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The alluring young woman he’d known as Mel Summersby had him thinking about going straight. Starting a family. Getting a... Even now, the blasphemous idea elevated his blood pressure. Getting a job.
“I think we should leave town,” she said.
“I think we should have a plan before we do anything.” He’d had a plan, of course. Get the heiress out of the house, meet the feds—the so-called feds—at the Embarcadero, get a good night’s rest at the Ritz-Carlton and head for the East Coast, where Bram Thorndyke would soon be the recipient of clemency in exchange for tonight’s little escapade. That had been Ash’s condition for participating.
“If we don’t get out of town now, we may not have another chance,” she said. “They’ll be looking for me very soon. Every highway out of town will be covered. Plus, we have a stolen car. A very ostentatious stolen car.”
She was right about the all-out search, of course. “So you’ve done this before.”
“Well, not quite this dramatically.”
“So you must have plenty of aliases. Aside from Mel Summersby.”
She was silent. And he’d been feeling guilty for dumping her. What a chump. She’d probably been twenty minutes away from doing the same to him. Apparently dalliances with the working class were a way of life for the rich and famous Melina Somerset.
“The highway to Big Sur is that way,” she said. “I’ve never been to Big Sur.” There she was, an edge of girlish delight in her otherwise sultry voice. Despite everything he knew, it made him want to give her whatever she longed for. Quite a talent she had. Well, she could find another way to Big Sur.
At the last minute, he made a sharp, tire-squealing turn.
“But don’t get the idea we’re going to Big Sur,” he said. “All we’re going to do is get out of town. Then we’re going to make a plan.”
MELINA ALREADY HAD a plan. The trick, she realized as they left San Francisco behind, was to get Ash Thorndyke to help her implement her plan.
They sprinted along the freeway to the south and Melina sat up and took notice. The highway was lined with precisely what she longed to see. American suburbia. Neon and fast food, billboards and discount stores. Parking lots full of SUVs and minivans.
She was in America. Somewhere there was a place for her, a place where she could belong and blend in and become average.
Ash turned on the car radio, cruising the dial, pausing whenever he landed on a news report.
“It won’t be on the news,” she said softly.
Tom Somerset would never let the world know that his daughter was on the loose. Sometimes it felt to Melina as if she only existed in her father’s imagination. Out of his sight, beyond his control, she ceased to be a real person. Deep in her heart, she knew that wasn’t so. Beneath the anger she felt toward him for completely disregarding her wishes for her life, she loved him as only a child who has already lost one parent can love. But she couldn’t dwell on that. She couldn’t think about how much she would miss him or how much pain this would cause him. He’d left her no alternative. Time and again he’d refused to treat her like an adult
That’s what she had to remember, her anger and her frustration. Not her love or her guilt.
“Hungry?” Ash asked. “I seem to recall that you eat like a workhorse coming off a diet”
She decided not to take offense at the comparison. It was unarguably true. Besides, he must recall more than that. She certainly did. The smell and the taste and the touch of him, all of it unavoidably poignant in her memory. Of course, it had been an adventure for her, one more thing she’d never done in her life.
For him, she supposed, it was just another meaningless romp.
“I want a cheeseburger,” she said. “Two all-beef patties, pickles, the works. French fries.”
“I wouldn’t subject a princess to fast food.”
“I don’t think you have a choice,” she said, not allowing her longing to show. If he knew how much she wanted to go into an American hamburger joint, if he knew how many months and years she’d daydreamed about doing just that, he’d never let her out of the car. “It’ll be fast. We need to keep ahead of them.”
Ten minutes later, they sat in a brightly lit hamburger restaurant, sacks of food on the table in front of them. The place was packed with teenagers and families with young children. Real Americans. Melina’s heart fluttered with excitement. Even when her family had lived in the U.S., they’d never visited a fast food restaurant. They’d had a French chef.
“I think we’re overdressed,” she said, smoothing a paper napkin over the lap of her evening dress and doing her best impression of nonchalance. “Although I do seem to have forgotten my shoes in our haste.”
“Black-tie is never in bad taste.”
Melina caught herself in a laugh—he was hard to resist. But she didn’t want to laugh with him, to get caught up in his easy charm again. She turned her attention to her food. She set the paper-wrapped cheeseburger in front of her, placed the little box of French fries beside it, then put a straw into her milk shake. Perfect. She relished the picture it made before she slowly unwrapped the sandwich. It looked just the way it looked on television.
“Quit staring at it as if you’ve never seen one like it before,” Ash said. “You’re the one who wanted to stop here. This is eat and run, remember.”
If he only knew. The closest she’d ever been to a real American cheeseburger was a thirty-five-inch television screen. But she wasn’t going to tell him that. “I savor my food.”
The first bite was heaven. Ground beef and melted cheese and grilled onions and crunchy pickle slices. She closed her eyes and smiled.
“You realize you’re calling attention to yourself,” he said, “acting orgasmic over a cheeseburger.”
She glanced around and realized the only one paying her any attention was Ash. She started to tell him the only person in the entire world who might recognize she looked orgasmic was one Ash Thorndyke. She decided against that reminder.
But for just one moment, she was sufficiently distracted from her food to notice the hands wrapped around his sandwich. His fingers were blunt, the nails clipped with precision. They were clearly strong hands; what was not so apparent was how sensitive those same hands were.
But Melina knew.
To head off any more disturbing memories, she smiled at him brightly. “So, what are you doing here, if you’re not kidnapping me for ransom?”
“Could we have this conversation later?” His gold-flecked eyes narrowed as he darted a glance around the dining area. He looked nervous and off center.
“I’d like to have it now. Explain yourself, please.” She took another rapturous bite.
“I overheard some people at the party. I thought you were in danger.”
Another paranoid man? Melina’s life had been so distorted by her father’s obsessive fear that it was a disappointment to find out that Ash was cut from the same cloth. His fears did not concern her in the least. She swallowed and chased with vanilla shake. “What people? What were you doing at the party? What kind of danger?”
“You don’t sound especially concerned.”
“If I flew apart every time someone worried about me, I’d have three ulcers now. Then I would not be able to enjoy this cheeseburger.”
“You won’t enjoy it anyway if it gets any colder.”
He was right. She ate another bite, dragged two fries through catsup, ate another bite of hamburger. Ash, she noticed, was barely touching his meal.
“What people?” she pressed, determined to ferret out what he was actually up to. “My father’s security people?”
“Yes.”
“You heard my father tell his security people to lock me up and that made you think I was in danger? Don’t you think that’s overreacting?”
“Do they routinely lock you up?”
“You don’t read many fairy tales, do you? Princesses are always locked up.” She feigned casual indifference, finishing her hamburger. Then she started on the fish fillet sandwich and the chocolate milk shake she’d also insisted on sampling. The fish was crispy and the milk shake sweet and thick. She sighed with pleasure. She couldn’t wait for breakfast. Eggs and hash browns, maybe, at a greasy spoon. Then, for lunch, pizza. A meat-lover’s pizza. And for dinner tomorrow, tacos and burritos. Or maybe fried chicken.
Life was good. Very good.
She finished her food. Ash had only picked at his. She’d studied him carefully. Funny what tricks the mind could play with memory in only a few short months. Before, in London, he’d always seemed so worldly, so mature, so versed in life. Tonight, he looked younger, troubled, as if he were adrift in a current he couldn’t navigate. She found she liked him at this disadvantage; it made him seem vulnerable. It made her feel strong.
“There’s more, isn’t there?” she asked.
He looked at her intently, the way he had sometimes after they made love. Rather, after they had sex. Clearly, there had been no lovemaking. That had been her delusion.
“You’re a grown woman,” he said quietly. “Why do you keep running away? Why not just leave? Permanently.”
She had noticed in looking around that average Americans cleaned up after themselves, wadding up their paper wrappers and stuffing everything back into the sacks. She busied herself doing the same.
“What kind of danger?” she asked, to keep him from pursuing his own questions. “What else did you hear?”
He snatched their bags from the table and stood. “Let’s get out of here.”
“I like it here.”
“Well, I don’t. And I have the car keys.”
She smiled. “No, you don’t.”
His eyes grew dark and troubled. “No. I don’t. But neither do you.”
She stood and walked toward the door with him. As they exited, she looked up at him sweetly and said, “I watched what you did when you hot-wired the car. I think I could do it, too.”
He made tiny slits of his eyes and jabbed one of his blunt fingers into her chest. “Don’t even think about it.”
She merely smiled. She liked distressing him. She liked the little sizzle of danger that pinged through her when his fingertip met her chest.
“I mean it, princess. A night in the pokey might sound like a lark, but it could be the least of your problems.”
“Oh?”
“Some people wouldn’t mind shooting a car thief.”
They were walking away from the restaurant, away from the sports car they’d driven up in. “I see. Like horse thieves.”
“Yeah. Like horse thieves.”
“We’re going the wrong way,” she pointed out.
“No, we’re not.”
They made their way to the darkest part of the parking lot, beside a massive discount store.
“Are we shopping for a new car?” she asked.
“You’re sharp, princess.”
“I like that one.” She pointed to another convertible with sleek, sporty lines.
“This time I pick.”
He chose a boring sedan with faded brown paint. It had a canvas bag of knitting in the passenger’s seat and an array of straw hats in the back seat.
“We shouldn’t take her knitting,” Melina said.
“She’ll get it back before she can count the stitches in the next row.”
The car rumbled to life when he hot-wired it, and they headed out of the parking lot.
Melina reached in back for one of the straw hats, a rolled-brim number with an orange-and-lime band. It didn’t fit. “I guess that’s why we’re leaving the other one. So its owner can get it back soon.” She didn’t bother to hide the sarcasm in her voice.
He said nothing.
They drove through the traffic, beyond the neon, into the darkness that soon led them to the coastal highway. Moonlight glittered off the restless Pacific. Melina rolled down the car window to let the sound of the surf break the silence.
“Why’d you have to lie?”
His question came out of nowhere, but she knew what he meant. Why had she pretended to be someone she wasn’t when they’d met in London? She wished she could have seen his eyes when he asked. Was there hurt? Anger? Or just idle curiosity? Melina didn’t know how to answer his question truthfully. Three months ago she would have been happy to confide in Ash. But she knew better than to trust him now.
She decided on another lie. “It was just a game.”
“Who won?”
She didn’t know how to answer that, either. He was the one who’d walked away, so some might call him the winner.
But she knew better. Their...liaison had been much more than a game, and in about six months, she’d have the evidence to prove that. “Why, I did.”
SWEET IDA’S TEAROOM stayed open late that night, to accommodate the Hope Springs high-schoolers finishing up their prom dates. Granted, most of them ended the evening at Confederate Cove with a flask of vodka, a carton of orange juice and steamed-up windows. But Sweet Ida’s was a tradition, too.
Ida Monroe had been staying open late on prom night for longer than any of these young ’uns had been alive and she expected to keep up the tradition as long as she still had anything to say about it.
Ida perched on her stool behind the counter, smiling fondly at the half-dozen youngsters attempting to look and act grown-up. She knew them all by name, remembered each and every one of them in diapers. Ida loved prom night.
There was Honey Lou Weidemann, looking like Scarlet O’Hara about to fall off her platform shoes. And Richie Holcomb, who didn’t know what to do with the tails on his cutaway when he sat. Stacy Tillman, the sheriff’s daughter, elegant as a model. And Winnie Wickerstaff, poured into something that ought to be illegal for underage girls. All of them sipping tea or coffee and nibbling on pastries and giggling over the night’s activities.
Ida was content to sit and watch.
Finally most of the couples paid up and left. She was down to one lingering couple, and preparing to lock up after they left, when the front door of the tearoom opened to admit a couple who weren’t dressed in formal wear. Maddie Sheffer and Leon Betton wore the uniforms of emergency medical technicians. They looked wrung-out.
“Thank goodness you’re still open,” Maddie said. She sounded as worn-out as she looked. “If we don’t get some coffee, they might have to come haul us down to County General.”
“Bad night?” Ida was already pouring the last of her coffee for them.
“Could’ve been worse, I suppose,” Leon said, taking the cup she brought and sprinkling in some sugar. “Didn’t lose anybody.”
“Yet,” Maddie added.
Ida stood beside the third chair at their table. “What happened?”
