Given the condition of his hands, he wrote only a few lines, in which he not only gave Cassandra custody of their unborn child, but took financial responsibility for any legal costs she might incur while seeking and attaining a divorce.
As Luke slid the paper across the desk to her, he gruffly said, “I do make two requests, Cassandra. That I be allowed to see my child occasionally, and that you accept financial help from me for its support.”
Her eyes wide and wary, she took the paper, then bent her head to read what he’d written. When she looked back up at him, there were tears swimming in her eyes. Luke couldn’t breathe. God help him, he could scarcely think. If she got up and walked out, he didn’t know what he’d do. To let her go would kill him.
“You’re setting me free?” she finally whispered.
“Yes,” he managed to grate out.
She simply sat there, staring at him, as if she were waiting for him to say something more, her big blue eyes sparkling with tears and dark with a desperate yearning. For a wild instant, Luke thought he’d won, that the yearning in her eyes had to mean that she still felt something for him—if not love, then at least fondness.
Then, in a shaky voice, she shattered that illusion. “You won’t do anything to try and stop me? You’ll just let me get up and walk out?”
Luke’s throat felt as if someone were stretching his neck on a rack. He couldn’t drag breath into his lungs. “Yes,” he rasped.
She bent her head again. When she looked back up at him, the desperate yearning in her eyes was gone, replaced by a glassy hardness. She pushed unsteadily to her feet, and Luke steeled himself against the urge to jump up and grab her. Not breathing, his heart laboring like an unoiled piston in his chest, he watched her turn and walk toward the door. She paused with one small hand on the doorknob to look back at him.
“Thank you, Luke,” she said softly.
And just like that, she walked out.
As the door swung closed, Luke shot to his feet. Only sheer force of will prevented him from bolting after her. He stood there, shaking like a palsied old man, his throat and chest aching. From out in the foyer, he heard the front door softly swing shut.
She was walking out of his life….
You won’t do anything to try and stop me? Luke curled his hands into throbbing fists, trying desperately to resist the compelling urge to run after her. Only it was bigger than he was—a mind-numbing desperation he couldn’t control. His life wouldn’t be worth shit without that girl. He couldn’t just let her walk away without putting up a fight.
Luke launched himself across the room, then out the door into the foyer. He was scarcely aware of Pipps as he raced the length of the hall. “Cassandra! Cassie, please, wait!”
She was about to let herself out the front gate when he stumbled onto the porch. Snowflakes drifted around her, dotting the upsweep of sable curls atop her head with white, swiftly melting flecks. In the threadbare gray wool dress, with a tattered wool blanket drawn around her shoulders to serve as a cape, she looked like a little waif standing there, her eyes huge splashes of darkness in the pale oval of her face. One hand resting on the gate latch, she looked back at him, her expression unreadable.
“Please…don’t go just yet,” Luke managed to say as he descended the three front steps in a leap. The soles of his boots lost traction on the snow-covered walk, and only the execution of some fancy footwork saved him from falling on his ass. Christ! Why was it that he bungled everything around this girl, the one person in the world he wanted to impress? “Let’s talk about this.”
She tucked the paper he’d given her under the edge of her blanket, almost as if she feared he might snatch it away from her. Luke’s throat tightened as he walked toward her. He was the one who’d taught her to be so wary, God forgive him. He alone was responsible for those dark circles under her eyes. And, oh, God, those glorious eyes…
“What is there to talk about, Luke?” she asked in a thin voice.
It was a damned good question, and he suddenly realized he had no answer. He didn’t have a clue what he meant to say, only that he couldn’t just let her leave. With shaking hands, Luke reached for her, vaguely aware as he curled his grip over her small shoulders that the pain in his palms seemed oddly distant, as if he’d somehow become removed from everything but her.
How long had it been since he’d touched her? Dear God, she felt so good. He wanted to jerk her against him and cinch her tight in an unbreakable hold. To hug her and keep hugging her, until she ceased to resist him. To keep her here with him, no matter what the cost.
It seemed to Luke that a whole minute slipped past, each painful second measured off by the slamming beats of his heart. She looked up at him expectantly, her eyes no longer expressionless and glassy, but still aching with hurt.
Luke hadn’t begged anyone for anything since he was a boy. He’d clawed and kicked and scrambled his way up from the gutter to a life of wealth and superficial respectability, and he’d sworn, once he got there, that he’d never demean himself again. Not for anything, or for anyone. But he’d beg for this girl. Crawl, if he had to. To hell with dignity.
“I know I’ve done a lot of bad things,” he told her raggedly. “But can’t we start over fresh, Cassie girl? Won’t you give me just one more chance to prove to you that I’m sincerely sorry for everything and that I really have changed?”
In the eerie light of the snow-brightened and moon-touched darkness, her eyes became luminous with wetness that sparkled and spilled over her lush lower lashes like diamond teardrops. “Oh, Luke, don’t you see? There’s only one thing I want from you. Only one thing that could convince me you’ve really changed.”
“What?” he asked with raspy desperation. “Name it, Cassandra, and it’s yours. What?”
An infinite sadness came over her pale face, and she slowly shook her head. “You really don’t know, do you? And the fact that you don’t makes it impossible for us.”
She pulled free of his grasp to unlatch the gate.
“Cassandra, tell me what you want from me,” he urged. “I meant it about the mine for your papa and brothers. I’ll see to it they live in the lap of luxury for the rest of their lives.”
She drew the gate open, her skirt snagging on the pickets, then pulling free as she swept out onto the sidewalk. Luke walked abreast of her along the opposite side of the fence, his boots crunching in the snow.
“What?” he cried, lifting his hands in bewildered supplication. “At least give a man a fair chance! Tell me what you want from me! I made a public retraction, exonerating your papa and brother! I’m working off the wages I owe them! I’ve made sure they can get work any goddamned place in town! What else? Tell me, and it’s yours.”
She just kept walking, her small chin held high. In the moonlight, Luke could see that tears were still streaming down her cheeks.
“Are you still angry because they served time in jail?” he demanded. “Dammit, I’ll have myself locked up. And I’ll serve double the time they did to make up for what I did to the both of them!”
She hugged the blanket more snugly around her shoulders and quickened her pace. That same, chest-squeezing panic rose within Luke again, nearly cutting off his breath. Up ahead, he saw Ambrose Zerek standing on the street corner, his hands shoved deeply into the pockets of his worn tweed jacket. Luke knew the younger man could probably hear every word he said, which went beyond humiliating, but at this point keeping his pride intact had sunk to the bottom of Luke’s list of priorities.
“Jewelry? Clothes?” He lengthened his stride to keep up with her, acutely conscious that the section of fence that bordered the side of his front yard stood only a few feet ahead of him. He was running out of room to follow her—and running out of offers as well. “I’ll build you a new house. How about that? The grandest house you can imagine, Cassie. A mansion! And you can reign in it like a queen. A new carriage with a matched team of horses. Beautiful clothes and jewelry beyond your wildest dreams. Sil
ks and furs!” He threw up his hands. “Goddammit, stop walking! Aren’t you hearing anything I’m saying to you?”
She never missed a step. As she reached the corner of the fence, she called softly, “Good-bye, Luke. God be with you.”
He jerked to a stop, the suffocating panic within him quickly turning to rage. A blinding, red rage. He reared back and planted the heel of his boot against the decorative picket fence, nearly uprooting two of the posts.
“‘God be with me?’ That’s a hell of a thing to say to a man who’s practically on his knees, begging you to stay with him!” he yelled after her. “If I wanted God’s company, I’d go to the frigging church!”
She didn’t look back. If anything, she hurried her footsteps.
“Fine!” Luke roared, the distended muscles and veins in his neck aching with the distorted pitch of his voice. “Go, then, if you’re so goddamned high and mighty! Turn your back on me and everything I’ve got to offer you! Mark my words, you’ll wind up married to some penniless ne’er-do-well, with a dozen snot-nosed brats clinging to your skirts, all of them squalling with hunger. Go, and see if I try to stop you!”
Realizing she was doing exactly that, Luke gazed after her with tears burning at the backs of his eyes.
“Good luck!” he fairly snarled as a parting shot. “Happy husband-hunting! I may be a whore’s bastard. And, raised in a brothel like I was, maybe I’m not a sanctimonious churchgoer who knows which hand to dunk in the holy water and what knee to genuflect on! But let me tell you this! You can look for a thousand years, and you’re never going to find a man who’ll love you more than I do!”
Cassandra reeled to a stop so suddenly, she nearly pitched forward on her face. She spun on the sidewalk to stare back at him. “What did you say?” she asked in a shaky voice.
Luke sucked in a sharp breath, the icy night air slicing a path to his lungs. “I said you’ll never find another man who’ll”—he broke off and gulped for breath, that one word he found so difficult to say snagging crosswise behind his larynx—“who’ll love you as much as I do.” He dragged in another deep draft of air. “I love you, Cassie girl. I love you so much it’s—it’s about to kill me.”
She gave a broken little cry and came flying back along the sidewalk toward him. Gawking at her, Luke just stood there, one foot still drawn back to kick the fence again. I love you, the words he’d vowed a lifetime ago never to say again. Evidently they were magical, for as she reached the fence, she launched herself at him as if the pickets weren’t even there.
Luke caught her against his chest and lifted her over the fence, scarcely able to believe those three words had been what brought her back to him. He’d offered her the world, and she’d waved it all away, as if it meant nothing.
“Say it again,” she cried with a sob, hugging his neck so hard he could scarcely breathe. “Say it again, Luke, please!”
He tightened his embrace around her, knowing as he did that he held the whole world in his arms. “Oh, God, Cassie…I love you.” He bent his head to bury his face against the sweet curve of her neck, his favorite spot because the scent of her surrounded him. “I love you.”
“Oh, Luke, I love you, too. And all I’ve ever wanted was to be loved back!”
Love. For so many years, Luke had regarded that word as a vile curse he’d never utter. Now he realized it was a gift, the very sweetest and most precious of gifts.
The paper he’d drawn up and signed, making it possible for her to leave him, slipped from her fingers and fluttered to the snow-covered ground. From the corner of his eye, Luke saw it land, the ink immediately starting to bleed as the pelting snowflakes melted over it.
It didn’t matter…from here on out, theirs was a verbal contract, based solely on trust, the wording quite simple, to the point, and equitable to both of them. I love you.
Luke whispered those words, over and over, as he carried his wife into the house, up the stairs, and into his bedchamber. As he laid her on his bed, where he had dreamed of having her since the first instant he’d seen her smile, he knew he had finally discovered Cassandra Zerek’s asking price.
His heart.
About the Author
CATHERINE ANDERSON, the award-winning author of both contemporary and historical fiction, lives with her husband and three canine friends—a mixed spaniel named Kibbles and two Rottweilers named Sam and Sassy who seem to think they are teacup poodles and that obedience training is for people.
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By Catherine Anderson
SEVENTH HEAVEN
BABY LOVE
CHERISH
FOREVER AFTER
SIMPLY LOVE
KEEGAN’S LADY
ANNIE’S SONG
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMPLY LOVE. Copyright © 1997 by Adeline Catherine Anderson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition July 2007 ISBN 9780061752063
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Catherine Anderson, Simply Love
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