Diana couldn’t contain a little smile. “That’s one of the more polite things I’ve called her.” She bit her lip and then, suddenly feeling utterly awkward and exposed, rose from the settee. “Thank you,” she said. “For everything tonight.”
Ethan stood, still watching her. She could fairly feel the curiosity and unspoken questions rolling off him, and appreciated it when he only said, “I guess I’ll be heading home now.”
She started out of the den, intent on walking him to the door and sending him on his way. But her palms felt damp and something alive seemed to be squiggling around in her stomach, not at all unpleasantly. In fact, it was warm and expectant, and it made her feel flushed and on-edge.
The cool air of summer night wafted in the front door, bringing the scent of lake and tiger lilies. She paused, waiting for him to walk past her and out so she could shut and lock it. But instead of walking through, he stopped next to her.
Diana’s heart began to thump harder as she looked up at him, and it was all she could do to keep from backing away. His eyes were dark, glittering with some intense emotion. “Have a good night,” she said nervously. “Thank you again.”
“Don’t you think we ought to make this mutually beneficial?” he asked, his voice low and tinged with irony. His gaze seemed to pin her there, against the wall in the narrow hallway.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean, if you’re going to use me as a deterrent to your boyfriend, or a pawn in your game of revenge, I think it’s only right,” he said, reaching for her, “that I actually earn the reputation.” He closed his hands around her elbows, tugging her so close that her skirt flowed around his legs. “Don’t you, Diana?”
She couldn’t move, even when she saw that his attention had fixed on her mouth—the mouth that she knew was parted slightly, moist from the tip of her nervous tongue...and waiting in anticipation for his to close over it. “I...I ….” she breathed, unable to find the words to silence him. Her heart was ramming hard and loud in her chest, and a flush of heat surged up through her body.
“That’s what I thought,” he murmured, his face moving closer, filling her vision.
His lips were soft and sensual, coaxing her to relax against him. They caressed her mouth lightly at first, teasing her, playing with the taste and texture of her lips.
Diana settled her hands against him, against his solid chest, feeling the warmth and firm shift of muscle beneath. That lively squiggling in her belly turned to heat and pleasure, rolling through her, spiraling down to her core. Embraced by firm, powerful arms, she turned her face up to receive his mouth fully, their lips and tongues tangling in a sleek, passionate dance. His hair felt soft and thick around her fingers, his shoulders spanned wide and muscular beneath her palm.
When he moved from her mouth, trailing his lips to the curve of her jaw, to whisper her name near her ear, Diana realized she was sagging weakly, her body plastered to him, the wall pressing into her spine. Shocked at the way she’d lost track of herself, she pushed against him, stepping out of the circle of his embrace.
Ethan looked down at her with hot eyes, his chest rising and falling, his lips full and damp from her. She pressed a hand to her own swollen mouth and tried to pull her emotions and thoughts back to where she was.
“Well, then,” he murmured in a low, rough voice. “That was a good start.” He started to reach for her again, but she slipped away.
“Do you feel better now?” she asked with a little bite in her voice.
“Not precisely,” he replied, still looking at her with dark intensity, and she felt her stomach flip over at the desire in his gaze. It couldn’t be meant for you, she heard a nasty little voice say. “But if that’s what’s going to happen when you use me to get back at your boyfriend, I’m not going to complain.”
“I didn’t—I wasn’t ….” Her voice trailed off. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry for that,” he said. His eyes slid over her, as sure and heavy as if he touched her with his hands. “I’m not.”
“Ethan,” she said, struggling to keep her composure. “I didn’t mean—I mean, this doesn’t mean anything. Jonathan is still—” She crossed her arms over her middle as a shield against him. “Everything was innocent until...you ….” Her voice trailed off. Her lips were still throbbing, and there were other areas of her body that were pulsing as well. “I think you’d better go.”
He gave her one last steady look, then a curt nod. “All right. Good night, Diana.”
SEVEN
Diana glanced at the shiny black phone as she stirred the pasta she was making for dinner. It had been silent all day—the first time, she realized, since she’d come to Damariscotta just over a week ago.
No, she hadn’t expected Ethan to call. He wouldn’t. He’d just come over, and walk right into the house.
Not that he had any reason to do so. She reached up to touch her lips more than once, remembering that long, hot kiss. No, he didn’t have any reason to come here. Not while she was still tied up with Jonathan. And even if she wasn’t.
It was a kiss. One, simple, hot, crazy kiss.
Jonathan hadn’t called since Ethan answered the phone late last night...and she wasn’t certain how she felt about that. She wasn’t certain how she felt about anything regarding Jonathan anymore. Hard to believe that a month ago, she was deliriously happy that she’d found a man to marry her—something her mother had despaired of ever happening, something that Diana herself had wondered about. Which was why she’d thrown herself so firmly into building her practice.
But now, she realized, she was rather enjoying her life without Jonathan in it. She hadn’t missed him at all.
After working on the Desai case in the morning, Diana tackled more of the den in the afternoon as a way to distract herself from...things. She found a stack of Aunt Belinda’s private journals during her bout of cleaning—as well as some curious information.
She’d been going through the bills to find the most pressing ones and found several statements for medical services. The odd thing was that none of them were for visits to Marc Reardon—they were all with a general practice physician fifty miles away, in Portland.
Diana recognized the procedure codes as ones for office visits and some general testing—blood work, a stress test, cholesterol screening and a hearing exam. Upon closer examination, she saw that they were dated over the last six months. Then, she found two more statements for recent physician visits with Marc Reardon. It seemed as if Belinda was being treated by two different physicians, making the drive to one fifty miles away for the same tests and consults she was having with Reardon. Second opinions were normal, but generally those were with specialists, not a general practitioner like Reardon.
As she made dinner later that evening, Diana mulled over those medical statements as well as her time frame for returning to Boston. Despite what she’d told Jonathan last night, she hadn’t made a decision about when she’d return.
She’d been telling herself she was preparing the house to be sold, but in the back of her mind, something bothered her about that plan. If she sold, she’d feel a little like she was betraying Aunt Belinda. But what in the world would she do with an old house in the middle of Maine?
A house on the lake and you wonder what to do with it? Her own thoughts surprised Diana and she stopped dead in the kitchen, holding her plate of pasta in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. She would never have thought it of herself, but the time away from the crazy stresses of her professional and social life back home was a welcome change. Despite the odd things that had been happening, she was actually enjoying the opportunity to relax and be carefree.
The thought struck her suddenly: The Fool.
Hadn’t that been the first card she’d seen from the Tarot deck? And hadn’t her first thought been that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt as carefree as the Fool seemed?
A shiver ran across the back of her shoulders and t
he hair on the nape of her neck prickled. She placed her dinner on the table and contemplated the absurd, ludicrous, impossible thought that the card—which had fallen randomly from the deck—had a pointed meaning in her life.
The second, and most insistent “random” card had been The High Priestess.
“Look beyond the obvious,” Ethan had said it meant. “Open your mind ….” And that card, Diana reminded herself as the queer feeling rumbling in her stomach became more insistent, had turned up five times.
Five times. For that to be mere coincidence stretched even the boundaries of Diana’s pragmatic mind.
Don’t sell the house,she thought suddenly. It would make a nice retreat. It’s not that far from Boston—only a few hours, and it would be nice to have a place to take the kids—
Whoa! She tried to stop the thought, but it roared in from nowhere and would not be ignored.
She slid into her chair at the table and looked unseeingly at her plate of food. Two children, she thought—maybe three...and suddenly, a picture, as clear and tangible as a photograph, flashed into her mind: two small dark-haired boys and toddling little girl chasing a big, dark dog, and Diana herself laughing at them, joining the chase over an expanse of green grass….
She shook her head with violence, dismantling the vision and refocusing on her dinner...but the pain had already started to throb behind her eyes.
“No,” she moaned, concentrating, concentrating so hard on wrapping fettuccine around her fork. But it was too late. Though she forced herself to eat some of her dinner, the migraine had settled in her head with a vengeance.
* * *
When Diana opened her eyes after the storm of pain, she found herself lying on the settee. Blinking, squeezing her eyes shut, then opening them again, she struggled to sit up.
It was dark outside and she could hear the chirping crickets and the faint cry of a loon. The house was in darkness, and there wasn’t enough moon to shine through the windows.
Nervousness clutched her middle as she swung her feet off the couch and fumbled for the switch of the lamp on the piecrust table. It took a moment, but she found the chain and yanked, and a soft glow broke the darkness.
“Motto?” she called, suddenly wanting to know that she wasn’t completely alone. “Arty? Here kitty!” This time, her falsetto wavered and cracked.
Silence hung over the house like a pall, and Diana stood, wondering why her mouth was so dry. She’d taken two steps toward the kitchen when the phone rang.
Her heart jumped into her throat at the sudden noise, and she hurried to answer the ugly black phone, just to hear another human’s voice. “Hello?” She picked it up, interrupting the second shrill ring.
Silence.
“Hello?” she said again, hating that her voice sounded desperate.
More silence.
“Is anyone there?” she tried again.
Suddenly, the dial tone blared rudely into her ear.
Her fingers were shaking when she let the receiver drop onto its cradle, and Diana had to swallow back a moan of fear. She ran to the front door and checked the lock, which was bolted firmly. All the windows were locked, upstairs and down, and the back door as well.
Diana turned on lights as she went, wanting the house to be a bright talisman against the night and against the ugliness of the voice out there. The remains of her uneaten dinner sat innocently in the kitchen, but all vestiges of hunger had disappeared.
Looking at the phone, she debated calling Joe Cap to report the incident, but decided it could wait until morning when she took the cats to the vet. It’s just a prank call. Some kids fooling around.
But someone broke into your house.
But they can’t get in. I’m locked up tightly. And I have Uncle Tracer’s gun.
Speaking of which...she went back to the den to get the rifle and turn off the lights. The sight of the settee reminded her of her earlier migraine. It had been the strongest one she could ever remember having, and it had obviously put her out of commission for hours.
A shiver jolted through her and queasiness started in her stomach. The image that flashed through her mind just before the onset of the headache—the vision of herself chasing three children and a big dog—flashed back. A big dog? She didn’t even like dogs. And she was afraid of the big ones.
She reached to pull the chain and turn off the light, but her attention was caught by the mahogany box and the small collection of books she’d placed next to it: Aunt Belinda’s journals.
Almost before she realized it, Diana had picked up one of the books and began to leaf through the pages from twenty years earlier. From when she’d been much younger, and so had Aunt Bee.
And she began to read.
Much later, Diana set the battered, leather-bound book down, her heart lodged painfully in her throat. She felt light-headed and queasy. The hair on her nape prickled, and blood hummed in her head. It can’t be, she thought frantically. This is too weird!
For once, Motto seemed to have found her presence acceptable, and he was curled up into a corner of the settee. Diana reached blindly for the cat, picking up ten pounds of dead weight and burying her chin in the fur. She stared across the room, seeing but not really seeing the stacks of papers and books, ignoring Motto’s low, throat-growls.
When the snobbish feline decided her presence was no longer necessary, she struggled out of Diana’s arms. The warmth that had been the bundle of cat left Diana, and she felt chilly, and lonely. She picked up the journal again, forcing herself to read the entry that had stopped her world.
“July 23, 1989. Diana has the Gift! Praise God, it is true without a shadow of a doubt! Little James Bettinger and his mama Rose were over, and the two children were playing with blowing soap bubbles.
Diana scampered up to me, cute as could be, and said, “Aunt Belinda, I know when Uncle Tracer is going to die. I saw it in a bubble.” I looked at her, surprised, and asked, “What did you see?” “I saw his gravestone and it said January 16, 1992.”
Before I could say another word, she ran off to blow more bubbles! My heart did not stop pounding for hours after—to have such a Gift! It seemed effortless for her. And my poor Tracer...I cannot hope but that she is wrong, but for her to see it with such clarity....
Well, I cannot write of my grief for his loss before it should happen, but I thank God that I have had this moment of foresight. At least I will have the chance to make our next two and half years together as wonderful as they may be...and should Diana be wrong, well, then I’ll be a relieved and happy woman on January 17, 1992. I shall write more on this later.”
Diana closed the journal, keeping her forefinger as a bookmark. Tears welled in her eyes. Thanks to Victoria, she’d learned long after the fact that Uncle Tracer had succumbed to cancer’s death grip on that date in 1992. But more importantly, she didn’t remember telling her aunt what she had seen in a bubble years earlier, at the age of ten.
“I couldn’t have known that,” she said aloud to Arty, who was just poking his salmon-colored nose around the corner of the desk. “Could she have been mistaken? Could she have misunderstood me?” The cat shot across the room, pouncing on Motto, ignoring Diana’s question.
She opened the journal again. Perhaps if she read further, she’d find an explanation for this unsettling entry.
The next few days’ entries were mundane, mentioning the things Diana had done with Aunt Belinda during that first summer’s visit—fishing, weeding the garden, swimming—as well as a few readings she had done using her Tarot cards. These last items were interesting enough—especially one entry which read:
“July 30, 1989. I had an odd vision today when I was doing a quick spread of cards. I saw a large explosion in my mind, near a big body of water. I had posed the question ‘What will happen today?’ as an experiment, and kept my mind blank.
After I laid out the cards, and I spent a moment concentrating, the explosion happened as if I were watching it on TV. It was a large build
ing, perhaps a factory or a warehouse, and it was on a shoreline. There were other buildings next to it. I don’t know what it meant, or where it was, or even if it really happened.
And then, the entry for the following day:
“July 31, 1989. I was reading the New York Times today and saw mention of a large warehouse having burned down yesterday. I immediately thought of my vision—could that have been what I saw during that spread? It was near the docks, so the article said. I’ll never know for certain, I suppose, but it may be true.
There was little mention of Diana herself in the ensuing entries—little but passing references to what they had done on a given day—and certainly no further comment about her “Gift”.
As Diana read on, she found that Aunt Belinda learned that when she did a Tarot spread to answer the question “What will happen today?” she would often see a vision or get the impression of something that had actually happened. Aunt Belinda learned to scour the newspaper, looking for reference to her vision—and when she didn’t find an answer in the New York Times or the Boston Globe, she began to increase her subscriptions to periodicals from all over the country. There seemed to be no particular geographic location or type of event that figured in the spread of cards.
That explains the piles of newspapers, and the circled articles, Diana thought, glancing at the papers stacked against the far wall of the den.
She read on, covering several years, where Aunt Belinda’s journal entries had become sparse.
At last, she came to another entry, this written in the angry scrawl of an unhappy person.
“August 14, 1991. Victoria is being ridiculous! After three years, I finally told her about Diana’s Gift and she told me that it was absurd and made me promise not to speak of it to her daughter again! She refused to listen to anything I had to say—she refused to even allow me to tell her about Diana’s prediction of Tracer’s death and about the car accident in Dublin.
‘I want your promise that you won’t show her those cards of yours anymore,’ she said, ‘and don’t even speak of fortune telling in her presence! I don’t want her to grow up like some kind of gypsy who thinks she can make a living reading crystal balls!’ Fortune-telling! I have never been so insulted—and so hurt!—in all my life! Is that what Geoffrey’s wife thinks of me? That I spend my time reading crystal balls in a dingy tent at county fairs? Or that I do séances in my office? I wish there was a way for her to understand that I did not ask for this Gift, nor did I even want it at first...but now I’ve come to respect it and have learned that I should thank the Lord for it.
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