Beloved (10 page)

214

Beloved

Diana Palmer

215

as he does, and you're craftier, too. All right, think about it. Take the
rest of the month. But two weeks is all you've got. After the
holidays, his resignation takes effect, and I have to
appoint some
one."

"I promise to let you know by then," Simon assured him.

"Now, to better things. Are you coming to the
Starks's Christ
mas party?"

"I'd have liked to, but my brothers are throwing a
party down
in Jacobsville and I more or less
promised to show up."

"Speaking of the 'fearsome four,'
how are they?"

"Desperate." Simon chuckled. "Corrigan
phoned day before
yesterday and announced that Dorie
thinks she's pregnant. If she
is, the boys are going to have to find a
new victim to make biscuits
for them."

"Why don't they hire a cook?"

"They can't keep one. You know why," Simon
replied dryly.

"I guess I do. He hasn't changed."

"He never will," Simon agreed, referring to his
brother Leo
pold, who was mischievous and sometimes outrageous in his
treatment of housekeepers. Unlike the other two of the three remaining
Hart bachelor brothers, Callaghan and Reynard,
Leopold was a
live wire.

"How's
Tira
?" Wallace
asked unexpectedly. "I hear her show
ing was a huge success."

The mention of it was uncomfortable. It reminded him all
too
vividly of the mistakes he'd made with
Tira
. "I suppose she's
fine," Simon said through his teeth.

"
Er
, well, sorry, I forgot.
The publicity must have been hard
on both of
you. Not that anybody takes it seriously. It certainly
won't hurt your political chances, if that's why you're hesitating to
accept the position."

"It wasn't. I'll talk to you soon, Wally, and thanks
for the
offer."

"I hope you'll accept. I could
use you."
"I'll let you know."

He said goodbye and hung up, glaring out the window as he
recalled what: he'd learned about
Tira
so unexpectedly. It hurt him to talk about her now. It
would take a long time for her to forgive
him, if she ever did.

If only their was some way that he could talk to her,
persuade
her to listen to him. He'd tried
phoning from home early this very
morning. As
soon as she'd heard his voice, she'd hung up, and
the answering machine had been turned on when he tried again.
There was no point in leaving a message. She was
determined to
wipe him right out of her life,
apparently. He felt so disheartened
he didn't
know what to try next.

And then he remembered Sherry Walker, a mutual friend of
his
and
Tira's
in the
past who loved opera and had season tickets in
the aisle right next to his, in the dress circle. He knew that Sherry had
broken a leg skiing just recently and had said that she wasn't
leaving the house until it healed completely. Perhaps, he
told him
self, there was a way to get
Tira
to talk to him after all.

The letdown after the showing made
Tira
miserable. She had
nothing to do just now, with the
holiday season in full swing, and
she had no
one to buy a present for except Mrs. Lester and
Charles. She went from store to colorfully decorated store and
watched mothers and fathers with their children and
choked on
her own pain. She wouldn't have
children or the big family she'd
always craved.
She'd live and die alone.

As she stood at a toy store window, watching the electric
train
sets flashing around a display of
papier
mache
mountains and
small buildings, she wondered what it would be like to
have chil
dren to buy those trains for.

A lone, salty tear ran down her cold-flushed cheek and
even as she caught it on her knuckles, she felt a sudden pervasive warmth
at her back.

Her heart jumped even before she looked up. She always
knew
when Simon was anywhere nearby. It was a sort
of unwanted radar
and just lately it was more painful
than ever.

Beloved

"Nice, aren't they?" he asked quietly.
"When I was a boy, my
father bought my
brothers and me a set of 'O' scale Lionel trains. We used to sit and run them
by the hour in the dark, with all the little buildings lighted, and imagine
little people living there." He
turned,
resplendant
in a charcoal gray cashmere overcoat over his
navy blue suit. His white shirt was spotless, like the patterned
navy-and-white
tie he wore with it. He looked devastating. And he was still wearing the hated
prosthesis.

  
"Isn't this a little out
of your way?" she asked tautly.

   
"I like toy stores. Apparently so do you." He searched what
he could see of her averted face. Her glorious hair was
in a long
braid today and she was wearing a
green silk pantsuit several
shades darker than her eyes under her
long black leather coat.

   
"Toys
are for children," she said coldly.
He frowned slightly.

   
"Don't you like
children?"

   
She clenched her
teeth and stared at the train. "What would be
the point?" she asked. "I won't have any. If you'll excuse
me..."

   
He moved in front of her, blocking the way. "Doesn't Charles want a
family?"

It was a pointed question, and probably taunting.
Charles's
brother was still in the hospital and
no better, and from what
Charles had been
told, he might not get better. There was a lot of
damage to Gene's heart. Charles would be taking care of
Nessa
,
whom he loved, but
Simon knew nothing about that.

"I've never asked Charles how he feels about
children," she
said carelessly.

"Shouldn't
you? It's an issue that needs to be resolved before
two people make a firm commitment to each other."

   
Was he deliberately
 
trying
 
to
 
lacerate
 
her
 
feelings?
 
She
wouldn't put it past him now.
"Simon, none of this is any of your
business," she said in a choked tone. "Now will you please let
me go?" she asked on a nervous laugh. "I have
shopping to do."

     
His good hand reached out to lightly touch her
shoulder, but
she jerked back from him as if he had
a communicable disease.
"Don't!"
she said sharply. "Don't ever do that!"

Diana Palmer
                                                                         
217

He withdrew his hand, scowling down at her. She was
white in
the face and barely able to breathe
from the look of her.

"Just...leave me alone, okay?" She choked, and
darted past
him and into the thick of the holiday
crowd on the sidewalk. She
couldn't bear to
let her weakness for him show. Every time he touched her, she felt vibrations
all the way to her toes and she
couldn't hide it. Fortunately she was
away before he noticed that
it wasn't
revulsion that had torn her from his side. She was spared
a little of
her pride.

Simon watched her go with welling sadness. It could have
been
so different, he thought, if he'd been less
judgmental, if he'd ever
bothered to ask her
side of her brief marriage. But he hadn't. He'd condemned her on the spot, and
kept pushing her away for years.
How could he
expect to get back on any sort of friendly footing with her easily? It was
going to take a long time, and from what
he'd just seen,
his was an uphill climb all the way. He went back
to his office so dejected that Mrs. Mack asked if he needed some
aspirin.

Tira
brushed off the chance meeting with Simon as a coinci
dence and was cheered by an unexpected call from an old
friend,
who offered her a ticket to
Turandot
,
her favorite opera, the next
evening.

She accepted with pure pleasure. It would do her good to
get out of the house and do something she enjoyed.

She
put on a pretty black designer dress with diamante straps
and covered it with her flashy velvet wrap. She
didn't look half
bad for an old girl,
she told her reflection in the mirror. But then,
she had nobody to dress up for, so what did it matter?

She hired a cab to take her downtown because finding a
parking
space for the visiting opera performance would be a
nightmare.
She stepped out of the cab into a
crowd of other music lovers and
some of her painful loneliness drifted
away in the excitement of
the performance.

The seat she'd been given was in the dress circle. She
remem
-

218

Beloved

Diana
Palmer

219

bered
so many nights
being here with Simon, but his reserved
seat, thank God, was empty. If she'd thought there was a chance
of his being here, she'd never have come. But she knew
that
Simon had taken Jill to see this performance
already. It was un
likely that he'd want to sit through it
again.

There was a
drumroll
. The theater went dark. The curtain started
to rise. The orchestra began to play the overture.
She relaxed with
her small evening bag
in her lap and smiled as she anticipated a
joyful experience.

And then everything went suddenly wrong. There was a move
ment to her left and when she turned her head, there was
Simon,
dashing in dark evening clothes, sitting down
right beside her.

He gave her a deliberately careless glance and a curt nod
and
then turned his attention back to the stage.

Tira's
hands clenched on the evening bag. Simon's shoulder
brushed against hers as he shifted in his seat and she
felt the touch
as if it were fire all the way down her
body. It had never been so
bad before. She'd
walked with him, talked with him, shared seats
at benefits and auctions and operas and plays with him, and even
though his presence had been a bittersweet delight, it
had never
been so physically painful to her in
the past. She wanted to turn
and find his mouth
with her lips, she wanted to press her body to his and feel his cheek against
her own. The longing so was poi
gnant that she
shivered with it.

"Cold?" he whispered.

She clenched her jaw. "Not at all," she
muttered, sliding further into her velvet wrap.

His good arm went, unobtrusively, over the back of her
seat
and rested there. She froze in place, barely
daring to move, to
breathe. It was just like the
afternoon in front of the toy store. Did
he know that it was torture for her to be close to him? Probably he did.
He'd found a new way to get to her, to make her pay for
all the terrible things he thought she'd done. She closed
her eyes and groaned silently.

The opera, beautiful as it was, was
forgotten. She was so
mis
-

erable
that she sat
stiffly and heard none of it. All she could think
about was how to escape.

She started to get up and Simon's big hand caught her
shoulder a little too firmly.

"Stay where you are," he
said gruffly.

She hesitated, but only for an instant. She was desperate
to escape now. "I have to go to the necessary room, if you don't
mind," she bit off near his ear.

"Oh."

He sighed heavily and moved his arm, turning to allow her
to
get past him. She apologized all the way down
the row. Once she
made it to the aisle, she felt safe.
She didn't look back as she
made her way
gracefully and quickly to the back of the theater
and into the lobby.

It was easy to dart out the door and hail a cab. This time
of
night, they were always a few of them
cruising nearby. She
climbed into the
first one that stopped, gave him her address, and
sat back with a relieved sigh. She'd done it. She was safe.

She went home more miserable than ever, changed into her
nightgown and a silky white robe and let her hair down
with a
long sigh. She couldn't blame her friend,
Sherry, for the fiasco.
How could anyone
have known that Simon would decide to see
the opera a second time on this particular night? But it was a cruel
blow of fate.
Tira
had looked
forward to a performance that
Simon's presence
had ruined for her.

She made coffee, despite the late hour, and was sitting
down
in the living room to drink it when the
doorbell rang.

It might be Charles, she decided. She hadn't heard from
him
today, and he could have stopped by to tell
her about Gene. She
went to the front door and opened it
without thinking.

Simon was standing there with a furious
expression on his face.

She tried to close the door, but one big well-shod foot
was
inside it before she could even move. He let
himself in and closed
the door behind
him.