скачать книгу бесплатно
“D’Artagnan,” he replied, liking the mystery. He didn’t have to share his past, his fears, his regrets. “I’m a defender of France, a—”
She put a hand on his arm to stop him and he felt the small, sizzling jolt of it go right to his heart.
“No,” she said seriously. “What do you really do?”
There was a subtle urgency in her voice that alerted him to something, he wasn’t sure what.
But she smiled sweetly at him, and he decided it was the sudden rise in volume of the room’s noise level. Too many years as a secret agent had left him with a certain paranoia that was difficult to shake.
The musicians had arrived and set up in the conservatory off the living room. Their tuning up rivaled the laughter and conversation of the hundred or so guests moving through the first floor.
A mellow mood settled over him and suddenly the last place he wanted to be with this woman was wedged on a stair in a room grown so loud that conversation was becoming difficult.
“Will you come upstairs with me?” he asked.
It wasn’t until he saw the flash in her eyes, even behind the mask, that he realized how that abrupt question must have sounded.
“No, no, no,” he assured her quickly. “I meant upstairs to the sitting room. I can’t even hear myself think down here.”
She continued to look suspicious.
Oh, no, he thought. She’d been so warm and interested in what he had to say a moment ago. That careless question couldn’t mean the end of what had seemed so promising.
He remembered her interest in the house—though he was suddenly having a little difficulty focusing on the details that might interest her—and said quickly, “And I have more to tell you.”
“About what?” she asked a little stiffly.
“About the house. About…why I’m here.”
She sat still for one more moment, then she picked up her plate and stood. “All right,” she said. “I’d love to hear more.”
AT LAST! Athena thought. The prospect of information she could use!
She preceded him up the stairs, then waited at the top for him to take the lead. He’d left the little reading alcove near the head of the stairs, she noticed, a half-moon-shaped spot where the railing looped out to look down on the floor below.
Her aunt’s cane-seated rocker was gone, but in its place was a high-back leather chair and matching ottoman. The stained glass lamp depicting birds in flight, which she’d always admired as a child and had looked forward to sitting beside one day, stood nearby.
But D’Artagnan was moving along the corridor to a room at the far end. They passed several bedrooms on the way, but she knew that the sitting room he was heading for connected to the master bedroom.
His step was unsteady, she saw, as he changed course ever so slightly to avoid collision with the doorway. She wondered what accounted for that. He’d had several glasses of champagne while they were sitting on the stairs, but the glasses were small. He hadn’t eaten, though, and champagne did have more of a kick than other types of alcohol.
There was a green futon where the gold brocade settee had been. Her aunt used to read them bedtime stories in this room when she and her sisters were very small, then they would all scamper off to their own bedrooms.
She put her plate on a low bamboo table and sat down.
He refilled their glasses, sat beside her on the futon, then raised his glass to hers. “To new discoveries,” he said.
“Discoveries?” she questioned.
He clicked the rim of his glass to hers. “You. I’ve been looking for you.”
She felt a moment’s trepidation. Did he know her plan? He couldn’t possibly. “You have? Why?”
He put a hand to the beaded headpiece that covered her hair and touched gently. “Because I need you,” he whispered, suddenly urgent, intense. “Where…have you been?”
There was sincerity in what she could see of his eyes. Tenderness in his touch. Response rose in her, instinctive and as urgent as he sounded.
She put her glass down and reminded herself sharply of why she was here. And that this could be the man who’d coerced her aunt out of her home, possibly even caused her death. At the very least, he was one of Hartford’s friends. She had to know more.
She took a prawn from her plate and put it to his lips. “I think you need something to eat,” she said. “Come on. Take a bite.”
He nipped the edge of the prawn with his teeth and drew it into his mouth. “I don’t remember these being this good,” he said, “until you touched them.”
“You were going to tell me about the house.” She drank from her glass to encourage him to drink his, on the principle of in vino veritas.
He obliged her. “It’s a place,” he said, his voice very quiet as he concentrated on her, “for lots of children. For visiting grandparents. For friends to sleep over and for club meetings and loud Christmas parties.”
For a moment she couldn’t reply. She’d always thought that, too, but as long as she’d been coming here, it had housed only Aunt Sadie and a cook-housekeeper. She’d looked forward to herself and her sisters and their families giving it the bursting-at-the-seams hilarity it deserved.
But did he own it? Was he Hartford? “Then, it’s your home?” she asked.
He didn’t seem to have heard her.
“I never had that,” he went on. He took her glass from her and put it with his on the table. He sloshed a little and she reached forward instinctively to mop up the liquid with a napkin, but he stopped her, catching her hand in his and leaning her back into his other arm.
“My house was empty. Of everything. Three times bigger than this but…” He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. “No laughter. No music. No voices in the dark.”
Athena was struck by that description. She could hear the silence he described. And for one surprisingly clear moment, could imagine a small boy alone in a big, dark house, surrounded by that silence.
She could feel his loneliness.
He tugged at her headpiece. “Can we take this off?” he asked.
She forced her mind away from him and back to what she was trying to do here. She pulled off the headpiece and let her hair fall.
“It’s…beautiful,” he said softly, pulling her into his arms and rubbing his cheek against it. She was beginning to lose her focus. She didn’t want to know that he’d had an empty, lonely childhood. She didn’t want to feel sympathy for this man.
She wanted to know if he owned the house, and if so, how he’d gotten it and whether or not he’d had anything to do with the plane crash that killed Sadie.
“D’Artagnan!” she said sharply, for want of his real name.
“Here, Constance,” he said, falling onto his back and bringing her with him. “I’m yours.” He held her face in both his hands and kissed her.
He smelled of toothpaste and champagne and an herbal aftershave. He was ardent and tender at the same time, and even in this slightly tipsy state, he was completely competent and masterful.
Then, while she was distracted by her own loss of equilibrium even though she was the sober one, he slipped up her mask and smiled as he looked into her face.
“I knew it,” he whispered. “Beautiful. Beautiful.” Then he winced, closed his eyes and muttered a quiet expletive.
She pushed up against his shoulders. “What?” she asked in concern.
He ran a hand over his face. “Allergy…medication,” he said, shaking his head as though trying to clear it. “Champagne. Bad.” He expelled a sigh as he held on to her with one hand, trying to sit up.
She tried to help by pulling on his arm but didn’t have sufficient leverage. He caught a fistful of her slip, exposed by her awkward position, and tried to draw himself up with it, but the combination of medication and alcohol was too strong and he fell backward, ripping off a large piece of silk.
Athena punched his shoulder once. “Wake up!” she demanded. “I want to talk to you!”
His eyes opened languidly and he caught her fist and kissed it. Then he was out like a light.
She could have wept with frustration.
She reached for his mask, wanting at least to know what he looked like, sure that would help her somehow. But she heard voices on the other side of the door. And it wasn’t locked.
She looked at the state of her costume, her host and the fact that she wasn’t even invited to this party, and decided that retreat was the wisest course of action.
At a knock on the door and a questioning “Hello?” she bolted, heading for the French doors that she knew led out to a veranda with stairs down to the backyard. Thanks to the rainy February night, the party would not have spilled outside.
She heard the sitting room door open when she was halfway down the stairs and ran through the darkness without looking back. She knew the way. She’d run down this road where she’d left the car a hundred times as a child.
But never with a man’s kisses stinging her lips, and a piece of her slip still caught in his hand.
Chapter Three
September
Where did he go from here?
David reread the three paragraphs on his monitor for the sixth time.
Jake stared moodily out the back window of the cab as it made the turn to Janie’s bungalow. He hadn’t had a letter in months, but then he hadn’t written her, either. Life had been too hard, too dark to chronicle it for her.
The cab pulled up in front of 722 Bramble Lane. Jake paid the driver and stepped out.
Janie was sitting on the front steps with a cup of coffee and a book. She looked up at the slam of the car door, froze for a moment, then dropped the book and the coffee.
The cursor blinked at the indent on the next paragraph as he waited for inspiration.
She ran into his arms?
He ran into hers?
She walked inside and slammed the door?
Jake pounded on the door?
David hadn’t a clue. He was writing the last chapter of his novel, trying to make his hero’s personal dreams come true after the hell he’d put him through in the previous three hundred pages.
But David couldn’t guess how Janie would react after she’d been skillfully wooed, willingly seduced, then left to fend for herself while Jake answered the CIA’s call after assuring her he was through with the work.
As he’d done at least once a day for months, he thought back to the costume party last February, and the woman who’d appeared in his living room like the realization of a dream.
He remembered her smile, the shape of her chin, snippets of their conversation. There were gaps in his memories. The champagne, the antihistamine and only four hours of sleep the night before had combined to knock him on his butt, but he recalled one crystal clear glimpse of her.
A heart-shaped face. Eyes the color of his favorite chambray shirt. A smile that tripped his pulse. And breasts that spilled out of her Empress Josephine dress like exotic blooms.
He could close his eyes now and catch the rose-and-spice scent of her that had clung to him when he’d awakened in the sitting room. He’d been alone on the futon with part of her slip caught in his fist and the taste of her on his lips.
He couldn’t remember what had happened, but he could imagine. The first few minutes of their meeting were clear in his memory—and he’d been plotting her seduction since then.
He remembered taking her upstairs, pouring more champagne, taking her in his arms and…had he told her about his lonely childhood, or had he just dreamed that? He couldn’t be sure.
But he wished he could be sure he hadn’t hurt her, offended her, upset her.
He’d tried to find her, but without a name or any idea what she did or who the friends were she was visiting, it had been impossible.
Even Mrs. Beasley hadn’t known who she was, though she remembered the dress. She’d arrived with friends, she said, and that was all she knew.
David got up from the computer and went downstairs to the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee and read the editorial page and his horoscope. He forced himself to write three pages every morning before allowing himself that luxury. Otherwise, he’d find a dozen excuses to keep him from the computer.
He’d submitted a full synopsis and three chapters of the novel to an agent in New York, primarily as a way to make himself finish it.
Writing columns, though putting him under the stress of three weekly deadlines, had been easy compared to writing fiction. And in a way, his work as a government agent had been the same. He’d had a clear subject, his own observations and feelings to draw from, input from other people.
In writing fiction, he sat there all alone, except for the demanding blink of the cursor. There were no source materials. Everything came out of his heart or his head and usually lived there behind closed doors, resisting his every effort to force them open.
When the doors did open, the material came at him haphazardly. It made him hurt, made him laugh, made him angry, made him wish he’d chosen to do anything but be a writer.
Until he put just the right words together and made a nebulous thought clear in a beautiful way. And then it was all right. He was all right.
But every morning was a fresh struggle. Every day he had to figure out just how he’d done it the day before.
He poured some Colombian roast into a plain brown mug and carried it to the living room coffee table where he’d left the paper.
He turned on the television for the noise. Dotty, his housekeeper, was away for a few days, Trevyn was somewhere in a remote spot of the Canadian mountains, taking pictures for a calendar, a commission he earned every year. With Bram in Mexico on a case for his already thriving detective agency, Cliffside was quiet as a tomb.
He folded back the editorial page as the weather report promised another week of Indian summer for the Oregon coast. Then the newscaster’s voice said, “We’ll show this item one more time for those of you who are joining us late or missed last night’s report. This woman was found in the Columbia River off Astoria by a pilot boat. She’s in fair condition at Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria, but cannot remember her name, where she lives, or how she ended up in the water. The Coast Guard reported no capsized boats or distress calls.”
David looked up from the paper, his attention snagged by the story—and felt his heart stall in his chest. He got up, knocked over his coffee in the process and stood stock-still in shock.
The grainy photo of the woman remained on the screen while the newscaster pleaded for anyone who knew this woman to contact the Astoria police.
The photo showed a woman on a stretcher, long red hair wet and lank against the pillow, her eyes closed. Her features were difficult to distinguish, but he knew the shape of that face, the delicate point of the chin. It was Constance! And her stomach mounded up under the blanket covering her, clearly in a very advanced state of pregnancy.
His heart hammered its way into his throat. Oh, God.
In his fuzzy memories of that February night, he saw her lying atop him, her hair free of the confining headpiece. He’d been filled with lust for her and she’d been so warm and responsive.
Though he struggled to remember, he still couldn’t recall what had happened after that.
