Almost Heaven Read online

  “Get any nearer to me.”

  She stopped cold, her mind registering the physical threat in his voice, refusing to believe it, her gaze searching his granite features.

  “Ian,” she began, stretching her hand out in a gesture of mute appeal, then letting it fall to her side when her beseeching move got nothing from him but a blast of contempt from his eyes. “I realize,” she began again, her voice trembling with emotion while she tried to think how to begin to diffuse his wrath, “that you must despise me for what I’ve done.”

  “You’re right.”

  “But,” Elizabeth continued bravely, “I am prepared to do anything, anything to try to atone for it. No matter how it must seem to you now, I never stopped loving—”

  His voice cracked like a whiplash. “Shut up!”

  “No, you have to listen to me,” she said, speaking more quickly now, driven by panic and an awful sense of foreboding that nothing she could do or say would ever make him soften. “I never stopped loving you, even when I—”

  “I’m warning you, Elizabeth,” he said in a murderous voice, “shut up and get out! Get out of my house and out of my life!”

  “Is—is it Robert? I mean, do you not believe Robert was the man I was with?”

  “I don’t give a damn who the son of a bitch was.”

  Elizabeth began to quake in genuine terror, because he meant that—she could see that he did. “It was Robert, exactly as I said,” she continued haltingly. “I can prove it to you beyond any doubt, if you’ll let me.”

  He laughed at that, a short, strangled laugh that was more deadly and final than his anger had been. “Elizabeth, I wouldn’t believe you if I’d seen you with him. Am I making myself clear? You are a consummate liar and a magnificent actress.”

  “If you’re saying that be-because of the foolish things I said in the witness box, you s-surely must know why I did it.”

  His contemptuous gaze raked her. “Of course I know why you did it! It was a means to an end—the same reason you’ve had for everything you do. You’d sleep with a snake if it gave you a means to an end.”

  “Why are you saying this?” she cried.

  “Because on the same day your investigator told you I was responsible for your brother’s disappearance, you stood beside me in a goddamned church and vowed to love me unto death! You were willing to marry a man you believed could be a murderer, to sleep with a murderer.”

  “You don’t believe that! I can prove it somehow—I know I can, if you’ll just give me a chance—”

  “No.”

  “Ian—”

  “I don’t want proof.”

  “I love you,” she said brokenly.

  “I don’t want your ‘love,’ and I don’t want you. Now—” He glanced up when Dolton knocked on the door.

  “Mr. Larimore is here, my lord.”

  “Tell him I’ll be with him directly,” Ian announced, and Elizabeth gaped at him. “You—you’re going to have a business meeting now?”

  “Not exactly, my love. I’ve sent for Larimore for a different reason this time.”

  Nameless fright quaked down Elizabeth’s spine at his tone. “What—what other reason would you have for summoning a solicitor at a time like this?”

  “I’m starting divorce proceedings, Elizabeth.”

  “You’re what?” she breathed, and she felt the room whirl. “On what grounds—my stupidity?”

  “Desertion,” he bit out.

  At that moment Elizabeth would have said or done anything to reach him. She could not believe, actually could not comprehend that the tender, passionate man who had loved and teased her could be doing this to her—without listening to reason, without even giving her a chance to explain. Her eyes filled with tears of love and terror as she tried brokenly to tease him. “You’re going to look extremely silly, darling, if you claim desertion in court, because I’ll be standing right behind you claiming I’m more than willing to keep my vows.”

  Ian tore his gaze from the love in her eyes. “If you aren’t out of this house in three minutes,” he warned icily, “I’ll change the grounds to adultery.”

  “I have not committed adultery.”

  “Maybe not, but you’ll have a hell of a time proving you haven’t done something. I’ve had some experience in that area. Now, for the last time, get out of my life. It’s over.” To prove it, he walked over and sat down at his desk, reaching behind him to pull the bell cord. “Bring Larimore in,” he instructed Dolton, who appeared almost instantly.

  Elizabeth stiffened, thinking wildly for some way to reach him before he took irrevocable steps to banish her. Every fiber of her being believed he loved her. Surely, if one loved another deeply enough to be hurt like this . . . It hit her then, what he was doing and why, and she turned on him while the vicar’s story about Ian’s actions after his parents’ death seared her mind. She, however, was not a Labrador retriever who could be shoved away and out of his life.

  Turning, she walked over to his desk, leaning her damp palms on it, waiting until he was forced to meet her gaze. Looking like a courageous, heartbroken angel, Elizabeth faced her adversary across his desk, her voice shaking with love. “Listen carefully to me, darling, because I’m giving you fair warning that I won’t let you do this to us. You gave me your love, and I will not let you take it away. The harder you try, the harder I’ll fight you. I’ll haunt your dreams at night, exactly the way you’ve haunted mine every night I was away from you. You’ll lie awake in bed at night, wanting me, and you’ll know I’m lying awake, wanting you. And when you cannot stand it anymore,” she promised achingly, “you’ll come back to me, and I’ll be there, waiting for you. I’ll cry in your arms, and I’ll tell you I’m sorry for everything I’ve done, and you’ll help me find a way to forgive myself—”

  “Damn you!” he bit out, his face white with fury. “What does it take to make you stop?”

  Elizabeth flinched from the hatred in the voice she loved and drew a shaking breath, praying she could finish without starting to cry. “I’ve hurt you terribly, my love, and I’ll hurt you again during the next fifty years. And you are going to hurt me, Ian—never, I hope, as much as you are hurting me now. But if that’s the way it has to be, then I’ll endure it, because the only alternative is to live without you, and that is no life at all. The difference is that I know it, and you don’t—not yet.”

  “Are you finished now?”

  “Not quite,” she said, straightening at the sound of footsteps in the hall. “There’s one more thing,” she informed him, lifting her quivering chin. “I am not a Labrador retriever! You cannot put me out of your life, because I won’t stay.”

  When she left, Ian stared at the empty room that had been alive with her presence but moments before, wondering what in hell she meant by her last comment. He glanced toward the door as Larimore walked in, then he nodded curtly toward the chairs in front of his desk, silently ordering the solicitor to sit down.

  “I gathered from your message,” Larimore said quietly, opening his legal case, “that you now wish to proceed with the divorce?”

  Ian hesitated a moment while Elizabeth’s heartbroken words whirled through his mind, juxtaposed with the lies and omissions that had begun on the night they met and continued right up to their last night together. He recalled the torment of the first weeks after she’d left him and compared it to the cold, blessed numbness that had now taken its place. He looked at the solicitor, who was waiting for his answer.

  And he nodded.

  36

  The next day Elizabeth was anxiously waiting in the hall on Promenade Street for deliveries of both the newspapers. The Times exonerated Ian by splashing across the front page:

  MURDEROUS MARQUESS ACTUALLY HARASSED HUSBAND

  The Gazette humorously remarked that “the Marquess of Kensington is deserving, not only of an acquittal, but of a medal for Restraint in the Face of Extreme Provocation!”

  Beneath both those stories were len