Prince of Ravenscar (Sherbrooke Brides 11)

Richard began pacing again. “Lily would understand. She always understood; she loved her family more than she ever loved you, Julian. I am not obsessed, damn you, Roxanne, I am not.”

“Were you going to kill me, Richard?” Roxanne asked.

“No. Manners would have taken you to the Continent, left you there. I swear to you, there was nothing about rape.”

Roxanne walked to him, stared him in the face, drew back her fist, and slammed it hard in his belly. He whooshed out breath, staggered a bit. “I don’t think you would have cared what Manners did to me. You are a coward, and you don’t deserve anything good in your miserable life. My sister asked you a good question: Why do you still wish to wed her after using her so abominably?”

Leah jumped to her feet. She looked at each of them, then her eyes came to rest on Julian. “It is all your fault. If you hadn’t murdered Lily, none of this would have happened.” She turned to Richard, her hands on her hips. “I find I agree with Roxanne. You are a coward, Richard, and you have no honor. Your father is right. You have grown twisted in your grief. As for Vicky, who knows what she is really thinking about anything. You are not a healthy man, Richard. What you are is pathetic.”

Leah walked out of the room, not looking back.

Julian looked at Richard. “I believe, finally, I know what happened to Lily.”

72

Hardcross Manor

THAT EVENING

Julian said quietly from the doorway of the drawing room, “Vicky.”

She looked up from the book she was reading. She didn’t move, merely regarded him without expression. “You should not be here, Prince. Surely you are still too weak from your injury. You were stabbed only two days ago.”

He had to keep standing, he thought, despite the vicious gnawing in his side. He would keep standing. He had to finish this. Now. He said, “I am well enough.”

“Why is Richard standing behind you? He might have a gun, you know; he might shoot you and bury you near to where you shot Lily. Don’t you think that fitting? You’re here as well, Papa. What is this?”

Baron Purley walked into the drawing room and sat down next to his daughter. He picked up her hand. It lay limp between his strong ones. He studied her long fingers, so much like Lily’s. “Would you like to have a Season in London, Vicky?”

“I? Now? Why should I?”

The baron said, “Did you not tell Leah you didn’t wish to have a Season because you might meet a prince and he would kill you, like Lily was killed? But you know, Vicky, you know the prince did not kill Lily. You know it.”

Vicky grew very still. She stared at each man’s face.

Julian said, “I know, Vicky. I know.”

She looked from her father’s face to her brother’s, both set and still. She looked down at her father’s big hands. She shook her head.

Julian said, “I know Lily never had a lover, Vicky. It simply wasn’t in her, not the girl I knew all my life, not the girl I married. I also could see no guilt in anyone else. So I was forced to face it—she either killed herself for some reason I simply could not fathom, or something else entirely happened. For the life of me, I couldn’t find my way to the truth. Until Leah came into the room today wearing Lily’s grown, her hair dressed like Lily’s hair. By you, Vicky.

“Tell us, Vicky. Tell us what happened that afternoon in the garden. Tell us what happened between you and Lily.”

Vicky never looked away from him, but Julian knew she wasn’t seeing him, she was seeing her sister on that hot, long-ago afternoon in the wildly blooming garden.

She said, her voice far away, as if reciting a story she’d read, “You still don’t know anything, Prince—particularly, the truth. The fact is Lily was going to leave me.”

“What do you mean she was going to leave you?” Baron Purley squeezed her white limp hand, but there seemed to be no life in that hand. He said gently, “Vicky, Lily was here nearly every day after she married the prince. When he was gone from Ravenscar on his shipping business, she spent entire days here; she even slept here in her old bedroom. I saw very little change. What do you mean she was going to leave you?”

There was no pain in Vicky’s simple words as she spoke them, her voice utterly without feeling. “I killed her. I killed my own sister.”

Julian clutched the back of a wing chair. He felt nausea and pain, and couldn’t think. Then the sickness passed, leaving only the pain. “Tell us why you killed her, Vicky.” He walked slowly to sit on her other side. He raised his hand and cupped her cheek. “It’s time, you know, time to understand what happened, so all of us can place it in the past, where it belongs.”

Richard was still standing by the open doorway, his face deathly white. He said, “Please, Vicky, tell us.”

Vicky looked again at her hand held between her father’s big ones. She raised her eyes to Julian’s face. “Lily loved you, Prince, she loved you too much, more than I wanted her to, but since I knew you all my life, knew you liked me, I wasn’t all that upset when she married you. She would live at Ravenscar. If you went to London, I would go with you. Everything would continue on the way it always had.

“I don’t think you realized it, but our souls were one, Lily and I, and we both knew it, even though Lily never said the words to me. From the very beginning I recognized I was part of her, and she was the very best part of me. She was my mother, my sister, my very best friend, and she loved me without reservation. But then it happened.”