Читать книгу Captured by Moonlight - Christine Lindsay - Страница 11

The sight of Laine sent shock waves through Adam like that of a bullet wound. Seven years since the beginning of the war and the last time he’d seen her. She’d been wearing a pretty blue dress then, her dark hair windblown because she’d rushed to Madras Central Station to not miss seeing him off. He’d been in uniform, though he’d just joined up. They’d only had five minutes, and he’d kissed her good-bye. He remembered that. Though he’d prayed—prayed long and hard to forget.

“As I live and breathe, Laine.” He regretted his futile attempt at humor.

She didn’t move. Torchlight danced across her features and caught the sheen of her smooth hair. Flickering light touched the line of her mouth that he knew so well, set as tight as a clamshell to stop the trembling of her lips. She was as embarrassed, or was it as shocked as he was, after that wretched letter he’d sent when she was still in France?

He reached for the tone he’d used with his men when he’d held them as they were dying in the trenches, or later in the hospital as they’d suffered surgery after surgery. No need to add to their pain. Speak with a trace of banter. Ironically, the ability to banter he’d learned from Laine. “Must be quite a surprise to come across me out here in the sticks...Laine.” To say her name out loud was more difficult than he’d imagined.

“You could say that.” A hint of the girl he used to know came through her sharpening tone.

He tried again. “I must apologize. I’m afraid my last letter to you was rather...bad-mannered.”

“Mmm. Bad-mannered? Yes, you could say that.”

Though she didn’t add a word out loud, the phrases, horrendously cruel, unfeeling desertion of what they’d meant to each other, clanged in his ears.

Bella’s perplexed expression mirrored Rory’s as they stood looking from him to Laine and then each other.

Strange, after all this time he still recognized that though Laine clasped her hands together like a schoolgirl and she spoke with that easy-going melody in her voice, she was seething. Confused, hurt, but seething as much as that tiger prowling the jungle two miles away. Her eyes, the color of tea, had always played traitor when she tried to hide her feelings. Now the girl whose humor used to ripple from her stood in the moonlight. Her face shone as pale as the petals of a lotus blossom...and as breathtakingly lovely.

He’d hurt her. Oh dear God, he’d hurt her.

Bella moved with swiftness to tuck Laine’s arm in hers. With a hint of steel beneath her laughter, Bella turned to him and ordered. “It’s obvious you two have a lot to catch up on. Don’t you think, Adam, it would be a good idea to invite us in? We could all use a cold drink.” She added, sotto voce, “And perhaps a dose of headache powder all round.”

Rory, brilliant doctor he was, stood on the path, his expression as blank as blotting paper.

To his relief, Bella walked Laine steadily toward the house. Rory waited for him to precede him inside.

He motioned Rory on and turned to look behind. His gaze sought out the grounds where the gardens ended. All quiet out there. But he remained conscious every moment of the one staring down at them from the darkened room above.

Inside the house, the gramophone stopped playing Rachmaninoff’s Second. One small mercy. Adam darted a glance at the dining room. The table had been set for three, but his house-servant, Ravi, who had seen Laine arrive, had set another place. Laine strolled with Rory and Bella into the drawing room, and he followed on unsteady legs. As if he were slightly drunk. He shook his head to clear it.

After plumping a cushion, Bella sat on the sofa. Rory leaned an elbow on the fireplace mantle. Wandering about the room, Laine studied the framed photographs he’d hung on the walls, the study of wildlife that had given him some comfort these past few years. She strolled to the small grand piano, one of the few luxuries from his old days he allowed himself.

Electricity fizzled inside him. To break the spell of unspoken questions, he opened the slats on the louvered doors to the veranda. He turned to watch Laine study his home, listened to the heels of her shoes clicking on the teak floors. Her gaze took in this old plantation home with its mahogany furnishings of decades gone by. Was she thinking this should have been hers?

Ravi poured glasses of lime juice and soda. With a cool drink in their hands, everyone seemed to take a sigh. All except Laine. She turned a page of sheet music at the piano. Rachmaninoff. He cringed. Why had he left out that piece of music, of all pieces?

She turned a smiling face to the rest of the room, but failed to meet his eyes. Her gaze went somewhere past his right shoulder. “So, Adam, how long have you lived here?”

Rory and Bella would have no idea the weight of her simple question, but the answer stuck in his throat. “I came here directly after being released from the army.”

“Your mother never breathed a word, Adam. I thought you were at home in Madras near her.” He heard the flat note in her chuckle. Saw her infinitesimal flinch. She ran her fingers along the piano lid. “Why, only two months ago I received a letter from Auntie—I mean, your mother. We correspond, but then we would, wouldn’t we?”

Bella set her empty glass on a table. “You and Adam are related?”

Laine jumped in before he could. “My parents and Adam’s...best of friends...since before I was born. Auntie Margaret and Adam were like family after my mother and father died. I was a miserable fifteen-year-old at the time.” She rolled back her shoulders and bestowed a dazzling smile on the room that fooled everyone but him. There was more than a hint of challenge in the thrust of her chin. “In fact, I was thinking of visiting Auntie while I’m down here in the south.”

He dredged up a light tone, which was becoming near impossible with each passing minute. “She’d love to see you, of course, but I’m afraid Mother isn’t at home right now. On a bit of a holiday to Ooty with friends.”

As he feared, that light of challenge in her eyes dimmed. A trace of dejection showed in the downward sweep of her lashes, but only until that chin of hers came up again, and renewed battle sparked in her eyes. “Well then, another time. And perhaps, Adam, we shouldn’t offend your cook by dawdling any further. I’m fading from starvation as we speak.”

Bella got to her feet. “Splendid idea, Laine. Lead on.”

Adam gestured for the two women to go into the dining room.

With Bella at his right and Rory on his left, Laine sat directly across from him. Most nights he was happy to eat by a few paraffin lamps, but tonight Ravi used the chandelier. It hung from the teak beam in the ceiling, lifting all shadows from the room. He had a better chance to really see Laine now. And she him.

She shook out her napkin and laid it across her lap as Ravi served the mulligatawny soup. Color had returned to her face in two round spots of red on her cheeks. The color of anger and not just hurt, though you’d never know it from her laughter at Bella’s comments. But then, Laine in her youth had gone out of her way for frivolity. She’d preferred a game of golf to a serious conversation. Loved a dart match over a discussion of good literature. Laine would never understand why he’d persuaded his mother to keep his whereabouts secret.

~*~

Silence thundered around the table. Or was that real thunder Laine heard? Had she seen a flash of lightning through the window? It had been nigh impossible to look Adam in the eye since that moment she first heard his voice. When he’d stepped into the light, and she knew for sure, the bandages of her barely healed world had been ripped off. She still felt the sting.

All this time she’d thought she wouldn’t feel a thing if she ever did run into him. But the sight of his dark hair and lean face, that absentminded look of a scholar that use to delight her and drive her mad at the same time, was now not two feet away. She went dizzy. Times when he had read and read and read—seemingly unaware of her—until she’d tossed aside his book, and he’d laughed and drawn her onto his lap to kiss her in apology.

She wanted to storm out of his house, but she wasn’t going to let him off the hook. That lamentably cold letter he’d sent her while she was still in France had been as vague as it had been cruel. But tonight, hearing that Auntie Margaret had...

She wanted answers.

Only by forcing herself to chat with Bella about trivial nonsense helped her get through the salad and fish course. Bella pretended to be interested in the larks of her fellow nurses in Amritsar and from when she’d worked in the military hospital in Colchester.

Rory’s kind smiles across the table helped too. “You worked in Colchester?” He renewed his gaze with interest. “I imagine you patched up many a man who’d lost limbs. See much facial reconstruction?”

“A bit. I only worked there six months. Mostly I served at Étables in France.”

“Was that where you earned your RRC?”

Adam’s head shot up.

At the same time Bella piped in with, “My word, you’ve been decorated with the Royal Red Cross. Why, I’m sure any hospital in the British Empire would be happy to have you. Bless you, my darling girl, for coming to the back of beyond to help us with our poor villagers.”

Laine took a sip of water, ignoring the pull of Adam’s gaze. Though she didn’t look at him, she was attuned to everything about him. His throat moved convulsively as he continued to recuperate from his earlier shock. She could smell the scent of alum on his clean-shaven face. Rubbing her fingertips together, she could almost feel that lock of hair that fell over his brow. Feel that ever-so-slight bump on the upper bridge of his nose from the smack of a hockey stick during a tournament when he was a boy.

Adam’s voice jolted her out of her thoughts. “The RRC, well I must say I’m not at all surprised, Laine. You always were...amazing.” He cleared the roughness from his voice. “The last I heard, you were at Étables. I passed through that hospital on my way back to England.”

He’d been so close to where she’d been stationed and had not stopped to even speak with her. She trembled. She’d gone over it in her mind countless times. If he’d been well then, surely he would have found her, explained why he no longer wished to marry her.

She forced herself to study him with clinical interest through the next courses. He had not so much as a limp. His speech and ability to hold intelligent conversation—not to mention run a plantation—proved there was nothing wrong with him mentally. Even his face. Unscarred. Unmarked. Except for a touch of gray at his temples, he appeared as sound as he’d always been. Still though, she’d seen enough of the horrors to understand. Men whose faces had been half blown off, limbs gone, their memory lost, their minds shattered by shellshock.

She kept control of her voice. “Were you wounded, Adam? I did receive the news that you were missing in action.”

He turned his startling blue gaze away from her. “Compared to many, you could say I got out with barely a scratch.” Something in his buoyancy rang untrue.

Her fingernails dug into her palm. She still had no idea what had happened to him, only that first report that he’d been declared dead. Then months later his letter had arrived. She’d opened it, breathless with joy that they’d made a mistake—he was alive—only to read his baldly written note that he no longer wanted to marry her and wished God’s blessing on the rest of her life. Bad manners? Yes, she could find a few other words to describe that letter, but not any she could speak aloud. Her mind spun. But Auntie Margaret?

For a long time she’d licked her wounds. If he’d wanted to marry someone else, he could have at least said so. But it was clear now there was no Mrs. Adam Brand. No womanly touches graced his home at all. At least she didn’t have to suffer that humiliation.

“You were listed as dead, Adam. I know this because I checked.” She was aware of Rory and Bella’s shocked expressions.

A tinge of crimson mottled Adam’s cheeks. “True. But in reality my company was merely cut off from our own lines for a number of weeks. We survived.” He said this in the same vein as if he were discussing the weather, not as if he were a man who had wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.

“I see.” So that was it. She still wasn’t entitled to a better explanation.

They moved into the parlor for coffee. In a numb stupor she listened to the conversation shift to Adam’s interest in the forestry works. She excused herself, needing to get outside even if the air was as sultry and unmoving as it was in the drawing room.

She strode through the house to the front door, across the wide veranda and down the steps. The garden’s darkness reached out, a haven to quiet herself so that she would not cry. With her hands clenched at her sides she counted her breaths and stalked down the road along a high wall of bamboo that enclosed a group of huts, all the while fighting the trembling of her limbs.

She veered around once, thinking she heard the soft pad of footsteps behind her. Only the clammy winds moved the lemon trees, and she strode closer to the bamboo wall.

A flurry of movement behind the wall brought her up short. So too did a hiss of indrawn breath. Right now she didn’t care if a Bengal tiger watched her through the gaps between the bamboo stocks. She leaned closer. In the darkness she couldn’t see what hid between the barricade and back of one of the huts. But something breathed hard.

Running footsteps pounded on the road. “Come away, Laine, please.” Adam swung her around to face him. She could hardly see him in the dark. He breathed hard, but not surely from running a hundred feet from the veranda. “Please come back to the house. We were about to serve coffee.”

They were alone, and that nervous tick to his jaw meant he knew she would jump on this chance. “A moment, Adam. You know what I’d like.”

“All I can say is I’m sorry, again, Laine. I could have written you in a far more gentle manner, but somehow cut and dried seemed kindest at the time.”

“What happened to you when you were missing? That’s the root of everything, isn’t it? Why you suddenly changed.”

He ran a hand through his hair, letting it fall to his side with a slap. “It was all quite as I said at the table. You were over there. You know. At times it was hard to see where the lines were drawn in the mud. Where the Germans were, where my own men were. We were lost. Some of my platoon...hurt. Many died. What more can I say? We made it back.”

“And you no longer wished to marry me.”

He went silent for several heartbeats. His voice came out as soft as the moths fluttering in a trace of light. “I’m afraid that’s correct, Laine.”

His lack of explanation clawed at her last shred of composure, and she silently fought to win it back. He gestured for her to walk to the house. At one time he would have taken her arm to guide her in the dark. Most men would have. Strangers even. But apparently not the man who, when he was a boy, had been more of a brother than a friend. Or when he’d become a man who used to express his love for her with the passion of a poet. Now he walked far from her so that he wouldn’t inadvertently touch her.

He glanced back at the walled-in huts. She knew him too well and recognized the poise he worked hard to strum up. “When did you transfer from Étables to Colchester, Laine?”

His lighthearted friendliness snapped her last strand of self-control. That was it! She stopped and glared at him with the fury of an offended water buffalo. “I was transferred to Colchester shortly after receiving the RRC, Adam. Which was shortly after receiving the news that you and your unit were missing in action. And then the news that you were dead. Then a number of weeks later, your charming letter arrived telling me that you were very much alive, but our wedding was off. You see, those in command thought I’d seen enough of the front and needed time to...grieve for you.”

Even in the dark she was aware of his flinch. She didn’t enjoy that but couldn’t help her last jab at him. “We obviously just missed seeing each other. You must have been routed home to India around the time I was being sent back to France. Perhaps you were even on the same ship as the mail packet that returned your family engagement ring that I had been wearing.”

He met her gaze but seemed unable to speak.

“I’m sorry, Adam. But it’s not even that—Dear Jane letter and all—that has left me somewhat testy. It’s that I’ve known you since I was a squalling, red-faced infant in a pram and you just learning to walk, and all these years have passed without receiving so much as a by-your-leave. If you didn’t want to marry me, you could at least have treated me as the friend I had always been, and let me know how you were.”

She gulped and shook her head. “And it’s the fact that your mother...Auntie...must be in on this...this conspiracy to keep me in the dark.”

He took her wrist with gentle fingers. “You mustn’t blame Mother. I badgered her. She didn’t want to—I alone am to blame, Laine, for...keeping you in the dark.”

She rushed past him, swallowing the painful lump in her throat, and marched toward Rory and Bella who stood on the veranda. As she stomped forward, the rains landed in a sudden sheet of water. One moment the air had pressed against them, suffocating. Now the world disappeared as if she strode through a waterfall.

Adam reached the veranda a moment later. The strain in his voice showed as he focused on Rory and Bella. “Perhaps it’s best we call it a night. I’ll have Ravi drive you home.”

He didn’t look at her, but all four of them could distinguish that the change in his tone was for her. “Laine, the raw jungle is on our doorstep. It’s best you don’t go exploring the surroundings unaccompanied. Far too dangerous what with snakes, leopards, wild elephants, and tigers to name a few. So if you desire to visit the plantation...I must insist on—” He searched for words. “I must insist you send a note, and I’ll make arrangements. I also ask that you respect the privacy of these outbuildings.”

She stood frozen while the warm rain cascaded off the edge of the veranda, obscuring everything outside. She had no intention of visiting his blasted plantation or snooping in his barns anyway.

When a large black Daimler drove up, Rory stepped into the rain to open the back passenger door. Adam had the good sense to assist Bella into the car so that Laine could scramble in by herself. If he had so much as touched her she couldn’t be held accountable for what she’d do to him. In spite of the monsoons, her anger burned like a tin roof under the Indian sun. What a dolt she’d been when she’d thought him dead, to think that death, and death alone, had separated them.