The child handed her a slightly rumpled sheet of drawing paper. Maya could easily discern a baby’s crib, a bassinet swaddled in lace, and a corner full of colorful toys. “How wonderful!” she cried in all honesty. For a child of Constance’s age, it was a marvelously accurate piece of workmanship. “Is this what this room used to look like?”
Constance nodded.
The baby inside Maya’s womb kicked in approval. Wistfully, she wondered what it would be like to have a sanctuary like this for her child. She’d hang a mobile of fairy-tale creatures over the crib, paint stars on the ceiling, stack wonderful books on the shelves...
Someday. She would do it someday. Smiling, she held the picture up against the cream-colored wall. “I think it would look good hanging right here, don’t you?”
Constance’s thin dark face beamed with relief. “I got tape.” She ran to fetch it.
Matty crept over to hug her knee. “We gonna stay here?” he asked in awe.
She didn’t believe in children sleeping with adults, but she didn’t see an alternative for tonight. The bed was certainly big enough for two. She ran her fingers through his hair and smiled as bravely as she could. “Looks that way, buster. Do you think that bed’s big enough for you?”
He eyed it with some trepidation but nodded slowly. “Can Muldoon sleep with us?” he asked plaintively. The cat had been sleeping in his room ever since she’d brought it with her from California.
How would she explain it to him if Muldoon never came back? How could she explain it to him if the social workers took him away?
She just couldn’t deal with the disaster yet. “Muldoon’s probably guarding your old room to make certain your toys don’t get lonely. You’re stuck with me tonight.” She hugged his small body close, making mental promises to fix everything in the morning.
She wasn’t a fixer by nature. That had been Cleo’s role. The ever-present burden of doing everything herself swamped her, and loneliness slipped through all the cracks in her defenses.
She just needed to be strong. She had Cleo’s child and the one about to be born to fill the emptiness. A life filled with children would be plenty more than enough.
She didn’t need useless men making demands, giving orders, and disrupting her goals. She’d take loneliness over that emotional rollercoaster again. Children had to be easier.
Why then, did tears fill her eyes as she gazed around the antiseptic guest room and wondered how her life had come to this?
Seven
I don’t suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
Maya stared at the enormous stainless steel double doors of what had to be Axell’s refrigerator. It looked as if it belonged in his restaurant. Where were the colorful magnets, the childish drawings, the memos of doctor appointments and whatnot that should clutter this magnificent expanse of empty steel? Her fingers itched to fill the space with color and life almost as much as if the doors were a piece of drawing paper.
All she’d wanted was a glass of milk to stave off the predawn lonelies. Painting a refrigerator wasn’t on the agenda. Biting her thumbnail, she eased open the wider of the two doors. A brilliant white light illuminated the gloomy kitchen. She hadn’t bothered turning on the overhead fixture because in her experience, with unexpected light creepy crawly things scattered across the floors. She preferred they scurry out of sight before she had to look at them. The refrigerator bulb, however, was almost blinding.
Probably because nothing blocked its glow.
Maya stared in fascination at the shelves of shiny-empty-aluminum. A half gallon of milk, some eggs, and butter hid in the distant corners of the vast interior. It almost reminded her of home. Almost. In Cleo’s ancient appliance, just the milk would have filled a shelf, if they’d had any.
“Miss Alyssum, are you fixing breakfast?”
The soft voice nearly startled her into jumping into the refrigerator. She’d probably fit, belly and all, Maya decided with amusement as she peered around the door to see Constance in her flowing nightshirt. The child had crept up quieter than any mouse.
“Well, it’s a mite early, and our options look limited. Would you like something?”
“Daddy’s other ladies usually fix French toast.” She watched Maya cautiously.
Daddy’s other ladies. Right. Rolling her eyes and biting her tongue on that one, Maya eyed the refrigerator contents skeptically. “Well, if you know where to find bread and syrup, we could do that. Or maybe even bread and cinnamon. Or jelly?”
“You and Matty slept on my side,” Constance replied irrelevantly.
Maya had enough psychology courses to know when a child had something on her mind. She just didn’t want to contemplate this particular topic at this hour of the morning in the house of a man she scarcely knew. By “side,” she assumed Constance meant her wing of the house. She’d already figured out Axell had a wing all to himself, since she hadn’t heard him come home.
“Well, I guess that makes us your guests,” she replied brightly, closing the refrigerator and opening a cabinet. Dumb move. Now she had no light.
“Sometimes Daddy’s ladies don’t stay for breakfast.”
All right, so the kid had a one-track mind. Deal with it. She’d long ago discovered how difficult it was to shimmer away from an unwanted topic around kids.
“Constance, what are you — ” The kitchen exploded with light.
Maya blinked. The sleepy man standing in the doorway did the same, then rubbed his eyes in the glare of the overhead fixture. Fixtures. The kitchen had track lighting all over the blamed room.
Axell Holm stood there in only his pajama bottoms. A soft brown fuzz nicely delineated his rounded pectorals and descended into washboard abs before dropping beneath the elastic falling over lean hips. Maya thought her eyes might pop out. Surely pregnancy prevented hormonal outbursts. Lean, hungry, artistic types did not have chests like that. She didn’t think yuppie businessmen should either.
She closed her eyes and pretended she’d imagined the whole thing. “Don’t you have anything dimmer?” she pleaded.
Hitting the dimmer switch, Axell lowered the confounded lighting while trying to assimilate the image of his elfin daughter standing beside a hugely pregnant fairy godmother in chaotic auburn curls and... He peeked from behind his hand. The shimmering turquoise nightgown nearly blinded him as much as the kitchen lights. He couldn’t remember his wife ever wearing that color, but Constance must have shown Maya the closet where he’d stored Angela’s things.
Maybe he was dreaming. “What are we doing out here in the middle of the night?” he asked cautiously. Actually, he’d come home in the middle of the night. It must be closer to morning. He blinked again at the vision in turquoise. Why did she remind him of a particularly striking bouquet of fresh flowers as she stood there against his steel and porcelain kitchen?
“I’m after warm milk. I believe Constance is checking on my sleeping habits.”
Axell heard her humor and didn’t want to interpret that remark. He regarded his daughter’s innocent expression with suspicion. Maybe his fault lay in believing an eight-year-old hadn’t yet developed the twisted mind of all females. “Constance, go back to bed. It’s Saturday. You don’t have to go to school.”
He recognized the rebellious pout of his daughter’s lower lip. Warily, Axell glanced at the teacher to see if she’d help. She beamed sunnily as she poured milk into a cup. Following the pattern of her recent behavior, it dawned on him that the gypsy woman didn’t believe in confrontation. She had a habit of slipping and sliding out of the most damning tempests with just a smile as her umbrella.
“Did you want warm milk too?” he asked his daughter. Two could play at the game of No Confrontation.
“French toast,” Constance replied stubbornly.
Red warning flags waved all over that one. Axell glanced at the gypsy putting the milk into the microwave. Her smile had grown suspiciously wider. Damn, but her mouth looked rosy and ripe even at this gawdaw
ful hour of the morning.
She was eight months pregnant, dammit! Easily eight months. Nervously contemplating babies popping out on the polished tiles of the kitchen floor, Axell rubbed his unshaven jaw and tried to gather his thoughts. He was standing here half-naked, for chrissake. He wasn’t used to having guests.
“When the sun comes up,” he agreed. “Now go back to bed and let Miss Alyssum drink her milk in peace.”
“I want milk.” Constance sat her skinny rear end in a kitchen chair.
Why in the name of heaven had he wanted the child to talk? It was a thousand times more peaceful when she kept her mouth shut. Axell glanced helplessly at the teacher again. How could she look even more innocent than his child?
“I believe Constance is worried about where I’m sleeping,” she replied with muffled laughter, removing the cup from the microwave and pouring a portion into a smaller cup for his daughter. “Go back to bed. I’ll see her back to her room.”
Where she was sleeping? Axell sleepily pondered that one until heat flushed up his jaw. He hadn’t realized Constance was aware of the women he occasionally entertained in his wing of the house. He tried to hustle most of them home before his daughter woke, but some had indulged their fantasies of homemaking and insisted on staying. He should have thrown them all out. With a sigh, he nodded in acknowledgment of her warning.
“All right. I’ll see you in the morning. Constance, behave yourself and do as Miss Alyssum tells you.” To hell with women. Staggering back down the hall, Axell left them to themselves. The one blamed day he could get a little sleep...
Chiming laughter exploded in the room he’d left behind. Confounded, know-it-all woman.
***
Maya wasn’t laughing hours later as she cuddled a meowing Muldoon in her arms while a policeman blocked her path. Through tear-filled eyes, she glared at the blue uniform and yellow police tape cutting off her access to Matty and Cleo’s home. She was used to losing homes. It really shouldn’t hurt so much. But she’d sort of hoped maybe she could have this one for the baby and Matty — at least until Cleo returned. She bit her lip and tilted her chin up to fight sobbing over this latest twist of Fate.
“It’s for your own safety, miss,” the officer insisted. “The place has to be torn down. Fire marshal’s orders. It’s a death trap. Those walls could fall any minute.”
“But there are works of art in there!” she protested, praying she didn’t sound whiny. “Hand made, irreplaceable... The artisans deserve compensation for their work. If I don’t salvage them...”
The policeman implacably shook his head. “No can do.”
Maya thought of all Matty’s clothes and toys, Cleo’s motley assortment of furniture, all the accouterments they’d gathered in years of careful scrounging, and the tears streamed down her cheeks. They’d been displaced so many times... The teapot! And her china cups! A wrecking ball would demolish their whole lives.
Shaking her head in denial, she hugged Muldoon and sought desperately for some argument to sway the officer. Why did authority always get in the way in the guise of helping? She and Cleo had spent their entire lives being shipped from one house to another with little more than a cardboard box of possessions between them. The teapot and cups were all they still owned from the home they barely remembered. She couldn’t lose them.
Wiping her eyes with her shirtsleeve, she thought frantically of ways around the catastrophe. She could creep in there in the dead of night... Creep? With her two ton belly? Fat chance. And she couldn’t just haul out the china when Matty needed his rabbit and his pajamas, and the artists who’d built the kaleidoscopes and wind chimes needed the income from their work and...
The CD player, with her recordings. Cleo’s photographs. Their whole damned lives were in that building. She bit her lip on another hiccupping sob.
“Trouble, Miss Alyssum?”
Walking from the corner where he’d been talking with a man Maya recognized as the mayor, Axell Holm stopped beside her with that puzzled expression men assumed when confronted with female emotion. Maya glared back at him.
“Of course not, Mr. Holm,” she said with sarcastic emphasis on the formal name. “Everything my family owns is going to be demolished with that wretched building. That’s no trouble at all. It just makes it easier to pick up and move.”
A frown knitted the bridge of his nose as he looked at the collapsed facade of the building. “That could be the mayor’s intention,” he replied thoughtfully.
Startled, Maya jerked her head around to look at him. “What?”
He caught her elbow and steered her away from the ears of the interested policeman. “The mayor wants your school closed, remember? If you have nowhere to live and no reason to stay, you’ll close the school without his having to make what could conceivably be an unpopular political decision.”
“You were just talking to the man,” she exclaimed. “Did he tell you this?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. If Ralph was gloating, he kept it to himself. We were just passing pleasantries about having all these old buildings inspected before someone gets hurt. We seldom agree on anything, but we agreed on that much.”
“Well, I should think so.” Maya shook off his hand and stalked down the alley next to the building, clinging to her cat. “Maybe they should tear down the whole damned town. But right now, I want inside that building. Those are my things. He doesn’t have any right to take them away.”
“He has every right, if there’s a danger to human life. That doesn’t mean he’s right, and that there is a danger.”
She stopped and swirled to look at him. “What does that mean?”
Clean-shaven and garbed in his version of casual wear— blue linen short-sleeved shirt and crisply creased khakis—Axell raised his hand over his eyes and inspected the roof of the building, then studied the remaining brick walls. “I think we can find an inspector who will say the remainder of the building is safe enough to enter to remove the contents. The brick facade may be weak, but the underlying structure should be sound.”
Maya thought she would kiss him. If her belly weren’t in the way, she’d throw her arms around this enigmatic Norse god and plant a smacker square in the middle of his chiseled jaw. That ought to shake him straight down to his steadfast toes. Instead, she beamed and patted Axell’s tanned arm. The warmth of his skin startled her, and she hastily withdrew the gesture. The expression in his eyes was shuttered as he warily lowered his hand and glanced down at her. Even bigger than she’d ever been in her life, she felt dainty and fragile in his solid presence.
“Where do we find an inspector?” she asked.
The “we” she had so ingenuously uttered knelled as loud as church bells between them. All the multifarious implications of “we” winged through Maya’s mind in the face of his silence. She didn’t think Axell’s astute businessman’s mind had missed them either.
“It’s Saturday,” he slowly responded, tearing his gaze from her to study the building. “I won’t be able to locate an inspector until Monday, at best. And then there’s the question of where you’ll transport the items once you’re free to move them.”
Maya could feel the shark’s teeth closing over her silly little Pisces head. She should have known better than to play in dangerous currents instead of placid little ponds. Biting her bottom lip, she let the tide sweep her straight into the deep blue sea.
“Any suggestions?” she asked gaily, as if that “we” hadn’t already tolled her doom.
Axell’s eyes narrowed as he caught her elbow again and steered her around a pile of crumbling brick. “Let’s go to the bar and talk about it.”
Every time someone in authority wanted to “talk” about something, it meant being uprooted again. Abandoning all hope, Maya floated downstream, hopelessly hooked on Axell’s bait.
Fish weren’t supposed to have nests anyway.
***
December, 1945
I don’t remember who seduced whom, but I remember th
e night you carried me back to my bed and stayed until daybreak. Don’t you ever tell me that was just a young man getting his jollies off. It was more than that, for both of us. We made the birds sing at midnight and the doves cry at dawn. No one ever made me feel like that before. No one ever can again. Does she wrap her legs around you until you roar with hunger? If she’s got breasts beneath all that binding, I bet you haven’t touched them yet.
Eight
If it’s dangerous to talk to yourself, it’s probably even dicier to listen.
Axell knew better than to get involved. He especially knew better than to get involved with a female with “trouble” written all over her. Some people lived from one disaster to another, and Maya Alyssum struck him as that kind of person. Her vulnerability would eventually expose his deficiencies, and nothing good could come of either.
But he had an inherent need to help the town of his birth, and to give back to the community some of the wealth it had so generously provided him. Angela had claimed he just liked controlling people, but that wasn’t so. Of course, in this case, helping — or controlling — Maya would ultimately solve his worst fear: losing Constance.
He sat Maya down in a booth at the back of the restaurant and signaled his bartender to bring them sweet tea. Matty and Constance were occupying themselves in the employee break room, well looked after by his doting staff. He could safely concentrate on bending this tear-stained waif of a woman to his will. He’d already noted she bent remarkably easily. He had experience and determination on his side. Surely he could keep a safe enough distance between them that emotions wouldn’t play a factor in their relationship, even if Maya was prone to all the usual female complexities.
“If I hire an inspector,” Axell paused to let the implication of her obligation sink in, “and he allows you to move your things, where will you move them?”
She twisted a red paper napkin between her fingers and didn’t look up. “We haven’t remodeled the upper story of the school yet. I thought Matty and I could move our things there. But we really need to keep Cleo’s shop open. She has to have somewhere to go when...” She hesitated, apparently not wanting to say the word “prison” out loud. “If only the mayor understood the awfulness Cleo went through to get this far, maybe he’d listen?”
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