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My lovely…that’s what he’d called her in the days when they’d been in love; when they’d made love. And the sound of it, falling again from his lips after all this time, brought back such a shock of déjà vu that she trembled inside.
Late August, the summer she’d turned seventeen, just weeks before he started his junior year at university, two hundred miles away…wheeling gulls against a cloudless sky, the distant murmur of the incoming tide, the sun gilding her skin, and Jake sliding inside her, with the tall grass of the dunes whispering approval in the sea breeze. “I miss you so much when we’re apart,” he’d told her. “I’ll love you forever.”
But he hadn’t. Thirteen months later, she’d spent two months studying art in France. When she returned, she found out from Penelope that he’d been seeing a college coed while she’d been gone.
She’d been crushed, although she really shouldn’t have been. As her weeks abroad passed, there’d been signs enough that trouble was brewing. His phone calls had dwindled, become filled with long, awkward pauses. He wasn’t there to meet her as promised, when she came home again. He didn’t even make it back for Thanksgiving. And finally, when there was no avoiding her at Christmas, he’d shamelessly flaunted her replacement in her face.
“Jake Harrington’s a two-timing creep,” sweet sympathetic Penelope told her, “and you’re too smart to let such a worthless jerk break your heart. Forget him! There are better fish in the sea.”
But she hadn’t wanted anyone else. As for forgetting, it was a lot easier said than done for an eighteen-year-old who’d just discovered she was pregnant by the boy she adored and who’d passed her over for someone new.
The spilled assignments at last cradled in her arms, Sally struggled to her feet with as much grace as she could muster and crammed the papers into her briefcase. “We went over all this on Saturday. I’ve told you everything there is to know.”
“Okay.” He shrugged amiably. “Then I won’t ask you again.”
Elation flooded through her. “I’m glad you finally believe me.”
“Of course I do,” he said. “You’re not the kind of person who’d hold out on me about something this important, are you?”
Guilt and suspicion nibbled holes in her relief. “Then why did you come here to begin with?”
“Mostly to find out if you’ve forgiven me for landing you in such a mess an Saturday. If I’d known Colette was going to go after you like that—”
“You had no way of knowing she’d react so badly. Consider yourself forgiven.”
“A lot of women wouldn’t be so understanding,” he said diffidently. “But then, you never were like most women.”
Diffident? Jake Harrington?
She’d have laughed aloud at the idea, had it not been that the hair on the back of her neck vibrated with warning. He was up to something! She could almost hear the wheels spinning behind that guileless demeanor! “And?”
“Hmm?” Doing his best to look innocently virtuous, he traced a herringbone pattern over the floor with the tip of his cane.
“You said ‘mostly’—that you were here mostly to find out if I’d forgiven you. What’s the other reason?”
He tried to look sheepish. Would have blushed, if he’d had it in him to do such a thing. “Would you believe, nostalgia got the better of me? When I heard you were on staff here, I couldn’t stay away.” He leaned against one of the cabinets holding supplies and sent her a smile which plucked unmercifully at her heartstrings. “This is where we met, Sally. We fell in love here. I kissed you for the first time next to the lockers right outside this room. You had blue paint on the end of your nose.”
“I’m surprised you remember,” she said, warmth stealing through her and blasting her reservations into oblivion.
“I remember everything about that time. Nothing I’ve known since has ever compared to it.”
The warmth turned to melting heat. Against her better judgment, she found herself wanting to believe him. “You don’t have to say that. You shouldn’t say it.”
“Why not? Don’t I have as much right to tell the truth as you do?”
He sounded so sincere, she found herself wondering. Was he playing mind games with her? Trying to trip her up? Or was she seeing entrapment where none existed?
Deciding it was better to err on the side of caution and put an end to the meeting, she indicated the bulging briefcase and said, “I should get going. I’ve got a full evening’s work ahead.”
He eased himself away from the desk. “Me, too. I’m still sorting through Penelope’s stuff and deciding what to do with it, and the house. I don’t need all that space.”
Watching as he limped to the door, she knew an inexplicable regret that he accepted his dismissal so easily. So what if his smile left her insides fluttering? They weren’t teenagers anymore. First love didn’t survive an eight-year winter of neglect to bloom again at the first hint of spring.
Still, having him show up so unexpectedly had unsettled her almost as badly as seeing him at the funeral. He stirred up too many buried feelings.
His voice, the curve of his mouth, the latent passion in his direct blue gaze, made her hungry for things she shouldn’t want and certainly couldn’t have. So, rather than risk running into him again, she waited until his footsteps faded, and the clang of the outside door shutting behind him echoed down the hall, before she ventured out to retrieve her coat from the staff cloakroom.
The sky had been clear when she left for work that morning and she’d enjoyed the two-mile walk from the guest cottage at the end of her parents’ driveway and through the park to the school. Sometime since classes ended, though, the clouds had rolled in again and freezing rain begun to fall. The ramp beyond the Academy’s main entrance was treacherous with black ice.
Twice, she’d have lost her footing, had it not been for the iron railing running parallel to the path. But the real trouble started when she gained the glassy sidewalk and found it impossible to navigate in shoes not designed for such conditions.
Turning right, as she intended to do, was out of the question. Instead, with her briefcase rapping bruisingly against her leg, she lurched into the dirty snow piled next to the curb, three days earlier, by the road-clearing crews.
It was the last straw in a day which had started badly and gone steadily downhill ever since. Exasperated, she gave vent to a stream of unladylike curses which rang up and down the deserted street with satisfying gusto.
Except the street wasn’t quite as deserted as she’d thought. A low-slung black sports car, idling in the lee of a broad-trunked maple not ten feet away, cruised to a stop beside her, with the passenger window rolled down just far enough for Jake’s voice to float out. “Faculty members didn’t know words like that when I was a student here,” he announced affably. “Come to think of it, I’m not sure I knew them, either.”
“Are you stalking me?” she snapped, miserably conscious of the fact that she cut a ridiculous figure standing there, ankle-deep in snow.
“Not at all. I stopped to offer you a ride home.”
“No, thanks. I prefer to walk.”
“Oh,” he said. “Is that what you were doing when you came sailing into the gutter just now?”
“I temporarily lost my balance.”
“Temporarily?” He let out a muffled snort of laughter. “Dear Ms. Winslow, if you insist on wearing summer footwear in the kind of winter which Eastridge Bay is famous for, it’ll be anything but temporary. Stop being stubborn and get in the car before you break your neck. I’d come round and hold the door open for you, except I’m having enough problems of my own trying to get around in these conditions.”
She debated telling him what he could do with his offer, but her frozen feet won out over her pride. “Just as well you’re not inclined to play the gentleman,” she muttered, yanking open the door and climbing in to the blessed warmth of the car. “I might be tempted to knock your cane out from under you!”
“Now that,” he remarked, stepping gently on the gas and pulling smoothly out into the road, “is why some people—people who don’t know you as well as I used to—talk about you the way they do.”
“And how is that, exactly? I’m living in the guest cottage on my parents’ estate, by the way. You turn left on—”
“I remember how to get there, Sally,” he said. “I’ve driven you home often enough, in the past. And to answer your question, unflatteringly. They say you came back to town and brought a bagful of trouble with you. Are they right?”
“Why ask me? You’ll find listening to their version of the facts far more entertaining, I’m sure.”
“As a matter of interest, where have you been for the last several years?”
“At university on the West Coast, and after that, down in the Caribbean.”
He didn’t quite snicker in her face, but he might as well have. “Doing what?” he inquired, his voice shimmering with amusement.
“Well, not weaving sun hats from coconut palm fronds or singing in a mariachi band, if that’s what you’re thinking!”
“You have no idea what I’m thinking, Sally. None at all. And you haven’t answered my question. What kept you in the sunny Caribbean all this time?”
“The same thing that’s keeping me occupied here. Teaching, except the children down there were so under-privileged that working with them was pure pleasure.”
“Very commendable of you, I’m sure. How long did you stay?”
“Two years in Mexico, and two years on the island of St. Lucia after that.”
“Why that part of the world?”
“They needed teachers as badly as I needed to get away from here.”
“What?” His voice quivered with silent laughter. “You never yearned to settle down in picturesque Eastridge Bay? To follow in your sister’s footsteps and marry a fine, upstanding man of good family?”
Once upon a time I did, but you chose to put a wedding ring on Penelope’s finger, instead! “Not all women see marriage as the be-all and end-all of happiness. Some of us find satisfaction in a career.”
“But not everyone runs away to a tropical island to find it.”
“I was trying to escape the winters up here. But this town is my home and I was happy to come back to it—until everything started going wrong.” She shivered inside her coat. The rain, she noticed, had turned to snow and was sliding down the windshield in big, sloppy flakes. She noticed, too, that they’d passed the turnoff for Bayview Heights blocks before, and were speeding instead along the main boulevard leading out of town. “You’re going the wrong way, Jake!”
“So I am,” he said cheerfully.
“Well, turn around and head back! And slow down while you’re at it. I’ve spent enough time stuck in a snow-bank, for one night.”
“No need to get all exercised, Sally. Since I’ve missed the turn anyway, we might as well enjoy a little spin in the country.”
“I don’t want to go for a spin in the country,” she told him emphatically. “I want to go home.”
“And you will, my lovely. All in good time.”
“Right now!” She reached for the door handle. “Stop this car at once, Jake Harrington. And stop calling me that.”
He didn’t bother to reply. The only sound to register above the low hum of the heater was the click of automatic door locks sliding home and the increased hiss of the tires on the slick surface of the road.
Stunned, she turned to stare at him. There were no streetlights this far beyond the town limits, but the gleam of the dashboard lights showed his profile in grim relief. “Are you kidnapping me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then just what are you doing?”
“Looking for a place where we can get something hot to drink. It’s the least I can do, to make up for keeping you out past your bedtime.”
The words themselves might have been innocuous enough, but there was nothing affable or benign in his tone of voice. The man who’d beguiled her with his smile and tender memories not half an hour ago, who’d offered her a ride home to spare her walking along icy streets, had turned into a stranger as cold and threatening as the night outside.
“You had this planned all along, didn’t you?” she said, struggling to suppress the fear suddenly tapping along the fringes of her mind. She’d accepted a lift from her one-time lover, the local hero come home from doing battle and with the scars to prove it, not from some faceless stranger, for heaven’s sake! To suspect he posed any sort of threat was nothing short of absurd. “This is what you intended, from the minute you showed up in my classroom.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Well, you didn’t have to go to such extremes. I’d have been happy to stop for coffee at a place in town.”
“Too risky. Think of the gossip, if we’d been seen together. The widower and the wild woman flaunting their association in public! Better to find some out-of-the-way place where the kind of people we know wouldn’t dream of setting foot. A place so seedy, no respectable woman would want to be seen by anyone she knew.”
Seedy? What on earth would prompt him to use such a word?
Numbly she stared ahead, once again in the grip of that eerie unease. By then, the snow had begun to settle, turning the windows opaque except for the half-moons cleared by the windshield wipers. She could see nothing of the landscape flying past, nothing of where they’d been or where they were headed.
Then, off to the side, some hundred yards or so down the road, a band of orange light pierced the gloom; a neon sign at first flashing dimly through the swirling snow, but growing brighter as the car drew nearer, until there was no mistaking its message. Harlan’s Roadhouse it read. Beer— Eats—Billiards.
And her premonition crystalized into outright dismay. She’d seen that sign before. And Jake was well aware of the fact!
He slowed to turn into the rutted parking area, nosed the car to a spot close to the tavern entrance and turned off the engine. Immediately the muffled, relentless throb of country and western music filled the otherwise quiet night, its only competition the equally brutal pounding of Sally’s heart.
He climbed out of the car and, despite his earlier claim that he was too lame to play the gentleman, came around and opened the passenger door. When she made no move to join him, he reached across to unclip her seat belt and grasped her elbow. “This is as far as we go, Sally,” he said blandly. “Hop out and be quick about it.”
“I’d rather not.”
“I’d rather you did. And I’m not taking you back to town until you do.”
Odd how a man’s mood could shift so abruptly from mild to menacing; how smoldering rage could make its presence felt without a voice being raised. And stranger still that a person could find herself responding hypnotically to a command she knew would result in nothing but disaster.
Like a sleepwalker, she stepped out into the snow, yet felt nothing of its stinging cold. Was barely aware of putting one foot in front of another as she walked beside Jake, past the rusted pickup trucks and jalopies, to the entrance of the building.
“After you,” he said, pushing open the scarred wooden door and ushering her unceremoniously into the smoke-filled interior.
At once, the noise blasted out to meet her. The smell of beer and cheap perfume, mingled with sweat and tobacco, assailed her senses.
Stomach heaving, she turned to Jake. “Please don’t make me do this!”
“Why ever not?” he asked, surveying her coldly. “Place not to your liking?”
“No, it’s not,” she managed to say. “I’m insulted you’d even ask.”
“But it was good enough the night you came here with Penelope, the night she died, wasn’t it?” he said. “So why not now, with me?”
CHAPTER THREE
SHE didn’t reply, nor had he expected she would. He’d outmaneuvered her too thoroughly. Instead she hovered just inside the door, uncertain whether to flee or surrender. Since he hadn’t a hope in hell of catching her if she tried to make a run for it, he eliminated the possibility by marching her to a booth on the other side of the dance floor.
“Cosy, don’t you think?” he said, sliding next to her on the shabby vinyl banquette so that she was trapped between him and the wall. Too bad he had to put his mouth to her ear for her to hear him. He didn’t need the dizzying scent of her hair and skin making inroads on his determination to wring the truth out of her.
“What’ll it be, folks?” A giant of a man, with beefy arms covered in tattoos and a head as bald as an egg, came out from behind the bar and swiped a dirty cloth over the tabletop.
Without bothering to consult her, Jake said, “Beer. Whatever you’ve got on tap. And nachos.”
“I don’t drink beer and I don’t like nachos,” she said snootily, the minute the guy left to fill their order.
“No?” Jake dug in his hip pocket for his wallet. “What did you have the last time you were here—champagne and oysters on the half shell?”
“What makes you think I’ve been here before?”
“I read the police report, remember?”
