LITMIR.BIZ

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her cold hands clasped in his. ‘How did you find her?’

      ‘I was going through papers, months after they died, because I was moving into the Dower House and I needed to make sure I was taking the personal documents and leaving all the estate papers for Cousin James. There were letters from the Brownes in a locked box. I thought she was alive and I could find her. And then they wrote to say she was dead.’

      ‘Oh, God. I told them to do that.’

      ‘I went there anyway. I wanted to see the grave. They told me everything, gave me your card.’

      ‘How could your parents do that?’ Avery demanded.

      ‘I suppose they thought it was best for me. I tell myself that. Why, after all this time, the hurt should be so sharp, I do not know. They did it for the best,’ Laura repeated on a sob, then caught herself, her hands over her mouth.

      ‘Oh, my darling.’ Avery reached for her. ‘My poor darling.’ By all that was merciful she stayed in his arms and her own went around him, her forehead resting on his shoulder.

      ‘When I found you had taken Alice it was bad,’ she said, her voice muffled. ‘Then when you told me about Piers I thought I hated you. I will never know how I managed to say nothing to you that day under his portrait. I saw myself in my mind’s eye with Piers’s sword in my hand, running you through.’

      The vision was so vivid he almost felt the blade of the sword, the sickening pain. ‘I understand.’

      ‘You do?’ Laura released him and sat back, her eyes enormous and dark as she stared at him. ‘You might understand now why I let Alice go in the first place, but still, I deceived you and then entrapped you.’ Laura forced a smile that caught at his heart. ‘You are only human, after all.’

      ‘I am only human,’ Avery agreed. ‘I understand why you had to pretend to be Mrs Jordan, why you mistrusted the man who had taken your daughter. I understand why you could not bring yourself to suggest marriage directly.’ But now she had told him the truth and he could be honest with her in his turn, he realised. Tell her things he had never told another soul.

      * * *

      ‘My father adored my mother,’ Avery said, his tone conversational, as he sat back on his heels. ‘We were such a happy family, I thought.’

      ‘You thought?’ Laura was still shaken from her own confidences. He could see her struggle to comprehend what he was telling her.

      ‘She’d had lovers for years. She’d lied and deceived, she had wound my father around her little finger. I thought she was perfect, too. And then he found a letter and it all came out. I saw her change—it was like something from a medieval myth. One moment there was Mama, beautiful, loving, sweet. The next there was a bitter, mocking creature hurling contempt with her back against the wall, confronted with evidence she couldn’t twist or hide. She had been acting for years.

      ‘She left without saying a word to me—I was eight. She went to her lover and my father died in an accident with his gun a few weeks later.’

      ‘An accident?’ she ventured, her voice appalled.

      ‘Everyone agreed it was best if it was. I found him,’ Avery said. He looked so small huddled there in the bracken and the blood.

      ‘Avery!’

      ‘She died a few years later. It seems it has left me finding it difficult to trust,’ he said with a wry twist of the lips. ‘I suppose somehow I see myself in Alice, fear for her if her love is betrayed, just as I fear for my own heart.’

      ‘Oh, my love. Oh, Avery.’ Laura found herself on her knees, reaching for him without conscious volition, before her words or his came together in her mind. ‘You fear for your own heart?’

      ‘You called me your love?’ Avery’s voice clashed with hers. ‘You love me?’

      She could lie, but then she had lied to him so often. She could pretend, but she had done that, too, and it was hollow. Summoning all her courage, Laura held his gaze and said, ‘I love you, Avery. Whatever happens, whatever you feel for me, I will always love you.’

      ‘Thank God. I lost my heart to you, my love,’ Avery said. The tautness had gone from his face and there was nothing in his smile but genuine, wondering, happiness. He gathered her in to him, his cheek against her hair. ‘I had a glimmering of it. That night we first made love I was going to ask you to marry me. I was going to wait until the morning and do it properly with the ring. And then, what happened, happened, and I closed off all those new feelings for you, sank back into suspicion. How could I let old history teach me so wrongly about trust and truth?’

      He felt so good, so strong and solid and male. Her man. My husband. ‘When I met you again unexpectedly in London, I thought I hated you,’ Laura murmured into his shirt front. ‘But there was always something there between us though, right from the start. I thought it was simply desire.’

      ‘I do not think there is anything simple about desire, my love.’

      Laura twisted so she could drop a kiss on his wrist, feel the pulse beat against her lips. He loved her. Miracles happened. ‘Perhaps that connection between us made the mistrust more extreme.’

      ‘It would take a better philosopher than I am to understand the mysteries of the heart,’ Avery said. ‘Who would have thought that I could fall in love with Alice’s real mother?’

      ‘Who would think I could learn to love the man who stole her from me, the man who told the world he was her father?’ Laura laughed at the sheer wonderful inevitability of it.

      ‘Papa?’

      The small voice from the doorway had them twisting round, clasped in each other’s arms like guilty lovers in a melodrama. Alice stood there gazing at them, her face pale, her eyes wide, hair ribbons trailing from her fingers like some misplaced carnival decorations. ‘You are not my father? I don’t understand.’

       Chapter Twenty-Two

      ‘Alice!’ Avery got to his feet and held out one hand to the child as he helped steady Laura with the other. ‘Come in. We need to talk.’

      Laura’s heart bled for him as she saw the look in the child’s eyes: doubt, anxiety, trust wavering on the edge of betrayal, but this was no time for displays of uncontrolled emotion. They had to reassure their daughter, nothing else mattered. She moved briskly across the room, closed the door and took Alice by the hand. ‘Come and sit down, Alice,’ she said with as much calm firmness as she could muster. ‘This is going to be a very big surprise and it is a good thing you are such a big girl now and can listen carefully and try to understand.’

      ‘We’ll sit on the floor,’ Avery said, folding down to sit cross-legged on the carpet. ‘Then we can all hold hands and look at each other.’

      ‘I am your mother,’ Laura said without preamble when they were settled, Alice’s cold little hand in her right hand, Avery’s big warm hand in the left. ‘Your real mother.’

      ‘You left me.’ Alice bit her trembling lower lip.

      ‘I lost you,’ Laura corrected gently. ‘You know that people have been unkind to you sometimes because Papa was not married?’ A nod. ‘People get very cross if a man and a woman make a baby before they are married and I’m afraid that is what your father and I did. We loved each other and he had to go to war. And then, darling, I’m so sorry, he was killed. He was very brave and he was doing his duty.’ Avery’s hand squeezed tight around hers.

      ‘Like Cousin Piers?’ Alice was looking steadier now.

      ‘Cousin Piers was your father, sweetheart,’ Avery said. ‘So I thought I must look after you. Only when I found you I knew at once that I loved you and that I wanted to be your papa. So I let you believe that I was.’

      ‘But...’

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