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“Okay, Mommy.” Ashley’s feet swung back and forth, her heels kicking the front of her booster chair.
Smiling, choking back tears, Jamie leaned forward and kissed Ashley’s cheek.
“Love you, Mommy,” Ashley said, pushing her cheek into the kiss without relinquishing her thumb.
“Love you, too, baby.”
Jamie fled.
LEAVING ASHLEY BEHIND in Karen’s kitchen was hard. But not as hard as growing up with a man who’d given her nothing—except bruises. Not as hard as being homeless at seventeen. She could do this.
She was only going next door. Yet as she walked into her house, as she picked up the piece of paper she’d left lying on her counter, the distance that separated her from her innocent little girl seemed suddenly insurmountable.
What did he want?
What could he possibly want?
He was new in town. Lonely. And somehow he knew that Jamie lived in Larkspur Grove.
He could go to hell.
She was already there.
By the time she got to the tiny bedroom she used as an office, Jamie was almost completely transformed. Encased in a hard shell of numbness her daughter wouldn’t recognize, she wondered how far the word had spread. How many more of them knew where she lived?
The phone seemed to jump out at her, threatening to pull her away, back to the life she’d left behind five years ago.
Even now, even here, Ashley was all that mattered. Her daughter was everything Jamie was not. Sweet. Unsoiled. Innocent. She was the part of Jamie that had never been given a chance to live. Not since the devil himself had moved in with Jamie and her mother, just after Jamie’s fourth birthday.
Jamie would do what she had to do, anything she had to do, to protect Ashley’s right to a childhood. Her right to grow up decently.
And if that meant facing down the demons from her past—one or all of them—she’d do it. There was simply no alternative.
PHONE IN HAND, she punched in the number. His number. Only the shaking of her finger testified to the trauma playing itself out inside her. At seventeen, she’d survived her stepfather’s debilitating advances. She’d survive this, too.
She pushed the last button. Lifted the mobile phone to her ear. Heard it ring...
The phone dropped to the floor, the ringing muffled by the plush gray carpet as Jamie flew to the bathroom and vomited. She hung over the toilet for another few minutes, just in case.
She could do this. She could do this.
It was just going to take a minute.
Wringing a washcloth under cold water from the basin faucet, Jamie fought the monsters she’d been fighting for as long as she could remember. Why had she ever thought she could outrun her past? She should have realized it would eventually catch up with her—destroy the present she’d so painstakingly created.
She buried her face in the cloth, welcoming its coolness against her hot skin. How had she ever been stupid enough to believe she could get away with these deceptions? That they wouldn’t always be part of her?
And then she met her eyes in the mirror. Big gray eyes, just like Ashley’s. Except that Jamie’s had seen too much. Way too much. More than any woman ever should. The eyes that stared back at her weren’t innocent like her daughter’s. They were knowing. They knew just the right look to promise a man anything.
They made her sick. So did the woman they belonged to. She’d made her choices. And had to be accountable for them.
Turning away from the mirror before she threw up again, Jamie wadded the cloth in her fist. The thought of Ashley being tarnished by her sins was killing her as surely as her stepfather would have done if he’d managed to catch up with her all those years ago.
He was dead now. But the effects of his having lived would never die.
The anniversary clock in the living room chimed the hour. She’d been gone from Karen’s for more than twenty minutes. Ashley was going to start wondering where she was.
Concentrating on the child, Jamie found the strength to enter her office a second time. To pick up the phone. To dial again. She’d been facing her problems head-on her entire life, even when it meant putting her own body between her stepfather’s fist and her mother’s weaker frame. Her strength was the only reason she’d survived this far.
She had one focus, one goal: doing what was best for Ashley. Life on the run, hiding, wasn’t it. Reaching for a recent photo of her daughter laughing at her from Santa’s lap, Jamie kept her eyes glued to the image as Kyle Radcliff answered his phone.
“Yes, Ms. Archer, thanks for getting back to me so promptly....”
His voice was just as she remembered it. When she remembered it. It was so warm, almost as if he were in the room with her. She could see him sitting there on the end of the hotel bed, hunched over, his head in his hands as he told her about his mother’s death. “...so I’d like to hire your services.”
He wanted to hire her services. She hadn’t gotten to that part of the memory yet. The part where he’d turned out to be just like all the rest. Her voice stuck in her throat.
He wanted to hire her services.
She wanted to die. Right then. Right there. What was the point of fighting anymore? She was who she was. Who she’d always been. Who she’d always be. The floor started to spin and she almost gave in, almost let that feeling of vertigo swallow her up. Almost.
And then her vision cleared again. And she could see the image she held of her laughing little girl. The trusting eyes. She couldn’t let Ashley be a part of this. Panicking, she tried to think of something to say. Did he know she’d had a child?
She concentrated on the red velvet dress she and Ashley had picked out together for the muchanticipated visit with Santa.
“Ms. Archer? Are you there?” He’d called her “Jamie” before.
“Yes. I’m here.” She didn’t know what else to say. How to keep him away from Ashley. How to keep the woman she’d been away from her child.
“So do you think you’ll be able to squeeze me in?,
Would he go away if she did?
“What exactly did you have in mind?” She hated the words, hated herself for saying them. But she was afraid that if she turned him down, he’d figure she was playing with him, would take it as a challenge, a come-on. That he wouldn’t go away. After all, men like him weren’t used to hearing “no” from women like her. Probably because women like her never said that particular word to men like him.
“You’re the professional, you tell me.” His voice was pleasant, calm, detached.
“You’re the one paying the bill.” The words practically choked her. But she had to gain some time, figure out what to do, how to get rid of him without making him suspicious—or even curious. Her daughter’s entire future depended on making this man nonexistent immediately. Forever.
She not only didn’t want him to call her again, she didn’t want him to think of her again.
“But I’ve never hired an accountant before—”
What?
“An accountant?”
“I’m sorry, I assumed you were an accountant,” he said.
His voice carried a hint of the self-deprecatory humor that had ensnared her almost five years before. That long-ago night, his humility had caused her to let down her guard, to do one of the stupidest things she’d ever done.
“Dean Patterson gave me your name,” he continued. “Said you do taxes. I just assumed you were an accountant.”
“I am.”
“Oh. Good. So, do you have time to take on one more client? Like I said, my records are in fairly good shape, but with the move from Las Vegas to Colorado and selling my house, I’ll need all the help I can get.”
Records? She’d clearly missed something.
“Dr. Patterson gave you my number?” The room had begun to spin again. Relief was making her light-headed.
“I’m sorry to impose like this on a total stranger, but the dean said you were the best.”
A total stranger. “No!” Jamie’s mind raced. “No, it’s no imposition.” The dean and his wife were good to her. They sent her seventy-five percent of her business. They had no idea who she’d been before she moved to Larkspur Grove, pregnant, single and two semesters short of her degree. She’d met them at a student-welcoming session, and for some reason Jamie had never understood, they’d shown an interest in her right from that first introduction, befriended her, helped her get established. They’d guessed, based on her silences, that she was a widow. She’d never corrected the assumption.
“You’ll take me on?”
Kyle Radcliff sounded hopeful, but she heard nothing more personal than that in his voice.
She was trapped. There was no way she could decline without arousing suspicion, maybe not his but certainly the dean’s. She’d just told Dr. Patterson about Ashley’s request for dance lessons, the tuition, recital fees, the costumes involved. Just thanked him profusely for saying he’d send another client or two her way.
Jamie took a deep breath. “It might be a couple of weeks before I can get to you.”
She’d met him once. It had been dark. She looked completely different now. She’d run into one of her college professors from the University of Nevada a couple of years ago and even he hadn’t recognized her. Surely someone who’d seen her only once, at night, wouldn’t know who she was.
“No problem. This all happened so fast I need a little time to unpack and find things, anyway. I just registered with the Las Vegas Educational Job Service in December and didn’t expect a permanent position to come through until the fall.”
The Las Vegas Educational Job Service. Which consisted of one very energetic woman, the service’s owner, Wanda Kendall. Wanda had an office at the university in Las Vegas and was the person who’d helped Jamie find Larkspur Grove, the one who’d arranged for her work-study position so she could finish her degree at Gunnison. The woman who’d introduced her to Dean Patterson.
“Were you teaching in Las Vegas?” At the university? When she’d been a student?
“Yeah,” he said easily. “I was head of the English department at a private college just outside the city.”
A private college. With no connection to Jamie at all.
Okay. So maybe here was her chance to prove there was no part of that other woman, the woman he’d known and forgotten, still left inside her. Here was her chance to put the past behind her, once and for all. To prove to herself that she could. And maybe, finally, to forgive herself....
“Mr. Radcliff, you’ve just hired an accountant.”
CHAPTER TWO
THE HOUSE WAS QUIET. Ashley slept soundly, tucked beneath her Little Mermaid comforter, as Ariel and Flounder smiled down at her from the walls above. Jamie had no idea how long she stood in her daughter’s doorway, absorbing the comfort of her presence. Yet no matter how long she stood there, it wasn’t long enough.
She’d made it through the day. Managed to convince herself that she was fine. That the phone call changed nothing. That it wasn’t any big deal.
Until darkness fell. And the woman Jamie had been, the woman who’d worked nights, returned to haunt her. Nighttime was often bad for Jamie; she was used to coping. But that night, none of her coping techniques were working.
She couldn’t find peace. Couldn’t shut the doors in her mind. Memories flooded her relentlessly until she was drowning, suffocating beneath their weight....
Jamie had only been four, Ashley’s age, when her widowed mother married John Archer. Though she’d loved her mother, Jamie had known, even then, that Sadie Archer wasn’t a strong person. It was why Jamie had wanted a daddy so desperately. She’d hoped and prayed for someone big and strong to take care of them, to keep them safe. She hadn’t known, then, to be careful what she wished for.
John was big and strong, all right, but the day he’d moved into her life was the last day Jamie ever felt safe. He’d been a hard man to please, an unforgiving man. And no matter how hard she tried, Jamie never could please him. She spilled her milk; she made too much noise; she left water on the floor in the bathroom.
At first, her mother had taken the beatings for all the things Jamie had done. But it wasn’t long, a few months maybe, before Jamie started getting them herself. By her fifth birthday, lying was a way of life. Stories came as automatically as the bruises she had to explain.
And several years after that, when it had become obvious that Jamie’s young body was stronger than that of her frail mother, she began to take the hits for both of them. She’d been twelve the first time she stepped in front of a fist aimed at her mother’s chest.
And seventeen the last time she’d felt his hands on her body...
COVERING HER MOUTH to stifle the sobs, Jamie backed away from Ashley’s door. The memories weren’t letting up. And Jamie couldn’t bear to live through them in her daughter’s presence.
She stumbled into the kitchen, as far from Ashley’s room as she could get, and slid down to the hard cold tile, leaning against a cupboard. All her possessions were new since she’d moved to Larkspur Grove—even her underwear. Especially her underwear. She’d brought nothing with her. Not so much as a photograph. But that didn’t obliterate the past’s existence. It lived and breathed inside her. In her heart, in her mind...
The cemetery in Trona, California, was lush, green, full of flowers. And crowded. Jamie had had no idea so many people had cared about her mother. But it made no difference. Surrounded by all these people, she still felt completely alone. Apart. Frozen. It had all been for nothing.
All the struggles. The prayers. The hopes for a better day. The promises of freedom from hell. They’d all been for nothing. Her mother had lived a life of torment. And then died. She’d never escaped. The future had ended before she’d ever reached it.
“‘Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid...’” The minister’s words faded beneath the screaming in her mind. Peace! Not where she stood. And fear? What else was there?
“You okay, baby?” John’s arm stole around her shoulders. She would have lost her lunch if she’d had any. All afternoon he’d played the role of loving stepfather. Just as he always did when anyone was around to see him. Anyone who mattered.
Jamie and her mother had never mattered.
Though she couldn’t make herself respond to him, she held herself steady by sheer force of will, bearing the weight of his arm about her. She hadn’t missed the tightening of his fingers on her upper arm. He’d issued his warning—she wasn’t to make a scene. The warning would be a bruise by nightfall.
And no one would ever believe that John had given it to her. Everyone loved John. He was a charming, personable man with a reputation for generosity. Jamie cringed every time she heard him described as a ‘wonderful family man.” But she knew better than to try telling anyone what had really been happening at home all these years. She knew John would deny everything in that charming salesman’s voice of his. He’d talk about how difficult she was, what a burden she’d been to him, what a liar she’d become. They’d believe him. They always did.
They’d believed him that time she’d told her kindergarten teacher he’d beaten her so badly she ached all over; he’d claimed merely to have spanked her once for lying to him. He’d actually had tears in his eyes when he’d related how hard it had been to raise a hand to her, saying he’d tried everything else to stop her compulsive lying.
It also hadn’t hurt that he’d been valedictorian of his class, in the same school district. Or that his parents—now dead but long revered—had both put in many years on the board of education.
And, of course, the die had been cast from then on. Jamie’s word was no longer valid. She was labeled. A compulsive liar.
Her stomach cramped with fear, she hoped the bruise on her arm was the only one she’d be sporting that night. John had been the perfect stepfather since her mother’s death three days before. But there had been people around. Her mother’s elderly sister, who’d flown in from Florida. Neighbors. Members of the church they attended.
They’d all be gone by evening.
“‘In my father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you...that where I am, there ye may be also...’”
Recognizing the familiar Bible verse, Jamie felt the first prick of tears that day. If only it were so. If only she could be sure her mother finally had her mansion.
Her expression stoic, Jamie refused to allow the tears to fall.
And as her mother’s casket was lowered into the ground, she looked not at her mother’s grave, but at the people around her. Their tears flowed freely. They mourned a wonderful, giving, fragile woman.
And not one of them knew.
“Let’s go,” John said, hugging her close.
