A Kiss Too Late

“Adam, I knew from the beginning how important the Standard was to you. That wasn’t the real problem.” It dismayed her how fresh her memories were–how readily she recalled the pain and disappointment of trying to get through to Adam. During their marriage she’d been like someone pounding and pounding on a door, never to have it opened, never to know what was on the other side. How ironic. Living with Adam so many years, but never being allowed to know his private thoughts or emotions. She’d begun to wonder if she knew her own husband at all.

She still didn’t really know him. Even now, his expression grew shuttered. “I gave you everything I could, Jen. Everything I had to give.”

“It wasn’t enough.” She heard the edge of bitterness in her own voice. “Let’s not start this all over,” she said quickly. “I’m here for my mother’s wedding, and that’s the only thing that matters.”

Adam studied her. “Don’t let another year go by before you visit your family again.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen after this,” she said, perhaps too sharply. “I’ll just have to see how it goes with my great-uncles and with my mother. As for you and me, Adam…well, let’s not have any more…unfortunate episodes.”

“I call it lovemaking.” His tone was final, yet he looked dissatisfied. He gazed at Jen a moment longer, frowning slightly. Her own gaze lingered involuntarily on the bold, expressive contours of his face. A week ago he had reawakened the passion between them, and now the familiar desire stirred in her again. She still wanted him. She still longed for his touch. Hadn’t she learned anything–anything at all?

She turned away and was relieved when he went back to the car and pulled open the passenger door for her. She slid into her seat, and a moment later they were on the road.

“I’m surprised you haven’t remarried,” she said when the silence grew awkward. “You wanted children, after all.” Jen paused for only a second. The issue of children had been one of the major sore spots in their marriage, and she felt it best to skim over the subject. “Anyway, these days it seems there’s always a story about you in the society columns, and a picture of you with some new woman.”

He drove the car smoothly along the winding ocean road. “I didn’t know you read the social pages,” he remarked.

“I don’t read them. It’s just that you can’t help glancing at a picture of someone you know. Besides, you give the gossips a great deal to talk about.”

“You believe the stories, Jen?”

“I believe the photographs.” She stared out the windshield, refusing to mention the jealousy that twisted through her every time she saw a picture of Adam escorting yet another lovely socialite. “The women you choose, they’re gorgeous,” she said in an offhand manner. “Apparently you didn’t waste any time after I was gone.”

“You made it clear you wanted nothing more to do with me. You’re still making that clear–even after I shared your bed.”

Dammit, why couldn’t they stop talking about that…incident? Jen feared her relationship with Adam was like a package she kept trying to wrap up and put away, only the paper kept tearing and the string kept coming untied. It certainly didn’t help to be sitting beside him like this, his closeness almost taunting.

Adam turned off the road and stopped the car in front of the heavy iron gates that guarded Jen’s childhood home. She frowned at them. She’d always detested these gates, convinced they’d been meant more to imprison the Hillard family than to keep intruders away.

Adam leaned out his window and punched a series of numbers on the security panel. A second later the gates buzzed and swung open ponderously. Adam drove through, the gates clanging shut behind the car.

“I don’t even know the security code anymore,” Jen said. “My family trusts you more than they do me.”

Adam slowly took the car under the elms of the drive. “I know it bothers you, that I’m still on good terms with your family.”

“I don’t understand how you get along so well with them,” Jen murmured. “I can never seem to agree with them about anything. I never seem to agree with my mother, that’s for certain.”

“Give your family a chance for once. You might be surprised.”

“Surprised–I seriously doubt that. Some things never change.”

He stopped the car in front of the house, although perhaps “house” wasn’t precisely the right term for such an ambitious structure. The Hillard mansion had been built in the late 1800s, at a time when Jen’s ancestors had harbored a fondness for Tudor architecture. The place resembled an English country estate, with its mullioned windows, stone walls, myriad chimneys and even a few conical towers. Architecturally the place was impressive, Jen supposed.

“Welcome home,” she said wryly. “I never did trust this house. When I was a kid, I used to feel lost in there.”

Adam sat with both hands resting on the steering wheel. “Jen…is it really so bad coming home?”

“It’s uncomfortable at the very least.”

“I could go in with you right now. It might help ease things.”

Jen glanced at him. “It’s better if I do this alone.”

“Maybe some things do change, Jenny,” he said in a quiet voice. “You seem different now. Stronger, I think. More independent, that’s for damn sure.”

Gazing into Adam’s dark eyes, she felt trapped in the intimacy of his car. It seemed that long ago the touch of his lips and the caress of his hands had branded her in some irrevocable way. Perhaps she resented him for that, more than anything else. Adam had been her first lover. And, in spite of his emotional distance, he’d been a very good lover. Too good. She’d begun to fear she would find no other man who could compare with him that way.

She pressed the window button, raising the glass all the way up. “I appreciate your meeting me at the station,” she said rather stiffly.

“There you go again, being polite.”

Her eyebrows drew together. “Okay, forget polite. All I know is, I’m not looking forward to going in that house.”

“I suspect you can handle your family. In a way, you handled all of us a year ago. This time just go a little easier.”

She turned from him. How like Adam to align himself firmly on the side of her family. That was the way it had felt back then: all of them, including Adam, lined up against her.

She scrambled out of the car. Adam deposited her suitcase and bag on the veranda, then jangled his keys in his hand.

“Positive you don’t want me to come in with you?” he asked.

“Positive.”

Adam gave her a fleeting smile and climbed back in his car. Jen watched it disappear down the drive. And she wished, quite suddenly, that she’d let Adam stay here with her, after all.

* * *

ADAM DROVE BACK OUT the gates, only to slow the car to a halt. He couldn’t explain why he wasn’t phoning the newspaper. He usually checked in to see how things were going; he rarely took this much time off. Hell, he shouldn’t be taking off time at all, not when he had Darnard Publishing looking to close a deal with him. They were making a generous offer for the paper. Very generous. Yet Adam still couldn’t force himself to sign on the dotted line.

Now he thought about Jen. That his ex-wife was a distraction there could be no doubt. More than a distraction. These days she seemed to have gained a special vibrancy, as if living in that run-down apartment of hers in New York actually suited her. Of course, she still had the patrician air that was her hallmark. That was the joke: for as long as Adam had known Jen, she’d fought against her aristocratic heritage, despising the fact that her maternal ancestors boasted a distant connection to Stuart royalty. And yet Jen moved with a naturally aristocratic bearing, something she couldn’t disguise. It showed in the confident way she walked, the way she could make even faded jeans and a T-shirt seem like the latest fashion. Meanwhile, her gray eyes betrayed the passion she tried to keep hidden underneath….

Damn. She was getting to him all over again. He’d hoped he’d worked Jenny out of his system that night in New York. He’d thought it would be safe, going to pick her up today and setting her straight about her family. He’d been wrong. Of course, he’d been wrong about Jenny plenty of times before.

Adam started the car moving again, but he didn’t call the paper. Instead, he went down the road and turned in at yet another pair of gates. A few minutes later he swung the car around in front of a rambling, gabled villa built of mellowed stone. It had been his parents’ home, the house where he’d grown up. He rarely came here anymore, and he couldn’t explain the impulse that had brought him today.

Adam climbed the porch steps and unlocked the front door. He moved restlessly through the dim, musty rooms with their shrouded furniture and drawn curtains. A caretaker cleaned and dusted the rooms periodically, yet still the place smelled of decay to Adam. All about him, the air hung heavy and stale from disuse.

He knew he ought to have sold the house years ago. After all, he wasn’t a sentimental person. But it was one more thing he couldn’t explain–why he held on to a house that felt more and more like a mausoleum with each passing year.

Adam frowned as he paced the drawing room. He didn’t care for niggling emotions he couldn’t explain. Now he glanced at the portrait of his parents that still hung in an alcove. It was a realistic portrayal, showing his mother and father turned toward each other, focusing solely on each other rather than gazing out at the rest of the world. Adam paused and studied the portrait for some moments. That was a mistake, of course, for he felt remnants of the old sensations rise within him–sorrow and guilt and anger. But it had all happened such a long time ago. Surely with a little effort he could make himself forget.

Adam turned from the portrait and strode outside, gazing across the wide lawn. Off among the trees he could see the rooftop of the Hillard house. His family and Jen’s had lived side by side for decades, and Adam couldn’t help feeling protective toward Jen’s two great-uncles and toward her mother. He didn’t like the sadness he’d sensed in them, ever since his divorce from Jen and her refusal to visit Newport.

Adam gazed speculatively at the Hillards’ rooftop. That was a problem he could tackle–convincing Jen her family needed more from her. He just had to make sure his involvement didn’t go beyond that.

Where Jen was concerned, he wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.

CHAPTER THREE