Charlotte had been thrilled with the scheme to strand Mattie on St. Gabriel. Long convinced that Mattie desperately needed a vacation, she had talked her niece into taking one at a plush resort just a bit beyond the Hawaiian Islands. And as long as she was going that far, Charlotte had said casually, she might as well hop over to Purgatory and pick up a valuable medieval sword from a collector named Paul Cormier.
Nobody had mentioned that the route to Cormier's island was via St. Gabriel.
“Hugh?”
“Yeah?”
“Who is Christine?”
Hugh frowned, “Christine Cormier? Paul's wife. She died a couple years ago. Why?”
“He thought I was her there at the end.”
Hugh shut his eyes and rubbed the back of his neck. “Damn. Paul was still alive when you got there?”
“Only for about three or four minutes. No more. He told me there was no point calling for help.”
“Christ.” Hugh leaned his head back against the wall. He remembered the great red wound in his friend's chest and the blood that had stained the floor and Mattie's clothing. “Was that the first time you've ever had to, uh…”
“Watch someone die? No. I was with my grandmother at the end. But that was so different. She was in a hospital and the whole family was there.” There was a long pause. “She was a famous ballerina, you know.”
“I know.”
“I still remember her last words,” Mattie said.
“What were they?”
“‘Pity the younger girl never showed any signs of talent.’”
Hugh winced. “She was talking about you?”
“Uh-huh. Aunt Charlotte said Grandmother might have been one of the finest prima ballerinas who had ever lived, but that didn't change the fact that she had all the sensitivity of a bull elephant. Even on her deathbed.”
Hugh was silent for a moment. He'd seen enough of her multitalented family to guess that Mattie, the only one without any artistic bent, had probably always felt like a second-class citizen. Her decision to forge a career as an art gallery owner had been viewed by the other members of the clan as a final admission that she had not inherited any of the family's brilliant genes. Only Charlotte had understood and sympathized.
“I'm sorry you had to walk in on Cormier like that,” Hugh finally said.
“I felt so damned helpless.”
Hugh smiled to himself in the darkness. “Paul was probably terribly embarrassed.”
“It's hardly a joking matter, for God's sake.”
“No, I didn't mean it as a joke.” Hugh tried to think of how to explain. “You had to know Paul. He was a gentleman to his fingertips. Took pride in it. He would never have dreamed of inconveniencing a lady. When I saw him a couple of months ago, he gave me a long lecture on how to deal with women. Said my techniques were lousy.”
“Did he really? Mr. Cormier was obviously a very perceptive man.”
“That's my Mattie. Sounds like you're pulling out of the shock. What did you say when Paul called you Christine?”
Mattie shrugged as she stared at the moonlight crawling slowly up her rumpled silk shirt. “I did what people always do in a situation like that. I held his hand and let him think I was Christine.”
Hugh studied her intently. “What makes you think everyone does things like that?”
“I don't know. Instinct, I suppose. There's so little you can do to comfort a dying man.” She moved around a little, obviously trying to get more comfortable. “He wasn't hallucinating all the time, though. At one point he warned me to get out of there. Then he said someone would come. Maybe he meant you. And then he made a little joke. It was amazing. Imagine someone being able to joke about his own death.”
“What did he say?”
“He said something about intending to reign in hell, I think. You know that famous quote from Paradise Lost? ‘Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven’?”
“I know it.” Hugh smiled to himself with grim satisfaction. “Sounds like Cormier. He probably figured his chances of getting into heaven were slight. But he'll do all right if he goes down instead of up. I'd back him in a contest with the devil any day. Paul may have had the manners of an angel, but I've seen him—” Hugh stopped himself abruptly. No sense bringing up Paul's past. It might lead to questions about his own, and Hugh definitely did not want that.
“Well, he thought he saw Christine again right at the very end, waiting for him, so maybe he went the other way after all.”
“Maybe. He loved her very much.” Hugh was silent for a moment, thinking. I should have been there with you, Paul. After all these years together, I should have been there at the end. I'm sorry, my friend.
“Thanks, Mattie.”
“For what?”
“For staying with him for those last few minutes. You probably shouldn't have hung around. You probably should have run like hell. But Paul was a good friend of mine. I'm glad he didn't die alone.”
Mattie was silent. “I'm sorry you lost a friend.”
“I just wish you hadn't had to go through that,” Hugh continued, his voice roughening.
“It was something of a shock,” she admitted.
“Why in hell didn't you do as you were told and follow the original flight schedule?” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Hugh wished he had bitten his tongue.
Mattie sighed. “Please, Hugh. No lectures. Not tonight. I know it will be very difficult for you to resist, but I would very much appreciate it if you would try.”
“But, why, Mattie? Was the thought of seeing me again all that terrible? You've been deliberately avoiding me for months. Nearly a whole damned year.”
She said nothing.
Hugh eyed her, feeling a deep anger tinged with guilt. He brushed aside the guilt and concentrated on the anger. It was an easier emotion to deal with. “You nearly got yourself killed today because of your stupid determination to avoid me at all costs.” He swore under his breath, thinking about what it had felt like to walk up the steps of Cormier's too-silent mansion and see that ominously open door.
There was no response from the still figure on the cavern floor.
“Mattie?” He heard the edge in his own voice and frowned.
She continued to stare silently out into the night.
Hugh swore again, knowing he should not have brought the subject up so soon. But he was not, by nature, a patient man. In fact, Hugh thought he'd exercised more patience with Mattie Sharpe during the past year than he had with every other person in his whole life combined.
The entire, convoluted mess was his own fault, of course, as Cormier had taken pains to point out a few months ago.
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, Hugh. You're old enough to know that. You have only yourself to blame for the situation in which you find yourself. Now you're going to have to work very, very hard to get her back. I rather think the exercise will be good for you.”
Hugh, as Cormier had carefully explained, had made the fatal blunder of rejecting Mattie's heart and soul a year ago. But he had compounded his error by taking her body, which she had offered along with the rest.
The lady apparently held a mean grudge. Cormier had warned him that women were inclined to do that.
There had been only one night with Mattie because Hugh had been booked on a plane back to St. Gabe the next morning. His stormy engagement to Mattie's brilliant, dazzling sister, Ariel, had at last ended in a hurricane of tears and recriminations. Ariel never did anything without a lot of melodrama, Hugh had discovered to his disgust. He was only grateful he'd found it out before the wedding. In the end he had wanted nothing more than to escape to his island and lick his wounds.
The last thing he'd intended doing that final night in Seattle was spend it with the quiet, restrained, obviously repressed, business-obsessed Mattie.
Mattie, whom he'd barely noticed while he struggled to deal with the fire and lightning that was Ariel.
Mattie, who had been
waiting quietly in the wings all along, knowing that the engagement to Ariel could not last.
Mattie, who had nervously called him that last night in Seattle and asked if he would come to dinner.
To this day Hugh was still not quite certain why he had accepted the invitation. He knew he had not been fit company for anyone, let alone someone as quiet and unassuming and nervous as Mattie. He had been consumed with rage, both at Ariel and at himself. All his fine plans to head back to St. Gabe with a wife in hand had gone up in smoke. Hugh, as Charlotte Vailcourt had frequently noted, was not accustomed to having anyone mess up his plans.
There were a lot of reasons Hugh had not gotten to know Mattie well by the time his engagement to Ariel had ended. For one thing, he simply had not spent much time with her. He had been too busy quarreling with Ariel over her unexpected refusal to move out to St. Gabriel. Ariel had somehow gotten the impression that Hugh had been planning to move to Seattle. The battle, once joined, had taken up every spare minute of Hugh's time.
But another reason why a man tended not to notice Mattie right off was that she was very different from Ariel. Mattie was a quiet, warm rain where Ariel had been a full-blown storm.
Everything about Mattie was more muted and less obvious than her sister.
Ariel's eyes were a fascinating, witchy green. Mattie's almost green gaze was softened with gold into a shade that was closer to hazel. Ariel's hair, cut in a dramatic wedge, was jet black; Mattie's, worn in a prim coil, was a warm honey brown.
Both women were slender, but Mattie's figure, which was nearly always encased in a severe, conservative business suit, seemed flat and uninteresting. Ariel, on the other hand, always appeared willowy and dramatic in the one-of-a-kind clothes she favored.
But that last night in Seattle something about Mattie had tugged at Hugh's senses. She had looked like a calm port in which to rest for a while after the storm. He had been lured gently into her web by an oddly old-fashioned womanly charm that was entirely new to him. The home-cooked meal of pasta and vegetables and the quiet conversation had been both soothing and simultaneously arousing. Her anxiousness to please had been balm to Hugh's lacerated ego. Her shy, rather hesitant sexual overtures had made him feel powerful and desired.
He knew she was not his type, but when the time had come he had taken Mattie to bed and lost himself in her warmth. He had been deeply aware of a sense of gratitude toward her.
The next morning Hugh had awakened with a hangover and the gnawing certainty that he had made a really stupid mistake.
The last person he had wanted to get involved with at that point was another Sharpe sister. He'd had it with the women of the clan. In fact, he'd had it with women and city life in general. He just longed to go home and devote himself to his fledgling charter business.
As he had packed his bag and phoned for a cab to the airport to catch his six o'clock flight, Hugh had tried to ease his way out the door by thanking Mattie for her hospitality. That was when she had made her plea, a plea that had echoed in his ears nearly every night since that last one in Seattle.
“Take me with you, Hugh. I love you so much. Please take me with you. I'll follow you anywhere. I'll make you a good wife. I swear it. Please, Hugh.”
Hugh had fled after first making a further mess of the matter by trying to explain to Mattie that she was not really his type.
He had not been gone more than a couple of months before he had finally admitted to himself that he had picked the wrong sister the first time around. Trying to rectify his error was proving far more complicated than he would have initially believed possible.
“Had Cormier lived here on Purgatory for a long time?” Mattie asked after a long silence.
“He settled here a few years ago. I think he liked the irony of the name.”
“Purgatory? Why is it called that?”
“It's part of the Brimstone Chain. A few of the islands in the group have active volcanos. Guess they made the original settlers think of fire and brimstone. Purgatory's the biggest one in the string. It's been independent since right after World War Two. None of the bigger countries wanted to own it.”
“Why not?”
“No commercial or military value. Not even any tourism to speak of.”
“Apparently someone's willing to fight for it.”
Hugh thought about that. “Yeah. Funny that Paul didn't pick up on that. He usually had an instinct for trouble. He always claimed Purgatory was paradise simply because it wasn't worth fighting over.” Paul had long ago grown weary of battle. Just as Hugh had. “Why don't you try to get some sleep, Mattie?”
“I couldn't possibly sleep tonight.” There was a shudder in her voice.
Hugh made a decision. He got up, walked over, and sat down right next to her, aware of the tension radiating from her. Deliberately he put an arm around her shoulders. She tried to pull away. He ignored the small, ineffectual movement and gently pushed her head onto his shoulder. Her body was taut and warm alongside his.
“Close your eyes, Mattie.”
“I told you, I can't.” She stiffened. “Hugh, I wish you wouldn't do this.”
“Close your eyes and imagine you're dozing off in front of your living room window.”
She said nothing more but she did not try to pull away from his grasp. Hugh waited, absently rubbing her shoulder.
Fifteen minutes later he realized she was asleep.
For a long time Hugh sat there enjoying the feel of holding Mattie at long last after all these months. He wondered what Cormier would have advised at this juncture.
“Patience, Hugh. You've already pissed in your chili once, as our dear friend Mr. Taggert is fond of saying. Don't screw up again.”
The problem, Hugh thought, was that he'd already been patient for months. He was not sure how much patience he had left. He was forty and he was alone.
And over the past year he had gotten very tired of being alone.
Mattie awoke the next morning to the scent of flowers. Exotic flowers. Rich, lush, vibrant flowers. Their perfume was a heavenly cloud that seemed to envelop her.
She opened her eyes and saw the massive bouquet lying on the floor of the cave directly in front of her face. It was a huge collection of vividly colored blossoms. There were dozens and dozens of flowers—orange, pink, and white lilies, spectacular bird of paradise, red torch ginger, heliconia, and myriad orchids. They were heaped in beautiful disarray. A veritable mountain of gorgeous blooms. Mattie knew that a mass of orchids and other exotics such as this would have cost two or three hundred dollars back in the States.
She smiled and reached out to touch a crimson petal. It was like velvet under her fingertips. Hugh must have gone out very early to collect such a wealth of flora.
Hugh. Of course this tower of flowers was his doing.
Mattie snatched her fingers back quickly and scowled at the huge assortment. It was really quite ludicrous. There were far too many flowers. A single perfect orchid or one golden yellow hibiscus bloom would have been far more tasteful than this colorful, confused heap.
It was no surprise that Hugh was as heavy-handed in presenting flowers as he was in everything else he did. As she had observed before, the man did not have a subtle bone in his body.
That thought brought back unwelcome memories of the one night she had spent in bed with Hugh Abbott. No, subtle was not a word that came to mind. What came to mind was the old phrase slam, bam, thank you, ma'am.
No wonder Ariel had broken off the engagement shortly after returning from Italy with Hugh in tow last year. She had explained to Mattie that Hugh had obviously been merely a phase she had been going through. He represented the Elemental period in her evolving artistic style. It was one of her shorter-lived periods.
Mattie sat up stiffly, stretching her limbs cautiously to see how much damage a night on the stone floor had done. She had to bite back a groan. Then she realized that Paul Cormier would not be waking up at all this morning and she sighed.
She got to her feet, aware that she was alone in the cavern. When she glanced at the level of seawater in the small, natural boat basin, she realized the tide must be out.
There was no sign of Hugh. She assumed he was out scouting around or doing whatever men like him did in situations such as this.
When she walked over to the ledge near the cave's entrance and peered out, Mattie could see the small patch of green foliage clinging tenaciously to a rocky overhang that jutted out above the sea.
Above and below the natural veranda there was nothing but sheer cliff. The facilities were definitely primitive, but there was not much choice.
A few minutes later she returned to the cavern and washed her hands in seawater. Then she turned her attention to the contents in the string bags.
Hugh's trip to Cormier's kitchen had been brief, but he had managed to make quite a haul. Mattie found several more small tins of fancy pâtés, marinated oysters, a jar of brine-cured olives, some homemade tapanade, sun-dried tomatoes, bottled spring water, and a wedge of hazelnut torte. There was also a bit of brie and a chunk of Stilton and some day-old French bread. Hugh had even swiped a white linen kitchen towel.
Mattie surveyed the lot and decided the only thing that vaguely resembled breakfast was the brie. She tore off chunks of the bread and began to spread it with the cheese.
When a boot scraped on the rocky floor behind her, Mattie started nervously and leapt to her feet. She whirled around, clutching the knife she had been using to spread the cheese.
“Hugh.” She inhaled deeply. “Don't ever sneak up on me like that again. I'm very jumpy these days.”
“Sorry. Didn't know if you'd be awake yet.”
He switched off the flashlight he was carrying and sauntered into the main cavern from the tunnel they had used yesterday. He was looking disgustingly refreshed and energetic, Mattie thought in annoyance. An occasional night spent on a gritty stone floor apparently did not bother him in the slightest.
His jeans and khaki shirt were a little stained but basically did not look much different than they had yesterday. Other than a day's growth of beard Hugh appeared none the worse for wear. He looked like Mr. Macho Adventurer, always at home in primitive jungles, barren deserts, or other perilous locales.
Silver Linings Page 4