Page 299 of Once an Angel
He would have held her, just held her in his arms all night long, memorizing the tilt of her snub nose, the ethereal softness of her curls beneath his fingertips, savoring the warm aroma of her skin for all the cold, lonely nights to come.
"Good-bye, my love," he whispered. He pressed his open palm to the polished mahogany of the door,
his hand lingering in reluctant farewell.
* * *
Emily huddled against the door, her knees drawn up to her chest, and listened to Justin's footsteps fade into silence. She shoved her hair away from her face with shaking hands, pressing hard against her temples as if she could somehow muffle the agonizing whispers of the ghosts in her head.
He don't want you. Nobody wants you.
I said I didn't like you. I never said I didn't love you.
. . . since he murdered your father.
I'll be back for you. I swear it.
Trust me.
Shoot me.
She rocked back and forth in a knot of aching misery. Tears rolled silently down her cheeks. One by one the ghosts reared their heads in visions seared like photographs onto the blank plate of her memory. Doreen thrust a coal bucket in her hand, taunting her. Nicholas's elegant lips curled in a sneer. Justin emerged from the waves, his dark hair whipping in the wind, his bronze skin misted with sea drops. Her daddy folded his tall frame to kneel before her so he could button her coat and straighten her bonnet before sending her out in the snow to play.
Yet, even those spirits were tolerable. The ghost who haunted her now was a child. A child dancing with sweet abandon through the darkened room, her petticoats layered with moonlight. She paused in her dance and bent to peer into Emily's face, her dark eyes softened with empathy as if she couldn't quite comprehend that anyone could hurt so much.
Emily recognized her then. She was the child she might have been had her father not died at the hand
of her lover. Trusting, loving, convinced the world was a bright place filled with people of good heart. Believing that someday a man would come, a man as fine and handsome as her daddy, who would love her forever.
It was that child Justin had touched with his love, that child Justin had wounded with his silence. The woman she might have become could have found it in her heart to forgive him. That woman would have been free of rancor and cynicism, free of the bitterness that raged within Emily now, burning their love
to crashing ruins.
She reached out a trembling hand toward the child's luminous face. She vanished without even a good-bye, leaving Emily in utter darkness.
Chapter 32
If you should ever pause to look back, I pray you
won't think too harshly of me. . . .
It was midmorning the next day when Penfeld knocked on Emily's door. "His Grace requests your presence in the study," he announced.
Did the valet's voice sound strangely thick, or was it her own overwrought imagination? she wondered.
"Tell His Highness I shall hasten to answer his summons," she replied.
She stole a look out the window as she dressed. The same underfootman who had been lurking in the shrubs all morning was still there, whistling under his breath and studying the slumbering foliage as if his life depended on it. Emily took her brimming pitcher from its basin, eased up the sash, and poured a stream of wash water down on his unsuspecting head.
"Damn it all!" he sputtered, shaking himself like a sheepdog. "What in the deuced hell—"
"Hello, Jason," Emily called out. "I'm terribly sorry. I didn't realize you were down there."
His gaze shot up to the window; a sheepish smile transformed his freckled countenance. "Quite all right, Miss Emily. I was just inspecting the roses for—"
"Blight?" she suggested.
"Aye, blight!" he quickly agreed. "Been a bad year for it."
