Emma Darcy - The Ultimate Choice

'You mean that you haven't thought of the wealth and the position I can give you, Kelly?' he said sardonically.

She slowly shook her head. 'I thought only of us.'

He stared at her and Kelly held his gaze with unflinching directness, compelling him to accept her sincerity. And for several moments only she and he existed, with the future a shimmering mirage of possibilities between them. Then, with a flicker of regret, his eyes wavered away from the promise in hers.

'I've had time to think, too,' he said wearily.

'Of Noni?' No more secrets, Kelly thought savagely. Let everything come out into the open where I can fight it. 'You loved her, didn't you?'

His face tightened. Kelly could feel him closing himself off from her, and almost panicked. Had she been too blunt? Was it foolish to remind him of someone else when she desperately wanted him to concentrate on her… on them… the togetherness they could have?

Minutes seemed to drag by. Kelly didn't think Justin was going to answer her. She almost didn't want him to. Yet his very silence was a wedge between them, making any true understanding impossible to reach.

Finally he spoke with cold, hard deliberation. 'Yes, I loved Noni Lloyd. With all the passion that a man is capable of. I couldn't replace her.'

A terrible hollowness burrowed through Kelly's heart. Tears of sadness blurred her eyes: sadness for herself, for Justin, for Noni… for the hopelessness of it all.

'No matter how much you wanted me to be her, I couldn't,' she said in anguished despair. 'I'll always be me.'

It seemed to jolt him. His expression darkened. 'Is that what you think I want?'

Kelly's mind whirled again, grasping wildly at threads of hope. 'I don't know what you want. But you can't say you don't feel passion with me, because it is there. I'm not mistaken about that.'

He gave a harsh, contemptuous laugh. Words exploded from his lips. 'Passion? You have no idea of the passion that has been driving me.'

'I want you to tell me!' Kelly challenged fiercely, driven to the edge of desperation by his seemingly callous dismissal. 'Tell me what you feel! This afternoon you said we had something special. You know we do. And I want you to tell me I'm not making some dreadful mistake!'

She started walking towards him, her hands stretched out in appeal, her heart thumping with the need to reach into him, claim him as her own. 'However much you try to hide from me, there's a bond that ties us together. I don't know why it is, but I feel it. It's your life and my life…intertwined.'

His face drained of all colour and his fingers dug into her shoulders, keeping her at arm's length. 'You feel that?' he demanded hoarsely. 'You really feel that?'

'Yes.'

His eyes probed hers, incredulous… pained… 'You know who I am?'

The question was strained through a gamut of emotions that made no sense to Kelly. 'Of course,' she answered.

'You remember me?'

The tortured, haunted look in his eyes frightened her. 'No… no…' she choked out. 'What do you mean?'

The coiled tension in him eased. He shut his eyes, expelled a long, shuddering breath, then opened his eyes to glittering slits. 'You don't know,' he said accusingly, and released her, his hands falling to his sides as he turned and walked over to the fireplace.

Kelly was shaking inside. 'Tell me!' she hurled after him. He couldn't withdraw now. Not having gone so far. She wouldn't let him, even though she felt dreadfully threatened by what had been left unsaid.

Justin's gaze swung back to her, and a terrible violence of feeling simmered in his eyes. His face was harsher than she had ever seen it, carved in angry bitterness.

'You shattered my life once, Kelly Hanrahan. I won't let you do it again. As much as you were unknowing and innocent then… you did it. And as much as you are unknowing and innocent now, I will not let you do it again.'

Kelly swallowed hard to fight down a wave of nausea. It couldn't be true…what he said. She wouldn't accept it. Couldn't. 'Please…explain!'

A grimness settled around his mouth. 'Sixteen years ago, you forced a choice on me that altered my existence. Why I did it I'll never know. And that's the bond we have-you and I-tied by destiny to a moment in time when I had to make a choice. And I didn't choose the woman I loved. I chose you.'

Kelly shook her head, stunned and bewildered by the hammering accusation. 'I don't understand!'

'Do you remember Noni Lloyd's accident?'

'Vaguely. Only vaguely. It was a long time afterwards before I realised she was dead. I saw her fall. And she didn't get up the way she always did. I ran to help her. There was a stranger and he…'

Her voice faltered. She looked fearfully into Justin St John's burning grey eyes.

'You were running… running on your little childish legs to help Noni,' he mocked savagely. 'The black stallion fell after it crashed into the wall. Noni was thrown and knocked unconscious. The horse had broken a leg. It was trying to struggle up. I didn't even see you until the last moment. You ran out from behind the fence-jump, not looking at the horse, crying out to Noni.'

The blood drained from Kelly's face. 'You were the man who pushed me away…' she whispered, her mind pummelled by a whole sequence of memories. The hands gripping her arms hard…being swept off her feet… falling… and the soft caress on her cheek as she cried… Grandpa picking her up, cuddling her, taking her home.

'You didn't see the danger,' Justin continued in a hard, driven voice. 'You were only a child. You would have been crushed…'

'As you picked me up, Noni's horse rolled on you,' Kelly realised with horror. 'Your hip and leg…'

'I was trying to protect Noni… until you got in the way.'

'And one of its hooves lashed out and killed her while you were pinned… rescuing me.'

'Yes,' he said, and his voice was drained of all expression as he added, 'Indirectly, you were responsible for her death.'

Kelly felt sick. Sick and faint and totally shattered by the dreadful revelation. Sheer anguish strangled any further words as the inexorable line of logic savaged her mind and heart. Justin had been unable to save Noni's life because he had chosen to save hers, crippling himself as he did so.

Too stricken to remain standing, Kelly stumbled to an armchair and dropped into it. She shook with nervous reaction as other memories cut into her consciousness.

Justin hadn't wanted to see her again after he'd realised who she was. The child…the child who had cost him too much already. That was what he had said just before she had asked him for the horses, before his vehement rejection of her riding them for show-jumping.

And she had blindly and stubbornly persisted; taking the black Hanoverian stallion that was so like the horse that had caused the tragedy. Justin had driven himself through pain in a desperate attempt to stop her, the child he had saved, who was wilfully taking the same path that had killed the woman he had loved. And lost, because of her.

All those afternoons he had watched her practising the jumps with the horses, how it must have tortured him! And today on Rasputin…the mistake in timing for the wall, and only the black stallion's great ability carrying them clear.

She lifted agonised eyes to the man who had paid so dearly for the choice he had made. 'I'm sorry, Justin. I never realised. You should have told me before. I won't jump again. Not when you've been so hurt by it.' He exploded out of the haunted thrall that was woven around his face, twisting with violent rejection at her offer, his eyes stabbing her with furious frustration. 'You think that's what I want? Why I tell you this?' Kelly flinched at the lash of his words. He turned away with a gesture of contempt, hurling more words at her with passionate intensity. 'You're free, Kelly. Free of me. You don't owe me anything. Your life is your own to lead. To risk. To do as you please. As is your right.'