AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Did you have something to do with my father’s death?”
Jesus. “Of course she didn’t,” Noah ground out. Protecting Juliet was his number-one concern, and he should have known that meant getting rid of the general’s daughter the moment he’d spotted her in the yarn shop. “I told you to get lost before, Marlys,” he said, starting for her, “and it’s time you listened.”
Marlys evaded him by squirming between the reporter and photographer. From the corner of the room, Noah could hear the distinctive click of a camera shutter. He shot the other photographer, the one closer to the action, a searing look. No pictures.
Marlys’s gaze remained on Juliet. “You played the doting wife in public and when my father’s friends were in our family home, but when he was taking his last breaths, you were being pampered at a spa. How could you? How can you explain that?”
“Damn it, Marlys.” Noah launched himself forward, but Juliet grabbed his arm and hauled him back.
“Don’t,” she said to him, then turned her attention to the other woman, her voice calm. “I’ve said this before, Marlys. I couldn’t know it was that day, that hour—”
“He hadn’t been eating.”
“Your father—”
“He hadn’t been drinking.”
Juliet pushed back her hair. “His illness meant he didn’t have much appetite—”
“Or was it that my father was refusing nourishment in order to hasten his death and you did nothing to stop him?”
Noah saw Juliet freeze. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Her lips set and her eyes narrowed as her gaze slowly slid from Marlys to his face. Was she connecting some inconvenient dots?
The general’s daughter’s tone was shrill. “Juliet—”
“Knows nothing about anything like that,” Noah interjected, his voice harsh and loud enough to reach all four walls of the store. He’d made a promise, but he couldn’t let a public accusation such as this stand. “In the last weeks, the general didn’t let anyone tend him during his meals but me.”
“The both of you hinted it embarrassed him to have me see him struggle to feed himself,” Juliet said slowly. “He flat-out refused to let me help. But neither of you told me how much he was eating and drinking. Or wasn’t eating and drinking.”
Noah knew the shit had hit the fan now. But with her looking at him like that, there was no way he could tell her anything less than the truth.
“He wasn’t, not at the end. He really couldn’t—it wasn’t a matter of choice,” he clarified. “But it was one of the general’s last commands that I not let you know that.”
“What? Why?”
Noah ignored the questions to pin Marlys with his glare. “Satisfied? Have you done enough?”
The general’s daughter’s face was pale. “What did you do?” she shot back.
“Christ, Marlys. Nothing like you’re insinuating—hospice was there alongside me. When the general wasn’t eating or drinking any longer, he asked us to keep the particulars quiet because it gave him a measure of control and self-respect. It gave him back a little dignity to think he was doing one last thing for his wife.”
“What last thing?” Juliet’s shaken voice made him ache.
“He didn’t want you hovering at his bedside. He didn’t want you making yourself sick while watching his every breath to determine if it was his last.”
“Hover—!”
“He knew that would be torture for you and he wanted to protect you from the ordeal. The day he sensed was his last day…” Noah looked down, then back to the face of the woman he loved. He’d held this secret for so long, but it was out now, and he recognized with another sharp ache that the casualty of it could very well be the future with her he’d almost started to believe in. “On that day he asked me to convince you to spend it at the spa.”
Juliet’s hand rose to her throat. At her side, Cassandra put her arm around her older sister’s shoulders.
Marlys made a strangled sound. “Why didn’t you call me, if Juliet wasn’t the one he wanted with him when he died?”
“Jesus Christ, Marlys. If he didn’t want Juliet as a witness to that, he certainly didn’t want you there either. He wanted to shield you, too.”
“Shield me?” she repeated. “Why would my father want to shield me?”
Noah shook his head. “Because he loved you, Marlys.”
She paled further, the angry expression on her face melting away. If he’d thought the little witch had a heart, he might have suspected it was broken. But he didn’t believe she had a single soft organ inside her, and when she scrambled backward and then ran for the door, he could only be glad she was gone.
