Thunder rolled as Rory turned to wait for Laine while Bella took the steps to a small pavilion of fretted marble, set a few yards from the main house. Their host presumably sat within. He stood, and the flaming torches on the lawn behind him threw his height and slender frame into sharp relief. The shape of his shoulders. The slight angle at which he bent his head as he listened to their chatter coming up the path.
“Rory and Bella,” he called out in pleasure, “I should have sent the car to collect you. It’s going to rain. Can’t you feel it? Like Wordsworth wrote, ‘How beautiful is the rain. After the dust and heat.’”
The tiger roared again out in the jungle. And Laine froze as Eve might have frozen when the first heartache had entered the world and everything had changed between Eve...and Eve’s own Adam. Rory caught her gasp, his smile fading to a frown.
Still cloaked in darkness their host came down the steps of the pavilion, but he stopped suddenly. “I hadn’t realized you brought company.”
“It’s the nurse we need,” Rory said. “Remember, you and I talked about—”
“Of course.” Their host’s voice had gone a tad breathless. “It’s just, Rory, we hadn’t decided... You know how upsetting it is to...” He turned toward her, trying to make out her features in the gloom. In the dark his voice had turned warm again. “Never mind all that, we mustn’t make the lady feel unwelcome.”
As though she were cold, she shivered. His accent was that of an educated man, an accent molded by Oxford. Balliol College to be precise. A man who adored poetry—Wordsworth, AE Housman, Virgil—the only man in a million who would name his plantation after the Roman goddess, Lavinia. She should have known. He used to write so many of Virgil’s verses to her in his letters, words that had set her aflame then with longing for him to return from college.
He took the remaining steps to the ground. His white shirt open at the neck and his gray flannel trousers, the garb of a man who never had cared for stiff formality. Light from the house and the torches sought out and found the lean planes of his face, the dark hair sweeping off his brow that when over-long curled at the base of his neck. The sensitive mouth curved in a welcoming smile for his uninvited guest.
She counted the stones at her feet, and looked up. It was not a dream. For there he stood.
His smile froze as her own when she stepped into the puddle of light on the path. She rallied up all the nonchalance she could. “Hello, fancy meeting you here, Adam.”
NINE
The sight of Laine sent shock waves through Adam like that of a bullet wound. Seven years since the beginning of the war and the last time he’d seen her. She’d been wearing a pretty blue dress then, her dark hair windblown because she’d rushed to Madras Central Station to not miss seeing him off. He’d been in uniform, though he’d just joined up. They’d only had five minutes, and he’d kissed her good-bye. He remembered that. Though he’d prayed—prayed long and hard to forget.
“As I live and breathe, Laine.” He regretted his futile attempt at humor.
She didn’t move. Torchlight danced across her features and caught the sheen of her smooth hair. Flickering light touched the line of her mouth that he knew so well, set as tight as a clamshell to stop the trembling of her lips. She was as embarrassed, or was it as shocked as he was, after that wretched letter he’d sent when she was still in France?
He reached for the tone he’d used with his men when he’d held them as they were dying in the trenches, or later in the hospital as they’d suffered surgery after surgery. No need to add to their pain. Speak with a trace of banter. Ironically, the ability to banter he’d learned from Laine. “Must be quite a surprise to come across me out here in the sticks...Laine.” To say her name out loud was more difficult than he’d imagined.
“You could say that.” A hint of the girl he used to know came through her sharpening tone.
He tried again. “I must apologize. I’m afraid my last letter to you was rather...bad-mannered.”
“Mmm. Bad-mannered? Yes, you could say that.”
Though she didn’t add a word out loud, the phrases, horrendously cruel, unfeeling desertion of what they’d meant to each other, clanged in his ears.
Bella’s perplexed expression mirrored Rory’s as they stood looking from him to Laine and then each other.
Strange, after all this time he still recognized that though Laine clasped her hands together like a schoolgirl and she spoke with that easy-going melody in her voice, she was seething. Confused, hurt, but seething as much as that tiger prowling the jungle two miles away. Her eyes, the color of tea, had always played traitor when she tried to hide her feelings. Now the girl whose humor used to ripple from her stood in the moonlight. Her face shone as pale as the petals of a lotus blossom...and as breathtakingly lovely.
He’d hurt her. Oh dear God, he’d hurt her.
Bella moved with swiftness to tuck Laine’s arm in hers. With a hint of steel beneath her laughter, Bella turned to him and ordered. “It’s obvious you two have a lot to catch up on. Don’t you think, Adam, it would be a good idea to invite us in? We could all use a cold drink.” She added, sotto voce, “And perhaps a dose of headache powder all round.”
Rory, brilliant doctor he was, stood on the path, his expression as blank as blotting paper.
To his relief, Bella walked Laine steadily toward the house. Rory waited for him to precede him inside.
He motioned Rory on and turned to look behind. His gaze sought out the grounds where the gardens ended. All quiet out there. But he remained conscious every moment of the one staring down at them from the darkened room above.
Inside the house, the gramophone stopped playing Rachmaninoff’s Second. One small mercy. Adam darted a glance at the dining room. The table had been set for three, but his house-servant, Ravi, who had seen Laine arrive, had set another place. Laine strolled with Rory and Bella into the drawing room, and he followed on unsteady legs. As if he were slightly drunk. He shook his head to clear it.
After plumping a cushion, Bella sat on the sofa. Rory leaned an elbow on the fireplace mantle. Wandering about the room, Laine studied the framed photographs he’d hung on the walls, the study of wildlife that had given him some comfort these past few years. She strolled to the small grand piano, one of the few luxuries from his old days he allowed himself.
Electricity fizzled inside him. To break the spell of unspoken questions, he opened the slats on the louvered doors to the veranda. He turned to watch Laine study his home, listened to the heels of her shoes clicking on the teak floors. Her gaze took in this old plantation home with its mahogany furnishings of decades gone by. Was she thinking this should have been hers?
Ravi poured glasses of lime juice and soda. With a cool drink in their hands, everyone seemed to take a sigh. All except Laine. She turned a page of sheet music at the piano. Rachmaninoff. He cringed. Why had he left out that piece of music, of all pieces?
She turned a smiling face to the rest of the room, but failed to meet his eyes. Her gaze went somewhere past his right shoulder. “So, Adam, how long have you lived here?”
Rory and Bella would have no idea the weight of her simple question, but the answer stuck in his throat. “I came here directly after being released from the army.”
“Your mother never breathed a word, Adam. I thought you were at home in Madras near her.” He heard the flat note in her chuckle. Saw her infinitesimal flinch. She ran her fingers along the piano lid. “Why, only two months ago I received a letter from Auntie—I mean, your mother. We correspond, but then we would, wouldn’t we?”
Bella set her empty glass on a table. “You and Adam are related?”
Laine jumped in before he could. “My parents and Adam’s...best of friends...since