‘Now—’ He sat down beside her and waited until she took a sip, turning his glass slowly between his hands as he said slowly, ‘I have a confession to make—’
Honor didn’t let him finish. ‘I knew it! You don’t have them. You’ve already thrown them away!’ she interrupted bleakly. Suddenly it didn’t seem the most favourable of the worst-case scenarios she had lined up after all.
That day beside the pool she had been so grateful of any excuse to stay that she had meekly let Adam think that he had threatened her into submission, but in the magic week that followed she had had time to regret her weakness. Did he still have those letters or didn’t he? Was he a control freak or an opportunist? In the end she had taken matters into her own hands and begun her surreptitious quest.
Meanwhile, although she had continued to perform all her regular work without hindrance, somehow something was always coming up to stop her from completing the Blake pamphlet...usually Adam himself. He was working in his own office downstairs but he seemed to have a sixth sense operating, for whenever she got to the point of calling up his file on her computer with the intent of fixing the final layout he would arrive with additional inclusions that necessitated editing or rewriting several other passages.
He had also insisted that in order to be fully involved in the project she had to know the people and places she was writing for and about. Nearly every day he whisked her away for a few hours to explore some interesting new corner of the sprawling Blake empire, providing her in the process with her first true inkling of what an important man he was, and the incredible weight of responsibility he now bore on his broad shoulders.
Often they had Sara chatting along in tow, a slyly observant chaperon, apparently perfectly happy but still rigidly avoiding the subject of school. Adam had gone into Auckland one day to see the headmistress, gaining her agreement to keep Sara at home a bit longer as long as she undertook to do several hours’ set schoolwork a day. He had taken Honor with him, dropping her at a radio station in the morning where she’d spent the day recording a new set of station promos.
‘If you knew I didn’t have them, why were you searching my office?’ Adam asked with impeccable logic.
She took another hurried sip, then a full-throated swallow. It lubricated her thoughts considerably and warmed her hollow stomach.
‘I thought you might have just misplaced them. You have an awful lot of paperwork floating around here, and I thought if I had a look around...’ She drank thirstily. It gave her something to do with her hands and her flapping mouth. Why didn’t he help her? This was supposed to be his
confession! ‘Do you think I could have another of these?’
Adam looked down at his full glass, then put it down and silently got up to fetch her another one, a little larger than the first.
‘You should have just told me,’ she continued as he came back beside her. ‘I would have understood. I mean, I wouldn’t have been offended or anything. I realise you must have found them hideously embarrassing—’
‘Must I?’
His quiet tone soothed her fears. ‘I mean, let’s face it, we all do things that we later regret. I don’t want you to think that I thought you thought I would take you seriously...’ She frowned as she heard how complicated that sounded. Was that what she had meant to say? She didn’t know, so she decided to put it another way. ‘Not that I have men writing me passionate love-letters so often I’m blasé about it or anything, but you have to take that kind of thing with a grain of salt if you’re sensible...’
‘And you’re very sensible.’
She was glad he understood that. ‘Yes.’
‘So sensible that you wrote back and told me very sensibly to stop writing such nonsense to you.’
Honor went scarlet and choked on the dregs of her whisky. He obligingly thumped her back until she got herself under control. By then her eyes were streaming.
He took a slightly limp, rain-spotted handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and she scrubbed her eyes with it fiercely, glad she hadn’t got around to putting on her make-up. Dining with Tania was always a case of Full War-Paint Will Be Worn. At least having a model as an elder sister had meant she could hold her own in the skill of application, even if she didn’t have the other woman’s prime raw material to work with.
‘You know very well—’
‘Ah, but that’s the catch. I don’t. You see, I’ve never written any passionate love-letters to you, so how could I have received replies to them? The only correspondence I’ve ever had with you are those amiable and argumentative, touching and funny letters we exchange once a month—’
‘But that’s impossible—they were in your handwriting—they were addressed to me—that is, to Helen—but they came to me!’ She was shocked by his absurd attempt to deny what they both knew were the facts. This was his grand confession?
‘But not hand-addressed. The envelopes were computer printed, weren’t they? Because after the first few letters I formatted your address-label into my word-processing files.’
‘But the letters—’
‘Oh, the letters were mine, I admit that. But they weren’t yours. They were never meant for you...or for your sister. The only love-letters I’ve ever written in my life were sent years and years ago, when I was still in my impetuous youth, to a sweetheart I was head over heels in love with...’
‘I...I don’t understand.’ The whiskey fumes that had gone to her head were dispelled by a cold chill. She was very much afraid that she was beginning to understand what he was trying, very gently, to break to her.
Another Helen? Not Helen Sheldon? Not her sister?
The magnitude of his revelation hit Honor like an avalanche.
My God, there was yet another gorgeous woman haunting his past! She couldn’t imagine him being unfaithful to his flawless Mary so that meant that Helen must have pre-dated her, a young man’s first dream of passion where Mary had been the paragon of his maturity.
And every ‘darling’, every ‘sweeting’, every romantic word of Shakespeare and John Donne...‘If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desir’d, and got, t’was but a dreame of thee’...every dear, delicious loop and curl of every exquisite, erotic word that Honor had treasured was so much meaningless gibberish! It wasn’t the shining beauty of her inner soul revealed to him on paper that had seduced him into his intense love-affair with words, it was the ghostly image of a former lover preserved!