The Perfect Temptation (64 page)

Chapter 20

The knock at the door was soft, but it
arrowed past her grief

and flared into a wild, surging hope. Alex
scrambled to her

feet and
darted
forward, afraid that if she delayed he'd change

his mind and leave her again. She flung the
door open, her

heart bursting with happiness.

"Preeya," she whispered,
staggering back, her hope

crushed and new tears flooding down over her
cheeks. Collapsing

on the edge of her mattress, she tried to
apologize for

the
rudeness of the
greeting, but only a choking sob rolled

past her lips.

"You do not have to explain,"
Preeya offered, advancing

into the room and softly closing the door
behind her. "Almost

twenty-five years ago I found your father as
I find you

now. His heart was as broken, his pain as
deep."

''Aiden's gone, Preeya," she sobbed,
wrapping her arms

around her midsection and rocking forward
and back. "I'll

never see him again. I'll never hold him.
And I love him so

much. I'd rather die than spend the rest of
my life hurting like

this."

“Your
father said the
same words to me,” Preeya went

on, settling on the bed beside her, "I
will say the same to you

as I did then." With a gentle hand she
tucked an errant strand

of hair behind Alex's ear. "Great loves
are destined. But such

a love always comes with a trial equal to
the glory and promise

of happiness.
If
you fail the trial, you deny what destiny

has deemed your course. But if you have
faith and trust that

what was meant to be
will
be, you will endure the trial and

be rewarded."

Alex dragged a wracking breath into her
body, desperately

willing Aiden back, willing
him
to come striding in the door,

his green eyes alive and bright with love
and devotion,
hard

with a determination to find a way for them
to be together.

"You have a choice, Alex," Preeya
admonished, taking

Alex's chin in hand and tenderly turning her
head so she was

forced to look into her eyes. "You can
wish yourself dead

and that is how Aiden will find you when he
returns for you.

You can surrender to despair and break his
heart.
Or
you can

dry your tears and believe that love is
eternal and that the

hope of it is never lost." .

"We leave in the morning, Preeya,"
she countered, unable

to stop the tears, unable to summon resolve.
''Am
I supposed

to hope for a miracle by then?"

Preeya arched a
dark
brow.
"Kedar
searched ten years for

your mother. Your mother endured ten years
before she could

be again in the arms of the man she loved.
Did their daughter

not inherit their strength, their faith,
their courage?”

Ten years of misery, of being apart. Then
ten years of

hiding their hearts and their love. That was
a reward for enduring?

"No, she didn't," she declared,
turning away. "I

want more in my life. And I want it now. I
want Aiden and a

home with him. I want to be the one to bear
his children."

"Aiden will find you no matter where
you are," Preeya assured

her. "No matter how long it
takes."

Dreadful certainty closed inexorably around
her heart.

There would never
be
a life with Aiden. No home. No children.

She could want as desperately as any woman
ever had,

but wanting wouldn't change the course
ahead, wouldn't

change Aiden. She scrubbed the tears from
her cheeks and

took a ragged, but steadying breath.
"He walked away,

Preeya," she said, lifting her chin.
"Sarad dismissed him and

he walked away. He's not going to turn
around and come
af
ter me."

Beside her, Preeya sighed and shook her
head. "It is the

rare man who sees his course at first
glance, Alex," she said

with obviously strained patience. "Give
your Aiden time to

stumble around in his darkness. Eventually
he will understand

what it is that he seeks. You must not only
have faith in

love itself, but also in the one you love.
If
he were not worthy

of it, you would not have given him the
precious gift of

your heart."

"He doesn't know that I did. I never
told him that I loved

him."

Preeya snorted in a most unladylike fashion
and slid off

the bed. She was halfway to the door when
she stopped and

turned back. "And do you think that
love exists only when

put into words?” she asked, her arms akimbo,
her tone kind

but firm. ''That he does not know by your
actions? That he

did not feel love
in
your touch? See it in your eyes? In your

smile?
That he did not
hear love in your voice when you

whispered his name and reached for
him
in the dark?"

For his sake, she hoped he hadn't. What
regrets he carried

from his time with her would be ever so much
deeper if he

knew that he'd broken her heart.

"Faith, Alex," Preeya declared as
she left. "You must live

in faith."

Alex closed her eyes, hearing the slow
painful beating of

her tattered heart and the pounding of
hammers as Sarad's

men coolly,
methodically
crated up her world. By morning's

light It would all be stowed away in the
hull of an India bound

vessel. The Blue Elephant would cease to be
.. And all

the life, all the hope, promise, and
happiness within its walls

would slip forever into the past.

Aiden leaned back in the dining room chair,
his legs stretched

out under the table, his arms folded across
his chest.
In
front

of
him
on the table sat three things: the ornate white velvet-lined

gold box containing a heaping mound of
finely cut gemstones,

a bottle of Carden's best brandy, and an
empty glass.

The box was beautiful. The stones were
worth
a king's ransom.

Or a princess's, depending on how he looked
at it. But it

was the brandy that largely occupied his
attention and his

thoughts. And had been for the better part
of the last two

hours-since he'd walked into the house and
decided that

there was nothing to be done but get himself
blindly, roaringly

drunk.

He'd gotten the bottle and the glass off the
caddy in the

study, carried it here where Sawyer had left
a lamp burning,

set them on the table within easy reach, and
then resolutely

planted his sorry carcass on the chair. And
he hadn't moved

since. He'd looked at the box of jewels,
thought about why

he'd been given them, remembered the look in
Alex's eyes

as he'd put her from his arms in the yard,
and that had been

the end of his purposeful thinking. He'd
spent God only

knew how long wandering through his memories
of the past

weeks, alternately smiling, laughing, and
thinking about

drowning his pain and sorrow in the brandy.

But he hadn't been able to reach out for it.
He just sat

there, staring at it. Which, he admitted
with a sigh, was

truly pathetic. He was genuinely miserable.
There wasn't a

part of
him
that wasn't weary and didn't ache. He didn't

want to think and he shouldn't have wanted
to feel anything-

especially the searing, pounding ache deep
in the

center of his chest. But he didn't want to
sleep, didn't want

to eat. And, apparently, he didn't want to
drink, either.
It

was the strangest, most confounding,
inexplicable thing.

Not the least bit rational. It wasn't as
though he didn't know

the kind _of blissful forgetfulness
to
be found in swimming

in alcohol.

Why he didn't want
to
escape, to forget, was the root of

it, he knew. The answer to that central,
all-important question

had been eluding him for the last hour.
Although "eluding"

wasn't the least bit accurate, he knew. It
implied that he

could sense an answer and simply couldn't
grasp it. The

truth was that he didn't have so much as an
inkling that one

actually existed. And it was a given that he
wouldn't find it

waiting
to
fallout of the bottom of a well-drained glass.

"You reach for that bottle and I'll
break your hands."

Aiden looked up at the familiar voice and
watched his

friend advance to the table. Proof, Aiden
silently growled,

that if you didn't lock the door behind you,
trouble was free

to wander in off the streets. "What are
you doing here?” he

asked not at all politely.

Barrett stripped off his greatcoat and
dropped
it
over the

back of a chair, saying, "I went by the
Blue Elephant to see

you, was told-rather summarily-of your
departure, and

was afraid you'd do something shortsighted.
I came by here

on my way home hoping to keep you from it.
Have I arrived

in anything approximating a timely
fashion?"

"Actually," Aiden drawled, his
gaze going back to the

bottle, "I've been sitting here for
quite some time, trying to

figure out why I spent a year drinking
myself into oblivion.

That's good brandy. All I have to do is
reach out and I can

have it. And God knows I feel so damn empty
I hurt clear

down to the soul. But I don't want to drown
the pain. I'm not

even tempted to pour myself a drink."
He looked up to meet

his friend's gaze. "Why is that,
Barrett?"