As Bright as Heaven(100)
A second later I am returning his kiss, and then his hands are everywhere on my upper body and his lips are finding me in places I have never before been found. Behind my ear, along my jaw, on the chevron between my clavicles. His chest muscles are tight under my fingertips, tensing with desire, and I hear a small voice in my head telling me nothing good can come from continuing this. Nothing. Conrad is married. To my patient. Conrad is married to Sybil. Sybil is his wife. But I cannot hold back the floodwaters. I’m in love with Conrad. I have been for weeks and had refused to admit it. I would do anything for him. Live for him, die for him. I would do anything, including cure his wife, if I could, and if it would make him happy.
His wife. He is married. Sybil is his wife.
I pull away. We are both breathing as though we’ve just run through a great stretch of woods. His hair is askew where I’ve run my hands through it. His coat is off and lies at my feet, his vest unbuttoned, and his shirt untucked. Three buttons on the front of my dress are open, and cold air stings my bare flesh.
Conrad is staring at me with tears in his eyes, and I don’t know if he’s sad that we’d started on each other or that we stopped.
“I’m so very sorry,” he says a second later, his words cutting across the space between us. “Please forgive me. Please. I’m so sorry.”
I don’t want him to be sorry. And I can’t utter the words that I forgive him, because I don’t. I can’t forgive him. I’m in love with him.
Conrad doesn’t know what to make of my silence. He stoops for a second to pick his suit coat up off the dirt floor and then he lays it across his arm. “Are you all right?” He doesn’t look at me. “Are you hurt? Did I hurt you?”
Hurt me? Has he hurt me? All I feel at this moment is an ache for everything in my life up to this point to have gone differently. I feel anew the scorching loss of Henry, my mother, Gilbert, and even my own innocence at embracing without question Maggie’s deception, year after year after year.
Conrad raises his head. I am still only partially buttoned and tendrils of my hair have fallen about my face. He looks away from my body for just a second and then returns his gaze, focusing on my eyes only.
“Please, Miss Bright. Tell me you are all right.”
I’m not. I’m not all right. Maggie and I have taken a child from his family, have caused his sister years of merciless suffering, and the man I love is married to someone else.
“Miss Bright?”
“Evelyn,” I say as new tears rim my eyes.
“Please. Did I hurt you?” His voice sounds pained.
“You could never hurt me, Conrad.”
His intense stare softens as he realizes that I’d wanted him to touch me and kiss me and take me. I wanted him. I want him. I have been watching him like he’s been watching me.
Conrad closes his eyes at the impossibility of our situation. Then he turns, puts on his suit coat, and tucks his shirt into his trousers. I refasten the buttons on my dress and slip the fallen locks of hair back into their hairpins.
He moves toward the door. “I won’t take advantage of you again, I promise,” he says over his shoulder.
He takes another step and I rush forward. “Conrad, wait!” I grab his hand, and my fingers touch his wedding ring. We both look down at the circle of gold. He pulls his hand away but then reaches up to touch my face for the merest second before he steps outside.
I watch him walk across the lawn to the driveway, and to the rows of automobiles parked in front. He climbs into his Buick and drives off slowly. I don’t move until he is gone from view. Before I leave the shed, I retrieve Ursula’s pencil box and I check to make sure that I’ve seen to every detail on my clothes and every hairpin.
It is only a few minutes after three, but I must find Dr. Bellfield and ask him if I might have the rest of the afternoon to take care of a family matter. I cannot think of Conrad right now or what almost happened in the shed or what did happen in the shed. I must first see that Ursula is all right in the solarium, and then I must talk to Maggie.
We must tell Alex the truth.
We must tell everyone the truth.
CHAPTER 61
Maggie
Samples of engraved wedding stationery are splayed across the dining room table, each piece of paper bearing names and details of people who do not exist. Palmer’s mother wants us to decide on a style so that the invitations can be printed next week. November is just around the corner and then it will be December in a blink, so Imogene Towlerton says. My future mother-in-law has stepped in where my mother would have, had she lived to see me marry, securing the wedding chapel at the church for the day after Christmas, ordering a cake, and supplying Palmer with the samples so that we can select the paper and ink for the invitations before he leaves.
I have been numbly agreeing to everything, including Imogene’s offer to take me shopping for a dress. When Palmer asks me which invitation I like best, I say, “How can I choose? They are all beautiful.”
I feel like I am planning someone else’s wedding, not mine. Palmer thinks I am a nervous bride, that’s all. Perfectly understandable. But it’s not nervousness I feel; it’s the sense that I’m being torn in two. Half of me wants to marry Palmer, take Alex to New York, and build a life, the three of us, far away from old heartaches. The other half wants to believe Jamie was leaning forward to kiss me when his father opened the door to the accounting office, wants to believe it wouldn’t have been any ordinary kiss. Wants to believe it would have been the sealing of a truth I have long known and that Jamie had finally realized and come home for, that we were destined to love each other.