ticket these days? Her budget was already stretched to breaking with the move back here to Thortonburg, and the fact she had not yet found a contract. But there was no telltale white slip on her windshield.
“I should just go put some change in my meter,” she said. “I—”
“Never mind,” he said. “I’ll look after it.”
Rachel took fierce pride in her independence. In the fact she had never asked anyone for help since Carly was born. Why did it feel so good to have someone say that? They would look after it?
For once, she would swallow her foolish pride and accept. Just for tonight, she would let herself believe in the fairy tale.
“Thank you,” she said. There. Three times. Now she owed him her life.
She wondered what it was like to be born into a family that had more money than several generations of them could spend. She wondered, as he held the door open for her and she slid into the deep leather luxury of the seats, what it felt like never to worry about money, to have as much to spend on a car as it would take to buy the small cottage that she dreamed of for herself and Carly. She had been squirreling away tiny amounts of cash toward that end since Carly had been born. But it suddenly occurred to her Carly could be a mother of three herself before she could save enough on her tight budget.
The car started with a rich purr that became a throaty growl as he put it in gear and pulled smoothly into traffic.
* * *
He found her utterly beautiful, the woman who sat beside him. Her hair, shoulder length, cut perfectly to frame the loveliness of her face, was a rich blend of colors that he did not think the term auburn did justice. Her eyes were the spectacular color of the purest jade. Her nose was small and neat and her mouth was sweet and vulnerable. There was a hint of stubbornness in the tilt of her chin.
She wore hardly a trace of makeup and the scent that wafted his way was clean and pure—soap, rather than perfume.
Her clothing, a navy blue trench coat over a white skirt and matching pumps, was plain and yet tasteful. Her hair was tucked behind her ears, and there were little white drops that matched the skirt attached to tiny earlobes.
Earlobes that begged a man’s lips to nuzzle them.
The thought shocked Damon Montague. Sergeant Crenshaw might not have been delicate about it, but he was right. Since the death of Damon’s wife just over a year ago, he’d been walking in a fog, held in the grip of a grief so deep, he was convinced it would never heal. Of course, it wasn’t just the loss of his wife.
Sharon had died bearing their first child, a son. The infant, perfectly formed, a tiny, angelic replica of Sharon, had died, too.
He knew that people thought he had everything. And once that might have been true. But the fact was, tragedy had made him long to be the most ordinary of men. Because money, position, prestige—none of it could buy him out of this place he was in. A place of feelings so raw and overwhelming, he did not know what to do with them. All his position had done was put his grief in a harsh spotlight, for viewing by the likes of Crenshaw. And now his position was making demands on him to get better. Get over it. Get on with life. Do his duty.
Even tonight, he’d come by private ferry from his island home of Roxbury to this neighboring island of Thortonburg to squire one of the many beautiful young women his well-meaning mother kept putting in his path. An unusually tall, if attractive girl, well-educated, from the best of families. Eligible, in other words.
When he’d come out of the opera to find his antenna broken, he’d felt relief, not anger. It was the perfect excuse to put the blond titan on his arm in a cab with his assistant, Phillip, and bid her adieu on the Opera Hall steps. No awkward moment when he had to try and escape kisses he had no heart for, conversation he could not stir interest in.
Other men’s stations would not demand that they remarry before their hearts had fully healed. Other men would not have to endure such pressure to put their feelings aside and produce an heir.
An heir. No, he did not think so. He spent many quiet hours locked in a nursery that would never have a baby in it now, no matter what his station demanded.
A nursery where Sharon was, still. In that silent room, sunshine-yellow, white lace at the windows, teddy bears everywhere, he could see his wife, her head thrown back in laughter, her eyes bright with the excitement of the coming baby, of the future. She could have had a staff of a dozen in there painting and decorating, but there she would be, alone, in a paint smock that stretched ever tighter over the beautiful mound of her belly, paintbrush in hand, her tongue caught between her teeth as she painted the bumblebee on the end of Pooh’s nose.
“Is something wrong?” the woman beside him asked softly.
He came back to the present with a jolt. “No,” he lied, and then realized he had wasted an opportunity. His offer to drive her home was motivated not just by a sense of wanting to help her, but a desire to know more about her missing sister.
Just recently Damon had found Prince Roland Thorton in a most compromising position with his sister, Lillian. Roland had given him some story about his own sister, an illegitimate daughter of Victor the Grand Duke of Thortonburg, having been kidnapped. Roland had come to Roxbury to investigate, to see if the Thortons’ arch enemies, the Montagues, were behind the kidnapping.
Even through his fury about Roland’s behavior with Lillian, and even through the insult of being seen as a suspect, Damon had sensed the truth in Roland’s story.
What kind of coincidence was it that Rachel’s sister, a young woman from Thortonburg, had gone missing in the very same time frame? This small group of islands in the North Atlantic were known the world over for their lack of violent crime.
Of course, the Thortons’ dilemma was top secret, and so Damon felt he couldn’t come right out and ask Rachel the questions he wanted to ask her.
“Did you know that man back there?” she asked him quietly. “The one in the police station waiting room? I thought you were a lawyer at first.”
A harder question than she knew. Damon did not know the man, but he had recognized his pain. If something good had come out of the terrible tragedy of his wife’s death, it was this: he had become a man of compassion. He recognized pain in others, and could not walk away from it.
It made him ashamed that once he had been so full of himself that he didn’t even recognize when others were hurting, let alone would have taken any steps to stop it.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t know him.”
“He seemed very lost,” she ventured.
“His son had been arrested. He didn’t know what to do. He was a simple man. A coal miner.”
“Oh, dear.”
He didn’t tell her that he had used his cell phone right there in the police station, and that his own lawyer was on his way from Roxbury to help the man. He just said, “I think it’s going to be all right.”
She smiled at him, and he liked her smile, and felt he wanted to make her do it often.
There it was again. That urge to help people in pain. Maybe because he was so helpless in the face of his own.
And
