THE coast of Cornwall in the summertime could be picture perfect, what with its hidden coves and tiny villages nestled atop rugged grey cliffs. Cornwall in February, on the other hand, could be bleak, windswept, miserable and bitterly cold. It was February now, and the attic in Sienna’s crumbling manor house didn’t afford quite as much protection from the gale that had blown in as she’d have liked. There was a roof. There were damp stone walls all around her and a window that didn’t quite fit its rotting wooden frame any more. There were boxes.
A whole row of damp and mouldy boxes that Sienna and Lex had yet to look through.
‘I think your roof leaks.’ The mildness of Lex’s delivery was a masterful example of frustration kept on a very tight leash. He’d said very little about the sorry state of the house. His eyes had said plenty though. He was gearing up for a reckoning, an offer to fix things, probably a health and safety lecture. She didn’t want to hear any of it. ‘And I think I’ve found a box of condolence cards,’ he added.
Sienna clambered her way over the refuse of her mother’s life until she reached Lex’s side. She stripped off her gloves and tucked them under her arm, straightened the woollen beanie hat on her head, delved into the box, and opened up one of the cards. Bingo.
‘Where do you want them?’
‘The kitchen.’ It was warmer in the kitchen. Soothing cups of tea could be made in the kitchen. There was gin in the kitchen and a girl never knew when a shot might come in handy.
They’d been home two days, during which time they’d opened up the house, aired the rooms, and shopped for groceries in the village. For all his wealth and the pampering that usually went with it, Lex seemed to be enjoying living life in the rough. He fitted, whether it be up here in the attic with cobwebs in his hair or naked in her bed rousing her with kisses and caresses she was powerless to resist. No Rudy, no pampering, no trappings of wealth. He didn’t need them. He fitted her.
Two hours later, Sienna sat at the kitchen table with the woodstove throwing welcome heat and the ancient light fittings throwing as much light on the situation as they could, aided in their task by the bronze-based lamp Sienna had brought in from the dining room.
‘How old is the wiring in this place?’ murmured Lex.
‘Older than the ark,’ she said dryly. ‘And before you nobly refrain to comment any further on the state of the wiring, yes, it needs replacing. It’s on the list.’
‘That would be the list on the side of the fridge,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s a long list.’
‘I live for challenge.’
Lex’s gaze slid to the piles and piles of musty, water-stained condolence cards on the table in front of them and then to the number of cards still in the box. ‘This is a good thing.’
‘Here’s one from your aunt Sophie,’ said Sienna. ‘With Deepest Sympathy…I think I like the simple cards best. The ones that stay far, far away from promises of heavenly bliss and a better place.’ Sienna did better with this task when she concentrated on the myriad ways the greeting card companies portrayed death rather than the names and handwriting of the people who had known and loved her mother.
‘I like this one.’ Lex held up a card with a picture of an English bulldog in an armchair on the front. ‘It’s from the secretary of the Cressingdon Rotary Club.’
‘It is a nice change from lilies,’ said Sienna. She glanced down into the box and sighed. ‘Anyone for gin?’
‘Gin will make you morbid,’ he said.
‘I’m already there. I’m hoping gin will give me the fortitude to keep going.’
‘Have some ice cream instead.’
‘I would, but a certain yacht-building, frou-frou cooking fiend has spoilt me for all other ice cream but his.’ Sienna sighed heavily. So much for Lex doing remarkably well living without the trappings of wealth. Sienna was having withdrawal symptoms. ‘I miss Rudy.’
‘Half of these haven’t even been opened,’ muttered Lex. ‘This one’s a letter. Looks like it’s from your father. It’s addressed to your mother.’ His gaze met hers, wary and concerned. ‘Want me to read it?’
‘No, I’ll do it.’
Lex handed it over reluctantly, as if he could sense her sudden dread. ‘Sienna, you don’t have to do this.’
But that was where he was wrong. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I do.’ More than ever she wanted to understand her parents’ love-hate relationship. Dissect it, understand it, be free of it.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ said Lex.
‘Thanks.’
The kettle had boiled and Lex had made instant coffee for them both by the time Sienna had worked her way through both pages of closely written prose. ‘Anything interesting?’ he asked as she set the letter aside and he set the coffee in front of her.
‘No. Nothing to do with the paintings, at any rate. My father was explaining why he’d been bedding one of my mother’s acquaintances. Apparently my mother drove him to it. She wasn’t earthy enough. Passionate enough. He called her a porcelain doll and just as cold. It was a hurtful letter. He’d written it that way deliberately. I’m glad she never read it.’ She picked up her coffee and sipped, grateful for the bracing hit of caffeine on a body that was running low.
‘That’s not how I remember Mary,’ said Lex. ‘Beautiful, yes. With porcelain skin. Gracious and graceful and sometimes a little reserved around people she didn’t know. Sometimes there was a sadness about her, but she wasn’t cold.’
‘No.’ Sienna slid him a grateful glance and a watery smile. ‘She wasn’t cold at all. He didn’t love her, not properly. Not the way she should have been loved.’ She tossed the letter aside and reached for the next envelope. ‘He didn’t love anyone.’
‘Do you know much about your father’s background, Sienna?’ said Lex gently.
‘You mean the starving artist living in his garret and the beautiful heiress who discovered him and then proceeded to fall in love with him?’ Another condolence card not from Elsie. ‘I know enough.’
‘Adriana once told me that your father’s mother had died giving birth to him. And that he’d been raised by a father who’d found solace in a bottle and given little thought to feeding or clothing the boy who’d killed his wife. Your father grew up hard, Sienna. He grew up without love. Hate and envy had a very strong hold on him. One he couldn’t shake.’
‘Is that supposed to make me understand why he did the things he did?’
Lex shrugged and sent her a rueful smile. ‘Does it?’
‘No,’ she muttered and reached for another card. ‘He was so…destructive. The more she gave, the more he hated her. If he didn’t love her, why couldn’t he have just let her be? He never let her be. He broke her. And then he killed himself because he couldn’t live with what he’d done. I don’t understand.’
‘Maybe you don’t need to understand,’ countered Lex gently. ‘Maybe knowing that you’re not like him is enough. Because you’re not like him, Sienna. Or your mother, for that matter. You’re stronger than they were. You’re the strongest person I know. You kept going, never mind the wounds they inflicted on you with their neglect. Your resilience amazes me, your willingness to believe the best of people humbles me. After all you’ve been through you still look for sunshine, even after the bleakest of moments. Why do you think I fell in love with you?’
Sienna felt her insides melt at his words. She’d spent most of her life feeling abandoned and confused. Scared of intimacy. Scared of turning out like her parents: over-dependent or abusive, suicidal, take your pick. But Lex didn’t think she was any of those things. He thought her strong.
The notion staggered her. Her, strong.
They found Elsie’s letter towards the bottom of the box. In it Elsie poured out her love, concern and regret that she wasn’t able to attend the funeral. She offered advice on whom of Mary’s friends and family young Sienna could trust and turn to for advice. Adriana Wentworth’s name was at the top of her list. She spoke of Margaret, her own sister, and said that if ever Sienna phoned or came to visit and Elsie wasn’t there, then Margaret would take care of her. She told Sienna never to forget that there were people who loved her and that all Sienna had to do was reach out to them and they would be there. She wrote not a single word about Sienna’s father even though he’d still been alive at the time. Elsie had been with Mary for twenty years. She’d known that young Sienna would find no comfort there.
There was no mention whatsoever of Elsie’s own illness.
The letter made Sienna’s eyes water and her heart fill with gratitude towards an old woman who’d tried to steer a young girl through the aftermath of her mother’s death from half a world away. Sienna looked up to find Lex staring at her, his jaw clenched and his eyes shadowed. ‘There’s nothing here about the paintings,’ Sienna told him with a weary smile that she couldn’t make stick. ‘It’s just advice to a young girl who’s just lost her mother. Good advice,’ she added faintly as her eyes filled again.
‘Sienna, you don’t have to do this,’ said Lex gruffly. ‘I don’t give a damn whether we find these paintings or not. It’s you I care about. And I hate what this is doing to you.’
‘Hey, people pay good money for therapy like this.’ Sienna tried for lightness and almost succeeded. ‘I’m saving a fortune here.’
‘You’re hurting,’ he said. ‘And watching you hurt and not being able to do anything about it is killing me.’ He stood up, paced the room, back and forth, back and forth. ‘Let’s get some air. Take a wander around the grounds or a walk along the cliffs.’
‘In this weather?’ She’d been watching the wind pick up and the rain come down all afternoon, wondering if today would be the day that the roof on this place finally gave up the good fight. Judging by the rattling of the windows and the whistling of the wind there was a very good chance it might be. ‘It’s a nice idea, don’t get me wrong. It’s lovely along the cliffs, but right now it’s raining pellets out there and they’re coming down sideways.’
‘Exploration is not weather-dependent,’ he said, striding to the kitchen door and opening it, only to be driven back a step by an icy north easterly that set china rattling and envelopes flying. ‘I see your point,’ he said, leaning his shoulder into the door in order to push it closed again. ‘You can show me round the inside of the house instead, point out all the things that need fixing or replacing.’
‘Are you going to offer to have them all fixed or replaced?’ she said, eyeing him as sternly as she could, given that this was the man who loved her and thought her strong.
‘I was thinking more along the lines of bypassing the offer altogether and moving straight onto the fixit side of things.’
‘You donning a carpenter’s belt is an appealing picture,’ she said. Very, very appealing. There was something about a handyman multimillionaire who loved her and thought her strong that pushed every one of her buttons and then some. ‘But I think I’d rather you gave me your thoughts as we went around as to whether this place was worth fixing up at all. A very clever man once told me to sell the place and cut my losses if I couldn’t maintain its upkeep. Maybe it’s time I took his advice.’
He looked at her, his expression wry. ‘Sienna, no. Some things you have to let go of. The sins of your parents is one of them. They’re not your sins. The need for a bunch of paintings to make you rich enough that you can marry me is another. But if you love this house, keep it. There’s a solidness here that’s worth building on.’ He looked around the long-neglected room. ‘Maybe you need to investigate the possibilities of taking on a business partner who can provide you with the capital you need to restore this place properly. You could look to opening up the place to paying guests at a later date, if you wanted to. A sympathetic business partner would be amenable to any number of plans for this place, including retaining it as a summer house for the occasional benefit of himself, his life partner, and their offspring.’
Sienna left her seat for the sole purpose of finding a better one on Lex’s lap. She put one hand to his heart and her other to his cheek and dropped a gentle kiss on his lips, a kiss that inevitably turned hungry. ‘Where exactly might I start looking for this wondrous-sounding business partner, do you think?’
‘Oh, you wouldn’t have to look far.’
‘You’re a good man, Alexander Wentworth the Third,’ she whispered, twining her arms around his neck and positioning her body for maximum points of contact, never mind their bulky clothing. ‘Why don’t I start by showing my potential new business partner the master bedroom?’ It was warm up in her bedroom, she’d had a fire going in the hearth all afternoon to ward off the chill. ‘We can tour the rest of the house later.’
Lex’s touch had always brought pleasure and need to Sienna, but this time it brought with it so much more. His touch infinitely gentle as he peeled away her layers of clothing until she was as vulnerable and as naked as the day she was born. His movements hurried as he shed his own clothes thereafter. As if he thought she might change her mind and turn him away, but there was no turning away from this. She couldn’t bear to turn away.
She could see their reflections in the gilt-edged mirror over the mantelpiece, Lex so dark and beautiful, every leanly muscled line of his body drenched in perfection, and herself so pale and slender in comparison. She’d inherited her mother’s porcelain skin. She had her father’s eyes. Her father’s words came back to haunt her only this time she tried pushing them away. I’m not pathetic, cowering, and weak. I’m not!
‘Tell me what you see,’ he murmured, and she shook her head.
‘No.’
His smile grew rueful as his gaze met hers in the mirror. ‘Want to know what I see?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I see a six-year-old girl in a pretty pink dress, with a ribbon in her hair halfway up a tree staring down at me and asking me if I’d ever been to the top. I see a twelve-year-old girl so pale and withdrawn she almost broke my heart, and then she saw me heading her way and smiled and broke my heart all over again. I see an eighteen-year-old woman-child in a pale blue dress who trembled in my arms and made me feel like a king. I see the generous and loving woman who holds my heart, and I see our future and it’s bright with love and riches that have nothing to do with money. Tell me you see it too.’
I’m not pathetic cowering and weak. I’m not! She repeated the litany over and over in her mind but she wasn’t there yet. She still couldn’t bring herself to take that last step. Sienna turned her back on the mirror and the picture they made and drew his head down towards hers, praying that it would be enough, that he would not turn away from her. ‘I see only you.’
The eye of the storm hit at around midnight, rattling the windows and the roof and funnelling icy gusts of air down the chimney, sending the cinders flying. Lex got up to check the fire, Sienna got up to go upstairs to the attic and check on the roof.
‘No,’ said Lex when she declared her intentions. ‘It’s not safe up there right now. It’ll have to wait until the storm passes. Check it tomorrow. Get some local roofers in to look at it tomorrow. They can put together a quote on the replacement cost while they’re there.’ Not a man to cool his heels once a concession had been made, Lex. Not a man to take no for an answer and leave it at that. She loved that about him. She needed that from him. ‘Come back to bed,’ he murmured, his eyes darkening. ‘I guarantee I’ll make it worth your while.’
‘I have a better idea,’ she said, with every intention of taking control of this lovemaking session right from the start, and, what was more, keeping it. ‘Why don’t you let me make it worth yours?’
The view from her bedroom windows the following morning wasn’t a pretty one. Long-neglected trees had lost branches, the dovecote lay in pieces on the ground, and the stable roof had fallen in and taken part of the stable wall with it.
‘It could have been worse,’ she murmured as Lex came to stand beside her. ‘I could have had a horse.’
‘True,’ he said. ‘There’s something sticking out of the wall.’
There was something sticking out of the wall. Some sort of thin wooden-pallet-sized container. Probably just insulation. One tiny little patch of insulation. In a stable wall. Sienna looked harder. Then she looked at Lex to see if he was thinking what she was thinking. His eyes were narrowed, his brow furrowed. ‘Want to go down for a closer look?’ he said finally.
‘I think so,’ she said, trying hard to emulate Lex’s calm. Paintings came in pallet-sized thin wooden containers these days. Rembrandts didn’t, to be sure. But some did.
‘Now?’ he said.
‘I think so.’
‘Yes,’ he said next. ‘I think so too.’ And matched her, speed for speed, in his rush to get dressed.
‘There’s a Monet in my stable wall,’ said Sienna some ten minutes later as they stood amidst the rubble and stared at the thin wooden box sitting snugly between the outer stonework wall and inner stable-box lining.
‘No, there might be a Monet in your stable wall,’ countered Lex calmly, though if ever a box looked as if it contained a couple of paintings, this was it. As a child he’d adored the excitement and anticipation of a treasure hunt. As a man he still enjoyed the hunt, but the stakes here were too high and he wasn’t talking about a bunch of priceless paintings.
He thought he’d been so clever, agreeing to help her look for the missing paintings. It had bought him time to show her what a life with him would be like, given her more time to get used to the idea of marrying him. It had kept her by his side. Somewhere along the way Sienna was supposed to have come to the conclusion that she loved him enough to marry him anyway, and to hell with the paintings.
But she hadn’t.
He’d never really expected to find the paintings.
He didn’t know whether he wanted to find the paintings now. They would make her wealthy in her own right, true enough. They might help her reconcile her past—he didn’t really know how that was supposed to work, other than Sienna thought it would help. If finding the paintings gave her the confidence to marry him, good.
If a small part of his brain protested that if Sienna really loved him she wouldn’t let herself be deterred by financial inequality or a traumatic past, well, he tried to ignore that particular philosophy in favour of working with the one on the table.
‘Let’s pull it out,’ she said, suiting actions to words, but the box didn’t move. ‘Lex, help me pull it out.’
Her excitement was infectious. Her suppressed impatience conjured up his own. The sooner they knew what was in that damned box, the sooner he could deal with it. He added his strength to hers, but the box was wedged in tight. ‘Got a crowbar?’ he said. ‘And a hammer?’
‘All that sort of stuff used to live in the tack room,’ she said with an air of dismay as she turned to survey the rear of the stables. ‘The good news is that the tack room is still intact. The bad news is that the entrance door is blocked by wreckage from the roof. It’s that door on the far left. But there’s a window.’
The window proved the way in and shortly thereafter Sienna armed with the hammer, and Lex with the crowbar, headed back towards the box.
Halfway there, Sienna began to grin. Then she began to laugh. ‘Does this feel somewhat surreal to you? I feel like Nancy Drew.’
Lex did not feel like Nancy Drew. Lex felt a lot like a tack-room door, one whose world was about to come crashing down around him. But he anteed up and set the crowbar to shifting stones with as much goodwill as he could muster. Minutes later the thin wooden box was free and Sienna lowered it gently to its side on the ground.
‘How do you want to do this?’ he said.
‘Carefully. Maybe there’s a latch or a lock. Maybe it’ll just swing open.’
But there wasn’t and it didn’t. The box, if it was a box, had been nailed shut tight. ‘I vote we loosen one of the sides with the hammer and then pry it off with the crowbar,’ he said. ‘Carefully.’
Sienna nodded and he set to work. The join came loose reluctantly but finally Lex had made enough of a crack to lever the claw of the hammer into it and loosen one side of the box. He wedged the crowbar deep into the centre of the crack so that one solid push would pop the side entirely and knelt there, looking to Sienna kneeling in the dirt on the other side of the crate, her clothes dusty and her eyes shining with hope.
‘Hey, Nancy,’ he said softly, holding out the crowbar towards her. ‘Your turn.’
Sienna leaned across and closed her hand over his. Her hand trembled. ‘Together,’ she said.
‘All right.’
Together they pushed on the crowbar and watched the side of the box pop free. Lex looked at Sienna and she at him. ‘I can’t look,’ she said in a shaking voice.
Lex didn’t want to. The contents of that box held the key to his future, his and Sienna’s, and he hated being at its mercy. ‘Together,’ he said gruffly.
‘All right,’ she whispered.
And together they leaned down and peered into their future.
Lex sat back up first. Sienna stayed looking, looking for what he didn’t know because there was nothing to see.
‘It’s empty,’ Sienna said in a small voice, and the stricken look in her eyes made his heart bleed and his stomach clench.
‘Yes.’
‘They’re not here.’
‘No.’
‘There’s nothing here.’
‘I don’t care,’ he said fiercely, and at her continued dismay, ‘I don’t care. The only reason I gave a damn whether those paintings were here or not was because you gave a damn, and because you have it fixed in your head that a marriage between us would fail without them. Well, it wouldn’t fail, Sienna. The difference in our financial status carries as much weight as we decide to give it, and I give it none. None!’ Her eyes were huge and she made as if to speak, but he wasn’t done yet. ‘And if you would just stop thinking about our circumstances for a moment and start feeling your way through all this, you might just decide that you don’t give a damn about the money side of things either.’ He looked down at the empty crate and something settled inside him, something bleak and bitter to fill the growing hollowness. ‘I can’t do this.’
She scrambled to her feet, her hand outstretched towards him, but he couldn’t have her near him, didn’t want her near him, not now. His need was too strong and so was his despair. ‘Alex—
‘No!’ He backed away fast. ‘No, Sienna. I’m sick of watching you dodge commitment to me in favour of wallowing in your past and pinning your hopes on a bunch of paintings we may never find.’ He made it to the door without stumbling. He almost kept walking, he needed to keep walking, but there was one last point he needed to make. ‘Why can’t you pin your hopes on me?’
Sienna watched helplessly as Lex strode away from her, dashed hopes mixing with despair and self-disgust to form a cocktail of rioting emotions. The one that surfaced first was anger. Not at Lex, no, not at Lex. This anger was directed squarely at herself. At her past and her stupid, senseless inability to let go of it. She stared down at the pallet on the ground and the hammer and crowbar lying next to it. The hammer wasn’t big enough, she decided, and the crowbar wasn’t quite right either. There was an axe in the tack room, maybe that would do the job. She found it a couple of minutes later, and with carnage in mind headed back to the pallet, her anger building with every step she took towards it. She kicked the box for good measure, stamped on it, and finally she raised the axe over her head.
‘Hi, Daddy,’ she said. ‘I hear you in my dreams, in my head, and I’m sick of you. You hear me? I’m sick of listening to you. This is for being a husband no woman deserved.’ Down went the axe and bit deep into the box. Wood splintered, but not enough. ‘And this is for being a father no child deserved.’ Thud went the axe. Crack went the pallet.
One down. But there was still her conflicting feelings for her mother to deal with.
‘I’m sorry that you never knew love the way I know it. I’m sorry that you chose the wrong man to give your heart to, but you didn’t have to let him break you,’ she said, and let the years of anger and grief at her mother’s final betrayal begin to build inside her. She started in on the sides of the box this time, swinging the axe in a wide sideways arc, sending the pallet skidding across the dirt. ‘I don’t care if I never find those bloody paintings, you hear me? I don’t want them any more. I don’t need them any more. I don’t need you.’ She set the axe aside and dragged the half-ruined pallet upright to rest against what was left of the wall. She picked up the axe again, hefted it, found a solid two-handed grip. ‘I’m very, very angry with you. This…’ She raised the axe high. ‘This is for leaving me.’ And with a frenzy of blows she smashed that box to hell and back.
When she was done…when her breath came in great gasping heaves and sweat stung the corners of her eyes…she dropped the axe to the ground and wiped her face with the sleeve of her shirt, well satisfied with the destruction she had wrought.
‘I’m through with you,’ she muttered, kicking at a corner chunk of box for good measure. ‘Both of you. I won’t let you destroy the love I’ve found.’
And turning her back on the wreckage of her past, she went in search of a future bright with love and filled with riches that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with belief.
She found him on the cliffs, looking every inch the brooding, scowling thief of hearts that he was. He watched her approach but he gave her nothing. Why would he, thought Sienna with a growing sense of panic, when all she’d done lately was reject everything he offered? Too scared to accept his love. Too wrapped up in her past to see the pain she’d been causing him.
But she saw it now. And she wanted it gone.
‘I wondered if I’d find you here,’ she said as she came up beside him.
He looked at her in silence and the hopelessness and despair in his eyes tore at her soul. The Lex of her childhood had never lost hope. There’d been nothing he couldn’t do. She had been the child of despair and lost dreams, but she wasn’t a child any more. She was a woman. A loving, caring woman, and if the man she loved beyond measure had lost hope, then he would just have to accept some of hers. ‘We didn’t eat breakfast. I thought you might want a cup of tea, or coffee. Or something.’
‘No.’
‘Or we could go into the village and have breakfast at the bakery. I hear the pies are very good.’
‘No.’
‘I’ll find something in the cupboard,’ she offered next. ‘Tinned baked beans on toast. Don’t tell Rudy.’
A twisted smile. Not much, but it was something.
‘Alex, I have an apology to make. I was hoping to make it over breakfast or at the very least over a cup of coffee in the kitchen, but I’ll make it here if I have to. I’ll make it anywhere, and I’ll make it short. I’m sorry I hurt you with my refusal to believe in your love for me, or in mine for you. I’m sorry it took me so long to realise that all the love I’ve ever dreamed of was right there in front of me and that it was mine for the taking if only I dared to believe. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I never want to hurt you. I’d rather cut out my own heart than trample yours.’ Sienna took a ragged breath and straightened her shoulders. ‘I know it’s a lot to ask, but if you haven’t given up on me…if you still want me for your wife…I’d like you to ask me to marry you one last time.’ She was trembling by the time she reached the last word. ‘If that’s what you want.’
‘I have no ring,’ he said roughly.
‘I don’t need a ring.’
‘I don’t have pretty words.’
‘You do have pretty words. You can string together the prettiest, most persuasive words I’ve ever heard. But the ones in your heart are the only ones I want to hear. They’re the most beautiful words of all.’
A smile began to bloom in Lex’s eyes, a teasing light that chased away the darkness and always had. ‘About that bended-knee thing…’
‘Alex,’ she said warningly. ‘We can talk about control issues later. Preferably when we’re naked. I love it when we do that. But right now would you mind a great deal if you just got on with your proposal?’
‘I can do that,’ he said, and his eyes grew vividly intent as he took her hand in his and lifted it to his lips. ‘Ready?’
‘Ready.’ Finally ready. Love had graced her life and she didn’t ever intend to let it go.
‘Marry me, Sienna,’ he said quietly. ‘Marry me and fill my heart.’
‘Yes,’ she whispered joyously. ‘A thousand times, yes.’