“Look—how big I was.” Martha pointed to a picture of her pregnant self standing in front of a glass door leading through a concrete wall, which Lisa knew from the sign above it was in fact the hospital. Her knowledge of her parents’ lives up until her birth was a little hazy—mostly from lack of interest on her part, she had to admit—but she knew she ’d been born in Maryland, right on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. The photographer, she presumed, had been Barty. Back when he and Martha had still been a couple. Lisa wondered briefly if they’d been happy, then dismissed the thought from her mind. “I had—such a hard time getting pregnant. I was so—excited. I wanted you—very, very much.”
“If you’d known how much trouble I was going to be, you would have run away screaming right there and then, right?” Lisa gave her mother a teasing grin. She ’d been a wild teenager, sneaking out, partying, running with an out-of-control crowd of other privileged kids who’d had, basically, three thoughts in their collective heads: getting drunk, getting high, and getting laid. She hadn’t been as bad as some of them, but she’d been plenty bad enough to provoke innumerable screaming fights with her worried mother.
“Are you—kidding? I wouldn’t have—missed a minute of it. Raising you—has been the joy of my life.”
An unexpected lump rose in Lisa’s throat. She had no doubt that her mother meant it, and equally no doubt that she didn’t deserve all that unconditional love. After her wild teenage years, she ’d gone away to college, and then law school, with scarcely a backward look. After the first summer, she’drarely even come home. She ’d taken everything—her mother’s love, the slightly anachronistic world she ’d left behind, the constant security of having plenty of money—for granted. If she ’d ever bothered to think about it at all, which she hadn’t, she would have been sure that all of it, everything, would always be there waiting for her. It had been bewildering—shocking, even—when she’d first begun to realize that that was not so.
“A glutton for punishment, aren’t you?” Lisa asked lightly, determined not to let her own maudlin reflections dampen her mother’s mood. Martha laughed, and Lisa smiled, too. Depression was an understandable side effect of the illness, and Lisa made every attempt to keep her mother upbeat.
At Martha’s direction, Lisa slowly turned the pages, looking at pictures of her mother in the hospital bed with Barty standing beside her, of her naked baby self, blood, umbilical, and all, clearly having just been delivered, being carried by a nurse toward what looked like a scale in the corner of the room, then cleaned up and wrapped now in a pink blanket with a tiny pink cap on her head, being handed to her mother, of the three of them, Martha in the hospital bed, Barty standing beside it, and her baby self in her mother’s arms. She was convinced. It was all there, from the carefully saved bracelets she and her mother had worn in the hospital, to her own tiny footprint, to the date, time, and place of her birth, along with her height in inches and her weight. There had been, as her father had assured her, no adoption. She was indeed Annalisa Seraphina Grant, her parents’ natural child, and the resemblance to Angela Garcia could be only a trick of distant-relative-type genetics or sheer chance.
Which was a surprisingly big relief.
Promptly at nine, Lynn Carter, the nurse who came in to get Martha ready for bed and then stayed with her during the night, appeared in the TV room’s doorway. She knocked lightly to get their attention, and Lisa looked around from her seat on the couch and smiled at her. Martha couldn’t turn her head to that extent, but she knew who it was, because this had become the familiar routine.
“Ready to go, Miss Martha?” Lynn asked. A tall, thin, black-haired woman in her fifties, with steel-rimmed glasses and, when needed, an equally steely manner, Lynn took her job seriously. Case in point, her nurse ’s uniform, which today was a short-sleeved white pantsuit. Lisa had told her that wearing a uniform wasn’t necessary. Lynn had insisted. It gave her authority, she said. Besides, she never had to worry about what to wear.
“Do I—have a choice?” Martha’s voice was gently humorous.
“No, ma’am,” Lynn said.
“Well, then—let ’s go.”
Lynn smiled at Lisa as Martha pushed the button that turned her wheelchair away from the TV and toward the door. The gentle whirr of the chair’s motor had become so familiar to Lisa that now she scarcely heard it.
Lisa said good night, and then her mother was gone. Left alone, Lisa hit a button on the remote and turned off the TV. Since coming home, she thought, as she stood up and stretched wearily, she’d watched more TV than she ever had in her life—and the sad thing was, she found she was actually beginning to care what was in those briefcases on Deal or No Deal, or who could lose the most weight on The Biggest Loser—but she couldn’t regret it. Watching TV with her mother was time shared with her, and time, she was becoming convinced, was an increasingly precious commodity for the two of them.
She shied away from the thought. The feeling she had that Martha had months rather than years remaining to live was far too depressing to dwell on tonight.
The good news about being banished to Siberia was that for the first time since she’d started working at the prosecutor’s office, she ’d had no work to bring home. Somebody else was responsible for making sure that all the paperwork needed for tomorrow’s cases was done, which gave her some much-appreciated free time. She called Triple A to make sure her car had been picked up—it had—and then called Nola to arrange to go to lunch with her on Friday, now that her father had bailed. After that, she headed outside, hungry for fresh air. She’d never been one for staying home, or staying inside, but since she ’d come back to Grayson Springs she ’d pretty much done just that.
Neither Robin nor Andy was anywhere in sight as she went out through the kitchen and across the porch, although the flowers Andy had brought in now took pride of place on the kitchen table. The workers’ vans were gone, too, she saw, so for once she had the five acres of gardens and lawn that made up the backyard completely to herself. The fading light had mellowed still more, so that everything was awash in the soft pinkish glow of the approaching sunset. Beyond the manicured grounds around the house, just visible through the trees, the distinctive red roofs of the farm’s horse barns seemed to shimmer as the sun’s last rays danced over them. A leggy foal frisked along a white fence while its mother and companions grazed nearby, paying it no heed. Closer at hand, insects chirped, tree frogs sang, and leaves rustled faintly in the welcome breeze. She had some thought of deadheading the geraniums or maybe weeding the tomato patch, but for the moment that was all they were: thoughts. Instead she headed for her favorite spot. Long shadows from the giant oaks and walnuts and tulip poplars that vied with one another to shade the back lawn striped grass that was thick and lush as an emerald carpet beneath her feet. Bypassing the formal flower gardens with their low brick walls and paved paths, Lisa walked until she came to the huge, old mulberry tree that she’d loved to climb as a child. Her rope swing still hung from a sturdy branch. There was a hammock on a stand nearby, flanked by a pair of white-painted Adirondack chairs. Plopping down in the swing, lost in thought, she pushed a foot absently against the ground so that she was rocking gently back and forth.
When someone caught the ropes from behind, stopping her in mid-motion, she glanced up, shocked.
Scott was looking down at her. She hadn’t heard him approach.
“Want a push?” he asked.
6
Before Lisa could answer, Scott ’s hands slid down the ropes, and he started pulling the swing backward until she had to cling to the ropes to keep from sliding off the seat and her feet dangled inches off the ground.
“Hey . . .” she protested, half laughing. He was still wearing his white shirt and gray pants, and she realized he must have walked down from his house to pick up his car.
“Hang on.”
Having dragged her high, he let go, and away she sailed, only to fall back toward him a moment later. He pushed her aga
in, catching the edge of the wooden seat and heaving so that she would go high. In that instant, as she flew upward and her feet stretched out toward the curving, berry-laden branches, she was maybe eleven years old again and he was the too-cool-for-words older boy who would push her in the swing if he was the only one around and she begged hard enough.
“You keep away from that Buchanan boy,” she could almost hear Robin and the rest of the household staff scolding her, as they had all those years ago every time they had chanced to see them together. “That whole family’s no good.”
She hadn’t listened, of course. When had she ever listened to anyone? Back then, before any hint of sexuality had entered her head, she had simply thought of him as a magnificent older potential playmate who would only rarely condescend to so much as speak to her. She ’d been too young to realize that in this small, closed society with its strict social stratifications that remained only slightly diluted to this day, he wasn’t considered a fit friend for Miss Lisa Grant of Grayson Springs. Now she saw it and realized how snobbish and stupid that was, and how hurtful—for him—growing up around here must have been. At the time, she had accepted as “just the way things were” the warnings to her that no one had cared enough about his feelings to bother to whisper, the fact that he wasn’t allowed to use the swimming pool or the tennis court or even come into the house for a drink of water without Miss Martha, his champion, being right there to expressly say so, or to so much as talk to her and her friends any more than necessity dictated.
She was glad, she realized with some surprise when he pushed her again, that he had, in her mother’s words, made something of himself. The boy who’d been looked down on for all those years deserved that much revenge.
When the swing flew back toward him once more, there were no hands to catch her and send her soaring again. Glancing over her shoulder in surprise, she saw that he was gone, walking away toward the house.
Jumping lightly off the swing, Lisa hurried after him.
“Your keys are on the hook in the kitchen,” she told him when she caught up and fell in step beside him.
“I know. I already got them. I just walked out to let you know, because I didn’t want you to think someone had stolen my car. I meant to say hello to your mother, but Mrs. Baker”—Scott had always called Robin Mrs. Baker, with the utmost respect—“said she’d already gone to bed.”
“She goes early now.” Lisa hesitated, not sure whether she should even mention the subject. “Is everything okay with your dad?”
Scott shrugged. “He’s in jail. Apparently he sideswiped a car at an intersection, then just kept on going until he got home. That ’s when he called me, but by then they’d tracked him down and sent somebody out to question him. He took a shot at a deputy who stepped through the door. He’sprobably looking at three to six months at a minimum. It’d be a hell of a lot more if everybody didn’t know him around here, and the deputy wasn’t Carl Wright.”
Carl Wright was another longtime neighbor. “You could pull some strings.”
“I don’t want to pull any strings. Not tonight, anyway. Ask me tomorrow.”
From that she gathered he ’d had it up to his eyeballs with his father, for which she didn’t blame him a bit.
“Have you had supper?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“There ’s some chicken soup left. And some fish. I could heat it up.”
“Are you offering to fix me a meal?”
“More like zap it in the microwave.”
He smiled, apparently deriving considerable amusement from the image her words conjured up. “Mrs. Baker would love that. She did everything but give me the evil eye when I stepped into the kitchen to get my keys.”
“She ’s that way with everybody. Robin is not what you’d call a people person.” It wasn’t exactly true—Robin was graciousness personified with those she deemed worthy of it—but it was close enough.
“Yeah, well, not that I mean to denigrate your zapping skills or anything, but I think I’ll take my chances with a burger at McDonald’s.”
Lisa grimaced. “We could go to Jimmy’s.”
Jimmy’s was a little diner about five miles down the road toward Versailles, which, in the local pronunciation, was “Vir-sails.” Besides decent food, it had music and, at almost any hour of the day or night, a lively crowd. What she needed, Lisa had just decided, was to get out of the house. With her mother in bed, the night yawned before her, as empty as a black hole. Even Scott’s company was preferable.
His brows lifted. “ ‘ We ’?”
“Why not? I’m bored. And I don’t have a car, so I can’t go anywhere on my own. And I am sick to death of watching TV.”
A beat passed.
“Just so you know, Princess, I got a rule about dating people who work for me. Therein lies a whole host of problems I don’t need. You want to go out, I suggest you call Loverboy.”
Lisa stopped dead. “I wasn’t asking you out. Not like on a date. God forbid.”
“Good to know we agree on something.” He kept walking, heading toward the porte cochere and his car.
“I was just trying to be nice to you,” she called after him, feeling her blood pressure start to rise.
“Do me a favor: Be nice to somebody else.”
“In future, don’t worry, I will.”
He reached his car, opened the door, and lifted a hand in farewell. “Don’t be late to work tomorrow.”
The warning about being late was downright infuriating.
“Jerk,” Lisa muttered as he got into the car and shut the door. He couldn’t hear, and she tried to be glad, because calling her boss a jerk was a really dumb career move. But as far as she was concerned, he was Scott first and her boss second. At least when they weren’t at work. And it had been Scott she’d been calling a jerk. Because he was, and always had been, world without end.
“Kinda late for visitors, isn’t it?” was how Robin greeted her when she stalked into the kitchen and shut the door with what, had she not mitigated it by grabbing the knob at the last minute, would have been a slam. “Course, you can’t expect that Buchanan boy to have any manners.”
As annoyed as she was at Scott, that set Lisa’s teeth on edge.
“First, he is not a boy. He’s thirty-two years old, which makes him a grown man.” Lisa paused long enough to jerk open the refrigerator, grab a Diet Mountain Dew, close the door, then glare at Robin. “Second, having been nice enough to give me a ride home when the Jaguar broke down, he had to come by and pick up his car. Third, he’s the Lexington-Fayette County district attorney, which means he ’s a very successful, powerful lawyer. He’s also my boss, and I’d appreciate it if you would be polite to him when you see him.”
“I’m polite to him,” Robin protested, eyeing her with surprise. “I’m polite to everybody. But there ’s no getting around the fact that he ’s trouble and always has been. All them Buchanans are.”
“Polite,” Lisa insisted through her teeth, popping open the soda as she headed out of the kitchen. “I mean it, Robin.”
What Robin said in answer she didn’t know, because she banged the door behind her as she headed for the workout room in the south wing. If she couldn’t go out, she could always run on the treadmill until she tired herself into a near stupor. Physical exhaustion was what she needed if she was to have any hope of banishing the edginess that had bothered her all day.
It was really kind of pathetic, Scott reflected sourly as he drove up the lane toward the main road that would eventually take him to Lexington and the apartment he called home there. Here he was, at age thirty-two, still dealing with the exact same set of problems that had bedeviled him as a teenager. First there was his father, whom he was pretty sure he didn’t give a shit about but was damned well sure he was stuck with. In a community this size, where everyone knew him as Bud Buchanan’s boy, there wasn’t any way of distancing himself from his father even if he wanted to, which ninety-nine percent of the time
he absolutely did. The same mean, violent drunk he’d always been, the old man had done his best to run off anyone who had ever cared for him, Scott included. Only sheer dogged determination not to let the old bastard win kept Scott coming back. That and the knowledge that the crazy SOB needed him, though the last thing on earth he’d ever do was either face it or admit it.
The other problem that had boomeranged right back at him was Lisa.
He’d been wanting to get inside her panties for so long now that it felt like a given of his life. From the time she ’d first started coming on to him when she was about fourteen to this day, he ’d been fighting the urge to jump her bones. At first she ’d been too young; he’d been ashamed of himself for even thinking about it, no matter how many times she had deliberately jiggled past him in a bikini or needed his “help” to reach something or carry something or fix something, all of which required a lot of brushing up against him, or said or did something so outrageously suggestive that she might as well have just begged him to screw her and have done. When she’d reached the age of consent, he ’d still been too cautious, too aware of their relative positions in life and how easy it would be for her and her family to annihilate him if something went wrong, and too conscious of what he owed Miss Martha to fool around with the daughter she adored. But all the way up until Lisa had graduated from college and quit coming home in the summers, he’d had it in his mind that one day he was going to say to hell with all the reasons why he shouldn’t and give her what they both wanted. By then, having graduated at the top of his class at the University of Kentucky law school, he was a fast-rising star in the prosecutor’s office and dating her was no longer out of his reach. All those old prejudices about the rich society girl and the dirt-poor local drunk’s son no longer applied.
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