The Last Time We Met - By Lily Lang Page 0,36

and water. He set a guard on her door and took away all of her clothes except an awful old night dress so she couldn’t run away. Even I wasn’t permitted to see her. She finally collapsed with a fever after six months. She was very ill; the doctor did not think she would live. But she asked for you—repeatedly.”

Jason made a sound in his throat. He felt his hands flex and close. William did not notice.

“When she finally recovered, she was never the same again. Father was pleased, of course. She had finally become the docile, quiet daughter he wanted. But when he tried to announce her betrothal to Lord Linley the year she was twenty-one, she told Father he could kill her or he could beat her or he could even drag her to the altar, but nothing he said or did to her could induce her to marry Linley.”

William paused and drew a breath as he gazed out onto the rolling parks and gardens of the land.

“Then, four years ago, Father was thrown from his horse during a hunt,” he continued. “He never walked again. Miranda nursed him faithfully. She never left his side, though he was moody and irritable. She eased considerably the last years of his life. When he died, and Uncle Clarence and his family came to Thornwood Hall, and they were—” He broke off. “Jason?”

The door clicked behind him. Jason had heard enough.

Miranda sat on the rim of a fountain in her mother’s beloved gardens. Like the rest of Thornwood Hall, the gardens had suffered under her uncle’s stewardship, but she imagined how it as she would make it: the ivy rambling across the walls and entwined lovingly around the pillars of the graceful Roman folly; Queen Anne’s lace frothing onto the cobblestone; the roses her mother had loved, dark as spilled wine, pink as the heart of shells, white as snow at dawn, growing in wild, fragrant profusion across the arbors and trellises. After Jason had been sent away, after her father had died, after William had left for Eton and her uncle had invaded her home, this garden had been the one place she could come to when she needed comfort, needed escape, needed to feel close to her mother. Now she drew a slow breath and rested her head in her hands. She felt very tired and terribly alone.

Her uncle was gone. He would never return, and Jason, having fulfilled his part of their bargain, would be gone soon too. Perhaps as soon as the morning. Her heart cried out in violent protest; to have to learn a second time to live without him would destroy her. But somehow, it had to be done. She would do it. She was not Emmett Thornwood’s daughter for nothing. Surely there was something for her still.

She opened her eyes; the beauty of the night settled around her; the stars above her shining bright and clear. Yes. There was something. Thornwood Hall was hers again; all the old retainers her uncle had dismissed had come back. William would return to school, of course, when the term began again, but he would come home for holidays. In a year’s time he would start at Oxford. And someday, not so long from now, he would take a bride. Miranda knew no home was big enough for two women; she would have to go somewhere, she supposed. The dower house, perhaps. It would need repairs, but William would certainly not begrudge the expense. She would become the favorite aunt of her nieces and nephews; she would learn to knit possibly, and keep cats, and grow roses.

The days, the months, the years seemed to stretch endlessly before her, each one identical to the next, colorless and without meaning.

“Miranda.”

She lifted her head at the sound of her name, spoken in the tender accents so familiar to her from her girlhood. She could not stop the sudden, fierce joy that gripped her as Jason walked toward her in the twilight, his stride purposeful, his gaze intent. Ten years stood between them; he no longer loved her and would never love her again, but he was here, at Thornwood Hall, and if her heart must be ashes again in the morning, tonight she was alive.

“Jason.” She rose to her feet. His name on her lips was involuntary.

He had reached her. He stilled her with a touch, but nothing could still the sudden pounding of her heart.

In the next moment his lips