Regarding her with kind eyes, Callie shook her head. “Not at all.”
“I begged him to bring me along. He couldn’t, of course. I didn’t understand why not at the time, but having met Mr. St. John I suppose I should be glad he didn’t. Gavin swore to write me, swore that somehow, someday he’d arrange it so we could be together again, but once his grandfather brought him to London, he forgot all about me. Worse than forgot, he ignored me. For two years, I wrote him, letter upon letter, but he never answered them, not a one.”
Callie frowned as if trying to put together a puzzle whose final few pieces were missing. “I haven’t known Gavin for very long, but from the bits and pieces of your time together at Roxbury House that Hadrian has shared with me and from what I’ve seen of him myself, I can’t believe he wouldn’t have written you back. As for forgetting you, that simply isn’t the case. From what Hadrian tells me, this past year he’s spent what amounts to a small fortune on a private detective to find you.”
Daisy jerked her head upright. “Gavin’s been paying someone to search for me? Are you quite certain?”
Callie’s effusive nod left no room for doubting. “The detective managed to trace you to Dover, but after that he came up empty. The news brought Gavin’s spirits quite low. Hadrian and Rourke dragged him out to the supper club that night, hoping a bit of fun might take his mind off you.”
Gavin had been searching for her all along, could it be? If so, then her life was akin to the farfetched scenario in the penny dreadfuls she read upon occasion where a case of mistaken identity or the machinations of a devious villain tore the lovers apart for years only to see them reunited in the end. In their story, however, the person Gavin had found again wasn’t the sweetly innocent girl of his memory but a tart-up music hall performer prancing half-naked about the stage. Small wonder he reacted as he had. It must have been quite a shock.
“Instead of the detective finding me, by some fluke Gavin found me himself.”
Callie nodded. “Yes, but my personal belief is that there is no such thing as happenstance. You and Gavin coming together again after all this time is a gift from God. Regardless of what brought you two together again, don’t waste this chance. Second chances are rare as four leaf clovers. Third chances, well, we don’t often hear of those, now do we?”
Daisy shook her head, which had begun to throb and not because of the single glass of champagne she’d drunk. “Even if Gavin didn’t, strictly speaking, abandon me, I’m not that girl any more and haven’t been for almost fifteen years. How can we ever come together as we are? He’s a respected barrister and I’m a showgirl … well, an actress now, I suppose, but still I’ll always carry my past with me. As long as we stay in England, I don’t see how I can ever be more to him than a mistress.”
A few weeks before, that would have seemed like a plumb deal but these past weeks with Gavin had changed her perspective on many things, including relationships. Now that she had a glimpse of how it could be between a man and a woman, how caring and respect and compassion and, yes, love could carry physical intimacy to new heights, she wanted more, so very much more. She wanted it all—the picket fence framed cottage, the happily-ever-after fairytale, and, yes, the until-death-do-us-part marriage vows—all the trappings of commitment that set soul mates apart from casual lovers.
“Perhaps it’s time to let go of that belief, time to take a chance and trust again, hmm?”
Take a chance. Trust again. What was the worst that could happen? She might be hurt but then the past twenty-four hours since she turned Gavin away had been the most hurtful period of her life.
Silence fell inside the carriage, not an awkward or sullen silence where people either make a great show of examining their fingernails or cast fuming stares out the window but rather a still, companionable quiet in which everything that must be said and heard has been so done, freeing all parties to mull over not only the “what ifs” of the situation but, more importantly, the “what nexts.”
Daisy looked over to Callie, realizing she’d lost all track of the time. It might be midnight or midmorning, five minutes or fifty since she climbed inside the carriage. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me where it is you lot are kidnapping me to?”
The carriage lamp swinging overhead illuminated Callie’s small, Mona Lisa-like smile. Lips twitching with suppressed laughter, she shook her head. “Not on your life. The destination is meant to be a surprise. Were I the one to spoil it after all the elaborate scheming that’s been carried on, Hadrian and Rourke would have my head on a platter and rightly so. For now, lean back and don’t fret about the destination. Just enjoy the ride.”
“The sight of lovers feedeth those in love.
Bring us to this sight, and you shall say
I’ll prove a busy actor in their play.”
—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
, Rosalind,
As You Like It
T
hey were traveling eastward, Daisy gathered that much. The streets were becoming progressively narrower and more winding and the smells wafting in through the carriage window considerably less pleasant. The carriage rumbled to a halt. Looking out the window on her side, she saw they’d pulled off the main street. A single torch lit the entrance to a large timber-framed structure in the Tudor style. The building sat back from the street, the turnabout paved in cobbles, a sign it must be very old.
The carriage door opened and Rourke offered a hand to help Daisy out. She took it and then turned back to Callie. “Aren’t you coming?”
The brunette shook her head. “This is your night, and your second chance. Good luck.”
“Thank you.” Daisy turned away to accept Rourke’s outstretched hand. She stepped down and, lantern in hand, the Scot escorted her to the main door. Somehow she wasn’t really surprised when he opened it without needing a key.
Stepping back, he said, “This is the final leg of the journey for me, but the first step for you.”
“Thank you.” She tried for a smile, but it felt as wobbly as the rest of her.
“You’re most welcome, lass.” Drawing back, he hesitated and then said, “He really loves you, you know.”
“I know, or at least I do now. And I love him, too, with all my heart.”
“Go to, then.” He handed her the lantern and turned back down the path.
With a final wave to her friends, Daisy stepped inside. The ancient arched oak door groaned closed behind her. Inside she had no need of the lantern. Candles lit her way from the entrance foyer to the auditorium. She followed the candle-lit path down the center aisle between rows of low, backless benches to the pillared platform stage. The tattered stage curtain rose as she approached, revealing a cloth-covered table set for two. Next to it, a silver pedestal bucket stood within reach, holding what looked to be a bottle of champagne on ice.
Gavin, heart-stoppingly handsome in formal evening dress, strolled out onto the stage. “I was beginning to think Hadrian might have gotten you lost in the dark.”
“Gavin, what is all this? Why did you go to the trouble of having our friends kidnap me from one theater only to bring me to another? A dusty one,” she added, suppressing a sneeze.
He shrugged. “I wanted some time alone with you, a private celebration, and Hadrian and Rourke were good enough to step in as escort and driver.” He reached down a hand and, taking it, she climbed the three steps up.
He released her and she said, “You mean step in as co-conspirators in a kidnapping?”
He shrugged, gaze stroking over her. “It was the only way I could be sure you’d come.”
“You might have simply invited me.”
He cocked a brow. “Would you have accepted?”
She thought about lying and then dismissed it. Far too many lies stood between them as it was. “I’m not certain.”
“Have you dined yet?”
Daisy thought for a moment and then realized she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Though the lobster patties, French cheeses, and strawberries dipped in rich, dark chocolate served at the reception had looked tempting, she hadn’t been able to summon much of an appetite.
She shook her head. “No.” Feeling eyes upon her, she chanced to see Jamison poke his silver head out from the side curtain as if awaiting his cue. Apparently, Gavin’s servant was yet another co-conspirator.
Following her gaze, Gavin said, “In that case, I’ve champagne chilling and a cold supper waiting in the wings, so you won’t thirst or starve. The only stipulation is that you have to spend the next few hours here with me talking, just the two of us. Do you mind?”
Daisy had no inclination to play coy. “Mind? Mind! I spent the better part of the day and then the evening after the performance wishing you might materialize next to me.”
She reached for him, but he held up a staying hand. “First we need to settle things between us, once and for all. We need to come to terms, an arrangement we can both live with, if you will.”
All this talk of terms and arrangements made him sound more like the flinty barrister of his reputation than the tender lover she knew. She opened her mouth to say as much when it occurred to her what he was about to propose wasn’t all that different from the no-nonsense business arrangement she’d insisted upon that first day at his flat.
If laying out their future in black-and-white terms was what it took to keep him, she was prepared to do so as well as to sign nearly anything he proposed. She wanted, needed, Gavin in her life. They were two halves of a single soul and though he was without doubt the better half, she wanted nothing so much as to spend the rest of her life working to make him happy, to complete him as he most certainly completed her.
Praying she wasn’t too late, she confided, “Oh, Gavin, I’ve just had what was supposed to be the most glorious night of my life only …”
“Only?” He still held himself from her but his voice was gentle.
“Only it didn’t mean a bloody thing without you there to share it.”
“But I was there, for most of it. I left midway through the final act.”
“But you weren’t in your box. I … I looked for you.” She felt embarrassment sting her cheeks and hoped it was too dark for him to see.
She couldn’t tell. He rested his gaze on her face, expression unreadable. How she wished she might fathom his thoughts as easily as she had just a few days before, but his heart, which he’d worn on his sleeve until now, appeared to have been put away. “I stood in the back just behind the curtain. You couldn’t see me, but I could see you. You were brilliant. Better than brilliant, you
were
Rosalind. Your performance tonight is certain to go down with the likes of Sara Siddons and Dorothy Jordan.”
“Thank you but I fancy myself as more of a Nell Gwynne.” She managed to get the words out over the lump lodged in her throat. Gavin’s compliment was sweeter to her than any praise penned by the most lauded of London theater critics.
He turned to the ice bucket. “Champagne?”
She shouldn’t, her head was reeling as it was, but she nodded her acceptance anyhow.
Watching him pour the frothy wine into two flutes, her gaze fell to his hands. She found herself remembering the feel of them moving over her, inside her, and shivered in a way that had nothing to do with the draft.
“You’re cold. Here.” He took off his dinner coat and tucked it around her shoulders. “This is where we came in, remember, with me tossing my dinner jacket about your very bare and very lovely shoulders. Did you think me mad?”
Daisy smiled. “Completely. And what of you, did you find me brazen?”
“Utterly shocking, but over these past weeks I’ve discovered that I rather fancy your brash ways so long as, like those lovely legs of yours, you display them in private, for me alone.”
She couldn’t think with him standing so close. Champagne in hand, she stepped away under pretense of examining the carved paneling on the side of the stage. Even coated in cobwebs and dust, the craftsmanship was exquisite. “Where are we, by the way?” He stepped back, too. “An old, abandoned theater built in Shakespeare’s day and last known as The
Parisian. The final play performed here was
The Misanthrope
by Moliere. It’s been vacant for a decade, longer perhaps.”
“What a shame.”
A slight smile played about his lips. “Yes, I thought so, too.” A pause, this one longer than the last, and then he added, “Sometimes people abandon their dreams much like abandoning an old building. Because it’s less trouble that way, because there isn’t enough love to see it through.”
The thinly veiled metaphor had her snapping up her head to meet his eyes. “I never said I didn’t love you. I’ve always loved you. I never lied about that.”
And yet she lied about so many other things. Now that she considered it, what a great lot of energy she expended needlessly when truth telling would have been so much simpler.
“Why didn’t you tell me you’d written me all those years ago?
The question and the accusation underlying it took her aback. Shaking, she set her glass down on the table before it could slip through her fingers. “I assumed you knew.”
“I didn’t.”
Even now she couldn’t trust herself to believe him. “One unanswered letter I could have chalked up to mishap but, Gavin, I wrote you so many times. The last letter I sent was from Calais.”
“I never received a single one, at least not until today.” He grimaced. “My grandfather left orders with the school that my correspondence be strictly monitored. He gave the headmaster a list of persons from whom I might receive letters. Everything else was to be sent on to him.”
Daisy felt tears prick her eyes. “When you didn’t answer, I thought you must not care to be bothered with me any longer, that your fancy new life hadn’t room for a foundling without even a surname to recommend her. When I sent my last letter and a month went by and you still hadn’t answered it, I told myself I had to face the fact you’d moved on—and that I had to move on, too.”
“I didn’t move on. I drifted. Wherever I went, whatever I did or saw, all I could think of was, ‘How Daisy would love this’ or ‘I can’t wait to tell Daisy about that.’ When I got back to London, the first thing I did was hire a detective to find you, but it was too late. There wasn’t a trace of you to be found, not in London and not in the counties, either. I never thought to look in France, let alone considered you might take a stage name. Foolish, foolish … “ He shook his head.
“How
did
you find out about the letters after all this time? Did your detective uncover them somehow?”
He shook his head. “My grandfather confessed what he’d done and then gave them to me. Along with owning up to the business about the letters, he admitted to attempting to bribe you into breaking it off with me. He also told me you refused him flat out. He even showed me the torn bank note. Why did you lie to me, Daisy? Letting me think you had a lover was bad enough but then to lead me to believe you betrayed us for the proverbial fifty pieces of silver … Why would you do such a thing?”
She looked down at the dusty floorboards. “I couldn’t have you ruining your life over me. I gathered your grandfather would cut you off if we married. I couldn’t come back into your life only to destroy it.”
He shook his head as though she were a careless child. “Had you but troubled yourself to come to me that day I would have told you I don’t give a tinker’s damn about my grandfather’s money.”
“You say that now but it’s been a while since you were poor. It would be very hard to go back to that kind of life.”
“Difficult, yes, but not unthinkable, and I would have done it, I would still do it without a second thought if it was the only way we could be together. As it happens, however, I have money of my own, independent of my grandfather’s legacy. Not great riches, by any means, but enough to take proper care of you and Freddie and the Lakes, too. But of course you didn’t come to me, did you, Daisy? Because despite everything we shared, you still didn’t trust me enough, didn’t love me enough, to believe we could work it out.”
“Oh, Gavin, don’t ever think that. If there was anyone I don’t trust, or love enough, that person is me.
Pushing you away before I could hurt you seemed the kindest thing I could do, but now I see it was cowardly and … self-defeating. As badly as I hurt you, I hurt myself that much more. If I could step back in time a month, I’d go about it all so very differently, but I suppose it’s a silly wish. It’s too late now, isn’t it?”
Rather than answer that, he said, “I almost forgot. I have something for you.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a slender, brown paper-wrapped package.
Taking it from him, she asked, “What is it?” Surely she was the very last person deserving of a gift.
Gaze trained on her face, he said, “Open it and find out.”
She slipped off the string and tore through the paper. Unfolding the contents, she snapped up her head. “It’s a deed. The deed to this theater … with my name on it. You bought me a theater, this theater!” Daisy had never owned a piece of property in her life, let alone a whole theater. Well and truly overwhelmed, she found herself speechless, drowning in the rush of love she felt.
He nodded. “I know it’s not the Savoy—yet—but I’ve had a surveyor out to look about and he’s assured me that the basic structure is sound. It’s everything else that wants fixing, but it’s yours if you want it, outright without obligation. You can take it and choose never to see me again. But I’d very much like to be a part of it, not just this theater but your life, yours and Freddie’s, if you’ll have me.”
“Gavin, are you asking what I think you are?”
His answer was in his smile, that wonderful lopsided smile that reached his eyes and lit up the whole of his handsome face. “Marry me, Daisy. Marry me and let us both stop drifting. Marry me and let the three of us be a family.”
“Oh, Gavin, I don’t know what to say.”
He set his champagne glass on the table and walked toward her. “Say yes. Say you’ll marry me. No more delays, my dearest darling girl, and God help us, no more lying. Whatever difficulties arise in the future, we face them openly and honestly and above all, together. And as much as I love you, I don’t want you to accept my suit for Freddie’s sake or the Lakes', for that matter. If you accept me, it must be for myself alone. And I’m giving you fair warning, Daisy, I’ll expect you to love me with all your heart and all your mind and, yes, all your body, for the rest of our lives. Can you promise that? Can you possibly want me that much?”
She swallowed hard. “I can and I do.” She loved him so much she felt as though her heart were squeezing in on itself. “But, Gavin, are you certain you’ve thought it all through? I’m an actress and before that a dance hall girl—not exactly the best background for a barrister’s wife.”