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“It may sound ridiculous, but it is also true.”
Corey searched his impassive features, shaking her head in denial of what she saw in his eyes. “The wedding ceremony was a sham. The judge was a plumber.”
“No, his father and his uncle are plumbers. He’s a judge.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Instead of replying, he handed the second folded piece of paper of her.
Corey opened it and stared. It was a copy of a marriage license with Corey’s name on it and Spence’s name on it. It was dated that day and signed by Judge Lawrence E. Lattimore.”
“We’re married, Corey.”
Her hand closed into an involuntary fist, crumpling the paper; her chest constricted into a knot of confused anguish. “Were you playing some sort of sick joke on me?” she whispered. “Why would you want to humiliate this way?”
“Try to understand. I told you what Joy said, and I thought this was what you wanted –“
“You arrogant bastard!” she whispered brokenly. “Are you trying to tell me that you actually married me out of pity and guilt, and you thought I’d like it? Am I so pathetic to you that you thought I’d be happy to settle for getting married at someone else’s wedding, in someone else’s gown, with a piece of wire ribbon for a wedding ring?”
Spence saw the tears in her eyes, and he caught her by the shoulders. “Listen to me! Corey, I married you because I love you.”
“You love me,” she scoffed, her shoulders shaking with laughter, fer face wet with tears. “You love me…”
“Yes, dammit, I do.”
She laughed harder and the tears came faster. “You don’t even know what love is,” she sobbed. “You ‘loved me’ so much that you didn’t even bother to propose. You didn’t see anything wrong with turning my wedding into one great big joke.”
From her perspective it was all true, Spence knew that, and the knowedge was as painful to him as the tears racing down her pale cheeks and the anguish in her eyes. “I understand how you feel about me right now.”
“Oh, no you don’t!” She twisted out of his grasp and angrily brushed tears off her pale cheeks. “But I’ll try to make it clear once and for all; I don’t want you! I didn’t want you before, I don’t want you now, and I will never want you!” Her palm crashed against his cheek with enough force to snap his head sideways. “Is that clear enough for you?” Whirling on her heel, Corey started for the closet where her suitcases were. “I’m not spending the night in the same house with you! When I get to Houston, I’m going to start annulment proceedings, and if you dare try to oppose me, I’ll have you and that drunken judge arrested in less time than it took you to arrange this marriage! Is that clear?”
“I have no intention of opposing an annulment,” he said in a glacial voice. “In fact,” he added as he tossed something onto the bed and walked to the door, “I suggest you use that to cover the cost of your attorney.” The door slammed shut behind him.
Corey collapsed against the wall and buried her face in her hands, her body shaking with silent sobs.
At lsat, a numbness finally swept over her, and she shoved away from the wall and went over to the telephone. She asked the servant who answered to locate her mother and grandmother and tell them t come up to her room immediately, then she instructed him to find Mike MacNeil and have him call her.
When Mike called, Corey told him something had come up, and she had to fly home tonight. The phone rang as soon as she hung it up. “Miss Foster,” the butler coolly informed her, “Mr. Addison’s car is on its way to the front and will be wainting for you there as soon as you are ready to leave.”
Despite the fact that she was desperate to get out of that house, Corey was irrationally infuriated at being summarily ejected from the premises that way. She finished packing in record time and closed her suitcases. As she put the last one on the floor, she remembered the object her “husband” had tossed onto the bed. Expecting to see a money clip with bills in it, she glanced toward the head of the bed, where she thought it had landed.
Lying atop a pile of ice blue satin pillows, glittering in the pale light from the setting sun, was a spectacular diamond ring that looked as if it should have belonged to a duchess.
Her mother and grandmother knocked on her door, and Corey called to them to come in while she picked up her purse and reached for her suitcases. Mrs. Foster took one look at Corey’s pale face, saw the suitcases, and came to a full stop. “Dear God, what’s wrong?”
Corey told them in a few brief sentences and nodded toward the ring on the bed as she left. “Please see that he gets that back. Then tell him if he ever comes near me again, I’ll swear out a warrant!”
After Corey left, Mrs. Foster looked at her mother in stunned silence, then she finally said, “What a stupid thing for Spence to have done!”
“He deserves to be horsewhipped,” Gram decreed without animosity.
“Corey will never forgive him for this. Never. And Spence is impossibly proud. He won’t ask her again,” said Mrs. Foster with a sigh.
Her mother walked over to the bed and picked up the ring, turning it in her fingers with a smile. “Spence will have to send a bodyguard with Corey when she wears this.”
Seventeen
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE WON’T SIGN THE RELEASES SO THAT we can use the pictures we took in Newport?” Corey exploded.
“I didn’t say he had flatly refused to sign them,” Diana said carefully. In the week since Corey had been back from Newport, she’d thrown herself into a dozen projects to keep from thinking about either her marriage or the annulment proccedings she’d started, and she looked exhausted. “He said he would sign them, but only if you brought them to him personally tomorrow tonight.”
“I am not going back to Newport,” she warned.
“You won’t have to. Spence will be in Houston taking care of some business.”
“I don’t want to see him in Houston or anywhere else.”
“I think he knows that,” Diana said wryly. “You not only started annulment proceedings, you asked for a legal injunction to prevent him from coming near you.”
“What do you think he’d do if we put the magazine out without the releases?”
“He said to tell you that if we do, his attorneys will dine on oour corporate carcass.”
“I hate that man,” she said wearily.
Diana wisely refrained from arguing that point and stuck to the matter at hand. “There’s a relatively painless way around this. He said he’s staying at the River Oaks house, so tomorrow night-“
Furious at the control he was exerting over the magazine and over her, Corey said, “Tomorrow night is the Orchid Ball. He’ll have to sign the releases during the day, instead.”
&n
bsp; “I explained to Spence we’re one of the sponsors and have to be there. Spence said he would expect you at the house before the ball, at seven o’clock.”
“I am not going there alone.”
“Okay,” Diana said, sounding as relieved as she felt. “Mother and I will wait in the car for you while you’re with Spence, then we’ll leave from there.”
Eighteen
COREY HADN’T BEEN BACK TO SPENCE’S HOUSE SINCE HIS grandmother lived there, and it seemed strange to be returning after so many years.
She knew he’d leased the house to tenants who’d kept most of the servants on, and the place was as beautifully maintained as it had always been. Since Spence was staying there now, Corey assumed either he had decided to sell it and it was vacant, or else the people who’d lived there for years had moved out.
All the carriage lights were lit on the front porch, just as they’d always been whenever guests were expected, but tonight, a strange colorful glow was visible through the closed draperies in what Corey knew was the living room.
“I won’t be long,” Corey told Diana and her mother as she got out of the car and walked up the front steps.
Clutching the release form in her hand, she rang the bell, her heart drumming harder as footsteps sounded in the foyer, and harder still when the door swung open and Mrs. Bradley’s former housekeeper said with a warm smile, “Good evening, Miss Foster. Mr. Addison is waiting for you in the living room.”
Corey nodded, then she walked through the dimly lit foyer. Bracing herself for the impact of seeing Spence for the first time since that hideous scene in Newport, Corey rounded the corner and walked into the living room.
Then she braced herself again, trying to assimilate what she was seeing.
Spence was near the middle of the candlelit room, leaning casually against the grand piano with his arms crossed over his chest.
