“He objected?” He chuckled. “I cannot understand why, Emmy. He must be a fool. Last evening, before I even recognized you, I was knocked over by your beauty. But this morning you are many times lovelier. Today you are yourself. Does he notknowyou, Emmy? Does he know only last evening’s lovely woman?”
She looked lovelier still with a blush of color in her cheeks. It was such a relief to him this morning to see that she was still the old Emmy, a creature far more suited to the wild than to a ballroom—though he really had been dazzled by her beauty there last evening before he knew it was she. But she was not as other women were. To try to make her so would only emphasize her handicap and make her feel both unhappy and inadequate. She was different, but she was not inferior. Did none of them understand that? Not even Anna—or Luke? But what did he know of her now? He had not seen or thought about her for seven years. She had undoubtedly become a woman.
“You are to marry him, Emmy?” he asked. Powell certainly understood and was willing to live with her inability to hear and speak, Ashley reassured himself. It had probably been unfair to judge him on the displeasure he had shown a few minutes ago, apparently over what was on that canvas.
She nodded.
But the man had objected to her appearance too; she had just indicated so. Yet this was Emmy, far more surely than that dazzling beauty of last evening. Powell’s disapproval did not bode well.
“You love him, little fawn?” It saddened him that the old name no longer suited her.
She would not answer him. Her feelings for her betrothed were none of his business, of course. He was a stranger to her—as she was to him. They stood there for several moments, looking at each other. He realized that he was feeling more relaxed than he had felt for days. Weeks. Months. There was something about Emmy... There had always been something about her.
You,she said then, holding both hands palm up and beckoning quickly with her fingers—the old gesture.Tell me about you.It was no mere polite inquiry. He could see the light of real interest and sympathy in her eyes. The temptation to do what he had done all those years ago was strong in him. He longed to open his heart, to pour out everything to her.Everything.Emmy had always understood him. He had been aware that she did not see every word that he spoke. He was never sure quite how many she had missed. But she had always understood him.
With one hand she indicated the edge of the rock where it protruded over the water. She seated herself there without waiting for his comment, and very briefly dangled one bare foot in the water. As he lowered himself beside her, she drew up her knees, clasped her arms about them, then rested one cheek on them, so that she could watch him.
Memory rushed at him again. She looked once more almost like the girl she had been. He felt almost like the very young man he had been.
“I went to India for the challenge,” he said. “I went to work to make my fortune. But most of all I went to acquire a sense of my own worth. I wanted to prove that I could make my own way in the world. You remember all this, Emmy.”
Yes. She needed neither to nod nor to smile. Yes, she told him, she remembered.
“I did it all,” he said. “’Twas like a dream come true. I was very happy. There was the war with France, of course, and it touched us in India. There was always danger and the threat of danger. But somehow it merely added to the challenge, the exhilaration. I had—I have—some close friends in the military.” Major Roderick Cunningham, for example, who had come to fetch him...
She gazed at him and then invited him with those beckoning fingers to tell her more. She knew there was more.
“And then I met Alice,” he said. From the way he had worded it, he had made it seem as if meeting her had put an end to the happiness, the exhilaration. “Her father, Sir Alexander Kersey, was my superior in the company. She was newly arrived in India—she had been at home with her brother until he died suddenly. I met her when I was in the middle of a raging fever. My valet had sent word to Kersey, and when I came to myself from the delirium, she was cooling my face with a damp cloth. She tended me tirelessly for a number of weeks, her old nurse always hovering in the background. She was exquisitely lovely, Emmy—small, dainty, dark, soft-spoken. Is it any wonder I tumbled head over ears in love with her?”
No, she told him with large, calm eyes and a half smile. He knew from the intentness of her gaze that she had read every word from his lips. No, it was quite understandable.
Perfectly understandable. Alice had been gentle and patient. She had been deeply grieving for her dead brother. She had responded to his sympathies and his attentions. She had fallen in love with him. And so they had married.
“And so we married, Emmy,” he said, “on a few weeks’ acquaintance, during which time I knew her as a nurse and she knew me as a patient. We set about living happily ever after.”
She reached across and touched his hand for a moment. Perhaps something of the bitterness in his voice must be visible in his face, he thought.Why are you not happy?her searching eyes and her puzzled frown asked him.Why have you come home?She did not need words or even gestures. He had never known anyone with as expressive a face as Emmy’s.
“Her father died,” he said, “and so through my wife I inherited property and another vast fortune. And then there was Thomas... Perhaps the challenge went, Emmy. Perhaps I was homesick and wanted to return to England. After all, I always said I would come back when I made my fortune—to settle on my own land, to live in contentment with my own family.”
She knew it was not as simple as that. She told him with her steady, intelligent eyes that she knew something was wrong, that she knew he was in pain even if she did not understand its source. Perhaps she had not even understood all he had told her. But she had sifted out essentials. She knew he had not told all.
He would tell her no more. She was a woman now with a life of her own to live. With a suitor of her own—and some sort of quarrel to patch up, it seemed. She did not need the burdens of a virtual stranger. Besides, he was no longer that boy who had selfishly loaded all his troubles onto the shoulders of a willing listener. He had learned to bear his burdens alone. Though he had come running back to Bowden, back to Luke, even back to Emmy, he had known even before his arrival that none of them could help him—partly because he would not allow any of them to do so. He was a man for whom self-reliance had been learned the hard way.
He looked over his shoulder down at her easel and then back at her. He grinned.
“May I see the painting?” he asked. “I confess myself curious, Emmy.”
She bit her lip and flushed again. She raised her cheek from her knees.
“’Tis so very dreadful?” he asked.
He could see her hesitation. She looked downright embarrassed.
“I’ll not insist,” he said, laughing. “Or keep you from your solitude, Emmy. I’ll take myself off back to the house. Perhaps I will have breakfast with Powell.”
But she relented then and shook her head and bounded to her feet to move lightly past him and down the rocks to lead the way to her easel. She turned to watch with wide and wary eyes as he approached.
It was not anything he might have expected. Indeed, it was difficult to know what it was she had painted. There were greens and browns and blues, all bright. Her colors appeared to have been thrown at the canvas rather than smoothed on. He could see bold brush strokes moving up through the paint in wild swirls that drew the eye upward to where they all almost converged. He had seen nothing like it before. He could almost sympathize with Powell’s frown. Except that therewassomething he could see. Whatever it was she had painted, she had done it with passionate conviction. It was a painting that pulsed with feeling. Itspoke—though he could not understand the language.
