Unraveled by Her (5 page)

“You accused me of enlisting my sister to storm Hartwell Castle and deliver the manuscript of
Unraveled,
the erotic novel I wrote. When, of course, I knew full well that it would excite you immeasurably. And once you had it, I faked a burning desire to get it back from you as an excuse for gaining admittance to Hartwell Castle, to meet you and to steal your heart.

“After that, you flat-out accused me of pretending to be a submissive in order to get a financial hold over you. Moreover, you accused me of inventing my BDSM relationship with Warren Courtney, my first lover, and of inventing my night at the Carlyle with the Master whose face I never saw and whose real name I never knew. And that my grand plan was to lure you into my ‘spider’s web,’ as you called it.”

I’m writing so fast, yet so carefully, that initially the words don’t really sink into my brain. And when they do, the horror of what Georgiana is forcing me to convey to Robert strikes me as hard as if Tamara had hit me over the head with her Glock, which I’ll bet she’d love to do.

“Continue writing, please,” Georgiana says. “ ‘The reality, Robert, is that you were right. Everything you accused me of was the truth. I was faking submission in order to get a financial hold over you. I did make up the story about Warren Courtney, about my night at the Carlyle with the Master. I made it all up. Every single word of it.’ ”

“But that’s a dreadful lie!” I burst out. “Robert will never believe that I’m not a real submissive. How could he, when I sailed through those five tests of my submission?” The blood throbs so hard in my veins that I’m afraid they’ll burst.

“By the time he’s read your letter, he will, mark my words,” she says darkly, and then carries on dictating in her queenly voice.

“Start a new paragraph: ‘But I took you in, Robert. How? Perhaps because, like Georgiana, I was always an actress. Most of all, because the mile-high dollar signs I saw whenever I looked at you made everything—the pain, the punishment—easier to bear.’ ”

“ ‘The mile-high dollar signs I saw whenever I looked at you’ is exactly the way in which Robert described that greedy man Murray, the owner of Le Château, who introduced him to Pamela—or rather, you—looking at him whenever he went to Le Château!” I say.

“Most perceptive of you!” she says, with a light laugh.

“But Robert will know I didn’t write that letter! He’ll know!” I say, exultant.

“The only thing he’ll know, Miranda, is that you cleverly recalled the exact phrase he used when he described Murray to you. Whereupon you craftily appropriated the identical sentiments for yourself and repeated them in this letter. And, knowing Robert as I do, I can assure you he will take that as yet further evidence of your innate cunning, your perfidy.”

She’s right. Of course he will. He’ll think that about me and a million worse other things as well.

“Not much more to go now, so let’s finish and be done with it. Next paragraph: ‘I bore it all, the punishment, the pain and the humiliation, Robert, because I knew that if I did, you would immediately hire me to ghost your autobiography and that I’d make millions from it. More than that, I knew that if you believed that I was the submissive of your dreams, you would trust, love, and marry me, and I would become Lady Miranda Hartwell, with all the fame and fortune that entailed.’ ”

Robert will never believe a word of this. He can’t.

“Don’t stop, cupcake, time waits for no woman,” Georgiana says, and if my chain were long enough to reach her face, I’d punch her. But it isn’t, so I clench my right fist, and with my other hand write the words she orders me to.

“That’s what I planned, Robert, that’s what I intended. But then I became enthralled by you, with everything you are, your godlike body, your handsome face, your strong, commanding voice, your piercing green eyes, your power, your glory, everything.”

“And now the final paragraph, the—what do the French call it?—coup de grâce. Take this down word for word: ‘Robert, because of everything you are, everything you do to me, you have captivated me completely. And that, as I’m sure you know, is my greatest fear, the fear I’ve lived with since my childhood. Of being captivated, out of control, and consumed by the all-embracing terror that once I show you how much I love and need you, you will abandon me without another thought. I just can’t risk that happening to me, Robert, I can’t. Which is why I had to leave you, before you could leave me. Please understand, and forgive me.’ ”

As tears flow from my eyes, Tamara snatches the letter away from me and passes it to Georgiana.

“Let me read it through one more time before she signs it,” she says.

And she does, enunciating every syllable in her best cut-crystal
Downton Abbey
way, while I sob as if my heart was breaking. Which, of course, it is.

After she has read the letter, she hands it back to me, and then, as an afterthought, offers me her white lace handkerchief.

“We don’t want the ink to run all over the letter, now, do we, cupcake?” she says, and after I wipe my tears away, I fight to stop myself from strangling her, just like she made Robert pretend to that night in the Honeymoon Suite—as he told me after Palm Beach and our romantic interlude there, when our love deepened and I first heard “our song.” Our song . . .

“May I please sign the letter now, Georgiana?” I say in a sweet voice.

She passes me the letter without another word. I sign it with a flourish and hand it back to her.

And wait, my stomach in a knot, while she reads it once more.

When she’s finished, she flings the letter down on the desk.

“Don’t you dare trifle with me, Miranda! You aren’t in some dungeon playing naughty schoolgirl with your precious fucking Robert anymore. Get to work, write the whole letter all over again and sign it properly, or else . . .” She is shaking with rage.

“I don’t know what on earth you mean,” I say evenly.

“Are you seriously hearing impaired, Miranda, or just plain stupid? You haven’t signed the letter properly. And I repeat: now you’ll just have to write the whole thing all over again,” she says.

“You don’t understand, Georgiana, if I don’t sign the letter with Robert’s special secret name for me, he won’t for one second believe that it isn’t a forgery, that I actually wrote it,” I say, holding my breath and praying that she’ll fall for it.

“But I’ve never once overheard him call you that on any of the tapes!” she says, with an icy glare.

“You wouldn’t have. He came up with it when we were in Palm Beach. His special secret name for me,” I say.

“He never gave
me
one,” she snaps, and drums her fingers on the desk so hard that I expect one of her nails to splinter any second. “And why the word
‘Ciel’
when you aren’t even French?” she demands, and her eyes never leave my face.

Robert’s a big-time gambler. I’m not. But now I must bet everything in a life-or-death gamble.

“But Robert always says French is the most romantic language in the world. So when we were in Palm Beach together, he told me that he loved me up to the sky, which is why he gave me the secret name
Ciel
,” I say, literally staking my life on my ploy.

She pauses for a long moment . . . and then she gives me one of her dazzling Lady Georgiana Hartwell smiles, the kind I recall from countless magazine covers.

“Thank you for explaining that to me so succinctly, Miranda. Now I completely understand. We’ll dispatch the letter just as you signed it,” she says.

Then, still wearing the gloves, obviously because neither she nor Tamara wants to leave her fingerprints on it, she folds the letter, puts it in an envelope, and hands it back to me.

“Now address it to him,” she says.

And nightmarish though the moment is, and though my chances of escape or of ever seeing Robert again are slim, when I write his name on the envelope, I am filled with a warm glow just seeing the name “Robert Hartwell” there, in black and white.

The second I’ve written the address, Tamara grabs the envelope from me, strides over to the mausoleum door, unlocks it, and marches outside, the envelope clutched in her big hands as carefully as if it housed a bomb.

Which, of course, she and Georgiana have designed the letter to be. A bomb that—unless Robert understands why I signed it with the code word “
Ciel
”—will inevitably explode and destroy his love for and trust in me for always.

Chapter Four

No matter how hard I try, I just can’t fall asleep on this rickety camp bed that they’ve made up for me in the living room.

Questions whirl through my mind at the speed of light: Why did Georgiana fake her own death? Whose decomposed body was found at the bottom of Hartwell Lake? Why did Georgiana model her appearance on mine when she decided to disappear? And, the most painful question of all—what part did the man who called himself William Masters—the man whom Murray claimed owned Pamela/Georgiana, but whom Robert later unmasked as my grandfather—really play in this cesspool of a story?

There are so many mysteries for me to solve, so much to work out, so much to understand, that I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to sleep. But if I’m going to keep up my strength so that I can cope with whatever ordeal I’ll face in the morning, I know I have to grab some rest.

Instead, I think back to the dramatic night when Robert and I decided to trust each other, at last. We were in his suite in the North Tower when he revealed the monstrous truth about Georgiana to me, how she trapped and betrayed him, and how he truly felt about her now. Then, using hypnosis, he helped me to remember and then work through the traumatic childhood memory I had spent a lifetime trying to repress—the memory of my grandfather transgressing all boundaries and touching me as I should never have been touched.

I remember the words I wrote in my journal afterward. “When I’ve cried all my tears away, Robert makes love to me, and, at last, I come as I’ve never come before. In the afterglow, I snuggle close to him, all the shadows gone and nothing but happiness ahead of us.”

We fell asleep in each other’s arms. I slept peacefully, secure in the belief that Georgiana’s specter was finally slain for all eternity. Or so I thought.

But now that I am held a prisoner in her mausoleum, I realize that the false sense of security I felt on that night was a fool’s paradise.

I don’t want to think about her anymore—only of the night on which Robert swept away all the shadows of the past and taught me to trust him, to believe in his love for me, and in my own capacity to fully experience sexual pleasure with him. I pray that very soon I shall be in his arms again, and safe. And on that thought, I finally fall asleep.

“Wake up, Miranda, wake up, it’s morning! We haven’t got time to waste!” Tamara yells from what seems like underwater, and the sound of her raspy voice snaps me out of my sleep and into a nightmarish reality.

She lumbers over to me with a silver tray on which a plate of blueberry waffles rests, alongside a mug of coffee.

“Lady Georgiana kindly made this for you before she went out,” she says.

Went out! Georgiana went out?

“But how? Where?” I say, picturing Hartwell Island and Hartwell Lake in my imagination. Robert has security surveillance on both the lake and the island, so she can’t just row to shore. How on earth can she come and go?

“Georgiana has her ways, don’t think she hasn’t,” Tamara says, then elaborates, “She’s a champion swimmer. And as she masterminded the installation of the estate security system herself, she knows exactly how to disable it.”

So that’s how I was ferried over to Hartwell Castle undetected!

But although I am starting to make sense of my predicament, I am seriously sidetracked from my thoughts by the smell of the blueberry waffles. For a second I remember the fairy tale about the witch fattening up Hansel and Gretel before she eats them. And the wicked stepmother feeding Snow White the poisoned apple. I wonder whether I’m taking a serious risk by eating even just one bite of the waffles Georgiana made for me. But I’m so hungry, and the waffles smell so good, that I ignore my misgivings and wolf them down anyway.

Much as I hate to admit it, they taste delicious. Just as Robert once told me, Georgiana is a terrific cook. I catch myself resenting that he praised her. I was so sure that I had vanquished my insecurities about Georgiana that I’m utterly amazed that, at the drop of a hat, I can still erupt into jealousy of her.

I force myself to push those emotions out of my mind, and instead get dressed in the peach Stella McCartney dress that Tamara has thrown on the bed. I have mixed feelings about the dress: I love it because Robert bought it for me, but the fact that he bought it in Geneva does bring the hell of my unhappy time there back with a vengeance.

Then the mausoleum door swings opens and there, on the threshold, stands Georgiana, dressed in a long, regal, purple halter-neck dress far more suitable for a ball than for hiding away in a tomb. Or for swimming across Hartwell Lake. Besides, she is bone dry.