He looks down at her slain body and falls to his knees beside her, his duty forgotten. His arms reach for her.
Lily. My love. My life. So briefly my life. For one night.
Only one night for love.
Lily!
He feels no pain from the bullet that grazes his head. The world blacks out for him as he falls senseless across Lily’s dead body.
PART III
An Impossible Dream
4
They did not proceed up the driveway as Lily had expected. They turned just inside the gates and were soon walking along an unpaved, wooded path. Neville neither spoke to her nor looked at her. His grip on her hand was painful. She had to half run to keep up with his long strides.
He was dazed, she knew, not quite conscious of where he was going or with whom. She did not try to break the silence.
In truth she was hardly less in shock herself. He had been about to get married. He had thought her dead—she knew that from Captain Harris. But it had been less than two years ago. He had been about to marry again. So soon after.
Lily had caught sight of his bride when she had burst into the church in a panic. She was tall and elegant and beautiful in white satin and lace.His bride. Someone from his own world. Someone whom perhaps he loved.
And then Lily had hurried past his bride and into the nave of the church. It had been like last night, like stepping into a different universe. But worse than last night. The church had been filled with splendidly, richly clad ladies and gentlemen, and they had all been looking back at her. She had felt their eyes on her even as her own had focused on the man who stood at the front of the church like a prince of fairy tales.
He was clothed in pale blue and silver and white. Lily had scarcely recognized him. The height, the breadth of shoulder, the strong, muscular physique were the same. But this man was the Earl of Kilbourne, a remote English aristocrat. The man she remembered was Major Lord Newbury, a rugged officer with the Ninety-fifth Rifles.
Her husband.
The Major Newbury she remembered—Neville, as he had become to her on that last day—had always been careless of his appearance and impossibly attractive in his green and black regimentals, which were often shabby, often dusty or mud-spattered. His blond hair had always been close cropped. Today he was all immaculate elegance.
And he had been about to marry that beautiful woman from his own world.
He had thought Lily dead. He had forgotten about her. He had never spoken of her—thathad been clear from everyone’s reaction in the church. He had perhaps been ashamed to do so. Or she had meant so little to him that he had not thought to do so. His marriage to her had been contracted in haste because he had felt he owed it to her father. It had been dismissed as an incident not worth talking about.
Today was his wedding day—to someone else.
And she had come to put a stop to it.
“Lily.” He spoke suddenly and his hand tightened even more painfully about hers. “It really is you. You really are alive.” He was still looking straight ahead. His pace had not slackened.
“Yes.” She stopped herself only just in time from apologizing, as she had done in the church. It would be so much better for him if she had died. Not that he was an unkind man. Never that. But—
“You were dead,” he said, and she realized suddenly that the path was a short route to the beach where she had spent the night. They had left the trees behind them and were descending the hillside, brushing through the ferns at reckless speed. “I saw you die, Lily. I saw you dead with a bullet through your heart. Harris reported to me afterward that you had died. You and eleven others.”
“The bullet missed my heart,” she told him. “I recovered.”
He stopped when they reached the valley floor and looked toward the waterfall, which knifed downward in a spectacular ribbon of bright foam over a fern-clad cliff to the pool below and the stream that flowed to the sea. The tiny thatched cottage that Lily had noticed the night before overlooked the pool. There was a pathway leading to its door, though there was no sign that the house was inhabited.
He turned in the opposite direction and strode toward the beach, taking her with him. Lily, who was feeling overwarm at the length and speed of their walk, pulled loose the ribbons of her bonnet with her free hand and let it fall to the sand behind her. She had lost hairpins during the night. The few that remained were not sufficient to the task of keeping her mane of curly, unruly hair confined on her head. It fell about her shoulders and down her back. She shook her head and allowed the breeze to blow it back from her face.
“Lily,” he said, looking down at her for the first time since they had left the church. “Lily. Lily.”
They were walking, not along the hard level sand of the beach, but down it. They stopped at the water’s edge. If only they were still separated by the ocean’s expanse, Lily thought. If only she had stayed in Portugal. It would have been better for both their sakes.
He would have married the other woman.
She would not have known that he had forgotten her so soon, that she had meant so little to him.
