and we may be able to rejuvenate that heart of yours with your own stem cells.”
“How long is long enough?” Bella asked.
The doctor focused on the medical chart in his hands. “Can’t say.”
“And if my heart continues to fail?”
“Heart transplant is a possibility down the line. Unfortunately, it won’t be easy finding a heart for you, Bella. B-negative donors aren’t thick on the ground.”
Bella smiled. Her doctor was young, a prodigy whose bedside manner left a lot to be desired. She appreciated his honesty. Knowing how much—or rather, how little—time she had left allowed her to plan how to use it wisely.
But a year? Two years? Three, if she was lucky? She had even less time than she’d hoped to get her children wed. With so little time, some of those marriages might have to be arranged without her offspring’s cooperation. It had to be marriage, she’d decided. Nothing less would do. Her marriage to Bull Benedict had been her salvation.
It had started badly, with blackmail on her side. Her aunt had threatened twenty-nine-year-old billionaire financier Jonathan “Bull” Benedict with charges of statutory rape if he didn’t marry destitute seventeen-year-old Isabella Wharton, Duchess of Blackthorne. Bull had sworn he’d hate her forever if she forced him into marriage.
She’d bit her lip and gone along with her aunt’s wishes in order to save her hereditary home, Blackthorne Abbey. And to give her unborn child a name. It was only later that Bull questioned whether he was the father of their first child. Only later that he learned Oliver was some other man’s son.
Because they were bound by law, they’d been forced to deal with one another’s lies. Because they were husband and wife, they’d scratched their bloody way through the tangled thorns of deceit to a love that healed all wounds.
Bella wanted her children bound to someone they could love by vows made before God. She was certain the moral commitment created by the spoken words, words pledging love and faith to one another, would give the young lovers the perseverance necessary to work through any differences that threatened their happiness.
She didn’t want her children wandering the world alone after she was gone, believing that love was a false thing. That love couldn’t be trusted. That was the lesson she feared they’d learned from the wickedness—the malicious trickery—that had finally torn her marriage apart.
“Of course, Bella, if you do end up with a new heart—or a rejuvenated one—you’ll be good to go for another fifty years,” the doctor said, interrupting her thoughts.
“Thanks a lot,” Bella said with a wry laugh. She was fifty-two. Reaching a hundred and two sounded pretty ambitious. And lonely, unless she could find a way to win her husband’s forgiveness. Bella felt hopeless about any sort of reconciliation with Bull. Especially when she considered how little she could tell him—certainly not the truth—about the event that had caused their bitter separation ten years ago, after twenty-five years of marriage.
They were still legally wed, but it was a marriage in name only. They lived separate lives. Every day for the past ten years, she’d feared Bull would come to her and ask for a divorce. It had never happened. She wondered if he was clinging to a fragile thread of hope, as she was, that someday they would find their way back to each other. Or whether he simply wanted to preserve his fortune. A fortune which, thanks to an ironclad prenuptial agreement, would only have to be shared with her if they stayed married for twenty-five years. They’d reached that mark a month before their separation.
Bella sighed inwardly. The chances of “love conquering all” seemed slim, considering how little time she had left. She needed to focus on her children’s happiness. When the end came would be soon enough to make peace with Bull.
“When can I get out of here?” she asked.
“Today, if you promise to follow my orders,” the doctor replied. “Make sure you exercise, Bella. Take your meds. And avoid stress. Otherwise…” He drew a finger across his neck, hung his head sideways and made a dying sound.
Bella grimaced at his antics. Maybe she could get Oliver, Riley, Payne, Max and Lydia to come to her, instead of having to go to the four corners of the earth to find them. Without revealing her precarious health, of course. Mother’s Day was coming up. That would make a good excuse to summon them to The Seasons, the Benedict family estate near Richmond, a former tobacco plantation her estranged husband’s family had owned since colonial days.
The doctor turned to Bella’s personal assistant, a quiet, intelligent, almost homely girl Bella had hired three years ago when she first began taking medication for her ailing heart, and ordered, “I don’t want her out partying till the wee hours, Emily. Bella needs rest if she’s going to stay alive until we can repair her heart—or find her a new one.”
“Of course, Doctor,” Emily replied. “I’ll take good care of Her Grace.”
Twenty-eight-year-old Emily Sheldon was nothing if not dutiful, Bella thought. The young Englishwoman refused to address Bella by name, instead referring to her in clipped British tones as “Your Grace,” an honor to which Bella was entitled by virtue of her aristocratic rank.
The refined, straitlaced young woman, who’d become as dear to her as another daughter, would follow the doctor’s orders to the letter. If Bella didn’t want to find herself being hounded by her assistant, she was going to have to involve Emily in her matchmaking plans.
When the doctor was gone, Emily began fussing with the sheets, pulling them up around Bella’s pale blue silk robe and smoothing them down. “I urge you to consider the consequences if you disobey the doctor’s orders, Your Grace. I’ll do my best to help you—”
Bella put a hand on her assistant’s delicate wrist and said, “Please sit down, Emily. I have something to discuss that’s going to require your entire attention—our entire attention—for the foreseeable future.”
1
“Hello, Princess.”
Kristin Lassiter’s heart skipped a beat. Without warning, she found herself facing a man she’d prayed never to see again. “Max?” Her voice broke because her throat had suddenly swollen closed. “What are you doing here?”
“Close the door, Agent Lassiter,” Max said.
Kristin had been ordered to report to the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Miami Field Office. She was just going back on duty in the field with a new partner, following the disastrous shooting incident she’d been involved in four months ago. So she wasn’t surprised her boss wanted to see her. But Rudy wasn’t in his office. This man was. With man being the operative word.
The last time she’d seen Max Benedict, he’d been a boy of eighteen. She’d been sixteen. They’d been best friends for three years. And lovers for one night. They hadn’t seen or spoken to each other since.
The troubled boy she’d known had been lithe and fit and tanned. This tall, broad-shouldered man looked powerful. And dangerous.
Kristin felt a spurt of alarm that bordered on panic. Why was he here? Had he come to find out why she’d run from him all those years ago?
“Why are you here, Max?”
“I have a proposition for you.”
Before she could open her mouth to protest he said, “A business proposition.”
So, he wasn’t here for personal reasons. She slowly exhaled, careful not to sigh audibly with relief. He was acting like they were old friends. But they hadn’t been friends for a very long time. She’d been vulnerable to him once. Had adored him with all the luminous passion one devoted to a first love. Seeing him in the flesh, seeing the promise of the boy revealed in the virile man standing before her, stirred all those unwanted feelings to life.
Max couldn’t possibly believe she’d want