The Great Escape

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  “Why’s that?”

  Bree shoved her hands deeper into the pockets. “I have a lot of memories attached to the house. Complicated ones.”

  Lucy understood complicated memories.

  “I spent every summer there when I was growing up,” Bree said. “I stopped coming when I was around eighteen, but the rest of my family used it for years until my father died and Mother went into a nursing home. Finally it got too expensive to maintain, so my brothers put it on the market.”

  “And Panda bought it.”

  She nodded. “I knew about him, but we’d never met. It was a shock finally seeing him.” She examined her broken fingernails. “It’s hard to think of someone else living there.” She regarded Lucy apologetically. “I should have told you, but I’m not used to confiding in people.”

  “You didn’t really owe me an explanation.”

  “Not true. Your friendship has meant more to me than you can ever imagine.” Once again, she started patting her pockets. “Damn it, where are my cigarettes?”

  “You left them at the cottage, remember? You’re trying to stop.”

  “Shit.” She sagged into the pale yellow Adirondack chair and said, almost defiantly, “I knew Scott was having affairs.”

  It took Lucy a moment to adjust to the change of subject. “Your husband?”

  “In name only.” Her mouth twisted bitterly. “I was flattered when he fell in love with me, but we’d been married for barely two years before he started screwing around. I found out right away.”

  “That must have hurt.”

  “It hurt all right, but I made excuses for him. He had an advanced degree. I’d left college after my freshman year to marry him, so I decided I wasn’t smart enough to hold his interest. But it kept happening and, believe me, all of those other women weren’t smart.”

  “What did he say when you confronted him?”

  She set an elbow on the chair and curled her hand tightly around the end of the arm. “I didn’t. I pretended not to know.” Her voice was full of pain. “Can you imagine? How gutless is that?”

  “You must have had a reason.”

  “Sure. I didn’t want to give up my life.” She stared blindly toward the road. “I’m one of those women the feminist movement passed by. I had no career ambitions. I wanted what the women I saw around me had while I was growing up. A husband, children—good luck with that. Scott refused to even talk about kids.” She rose from the chair. “I wanted a beautiful house. Never having to worry about money. Knowing exactly where I fit. I wanted that security so much I was willing to sell my self-respect to get it. Even at the end … A year ago …” She stopped, hugged herself, her expression bleak. “I wasn’t the one who walked out. He walked out on me. I was still hanging on, the faithful doormat wife.”

  Lucy’s heart filled with pity. “Bree …”

  Bree refused to look at her. “What kind of woman lets herself get treated that way? Where was my pride? My backbone?”

  “Maybe you’re finding it now.”

  But Bree was too caught up in self-loathing to accept comfort. “When I look in the mirror, all I feel is disgust.”

  “Clean off your mirror and take another look. I see an amazing woman who’s building a good business and also taking responsibility for a kid who’s not exactly easy.”

  “Some business. A broken-down farm stand in the middle of nowhere.”

  “It’s not broken-down. Look around. This is the Taj Mahal of farm stands. The honey is the best I’ve ever tasted, new customers are stopping all the time, you keep adding more products, and you’re making a profit.”

  “Which I’m plowing right back into new jars and Christmas ornaments, not to mention soap molds and a few gallons of cocoa butter for the lotions. What happens when Labor Day comes and the tourists leave? What happens when winter’s here and Toby stages a full-out teenage rebellion?”

  Lucy had no easy answer for that. “You’ve figured everything else out. I’m betting you’ll figure that out, too.”

  Lucy could see that Bree wasn’t buying it, and her own need to make other people feel better asserted itself. “What if Scott showed up today and said he’d made a mistake? What if he said he wanted you back, and he’d never screw around on you again? What would you do?”

  Bree thought it over. “If Scott showed up?” she said slowly.

  “Just supposing.”

  “If Scott showed up …” Her jaw set. “I’d tell him to go screw himself.”

  Lucy grinned. “Exactly what I thought.”

  LUCY WAITED UNTIL PANDA FINISHED his afternoon workout before she went upstairs to find him. Bree’s story explained her reaction to meeting him, but not his to seeing her. He stood in the middle of the small, overcrowded bedroom he’d taken for himself. As he pulled his damp T-shirt over his head, the sight of that sweaty, too-ripped chest distracted her. But only momentarily. “Why were you so rude to Bree?”

  He sat on the side of the bed to take off his sneakers. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you do.” One of his sneakers hit the floor. “When I introduced Bree, you threw yourself in your car and raced off like a teenager trying to beat curfew. You didn’t even say hello.”

  “I’ve got no manners.” His second sneaker landed with a thud.

  “You have perfectly good manners when it suits you.”

  He balled up his socks. “I have to take a shower.”

  “It can wait.”

  But apparently not, because he walked right past her and across the hallway to the bathroom. The lock clicked behind him.

  He kept away from her for the rest of the afternoon. She repaired her black fingernail polish, dyed her bangs magenta, and reapplied her dragon tattoo. Then she went upstairs to bother Temple, which turned out to be a big mistake. A brutal workout and a stinging lecture on the stupidity of Lucy’s “Good Enough” exercise philosophy left her drenched in sweat and pissed off.

  Temple refused all of Lucy’s offers to make anything but a plain green salad, and that night they ate more frozen dinners of dry turkey, mushy brown rice, and mashed parsnips. Lucy fell back on her favorite expression from when she was fourteen. “This blows.”

  “So does being fat,” Temple replied self-righteously.

  “You blow, too,” Lucy grumbled.

  Panda lifted an eyebrow. Temple reached across the table to pat Lucy’s hand. “Somebody’s got PMS.”

  Panda slammed his elbow on the table. “I swear to God, if I hear any more about PMS, cramps, or even female acne, I’m going to blow something up.”

  Temple waved a breezy hand toward the door. Panda glowered. Lucy hadn’t been able to get him alone yet, and she didn’t want to talk about what had happened at the farm stand in front of Temple, so she picked another target for her bad mood. “I hate this table.”

  “Tough,” Panda said.

  Temple snorted. “He likes being surrounded by squalor. It reminds him of his hideous childhood.”

  “How hideous?” Lucy said. “He never tells me anything.”

  “My father was a drug dealer shot by a dissatisfied customer when I was two,” he said matter-of-factly. “My mother was an addict. We had rats in our apartment. That’s the part Temple likes best.”

  “And he stole food so they could eat,” Temple said gleefully. “Isn’t that sad?”

  Lucy pushed her plate away. It didn’t seem right for Temple to know more about him than she did. “What else did you learn?”

  “He graduated from college with honors,” Temple said.

  Panda frowned, clearly displeased by any information that didn’t portray him as a menace to society. “How do you know that?”

  “Google.” She sniffed. “You don’t think I’d have kept hiring you if I hadn’t investigated you?”

  “By Googling me? You’re a crackerjack detective, all right.”

  “He was also in the army,” Temple went on. “Boring. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an
ything about his romantic history. I think we can safely assume a trail of broken hearts has been left behind.”

  “Or unmarked female graves,” Lucy said, which only made him smile.

  How could Temple work out with him every day and not want to rip his clothes off? Instead, whenever she took a break, she tended to stare out the window. Lucy studied the long tendon that ran down the side of his neck. The one she liked to bite. He caught her at it and gave her a look that said he knew exactly what she was thinking.

  PANDA DIDN’T COME THROUGH HER sliding door that night, and the boathouse remained dark. It was the first time they hadn’t been together since their affair had begun, which led her to wonder … If his connection with Bree only involved real estate, why was he being so secretive?

  Rain peppered the windows the next morning, matching her mood. What was it that he didn’t want her to know? She needed their affair to be completely straightforward—no murky corners or dark mysteries she might find herself pondering when they weren’t together. She pulled on an old yellow slicker that one of the Remingtons, maybe Bree herself, had left behind in an upstairs closet, and she set off across the wet grass. But instead of heading for the woods, she turned toward the three acres of land on the north side of the house, a rockier area she hadn’t originally realized was part of his property. By the time she reached the top of the steep slope, she was out of breath.

  Panda stood at the edge of the bluff in what she’d come to think of as his brooding place. He wore a high-end dark gray rain jacket and jeans. His head was bare, hair wet and wind tousled. She took in his swarthy, rain-slicked face. He didn’t look happy to see her.

  “I missed my sex last night,” she said. “I’m thinking about firing you.”

  PANDA HAD FIGURED SHE’D FORCE a confrontation, but he’d hoped to buy a little time before it happened. He should have known better. Shit. If he didn’t get away from this place soon—away from her—he was going to lose it. He’d tried to talk Temple into letting him out of his contract, but she’d refused. When this was over, he was getting back to doing what he did best, protecting clients from real danger.

  The wind flipped up the collar of his jacket. “I wouldn’t advise firing me,” he told her. “I’ve got a sex tape.”

  She didn’t smile. In a yellow slicker, with a black-lined hood pulled over her ridiculous hair and three inches of black cuffs turned up, she looked like a wet bumblebee. “You’re lying,” she said. “Tell me why you had your little freak-out when you saw Bree.”

  “Would I lie about something as serious as a sex tape?”

  “In a heartbeat. I know Bree’s family owned the house. She told me all about it.”

  He should have made the connection between the woman named Bree that Lucy visited at the cottage and Sabrina Remington West, but this asinine assignment had dulled his thinking. “Video cameras are small,” he said. “I’m exceptionally good at hiding them.”

  Again, no smile. She meant business, and he didn’t like that. “Bree told me she’d never met you,” she said. “So why did you run off like that?”

  He came up with the most plausible explanation. “She reminded me of an old girlfriend.”

  “What old girlfriend?”

  He ignored the slick of raindrops on her cheek to work on his sneer. “I don’t ask about your lurid past. Leave mine alone.”

  “You don’t ask about my lurid past because you know you’d fall asleep if I told you about it.” She paused. “Something I intend to fix.”

  He frowned. “You told that woman who you are. Do you really think she’s going to keep it to herself?”

  “She has for a month. And other than Temple’s dubious companionship, Bree is the only friend I have on the island.

  What did that make him? “Who needs friends here?” he said. “We’ll all be leaving in a couple of weeks.” He ramped up his argument. “You’re getting way too cozy with people. You ride into town whenever you like, talk to whoever you want. It’s not smart.”

  “I like talking, and this conversation isn’t about me. It’s about you, and if you don’t tell me the truth, I’ll start digging around. Believe me, my resources are a lot more powerful than Google.”

  He wished she hadn’t moved so close to the edge of the bluff, but if he told her to step back, she’d bite his head off. He yearned for the quieter, more compliant woman he’d first met. “Why do you even care?” he said.

  “I don’t like mysteries.”

  “Leave it alone, Lucy.”

  Her hood blew back. “Here’s what I think. I think you have some kind of connection to the Remington family. That’s why you bought this house, and that’s why you don’t want anything changed.”

  “The house has roots, and I don’t. It’s what I like about it and why I’m not getting rid of the table you’re so obsessed with.”

  Fortunately she moved a few steps away from the edge. “Could be true,” she said. “Now tell me the rest.”

  Like hell he was telling her the rest. As he watched the wind slap that yellow slicker against her small body, he couldn’t imagine spilling his guts about any of it. Curtis, the army, how it felt to be a cop walking into some rat-hole apartment to tell a mother her kid was dead. How it felt not being able to trust yourself. He’d rather tell her how beautiful she was. Even her messy hair and fake tattoos couldn’t destroy the sweet feistiness of that face or the allure of those green-flecked eyes.

  He reminded himself that all this sweetness, that spirit, was destined for somebody else. Someone who hadn’t spent so many years mucking around in the shadows. Someone who could never hurt her.

  “There’s no rest to tell.” He reached out and pulled her hood up, sending rainwater down the back of her neck. “You laid out the terms for this affair. Don’t tell me you’ve gone soft and fallen for me.”

  He watched her closely—not sure what he wanted to see—both relieved and disappointed that her expression remained unchanged. “I’ve fallen for your body,” she said, “even if you are starting to look like a warning poster for illegal steroids. The body is definitely spectacular—all but the part between your ears.”

  She was so full of life, so smart, so screwed up. For years, she’d been pushing herself into a mold that didn’t quite fit, trying so hard to be the perfect daughter, and now she was floundering. As for the two of them … For all her big talk about her asinine reverse bucket list, she wasn’t cut out for a dead-end affair. She needed real intimacy, something he couldn’t give her, and damn it, if she wouldn’t look out for herself, he’d do it for her.

  He turned his smile into the facsimile of a leer. “You’re a hot number, babe. Hell on wheels when you’re naked, but a pain in the ass once you’ve got your clothes on. If you want real communication, pull down your pants.”

  She blinked at his crudeness. His stomach twisted, but he was doing what he needed to. Still, he had to will himself not to take her into his arms and kiss the raindrops from her cheeks.

  “Interesting.” She pushed her hood back and lifted her chin. “Keep your secrets, Panda. I really don’t care all that much.”

  She disappeared, sending him into the foulest of moods.

  THE SKIES CLEARED, AND LUCY let Toby talk her into going out with him on Big Mike Moody’s boat. The idea of spending the afternoon in the funk of his salesman’s cologne didn’t appeal to her, but it was better than stomping around the house.

  Did Panda really believe she wouldn’t see through his crap—that calculated insult and ridiculous sneer? It was his way of reminding her to keep her distance, as if she needed a reminder. This affair was supposed to be another check mark on her reverse bucket list, but by holding on to his secrets, he’d made her do exactly what she didn’t want—think too much about him.

  She forced a smile as she and Toby approached the roomy blue and white powerboat docked in the municipal harbor. Toby’s eyes shone with anticipation. “Permission to come aboard.”

  “Permission granted
.” Mike’s grin showcased his straight, gleaming teeth. He wore khaki shorts, a white Polo with a green logo, and boat shoes. Expensive Revo sunglasses hung by a strap around his tanned neck.

  She’d traded her skank clothes for her black bathing suit and a white terry cover-up, but she’d kept her nose ring. He took the tote that held her sunblock, a towel, her ball cap, and some cookies she’d bought at the Painted Frog. Unfortunately, he also held out his hand to help her aboard, but the cologne pollution she remembered was noticeably absent, along with his gold bracelet and college ring.

  “Glad you could come with us today, Miss Jorik.”

  She was disappointed. “Bree told you who I was.”

  “No. Remember how I said I never forget a face? It finally came to me a couple of weeks ago.” He gestured toward her dragon tattoo. “You’ve got a real good disguise going for you.”

  Toby dashed to the stern to check out the fishing gear. She pulled her ball cap from her tote. “Nobody in town’s recognized me, so the news doesn’t seem to have spread.”

  “I figured if you wanted people to know who you were,” he said earnestly, “you would have told them.”

  His openness was refreshing, and she found herself warming to him.

  Once the boat was out of the harbor, he let Toby take the wheel. Eventually they passed around the south end of the island. When they were closer to shore, Toby got his rod and began to cast, with Mike giving him pointers. Lucy went over the other side to swim and to not think about Panda.

  The next few hours passed pleasantly, but the fish weren’t biting, and eventually Toby gave up and went in to swim himself. As Lucy lounged on the deck, she realized her initial impression of Mike had been wrong. He wasn’t a phony at all. Instead, this good-looking, gregarious salesman was one of those people who genuinely looked for the best in everyone, even the sixteen-year-old who’d rear-ended his Cadillac the previous week while texting his girlfriend. “All teenagers do stupid things,” he said as they bobbed at anchor while Toby snorkeled. “I sure did my share.”