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*

  The realisation of what to do came to her as she helped Alice choose ribbons. ‘The blue to match your new dress and the green for the new bonnet,’ she agreed, her mind half a mile away where one tall, brown-haired gentleman dealt with his correspondence and perhaps contemplated ways of ridding himself of his untrustworthy wife.

  The answer came with a jolt as she gave Alice the coins to pay for her purchases. Tell him the truth. Tell him everything, however painful it is, however it reflects on Mama and Papa. Be utterly and completely open without trying to work out whether it will make things better or worse. If he forgives me, I will tell him I love him, tell him the new secret that is still just a hope. If I tell him first he will think I am trying to wheedle him into forgiveness.

  And I will forgive him, however hard it is. I will learn to understand and forgive, for Alice and because I love Avery.

  *

  ‘Avery?’

  Avery turned from the bookshelves he had been staring at for the past ten minutes. ‘Laura.’ She was the last person he wanted to see, not while he was wrestling with his conscience over what he had said to Miss Pemberton. It was probably a sensible precaution, a rational part of him said. You love her, his heart urged. Trust her.

  ‘You want to talk to me?’ He pulled a chair round so she could sit, but she stood in the middle of the floor, her hands clasped in front of her like a defendant in the dock.

  ‘Yes, I want to talk.’ She was very pale, but her voice was steady. ‘I overheard you speaking to Miss Pemberton.’

  ‘Hell.’ He did not try to justify himself or to touch her. There was a core of inner steel there, he realised as he met her steady gaze. It was not hostile or tearful, just…strong.

  ‘I had thought that we were…that things would be all right. It wouldn’t ever be perfect, but we could be a family even if you did not love me, even with everything that had happened in the past. But I did not realise until I overheard you how little you trusted me, how little you understood why I had lied to you, why I had trapped you into marriage.’

  ‘There are things you have not told me. There are still secrets,’ he said and Laura nodded, slowly, accepting the accusation. ‘But I should not have spoken to Miss Pemberton.’ Her eyes widened at the admission, but he pressed on. ‘I should have talked to you instead.’

  ‘I did not trust you with everything I need to tell you. And you do not trust me and I cannot blame you for that.’

  Avery turned away sharply, one hand fisted in the silk window curtain, his back turned, unable to meet the honest pain in her face. If he touched her now he would kiss her, lose this chance of honesty in the flare of passion that overcame him whenever he felt the softness of her under his hands, caught the scent of her in his nostrils.

  ‘I would happily die if that would make Alice happier or safer,’ Laura said. ‘I do not know how to make you understand what I did and allow me to be a proper mother to her. I want us to be a family, a happy one,’ she added, her voice a whisper he had to strain to hear.

  Avery unclenched his hand from the curtain, leaving it criss-crossed with creases like scars. ‘Tell me what happened when you knew Piers was dead.’

  Behind him there was the rustle of silk as Laura crossed to the chair and sat down. ‘I told my parents I was with child. They were…aghast. Will you forgive me not repeating what they said? It is very painful.’

  ‘Of course.’ His voice sounded rusty.

  ‘We agreed that I would pretend to be ill and go to one of our country estates to recover. Luckily there were all sorts of fevers going around that year. I coughed and moped for two weeks, then apparently succumbed to the infection.

  ‘It was a healthy pregnancy.’ Her voice trailed away, then she said, almost angrily, ‘You want to know why I waited six years to find her, don’t you? That is what you cannot understand or forgive.’

  ‘I can forgive if I understand,’ he offered and turned. This was the sticking point, the thing that Laura found most difficult to tell, he realised. He took the chair opposite her and sat down, leaning forward, his forearms on his knees, just out of touching distance.

  ‘My parents told me she was dead,’ Laura said abruptly. ‘When my baby was born my mother took her, wrapped her. I heard her cry, once. I thought Mama would give her back to me to hold, but she gave her to the nurse and they went out of the room. Then Mama came back and said she was dead.’ She stopped and drew a deep, shuddering breath.

  ‘I watched her from the park the day before you found me there. That was the first time I had heard her voice from that day. They told Mab her name in the village. A shopkeeper knew my daughter’s name and I did not.’

  Avery found he was on one knee in front of her chair, both 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…’ Alice turned to Laura, her forehead crinkled with the effort of working it all out. ‘If you are my really mama, why didn’t you marry Papa?’

  ‘Because I didn’t know where you were,’ Laura told her. ‘You see, my mother and father thought it was best if they sent you away so no one knew I had been in love with your father and that we had had a baby.’

  ‘Because silly people get cross because of you not being married.’ Alice nodded, obviously having sorted that out to her satisfaction.

  ‘It took me six years to find you,’ Laura explained. ‘And I pretended to be Mrs Jordan because I didn’t know what your papa would think of me.’

  ‘So why didn’t you tell me? And who was the bad man you were running away from?’

  ‘Er…’

  ‘Mama did not tell you because I was cross with her, too, which was exceptionally silly of me,’ said Avery firmly. ‘And the bad man frightened Mama in the park, but he has gone now and will never come back.’

  ‘So it is all right now?’ Alice asked, the anxious quaver back in her voice. ‘Even though Papa isn’t my really father and Mama is…Mama?’

  ‘It is perfectly all right,’ Avery said. ‘Grown-ups make a lot of muddles about things sometimes and we can’t tell everyone about who really is who because otherwise some people will be horrid to Mama. But now we are a family and nothing is going to spoil that.’

  ‘Would Cousin…Cousin Piers be pleased? Can you tell me more about him?’ Alice jumped up and put her arms around Avery’s neck and kissed him. ‘I don’t love him like you, Papa, but I’d like to know about him.’

  Laura found she was looking at her husband and daughter through a mist of tears. Avery appeared to have lost the ability to speak. ‘We will talk about him lots,’ she promised. ‘And he would have been very, very proud of you, Alice.’

  And then Avery opened his arms and pulled them both close and they clung together, murmuring disjointed reassurances to each other. There were tears, but when Laura finally stood up and took her daughter’s hand and went upstairs so they could wash their faces and brush their hair it seemed as though none of them could help the smiles and the laughter of sheer happy relief.

  *

  ‘Are you tired?’ Avery asked when finally Alice, who had been allowed to stay up for dinner, had fallen asleep with her head on the tablecloth and had been carried up to bed.

  ‘Exhausted,’ Laura admitted as she walked unsteadily into Avery’s bedchamber and collapsed on the bed. ‘I can’t face going downstairs for tea. But I do not think I will ever sleep either.’

  ‘Happy?’ Avery asked. He kicked off his shoes, then leaned against the bedpost and began to untie his neckcloth. The dressing-room door opened and he called, ‘That will be all for tonight, thank you, Darke.’ It closed again and he joined her on the bed.

  ‘Happy? I do not think I know the name for it. It is as though someone has swept away all the doubts and worries and pain and loss and I’m like a newly whitewashed house. Empty. And yet full. Confused,’ she added when he laughed. ‘Happy, content, terrified I will wake up and this is all a dream.’

  Laura turned on her side and propped herself up on her elbow. Avery was lying on his back, eyes closed, mouth curved into a smile of pure content. ‘How do you feel?’

  He opened his eyes and studied her for so long that Laura felt herself grow rosy with the intensity of the look. Then Avery sat up. ‘There are not the words. Let me show you how I feel.’

  Time stood still as he kissed her, caressed the clothes from her body, then lay and allowed her to strip him and caress in her turn. All the urgency, the heat, that had driven their lovemaking before had gone, replaced with a tenderness that went far beyond the erotic. Avery made love t
o every inch of her body with lips and teeth and tongue and gentle, relentless fingers.

  Laura was swept from one peak to another, her body saturated with sensation. When he finally took pity on her and fell back beside her she summoned what remained of her energy and moved on top of him, straddling the narrow hips. He closed his eyes as she rose up and took him into her body, sinking down until they were joined, perfectly, and she felt a tide of feminine power sweep through her, meet and meld with his maleness.

  He let her set the pace, lay and watched her through heavy-lidded eyes, his lips parted, his breathing ragged as she slowly, slowly built the tension, twisting the rope of passion between them until he reached out, gripped her wrists and thrust up, taking them both over the edge, into the storm.

  *

  They lay there, blissfully relaxed, drifting in and out of sleep, for hours. Eventually a clock, somewhere deep in the house, struck three.

  ‘I am awake,’ Avery said. ‘And hungry.’

  ‘So am I. Shall we raid the pantry? There is plum cake and cheese.’

  ‘A recipe for indigestion,’ Avery teased, but he belted his banyan and followed her downstairs, through the sleeping house. They filled plates and made tea and then tiptoed out again.

  ‘Goodness knows what we are going to have to tell Miss Pemberton,’ Laura said as they curled up against the pillows and tried not to get cake crumbs in the bed.

  ‘I will tell her that I was a foolishly suspicious husband. Miss Pemberton will consider me a brute and will probably order A Vindication of the Rights of Women from the library for you.’

  ‘Poor Avery,’ she teased and then, suddenly anxious, added, ‘Are you truly comfortable with Alice realising you are not her blood father?’

  ‘I am very happy. It has done my conscience no end of good, confessing. She’ll have lots of questions, but we will deal with them honestly as they come up.’ He put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to let Alice have a puppy,’ Laura said.

  ‘I had forgotten I had a bone to pick with you, my lady,’ Avery said sternly. ‘Whatever possessed you to promise Alice a puppy at dinner time? I foresee months of puddles on carpets, shredded upholstery and missing slippers.’