Forgotten Vows

Edward was feeling sick, physically ill, when Lambert returned to the office wearing jeans and climbing boots and carrying a lightweight jacket. He dropped another pair of boots at Edward’s feet.

“You’ll need these,” Lambert said. “I think they’ll fit you.”

Edward closed the file, but he couldn’t close away the memory of the police photographs or the medical reports. He couldn’t close away the rage that he felt growing inside him—the need to hit—to hurt. He held his hand flat on the cover of the folder as if by doing so he could hold all its horrible contents away from him, away from Jennie. God, no wonder she didn’t remember. Thank God she didn’t remember.

“What did this to her?”

Lambert took the folder from him and put it back in the desk drawer before he answered. “For a while, I entertained the thought that maybe you did this to her.”

They took the sheriff’s Land Rover. They’d driven for over an hour, most of it on narrow dirt roads, the last fifteen or twenty minutes uphill on a rutted, hole-pocked narrow trail. They’d long before left the green surrounding Avalon and had entered what Edward had always thought typical of eastern New Mexico—harsh, rocky land, barren except for scattered cactus, which now, but only for a few short days, blazed with color, outcroppings of rock, the badlands of hundreds of B-grade western movies, and mountains—harsh and unforgiving.

Lambert eased his vehicle across a boulder-strewn dry gully, left the track and pulled to a stop at the edge of the precipice that overlooked the dry bed of some ancient ocean.

“Watch your step,” Lambert told him and felt his way over the edge and onto a barely visible animal trail. With only one quick glance toward the valley floor, Edward followed, feeling rocks sliding beneath his sturdy boots.

Finally, they reached an outcropping of rock that formed a narrow ledge and an overhang that created a sort of cave. The animal trail continued downward, but Lambert stopped.

“There are two ways to get here,” Lambert told him. “Up from the valley floor, or down from the ridge.” He pointed to a shallow depression beneath the overhang. “Two high-school boys cutting class and out exploring for outlaw gold found Jennie there.

“We don’t know when she lost her sight, but even sighted, there’s no way she got here by herself. She either fell or was pushed from about where we parked,”

In the last few hours, Edward had been hit with almost more than he could stand. For his sanity, for Jennie’s sake, he had to emotionally separate Jennie from this anonymous broken woman who had been discarded on a New Mexico mountainside. He had to get his protective armor in place, had to stop acting like a terrified ten-year-old. Never again, he’d promised himself years ago, would he give in to the nameless, numbing horror he had once experienced. And he hadn’t. Until now. But not until Jennie had he let himself be vulnerable again.

“You’re sure she didn’t come here for some reason?”

“What reason?” Lambert asked. “And yes, I’m sure. She couldn’t have walked it. The trail down from the top is a cakewalk compared to the one up from the valley floor. And we found no vehicle.

“You last saw her on the seventeenth of November,” Lambert asked abruptly. “What was she wearing?”

What was she wearing? For a moment, the memory swirled through Edward’s mind.

He pulled the sheet over Jennie’s bare shoulder and smoothed the dark hair away from her cheek, placing a kiss that was much more chaste than anything he felt at that moment on the tender skin he had just exposed.

“God, I hate to leave you,” he told her, tracing his finger over her cheek, outlining lips that only a short while before had driven him nearly crazy with her untutored passion.

“And I hate for you to leave, but you know Madeline wouldn’t have called unless it was important,” she said.

“Are you all right?” he asked her. “Really all right? I didn’t hurt you?”

She grinned at him then. “One of my deepest, darkest secrets is this hidden desire I’ve had to be ravished by a loving madman. Edward?” She sat up in the bed, letting the sheet fall away from her as she captured his face in her small hands.

“Edward, I’m teasing you. Of course you didn’t hurt me. You’d never do that.”

“She was—she was dressing for dinner,” he said, forcing himself back to the present. “We were going to go out to eat when I returned… before we caught our flight.” Edward threw off his memories. “Could she have parked somewhere else and walked in?”

Lambert shook his head. “She was wearing a white silk dress, silk lingerie. No jewelry. No hose. No shoes. The boys found her on the twenty-first.”

“So she had four days to get here.” Edward focused his thoughts on those days rather than on the way Jennie had looked in the photos. “Four days to—to do what?”

Again Lambert shook his head. “I think she was here at least as early as the nineteenth.”

“Why?”

“It rained on the nineteenth. Her clothes were… muddy.”

“Who?” Edward shouted. It was either shout or scream. He looked at the ridge above him. “What kind of animal would do this?”

“I don’t know,” Lambert told him. He studied Edward carefully. “And until I find out, Jennie’s a ward of the court. I’m her guardian. Until we find whoever did this, I’m not letting you take her out of my jurisdiction.”

Edward met Lambert’s appraisal with one of his own. “I won’t try to,” he admitted. “It doesn’t seem I’ve done too good a job of protecting her. I appreciate all the help I can get. I do want to bring some of my people here, make arrangements to stay as long as necessary. I’m not leaving Jennie.”

Lambert nodded his agreement. “I’ve got some ideas of my own now that we know who she is, but do you have any suggestions as to how we find the bastard who did this?”

Edward looked over the valley floor. He wasn’t ready, or able, yet, even to consider that Jennie had been taken from him, that she hadn’t left voluntarily. But even if she had left willingly with someone, she had been betrayed even more brutally than Edward.

“There was no ransom demand.”

Lambert waited quietly while Edward sifted through his memories, realigning them, examining them in the light of what he had learned in the last few hours.

“Two suggestions,” Edward said finally. “We need to find the former security guard at my apartment. He quit without notice and left the day before the wedding. And…maybe you’d better do this. Ask Winthrop’s daughter where she got the painting.”

Edward allowed his bittersweet memory only a moment’s life.

“It was Jennie’s wedding present to me. The last time I saw it, it was in my apartment—and so was Jennie.”

Three

Jennie awoke while the house lay silent and still. Quietly, she made her way to the window seat and pushed open the casement window. Then, drawing her feet up onto the cushion in front of her, she rested her chin on her knees and surrendered to the gentle breeze that drifted through the window as she listened to the predawn sounds of birds searching for their breakfast.

Her world was still dark, and would be until the sun rose to lighten the dense fog of her sightlessness.

And she was alone. Still. Though surrounded by a house full of loving, caring people.

Had she always been alone?

This was the question that had filled too many of her sleepless hours in the months of her life since she had first woken up in Avalon.

She couldn’t have been—not if she trusted her dreams.

But after what had happened to her, who, or what, could she trust?

The man hadn’t returned by the time she had been put to bed like a child or an invalid. She didn’t even know his name.

“It’s better this way,” Reverend Winthrop had insisted softly, patiently, and with a sadness she had not heard before in his voice. “Lucas will explain, if any explanations are necessary.”

Better for whom?

Not for the first time, Jennie wondered how she looked. She knew she was shorter than most people, or at least those she had met in Avalon, whose voices all seemed to come from above her head—even Matilda’s. And small. At least compared to Sheriff Lambert, who had carried her easily on more than one occasion when she was in the early stages of her recovery.

But did she look like a child? Or worse, like someone who couldn’t cope with the slightest obstacle, frustration or tension?

Didn’t they know? Didn’t they know that her every waking hour, and too many of her sleeping ones, were filled with all of those things?

Who was the man?

Was he the tall, stern man of her dreams?

And why hadn’t he returned?

“Foolish question,” she whispered to the caressing breeze. He hadn’t returned because Sheriff Lambert hadn’t let him return—wouldn’t let him until he had completely checked out the man’s story and probably his life from the day he was born. The man in her dreams would not quietly tolerate that kind of inspection, that kind of doubt.

But then, the man in her dreams was just that—a figment of her imagination, created by her subconscious to ease her loneliness, to fill the awful empty hours of the night when her doubts and fears crept around her.

She heard noises through the open window, the sounds of kitchen windows on the floor below being opened and then the robust and off-key singing of Caitlin, the Winthrops’ cook and housekeeper, as she began preparations for breakfast.

Jennie sighed and rolled her head and shoulders, hating the tension that too often plagued her, then relinquished her comfortable place at the window. Matilda would be coming soon to check on her, and because Jennie didn’t want the kindhearted woman to worry about how long her charge had been awake, she eased herself back into bed and pulled the sheet up.

Maybe today he would return, she thought as she turned onto her side and burrowed her cheek into the softness of the down pillows. Maybe today someone would tell her who he was. Maybe today someone would tell her who she was.

Edward paced the comfortable room, impatient for dawn to finish lighting the sky, impatient to make the telephone calls he had promised Lambert he would wait to make. Impatient to see Jennie again. To confront her with his accusations? To comfort her? Or just to hold the woman who was his wife and pretend that the last six months had never happened? To pretend that she loved him, to pretend that he was capable of giving her the love he’d once thought she wanted from him?

Lambert had brought him back to the outskirts of Avalon to this converted private hunting lodge last night too late for anyone with any decent manners to go banging on the vicar’s door. The problem was, Edward wasn’t feeling particularly decent, mannerly or even civilized by that time. What did keep him from rebelling against Lambert’s edicts was the knowledge that Jennie was probably asleep and that she’d need all the rest and strength she could stockpile against the time he finally told her all he knew about her disappearance. If he told her the whole story.

What Edward didn’t understand was why he had also acquiesced in the matter of not contacting his office until the next day. Postponing telling anyone until after he had talked with Jennie, until after he’d had time to absorb at least partially all that he had learned that day, until he’d had time to understand at least partially all the conflicting facts and emotions that had battered him that day, had seemed reasonable, natural even.

But that had been while he and Lambert were seated in front of a still-necessary fire in the huge stone fireplace downstairs, eating the thick roast beef sandwiches the sheriff had, with no apparent effort, convinced the innkeeper to produce long after the dining room had been cleared. Edward had leaned back in a heavy leather chair, poised between exhaustion and jittery nervous energy, and accepted a welcome brandy and not so welcome advice.

He had, reluctantly, accepted the sheriff’s advice, knowing that all hell could have broken loose in his corporate offices in the twenty-four hours since he’d left San Francisco without telling anyone where he was going.

Now, in the gray light of early morning, all that kept him from calling Madeline was his promise to the sheriff, a promise he was eager to be released from but that he would honor.

At last, faint noises rose from the rooms on the ground floor. He stopped near the window, listening, until he recognized the sounds of the lodge coming to life. At last. It seemed hours since he had given up on sleep. He rolled his neck and shoulders in a vain attempt to ease the tension there, then headed for the shower in order to prepare himself for the day’s events. There was no more time for delay. Jennie was waiting for him.

He stopped as he reached the bathroom door.

She was waiting for him, and she had no idea who he was.

Once before, he’d thought that. Once before, he’d convinced himself that none of the curse of the Carlton past could intrude on the magical time he spent with her.

Well, this time she didn’t know him. Yesterday had convinced him of that much at least. But his past, with all of its suspicion and betrayal and pain, was as alive as an actual, physical person standing firmly by his side.

Laughter as soft and delicate as the melody of a distant wind chime whispered through the vicarage garden, calling to Edward and leading him deeper into the comforting, slightly shaggy maze of spring flowers and ancient trees with their tender new leaves. Leading him deeper into the maze of conflicting emotions which battered him mercilessly. Pain, anger, frustration, but most of all, weariness. Unrelenting, soul-draining weariness.

God, he was tired. Tired of being alone. Tired of always having to protect his companies, his privacy, his emotions, and even his life, from the greed that his father, and now he, seemed to attract like a powerful magnet.

For a few weeks, the woman somewhere ahead of him in the garden had made him believe in happiness and love and the goodness of others. He’d thought he wouldn’t be able to survive her betrayal. And now, wounded as she was, she tempted him once again to believe, to hope that there would be someone to take away the emptiness of his life. An emptiness that before Jennie he had so completely denied, not even he had known it existed.

No!

For a moment, he thought he had moaned the word aloud, so abruptly had the denial overcome him. He stopped, slowed his breathing and listened for any outward sign that he had been heard. “No,” he whispered when he at last accepted that the cry had been entirely in his mind.

But he didn’t know what he was saying no to—the memories of his sorrow, or the memories of those first unreal weeks with Jennie.

Not again, he promised himself. He would see to her needs and he would help her recover if that was at all possible, but he wouldn’t, couldn’t open himself to the kind of pain that she had so easily, so senselessly inflicted on him. Not again.

He heard her laughter, closer now, mocking him, beckoning to him, and now it was joined by another voice, also feminine, but deeper, and, he knew, somehow, younger. The words were indistinguishable but spoken in a pleasant, bantering tone which called from Jennie another gurgle of laughter.

Edward tensed, remembering that laughter all too well. Then, forcing himself to relax, he centered his attention on the direction from which the sounds were coming and not on the bitter memories they evoked, and continued walking.

He wanted to see her once more without the presence, well-meaning or otherwise, of the vicar or the sheriff. That was why he hadn’t waited for Lambert to arrive at the lodge but had requested a ride into town from the innkeeper. Requested in a calm, civil manner, but in a tone all of his employees would have recognized as a demand.

He hadn’t known Jennie was in the garden. That was an unexpected bonus. When he had arrived at the vicarage, he had thought merely to take a few moments in the pleasant surroundings to collect himself and his vagrant thoughts before beginning the confrontations that were sure to mark the day.

As he walked deeper into the garden, he heard Jennie’s voice join the other, and as he drew closer he began to discern words. Words, but not meaning.

“Watch out,” the younger voice said breathlessly. “To the right. Higher. Quick. Up, up. Oh, drat.”

“Ouch.”

“Got you, did he? Darn, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Jennie said softly. “Here, let me have him. No, no, no,” she crooned. “Easy. It’s time to be soft now. Easy. Easy. That’s a good boy.”

What the hell? Edward thought, even as he felt himself succumbing to the hypnotic temptation of Jennie’s soothing voice. A lie, he reminded himself. It had all been a lie. That was all he needed to remember. And someday, some way, he would learn the reason for that he.

He rounded a lilac bush and found her there, wearing another of those soft, flowing dresses and sitting on another stone bench. She was holding a half-grown yellow tiger-striped kitten that had stretched out in her lap and was purring loudly enough to be heard across the several feet that still separated Edward from the two women.

No, not both of them were women, he amended. The girl sitting cross-legged at Jennie’s feet had several years to wait before she reached that status. All arms and long legs and huge eyes in a too-thin face, she seemed, somehow, comfortable with the spurt of growth her body had given her, comfortable with the awkward age she was passing through. Comfortable with sitting and talking sad playing with a blind woman.

The girl saw him first and rose to her feet with awkward grace. “Jennie,” she said in a hushed, protective voice. “We have company.”

Jennie half rose and looked around, surely an instinctive gesture, because she looked right through him with her sightless eyes, then sighed and gave a little frown. “Who?”

“Don’t know,” the girl muttered. She lifted her chin and challenged him. “You’d better tell us who you are and why you’re here before my dad gets here, mister.”

Lambert. Edward identified who her father must be before she finished speaking. The girl’s coloring was lighter and her features finer, but her mannerisms were completely and distinctly the sheriff’s.

“I’m sorry I startled you—”

Jennie’s frown turned into a smile of such dazzling joy it hurt him to watch. “You came back,” she said breathlessly. He saw the tension drain from her as she sank back onto the bench and stroked the kitten. “I—I knew you would.”

But she hadn’t known. That much was as painfully clear to him as her happiness had been only moments before. And suddenly he felt this overpowering need to comfort her as she comforted the kitten. “It was late last night when we returned to Avalon—too late to disturb you.”

“You went somewhere?” she asked. “You and the sheriff? Is everything all right?”

No, it wasn’t, hadn’t been for a long time, might never be. But that wasn’t what she meant. She meant between him and the local law. “Yes,” he said gently. “Everything is fine.”

She extricated a hand from the cat and held it out to him. “Please,” she said, her smile an invitation he had never been able to resist, “join us.” She nodded toward the girl at her feet. “This is Jamie. Jamie, this is—” She stopped abruptly and looked toward him as her smile faltered. “I’m sorry. I don’t know your name.”

They hadn’t told her. Not one thing. And in spite of the fact that she would have to know, have to confront who she was and what she had done, he couldn’t tell her, either. Not now. Not without more support for her than a half-grown cat, an adolescent girl and an embittered and cynical man she had no memory of.

“I’m Edward,” he said, stepping to her side and, because he couldn’t help himself, taking her small hand in his.

“Edward.” Her voice caressed his name as she tested the sound of it. “Edward.”

Her fingers flexed in his and he felt their gentle pressure. Because he couldn’t stop himself from this, either, he ran his thumb over her fingers, across the one where his rings had once dwelled, and found a ridge of tortured bone beneath delicate, pale skin.

Startled, he looked down. With a sense of relief, he found something else on which to focus, a small trail of blood oozing from a tiny wound in the fleshy pad of her thumb. “Your cat has drawn blood,” he said.

“Let me see,” Jamie said.

The girl pushed her way between them and grabbed Jennie’s hand. “Oh, darn,” she said. “I’m sorry. Heathcliff’s had his shots so that—”

“It’s all right,” Jennie told her.

“But-”

“It’s all right, Jamie,” she repeated again. “He was just playing.”

“Something to clean it with would be in order,” Edward told the girl.

“And I’m supposed to believe it’s all right to leave you alone with her?”

“Yes,” Jennie insisted softly. “It is. And no, I don’t need any first aid.”

Jamie studied him with Lambert’s wary, suspicious eyes. And then, because Edward couldn’t stop this, either, another, darker thought intruded. Meggie. Was this how his sister would have been at Jamie’s age? Tall, yes. That had always been a given. But would she have been poised and comfortable with herself beneath the mantle of security Jamie wore so casually? Or would she have been awkward and at war with a body growing too fast for her heart and mind to keep pace with?

This was something else that Jennie had done to him. She had drawn him out of the shell he had so painstakingly erected and laid open wounds he had thought long healed.

Forcing himself away from those thoughts, he smiled at the girl. “You might as well tell Reverend Winthrop I’m here, even though I’m pretty sure the innkeeper has already called your father and told him that he brought me into town.”

Jamie grinned at him. “It’s a small town. It’s either great or a really big pain depending on your attitude and what you want to keep secret.”

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