“I can get—”
“I don’t want to wait. I’m
outta
here.”
“But it’s the middle of the night, and it’s starting to rain.
What if no one picks you up? What about your leg?”
“I’ll survive. I’m damn good at that.”
She considered his battered body and wondered what, exactly,
he had survived. She thought about his bad leg, and grimly speculated on how
much damage she had done to the good one with that bat. Was he in a lot of
pain, but just too much of a tough guy to show it? “Tucker—”
“I wonder if
R.H.
knows just how
lucky he is to have you watching after things for him.” The statement might
have been taken as a compliment under different circumstances. As it was, his
words, soft-spoken though they were, just made her feel that much colder. “You
couldn’t be more eager to carry out his dictates. Your enthusiasm blows me
away, it really does. You must love rules almost as much as he does.”
Despite the implied criticism, there was no real rancor or
arrogance in his tone, as if he knew she wasn’t responsible for her nature.
Harley felt numb.
“Loving rules is something I can’t relate to,” he continued. “My
guess is you need them like you need to breathe. Any hint of disorder, anything
messy or unexpected in your life, just won’t do.” Harley wanted to tell him he
was wrong, but she knew he would see that for the lie it was. “That’s why you’re
incredibly relieved that I’m leaving. I’m very messy and very unexpected, and
you’re not entirely sure what the old man would think about my staying in the
house. God knows, you don’t want to displease
R.H.
Everyone who knows my father craves his approval. I’ve been there.” He looked
up at the enormous, whitewashed brick house, each window fitted with its own
crisp, green-and-white-striped summer awning. “But I can’t go back.”
He descended another step and turned to face her, their
heights almost level now. “He’s lucky to have found you. You’re orderly and
right-thinking and good at giving commands. You’re him! You’re Raleigh Hale,
only— How old are you?”
“Twenty-three,” she replied woodenly.
“Only forty-five years younger, and…” He hesitated, then
lifted a hand to her face, trailed his fingertips lightly along her
jawline
, and traced her lower lip with his thumb. “You have
a much, much nicer mouth.”
With a gentle pressure under her chin, he tilted her face
toward his. He was suddenly very close to her. When he closed his eyes, so did
she. Then she felt his warm mouth on hers, the rough sandpaper of his stubble
grazing the soft skin around her lips.
In a moment, the kiss was over. It had been fleeting,
scratchy-sweet. A goodbye kiss between two people who had only known each other
for ten strange minutes in the middle of the night and would never meet again.
Harley was breathless, and her legs felt weak.
“Goodbye.” He shrugged. “Whatever your name is.”
She took a steadying breath. “Harley.”
He smiled. “Harley. Thanks.”
He turned and made his awkward way down the porch steps, then
disappeared into the darkness without once looking back.
***
Harley raced up and down halls and in and out of rooms,
slamming windows shut against the sudden, torrential rain. It was like a living
thing, a monster, rattling the sashes and soaking her with its spray as she
struggled to keep it out of Raleigh Hale’s home. She grabbed a pile of towels
from the linen closet and went from window to window, drying off woodwork,
varnished floors, and the furniture she had so painstakingly polished the day
before. She saved her own room for last.
Tucker is out in this
. According to the clock on
her night table, it was 3:17 a.m. He had left two hours ago. During most of
that time, the rain had been no worse than a light drizzle, yet even then, she
had worried about him. And now…
Through the closed windows she could hear the crashing of
storm waves on the beach below the house and the scraping of wind-whipped
branches against the roof. And, of course, the driving rain. She thought about
his limp, about the obvious pain he was in, pain made all the worse by her
attack with the baseball bat. A wave of guilt overcame her. How far had he
gotten? Had he gotten a ride? The only logical road for him to have taken didn’t
see a lot of traffic at night. And on a night like this… She pictured the
road, bleak and deserted. No gas stations, no convenience stores, no shelter of
any kind.
Harley took her rain-dampened robe off and threw on the
clothes she’d worn the day before. She looked in the mirror, at her mouth. The
skin surrounding it still felt raw from the contact with his prickly stubble.
She ran a finger over the sensitive skin, her mind unfocused. When she snapped
out of it and saw herself in the mirror, she suddenly realized why she had
gotten dressed.
***
Tucker Hale leaned back against a chain-link fence, hunched
over, and pulled up the collar of his denim jacket. He smiled ruefully. He had
just left a dry house that he had traveled thousands of miles to get to—and the
most attractive woman he had seen in a long time—so that he could stand out
here in this hellish rainstorm in the middle of the night and get soaked to the
bone. It was as if the rain were beating on him with a thousand little fists.
Harley and her baseball bat couldn’t have done any worse.
Harley. Until he’d heard her call the old man “Mr. Hale,” he
thought she might actually be some new half-sister from a second wife. Or even
the second wife herself. Rather young for a stepmother, he thought. And
rather… Well, he would have had a hard time calling her “Mom,” that’s for
sure.
She was very pretty in an offbeat kind of way. Not a classic
beauty, but she did have classic lips. Wide, full, naturally red lips.
Incredible. Great hair, too—bronze shot through with gold, thick and shiny, a
sexy, sleep-tangled mane. She had a sweet, all-American voice. It was hard to
pin down her origins, but he doubted she was a native New Yorker.
She had guts, too, facing him down with that bat. She’d been
scared, but that hadn’t stopped her. Too bad she was such a martinet. He sensed
in her the kind of officious, regimented thinking that had driven him away from
R.H.
and Hale’s Point two decades ago. She really did
remind him of his father: everything by the book, nothing left to chance.
He wasn’t only soaked to the bone, he was chilled to the
bone, as well. God, his legs hurt—both of them now, not just the one. Every
step made his right shin throb and sent a jolt of fire up to his left hip. Why
hadn’t he stayed in Hale’s Point? Or at least let Harley drive him, or better
yet, called a cab? It was that old bolting instinct. That urge to flee.
He shook his head. What was the matter with him, anyway? Kids
hitchhiked—kids too broke to get around any other way. He had no business being
out here. He was thirty-seven years old and far from broke. His net worth
probably exceeded that of his father at this point, and none of it, he reminded
himself proudly, was inherited.
It was beginning to look like he’d be spending all night out
here. Cars were few and far between, and in this downpour, he’d be invisible.
Headlights. The hell with it. He wrapped his arms tightly
around his chest, lowered his head, and closed his eyes.
Could you sleep standing up in a rainstorm? He tried to
remember all the worst places he had slept. The hospital was pretty bad, with
his leg in traction. But that wasn’t half as bad as that roach-infested oven of
a cell in D-Block, with a 320-pound bunkmate who’d murdered his brother-in-law
by suffocating him with a pillow while he slept. And then there was the time
his pals had talked him into climbing that mountain in the Canadian Rockies and
they’d had to rig up their sleeping bags so they hung vertically off the cliff
face.
That
had been a trip.
A horn honked somewhere…. Funny thing was, he’d slept like
a baby that time. He could still remember the feeling, suspended high above the
Rockies in the sharp, cold air, drifting, drifting….
Honk.
“Tucker!”
He opened his eyes and raised his head. A car had pulled
over. Its door stood open. Inside, it glowed with light.
She was there, beckoning to him.
Tucker began stripping
the moment the front door closed behind him. Leaning
on the hall table for support, he tossed his cap, cane, duffel, and denim
jacket onto the tiled floor. Then, in one swift motion, he whipped his sodden
sweater and T-shirt over his head and flung them on top of the jacket.
Harley’s eyes grew wide at the sight of his bare chest—more
in horror, he realized, than in appreciation. The ragged gashes carved into his
flesh between his left shoulder and the bottom of his rib cage were an alarming
sight—even to him. His back, on that side, was almost as bad.
He took the towel she handed him, quickly dried his face,
hair, and upper body, and draped it around his neck. Then he undid the button
fly on his jeans. “Hope you don’t mind, but I’ve got to get out of these.”
She turned around and headed toward the back of the house. “I’ll
make up your bed.”
“I can handle that. Don’t worry about it.”
“I don’t mind.” Clearly Harley just wanted an excuse to get
away from him while he undressed. That was okay. Still, he wondered whether it
was the nudity or the scars that had unnerved her.
He kicked off his wet, heavy jeans and added them to the heap
on the floor. In the car, Harley had told him that the sensible thing was for
him to come back to the house, catch a few hours’ sleep, and book a flight when
it was convenient. Exhausted, drenched, and in pain, he had thanked her for her
trouble and agreed to do the sensible thing.
He wrapped the towel around his hips, bent to retrieve his
cane, and followed Harley to the maid’s room, next to the kitchen. The maid
wouldn’t be back until September, so he had decided to sleep there, instead of
in his old room, in order to avoid the stairs. He didn’t think his leg could
take any more abuse than it had already suffered tonight.
She was bending over the narrow bed, making crisp hospital
corners in the white cotton sheets.
He said, “I want to be able to bounce a dime off that sheet,
Private.”
Her face stained pink when she saw that all he had on was the
towel. She
was
uptight. Then her gaze
dropped to his disfigured left leg, and she quickly returned her attention to
the bed.
“I’m going to take a hot shower before I turn in,” he said.
He flipped the light switch in the little bathroom off the maid’s room, then
turned on the water in the claw-footed tub, adjusting the knob to get it
scalding.
“I’m done here,” she said, turning to face him, her arms
folded across her chest. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wore a
white sweater and new jeans with an ironed-
in crease
;
she looked like a schoolgirl. Except for her face. The hot color in her cheeks
brought out the green in her hazel eyes. Even her lips seemed to blush a darker
red.
He was staring at her. He should say something. “Thanks for
everything, Harley.”
“No problem. Good night.”
“Good night.”
***
He couldn’t move. He lay on his back in the white sand and
stared at the hot-pink sky and green palms, blue waves slapping the shore.
Á shadow fell over him. It was her. He saw her lips, those
amazing lips. She knelt down and leaned over him, and he thought she was going
to kiss him, but instead, she said, “Does it hurt?”
He looked down. It was Alaskan snow he lay on now, and it
burned, it was so cold. The reason he couldn’t move was the jagged pieces of
metal that pierced him all along his left side, pinning him down like an insect
in a case.
“Does it hurt?” she repeated. He was consumed with hurt. Pain
was all there was and all there ever would be.
“No.” he said.
She stood. ‘‘Liar.”
She was gone. He tried to sit up, to reach for her, and the
metal tore at his flesh.
“No!” he gasped. He sat up in bed, sweating and shaking. “No,”
he whispered.
He looked around. The maid’s room. Hale’s Point. Oh, yeah. He
rubbed the back of his neck. “Wow.” He couldn’t even sleep without pain. Even
in his dreams it pursued him.
There was a digital clock on the night table. It was 8:05
a.m. Outside, the waves still lapped and retreated, but they didn’t sound
right; too loud and too regular, just like they were in the dream.
His bed stood against the back wall, a window within reach.
He pulled the curtain back and pried apart the slats of the blinds, squinting
against the bright sunlight. He could see all of the brick patio and most of
the pool. The patio was scattered with teak furniture, including a large round
table under an enormous square canvas umbrella. The pool took up a good part of
what had been, in his boyhood, a flat expanse of broadloom lawn. The lawn ended
fifty yards from the house in a low stone wall bordered with roses, lavender
and creeping thyme.