Page 102 of The Tempting of Thomas Carrick
That it didn’t hold his attention because it didn’t hold his heart?
You need to learn to think with your heart as well as your head.
That morning, sitting behind his desk, shaken and shocked, he’d heard Manachan’s voice in his head. Manachan was as wily and as cunning as they came, but how could his uncle have known about this? About the situation he now faced?
He’d closed his eyes—then, jaw setting, he’d shaken his head, opened his eyes, and got down to business.
He’d told himself that the distraction caused by his time in the country would fade.
Quentin and Humphrey had arrived, and for the first time in his life he’d had to deploy, strengthen, and rely on his façade to greet them, to talk and exchange news with them, all the while hiding the deadening numbness inside him.
It had quickly become apparent that the business had run smoothly without him there. Quentin knew the guiding framework Thomas and he had set in place as well as Thomas did, and Humphrey had stepped up and filled Thomas’s shoes in terms of his day-to-day role, and had done very well.
Why Thomas had done it, he didn’t know, but he’d used his injury as an excuse not to take back all that Humphrey was now handling.
More than any of his reactions, that one had rocked him to his foundations.
What am I doing?
He’d asked himself that through the rest of that day and into an evening spent with a bottle of whisky.
At some point during that night, he’d found himself staring at the prospect that, deep down, he didn’t really want his old position back.
Carrick Enterprises didn’t need him—indeed, could function perfectly well without him. He didn’t need to be there, in the office, for it to flourish.
And if that were so, then his position there couldn’t give him what he needed, couldn’t ground him, anchor him, ultimately wouldn’t satisfy him. It wouldn’t—couldn’t—fulfill his deeply rooted need forhisplace—the right place for him, with the right passion and with people who needed him in a position he and only he could fill.
Despite his long-held belief, his position as principal partner of Carrick Enterprises hadn’t sunk its talons into his soul and refused to let go.
Yet something—someone else and another place—had.
He’d drained his glass and had refused, outright, to believe that. Any of that. Not wanting his established position back equated with him not wanting his carefully constructed life back, and that couldn’t be—wasn’t—true.
He’d decided it had been the whisky talking. He’d stoppered the bottle and had gone to bed.
Not that he’d slept, not even after the whisky.
Since then, he’d steadfastly lived as he had before, done all the things he’d done before, exactly as he had before, and had waited for the effect of his sojourn in the country to fade—for the talons to loosen and slip free.
They hadn’t.
Yet.
He remained adamant that, with time, they would. That with time he would reclaim his passion for this life, and be able to go forward as he’d always intended, following his carefully defined, self-determined path into the future.
Attending his aunt’s soirée that evening was to be his first new step along that path since he’d returned.
He hadn’t wanted to arrive too early and have to stand in any receiving line, chatting with matrons and their hopeful daughters while waiting to greet his uncle and aunt, so he’d taken a roundabout route from his lodgings in Bell Street; he’d headed north along Candlerigg Street, then had crossed the road to amble about the gardens surrounding St. David’s Church. Stepping out along Canon Street, he walked east, intending shortly to veer south to Stirling Square, and so on to Stirling Street and the Hemmingses’ house.
Unfortunately, the diversion also gave his mind the perfect opportunity to remind him of all he was striving to forget.
Like the need he’d sensed—had been so openly shown—by Lucilla, and also by so many in the Vale.
He hadn’t immediately understood what it was that had so called to him; in her, he’d seen it as simply another emotion in her mesmerizing emerald eyes, another element of her fire, another aspect of the fierceness of her loving.
Only now, with his mind so insistently revolving about his own need—a need to be truly needed by others—did he finally recognize that emotion in her eyes for what it was—for what it had been.
She had shown him, had exposed and put on display, her deepest vulnerability, and had trusted him to see it, to recognize and honor it.
