Kingdom by the Sea (Romantic Suspense)

by Jill Winters

  Speaking with authority, Michael said, “Okay. You get two cards, and the rest of your hand comes from what's put on the table.” He dealt three cards from the deck, setting them face up in a row. “First round is three cards down. This is called the flop.”

  He flipped another card, set it face-up beside the others. “This is called the turn.” He set down a fifth card. “This final deal is called the river. So now you've got two cards in your hand and five on the table. Your job is to make a good hand for yourself. Got it?”

  “Sort of...” she said.

  Michael collected the cards, re-shuffled, and then re-dealt. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Why are you praying?”

  She looked down and realized her hands were clasped together, hopefully. “Oh, I was just waiting.”

  “Waiting for what? It's on you.” Confused, she hesitated. “Nicole, each hand you either have to bet, check, or fold. Are you gonna bet?”

  “But I don't have anything good,” she explained.

  “Nicole. You're not supposed to tell me that. See, that's another problem you have—you're too sincere.”

  “It's just you...”

  “Doesn't matter. Forget that it's me. Remember—show some confidence, even if it's bullshit. Half of confidence is bullshit, you know. Excuse my mouth, by the way.”

  “So what you're saying is it's an act, in a way? Poker?”

  “It's a total act. What you portray, becomes what is. At least until the next hand. You show no emotion unless it has a purpose. You try to figure out, based on what you have and what you see on the table, what your opponent is likely to have—or not have. You watch the way they bet, and then you play off of it. You psych them out to get them to do what you want.”

  “It's so complicated,” Nicole remarked.

  “It really isn't. People become predictable.”

  They played a couple of hands, using hypothetical numbers, not real money, and Nicole was really no better after a few tries at this, but she was having fun anyway.

  “Fifty,” he said now, raising the bet. She looked at her cards and frowned. Then she shook her head. With a wry expression Michael said, “Nicole. What does that mean?”

  “I don't have anything. Oh sorry! I'm not supposed to tell you that. Um okay. I just prefer not to bet an additional fifty dollars at this time. How's that?”

  “Awful,” he said. “Too polite.”

  “Jeez, I can't be polite now, either? I just don't fit in with your kind.”

  “And we've talked about this already—you can't just shake your head. You have to say something. You have to bet, check, or fold.”

  “Okaaay—I fold. Happy?”

  As he collected the cards, he grinned at her. She felt her stomach tighten, and then a brief fluttering in her chest. God, there was just something sexy about him.

  “Shit—Nicole,” he said suddenly when two of her cards slipped out of his hand and fell face-up onto the table. “Hey—this was a good hand! Why did you fold?”

  “It was?” she said, surprised, leaning in to look. “What did I have?”

  “Two pair. See? A pair of eights and a pair of Jacks. Damn, all I had was a couple of fours.” Discouraged, he shook his head. “I can't believe you folded like that.”

  “Oh my God, I didn't even realize! I was so focused on getting either another jack or another eight, so I could have a full house. I guess I didn't see what was right in front of me.”

  At that, he leveled her with a look. “Do you remember what I told you before?”

  “Yes, but which part? That moving too fast will scare people off?”

  “But what else?”

  “‘Ask yourself—what are the odds?’” she said, imitating him.

  “And?”

  “And not to keep checking my cards or it's a giveaway that I have something but am insecure about it.”

  “Wow, I really was a showoff tonight, wasn't I? It sounds like I couldn't shut the hell up.”

  Even as she giggled, she struggled to remember what else he had taught her, whatever thing he was referring to now. “Oh! I know. You said: Don't get your mind set on one way the cards can go. Look for every angle, because something else can always come up to disrupt your plans.”

  “Exactly.”

  With a pat on the table, Nicole smiled proudly. Hey, she may suck as a poker player, but she was still a good student. Then it struck her...

  “But wait. Before, you mentioned that mistakes in poker are mistakes in real life. What does all of that have to do with your real life?”

  For a moment, he hesitated. Then shuffled the cards.

  “Nothing,” he lied, “I just made that up.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “I want you to come with me.”

  The woman in Danya Rosenberg’s dream spoke with gentle finality.

  The dream was so real, it was terrifying. It was the kind of dream that, even in the midst of it, you actively longed to wake up.

  But you waited it out, because it's all you could do.

  Danya explained now to this woman—who was some kind of nurse or teacher—in the dream she kept shifting—that Danya simply could not go with her.

  Dreams were so perplexing. It was the mood or feeling of the dream that lived on, not the disjointed events that played out in a half-baked plot. At eighty years old, Danya was still confounded by the way your mind played such tricks.

  “Don't be afraid,” this woman said now.

  Danya insisted. “I want to wake up. Please, please let me wake up now...I have such a bad feeling.”

  “Here, sit next to me,” the woman urged, patting the cushion of the settee. It was some paisley fabric; it was familiar somehow. It reminded Danya, suddenly, of a sofa she had had in her first apartment in Brooklyn.

  Reluctantly Danya sat. She would stay disengaged from this warped version of reality, stay focused on the escape of morning. Her dreams were often upsetting. She often dreamed about those who had gone already, her family, sometimes her daughter... Now sadness clutched her chest like a fist around her heart. “I'm so afraid,” Danya admitted. It had sprung from deep within; not a passing fear, but an acute terror. Now her heart began to speed up, her chest tensed like it was being stretched too tight.

  “You mustn't be,” the woman said soothingly. “Everybody dies.”

  “What is this...?” Danya asked, suddenly confused and feeling helpless. Almost feeling like a little girl again. Like her mother would come and take her hand. Of course Danya's mother was long gone. Everyone who had meant anything to her was gone. Her heart squeezed again. Eliana, her mind cried. Eliana...I'm so sorry.

  “To everything, there is an end,” the woman said, providing a fractured kind of answer. Still, the words ran like ice water down Danya's spine.

  Wake up, wake up, Danya begged herself. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words would come. Frozen, she felt tears well in her eyes, burn her nose. “I'm not ready for the end,” she said. But the words were silent. How inexplicable; for the past two years, she had felt ready. She had been sadly, complacently resigned to an end. Everyone thought if you lived to be this old, you were lucky—but Danya didn't feel lucky. Her husband was gone, and in his absence, the harsh realization that she had spent her whole life under the thumb of a controlling, cold man and for what? To lose her daughter? To never know her grandson—Eliana's child with that Italian Catholic she'd married.

  At the time it had all seemed so important. Both Danya and Ariel had lived the first twenty-five years of their lives in Jerusalem, and both had been raised in a strict Orthodox tradition. They had assumed it would be passed, in full spirit, to their daughter.

  More so than most of their relatives, Ariel had adhered to the oldest, most traditional of the Orthodox tenets, which reviled any marriage outside of the faith. So when Eliana had come to them all those years ago, telling them she had fallen in love with a man named Christopher Corso, she had been told straight a
way that the match was unacceptable. Of course, Ariel had been crueler than that in his phrasing; he accused Eliana of carrying on, disgracefully, in secret. If Ariel was anything, he was an unforgiving man, and Danya knew now, looking back, that it had nothing to do with his religion. It was just inside of him; it was who he was, just as any flawed person has an intrinsic nature. There were good and bad people in every group, Danya could see now, but it took her years to observe and believe this, and by then, it was too late to defy her husband. Ariel warned Eliana that if she married this man, she would never be welcomed back to his home, that she would be shut out.

  The worst part of it all was how weak Danya had been. Being so traditional herself, she had shared in her husband's disapproval at first. Then, even as her feelings softened, it was difficult to assert herself. Danya had married Ariel when she was only nineteen years old; her submissiveness to him had been ingrained.

  After Eliana had left to marry this Christopher Corso, Danya began to worry for her daughter's health. Eliana had always been asthmatic, prone to bronchitis, and had never been a strong girl, physically, but such maternal appeals fell quickly. As Ariel would rigidly insist: the girl made her choice.

  One day when Danya was cleaning out Ariel's closet, she found a stack of letters. Eliana had been gone for five years at that point. The letters were unopened, but their daughter's name was scribbled across the return address. One of the postmarks was from that very year. Eagerly, Danya began to peel them apart, when Ariel suddenly appeared. He snatched the letters out of her hands and refused to let her see them. When asked why he had kept them at all if he never intended to read them, Ariel said that it was so he could throw them in their daughter's face if she ever came crawling back.

  It was obvious that Eliana's defection hurt Ariel deeply, but with Ariel...the more sadness he carried, the more it corroded into vicious anger.

  Secretly, though, Danya recalled the return address she had read on the envelopes. And one day she traveled to Long Island to see her daughter. But when she got to the address, she found that her daughter was no longer there. A neighbor simply said “they moved,” but she didn't know where, or much about Eliana and her husband either. Grasping at a hope, Danya told herself that she would intercept the next letter that came from Eliana, which would reveal her new address.

  No more letters came. At least not any that Danya could find.

  It wasn't until Ariel died sixteen years later that Danya finally discovered what had become of her daughter. Little Stuart Weinstock from around the corner had grown up into an attorney. At Danya's request, he found the information. Indeed, Stuart Weinstock had been the messenger: Eliana had died of pneumonia only a few months earlier, Christopher had died some years before that in a construction accident, and the two had had a son named Michael.

  Danya would never forget the one time she met her grandson, Michael. A clumsy way to go about it, to be sure, but Danya had worked up the nerve to ride to the garage where Michael worked. For several minutes, she stood across the street, just watching him. He was a handsome young man; dark hair, dark eyes, like Eliana. While he worked, he appeared singularly focused on the task—until Danya broke his concentration, approaching him and blurting out, “I am Eliana's mother. I am your grandmother.”

  Those dark, cold eyes of his, that stony expression, not sad, somewhere between angry and unfeeling altogether. “Eliana's dead,” he had said.

  “I know,” Danya admitted. “I wanted to...”

  “You made the trip for nothing,” he told her.

  “But—”

  With steely calm, he cut her off. “I have no interest. You're too late.” Then he turned and walked away.

  We have no daughter had been Ariel's mantra and Danya had allowed herself to agree in some fashion—or to pretend agreement—and now this would be her punishment. She had waited too long to make it right and now she truly would have no daughter, ever again.

  After that, Danya had tried again, futilely, to talk with Michael, to explain or apologize, to get to know him, but he truly was as hard as he had seemed that day. Danya wondered when the boy had turned so hard. Or if he just had that in him, like Ariel.

  Thinking of Ariel was always enraging. Thinking of how weak and crumpled Ariel had looked in his hospital bed, and how that was the man she had been so afraid of all those years?

  “I'm not ready for the end,” she repeated now, her voice no more than a broken whimper.

  “After the end, is a new beginning,” the woman promised her. “There is something good to come. I'll help you get there.”

  “But I don't want to go anywhere yet! I just want to wake up.”

  “You have to come with me, Danya,” the woman insisted.

  “But I...” A hot tear slid down Danya's cheek, then another. Her voice was barely a croaking whisper, a choke, and she cried, “Please, I want to wake up. I have to wake up—I have to see Michael again. I have to try again...”

  Now the woman's face changed again. Now it was the face of Danya's mother. Or—had it been so earlier in the dream? She couldn't remember.

  Terror shook Danya's chest as this woman—who looked like her mother, but was not quite her—held Danya's hand and gave her a sympathetic look. A look that told her: this was not just a dream, this was what it was to die in your sleep. The last thing Danya remembered seeing was Eliana's face...her sweet, beautiful face...

  Chapter Nineteen

  The next night Michael was over, preparing his one dish, chili. “Want some help?” Nicole offered, leaning close to the stove.

  “No way, this is my big moment.”

  “Really...this is it, huh?” she said with mock pity.

  “Actually, could you hand me the wine?”

  Once she passed the bottle, he poured a splash of Cabernet into the pot. “So how is that research project going?” he asked.

  “So far, so good. There’s a lot of interesting history. For instance, I was reading today that in 1879, some kids on the beach came across the base of the original lighthouse buried in the sand. Apparently the erosion from recent storms had partially unearthed it, and the boys more or less stumbled upon it. So get this—when they dug further, they found clay pits underneath, and inside of them, ancient gold coins!”

  Doubtfully, Michael said, “Are you making this up?”

  “No, it's true! I just read it today. At the time, people were confused how these coins could have gotten there. Finally people figured that pirates must have buried them there long ago—long before the original lighthouse was ever put up.”

  “I wonder whatever happened to the coins,” Michael remarked, stirring crushed red pepper into the chili. “You know, I'm surprised you went to school for English instead of history. You're really into it.”

  “I love books,” Nicole said. “You know the stereotype of women and shoes? Well, picture that, but with books.”

  “I read a lot, too,” Michael said, turning the stove down as the chili began to bubble.

  “You do?” she said, surprised.

  “Yes.”

  “What, you mean books?”

  “Yes, books,” Michael said with a laugh. “What the hell?”

  Nicole laughed then, too, realizing how she had sounded. But honestly she would not have pictured Michael with a book in his hand. She wasn't sure why; maybe it was the shaved head. I'm too sheltered, she thought suddenly. Unfortunately, the thought flitted pretty effortlessly to the back of her mind.

  “Well, you're welcome to borrow something. My aunt's library is filled with books. Which I realize is kind of appealing in a 'library.' Here...” She tugged lightly on his sleeve. “...I'll show you.”

  With a surge of adrenaline, Michael tossed the towel to the counter. Finally he and Nicole were moving past the kitchen.

  Had she not invited him deeper into the house, he'd planned to lead her around to that at some point tonight, but it was always better when a woman believed something was her idea.

  As
she led him down a hallway on the first floor, Michael eyed his surroundings carefully. They passed a closed door on the left. Casually, he asked, “What's in there?”

  “Oh, that was my aunt's studio,” Nicole said, glancing back. “She painted in there. The library's in here.” She led him into the next room and flipped on the lights.

  Admiringly, Michael cast his eyes around. “Man...this place is like something out of a movie.”

  “Isn't it great? I feel like it's glamorous and vintage at the same time.”

  “A lot of paintings,” he remarked.

  With a tilt of her head, Nicole turned and looked at him. “That's a strange comment.”

  “Why?” he said.

  “Because...most people would comment on how many books, that's all.”

  Fuck, that was stupid of him.

  “Take your time, look through the books,” Nicole offered.

  Michael willed himself to remain casual, to be discreet. A girl in a blue dress, Lucius had told him. That, and the approximate dimensions of the painting.

  Of course, Michael wouldn't be relying on Lucius for information much longer. He fully intended to smoke out their silent partner himself and put things on more level ground. He wasn't greedy; he was content with 20% . But he had no intention of getting bled out of his cut by Lucius or some anonymous puppet master. Whoever was behind this job, it was obviously someone who was determined to get inside this house—but did not know how to go about it himself.

  Or herself? Michael considered suddenly. But he dismissed the notion that Lucius’s silent partner was a woman.

  Now he took a quick inventory of the library walls. It was an eclectic mix by all different artists. Two seascapes, a portrait of William Shakespeare, a painting of the World's Fair, one posed royal court or another, several elaborate landscapes.

  Well, hell, he didn't think it would be that easy. The girl in the blue dress could be hanging in another room, he supposed. But he wouldn't bet on it, given the fact that—