The Wager

“I know what a shock this is for you, finding out this way—”

“Do you, Uncle Paul? Do you really have any idea how I feel?” Another bolt of pain ripped through her. Her heart ached as she stared at him—the honorary uncle she had loved and trusted all of her life. The man who had perpetuated the lifetime of lies her mother had told her. “I thought you loved me,” she told him, her voice breaking.

“Laura, I do love you. I’ve always loved you. You’re like a daughter to me.” He gathered her to him, patted her back the way he had when she’d been a child and had fallen and skinned a knee.

For a moment, because the ache inside her was so great, Laura took comfort in the feel of his sturdy shoulder beneath her cheek, the familiar scents of peppermint and pipe tobacco that she’d always associated with him. She wept, remembering how she’d crawled into her uncle’s lap as a little girl and listened to stories about his adventures in the navy and his close friendship with her father.

And not a word of it had been true.

The admission was like a knife in her chest. She lifted her head, took a step back and stared into his eyes. “How could Momma do this to me? How could you?”

“Neither of us meant to hurt you. Please believe that. Hurting you was the last thing either of us wanted.”

Laura mopped her wet cheeks with the handkerchief he offered her, then she clenched the white linen in her fist. “All these years I believed my father was a hero, that he and my mother had been deeply in love, devoted to each other.” The smiling face in the clippings on the table seemed to mock her as Laura recalled the child she had been, how each night she had gotten down on her knees and prayed for this man she’d believed to be in heaven watching over her. And all the while…all the while he hadn’t been in heaven. He hadn’t even been dead. He’d been alive and raising a family in New Orleans.

Pain ripped through her at the sight of him with his arms around the twin girls. She pressed her palm to her breast, trying to ease the ache in her chest. When her mother had died in her arms that night on the dark, wet road, Laura had been positive that nothing could ever hurt her so deeply again.

She had been wrong.

Learning of her mother’s deception and then having the memory of the father she’d loved stripped away from her was every bit as wrenching. It was like losing both of them all over again.

“I’m sorry, Laura. I’d sooner cut off my arm than hurt you.”

But he had hurt her…terribly. So had her mother. Wrapping her arms more tightly about herself, Laura ignored the twinge in her left shoulder, the reminder of the accident that had left her with a separated shoulder, bumps and bruises, but had taken her mother’s life. Oh, God! She swallowed back the spurt of anguish that came as she thought of her mother asking her to forgive her. This was what her mother had tried to tell her that night.

“Please, try to understand.”

“I don’t understand. I can’t,” Laura countered. She looked at the jumble of clippings and photos on the table. “And I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

“Believe that I love you,” her uncle told her, his voice softening. “And believe that from the moment your mother learned you were growing inside her and until the day that she died, she loved you, too.”

“Is that why she lied to me all these years? Is that why you lied to me?”

He brushed his fingers along her damp cheek where the last of the bruising from the accident had begun to fade. “It wasn’t my place to tell you. It was your mother’s.”

Laura stepped away from his touch. “And she chose to deceive me.”

Her uncle sighed. His hand fell to his side. “Juliet didn’t set out to deceive you. She only meant to help you. If you believe nothing else, believe that.”

“Why should I?”

“Because it’s the truth. You were so smart, even when you were just a little thing,” he explained. “You were barely able to talk when you starting asking questions about your father. Where was he? Why did the other daddies pick up their kids from school, but your daddy never came for you? You were so eager to have a father that you even asked me if I’d be your daddy.” A pained expression flitted across his face for a moment before he continued. “Anyway, your mother was worried about you. And she felt guilty for not being able to provide you with the daddy you seemed to want so much. That’s when she started telling you the stories about your father.”

“You mean the lies about my father, don’t you?”

“She only did it to protect you. She didn’t want you to think that your father hadn’t wanted you.”

But her father hadn’t wanted her, Laura reasoned as she looked at the photograph of him with his daughters and felt that sharp sting of rejection. “My mother should have told me the truth.”

“She wanted to—especially as you grew older. But she was afraid that you wouldn’t be able to forgive her, that you might even hate her.”

“So instead she let me believe in a father who never even existed,” Laura accused. The all-too-familiar ache that she had lived with since her mother’s death welled up inside Laura again. As much as she had loved her mother, right now, she almost hated her. And the admission both shamed and angered her. Above all, it hurt. So much. So very much. She wanted to scream at her mother and demand she explain. At the same time she wanted to bury her face against her mother’s shoulder, to hug her close and breathe in that combination of talcum powder and the rose scent that her mother wore. The tears spilled over once more, streamed down Laura’s cheeks. “How could the two of you do it, Uncle Paul? How could you make up those stories? How could you let me love someone who wasn’t even real?”

Her uncle washed a hand down his face. For the first time he looked old to her, Laura thought, as though the very life had gone right out of him. He picked up an aging photo of the handsome navy officer and the dark-eyed brunette and traced the worn edges with his index finger. “He was real, Laura. Not everything was a lie. Twenty-nine years ago your father really was my best friend. We were flight buddies serving in the same unit. And your mother really was a WAVE nurse working at the base hospital in San Diego when she met Drew.”

Drew. Hearing her father referred to by the strange name shook Laura. Andrew Jardine was her father—not Richard Harte. She clamped down on the churning in her stomach that came with the realization. This was something she had to face, a problem she had to deal with, she told herself. Drawing in a deep breath, she reminded herself that she dealt with problems every day in her job as the assistant general manager at the Ambassador Grand Hotel. She would deal with this problem as she would any other—by listening, gathering information and analyzing the data. Then she would decide how to proceed, how to deal with the fact that she wasn’t the person she’d thought she was.

“I was with Drew when he met Juliet for the first time. He was recovering from knee surgery and hadn’t been cleared to drive yet, so I took him to the hospital for his first physical therapy session. I remember it like it was only yesterday,” he said. Her uncle continued to stare at the photograph. “Drew and I were sitting in the waiting room, joking about how he had to get his knee in shape so he could dance at his wedding that summer. Then we heard this angel’s voice calling his name. When we looked up, there she was. This vision with wild dark hair and sparkling brown eyes. I think Drew fell in love with Juliet right there on the spot. And Juliet…well, she felt the same way about him.”

“Did she…did my mother know he was engaged?”

“Yes,” Paul admitted. “Drew was honest with her. He told Juliet right from the start about Adrienne.”

Laura’s heart sank. Her mother had known he was an engaged man. And the two of them had had an affair, anyway. She felt the bitterness of disappointment as she digested that information. Only now could she admit to herself that she had been hoping for some plausible explanation, some tale about them being star-crossed lovers, anything to excuse her mother’s actions. She had wanted, needed to believe that the relationship had been innocent, that she hadn’t been a mistake.

As though he knew what she was thinking, her uncle said, “Don’t judge them too harshly, Laura. They tried to fight their feelings for each other. But Drew was at the hospital three times a week for more than two months for therapy and Juliet couldn’t very well claim that she was unable to do her job because she was in love with her patient. She was a WAVE nurse. She didn’t have that option.”

“She could have walked away from him. And he could have left her alone.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to be in love, really in love, the way they were,” her uncle told her. “That type of love, it doesn’t happen for everyone. If you’re lucky, it might find you once. And when it does, it grabs you by the throat and takes charge of your heart and soul, and it refuses to let go.” The smile he gave her was fleeting. “Even if you’re able to walk away from it, how you feel about the other person doesn’t change. You don’t stop loving him or her. Juliet and Drew could no more have stopped loving each other than you or I could stop an earthquake from happening. Your mother was in love with Drew, and he was in love with her.”

“Then why didn’t they do the right thing? Why didn’t he break his engagement and marry my mother if he loved her so much?”

Paul rubbed a hand across his brow as though his head were aching. “It was complicated. The Jardine family is an old, distinguished family in New Orleans. Things were done differently in the South, particularly back then. Drew couldn’t just break off his engagement because he’d fallen in love with your mother. There were other people who had to be considered, other families whose livelihoods were dependent upon his marriage to Adrienne.”

“You make it sound like a business merger.”

“In many ways it was. Drew’s family was in the hotel business and so were the Duboises—Adrienne’s family.”

That bit of news came as a shock to Laura. Then she remembered the newspaper clippings with the photo of Andrew Jardine accepting an award in front of a hotel. A shudder went through Laura as she thought of the career she’d chosen in hotel management. Had her mother encouraged her interest because she’d known about the Jardine family’s business? Or had her choice of profession served as a painful reminder to her mother of the man she had loved and lost? Either option left Laura feeling sick inside.

“Drew was an only child with a widowed mother. He had responsibilities to her, to the other members of his family, to the people who worked for them. He couldn’t just walk away from those responsibilities.”

“So he walked away from his responsibility to my mother instead.”

Her uncle shook his head. “It wasn’t like that. He wrote to his mother, telling her about Juliet, that he loved her and wanted to break his engagement to Adrienne. Naturally, his mother was upset. Adrienne and Drew had grown up together, had been childhood sweethearts. Her parents were old friends and Olivia Jardine, your grandmother…”

A shiver went through Laura as she heard the woman referred to as her grandmother. She’d never had a grandmother. And though she’d often wished her mother had had an extended family, she didn’t want one now—not this way.

“…Olivia loved Adrienne like a daughter, and Juliet…well, your mother was a stranger and not even from the South. Olivia insisted Drew come home to discuss the situation before he did anything. So he did as she asked. He went back to New Orleans, and then he sent for Juliet.”

“What happened?” Laura asked, her curiosity overriding her hurt and disappointment.

“I’m not really sure. Neither Juliet nor Drew ever told me exactly what went down.”

They didn’t need to because she had a pretty good idea of what had transpired, Laura decided. Olivia Jardine hadn’t wanted anything to do with her son’s bastard child. Had her father wanted her? she wondered. Obviously, he hadn’t. She had been a mistake, the unexpected result of his fling with her mother. The realization left her feeling hollow inside. Turning away, Laura spied the clipping on the table of her father and his children. And as she looked at the photo of the Jardine family, Laura thought of her own life, all the years she had ached to know him, to be loved by him.

“Only your mother and Drew know what happened and why Juliet came back from New Orleans alone.”