With her head held high Elizabeth walked down the steps of the Fitzgerald home, planning for obstacles and strategizing ways to overcome them. Zachary posed the biggest stumbling block. She must find a way to make him understand that they were one soul and that whatever door they came to, they’d open it together. Fate more than mere coincidence had determined that consequence. Hadn’t their initial meeting in Missouri, and then years later in New York, suggested some cosmic order, driving them forward along an unstoppable plan? God had placed them on a path. Destiny had knocked. Zachary didn’t realize it yet. No longer would she allow him to ignore unavoidable events, inevitabilities and mechanisms behind them.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Elizabeth swept into his office in a tsunami of a cream-colored gown, her hair pinned up in an intricate, heavy mass, her slim waist flowing into the ornate folds around the bustle. He stood paralyzed by her ivory form as she moved into his office, floating through the half-green light–a slim, ethereal woman whose luminous dress seemed to whisper as she moved. Soft strands of errant hair fluttered about her face like the pearly wings of birds.
How he wanted her.
“Elizabeth, you…must…leave.” After the other night, he couldn’t promise to keep his hands off her.
“I’m not leaving. We must talk.” When she spoke to him, her voice was as sweet and low as cool water passing over smooth stones. Yet he detected an urgency despite her calm demeanor.
He grabbed her elbow and pushed her to the door. Refusing to leave, she slammed it shut and turned to him.
“The men will talk,” he said.
“That’s a lame excuse on your part. I don’t care. I feel safe here, connected to you with peace as well as necessity. The necessity being I can’t give in to your time schedule. I will never see my daughter again.” Her voice caught, struggling to keep outthe desperation. “My mother and father are insisting I marry the duke, having enticed him with a new proposal. They are announcing the banns in a couple of days.”
“Not to that degenerate. I thought I gave him a beating enough to have him packing. What I find most reprehensible is that your parents would forsake your happiness for a tyrant with a title. Hadn’t they heard what happened at the opera?” Patrick Maguire’s warnings about the nefarious duke roared in his head, the man’s taste more suited to men. The bell rang, signaling all the workers to go home.
“Yes, they heard about the fiasco and blamed it all on you, expediting my marriage to him by sweetening the contract with added funds. After the nuptials, the duke insists on hastening to England—I’ll be separated from Caroline…forever.”
His mouth twisted in derision. “To rebuild his bankrupt ancestral home with your dowry, and then to leave the most important thing in the world to you, your daughter, behind?”
“Marry me, Zachary. Now. I’ll leave my family.”
“Get out! Before I do something we will both regret.” She was offering herself. He couldn’t go there.
“Zachary, what in your life has dragged you down?”
He grabbed her by her shoulders, pinned her to the wall. Outside, the crack and snap of a final engine shut down. The walls of the office closed in. His mind clawed for logic. To escape the lunacy that controlled him. He took deep breaths.
“Please,” she begged.
How he hated to hear her beg.You fool,he told himself savagely, but the past that tracked him like an ugly shadow came roaring down. “No!”
What was happening to him?
“What am I supposed to think?” Elizabeth burst out crying and buried her beautiful face in her hands. My mother and sister throw my lack of virtue in my face all the time. My father,although he says nothing, every time he looks at me it’s with shame. Do you know how that feels?”
Despair leaped from her so profound…she sobbed, her diatribe never-ending, but becoming high-pitched, hysterical sputtering of all the wrongs incurred on her.
“Is it because I’m imperfect?”
Elizabeth needed him. Now.
His voice came hoarse. “You are perfect, Elizabeth. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.”
Loud, soulful, hiccuping anguish. “I told you before, I am innocent. I have no recollection…it happened the night our family hosted a ball. I had a cup of punch. Dizzy. The room spun. A terrible headache. Thinking I had too much to drink, I excused myself. I barely made it up the stairs to my room and collapsed.”
She clutched his shirt, unleashing a flood of desperate gasps, reliving the horror.
“There was a dark shadow above me, a silhouette of a man. A soft cloth was rammed over my mouth and nose, the smell abominable. My stomach heaved. There was a raspy voice. Yes, I remember it now.‘Elizabeth, you will have only me.’”
Envisioning her helplessness, Zachary clenched her shoulders, squeezed his eyes shut. The metallic smell of the storm came on with a vengeance followed by howling winds that threw rain against the window in strong gusts.
His eyes flared. “Don’t even go there.” Damn. He’d been a brute. He’d been cruel when he only wanted to take her in his arms. “I’ll kill the bastard who dared to touch you.”
How petrifying her secret must have been. How brave she was to tell him the specifics of her nightmare. He took her in his arms, rubbed his chin in the silkiness of her hair. The man who raped her knew the family. He was at that ball. She had been drugged. Twice. The cup of punch, and then chloroform over her mouth and nose to put her to sleep while the bastard raped her.
