The Rogue (The Moorehouse Legacy #4)(60)

“Madeline, may I please come in? I’ve wanted to talk to you since Memorial Day. Actually, before that, too. I had hoped, while we were in Greenwich…” Amelia drifted off into silence awkwardly. “I’m babbling.”

Mad felt like she was jumping into the ocean without a life jacket, but she stepped aside and motioned with her arm. It would never have dawned on her to go looking for the woman, but since she was here, it seemed worthwhile to hear her out.

As Amelia came in, so did her perfume. The scent around her was light and lemony, perfect for her navy-blue and white clothes, completing a carefully constructed look. Except it was funny. The clothes and the hair and the makeup and the jewelry all coalesced into a gorgeous statement of wealth and ease, but it was Amelia herself who didn’t fit the picture. She looked…worn out. Ground down.

Mad shut the door. “Amelia—”

“The day you left Greenwich, Richard told me it was because you thought I’d been with Spike. I wasn’t. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

Mad opened her mouth to point out that the woman had twice before. But then she changed the direction of her words. “I saw you coming out of his room. Why were you there if you hadn’t spent the night?”

“I’d gone to ask him if he would talk to you for me. I’ve wanted to apologize to you for a while now, but you’ve always been away. And I thought there was a good chance you wouldn’t listen.”

This was definitely not part of the pattern, Mad thought. Everything was off here. Gone was Amelia’s iron-clad confidence, her nose-up disdain, her sharp smile and sharper calculation. In their place? A ruined woman.

With a chill, and because she wasn’t sure she could trust anything she was hearing, Mad asked, “What…has happened to you?”

“I miscarried seven months ago.”

Mad felt her eyes pop as she brought her hand to her throat. “Amelia…”

“It was unplanned, but that didn’t matter to me. It still doesn’t. I am…devastated.” The woman took a deep breath. “And my lover is married now, his wife pregnant with twins. I never told him about the baby…at least not until the weekend you and I were both in Greenwich. When I finally explained to him what had happened, he didn’t believe me. Accused me of creating the story to engender sympathy. Oh, Madeline, I lost the love of my life because of my arrogance and now I suffer alone.”

Tears welled in Amelia’s eyes and they were not of the crocodile variety. Her face had gone blotchy and a red flush had crept up her neck. She seemed barely able to hold it together.

“My baby would have been born this week.” Amelia cleared her throat. “I wanted to tell you these things because if I didn’t, you would never believe me when I told you I was sorry for what happened in the past. For what I did to you with those two boyfriends of yours. And you also wouldn’t believe me when I told you that whatever you saw in Spike’s doorway, he and I were never together. Never. I wouldn’t do that to you now and it was clear that morning that he never would have.”

Oh, God, Mad thought. Spike…Spike hadn’t lied.

Panic and a choking sense of urgency flooded her chest. She had to go see him. Immediately—Oh, hell…the board meeting was in two hours.

Right afterward. She would drive up to Saranac Lake and see him in person right afterward.

Amelia wiped beneath her eyes. Once, twice. “I was so evil. And I’m so very sorry.”

Mad refocused on her half sister and her heart stilled as she thought of what Amelia appeared to have been through. But then she had to ask, “What I never understood is why. Why did you do it? I was never any threat to you. I was the ugly tomboy.”

Amelia wrapped her slender arms around herself, her Hermès bag falling in front of her hip. “Do you know what Papa told me when I turned eighteen? He told me that I was lucky I was beautiful as the rest of me was unredeemably unattractive. All along, he told me that my looks were the only thing I had to leverage in the world and because I believed him, I used them…I used them for fun and out of desperation and because I was bored. I used them because I actually liked the men or maybe I wanted something. And sometimes…sometimes I used them to hurt people.”

Mad measured Amelia, looking at a woman she’d always assumed was unbreakable. Her half sister didn’t seem that way now; she looked as though she was going to shatter apart. The difference was so astonishing…the revelations so unexpected, Mad didn’t know what to do.

“That’s all I came to say.” Amelia glanced around the penthouse, then met Mad’s eyes. “I understand if we can’t have a relationship because of all those years. I can’t imagine trusting someone like me would be easy. I just…couldn’t live with this hanging over me anymore. I can’t fix what happened to my baby or the man I loved. But this, with you…This was something I could do something about.”

Amelia walked over to the door. Then she paused. “You should know that Richard called me and invited me out to Greenwich that weekend. He’s never done that in the four years since Father died and I believe he wanted me to come because you were there. You and a man you liked. Be careful of Richard, Mad. He’s very smart and he gets what he wants. I don’t know why he needs to have you and Spike apart, but for some reason he thinks he does.”