“No. Eve sends news as well that Ilona is nearing her delivery date and doing well. Between them, I’ll be an uncle again twice over and soon. I’m pleased for them both.”
“What then?” She waited. “James?”
With a sigh, James uncurled his fingers from around the letter and smoothed it out. “Lady Polwarth, too, has delivered an heir for her husband.”
“Lady Pol…? Oh, your Mrs. Ross?”
“Aye.” His native brogue weighed heavily on the word.
The lively light dimmed in Maggie’s gaze. “Oh. Are you regretting the choice you made?”
Two years in New York, he had few secrets from his hostess, so he didn’t try to pretend he didn’t understand the question. Besides, quite likely, she knew him better at this point than anyone ever had. Without him seeing it, she’d become a dear friend, perhaps his dearest. Smart, strong-willed, and shrewd. He was never able to escape her keen gaze for long.
“No,” he said honestly.
“Then what is it?”
Shaking his head, he rose and strode to the front window, looking out over the gates marking the corner of the Central Park. However, it wasn’t the clumps of snow and ice falling off the trees he was seeing, but rather the memory of full skirts twirling around the dance floor of Haddington’s Edinburgh townhouse two years past. When he’d stood outside on the terrace, looking in.
“Nothing,” he answered at last. “I suppose it’s just the realization that life moves on.”
Yet, despite his best efforts, his had changed only minutely.
Perhaps that was the problem.
He’d come to New York with the express purpose of finding a bride and wedding as quickly as possible. To throw himself into the tumult of lovesick ecstasy. To find the wedded bliss that knotted his gut with envy.
He’d been confident of instantaneous success as he knew exactly what he was looking for. But the longer he was there, the more his disenchantment grew. The more he realized the impossibility of his search.
He’d thought, as he assured Maggie time and again, he’d put that fantasy behind him, content to focus on monetary achievement instead. Eve’s letter had roused that old envy’s ugly head for the first time in a long while. Reminding him that he was missing something all the greenbacks in America couldn’t buy. The satisfaction of all his success wasn’t quite enough to fully satiate his renewed disquiet that something more important was missing from his life.
Bloody hell, Prim hadn’t been wrong the other night. Despite Maggie’s friendship, he was lonely as Prim had said. While he hated the sensation, the good Lord knew how well acquainted he was with it.
It wasn’t only a matter of missing his family. It was missing something within himself. Despite being born amidst a near dozen siblings, he’d wallowed in it his whole life. No amount of companionship, laughter, or diversion ever filled it.
James slipped his hand into his pocket. His fingers curled around the locket his father had given him. It had been his mother’s before she’d died. Though he hadn’t opened it in years, he could picture in detail the aged and cracked miniature of his mother as a young woman on one side, his father on the other. Strands of their hair, braided together, were tucked within its hinged walls.
On his deathbed, his father had said he’d tried to live on this earth without his love but couldn’t go it alone. Not without his bonny Eileen. Loneliness ate at a man, he said. Of all his children, James might be the one to best understand.
He did.
His father had given him the locket that day so James would know he was never alone. In a way, it’d only served to amplify how alone he truly was.
As for love, after seeing how it’d wasted his father away, James had never wanted it. He hadn’t wanted to bear that kind of anguish. Ever. Then, after years of watching Francis’s first wife deliver misery in heaping helpings, he’d never wanted marriage either.
But he’d stood on that terrace two years ago, watching his brothers, becoming a believer for the first time. He’d realized that love didn’t only destroy. That it offered more than it stole from a man. He’d set off in search of that elusive emotion for himself.
And failed.
It wasn’t the search for a wife that kept him from home now. It wasn’t Larena’s happiness making him miserable. As much as he hated to admit it now as he wouldn’t then, it was envy, pure and simple.
He hated floundering about in this miserable solitude. He wanted what they had, what he apparently could not find for himself. He wanted someone to call his own. To be at his side, to find comfort in. To share a life. To shed the loneliness.
He wanted children around him. The joy they brought, the youth they restored in him.
He wanted love.
Bugger it all, he wanted to give his to someone.
