Love, Come to Me(57)

Chapter 7

Disturbed by questions that had no obvious answers, Lucy busied herself with small tasks all day as she pondered the intricacies of her situation. It had been disappointing to wake up and find that Heath had already left, but it had also been a relief to be alone with her thoughts. Everything seemed to have changed since last night. Heath had taken away many of her illusions. It would be a lie to say that she had not found pleasure with him—and that was puzzling when she had believed for so long that the only man she wanted was Daniel. But had her feelings for Daniel been merely a habit? Had she shared an “understanding” with him for so long because it was safer and easier than opening her heart to someone else? I cared for him sincerely, she told herself, confused by doubts that she had never allowed herself to consider before. I still care for him. But had it really been love, or just something she had mistaken for love?

Now she was starting to care for her husband in a way that she hadn’t expected, though he was the most exasperating, unpredictable, and complicated man she had ever met. Despite his claims to the contrary, he almost always managed to get his own way, and he had no qualms about shedding gentlemanly scruples when they prevented him from getting what he wanted. There were two sides to him. He could be a scoundrel just as easily as he could be a gentleman, and the art of dealing with him in either case was something she just hadn’t been able to learn yet.

Heath arrived home well after dinner. As he walked in the front door, Lucy took his coat, her fingers curling into the smooth, dark cloth before she hung it up. There was a strange expression on his face. He looked strained and a little tired, but there was a barely suppressed energy about him, an air of triumph. Something had happened today—she knew it just by looking at him. She had a premonition that she was not going to like what he had to tell her.

“We have to talk, Lucy.”

“Is it good news or bad news?”

“That depends on how you look at it.”

“That doesn’t sound very promising.”

Heath smiled briefly and then gestured to the sofa. “You’d better sit down. It’s going to be a long conversation.” The way he looked, the exaggerated calmness of his tone—all of it indicated without a doubt that he was going to say something important.

“A conversation about what?”

“About all those meetings I’ve had in Boston. I should have talked to you about them sooner. But the longer I let it go, the harder it was to approach you . . . and with things between us the way they were, it was easier to keep putting it off—”

“I understand,” Lucy said, sitting down suddenly, wondering if her earlier suspicions had been right after all. What if he had been visiting some woman in Boston? Oh, it was too awful to think about!

Heath sat down beside her and picked up a glass she had been drinking out of earlier. It was empty, and he turned it idly in his hands as he spoke. “I wasn’t sure about how things were going to turn out, so I’ve been biding my time. Now the moment is right, and we’ve got to take care of everything quickly.”

She nodded slowly. Was he trying to tell her about another woman? Would he be so cruel as to tell her something like that after last night? No, no, even if it was true, there was no reason for him to tell her about someone else . . . was there?

“Have you ever read the Boston Examiner?” he asked.

The question was so far off from what she had expected that she looked at him in blank surprise. “What? I . . . no, I don’t think so . . .”

“I’ve done research on all the papers in the area. The Herald has the highest circulation, about ninety thousand . . . and the Journal has about half that many subscribers. Then come all the rest, none of them any higher than seventeen thousand subscribers each. The Examiner could be called the best contender for third place—a very weak third place.”

Newspapers. He was talking to her about newspapers. What did they have to do with anything? “That’s very interesting,” she said dutifully, and he grinned at her lack of enthusiasm.

“The Examiner is being killed off by the combined efforts of the Herald and the Journal. They’re stealing away advertisers and subscribers, and pulling all kinds of underhanded—”

“Heath,” she interrupted impatiently, “I don’t want to hear about all of that right now. I just want to know what you were going to tell me.”

“All right.” The reckless sparkle in his eyes intensified. “The paper has been put up for sale. After approaching the publisher and looking through the books, I decided it could be made into a competitive enterprise. As of today, we’re the new owners of the Examiner.”

Lucy stared at him in dawning amazement. “The whole thing? The whole newspaper? A Boston newspaper, Heath . . .”

“Actually, not the whole thing . . . just a little over half. The rest of it belongs to Damon Redmond—he’s from a family in Boston that—”

“Redmond? As in the Lowells, the Saltonstalls, and the Redmonds?”

“Yes. That family. Third son of John Redmond III. I met Damon when I was abroad, just before the war started.”

“But . . . do either of you have enough experience to make the newspaper successful?” Lucy asked, too taken aback to be tactful.

Heath smiled wryly. “In this case, I’m not sure experience has much to do with it. The more experience a man has, the more inclined he is to stick to what’s been done in the past . . . follow tradition . . . and that’s exactly what I don’t plan to do. The business is changing, and the way things were done ten years ago won’t survive much longer. Some papers are keeping up with the times—like the New York Tribune—and the ones that aren’t are going out of business. Now is the perfect time to take advantage of that. I want to develop a new kind of journalist and a new kind of newspaper—”