Legacy of Secrets (57 page)

“Jayzus,” she exclaimed afterward, flinging herself onto the sofa in front of the drawing room fire. “I’m so happy, Finn O’Keeffe, just to have found you again. My old friend.”

He sat beside her and put his arm around her. “Is that all we were, Lily? Friends?”

Lily looked at his thin, handsome face close to hers, older now and with lines of experience on it; she felt his hard body against her breasts; and she looked into the eyes of the one man she knew she had always loved. The fizz of excitement traveled the length of her body from her toes to
her loins to her belly to her breasts, and then to her lips as she kissed him.
This is what I want,
she told herself, wrapping herself even closer to him.
This is what I have always wanted. Ever since I was old enough to know about love.

Finn’s hands were caressing her and she never wanted him to stop. Dermot had almost destroyed her and Ned Sheridan had redeemed her, but Finn was the man she had always loved. She would do anything he asked, anything. Only not now.

She pushed him away. “I can’t,” she said shakily. “Not here …”

“Then come to New York.”

“Tomorrow,” she agreed quickly. “I’ll be there.”

He walked her home through the quiet, cold, gaslit streets, pausing often to kiss in the shadows. They said a formal good night at her front door and she tucked the card he had given her with his New York address into her purse.

“Tomorrow evening,” she whispered. “At seven.”

She saw the smile light up his eyes. “I’ll be waiting,” he promised.

I
T WAS SNOWING IN
N
EW
Y
ORK,
fat whirling flakes that made the sidewalks slick and decorated Lily’s black hair like wedding confetti as she hurried into Finn’s apartment building. She was wearing her golden sable coat and a matching Russian-style hat, and when Finn opened the door and saw her, he laughed and said that with her pink nose and pink cheeks she looked exactly like a little frozen golden bear.

“But it’s you who were the bear,” she said, laughing. “Don’t you remember, when I made you dance for Ciel?”

“I remember,” he said, unwrapping her from her coat.

“Did you ever forgive me for that?” she demanded, turning in his arms and smiling at him.

“I forgave you for that all right, and you know it.”

“And … for everything else I ever did that hurt you?”

He shrugged. “You know everyone always forgives you everything, Lily. That’s the way it’s always been.”

“Oh, Finn,” she cried happily, reaching up and linking her hands around his neck. “I can’t believe we are really here. Together again. Almost like in the old days.”

“Only better,” he murmured, his face in her hair, “because now you and I are equal, Lily. I can hold you in my arms. And I would never have dared do that—in the old days.”

Her cold lips met his and they clung together, drinking each other in. Then she pushed him away, laughing. “I can’t breathe,” she complained. He began to take the pins from her hair. It reached her waist in a shining black wave and he ran his hands through it, marveling at its scented softness.

He took her hand and they walked together into his bedroom. It was dark and masculine with deep-green walls, and tall shelves filled with books. There was a Turkish rug on the parquet floor and a wide bed covered with a gold velvet spread.

Finn drew her into a circle of lamplight by the bed and kissed her again. He unbuttoned the dozen tiny buttons down the back of her soft violet woolen dress. It fell from her shoulders and she turned and slid her arms around his neck and began to kiss him. Her longing for him was like an ache inside her, she thought of nothing else, only his hands on her bare skin, holding her closer and closer.

She slipped off her chemise and stood in front of him, and he stared at her as though she were a vision. Filled with happiness, she said, “It’s all right, Finn darling. This is the way it’s meant to be.” And she walked into his arms again and he kissed her and then lifted her up and lay her on the gold velvet bed.

Their eyes never left each other as he stripped off his clothes and walked toward her. He removed her undergarments as gently as if he were unwrapping a precious porcelain statue, and then he looked at her, naked in his bed. His eyes traveled from the tips of her pink toes, along her
smooth legs past the slender curve of her hips, the deeper curve of her waist, and the delicious curves of her breasts. He saw the dusky rose flush of excitement on her cheeks and her cloud of glossy black hair spread like a cape around her. Her parted red lips waited for his kisses and her brilliantly shining sapphire eyes looked unashamedly into his as she flaunted her nakedness to him.

“You are the most beautiful girl I have ever seen,” he said, taking her foot and kissing each of her perfect toes.

“And have you seen many, then, Finn?” she asked, suddenly jealous.

“Enough to compare.”

She held out her arms and said passionately, “I think I have been waiting all my life for you.”

They clung together, flesh against flesh, lips against lips, and she felt him tremble with desire for her. And when he finally made love to her it was with all the fire and passion she had craved from Ned. “God, don’t ever stop, don’t ever leave me, don’t, don’t,” she screamed in passion, and he made love to her again.

Afterward they lay exhausted, still entwined. He lifted his head and looked at her. Their eyes locked, filled with new knowledge of each other, new intimacies, new savagery, new tenderness. “I always loved you,” he said quietly. And he meant it.

She stroked his face and he kissed her hand. “And I have always loved you,” she said. “I suppose I always knew it, but it was forbidden.”

“No longer,” he said, and she smiled.

“No longer,” she agreed.

He sat up and took the love-knot necklace from the table by the bed. He dangled it in front of her eyes, smiling at her.

“Then you didn’t sell it after all,” she exclaimed.

“How could I?” he asked ambiguously. “After all, it belonged to you.”

“And so,” she reminded him, “did the fifty gold sovereigns.”

He shrugged nonchalantly. “They always say evil comes to those who do evil. Somebody stole them from me.”

She laughed. “Poor Finn. You just couldn’t win, could you?”

“Not until now,” he said, sliding the diamonds around her neck and fastening them.

She lay back on the pillows in her cloud of hair, naked but for the diamond necklace, and he smiled a satisfied little smile. “You will never know,” he said softly, bending to kiss her again, “just how many times I have pictured you exactly like this.” And he lay down next to her and took her in his arms, feeling like a man whose fantasies had all just come true.

W
ELL NOW, TODAY IS A DAY
of slanting rain. The droplets running down the drawing room window obscure my view of the lawn, and I’m afraid my lovely tall daisies are being crushed beneath the torrent and the wind is wreaking havoc with the Gloire de Dijon roses, whose scent for the one month they blossom is worth waiting the rest of the year for. “Elemental,” I suppose you might call our Irish weather. But it’s nothing at all like that long, cold New York winter that Lily spent as Finn’s mistress.

Lily told Ciel that they devoured each other with their passion that winter. Somehow she deluded her poor husband into believing she was doing charity work. She took a permanent suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, but she rarely used it. She was in Finn’s bed in the morning when he left for his office, and she was in his bed, waiting for him, when he came home again at night. I don’t know what she did in between. I don’t think she ever said. It wasn’t important. Except to Ned Sheridan.

Ned came back from his tour on a day when, quite by chance, Lily had just returned from a weekend in Boston and she was in her suite in the hotel. She knew she had to tell him and it pained her, but she was so wild for Finn, nothing else mattered.

She told him bluntly that it was over and his face turned
gray with shock. “But I want to marry you,” he said, bewildered.

“You know I would never be happy married to an actor,” she said sadly. “I’ve told you often enough. It would never have worked, Ned. You’re always on tour, going from city to city—it’s all trains and hotel rooms and cold theaters.”

Stricken, he stared at her. He said, “But I am an actor. I can’t change that, Lily. What else would I do?”

“Nothing, darling Ned,” she said soothingly. “Your career is everything to you. It’s more important than I am. And after all, who am I to deprive the theater of one of its brightest stars. Besides,” she added, lying, “I must go back to my husband.”

As he left she said, “We shall always be friends, Ned, shan’t we? I couldn’t imagine my life without you in it somewhere.” And he, poor darling sap, grabbed as usual at the crumbs from her bountiful table.

“Always,” he agreed, pinning all his hopes on that one little word.

But Lily had no time even for a friend, and she dropped Ned from her life again as easily as she had forgotten about her child, born on Nantucket ten years before, because all she could think of was Finn.

A
COUPLE OF MONTHS LATER,
wounded and unable to forget her, Ned married his costar, Juliet Scott. Lily read about it in the
New York Herald.
“How could he get married?” she asked herself, bewildered. “When only a couple of months ago he was swearing undying love for me. Swearing he would always be my friend.”

Then she forgot him, because she found she was pregnant. She had almost felt the moment of impact when their bodies had joined together to make their child. It was all so wonderful and so completely different from the fear and
humiliation she had suffered the last time that she danced around the room with the sheer joy of it.

Their affair had been going on for five months. Spring was in the air and she calculated her baby would be born in October. She would have to divorce John and marry Finn. Because that’s what she wanted. To be Mrs. Finn O’Keeffe James. She could see her life stretching before her in a thousand shiny warm days of happiness.

They would buy a house in the country, because she didn’t want her son raised in the city, breathing all that dirty air. And she must find a good nanny for the boy and staff for the house, and oh, there would be a thousand and one things to keep her busy.

Once they were married they would entertain properly, and who knew better than she how that was done? They would have a host of friends and she and Finn would love each other forever, just as passionately and completely as they did now. She shivered with excitement, remembering their animalistic forays in bed. Afterward they were tender with each other, but when they made love she demanded his power and passion, and she got it.

They were such a perfect match, she told herself contentedly as she took a leisurely bath, preparing for Finn’s return at seven o’clock. She put on a simple dress: white with tiny blue flowers sprinkled over it. She knotted the blue sash tightly around her waist, thinking with satisfaction that she would not be able to do that for much longer. She tied back her hair with a matching ribbon, splashed on her spicy oriental cologne, and pinned a bunch of violets at her shoulder. She stared at herself in the mirror; she looked like the seventeen-year-old girl she had once been.

She heard Finn come in and she ran from the bedroom to greet him, her face alight with her secret. She was enchanted by the new life she saw in front of her and she couldn’t wait to tell him all about it. He was Finn: her childhood friend, her confidant, her morning-racer across the strand at Ardnavarna. He was the only man in the world who truly understood her, and their new life together
would rise like a phoenix from the dead ashes of the past.

She told him excitedly about the baby and her plans for their new life and he stood by the window, staring down into the street as though she were talking about someone else. “And I’m sure it will be a son,” she said happily. “I feel it in my bones.”

Finn knew the moment of truth had finally arrived. Even when he was with her, he had never allowed himself to forget the wounds she had caused him. They festered like an old sore constantly picked at, and he deliberately kept them fresh to remind himself, when the time was right, of what he must do. He meant to get even with her, even if it killed him to do it.

“So,” he said coldly, “then I have finally accomplished the deed I was credited with ten years ago, Lily. Now you can go back to your nice husband and bring up your child. It’s as likely to be his as it is mine, and there is no way to prove otherwise. You’ve done a good job in keeping our little affair secret. He probably doesn’t even suspect.”

She stared at him, her mouth open and her eyes wide with shock, and he added the final knife thrust. “I’ll not be marrying you, Lily Molyneux. You’re too grand for the likes of myself.”

She twisted her hands together, shaking her head in disbelief. It had to be some strange joke he was playing on her. It wasn’t happening; it couldn’t be true. She knew he loved her.