Carousel of Hearts (26 page)

His words were an eerie echo of her own thoughts, and Antonia felt a knot of pain deep in her chest. She had thought he looked different, and now she understood why. Today  the two Adams had merged—the familiar beloved cousin and the dynamic, unpredictable stranger were now one. “I don’t know what to say,” she said helplessly.

His lips quirked with amusement. “I believe it is customary to say, ‘This is so unexpected.’ Perhaps it is, although it shouldn’t be. Am I misremembering what happened up at the Aerie?” He watched with interest as Antonia blushed at the memory of the first discovery of passion.

Adam continued, “And the time in the summerhouse, it must have been just before my memory came back. I think you said something about loving me without limitation and wanting most desperately to marry. Did that really happen or did I imagine it?”

Antonia felt as if she was in quicksand, and sinking fast. “You didn’t imagine it,” she whispered, her gaze shifting away.

“Did you mean what you said?” he asked, his voice mild but insistent. “Or were those words only for the Adam with amnesia?”

“I—I meant it.” Her defenses shattered with explosive suddenness, exposing the pain and anger she’d buried so deeply eight years earlier. Antonia lifted her head to glare at her cousin. “But if you’ve loved me forever, how come you ran away to India the way you did, without a word, not even good-bye?” she asked furiously. “It was a shabby way to treat a friend or a sister. If you really loved me, as you claim, it was unspeakable.”

Adam’s mouth twisted with bitter regret. “I did not have any choice, and the reason that I didn’t was a direct result of the fact that I loved you.”

“Then why didn’t you offer for me then, instead of going to India?” she cried. “The whole time we were growing up, I assumed that someday we would marry. It seemed unnecessary to speak of it because marrying you was as natural and inevitable as the rain and the hills.”

Antonia’s voice broke and it was a long moment before she could continue. “Then you just ran away, as if you couldn’t get away from England fast enough. That was when I realized how much I had misjudged your feelings.”

“You thought that we would marry someday?” Adam was looking at her with wonder, a glow deep in his eyes. “I assumed the same when we were young. But later, when I understood the difference in our stations, I came to believe that marriage was impossible, that you had regarded me in the light of a brother only.”

“After you left, I had to think of you as a brother so I could get on with my life.” Antonia brushed at her eyes angrily. “Did you think I would patiently wait here like Penelope? At least she was married to Odysseus, but you never made a declaration, never offered so much as a single word of love, either in person or in your letters after you left. A pretty fool I would have been to wait and hope! Since you treated me as a sister, I responded in kind.”

“It was impossible to speak,” Adam said flatly, struggling to maintain his own composure. Though he ached to kiss away the tears in Antonia’s beautiful cinnamon-brown eyes, there was still much that needed to be said. He had confirmed that there was fire between them. Now he must persuade her mind before he could win her heart.

Restlessly he shifted his weight against the table, his fingers gripping the edge hard. “You remember that your father was going to buy me a commission?”

When she nodded, he continued, “Just before I finished at Cambridge, some busybody relative told Spenston you and I were behaving with disgraceful impropriety. That you were far too free in your ways and risked damaging your chances of a suitable match, and that I had ideas far above my station. So Spenston called me in to find out if there was any truth to the rumor.”

Arrested, Antonia stared at him. “Why didn’t you declare yourself and ask his permission to court me then?”

“I did,” Adam said, a hard edge in his voice. “I knew better than to ask him if we could marry soon. You were only seventeen and needed to see more of the world before making a decision, and I knew that I must do something to prove myself. That’s one reason I thought the army was a good choice. It seemed the best avenue available for a young man with no financial expectations. If I managed to distinguish myself without getting killed in the process, it would narrow the disparities in our station a little.”

“Father never told me that you had offered for me,” Antonia said with puzzlement. “Yet surely he agreed. You two always got on so well. You were like a son to him.”

“No!” Adam tasted bitterness harsh on his tongue. “Spenston rescued me from the gutter for the sake of his connection with my father and for his image of himself as a charitable and generous man. He let me live in your household for your sake, and perhaps to assuage his own guilt for the unpardonable way he neglected you. But I was never a son to him, and he was never a father to me.”

Even now, it was painful to discuss that interview with Antonia’s father. “The earl asked me if there was any substance to the rumor that I aspired to your hand. When I said it was true, he gave me the worst dressing down of my life. He was shocked and appalled that I had the effrontery to set my sights on someone so far above me in birth and fortune.”

Antonia sprang to her father’s defense. “Father would be the last man on earth to condemn you for your birth! He believed that all men were equal in the eyes of God, and he spent his life fighting for reforms to help the common people.”

“Spenston may have worked for the common people, but he certainly never thought he was one of them,” Adam answered acidly. “On the contrary, the great Whig liberal spelled out in excruciating detail how scandalized he was at my ingratitude, how pathetic and inappropriate my aspirations were. He made it very clear that the only child of the ninth Earl of Spenston would never be permitted to waste herself on a penniless bastard.”

Antonia stared at Adam with horror. “No, he couldn’t possibly have been so cruel as to say that.”

“He did say it. And worse.” It took Adam a moment to collect himself enough to continue. “Not that I could blame him. It is natural for a father to want his child to marry well, and you were not just any daughter. You were one of the greatest heiresses and most beautiful girls in England. A royal duke would scarcely be good enough for you.”

Antonia’s eyes were drowned in tears. “It must have been ghastly for you,” she whispered. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“How could I?” Adam asked bleakly. “Spenston was right. My aspirations were pathetic, but I had been too naive and too much in love to see what a fool I was. I had adored you since the day we met, when you accepted me as a valued cousin even though I was a soot-covered urchin. After your father finished with me, I realized just how unworthy I was to marry you.”

“By any reasonable standard, you are far worthier than I,” she said, her hands clenching into fists. “You were wiser and kinder and more generous than any other man I know.”

“You were the only one who believed that,” Adam replied bluntly. “Everyone else was quite clear where I belonged on the social scale. Here at Thornleigh, at Thornton family gatherings, at Rugby and Cambridge, there were always subtle and not-so-subtle reminders that I was allowed among my superiors only on sufferance. I never told you because I knew you would come charging to my defense, and I’d be damned if I would let you fight my battles for me. Besides, there was nothing you could do or say that would alter the reality of what I was.”

“Stop talking as if you were a leper!” Antonia cried. “I can’t bear it.” It was horrifying to realize how unperceptive she had been and how Adam must have suffered.

It also hurt to realize just how cruel her idolized father had been. Her cousin was far more tolerant of the earl’s behavior than Antonia could be. How
dare
her father, who had never had time for his daughter, dismiss the one person who had always been there for her!

Adam’s words were creating a whole new picture of the past, and now she could better understand what had happened. “Did my father force you to leave England to get you away from me?”

“In a way. He didn’t have me kidnapped, but he demanded that I swear never to see or contact you again. Amusing, isn’t it? In spite of my unworthiness, he was willing to believe that my word was good.’’ Adam smiled humorlessly. “I proposed a bargain. I refused to promise I’d never contact you, but I told him that if he found me a post with the East India Company and gave me the money he had intended to use to buy a commission, I would go to India, and that I would say and write nothing that would interfere with you finding a suitable husband.”

“I see.” Antonia swallowed hard, absorbing that. “That is why your letters were always so resolutely unloverlike?”

Adam nodded. “I could have defied your father, but again he was right. Whatever his reasons for taking me in, I did owe him a great deal. It would have been very shabby to court his only daughter against his wishes.”

He sighed and ran one hand through his light hair, tousling it thoroughly. “There was more to the bargain. I couldn’t do anything about being illegitimate, but I could do something about being penniless. I told your father that I would never ask you to marry me unless I had a fortune equal to yours.

“Spenston found my proposal amusing, knowing that the odds of my achieving my goal before you married elsewhere were infinitesimal. He also supposed that my lowering myself to trade would quash any romantic longings that you might cherish. It was a very safe bargain for him to agree to.”

Antonia voice was hushed. “That is why you worked so hard in India?”

Adam nodded again. “It was the only hope I had. To be a rich baseborn merchant was somewhat better than to be a penniless baseborn soldier. I seized every opportunity to build the small stake I began with. I took risks, always trying the long chance that might pay off spectacularly.” His face tightened. “And whenever I received a letter from you, I wondered if it would contain news of your marriage.”

The magnitude of what he had endured was beyond Antonia’s experience and comprehension. Adam must have suffered agonies, particularly in her first few Seasons, when she was the object of considerable attention. Antonia had written him often, gay little letters about her doings and her suitors, with the unadmitted desire of showing that some men wanted her, even if her cousin didn’t. “So when I wrote you that I was betrothed to Lord Ramsay…?”

“Since you said you were planning an early wedding, I thought you must already be married by the time I received the letter.” Adam’s face was rigid. “I went out and got blind, stinking, paralyzed drunk that night.”

Antonia bit her lip as she imagined how he must have felt. “Adam, I’m so sorry. I had no idea that I was hurting you,” she whispered. “I had long since accepted that there had never been anything romantic between us except for my dreams.” She thought back. “It must have been almost a year until you got the letter saying that I had cried off.”

“Ten months, two weeks, and three days,” he said precisely. “Don’t blame yourself, Tony. How could you know? I was trying very hard to keep my part of the bargain.”

He shrugged. “I survived by becoming philosophical. If, as I tried to believe, we were meant to be together, it would happen if I worked hard enough. The longer you stayed unmarried and the wealthier I became, the more possible it seemed. When I achieved the financial goals I’d set, I came home.”

Adam gave a smile of wintry bleakness. “It seemed a bad omen to find you a baroness. The gap between us was as wide as ever. Then Simon came along, and it appeared that all my efforts were for nothing.”

Antonia gasped. In the drama of her cousin’s story, she had completely forgotten about Lord Launceston’s existence. “Adam, you shouldn’t have said any of this. I’m betrothed to Simon.”

His gaze burned into hers. “Are you in love with him or with me?”

Antonia shrank back against the cupboard, feeling trapped. Adam’s story had brought vividly alive all the love and romantic assumptions she had felt as they grew up together, plus the passion she had discovered so recently.

But she had given her word to Simon. He deserved her loyalty, and she did care for him. “I love you,” she said wretched, “but it would be wicked and dishonorable to cry off from Simon a second time.”

“It would be more wicked to marry him if you love me,” Adam said, his voice implacable. “As Judith reminded me when she broke our betrothal, in the long run it is better to be honest than noble. Simon is my friend and I would do almost anything for him, but I will not politely stand by and let him marry you without a struggle. The decision is yours, Tony. Which one of us do you want?”

Antonia buried her face in her hands. “I don’t know what I want! To marry you seems so selfish.”

“Because it is more virtuous to suffer than to do what you want? Don’t forget, your virtue will condemn me to suffer as well,” Adam pointed out with relentless logic. “I could bear it if you loved another man, but that isn’t what you’re saying.”

She began to shake with silent tears. Too much had happened. Learning of Adam’s love and how much he had endured for her over the years, discovering that her idealized father had had his share of hypocrisy, having to make a choice that must hurt one of the men she cared most about.

Adam was right. Her own guilt was inclining her to make the choice that would punish her, but doing so would punish him as well.

Adam’s dark velvet voice cut through her misery. “You may not know what you want, but I do. Look at me. Tony.”

She raised her head and looked into his intense gray-green eyes as he said, “You want a husband who will hold you at the center of his life. You don’t want a man who will put politics, or gaming, or society, or anything else first.

“Simon may love you, but he loves ideas and the challenges of the mind as well. You will never come first with him in the same way that you do with me. I love you, and I have spent my life proving it.” Adam stretched out his hand to her and said softly, “Come.”

Antonia could feel the force of his will pulling her. She took an involuntary step toward him. While the decision was hers, Adam was exerting all his physical, mental, and emotional power to prove why she should choose him.