A Gift of Love Read online

  “Before you go – we have to –“ the judge began, but Spence intervened. “You can congratulate me in a few minutes, Larry,” he said smoothly. “I’ll meet you in the library, where it’s quiet, as soon as I take Corey upstairs. There’s a cab front to take you home after we talk.”

  In the space of time it took to leave the gazebo and start down the hall to her suite, Corey’s emotions had plummeted from an enthusiastic high over the outstanding photographs she was certain they’d gotten to an inexplicable depression, which she tried to rationalize as a normal letdown after a day of extraordinary tension and hard work. She knew Spence wasn’t to blame. He’d played his role as surrogate bridegroom with a combination of unshakable calm and boyish enthusiasm that had been utterly charming.

  She was still trying to sort out her tangled emotions when he opened the door to her suite and stepped aside, but when she started to walk past him, he stopped her. “What’s wrong, beautiful?”

  “Oh, please,” she said on a choking laugh, “don’t say anything sweet, or I’ll burst into tears.”

  “You were a gorgeous bride.”

  “I’m warning you,” she said chokily.

  He drew her into his arms, cupping the back of her head and pressing her face to his heart in a gesture that was so tender and so unexpected that it moved her another step closer to tears. “It was such as awful farce,” she whispered.

  “Most weddings are an awful farce,” he said in quiet amusement. “It’s what comes afterward that matters.”

  “I suppose so,” she said absently.

  “Think about the weddings you’ve seen,” he continued, ignoring the startled looks of several wedding guests who saw them through the open door as the guests walked down the hall. “Half the time the groom is hungover or the bridge has morning sickness. It’s pitiful,” he teased.

  Her shoulders shook with a teary laugh, and Spence smiled because the sound of her laughter had always delighted him, and making her laugh had always made him feel as if he were better, stronger, nicer than he really was. “All things considered, this is about as close to a perfect wedding as you could hope for.”

  “Not to me it isn’t. I want a Christmas wedding.”

  “Is that the only thing you dislike about this wedding – the season of the year, I mean? If there’s anything I can do to make you happier about all this, tell me and I’ll do it.”

  You could love me, Corey thought before she could stop herself, then she pushed the thought aside. “There is absolutely nothing more you can do beyond what you’ve done. I’m being ridiculous and overemotional. Weddings do that to me,” she lied with a smile as she stepped back.

  He accepted that. “I’ll deal with Lattimore, and then I want to change clothes. In the meantime, I’ll have some champagne sent up here, and then I’ll come up and share it with you, how does that sound?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  Sixteen

  A SHOWER HAD PARTIALLY REVIVED COREY’S SPIRITS, AND SHE surveyed the selection of clothes hanging in her closet, wondering what the appropriate attire was for a stand-in bride who was about to have champagne with a surrogate groom after their pretend wedding. “This will work,” she said with relief as reached for the billowy cream silk pants and long tunic she’d brought along because they were flexible enough to wear to almost any social event in a Newport mansion.

  She was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, brushing her hair, when she heard Spence knock on the door and then let himself in. “I’ll be right there,” she called, pausing long enough to put on pearl earrings. She straightened and stepped back from the mirror. She looked much happier and more contented than she felt, she decided with relief. Because what she felt was… haunted. She had worn a bridal gown and veil and stood beside Spence in a rose-covered gazebo while he held her hand in his, smiling tenderly into her eyes. He had even slipped a ring on her finger afterward… The memories of their “wedding” seemed to be permanently imprinted on her mind. No, she told herself, not permanently, only temporarily. Memories would soon give way to the reality. The wedding had been a hoax, the “ring” a piece of gold ribbon with a wire in it. The reality made her ache.

  Spence had taken off his tuxedo jacket, loosened his tie, and opened the top buttons of his formal shirt. He looked every bit as sexy and elegant that way as he had during the wedding; he did not, however, look nearly as relaxed. His jaw was rigid, and his movements were abrupt as he ignored the champagne chilling in a gold bucket and jerked the stopper out of one of the liquor decanters on the cabinet. He poured some into a crystal tumbler and lifted the glass to his mouth. “What are you doing?” Corey asked, watching him take two deep swallows of straight bourbon.

  He lowered the glass and looked at her over his shoulder. “I’m having a very stiff drink. And now I’ll fix one for you.”

  “No thanks,” Corey said with a shudder. “I’d rather have the champagne.”

  “Take my advice,” he said almost bitterly, “have a regular drink.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re going to need it.” He fixed her a drink that at least had ice cubes and some club soda to dilute it and handed it to her. Corey sipped it, waiting for him to explain, but instead of talking, he stared at the glass in his hand.

  “Spence, whatever is wrong, it can’t be worse than you’re making it seem to me right now.”

  “I hope you still feel that way in a few minutes,” he said grimly.

  “What is it?” Corey said desperately. “Is someone ill?”

  “No.” He put down his drink, then he walked over to the fireplace and braced his hands on the mantel, staring into the empty grate. It was a pose of such abject defeat that Corey felt a fierce surge of protective tenderness. She walked up behind him and laid her hand on his broad shoulder. It was the first time since coming to Newport that she had voluntarily touched him except when he was kissing her, and she felt his muscles tense beneath her hand. “Please don’t make me wonder like this, you’re scaring me!”

  “An hour ago, my idiotic niece called to tell me she was now married to her beloved restaurateur.”

  “So far, that sounds good.”

  “That was the only good part of the phone call.”

  Visions of car crashes and ambulances flashed through Corey’s mind. “What was the bad part, Spence?”

  He hesitated, then he turned and looked directly at her. “The bad part is that, during our conversation, we also discussed the elopement letter she left for me last night. It appears that in her haste to explain how you’d influenced her decision to elope, Joy was a little remiss about the verbs she used. Specifically, she failed to clearly differentiate between past and present tense.”

  “What do you mean she explained how I influenced her?” Corey asked warily.

  “Read the letter,” he said, taking two folded pieces of paper out of his pants pocket and handing Corey the one on top.

  Corey saw at a glance what he was talking about.

  Corey told me she loved you and wanted to have your baby, she said you’re the only man she’s ever felt that way about, and that’s why she’s never married anyone else. Uncle Spence, I love Will. I want to have his babies someday. That’s why I can’t marry anyone else…

  Despite the mortification she felt, Corey managed to affect a calm, dismissive smile as she handed the letter back to him. “In the first place, I was describing how I felt about you when I was a teenager, not an adult. Secondly, the conclusion she drew about why I haven’t married was hers, not mine.”

  “As you can see, that’s not quite the way it read.”

  “Is – is that all that’s bothering you?” Corey said, relieved that he wasn’t going to challenge her explanation.

  Instead of answering, he shoved his hands into his pockets and studied her in impassive silence for so long that Corey took a nervous sip of her drink. “What’s bothering me,” he said bluntly, “is that I don’t know how you feel about me now.”
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br />   Since she didn’t have the slightest idea how he felt about her and he wasn’t volunteering any information about it, Corey didn’t think he had any right to ask the question or expect an answer. “I think you’re one of the handsomest men I’ve ever married!” she joked.

  He was not amused. “This is no time to be evasive, believe me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I know damned well you feel something for me now, even if it’s just common garden-variety lust.”

  She gaped at him. “Does your ego need a boost?”

  “Answer the question,” he ordered.

  Struggling desperately to put a light tone on the matter and end it, she said, “Let me put in this way: If we ever do an article on ‘Great Kissing’, you’ll be featured in the Top Ten, and I’ll give you my vote. Well?” she teased. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’d be accused of bias for voting for your own husband.”

  “Don’t call yourself my husband,” Corey said. “It isn’t funny.”

  “It isn’t a joke.”

  “That’s what I just said,” Corey pointed out impatiently.

  “We’re married, Corey.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “It may sound ridiculous, but it is also true.”

  Corey searched his impassive features, shaking her head in denial of what she saw in his eyes. “The wedding ceremony was a sham. The judge was a plumber.”

  “No, his father and his uncle are plumbers. He’s a judge.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Instead of replying, he handed the second folded piece of paper of her.

  Corey opened it and stared. It was a copy of a marriage license with Corey’s name on it and Spence’s name on it. It was dated that day and signed by Judge Lawrence E. Lattimore.”

  “We’re married, Corey.”

  Her hand closed into an involuntary fist, crumpling the paper; her chest constricted into a knot of confused anguish. “Were you playing some sort of sick joke on me?” she whispered. “Why would you want to humiliate this way?”

  “Try to understand. I told you what Joy said, and I thought this was what you wanted –“

  “You arrogant bastard!” she whispered brokenly. “Are you trying to tell me that you actually married me out of pity and guilt, and you thought I’d like it? Am I so pathetic to you that you thought I’d be happy to settle for getting married at someone else’s wedding, in someone else’s gown, with a piece of wire ribbon for a wedding ring?”

  Spence saw the tears in her eyes, and he caught her by the shoulders. “Listen to me! Corey, I married you because I love you.”

  “You love me,” she scoffed, her shoulders shaking with laughter, her face wet with tears. “You love me…”

  “Yes, dammit, I do.”

  She laughed harder and the tears came faster. “You don’t even know what love is,” she sobbed. “You ‘loved me’ so much that you didn’t even bother to propose. You didn’t see anything wrong with turning my wedding into one great big joke.”

  From her perspective it was all true, Spence knew that, and the knowledge was as painful to him as the tears racing down her pale cheeks and the anguish in her eyes. “I understand how you feel about me right now.”

  “Oh, no you don’t!” She twisted out of his grasp and angrily brushed tears off her pale cheeks. “But I’ll try to make it clear once and for all; I don’t want you! I didn’t want you before, I don’t want you now, and I will never want you!” Her palm crashed against his cheek with enough force to snap his head sideways. “Is that clear enough for you?” Whirling on her heel, Corey started for the closet where her suitcases were. “I’m not spending the night in the same house with you! When I get to Houston, I’m going to start annulment proceedings, and if you dare try to oppose me, I’ll have you and that drunken judge arrested in less time than it took you to arrange this marriage! Is that clear?”

  “I have no intention of opposing an annulment,” he said in a glacial voice. “In fact,” he added as he tossed something onto the bed and walked to the door, “I suggest you use that to cover the cost of your attorney.” The door slammed shut behind him.

  Corey collapsed against the wall and buried her face in her hands, her body shaking with silent sobs.

  At last, a numbness finally swept over her, and she shoved away from the wall and went over to the telephone. She asked the servant who answered to locate her mother and grandmother and tell them t come up to her room immediately, then she instructed him to find Mike MacNeil and have him call her.

  When Mike called, Corey told him something had come up, and she had to fly home tonight. The phone rang as soon as she hung it up. “Miss Foster,” the butler coolly informed her, “Mr. Addison’s car is on its way to the front and will be waiting for you there as soon as you are ready to leave.”

  Despite the fact that she was desperate to get out of that house, Corey was irrationally infuriated at being summarily ejected from the premises that way. She finished packing in record time and closed her suitcases. As she put the last one on the floor, she remembered the object her “husband” had tossed onto the bed. Expecting to see a money clip with bills in it, she glanced toward the head of the bed, where she thought it had landed.

  Lying atop a pile of ice blue satin pillows, glittering in the pale light from the setting sun, was a spectacular diamond ring that looked as if it should have belonged to a duchess.

  Her mother and grandmother knocked on her door, and Corey called to them to come in while she picked up her purse and reached for her suitcases. Mrs. Foster took one look at Corey’s pale face, saw the suitcases, and came to a full stop. “Dear God, what’s wrong?”

  Corey told them in a few brief sentences and nodded toward the ring on the bed as she left. “Please see that he gets that back. Then tell him if he ever comes near me again, I’ll swear out a warrant!”

  After Corey left, Mrs. Foster looked at her mother in stunned silence, then she finally said, “What a stupid thing for Spence to have done!”

  “He deserves to be horsewhipped,” Gram decreed without animosity.

  “Corey will never forgive him for this. Never. And Spence is impossibly proud. He won’t ask her again,” said Mrs. Foster with a sigh.

  Her mother walked over to the bed and picked up the ring, turning it in her fingers with a smile. “Spence will have to send a bodyguard with Corey when she wears this.”

  Seventeen

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE WON’T SIGN THE RELEASES SO THAT we can use the pictures we took in Newport?” Corey exploded.

  “I didn’t say he had flatly refused to sign them,” Diana said carefully. In the week since Corey had been back from Newport, she’d thrown herself into a dozen projects to keep from thinking about either her marriage or the annulment proceedings she’d started, and she looked exhausted. “He said he would sign them, but only if you brought them to him personally tomorrow tonight.”

  “I am not going back to Newport,” she warned.

  “You won’t have to. Spence will be in Houston taking care of some business.”

  “I don’t want to see him in Houston or anywhere else.”

  “I think he knows that,” Diana said wryly. “You not only started annulment proceedings, you asked for a legal injunction to prevent him from coming near you.”

  “What do you think he’d do if we put the magazine out without the releases?”

  “He said to tell you that if we do, his attorneys will dine on our corporate carcass.”

  “I hate that man,” she said wearily.

  Diana wisely refrained from arguing that point and stuck to the matter at hand. “There’s a relatively painless way around this. He said he’s staying at the River Oaks house, so tomorrow night-“

  Furious at the control he was exerting over the magazine and over her, Corey said, “Tomorrow night is the Orchid Ball. He’ll have to sign the releases during the day, instead.”

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nbsp; “I explained to Spence we’re one of the sponsors and have to be there. Spence said he would expect you at the house before the ball, at seven o’clock.”

  “I am not going there alone.”

  “Okay,” Diana said, sounding as relieved as she felt. “Mother and I will wait in the car for you while you’re with Spence, then we’ll leave from there.”

  Eighteen

  COREY HADN’T BEEN BACK TO SPENCE’S HOUSE SINCE HIS grandmother lived there, and it seemed strange to be returning after so many years.

  She knew he’d leased the house to tenants who’d kept most of the servants on, and the place was as beautifully maintained as it had always been. Since Spence was staying there now, Corey assumed either he had decided to sell it and it was vacant, or else the people who’d lived there for years had moved out.

  All the carriage lights were lit on the front porch, just as they’d always been whenever guests were expected, but tonight, a strange colorful glow was visible through the closed draperies in what Corey knew was the living room.

  “I won’t be long,” Corey told Diana and her mother as she got out of the car and walked up the front steps.

  Clutching the release form in her hand, she rang the bell, her heart drumming harder as footsteps sounded in the foyer, and harder still when the door swung open and Mrs. Bradley’s former housekeeper said with a warm smile, “Good evening, Miss Foster. Mr. Addison is waiting for you in the living room.”

  Corey nodded, then she walked through the dimly lit foyer. Bracing herself for the impact of seeing Spence for the first time since that hideous scene in Newport, Corey rounded the corner and walked into the living room.

  Then she braced herself again, trying to assimilate what she was seeing.

  Spence was near the middle of the candlelit room, leaning casually against the grand piano with his arms crossed over his chest.

  He was wearing a tuxedo.