Mohan grinned and nodded. "Yes, sir. Sawyer insisted."
"He's a good man."
"Aiden, please," she said softly, catching his arm and
staying him.
Tears welled along her lower lashes and tore at his heart.
"Good-bye, Alex," he whispered, lifting her hand and pressing
a light kiss to the back of it He released her with a wink
and managed to clear the lump from his throat to say,
"You'll be the best princess India ever had."
"Aiden ... "
''Take care of her," he instructed Vadeen as he walked
past, determined to be gone before Alex's tears shredded
what little was left of his dignity.
"With my life."
He couldn't speak; not and keep hidden his ravaged emotions.
He nodded instead and kept walking, willing himself
to keep his gaze on the carriage and his mind focused on the
task of getting the horses tied to the rear of it, on getting
back into the driver's box and setting it all in motion, on getting
the hell gone before he made a complete, blubbering
fool of himself.
Alex fought back the tears and turned to her uncle. "I will
join you in the house in a moment. For now I wish to say my
farewells privately."
"Narain will wait for you here," he declared, turning
away. "Do not tarry, niece."
She didn't have the time or the energy to protest. And
she'd tarry if she damn well pleased. Gathering her skirts,
she hurried out toward the rear of the carriage, her heart
lodged high in her throat and her thoughts a confusing jumble
of words and swirling emotions. .
"You're not leaving with regrets, are you?" she blurted as
she reached his side. "You have nothing to be sorry for,
Aiden."
He looked down at her and blindly finished tying the
reins of her horse to the ring. ''Well,'' he drawled, "I never
did teach you to dance."
His voice was tight, too tight, too controlled. He was
hurting just as deeply as she was. Desperate to prolong her
time with him, wanting with all her heart and soul to ease his
conscience in his leaving, she raised her hands in the pose
her mother had taught her long ago. "Teach me now," she
pleaded. "Show me how to dance, Aiden."
He swayed on his feet and then stiffened, expelling a hard
breath. Offering her a brittle smile and a cocked brow, he
asked, "Does an Indian princess really need to know how
Englishmen dance?"
''There's a difference between needing and wanting;' she
countered, her heart tearing. "I want to know what it's like to
dance with you. I want that memory to tuck away with all the
other treasures that have been ours."
He looked over at the door, to where Narain waited
silently for her in the shadows. Then slowly, almost hesitantly,
he stepped close and took her hand in his and slipped
the other to the small of her back. "Keep the distance between
us as we move," he whispered, his voice catching.
Alex nodded, afraid her sorrow would overflow if she tried
to speak. He guided her smoothly backward and she looked
up at him, memorizing his face as it looked in the moonlight,
remembering the way he smiled, the sound of his laughter.
Ask me to stay, Aiden, she silently begged. Ask me to love
you. Tell me that you'll try to find room in your heart for me,
too.
He stumbled and stopped, then deliberately released her
and stepped back. "I can't do this, Alex. I have to go." He
moistened his lower lip with the tip of his tongue and took a
ragged breath. Cupping her cheek in the palm of his hand,
he gazed down at her and murmured, "Stay safe, my beautiful
princess. Think of me from time to time and know that
I'll never forget you."
And then he was gone, striding past her without another
word, without another touch. She couldn't turn and watch
him disappear from her life. It was all she could do to stand
where she was and keep silent with the tears coursing over
her cheeks. The springs of the carriage creaked. The leather
of the reins popped. The horses snorted and then their
hooves pounded over the hard-packed earth of the yard and
onto the brick pavers of the street beyond.
She stood in the darkness, listening to them fade away.
"Princess ?"
The sob broke from her soul and tore up her throat. Gathering
her skirts, she fled toward the house, past the startled
guard, and up to the sanctuary of her lonely room.
Chapter 20
The knock at the door was soft, but it arrowed past her grief
and flared into a wild, surging hope. Alex scrambled to her
feet and darted forward, afraid that if she delayed he'd change
his mind and leave her again. She flung the door open, her
heart bursting with happiness.
"Preeya," she whispered, staggering back, her hope
crushed and new tears flooding down over her cheeks. Collapsing
on the edge of her mattress, she tried to apologize for
the rudeness of the greeting, but only a choking sob rolled
past her lips.
"You do not have to explain," Preeya offered, advancing
into the room and softly closing the door behind her. "Almost
twenty-five years ago I found your father as I find you
now. His heart was as broken, his pain as deep."
''Aiden's gone, Preeya," she sobbed, wrapping her arms
around her midsection and rocking forward and back. "I'll
never see him again. I'll never hold him. And I love him so
much. I'd rather die than spend the rest of my life hurting like
this."
“Your father said the same words to me,” Preeya went
on, settling on the bed beside her, "I will say the same to you
as I did then." With a gentle hand she tucked an errant strand
of hair behind Alex's ear. "Great loves are destined. But such
a love always comes with a trial equal to the glory and promise
of happiness. If you fail the trial, you deny what destiny
has deemed your course. But if you have faith and trust that
what was meant to be will be, you will endure the trial and
be rewarded."
Alex dragged a wracking breath into her body, desperately
willing Aiden back, willing him to come striding in the door,
his green eyes alive and bright with love and devotion, hard
with a determination to find a way for them to be together.
"You have a choice, Alex," Preeya admonished, taking
Alex's chin in hand and tenderly turning her head so she was
forced to look into her eyes. "You can wish yourself dead
and that is how Aiden will find you when he returns for you.
You can surrender to despair and break his heart. Or you can
dry your tears and believe that love is eternal and that the
hope of it is never lost." .
"We leave in the morning, Preeya," she countered, unable
to stop the tears, unable to summon resolve. ''Am I supposed
to hope for a miracle by then?"
Preeya arched a dark brow. "Kedar searched ten ye
ars for
your mother. Your mother endured ten years before she could
be again in the arms of the man she loved. Did their daughter
not inherit their strength, their faith, their courage?”
Ten years of misery, of being apart. Then ten years of
hiding their hearts and their love. That was a reward for enduring?
"No, she didn't," she declared, turning away. "I
want more in my life. And I want it now. I want Aiden and a
home with him. I want to be the one to bear his children."
"Aiden will find you no matter where you are," Preeya assured
her. "No matter how long it takes."
Dreadful certainty closed inexorably around her heart.
There would never be a life with Aiden. No home. No children.
She could want as desperately as any woman ever had,
but wanting wouldn't change the course ahead, wouldn't
change Aiden. She scrubbed the tears from her cheeks and
took a ragged, but steadying breath. "He walked away,
Preeya," she said, lifting her chin. "Sarad dismissed him and
he walked away. He's not going to turn around and come after me."
Beside her, Preeya sighed and shook her head. "It is the
rare man who sees his course at first glance, Alex," she said
with obviously strained patience. "Give your Aiden time to
stumble around in his darkness. Eventually he will understand
what it is that he seeks. You must not only have faith in
love itself, but also in the one you love. If he were not worthy
of it, you would not have given him the precious gift of
your heart."
"He doesn't know that I did. I never told him that I loved
him."
Preeya snorted in a most unladylike fashion and slid off
the bed. She was halfway to the door when she stopped and
turned back. "And do you think that love exists only when
put into words?” she asked, her arms akimbo, her tone kind
but firm. ''That he does not know by your actions? That he
did not feel love in your touch? See it in your eyes? In your
smile? That he did not hear love in your voice when you
whispered his name and reached for him in the dark?"
For his sake, she hoped he hadn't. What regrets he carried
from his time with her would be ever so much deeper if he
knew that he'd broken her heart.
"Faith, Alex," Preeya declared as she left. "You must live
in faith."
Alex closed her eyes, hearing the slow painful beating of
her tattered heart and the pounding of hammers as Sarad's
men coolly, methodically crated up her world. By morning's
light It would all be stowed away in the hull of an India bound
vessel. The Blue Elephant would cease to be .. And all
the life, all the hope, promise, and happiness within its walls
would slip forever into the past.
Aiden leaned back in the dining room chair, his legs stretched
out under the table, his arms folded across his chest. In front
of him on the table sat three things: the ornate white velvet-lined
gold box containing a heaping mound of finely cut gemstones,
a bottle of Carden's best brandy, and an empty glass.
The box was beautiful. The stones were worth a king's ransom.
Or a princess's, depending on how he looked at it. But it
was the brandy that largely occupied his attention and his
thoughts. And had been for the better part of the last two
hours-since he'd walked into the house and decided that
there was nothing to be done but get himself blindly, roaringly
drunk.
He'd gotten the bottle and the glass off the caddy in the
study, carried it here where Sawyer had left a lamp burning,
set them on the table within easy reach, and then resolutely
planted his sorry carcass on the chair. And he hadn't moved
since. He'd looked at the box of jewels, thought about why
he'd been given them, remembered the look in Alex's eyes
as he'd put her from his arms in the yard, and that had been
the end of his purposeful thinking. He'd spent God only
knew how long wandering through his memories of the past
weeks, alternately smiling, laughing, and thinking about
drowning his pain and sorrow in the brandy.
But he hadn't been able to reach out for it. He just sat
there, staring at it. Which, he admitted with a sigh, was
truly pathetic. He was genuinely miserable. There wasn't a
part of him that wasn't weary and didn't ache. He didn't
want to think and he shouldn't have wanted to feel anything-
especially the searing, pounding ache deep in the
center of his chest. But he didn't want to sleep, didn't want
to eat. And, apparently, he didn't want to drink, either. It
was the strangest, most confounding, inexplicable thing.
Not the least bit rational. It wasn't as though he didn't know
the kind _of blissful forgetfulness to be found in swimming
in alcohol.
Why he didn't want to escape, to forget, was the root of
it, he knew. The answer to that central, all-important question
had been eluding him for the last hour. Although "eluding"
wasn't the least bit accurate, he knew. It implied that he
could sense an answer and simply couldn't grasp it. The
truth was that he didn't have so much as an inkling that one
actually existed. And it was a given that he wouldn't find it
waiting to fallout of the bottom of a well-drained glass.
"You reach for that bottle and I'll break your hands."
Aiden looked up at the familiar voice and watched his
friend advance to the table. Proof, Aiden silently growled,
that if you didn't lock the door behind you, trouble was free
to wander in off the streets. "What are you doing here?” he
asked not at all politely.
Barrett stripped off his greatcoat and dropped it over the
back of a chair, saying, "I went by the Blue Elephant to see
you, was told-rather summarily-of your departure, and
was afraid you'd do something shortsighted. I came by here
on my way home hoping to keep you from it. Have I arrived
in anything approximating a timely fashion?"
"Actually," Aiden drawled, his gaze going back to the
bottle, "I've been sitting here for quite some time, trying to
figure out why I spent a year drinking myself into oblivion.
That's good brandy. All I have to do is reach out and I can
have it. And God knows I feel so damn empty I hurt clear
down to the soul. But I don't want to drown the pain. I'm not
even tempted to pour myself a drink." He looked up to meet
his friend's gaze. "Why is that, Barrett?"
''Maybe you're a year older and a year wiser," he offered.
Aiden snorted.
Barrett considered him for a long moment, his lips pursed
and his brows knitted. Finally, he quietly asked, "How honest
do you want me to be?"
If Barrett had an answer, he was entirely willing to hear
it. "Hell, I can't hurt any deeper than I already do."
''All right." he said crisply, leaning back against the buffet
and crossing his anus over his chest. "I never met your Mary
Alice Randolph. Tell me about her."
Mary Alice? He knew wh
at she had to do with wanting to
drink himself blind. But what did she have to do with Alex?
Leaving Alex behind was why he was sitting here asking himself
pointless questions instead of being at the Blue Elephant.
rolling around on black satin sheets in the throes of mind-staggering
passion. Even as he considered asking for an explanation,
he decided that he didn't care. He was too tired to
try to make sense of anything. ''What do you want to know?"
Barrett cast him a quick look and then shrugged. "I don't
know. What did she look like?"
He could see her so clearly. They'd met at a party and
she'd been hiding in a corner behind the potted palms. "She
was blond and blue-eyed and petite. A tiny little slip of a
thing. She always wore pink."
After pondering that information for a moment, Barrett
nodded and asked, ''What made her special?"
Aiden frowned. He'd found himself in the same corner
in trying to evade an encounter with his former-as of that
afternoon-lover, Rose. He couldn't pretend that he wasn't
sharing it with someone else. They'd struck up a conversation.
and ... Damn if he could remember about what,
though.
It was odd and more than a little troubling to be able
to look back and see Mary Alice but to have no recollection
of anything she'd ever said, of her thoughts on anything, or
of her hopes. and dreams beyond those of getting back to
Charleston.
"Don't you remember, Aiden?"