Modean Moon - Forgotten Vows

“You’re sure she didn’t come here for some reason?”

“What reason?” Lambert asked. “And yes, I’m sure. She couldn’t have walked it. The trail down from the top is a cakewalk compared to the one up from the valley floor. And we found no vehicle.

“You last saw her on the seventeenth of November,” Lambert asked abruptly. “What was she wearing?”

What was she wearing? For a moment, the memory swirled through Edward’s mind.

He pulled the sheet over Jennie’s bare shoulder and smoothed the dark hair away from her cheek, placing a kiss that was much more chaste than anything he felt at that moment on the tender skin he had just exposed.

“God, I hate to leave you,” he told her, tracing his finger over her cheek, outlining lips that only a short while before had driven him nearly crazy with her untutored passion.

“And I hate for you to leave, but you know Madeline wouldn’t have called unless it was important,” she said.

“Are you all right?” he asked her. “Really all right? I didn’t hurt you?”

She grinned at him then. “One of my deepest, darkest secrets is this hidden desire I’ve had to be ravished by a loving madman. Edward?” She sat up in the bed, letting the sheet fall away from her as she captured his face in her small hands.

“Edward, I’m teasing you. Of course you didn’t hurt me. You’d never do that.”

“She was—she was dressing for dinner,” he said, forcing himself back to the present. “We were going to go out to eat when I returned… before we caught our flight.” Edward threw off his memories. “Could she have parked somewhere else and walked in?”

Lambert shook his head. “She was wearing a white silk dress, silk lingerie. No jewelry. No hose. No shoes. The boys found her on the twenty-first.”

“So she had four days to get here.” Edward focused his thoughts on those days rather than on the way Jennie had looked in the photos. “Four days to—to do what?”

Again Lambert shook his head. “I think she was here at least as early as the nineteenth.”

“Why?”

“It rained on the nineteenth. Her clothes were… muddy.”

“Who?” Edward shouted. It was either shout or scream. He looked at the ridge above him. “What kind of animal would do this?”

“I don’t know,” Lambert told him. He studied Edward carefully. “And until I find out, Jennie’s a ward of the court. I’m her guardian. Until we find whoever did this, I’m not letting you take her out of my jurisdiction.”

Edward met Lambert’s appraisal with one of his own. “I won’t try to,” he admitted. “It doesn’t seem I’ve done too good a job of protecting her. I appreciate all the help I can get. I do want to bring some of my people here, make arrangements to stay as long as necessary. I’m not leaving Jennie.”

Lambert nodded his agreement. “I’ve got some ideas of my own now that we know who she is, but do you have any suggestions as to how we find the bastard who did this?”

Edward looked over the valley floor. He wasn’t ready, or able, yet, even to consider that Jennie had been taken from him, that she hadn’t left voluntarily. But even if she had left willingly with someone, she had been betrayed even more brutally than Edward.

“There was no ransom demand.”

Lambert waited quietly while Edward sifted through his memories, realigning them, examining them in the light of what he had learned in the last few hours.

“Two suggestions,” Edward said finally. “We need to find the former security guard at my apartment. He quit without notice and left the day before the wedding. And…maybe you’d better do this. Ask Winthrop’s daughter where she got the painting.”

Edward allowed his bittersweet memory only a moment’s life.

“It was Jennie’s wedding present to me. The last time I saw it, it was in my apartment—and so was Jennie.”

Jennie awoke while the house lay silent and still. Quietly, she made her way to the window seat and pushed open the casement window. Then, drawing her feet up onto the cushion in front of her, she rested her chin on her knees and surrendered to the gentle breeze that drifted through the window as she listened to the predawn sounds of birds searching for their breakfast.

Her world was still dark, and would be until the sun rose to lighten the dense fog of her sightlessness.

And she was alone. Still. Though surrounded by a house full of loving, caring people.

Had she always been alone?

This was the question that had filled too many of her sleepless hours in the months of her life since she had first woken up in Avalon.

She couldn’t have been—not if she trusted her dreams.

But after what had happened to her, who, or what, could she trust?

The man hadn’t returned by the time she had been put to bed like a child or an invalid. She didn’t even know his name.

“It’s better this way,” Reverend Winthrop had insisted softly, patiently, and with a sadness she had not heard before in his voice. “Lucas will explain, if any explanations are necessary.”

Better for whom?

Not for the first time, Jennie wondered how she looked. She knew she was shorter than most people, or at least those she had met in Avalon, whose voices all seemed to come from above her head—even Matilda’s. And small. At least compared to Sheriff Lambert, who had carried her easily on more than one occasion when she was in the early stages of her recovery.

But did she look like a child? Or worse, like someone who couldn’t cope with the slightest obstacle, frustration or tension?

Didn’t they know? Didn’t they know that her every waking hour, and too many of her sleeping ones, were filled with all of those things?

Who was the man?

Was he the tall, stern man of her dreams?

And why hadn’t he returned?

“Foolish question,” she whispered to the caressing breeze. He hadn’t returned because Sheriff Lambert hadn’t let him return—wouldn’t let him until he had completely checked out the man’s story and probably his life from the day he was born. The man in her dreams would not quietly tolerate that kind of inspection, that kind of doubt.

But then, the man in her dreams was just that—a figment of her imagination, created by her subconscious to ease her loneliness, to fill the awful empty hours of the night when her doubts and fears crept around her.

She heard noises through the open window, the sounds of kitchen windows on the floor below being opened and then the robust and off-key singing of Caitlin, the Winthrops’ cook and housekeeper, as she began preparations for breakfast.

Jennie sighed and rolled her head and shoulders, hating the tension that too often plagued her, then relinquished her comfortable place at the window. Matilda would be coming soon to check on her, and because Jennie didn’t want the kindhearted woman to worry about how long her charge had been awake, she eased herself back into bed and pulled the sheet up.

Maybe today he would return, she thought as she turned onto her side and burrowed her cheek into the softness of the down pillows. Maybe today someone would tell her who he was. Maybe today someone would tell her who she was.

Edward paced the comfortable room, impatient for dawn to finish lighting the sky, impatient to make the telephone calls he had promised Lambert he would wait to make. Impatient to see Jennie again. To confront her with his accusations? To comfort her? Or just to hold the woman who was his wife and pretend that the last six months had never happened? To pretend that she loved him, to pretend that he was capable of giving her the love he’d once thought she wanted from him?