He pulled away from her. “I suppose it would be too much to ask if you’d leave me alone?” he asked coolly.
“Yes, it is! You can’t do this to me, playing the devoted lover one minute, the model husband the next. I want to know where I stand in your life! Are you going to divorce her?”
Molly held her breath, an impossible hope building inside her, but it was useless. “Yes, I’m going to divorce her,” he said. “But it doesn’t have a damned thing to do with you. Look, Lisa, it’s been over a long time, and it wasn’t much to begin with. We were both lonely, you and I, but we both know it was a mistake.”
She stared up at him. “That brings me to the second question, though it sounds like you already answered it. Are you going to ask me to marry you?”
There was a long pause, and Molly almost felt sorry for her. “Lisa, I couldn’t afford you, and well you know it.” His voice was suddenly gentle.
She laughed unhappily. “How very flattering of you, Pat. The truth of the matter is that you don’t want to marry me. And I think, if you were really honest with yourself, you’d admit that you don’t want to divorce that unfaithful wife of yours either. There’s nothing you’d like better than to play love’s young dream with her, regardless of the fact that she’s ten years younger than you and she’s cheated on you with every man she could lay her greedy little hands on.”
“She doesn’t have anything to do with you and me, and I’m not about to discuss her with you.”
“But there is no you and me. There hasn’t bear really, since before you married her. And there never will be.”
“No,” he said with great finality. “There never will be.”
She stared at him for a moment longer, then she reached up and ran her hand along Patrick’s face with a longing gesture. “It’s a shame, darling,” she murmured. “It could have been marvelous.” She sauntered out the door with more self-assurance than Molly knew she possessed, and she felt a moment’s compassion for the woman.
Without another word Patrick turned and started toward the door. Molly ducked back among the bales of hay, but she needn’t have bothered. His mind was on other things, and, as she watched his closed face, she wondered what she had done to him, why things had gone so terribly wrong in that shadowy past, and she could have wept with frustration and nameless guilt.
It took her a moment to compose herself. She couldn’t very well spend the rest of the day out in the stable, and the conversation she had just overheard was having a belated effect on her. If he didn’t want Lisa Canning, then there might, just possibly, be a chance. For the future. For them.
She entered the kitchen close on Patrick’s heels, unable to keep a little bounce out of her steps.
“Oh, there you are,” she said blandly. “Lunch should be ready. We’re eating in the dining room for the time being.” She gestured to the table littered with dirty bowls, cutting boards, and cookbooks.
A brief smile lit his forbidding face. “You cooked it?”
“I did, indeed. And very tasty it will be, if I haven’t burned it looking for you.” She pulled the cast iron skillet out of the oven and noted with satisfaction the golden crust.
“I was in the barn,” he said, looking at her curiously and not without suspicion.
“Really?” she said ingenuously. “Well, that’s where I should have looked, I suppose. Would you call the others?”
Fifteen
“What the hell made you decide to wear that dress?” Patrick demanded explosively after a moment of dead silence.
Molly stared down at the white eyelet dress, one of the few pieces of clothing left from her original wardrobe. “You told me I usually dress for dinner. I thought I would tonight. What’s wrong with it?” she asked, touching the delicate material. “It’s pretty.”
Uncle Willy snorted into his drink, and Patrick continued to glower, so it was up to Aunt Ermy to explain the situation.
“That, my dear, was your wedding dress.”
It struck no chord of memory. She stared down at it, trying to force some faint glimmer of recognition, but it meant nothing to her. Just a pretty dress.
“I would appreciate it if you’d change, Molly,” Patrick said heavily after a moment, and there was pain in his dark blue eyes, a pain she recognized with an unholy pleasure. He couldn’t be indifferent to her.
“Yes, my dear. Something in black would be more suitable on today of all days,” Aunt Ermy said.
“Why today of all days?” she inquired innocently.
“Because your poor father’s death has just been made known to us,” she snapped back. “Granted, no one had seen or heard from him for a decade—Patrick’s father, rest his saintly soul, assumed poor little Molly was an orphan when he fetched her home here. You’d been staying with some distant cousins, but they no longer had any room for you, so Jared took you in. Such a kindly man, always taking in waifs.”
“Yes, wasn’t he?” Molly said with a pointed look at Ermy’s smug direction.
Ermy, however, was oblivious. “I’m certain Jared would want proper attention paid to your father’s death. After all, he was Jared’s third cousin. Or something like that. A little more decorum and proper feeling wouldn’t hurt you one bit, my girl. Go and change.”
