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John offered all the answers, provided all the solutions—all but one. She didn’t love him. Not that way. Not the way she’d loved Michael.
The fire crackled. She looked from the blue/yellow flame to her left hand and the two-carat diamond solitaire John had given her three weeks ago. Firelight glinted off the brilliant and perfectly faceted marquise. She thought of the inexpensive, plain gold band Michael had given her, remembered the love and the hopes and the dreams he’d offered with it.
Love, however, hadn’t solved the problems they’d amassed during their turbulent five years together. Love hadn’t been the be-all or end-all to everything that had gone wrong between them. For that reason, it didn’t seem essential for love to factor in to her relationship with John. She cared for him, as much, she thought, as he cared for her. In the end, it seemed reason enough to finally agree to marry him.
“So,” her father persisted as he lifted the one scotch he allowed himself every evening. Ice shifted, clinked softly in the Waterford crystal glass. “Are you close to setting a wedding date?”
She let out a deep breath. Like her father, John had also been pressing her to set a date. She’d been dragging her feet ever since the story had been picked up by every legitimate and illegitimate news publication in the country. The public announcement of their engagement two weeks ago had seemed like an act of betrayal. It also seemed so final.
She rubbed a finger across her brow, unable to ignore the dull headache pounding there. She hadn’t been prepared for the media circus the announcement had become. The tabloids had taken cannibalistic delight in catching pictures of her and John together, pictures of Brandon.
The worst, though, was the resurrection of the photographs of the train wreck in Ecuador that had claimed Michael’s life. Reliving the sensationalized and gruesome accounts of Michael’s disappearance had been a nightmare. Because of it, she hadn’t been able to think about setting a wedding date with John. For reasons she didn’t fully understand, she hadn’t wanted to.
“It’s a little early for definite plans considering…”
Grant frowned at his drink, then at his daughter when her words trailed off.
“Considering that you’ve never gotten over Michael.”
She folded a corner of the quilt over Brandon’s little body. The flannel felt soft and real beneath her fingers. Very few things felt real lately. She scooted back until her shoulders rested against the sofa.
“I was over him before he died,” she said, trying to make them both believe it.
“And yet…” Grant covered her slim shoulder with his hand. She was his little girl and she was hurting. “And yet it hurts you to think of his death as an absolute.”
“Yes,” she admitted, covering his hand with hers, feeling the strength there, needing the compassion. “It hurts.”
After all this time, it still hurt.
“I think of him,” she confessed, drawing her knees to her chest. “I think of Michael more and more often lately.”
She looked over her shoulder, met her father’s troubled eyes and shrugged self-consciously at her admission.
“Sometimes…sometimes, I’ll see someone in a crowd and the likeness to Michael will startle me so that for a moment, I actually think it’s him.”
Returning her gaze to the fire, she wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees.
“Those damn crank calls haven’t helped,” her father muttered angrily.
She thought of the phone calls she’d received the past two weeks—the ones where there had been nothing but silence on the other end. The ones that had shaken her enough that she’d stopped by to talk to her brother Drew. When she’d met up with Kristina, Drew’s new bride, instead, she’d pocketed the phone numbers of private detectives Tom Reynolds and Lucas Starwind that Kristina had given her.
“I wish you would have called Tom or Lucas, or even the police,” Grant added.
She’d been spooked enough by the calls that she’d actually considered calling them—considered, but not followed through.
“They have their hands full investigating the problems you’ve been dealing with since last December.”
Grant grew silent.
The problems all appeared to be tied to the unsolved murders of her grandfather, King Thomas Rosemere of Altaria, her uncle, Prince Marc, and the subsequent attempted assassination of her brother, Daniel, who, as the eldest son of Emma Rosemere Connelly, had taken Thomas’s place as king.
Absolutely, the Chicago P.D. and her father’s hired investigators had their hands full.
“Besides,” she said, “what would I have told them? That I’d received some strange phone calls? ‘No. No heavy breathing. No, the calls hadn’t seemed ominous. No, they hadn’t felt like pranks, either. Hadn’t felt like wrong numbers.’
“It’s not much for anyone to go on, Dad, and it wasn’t enough for me to follow through with the detectives. And yet…”
“And yet what?” he asked when she paused.
“Last week,” she said, speaking more to herself than to her father, “I was walking out of a shop and…it was like I felt Michael there, watching me, waiting for me.”
“It’s all this business with your grandfather’s death and Daniel’s attempted murder,” her father said with gentle concern. “All the extra security I’ve had set up is making you nervous. This whole damn situation is making you nervous.”
“No. No,” she assured him. “It’s not that. I’ve never felt threatened on that front even though I know you’ve been concerned for me. For all of us. It’s… I don’t know. Like today in the park. There was a man.” Her heart stuttered now as it had when she’d seen him. “I couldn’t stop thinking about Michael.”
She rubbed her arms, closed her eyes. “Sometimes lately, it feels like he’s…still here, Dad.”
Her father sighed. “It’s because you never had closure.”
No. There had never been closure. Instead, there’d been a train derailment in the jungles of Ecuador, endless nights of not knowing, the empty ache of waiting. The helplessness of uncertainty. Of needing to hear. Of wanting to know, yet not wanting to know the worst of it. Then just wanting to know anything.
The jungle was dense and wild, the cavernous cliffs below the derailment site impassable. Michael’s body hadn’t been the only one that had never been recovered. And Tara had never recovered from the guilt of knowing that the last words she’d spoken to him had been the last words he’d expected to hear.
She still remembered every moment of that day as if it were yesterday. She drifted back to that day at the airport—that horrible day. She could still see the shock and pain on Michael’s face in her mind. Still heard the hurtful words….
“You don’t have to see me off at the gate,” Michael said as he closed the trunk, hefted his flight bag over his shoulder and set his Pullman on the curb by the car.
Around them horns honked, hotel shuttles jockeyed for parking. Travelers hunched their shoulders against the cold, struggled with their luggage, rushed to make their flights.
It was so cold. Cold outside. Cold inside. The bite of it stung her cheeks as she stood there, the collar of her red wool coat turned up against the wind, the air as heavy as the lead-gray sky. Stray snowflakes taunted, promising the bitter Chicago winter to come.
Michael’s eyes were troubled as he watched her face. He knew something was wrong. Finally, he knew. After months of combative silences and fractured truths, he finally understood. Finally. Too late.
“We’ll talk,” he promised as he gripped her shoulders and turned her to face him. “You know I have to go on this trip. It could make or break my promotion, babe.” He rocked her gently, lifted one corner of his mouth in that crooked smile she’d never been able to resist.
When she didn’t react, he bent his knees, met her at eye level. “When I get back, we will talk.”
“It’s too late, Michael. It’s too late to talk.” Her words sounded as frigid as the wind that whipped off Lake Michigan and picked up speed and force as it funneled through the city and cut its way to O’Hare. “It’s been too late for a long time now.”
He straightened, his hands tightening on her shoulders. He drew her toward him protectively when a woman sprinting for the terminal doors bumped against them with a mumbled apology. His breath puffed out in smoky white clouds of frost that crystallized on the brittle air.
“It didn’t feel like it was too late last night.”
Last night when they’d made love.
Against all odds, when they could no longer communicate on a verbal level, they’d never lost their ability to communicate in bed.
As she stood there, feeling the heat of his strong hands through her winter coat, seeing the passion in his eyes, she knew that sex had been the only thing keeping them together for some time now.
“Michael…this is hard.” She worked up her courage to say the words but she couldn’t look at him. “I…I want a divorce.”
She felt his shock like the blow that it was. For a moment he was utterly still. Then his hands loosened their hold on her shoulders, dropped to his side.
“You don’t mean that,” he said after a moment in which they both felt the truth and the finality of her decision like the cut of the wind against their faces.
“Look at me,” he demanded, each word a command, each breath an effort. “I deserve to have you look at me when you tell me you want to rip my life apart.”
“Our life.” She raised her head, felt her heart beating with anger and hurt and utter helplessness. “It’s our life that’s being ripped apart, and I’m not the only one responsible. This didn’t start here, Michael. Not today.”
She felt the tears and couldn’t blink them back. “I—I can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to.”
“I don’t accept that.” His words were as clipped as the wind.
She lifted her chin, looked past him at the glut of humanity crowding toward the terminal doors.
“I’m sorry. But your acceptance doesn’t change things. I want a divorce,” she repeated, meeting the bleakness and the anger in his gray eyes one last time. Then she turned away.
Like an automaton, she walked around the front of the car, opened the door and slid behind the wheel. She wasn’t aware that she’d fastened the seat belt, turned the key and slipped the car in gear. But as she checked the rearview mirror, she was very aware of him standing there. The wind tugged and whipped his dark hair around his beautiful face; his strong cheeks were red from the cold, his gray eyes were set with defiance and denial.
It wasn’t until after she’d parked in front of their apartment that she’d realized she was still crying, that she couldn’t stop crying.
Tara blinked herself away from a moment that even now, two years later, remained as vivid as Lake Michigan in the swell of a storm. She looked toward the floor-to-ceiling windows of her parents’ manor house and felt like crying now.
She still missed what she and Michael had once had. The passion, the hopes, the dreams, the defiance that had them eloping on prom night simply because they were in love. They were in love, but he was the boy from the wrong side of the tracks and she was the princess her wealthy parents wanted to exile to an exclusive girls school to get her away from him. Away from Michael, who hadn’t been good enough for her, who could never provide for her by Connelly standards.
“John won’t wait forever, Tara.”
Her father’s voice broke through the years, through the tears she hadn’t been able to shed for some time now. The accuracy of his statement undercut all the might-have-beens and should-have-beens, and relayed the truth.
“I know.” She laid a gentle hand on Brandon’s bottom, needing to feel his sturdy little bulk, to touch what was real when the surreal threatened to outdistance it.
The door to the den opened with a subtle creak.
“Mr. Connelly, I’m sorry to intrude.”
Ruby, dressed in her starched black uniform even at this late hour, stood in the doorway. Her hands clenched the doorknob so hard her knuckles had turned white. Her eyes were as round as the buttons on her blouse, her cheeks as gray as her apron.
Her father realized that something was wrong at the same moment Tara did. The unflappable Ruby, who had been their head housekeeper, a fixture and a friend for all of Tara’s memories, was far from the composed manager of Lake Shore Manor.
“Ruby?” Grant’s brows knit together with concern. “What is it?”
“Mr. Connelly,” Ruby repeated, clearly struggling for control. “There…there’s a gentleman here. He wishes to…he wishes to see Miss Tara.”
“At this hour?” Grant snorted. “And does this gentleman—who has the audacity to come to my home at—” he raised his arm, shoved back the cuff of his custom tailored white shirt and checked his watch “—just after nine o’clock in the evening—have a name?”
A preemptive anticipation had Tara’s heart suddenly pounding. Her breath inexplicably clogged in her throat as she rose jerkily to her feet.
If possible, Ruby turned a whiter shade of pale. Her gaze shot to Tara, apologetic, even a little alarmed, and yet guardedly hopeful as she opened the great oak door wider.
A man stepped into the room, a shadow in the doorway, a ghost from the past.
“Good Lord,” Tara heard her father murmur in shock and incredulity as Michael Paige’s lean, athletic frame filled the doorway.
Tara shook her head, disbelieving, yet wanting, with everything that was in her, to believe. She touched her fingers to her lips, tears brimming as the man’s somber gray gaze sought and found hers.
“Michael.”
Her father rose to his feet behind her; his strong hands gripped her shoulders, steadying her. But all she could see, all she could feel was Michael.
Blood roared through her ears. Her heart pounded like thunder—in her chest, in her throat. Her legs grew wobbly and weak. Tears stung in a hot, burning flooding of emotions.
Through the watery mist she stared as her husband stood there, his eyes—those flinty gray eyes—warm on hers, unblinking on hers.
He took a step forward and caught her hands in his. She cried out at the shockingly familiar feel of his fingers grasping hers. His grip was hard, his hands callused. Warm. Real. Alive.
She stared down at their clasped hands, aware that hers were shaking, and she studied the strength and the scars—some she recognized, some she did not.
“Tara.”
She raised her head at the gruff need in his voice, watched his eyes as he searched her face, then cast an unspoken plea at her father. Her father squeezed her shoulders protectively, hesitated, then with reluctance, dropped his hands.
With his gaze fast on hers, Michael pulled her into his embrace.
She fell into his arms on a sob, clung to him desperately, wept without shame—for him, for herself, for everything they’d lost.
He was here. My God, he was alive. Strong, warm and real. He smelled—oh, he smelled like Michael. She buried her face in his neck, needing more assurance that it was him—really him—and not some horrible trick of imagination and misery and guilt.
His hands roamed her back with a tender urgency, a familiar intimacy that said he, too, was struggling with the reality. His heart beat wild and strong against her breast as he whispered her name against her hair.
She pulled back so she could see his face, to cement into fact that it was really Michael.
The man she had loved.
The man she had asked the courts to declare legally dead.
The man she planned to divorce.
Two
Michael buried his face in Tara’s hair, wallowed in the silk and honey scent of her. It seemed like forever since he’d felt the sweet press of her breasts against his chest, her slim hips aligned with his. It seemed like a thousand forevers—and yet it felt like yesterday and the hundreds of yesterdays they’d shared.
He’d seen everything from shock to joy, disbelief to denial, hope to love in her eyes before she’d flown into his arms. He didn’t care that her reaction had been knee-jerk, maybe even involuntary. The only thing he cared about was that he was finally holding her.
“Michael…son.”
He heard Grant say his name a second time before he reluctantly lifted his head, searched Tara’s eyes. He touched his thumb to the aristocratic arch of her cheekbone, smiled gently, then transferred his attention to her father.
The man looked shaken. He appeared to be in as much shock as Tara and Ruby.
