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I should kiss her. We were going to marry. Soon, she would be in my bed every night. I was a young man. This was something I should want, in fact, look forward to, yet the idea left me cold. Regardless, I leaned closer and kissed her gently on the mouth. She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me back. An experienced kisser, I thought. Not like Addie had been—soft and unsure yet teeming with passion. No, this was not like kissing Addie at all. I likened this to kissing a pretty doll. A man would expect to find pleasure in the company of such a beautiful woman instead of likening her to a cold and porcelain toy. There was nothing wrong with her. It was me.
I loved Addie.
Why? Why did it have to be Addie I loved instead of this woman standing in my arms? It was when I disengaged from her and looked behind us that I realized we were not alone. Delphia and Addie, clutched together as if they were in a windstorm, stared at us. They had obviously just come from around the corner of the house, perhaps thinking of taking in the night air before retiring. Addie’s eyes were wide and horrified. The way mine would have been had it been her kissing another man.
I jumped away from Lena as if she were on fire.
“That bad, darling?” Lena asked.
“No, of course not,” I said under my breath. “We have company.” I gestured with my chin toward Delphia and Addie, who were now backing away, the shadows of the night eating them up, taking them from me. In the next second, they were gone.
I sat on the steps, hard enough that I winced as my backside thunked against the hard wood.
“I know why you’re marrying me. I may be spoiled, but I’m not an idiot.”
“I don’t understand why you want this,” I said. “You could have anyone. Maybe someone who you loved.”
“I’m sorry you love someone else and not me.” Lena encircled a post with one arm.
“It’s not what you think. I’m helping her with her manuscript, that’s all.”
“Don’t start our life together lying to me, James.”
“I didn’t want it to happen,” I said. “It was so unexpected.”
“I figured as much. Don’t look so sad. How could I expect you to love me? You hardly know me. Anyway, I’ve lived my entire life in a house without love. Why not continue that into my adulthood?” A sad smile played at her mouth. “Maybe in time, you’ll learn to love me. We can still have a good life. A family. Children. We can be the missing piece for the other, James, if we can fall in love just a little.”
“Missing piece?”
“The love we seek. The love we never received from our fathers. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? When one really examines it closely? There are worse reasons to marry than to prove our worth to our fathers.” She glanced away from me, biting her bottom lip. “Father told me if I don’t do this, he’s tossing me out onto the street.”
My mouth fell open. “Are you serious?”
“I’m afraid so. He wants this, and I am powerless.” She sat next to me and rested her head against my shoulder. Her complexion mimicked the color of the moon that had come to rest above the line of aspens in the distance. “Once Father decides something, there’s no turning back. Pleasing Father is what I want most in life. It’s my only ambition. The only one afforded to me. I have no one else.”
I stewed in that for a moment. Was it true? Was she as much at the mercy of our fathers as I?
“So we must make the most of…whatever this is between us?” I asked.
“We can be a comfort to each other,” Lena said. “It doesn’t have to be terrible.”
“Maybe we can fall in love eventually?”
“Perhaps. People like you and me, the son and daughter of reckless men, are at their mercy. The sooner we both accept that, the happier we’ll be.”
We sat in silence. A cricket started up singing, then abruptly stopped. An owl hooted somewhere in the forest.
“You’re right, we should go home to New York City,” Lena said. “Get out of here.”
“Yes, we should.” I sighed, letting my shoulders droop. Would the torture stop if I were away from Addie? Was it possible that I’d ever stop thinking about her? “I’m tired. May I walk you to your room now?”
“Yes, you may. We must be quiet walking up the stairs. I don’t want Father to know we’ve been out here alone.”
A twig snapped from somewhere in the yard. A deer or rabbit, most likely. How I wished to be that free. To roam the moonlit garden with no one’s destiny but my own to worry about. Instead, I stood and held out my hand to my fiancée and led her into the house.
14
ADDIE
