Читать книгу A Kiss Too Late - Ellen James - Страница 6

J EN STARED out the window of the bus, already certain she was making a mistake. She didn’t want to return to Newport. She wasn’t ready yet. But here she was, traveling up from New York, regretting every mile that rumbled under the wheels of the bus, regretting every mile that brought her closer to home.

She knew she’d see Adam again, of course. He’d be here for her mother’s wedding; he was practically an adopted son of the Hillard family. But it had been only a week since the tumultuous night Jen had spent with him. Her face heated just at the memory.

A book lay in her lap, open but unread. She slapped it shut and stuffed it into her carryall. The bus was now traveling through the narrow streets of Newport, Rhode Island, and she tried to resist the quaint beauty of the town: the old wooden houses standing cheek by jowl, the vines trailing from window boxes, the showy rhododendrons sprouting everywhere like colorful balloons.

When the bus pulled up at the station, Jen had to force herself to get off with the rest of the passengers. She felt tense as she made her way into the station with her carryall and one small suitcase. She tried to reassure herself that she wouldn’t be staying long in Newport. A few days–would it really be so bad? Afterward she’d return to New York and to the life that truly mattered to her.

“Hello, Jen,” said a voice behind her, the unmistakable voice of Adam Prescott. Jen drew in her breath. She’d expected to have a little more time to prepare herself. What was he doing here, anyway?

She couldn’t turn to face him–she just couldn’t! Not after that impetuous night they’d spent together. Jen remained frozen where she was, her back turned to Adam. Unfortunately, even though she wasn’t looking at him, she felt his presence like an overwhelming force. Her nerves seemed to tingle uncomfortably, just because she knew he was there….

At last Adam came around in front of her, and she actually had to look at him. She struggled to present an aloof facade, but she didn’t think she was very successful.

“Hello, Adam,” she said stiffly. “It’s…a surprise to see you. I thought you’d still be in Boston.”

He gave a faint, skeptical smile. “You don’t have to be polite with me, Jen.”

She gazed at him. Adam had always been much too direct for her liking. And he was much too attractive and too self-assured. His dark brown hair with distinctive hints of gray waved back from his forehead. Prematurely gray hair was a Prescott family trait, and Adam had started to show the first silvery streaks when he was in his early twenties. He was forty now, and the Prescott trademark had worn well on him. Everything wore well on the man, including that dark luxuriant mustache of his. If possible, he looked even better than he had a week ago….

He was indulging in a perusal of his own. “I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye the other day,” he said quietly.

“Still, you managed to leave your message.” She rummaged inside her carryall, found an envelope and thrust it at him. “There. I’m returning your money. I hardly expected payment for…services rendered.” She was furious, but somehow she kept her voice cool.

Adam stared at the envelope. “I think you know that wasn’t my intention. I was worried about you, Jen. After seeing how you live, it doesn’t make sense…”

Jen sighed. “Let’s drop it, all right? Everything. What happened in New York was a mistake for both of us.”

He pocketed the envelope, regarding her with a dissatisfied expression. Jen gazed into his dark brown eyes a trifle too long. He was unsettling her all over again. Why did he affect her this way? Somehow she managed a shrug.

“I expected the chauffeur to come for me. I can’t imagine you tearing yourself away from your newspaper. Did my mother bribe you?”

“I arranged to take a few days off. And I volunteered to pick you up. I thought we could finally clear the air about a few things.”

“We’ve done enough damage already,” she said tightly, but Adam had taken her suitcase and was leading the way out of the station as if he expected her to follow automatically. Hadn’t it always been like that, Adam leading, Jen expected to follow?

She stood in the middle of the station, watching Adam’s broad-shouldered back retreat. No matter that his shoulders looked wonderful in that dark, silk-woven jacket. Surely after all this time she knew how to resist his appeal.

She’d never been good at resisting him, that was the problem. Even during those painful times of their marriage, she’d longed for him, ached to have him near. With Adam, she’d always been like tinder waiting for the touch of flame. In the end, there’d been only one solution. Her one hope of making a life for herself had been to leave Adam.

Now he reached the door and turned to glance back at her, waiting. She was tempted to let him wait, but she couldn’t ignore practicalities. She’d have to go with him, or walk–and if he had something he wanted to say to her, he’d stick around until he’d said it. She knew him well enough to know that. With another sigh, Jen went to the door and out to the parking lot with Adam.

He tossed her suitcase into the trunk of a tasteful sedan that managed to convey a hint of recklessness in its lines, as if at heart the vehicle was actually a race car. Adam himself was rather like that, his appearance subtly polished but suggesting reckless energy underneath.

Jen slid into the passenger seat, and a few seconds later Adam wheeled the car out of the lot. Pressing a button on his side, he lowered Jen’s window. Feeling contrary, she found the button on her side and raised the glass. But soon the car became too hot, and with a grumble she lowered the window again.

“You used to do that a lot,” Adam said. “Even before we were married, remember? We’d go out to dinner, and you’d insist on being the one to pay the tab. You’d argue with my opinion about a concert or a play or a book. You’d argue with me about anything.”

Jen found herself tensing again. She’d been so young when she’d fallen in love with Adam. Young, in love and at the same time needing desperately to declare her independence. From the beginning, Adam’s powerful personality had inspired both fascination and rebellion in her. It had made for a volatile combination.

“Oh, yes, I remember,” she murmured. “But you never understood–”

“I knew what was going on. I’m not dense, Jenny.”

Jenny. It had been his own private name for her, a name that no one else had ever used. It seemed to have slipped out just now almost against his will. He stared straight ahead, not saying anything more. Jen stared straight ahead, too. The silence was potent, filled with all the unspoken recriminations and misunderstandings between them.

Jen made an effort to concentrate on the scenery. After a short while they left the crowded downtown streets behind and began driving along the ocean. A few people were out with their fishing poles, and gulls sunned themselves on the rocks. Out on the water, sailboats skimmed easily along. Jen wished she could enjoy the relaxed view, but she was only growing more keyed up in Adam’s company. And clearly he was determined to have his say. He pulled off the road and onto a point that overlooked the water. Waves surged against the rocks below, the ocean restless. Adam seemed restless, as well. He swung out of the car as if too impatient to sit still any longer.

Jen climbed out, too, and went to stand a short distance from him. Offshore, a tall ship rode the swells. It was a big, four-masted schooner at full sail, a ship that could have materialized straight from the nineteenth century–the past merging into the present on this lazy summer afternoon.

At last Jen glanced over at Adam. “If you’re going to talk about the other night, please don’t. We both had too much to drink, that’s all. We got carried away.”

The breeze ruffled Adam’s hair until it was no longer so impeccably groomed. His voice was gruff when he spoke.

“I had a lot more I wanted to tell you that night. I didn’t get a chance. The fact is, you’ve been trying to avoid me this past year, Jen. And you’ve also been avoiding your family. That isn’t right. They need you, and you can’t go on letting them down.”

Jen stared at him. “That’s what you wanted to tell me? You wanted to give me a lecture on my family? I suppose I should’ve known.” She kicked a small stone. “And I’m not hiding out in New York, trying to avoid you. I’m simply leading my own life. A good, happy life, by the way.” She stopped. Why did she feel so defensive around Adam? Why was she trying to justify herself to him?

His features were set in the hard, uncompromising lines so familiar to her. “A good life?” he echoed skeptically. “Don’t forget, Jen, I’ve seen your apartment. I don’t know what the hell you’re doing in New York, but that’s not the point. New York’s only a couple of hours away. You’ve been acting like it’s in another country, always making excuses why you can’t come home. And that is hurting your family. All I’m trying to tell you is–don’t do it on my account. You can start coming home again.”

She made an attempt at laughter. “Now you’re giving me permission to return. I guess you never really understood me or why I left you. And obviously you still don’t understand.”

“Explain it to me, then. Let’s straighten this out once and for all.”

Anger churned inside her. This was typical Adam Prescott–behaving as if she was someone he had to bring into line.

“I tried to explain it to you, Adam. A hundred times I tried. But you never listened.”

They stood facing each other on the rocky outcropping, the waves splashing unheeded below. Adam jammed his hands into his pockets.

“This is about the newspaper,” he said, “isn’t it? You always resented how much time I put into it.”

She made a gesture of futility. They’d been apart all this time, and still it seemed their arguments were destined to follow the same path.

“Adam, I knew from the beginning how important the Standard was to you. That wasn’t the real problem.” It dismayed her how fresh her memories were–how readily she recalled the pain and disappointment of trying to get through to Adam. During their marriage she’d been like someone pounding and pounding on a door, never to have it opened, never to know what was on the other side. How ironic. Living with Adam so many years, but never being allowed to know his private thoughts or emotions. She’d begun to wonder if she knew her own husband at all.

She still didn’t really know him. Even now, his expression grew shuttered. “I gave you everything I could, Jen. Everything I had to give.”

“It wasn’t enough.” She heard the edge of bitterness in her own voice. “Let’s not start this all over,” she said quickly. “I’m here for my mother’s wedding, and that’s the only thing that matters.”

Adam studied her. “Don’t let another year go by before you visit your family again.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen after this,” she said, perhaps too sharply. “I’ll just have to see how it goes with my great-uncles and with my mother. As for you and me, Adam…well, let’s not have any more…unfortunate episodes.”

“I call it lovemaking.” His tone was final, yet he looked dissatisfied. He gazed at Jen a moment longer, frowning slightly. Her own gaze lingered involuntarily on the bold, expressive contours of his face. A week ago he had reawakened the passion between them, and now the familiar desire stirred in her again. She still wanted him. She still longed for his touch. Hadn’t she learned anything–anything at all?

She turned away and was relieved when he went back to the car and pulled open the passenger door for her. She slid into her seat, and a moment later they were on the road.

“I’m surprised you haven’t remarried,” she said when the silence grew awkward. “You wanted children, after all.” Jen paused for only a second. The issue of children had been one of the major sore spots in their marriage, and she felt it best to skim over the subject. “Anyway, these days it seems there’s always a story about you in the society columns, and a picture of you with some new woman.”

He drove the car smoothly along the winding ocean road. “I didn’t know you read the social pages,” he remarked.

“I don’t read them. It’s just that you can’t help glancing at a picture of someone you know. Besides, you give the gossips a great deal to talk about.”

“You believe the stories, Jen?”

“I believe the photographs.” She stared out the windshield, refusing to mention the jealousy that twisted through her every time she saw a picture of Adam escorting yet another lovely socialite. “The women you choose, they’re gorgeous,” she said in an offhand manner. “Apparently you didn’t waste any time after I was gone.”

“You made it clear you wanted nothing more to do with me. You’re still making that clear–even after I shared your bed.”

Dammit, why couldn’t they stop talking about that…incident? Jen feared her relationship with Adam was like a package she kept trying to wrap up and put away, only the paper kept tearing and the string kept coming untied. It certainly didn’t help to be sitting beside him like this, his closeness almost taunting.

Adam turned off the road and stopped the car in front of the heavy iron gates that guarded Jen’s childhood home. She frowned at them. She’d always detested these gates, convinced they’d been meant more to imprison the Hillard family than to keep intruders away.

Adam leaned out his window and punched a series of numbers on the security panel. A second later the gates buzzed and swung open ponderously. Adam drove through, the gates clanging shut behind the car.

“I don’t even know the security code anymore,” Jen said. “My family trusts you more than they do me.”

Adam slowly took the car under the elms of the drive. “I know it bothers you, that I’m still on good terms with your family.”

“I don’t understand how you get along so well with them,” Jen murmured. “I can never seem to agree with them about anything. I never seem to agree with my mother, that’s for certain.”

“Give your family a chance for once. You might be surprised.”

“Surprised–I seriously doubt that. Some things never change.”

He stopped the car in front of the house, although perhaps “house” wasn’t precisely the right term for such an ambitious structure. The Hillard mansion had been built in the late 1800s, at a time when Jen’s ancestors had harbored a fondness for Tudor architecture. The place resembled an English country estate, with its mullioned windows, stone walls, myriad chimneys and even a few conical towers. Architecturally the place was impressive, Jen supposed.

“Welcome home,” she said wryly. “I never did trust this house. When I was a kid, I used to feel lost in there.”

Adam sat with both hands resting on the steering wheel. “Jen…is it really so bad coming home?”

“It’s uncomfortable at the very least.”

“I could go in with you right now. It might help ease things.”

Jen glanced at him. “It’s better if I do this alone.”

“Maybe some things do change, Jenny,” he said in a quiet voice. “You seem different now. Stronger, I think. More independent, that’s for damn sure.”

Gazing into Adam’s dark eyes, she felt trapped in the intimacy of his car. It seemed that long ago the touch of his lips and the caress of his hands had branded her in some irrevocable way. Perhaps she resented him for that, more than anything else. Adam had been her first lover. And, in spite of his emotional distance, he’d been a very good lover. Too good. She’d begun to fear she would find no other man who could compare with him that way.

She pressed the window button, raising the glass all the way up. “I appreciate your meeting me at the station,” she said rather stiffly.

“There you go again, being polite.”

Her eyebrows drew together. “Okay, forget polite. All I know is, I’m not looking forward to going in that house.”

“I suspect you can handle your family. In a way, you handled all of us a year ago. This time just go a little easier.”

She turned from him. How like Adam to align himself firmly on the side of her family. That was the way it had felt back then: all of them, including Adam, lined up against her.

She scrambled out of the car. Adam deposited her suitcase and bag on the veranda, then jangled his keys in his hand.

“Positive you don’t want me to come in with you?” he asked.

“Positive.”

Adam gave her a fleeting smile and climbed back in his car. Jen watched it disappear down the drive. And she wished, quite suddenly, that she’d let Adam stay here with her, after all.

* * *

ADAM DROVE BACK OUT the gates, only to slow the car to a halt. He couldn’t explain why he wasn’t phoning the newspaper. He usually checked in to see how things were going; he rarely took this much time off. Hell, he shouldn’t be taking off time at all, not when he had Darnard Publishing looking to close a deal with him. They were making a generous offer for the paper. Very generous. Yet Adam still couldn’t force himself to sign on the dotted line.

Now he thought about Jen. That his ex-wife was a distraction there could be no doubt. More than a distraction. These days she seemed to have gained a special vibrancy, as if living in that run-down apartment of hers in New York actually suited her. Of course, she still had the patrician air that was her hallmark. That was the joke: for as long as Adam had known Jen, she’d fought against her aristocratic heritage, despising the fact that her maternal ancestors boasted a distant connection to Stuart royalty. And yet Jen moved with a naturally aristocratic bearing, something she couldn’t disguise. It showed in the confident way she walked, the way she could make even faded jeans and a T-shirt seem like the latest fashion. Meanwhile, her gray eyes betrayed the passion she tried to keep hidden underneath….

Damn. She was getting to him all over again. He’d hoped he’d worked Jenny out of his system that night in New York. He’d thought it would be safe, going to pick her up today and setting her straight about her family. He’d been wrong. Of course, he’d been wrong about Jenny plenty of times before.

Adam started the car moving again, but he didn’t call the paper. Instead, he went down the road and turned in at yet another pair of gates. A few minutes later he swung the car around in front of a rambling, gabled villa built of mellowed stone. It had been his parents’ home, the house where he’d grown up. He rarely came here anymore, and he couldn’t explain the impulse that had brought him today.

Adam climbed the porch steps and unlocked the front door. He moved restlessly through the dim, musty rooms with their shrouded furniture and drawn curtains. A caretaker cleaned and dusted the rooms periodically, yet still the place smelled of decay to Adam. All about him, the air hung heavy and stale from disuse.

He knew he ought to have sold the house years ago. After all, he wasn’t a sentimental person. But it was one more thing he couldn’t explain–why he held on to a house that felt more and more like a mausoleum with each passing year.

Adam frowned as he paced the drawing room. He didn’t care for niggling emotions he couldn’t explain. Now he glanced at the portrait of his parents that still hung in an alcove. It was a realistic portrayal, showing his mother and father turned toward each other, focusing solely on each other rather than gazing out at the rest of the world. Adam paused and studied the portrait for some moments. That was a mistake, of course, for he felt remnants of the old sensations rise within him–sorrow and guilt and anger. But it had all happened such a long time ago. Surely with a little effort he could make himself forget.

Adam turned from the portrait and strode outside, gazing across the wide lawn. Off among the trees he could see the rooftop of the Hillard house. His family and Jen’s had lived side by side for decades, and Adam couldn’t help feeling protective toward Jen’s two great-uncles and toward her mother. He didn’t like the sadness he’d sensed in them, ever since his divorce from Jen and her refusal to visit Newport.

Adam gazed speculatively at the Hillards’ rooftop. That was a problem he could tackle–convincing Jen her family needed more from her. He just had to make sure his involvement didn’t go beyond that.

Where Jen was concerned, he wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.