by Nora Roberts
When she straddled him, looked down at his handsome face, saw the greedy desperation in his eyes, she smiled. She took him into her, fast and hard and thought that nothing fit so well inside her as did a rich man’s cock.
Hayley bolted up from the sofa as if she’d been shot out of a cannon. Her heart clanged, hammer to anvil, in her chest. Her breasts felt heavy as if, oh God, as if they’d been fondled. Her lips tingled. Panicked, she grabbed at her hair and nearly wept with relief when she felt her own.
Someone laughed, and had her stumbling back, rapping up against the couch and nearly spilling onto it again. The television, she saw as she crossed her arms protectively over her breasts. Just the television, sophisticated drama in black-and-white.
And oh, God, what had happened to her?
Not a dream, or not just a dream. It couldn’t have been.
She dashed out of the room to check on Lily. Her baby slept, snuggled with her stuffed dog.
Ordering herself to calm, she went downstairs. But when she reached the library, she hesitated. Mitch sat at the library table, tapping away at the keyboard of his laptop. She didn’t want to disturb him, but she had to check. She had to be sure. Waiting until morning just wasn’t in the cards.
She stepped inside. “Mitch?”
“Hmm? What? Where?” He looked up, blinked behind his hornrims. “Hi.”
“I’m sorry. You’re working.”
“Just some e-mail. Do you need something?”
“I just wanted to . . .” She wasn’t shy, and she wasn’t prudish, but she wasn’t sure how to comfortably relate what she’d just experienced to her employer’s husband. “Um, do you think Roz is busy?”
“Why don’t I call up and see?”
“I don’t want to bother her if . . . Yes, yes, I do. Could you ask her to come down?”
“All right.” He reached for the phone to dial the bedroom extension. “Something happened.”
“Yeah. Sort of. Maybe.” To settle one point, she walked to the second level, behind the table and studied the pictures on Mitch’s work board.
She stared at the copy of the photograph of a man in formal dress—strong features, dark hair, cool eyes.
“This is Reginald Harper, right? The first one.”
“That’s right. Roz, can you come down to the library. Hayley’s here. She needs to talk to you. Right.” He hung up. “She’ll be right down. Do you want something—some water, some coffee?”
She shook her head. “No, thanks. I’m okay, just feeling a little weirded out. Ah, when Stella first came here, when she was living here, she had dreams. That’s when it really started, right? I mean, before that there were . . . incidents. Sightings. But nothing much ever happened—at least not that Roz heard of—that was dangerous. Regarding The Bride, I mean.”
“That seems to be the case. There’s been a kind of escalation, which seemed to start when Stella moved in with her boys.”
“And I came a few weeks after. So it was the three of us here, living in Harper House.” Her skin still felt chilled. She rubbed her bare arms and wished for a sweatshirt. “I was pregnant, Stella had the boys, and Roz, well, Roz is bloodline.”
He nodded. “Keep going.”
“Stella had the dreams. Intense dreams, which we have to believe were somehow plugged into her subconscious by Amelia. That’s not a very scientific way of putting it, but—”
“It’s good enough.”
“And when Stella and Logan—” She broke off as Roz came in. “I’m sorry I dragged you down here.”
“It’s all right. What happened?”
“Finish your thought out first,” Mitch suggested. “Line it up.”
“Okay, well, Stella and Logan got involved, and Amelia didn’t like it. Stella’s dreams got more disturbing, more pointed, and there were violent incidents, culminating in how she blocked us all out of the boys’ room that night—that first night you came here, Mitch.”
“I’ll never forget it.”
“She told us her name that night,” Roz commented. “Stella got through to her, and she gave us her first name.”
“Yeah. Wouldn’t you say she’s left Stella be pretty much since then? She’d have told us if she had dreams still, or if anything happened to her directly.”
“The focus transferred to Roz,” Mitch said.
“Yeah.” Pleased they seemed to be traveling the same road, Hayley nodded. “And it was even more intense, right? Like waking dreams, Roz?”
“Yes, and an escalation of violent behavior.”
“The closer you got to Mitch, the crazier she got. That’s the kind of thing that pisses her off. She nearly killed you. She rode to the rescue, you could say, when you were in trouble, when push came to shove, but before that she attacked you. But since then, since you and Mitch got engaged, got married, she’s backed off.”
“Apparently, at least for the moment.” Roz stepped over, ran a hand down Hayley’s arm. “She’s moving on you now, isn’t she?”
“I think so. I think that the three of us being in the house—you and Stella and me—maybe that pushed her out of pattern.” She looked toward Mitch, lifting her hands. “I don’t know how to put it, exactly, but things really got rolling then, and the ball seems to pick up bulk and speed, if you get me.”
“I do, and it’s interesting. The three of you—three women at varying stages of life—all unattached at the point you came together. Your connection made a connection to her, we could say. And as Stella, then Roz became emotionally, romantically involved, it caused Amelia’s behavior to deteriorate.”
“Honey, did she hurt you?”
“No.” Hayley pressed her lips together, then looked from Roz to Mitch. “I know we’re supposed to, like, report anything, so Mitch has it on record. I just don’t know how to say all this. At least not delicately. It’s a little bit embarrassing.”
“You want me to step out?” Mitch asked her. “So you can talk to Roz about it?”
“No, that’s just dumb—of me, I mean. She’ll just tell you anyway.” To brace herself, Hayley blew out a long breath. “Okay, so I was taking an hour to relax, watch some TV upstairs in the sitting room. And there was this old movie on, and I was daydreaming, I guess. All those fabulous clothes, you know, and the beautiful lighting, and the fancy clubs where people went out to dance and all. I was imagining what it would be like, how I’d be all dressed up, and I’d see someone.”
She trailed off a moment. She didn’t have to say the someone was Harper. That didn’t have to be relevant.
“Anyway, we’d dance, and fall in love, and have that big movie kiss? You know what I mean.”
Roz smiled. “Absolutely.”
“Well, then I guess I was drifting off some, and I was thinking about what happens after The End? Thinking about sex, I guess,” she said and cleared her throat. “Just a fantasy thing, candlelight and flowers and a big white bed, being in love. Making love.” She lowered her head, put it in her hands. “This is mortifying.”
“Don’t be silly. Healthy girl like you didn’t think about sex, I’d be worried.” Roz gave her shoulder a little shake.
“It was nice. Romantic and exciting. Then, it changed. Or I changed. And it was calculating. I was thinking about how I’d do these things. I could feel the skin and the form and the heat. There were roses. I could smell roses, but I had lilies in the fantasy, and now there were roses, and firelight. And his hands were different—soft and smooth. Rich, that’s what I thought. And I thought the guy’s wife wouldn’t do what I’d do, and that’s why he came to me. How he’d pay. And I felt my hair, and I could see it. Long and blond and curly. I saw it when it fell over my face, not like I was watching, but like I was there. It was me. And I saw him. His face.”
She turned to the board and pointed at Reginald. “His face. He was inside me, and I saw his face.”
She let out another long breath. “So.”
After a moment of silence, Roz spoke. “I don’t think it would
be that unusual for your mind to weave that sort of thing together, Hayley. We all spend a lot of time thinking about these people, trying to put it all together. We know she was his mistress, we know she bore him a child, so we know they had sex. And for her, we can assume or at least speculate that it was, at least in part, a kind of business arrangement.”
“You know how your body feels when you’ve been fooling around? Physically. Not just the buzz you get from a sex dream, but how you feel physically when you’ve been with a guy. Maybe I haven’t been with one since before Lily was born, but you don’t forget how it feels. And that’s where I was when I woke up, or came out of it. Roz, I smelled those roses. I know how his body was shaped.”
She had to take a breath, had to swallow hard. “I felt him inside me. Inside her, I guess, but it was like being her while it was happening. She liked being with someone handsome and skilled. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been ugly as homemade sin and a dud in bed, but this was like a bonus. Rich was the bottom line—the rest was icing. I know that, because I was right inside her head. Or she was in mine. I didn’t imagine it.”
“I believe you,” Mitch told her.
“We believe you,” Roz corrected. “You’re the closest to her age when she died, at least the age we think she was. Maybe she’s relating to that, to you, and trying to go through you to tell us what it was like for her.”
“Possibly.” Mitch tipped back in the chair when Roz arched her brows at him. “It could give us more insight on her, on what happened and why. What else can you tell us about her?”
“Well, I don’t think she got that much of a rush out of sex—from the power, the control, yeah, but not the rest of it. It’s just what she did, and from his, um, response, she was good at what she did. Her body was a lot better than mine.”
With a sheepish smile, she held her hands in front of her breasts to mime someone well-endowed. “And she was cold inside. The whole time they were doing it, she was thinking about what she’d get out of him. There was a derision—that’s the best way to describe it—for the wives of men like him. I guess that’s about it.”
“Hardly her best side. Or maybe it is, from her point of view,” Mitch considered. “She was in charge, doing what she’d chosen to do. Young, beautiful, desired by a powerful man and controlling that man through sex. Interesting.”
“Creepy’s what it was. And if I get to have sex, I’d like to have it with my own body. But anyway, I feel better, getting all that out. I think I’ll go back up, maybe do some yoga. I don’t think she’s going to bother me while I’m trying to twist myself into the warrior position or whatever. Thanks for hearing me out.”
“Anything else happens, I want to hear it,” Roz told her.
“That’s a promise.”
Roz waited until Hayley was gone, then turned to Mitch. “We’re going to have to worry about her, aren’t we?”
“Let’s not skip straight to worry.” He took her hand. “Let’s start with we’ll keep an eye out for her.”
five
FROM STELLA’S KITCHEN window, Hayley could see the spread of the back gardens, the patio, the arbor, the treehouse Logan and the boys had built snugged into the branches of a sycamore.
She watched Logan push Lily on a red swing that hung from another branch while the boys tossed an old ball for Parker to chase.
It was, she thought, a kind of moving portrait of summer evening. The sort of lazy contentment that only comes on breathless summer days right before the kids are called in for supper and the porch light goes on. Yellow glows to chase the moths away and to shine a circle that says: We’re home.
She remembered, so clearly, what it was to be a child in August, to love the heat, to rush through it to snatch every drop of the sun before it went down.
Now, she hoped, she was learning what it was to be a mother. To be on the other side of the screen door. To be the one who turned on the porch light.
“Do you get used to it, or do you still look out sometimes like this, and think ‘I’m the luckiest woman in the world.’ ”
Stella moved over to the window, smiled. “Both. You want to sit out on the patio with this lemonade?”
“In a minute. I didn’t want to talk about this at work. Not just because it’s at work, but because it’s still on the Harper estate. And she’s on the estate. She can’t come here.”
“Roz told me what happened.” Stella laid a hand on Hayley’s shoulder.
“I didn’t tell her that it was Harper. I mean when I was fantasizing, I was with Harper. I’m just not going to tell her I was fantasizing about getting naked with her son.”
“I think that’s a judicious edit at this point. Has anything happened since?”
“No, nothing. And I don’t know whether to hope something does or something doesn’t.” She watched Logan field the mangled slobbery ball that rolled his way, then toss it, sending dog and boys on a mad chase while Lily bounced in the swing and clapped her hands.
“I can tell you this, if I have to star in someone’s life and times, I’d rather take a turn in yours.”
“I believe in being a good and true friend, Hayley, but I’m not letting you have sex with Logan.”
Hayley snorted out a laugh, then gave Stella an elbow nudge. “Spoilsport, and though I wasn’t going there, I bet—wow.”
Stella’s smile was lazy as a cat’s. “You bet right.”
“Anyway. I was just thinking how it would be to have someone as crazy about me as Logan is about you. Toss in a couple of great kids, a beautiful home you’ve made together, and who needs fantasies?”
“You’ll have what you’re looking for one day, too.”
“Listen to me, you’d think I was the redheaded stepchild. I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately.” She rolled her shoulders as if shrugging off a weight. “I keep catching myself doing a poor-me routine. It’s not like me, Stella. I’m happy. And even when I’m not, I look for a way to make myself happy. I don’t brood and bitch. Or hardly.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Maybe I’ve got a thing for Harper, but a little frustration’s not enough to bring me down. Next time you hear me feeling sorry for myself, give me a good smack.”
“Sure. What are friends for?”
SHE MEANT IT, too. She wasn’t the type to sit around ticking off the negatives of her life to see if she could make them outweigh the positives. If something was wrong, something was missing, she acted. Fix the problem and move ahead. Or if the problem couldn’t be fixed, she found the best way to live with it.
When her mother had left, she’d been sad and scared and hurt. But there’d been nothing she could do to bring her back. So she’d done without—and done pretty damn well, Hayley thought as she drove back to Harper House.
She’d learned how to help make a home, and she and her father had had a good life. They’d been happy; she’d been loved. And she’d been useful.
She’d done well in school. She’d gotten a job to help with expenses. She knew how to work, and how to enjoy the work. She liked to learn, and to sell people things that made them happy.
If she’d stayed in Little Rock, at the bookstore, she’d have made manager. She’d have earned it.
Then her father had died. That had blasted a hole in the foundation of her life, and had shaken her like nothing before or since. He’d been her rock, as she’d been his. Nothing had felt steady or sure when he’d died, and her grief had been a constant raw ache.
So she’d turned to a friend—that’s all he’d been really, she admitted as she turned down the drive to Harper House. A nice boy, a comfort.
Lily had come from that, and she wasn’t ashamed of it. Maybe comfort wasn’t love, but it was a positive act, a giving one. How could she have paid that kindness back by pushing the boy into marriage, or responsibility when he’d already moved on by the time she’d realized she was pregnant?
She hadn’t wallowed—or hardly. She hadn’t cursed God or man, for long.
She’d accepted responsibility for her own actions, as she’d been taught, and had made the choice that was right for her.
To keep the child, and raise the child on her own.
Hadn’t worked out quite that way, though, she thought with a smile as she parked. Little Rock, the bookstore, the house she’d shared with her father had no longer been her comfort zones once she’d started to show. Once the looks and the questions and the murmurs had begun.
So, fresh start.
She climbed out of the car, rounded it to open the back door and unhook Lily from her car seat.
Sell everything that could be sold, pack up the rest. Positive, move forward. All she’d expected by coming here to Roz was the possibility of a job. What she’d been given was family.
Just more proof, to her mind, that good things happened when you took steps, when you worked for them—and when you were lucky enough to find people who’d give you a chance to do your best.
“That’s what we are, Lily.” She hoisted Lily up, covered her face with kisses. “We’re a couple of lucky girls.”
She swung the diaper bag over her shoulder, bumped the car door shut with her hip. But as she started toward the house an idea bloomed.
Maybe it was time to try her luck again.
Sit around waiting for things to happen and nothing much did. But act, you either failed or succeeded. Either was better than standing still.
She strolled around the house, taking her time, just to see if she could talk herself out of it. But the idea was planted now, and she couldn’t find a good enough reason to uproot it.
Maybe he’d be shocked or stunned or even appalled. Well, that would be his problem. At least she’d know something and stop wondering all the damn time.
As she rounded the curve in the path, she set Lily down, and let her little girl trot toward Harper’s front door.
Maybe he wasn’t home, out with some woman. Or worse, had some woman in his home. Okay, that would be bad, but she’d deal with it.
It was time she dealt with it.
Though the dark wasn’t deep yet, the path lights were glowing, those pretty soft green lanterns speared at the edges of the brick to guide the way. A few early lightning bugs blinked on and off, on and off over the heads of flowers, and out beyond to the roll of grass to lose themselves in the shadows of the woods.