He laughed uproariously. “Okay, so it was a pun-laden example. But I mean it!”
“Sorry, can’t hear you!” I scratched my nails across the tiny microphone area of my phone. “The connection’s breaking up. I’ve got to go!”
“Quinn Barton, don’t you dare hang up on—”
I pushed the button. It didn’t have the same old-fashioned pleasure as slamming a receiver down, but he got the point.
A one-night stand.
Who did he think I was?
The only time I’d come close to doing that was, in fact, the two-night stand with Frank. And that was Frank, not some stranger who could land me in some weird place physically, emotionally, or, god knows, geographically.
Then again, Las Vegas wasn’t my usual stomping ground geographically.
I took a moment to think about that. It really had been fun, truth be told. It was sinful, in a way. Not my usual way of life, not the way I was raised, not something I’d generally say was the mark of a dignified woman, but, damn, it had been fun. We’d driven something like seventeen hours a day for two days, stayed in Vegas one night, then turned and came back.
It wasn’t the destination, it was the journey. I’d hoped to shake off all the vestiges of Burke along the old and new highways of America. And, yeah, wherever you go, you still have your own head to contend with and obviously I couldn’t just completely forget the man I was in love with, who had hurt me so badly, but there had been some genuinely cool moments out there on that long ribbon of highway.
I remembered stopping at a weird little diner near Albuquerque. The waitress was strangely beautiful, but her makeup was too heavy and I just knew she’d never get out of that small town and learn that she could have looked like—no, she probably could have been—a serious movie star. Anyway, everyone else in the diner had been old, and everyone was fond of her, no one was making moves on her, and Frank and I talked later about how if she didn’t have a boyfriend already her chances of meeting someone and being swept off her pretty feet looked slim.
There was a raccoon in the bathroom of a rest stop near Memphis. That was the first time I used the men’s room without caring if someone walked in—there were no locks on the doors—as long as they were human.
Texas had been hot and so humid, even at night, that I felt like I’d been slapped in the face with a wet washcloth when I got out of the car to get a Coke from a Texaco food mart.
And the lights of Vegas had been more dazzling than I had ever even imagined. Honestly, everywhere we went there, I felt like I was on the set of a Miss America show. If my conscience had allowed me to stay longer, I wonder how much farther away from this briar patch of Burke I could have gotten.
Chapter 14
It was pretty safe to say that Dottie was trying to set Burke and me up at this point.
Whether she imagined there was some great reconciliation in the future or she was just trying to “heal” us, I couldn’t say. Her attempts were pretty ham-fisted, but there was nothing I could do about it easily. To refuse her requests to come do her fittings when she was physically up to it would have felt petty.
Unfortunately, when I arrived on the afternoon of One-Night Stand Day, she wasn’t there.
No one was.
I tried her cell phone number, but there was no answer.
Huh.
What was I supposed to do now?
I could have left, of course. If this was just an ordinary client who wasn’t there when I showed, I’d leave and let them come to me next time, but, for one thing, it was Dottie. And for another thing, it was Injured Dottie. She might have been hobbling as fast as she could to her car in the parking lot of the Safeway, fretting about the time and too deaf to hear her phone. Or maybe she was stuck in a doctor’s office, and had the ringer off. Or who knows? I’d left Becca in charge of the shop, so there wasn’t any reason I couldn’t wait around at least a little while.
I wandered over to the paddock and old Rogue came over to the fence where I stood. I touched his silky muzzle, then patted his forehead and ran my fingers down his rough mane.
“Where’s your mistress?” I asked him. “Did she lure me here to make me think about the past?”
I turned my face toward the sun, which was setting, predictably, in the west corner of the property. Amber light slanted through the trees, casting lengthening shadows across the perfect stretches of green grass. It looked almost like a golf course, the fields were so immaculate.
It was easy to remember why I’d loved it so much here. Why I’d thought this was going to be It for me, forever and ever. It was a beautiful place. Not everyone’s cup of tea, I guess. Lisa Douglas, from Green Acres, probably still would have preferred New York, but I doubt she’d have been as miserable here as she was in Hooterville.
This was definitely not Hooterville.
To me, it was heaven. And that fact would never leave me, so it hurt to be standing here knowing that before long it would belong to someone else and I wouldn’t be able to even visit anymore.
I took my phone out and tried Dottie again.
Again, she didn’t answer.
So I walked across the gravel drive and on toward the tenant house. Part of me wanted to resist. But most of me had to go, had to see, had to face it. Maybe it would be cathartic. Maybe I would surprise myself by not feeling what I thought I’d feel.
It was like that when my grandfather had died. I’d been so upset to begin with, and, on top of that, so afraid to go to the funeral because Michaela Whitney, who was a bitch even in second grade, had told me they would have his dead body lying out for everyone to see. Of course, she’d said it in even more graphic, Halloweeny detail.
And she was right, though it wasn’t quite like the picture she’d had me imagining. In the end, I’d even managed to go to him and whisper good-bye, even touching that familiar thatch of gray hair. After that, I was less afraid of death.
Maybe facing the past would make me less daunted by it.
I walked across a sweep of newly cut grass to the tenant house and to the front stoop. The wood thudded dully beneath my footsteps. Then, following an impulse I probably should have ignored, I pulled open the screen door, and gave a sad smile at the still-familiar creak of it. This wasn’t a place where anyone had ever spent much time, except for Burke and me, so it didn’t surprise me that no one had bothered to replace the old door. If things were still the way they used to be, once every other week Dottie’s maids came down and did a cursory dusting so it didn’t become a Disney-like haunted house, but other than that, no one came here unless it was to get the Christmas decorations out of the storeroom, or to put them back in.
I tried the main door and was surprised it was unlocked. Not that that gave me a license to walk on in like a thief. This was still trespassing, but I knew Dottie wouldn’t mind.
The floorboards groaned beneath my weight. That was something else that had always been true, even at my high school weight. In a way it sounded like an old song to me, played a million times so that I knew every subtlety of every instrument.
The thing that I didn’t realize I’d recognize was the smell. But it made sense. Ten years didn’t put that much age on antiques. They’d had that smell of old wood and furniture polish for decades, why would that be any different now? It was just something I’d never thought about back then, probably because we were always so eager to run inside and tear each other’s clothes off. The smell never registered on a conscious level.
For a moment I just stood there, breathing it in.
I used to imagine living here, once upon a time. I’d pictured myself passing birthdays and holidays here. Open windows with wind lifting lace curtains in the summer, a woodsy fire in the stone fireplace in the fall and winter, and a symphony of azaleas coming into bloom out front soon after the first crocus of spring.
This place felt like “home” to me in a way no other place ever had.
Why had he ruined that? He’d wanted it as much as I had, I
was sure of it. Why would he ever have done anything that he knew could risk our future together? Had he imagined he could just insert someone else into my role if I didn’t work out?
Maybe he hadn’t thought at all. Maybe he’d taken me so thoroughly for granted that the intricacies of right and wrong, cause and effect, abuse and consequences, never even entered his mind.
I’d probably never know for sure. How could I ever believe him, no matter what he said?
All I knew was that we probably could have had a wonderful life together. We could have spent our whole lives living toward those wonderful words Robert Browning had written: Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be, / The last of life, for which the first was made …
Had he once felt that way about Perry?
Could I ever feel it about someone else?
Was it necessarily Burke in my visions of living in this house? In the most obvious sense, yes. But having grown up an only child, heavily reliant on my imagination, I think most of my imaginings were of me cooking dinner in the kitchen, me waking up to the expanding green outside the window, me on the porch in the summer with the fireflies and toasted marshmallows.… Certainly I’d loved Burke. Enough to marry him. And I would have been a good wife. But I think maybe a big part of my heartbreak after the breakup was the whole imagined life I’d lost, not just the man.
I sat heavily on the old wing chair by the stairs and spent a good few minutes reveling in my own pity party. This was the perfect place for it. No other environment could have made so much emotion bubble up in me so fast.
In a way I was glad the place had remained abandoned, though I recognized that was selfish of me. But it just would have been too weird, too sad, to think of someone else here, some stranger, living the life I’d thought I’d have.
Interesting how garbled and confusing the past becomes under the anesthesia of time. You try to count the years and make some sense of them, but almost immediately they blur and become one big thing.
The past.
I stood up and walked through the little rooms, remembering stories I’d heard about some of the things on the walls and tables. Knickknacks and tchotchkes collected around the world during Burke’s grandparents’ younger and more adventurous days. There were a lot of pieces from Ireland in particular, as Burke and Frank’s grandfather had believed Irish Thoroughbreds to be superior and infused his stock with plenty of Irish blood.
I paused at the door to the little bedroom we used to sneak off to. It took a minute to gather myself enough to look. When I did, it was like looking at a snapshot. Like everything else in the house, the bedroom remained unchanged. That might have seemed more strange had it been a high school bedroom in a generic house in suburbia, but here it seemed right, in this room with its four-poster bed topped with a hand-sewn Pennsylvania Dutch bedspread and a thick warm duvet from Germany.
I remembered what it felt like snuggling up under the sheets on cold winter nights. In my mind’s eye, I could see Burke’s forearm, strong with prominent veins, pulling it up and over us. It felt protective. Funny how safe I’d felt in those days, how completely carefree, when my adult self realized I should have been terrified my parents might have found out I wasn’t really sleeping over at my girlfriends’ houses.
Or, worse, Burke’s grandparents could have come out and discovered us. That had the potential to be tremendously embarrassing. In so many different ways.
But, like I said, no one paid much attention to the little house on the edge of the property.
“Enjoy yourself while you can,” I said to the ghost of the younger me. Or, rather, to the empty bed. Even though it all still looked frozen in time, I was deeply aware that it was not. Time had passed. So many things outside these walls had changed. “Relish every moment, because, like every sorry old song will tell you, you don’t have forever.”
I felt tears threaten and chastised myself for being able to work up angst about this so long after the fact.
Glenn was right, there was nothing healthy about being imprisoned by the past. Every layer of my consciousness, right down to the deepest subregions, knew that even though a lot of things looked the same, they weren’t. It was so easy not to notice you were getting older when every single day was pretty much the same as the last or the next. Before you knew it, you’d aged, but who could say at one point it had happened? It happened at no point, and at every point.
I didn’t want to feel like this.
More accurately, I couldn’t afford to feel like this. If I’d been given a million emotional dollars at birth, I’d already spent 999,099 of them.
The screen door banged, startling me out of my melancholy thoughts, and giving my heart the jolt of touching a live wire.
I whirled around to see Frank coming in, which repeated the whole adrenaline-jolt thing.
He must have seen the shock on my face. “The door was open,” he said, as if he owed me an explanation for coming in to find me stalking on his family’s private property.
“I know, I—” I what? I found it that way myself? That would set off false alarms. Better to just tell the truth, or at least enough of it to explain the inexcusable. “I’m supposed to meet Dottie, but she’s not here, so I thought I’d kill some time, and…” There was no way I could let him know what a basket case I was. I had to, at least, make the effort to sound detached, so I added, “I wondered if it was the same in here, so I couldn’t resist coming in to take a look.”
He took slow deliberate steps toward me. “Exactly the same, huh?” He looked around, and I thought I could see, in his expression, the same tender sadness I’d felt looking at it.
“I know you think I’m impervious to it, but I hate to see it go too.”
“Do you come here a lot?”
“Not in ages. I don’t even know how long.” He shook his head. “I think I put a few things in storage a few years ago, but I can’t remember what, or when. Just in and out. I didn’t stop and look around.”
I swallowed. My history here had always been inside of me, a feeling remembered, even if there weren’t descriptions attached to it anymore. “I kind of wish I hadn’t. It’s kind of sad.”
He tilted his head ever so slightly and looked at me. “I remember when you used to come as a kid. Seeing you in here like this is kind of like seeing a ghost.”
My face grew warm under his gaze and I shook my head. “Ghosts don’t age.”
“Seems like you don’t either.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is.” He stopped a few feet away, far enough to take me in entirely, and I felt him do exactly that as certainly as if he’d touched me. “When I first saw you the other night. Whew.” He paused, looked lost in thought, then met my eyes again. “I loved you once, you know.”
“What?” It wasn’t quite the needle scratching across the record, but the effect was the same. “You loved me?”
He narrowed his eyes. Come on.
I waited.
“Perhaps you’ve forgotten our own history, short as it was?” he said, lifting an eyebrow. He was defensive too. Maybe not as defensive as I was, but certainly on alert.
“Bad subject,” I amended, hoping to close it before it got even more uncomfortable. “Bad time in general.”
He gave a hollow laugh. “Yeah, that’ll make it go away.”
“There’s no reason to revisit it.”
“Nope, you’re probably right.” He took another step toward me and I felt it as surely as if he’d touched me.
More disturbingly, I felt like I wanted him to touch me.
A flush spread over me. What was with me? Not only feeling everything, but showing everything I felt. Suddenly the most reliable thing in my life was my body’s betrayal of me.
Was my need for “revenge” against Burke still so great that I had an internal instinct to do this?
Or was it just the prospect of comfort, the relief, of letting go of control and letting someone else—someone capable—handle thi
ngs that was appealing to me?
The one thing I knew for sure was I was not interested in Frank Morrison. It was just too much to have serious relationships with two different brothers.
“Where is Dottie?” I asked, my voice sounding a little high and fast, even to my own ears. I took out the phone and hit redial, all but tapping my toe and chanting, Answer answer answer please, Dottie, answer.
She did not.
“I think she had a doctor’s appointment,” he said, and he really seemed unaware of the rising turmoil inside of me. “Maybe it was a lawyer. Some sort of appointment.”
“Well, who knows how long she’ll be, then?” I swallowed hard and tried to take a step backward, but I couldn’t force myself to move. “Maybe you could just tell her I came by but I had to get back to the shop?”
“Do you?” With one final step he closed the distance between us. Now he was directly in front of me, looking down into my eyes. I could feel the heat of his body. Smell him, his clothes, his skin, his hair.
It was like safety was within reach, but that was crazy.
No, I told myself. Just, No. Wrong guy.
But I wasn’t a good listener. “Do I what?” I asked.
He reached out and touched my cheek, idly brushing his thumb along my skin. “Have to get back to the shop?”
“Yes.” My voice was barely a whisper.
He cupped his other hand on my rib cage and trailed it down a few inches before pulling me against him. “Now?” He moved his mouth next to mine. I could feel his breath on my skin.
I nodded. Mute. And made an effort to step back but couldn’t.
My phone rang.
I jumped and put a hand to my chest, lifting it to my ear. “Hello?”
“Quinn, dear, it’s Dottie. I am so sorry to do this to you, but I am stuck in Middleburg and I don’t think I can be there inside of an hour. Could be even longer. Can we reschedule?”
“Sure.” My breath was still uneven. “Call me when you know what works best for you.”
“I will. I will do that. And, honey, I am so sorry. This is very poor manners. I assure you I know your time is worth more than this.”
Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger Page 16