Page 22 of Gabriel's Angel

“Yes.” She looked at him again. “I know I led you to believe that I hadn’t married the baby’s father. It seemed easiest.”

“You don’t wear a ring.”

Color washed into her face. The shame of it. “I sold them.”

“I see.” There was no condemnation in the two words, but she felt it nonetheless.

“We stayed in Paris for our honeymoon. I wanted to go back to the States and meet his family, but he said we should stay where we were happy. It seemed right. Geoffrey was furious with me, lectured and shouted about me wasting myself. At the time I thought he meant my career, and I ignored him. It was only later that I realized he meant my life.”

She jumped when a log fell apart in the fire. It was easier to continue if she looked at the flames, she discovered. “I thought I’d found everything I’d ever wanted. When I look back I realize that those weeks we spent in Paris were like a kind of magic, something that’s not quite real but that you believe because you aren’t clever enough to see the illusion. Then it was time to come home.”

She linked her hands together and began to fidget. He had come to recognize it as a sign of inner turmoil. Though the urge was there, he didn’t take them in his to calm her. “The night before we were to leave, Tony went out. He said he had some business to tie up. I waited for him, feeling a little sorry for myself that my new husband would leave me alone on our last night in Paris. Then, as it got later and later, I stopped feeling sorry for myself and started feeling frightened. By the time he got back, it was after three and I was angry and upset.”

She fell silent again. Gabe pulled the afghan from the back of the couch and spread it over her lap. “You had a fight.”

“Yes. He was very drunk and belligerent. I’d never seen him like that before, but I was to see him like that again. I asked him where he’d been and he said—essentially he told me it was none of my business. We started shouting at each other, and he told me he’d been with another woman. At first I thought he said that just to hurt me, but then I saw that it was true. I started to cry.”

That was the worst of it, Laura thought, looking back on the way she’d crumbled and wept. “That only made him angrier. He tossed things around the suite, like a little boy having a tantrum. He said things, but the gist of it was that I’d have to get used to the way he lived, and that I hardly had a right to be upset when I’d been Geoffrey’s whore.”

Her voice broke on the last word, so she lifted the glass and cooled her throat with the water. “That hurt the most,” she managed. “Geoffrey was almost like a father to me, never, never anything else. And Tony knew, he knew that I’d never been with anyone before our wedding night. I was so angry then, I stood up and began to shout at him. I don’t even know what I said, but he went into a rage. And he—”

Gabe saw her fingers tighten like wires on the soft folds of the afghan. Then he saw how she deliberately, and with great care, relaxed them again. With an effort, he kept his voice calm. “Did he hit you, Laura?”

She didn’t answer, couldn’t seem to push the next words out. Then he touched a hand to her cheek and turned her face to his. Her eyes were brimming over.

“It was so much worse than with my uncle, because I couldn’t get away. He was so much stronger and faster. With my uncle, he’d simply struck out at anyone who didn’t get out of the way in time. With Tony, there was something viciously deliberate in the way he tried to hurt me. Then he—” But she couldn’t bring herself to speak of what had happened next.

It was a moment before she went on, and Gabe sat in silence as the rage built and built inside him until he thought he’d explode. He understood temper, he had a hair-trigger one of his own, but he could never understand, never forgive, anyone who inflicted pain on someone smaller, weaker.

“When it was over,” she continued, calmer now, “he just went to sleep. I lay there, not knowing what to do. It’s funny, but later, when I talked with other women who had had some of the same experiences, I found out that it’s fairly common to believe you had it coming somehow.

“The next morning, he wept and he apologized, promised that it would never happen again. That became the pattern for the time we were together.”

“You stayed with him?”

The color came and went in her face, and part of that, too, was shame. “We were married, and I thought I could make it work. Then we went back to his parents’ home. They hated me right from the start. Their son, the heir to the throne, had gone behind their back and married a commoner. We lived with them, and though there was talk about getting our own house, nothing was ever done about it. You could sit at the same table, hold a conversation with them, and be totally ignored. They were amazing. Tony got worse. He began to see other women, almost flaunting them. They knew what he was doing, and they knew what was happening to me. The cycle got uglier and uglier, until I knew I had to get out. I told him I wanted a divorce.

“That seemed to snap him out of it for a while. He made promises, swore he’d go into therapy, see a marriage counselor, anything I wanted. We even began to look at houses. I have to admit that I’d stopped loving him by this time, and that it was wrong, very wrong, for me to stay with him, to make promises myself. What I didn’t realize was that his parents were pulling on the other end. They held the financial strings and were making it difficult for him to move out. Then I discovered I was pregnant.”

She laid a hand over her belly, her fingers spread. “Tony was, well, at best ambivalent about the idea of having a child. His parents were thrilled. His mother immediately started redecorating a nursery. She bought antique cribs and cradles, silver spoons, Irish linen. Though it made me nervous, the way she was taking over, I thought that the baby might be the way to help us come together. But they weren’t looking at me as the baby’s mother, any more than they’d looked at me as Tony’s wife. It wastheirgrandchild,theirlegacy,theirimmortality. We stopped looking for houses, and Tony began to drink again. I left the night he came home drunk and hit me.”

She drew a careful breath and continued to stare at the fire. “It wasn’t just me he was hitting now, but the child. That made all the difference. In fact, it made it incredibly easy to walk out. I called Geoffrey, buried my pride and asked for a loan. He wired me two thousand dollars. I got an apartment of my own, found a job and started divorce proceedings. Ten days later, Tony was dead.”

The pain came, dull and low. Laura shut her eyes and rode it out. “His mother came to see me, begged me to bury the divorce papers, to come to the funeral as Tony’s widow. His reputation, his memory, were all that was important now. I did what she asked, because—because I could still remember those first days in Paris. After the funeral I went back to their house. They’d told me there were things we needed to talk about. That was when they told me what they wanted, what they intended to have. They said they would pay all my medical expenses, that I would have the best possible care. And that after the baby was born they would give me a hundred thousand dollars to step aside. When I refused, when I had the nerve to be angry at what they were suggesting, they explained that if I didn’t cooperate they would simply take the baby. Tony’s baby. They made it very clear that they had enough money and influence to win a custody suit. They would bring out the ‘fact’ that I had been Geoffrey’s mistress, that I had taken money from him. They’d checked my background and would show that due to my upbringing I would be an unstable influence on a child. That they, as the child’s grandparents, could provide a better environment. They gave me twenty-four hours to think it over. And I ran.”

He didn’t speak for several minutes. What she had told him had left a bitter taste in his mouth. He had asked for her story, had all but demanded it. Now that he had it, he wasn’t at all sure he could handle it.

“Laura, no matter what you were told, how you were threatened, I don’t believe they could take the child.”

“That isn’t enough? Don’t you see? As long as there’s a chance, I can’t risk it. I’d never be able to fight them on their terms. I don’t have the money, the connections.”

“Who are they?” When she hesitated, he took her hand again. “You’ve trusted me with this much.”

“Their name is Eagleton,” she said. “Thomas and Lorraine Eagleton of Boston.”

His brows drew together. He knew the name. Who didn’t? But because of his family’s position, it was more than a name, more than an image. “You were married to Anthony Eagleton?”

“Yes.” She turned to him then. “You knew him, didn’t you?”

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