that would prove beyond a shadow of doubt you don’t love Trathen.”

“What evidence is that?”

Without warning, he wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her hard against him. “This,” he said, bent his head, and kissed her.

The moment his lips touched hers, she felt a strange, weightless sensation, making her think perhaps he’d just dragged her off that damned cliff at Angel’s Head. Down, down, she felt herself falling, heart in her throat, and she couldn’t stop it. Down she fell, into the abyss of the past, when she was a girl in love, and William Mallory’s kiss was as necessary to her life as the food she ate and the air she breathed.