Read Come Near Me for Free Online Page B

leaning back against
the cushions and sliding the brim of his hat down low over his
eyes. “He’s handsome, convenable, clever. He seems clean enough. At
least, this way, I get to choose who sleeps in my wife’s bed.”
    Sherry’s quick, sharp intake of breath sliced
through him like a knife.
    “I could kill you for saying that,” she
nearly hissed. “Don’t dare come into my rooms tonight, Adam. I’m
warning you. Don’t take that chance. I’ve traveled a long way from
the silly child in love I was last spring, to a woman pushed into
giving pain as well as feeling it.”
    “Child, in love. Woman, threatening mayhem. I
understand, darling, and I consider myself fairly warned,” Adam
drawled, hating himself, wanting her. “After all, as you say—oh, so
often—you only speak the truth.”
    “And you hear only lies.”
    “I believe only what I see,” Adam shot back
before he could will himself silent. “I heard the lies—even read
one of them, didn’t I? I saw the truth.”
    “Dickie—”
    “Don’t!” Adam shot forward on the cushion,
his hands braced on its edge on either side of him. He relaxed his
grip, took a steadying breath. “Don’t,” he repeated softly, nearly
trembling with sudden passion, a passion alive with hate, born of
pain. “Don’t ever say his name. Do you understand that? Don’t say
the man’s name. Lie for him, Sherry, cry for him, be glad he left
you to face me alone like the coward he was—because I would have
murdered him. But... don’t... say... his name.”
    He watched as she sat very still, very
straight, her eyes wide, her cheeks pale. He’d gone too far this
time, said things they’d only hinted at before, never put into
words. If he could draw them back, he would. Cut out his tongue.
But he’d said them, said them all tonight for some unfathomable
reason. He couldn’t take them back. He could only sit, and wait,
and call himself seven kinds of bastard.
    “You never loved me. Not really. You couldn’t
have,” she said quietly. “Dickie was an excuse. Even Geoff is an
excuse, your own brother. You’re using them, both of them. My God,
Adam, how satisfying it must be always to be right, never be wrong.
Never to make a mistake, never have to listen to anyone else’s
definition of reason. But you made one mistake in your enviable
life, Adam, didn’t you? Just that one mistake. Marrying me. What a
pity you had to do that, Adam. It’s all that stiff-backed honor of
yours. If you’d felt you could have had me without marriage, it
would have been better for—”
    She tilted her head back against the velvet
cushions, staring blindly at the roof of the coach. He could see
the line of her throat. The vulnerable line of her throat as it
worked silently, swallowing tears, swallowing whatever else she
wanted to say.
    “God, Sherry, what a mess we’ve made.” Adam
turned and opened a small, square door that gave access to the
driver. “Stop here, Fitzhugh. I’ve decided to walk.” A moment later
he was standing on the cobblestones in the dark, his hands drawn up
into fists at his sides, watching the coach carrying his wife
disappear into the dark.
    ~ ~ ~
    “Emma? Have you any idea as to the
whereabouts of my new gloves?”
    “Is I supposed ta?”
    Sherry sighed, turned away from the drawer
she was in the midst of rearranging from the tangled heap it was
into a new, yet-still-tangled design, and looked at her lady’s
maid.
    “There’s something not quite right here,
Emma,” she said, pushing back an errant lock of her bothersome mop
of hair. “I do believe I should be sitting on that bench, admiring
my stylish self, and you should be over here, looking for my
gloves. I may be wrong, but I don’t believe so. Do you?”
    Emma Oxton pulled a face at her own
reflection, laid down Sherry’s brush—the one she’d been pulling
through her own golden curls—and swiveled on the bench. “I suppose
not, ma’am,” she said, sighing as she reluctantly rose.