by Ruthie Knox
A picture of her—naked in a huge bathtub, up to her neck in bubbles—popped into his head. The tempting vision lingered, teasing his imagination with an endless array of erotic possibilities, until he finally, reluctantly, blinked it away.
Finding he was still unable to place the particular scent she was wearing, he concluded he must not have come in contact with it before. He definitely would have remembered it.
Because he had little choice while she tended his wound, he stared straight ahead, his attention immediately drawn to the hollow spot at the base of her throat. He was tempted to reach out and touch the shallow indentation, just to see if her skin was as smooth as it looked. He resisted, and his gaze followed a path of pale freckles downward to where the scoop neck of her T-shirt curved from one collarbone to the other.
“This should only take another minute,” she said as she applied disinfectant with a piece of cotton.
Don’t hurry on my account, he wanted to say, but wisely kept his mouth shut. He suspected she’d take offense at his smart remark, accuse him of behaving no better than the horny boys in her classes. And she’d be right.
Still, he couldn’t seem to stop his thoughts from wandering into dangerous territory, not as long as she was standing where she was. And certainly not as long as her hip brushed against him each time she twisted to the side to reach for another cotton ball.
He wondered if the kids in her classes had any idea how lucky they were to have her for a teacher. If he’d had Miss de Bieren standing in front of his class when he was in high school twenty years ago, he would have given his best shot at becoming the teacher’s pet. And probably would have spent a good deal less time in detention.
“Okay, now for a dressing,” she said cheerfully, obviously oblivious to his errant musings.
With one hand holding his hair off his forehead, she leaned closer to him and reached for a bandage, stretching toward the open box on the counter. Before he realized what was happening, she swayed too far to the side and lost her balance.
Instinctively, his hands shot up to her hips to try to prevent her fall. He wasn’t quite fast enough.
She fell against him, her right breast skimming across his mouth in deliciously slow motion.
A white-hot blade of desire pierced him, its intensity startling him. Reflexively, his fingers dug into the firm flesh of her fanny, and he sucked in a deep breath, unintentionally drawing in the material of her soft cotton T-shirt as well.
When the oxygen finally reached his brain, he was able to take note of several fascinating facts. One: This day was turning out a whole heck of a lot better than it started; two: The schoolteacher might be a tiny little thing everywhere else, but the part of her nudging his lips wasn’t small at all; and three: Her nipple had instantly beaded into a tight knot beneath her shirt, which made him wonder if she was enjoying this little mishap as much as he was.
A definite possibility, he decided, allowing several more pleasure-filled seconds to pass before he convinced himself to set her away from him and back on both feet.
It seemed like a long time before she finally tipped her head down. He looked up at the same moment and found himself staring into a pair of eyes as blue as the uniform shirt he’d worn every day of his life for the first five years he’d been on the force.
Slowly, he lowered his gaze to her lips. They were glossy as glass and pink tinged, like the pink spreading up her neck and over her cheeks. It occurred to him that if he leaned forward and let himself sit an inch taller, his mouth would be even with hers. He’d be able to kiss her.
A voice inside his head warned him he had no business even considering such an action. But he’d spent too much time pondering the scent of her perfume, worked up too great a curiosity about the smoothness of her skin, fantasized too real a picture of her wonderfully naked in a tub full of bubbles. All he wanted was a taste, just one little taste. What could it hurt?
“Sorry,” she said. She added a half smile and a nervous giggle to her apology as she took one step back, effectively nixing his experiment. Her hand quivered as she ripped open the bandage she’d managed to snag.
“No problem,” he automatically replied, letting his hands fall to his lap as her warm fingers positioned the bandage over his wound and pressed gently against his skin.
No problem? he repeated silently. Then why are you having to use both hands to hide the physical evidence to the contrary? He was as shocked by his unexpected reaction as Miss de Bieren would be—if she discovered it.
And why the hell was he getting so turned on by a pint-size blonde with hardly enough hair to grab hold of? His taste in women usually ran toward long-legged brunettes with lush shoulder-length manes he could sink his hands into.
A one-word explanation came to mind immediately: Overtime. The string of eighteen-hour days he’d been putting in for three straight weeks might be great for his bank account, but it was murder on his social life.
Murder.
Suddenly he remembered what had brought him to Benito Juarez Middle School that morning.
“All done,” she said, her tone overly bright as she stepped out from between his legs. She scooped up the handful of soiled cotton balls and tossed them in the wastebasket, then picked up the steel bowl and carried it to the sink. “You’ll probably want to take an aspirin or two for pain,” she added, her gaze riveted to her hands as she washed and dried them. “I can get you some if you’d like. And I’m really sorry about the accident. As you might have noticed, we’ve had plenty of rocks thrown through the windows here. But no one’s ever been standing in the line of fire before.”
“I guess it was just my lucky day,” he said quietly. His left hand strayed up to test the damage done to his head, but his eyes watched every move Miss Rebekah de Bieren made.
She was doing it again, he observed, putting on the same nonchalant facade she’d worn in her classroom. Only this time she wasn’t pretending to be unaffected by a broken window or the blood streaming down his face. This time, she was trying to convince him she hadn’t noticed the sparks that had flashed back and forth between them like lightning in an electrical storm.
Or maybe, he amended, recalling the telltale trembling of her hands a minute earlier, maybe she was trying to convince herself.
Read on for an excerpt from Jean Stone’s Ivy Secrets
Chapter I
Charlie Hobart packed the suitcase, unsure whether she should feel happy or sad. Peter’s overbearing mother was dead—reason, certainly, to celebrate—but Jenny would be leaving tomorrow to visit Tess. The absence of her fourteen-year-old daughter always unsettled Charlie and evoked more than a little guilt.
She sighed and tucked a pouch of maxipads into the inside pocket. Though Jenny was mature for her age, Charlie still worried when she went off to visit Tess: Tess, after all, had no children, not even a husband. And though Charlie knew, from their years together at college, that Tess was able to take care of herself, she wondered if her long-ago friend was capable of looking after another human being. The summers Jenny spent with Tess still had not quelled Charlie’s fears, for, at thirty-seven years of age, Tess had seemingly forever dodged responsibility, sequestered in her glassblowing studio, doing God only knew what. Yet Jenny loved her “aunt” Tess, loved spending summers with her in Massachusetts. And Jenny’s absence enabled Charlie and Peter to come and go as they pleased—to the Hamptons, to Newport, to the Berkshires. So far, they had all survived the arrangement.
“Don’t you think Jenny’s old enough to do that?”
Charlie closed the lid on the suitcase. She didn’t turn toward her husband’s voice in the doorway. “I’m making sure she has everything she needs.”
“Tom Williamson is in the library. He’s here to go over Mother’s will.”
Charlie crossed her arms and looked out the window of her daughter’s bedroom, across the rolling, lush grounds of the Hudson Valley estate. Jenny, Charlie knew, would not miss Peter’s mother either. The woman ha
d a subtle, yet distinct way of informing Jenny that she didn’t measure up to Hobart quality. Charlie knew the feeling.
“I’ll be down in a minute,” she said.
She heard Peter’s footsteps retreat and wondered what was going through his mind. Terror, probably, mixed with mounds of insecurity. Many offspring of a matriarch such as Elizabeth Hobart might feel tremendous relief at her death. They might languish in the release of such a heavy, dark burden. They might, at last, find peace.
She wondered if Peter would. Peter had been overly dependent on his mother. After his father’s death when Peter was six, he watched as his mother lorded over the family’s textile mills with the determination and fortitude of a man, in an era when only men were allowed to show such strength. He watched, and he labored to master his legacy. Yet along the way, Peter had acquiesced, becoming another of his mother’s people-possessions, to be ruled, molded, and manipulated. Charlie feared that despite Elizabeth’s death, the woman would remain in control.
In all these years, the only time Peter had wavered from his mother’s wishes was when he married Charlie—unacceptable, undeserving Charlene O’Brien, from a working-class family of eight, from Pittsburgh, of all places. But Elizabeth apparently had determined that living with Charlie’s background was preferable to living without her son, especially when Peter and Charlie arrived at the Hobart manor from college with a marriage certificate in one hand and a crying infant in the other. Elizabeth Hobart had gritted her teeth and let them in. And Charlie—and Jenny—had been paying for it ever since.
Maybe now things would change, if not for Peter, then at least for herself. And Jenny.
Charlie turned back to the suitcase and slowly closed the lid. She was, she knew, procrastinating going downstairs. Even after all these years, Charlie still wasn’t comfortable with brandy and stiff chatter and the hard Victorian settee in Elizabeth Hobart’s library. Even after all these years Charlie would have preferred jeans and sweatshirts, and curling her legs underneath herself on lumpy, overstuffed cushions. She wondered if Peter knew that, or if he had, instead, chosen to believe that Charlie enjoyed her leading role as dutiful wife, society lady, the role she had worked so hard to win, to cultivate, then play out so well.
She stooped to check her hair in the mirror of Jenny’s dressing table, to be sure that no golden-brown loose strands had escaped the big gold clip at the nape of her neck. But as she caught her reflection, Charlie ignored her newly rinsed hair and looked instead into her eyes, eyes that had once been bright blue, but now seemed to have lost their enthusiasm, their zest. Age, she suspected, had done that. Age, motherhood, and Elizabeth Hobart. A small spark of excitement tingled through her. Now that the woman was dead, maybe Charlie would begin to live. Maybe she could stop playacting at being a woman she wasn’t. Maybe she could finally become the woman she was meant to be. Whoever that was.
She glanced at the photos inside the edge of Jenny’s mirror, neatly clipped magazine photos of scary-looking rock groups with unfamiliar names, and a photo of Jenny herself—thick-dark-haired, huge-eyed Jenny—crouched beside a shaggy beige-colored dog, Tess’s dog. In the picture, Jenny was smiling. Charlie realized it had been a long time since she saw her pensive daughter smile. Perhaps it was the company of the dog that brought out that beautiful smile; perhaps it was because the photo had been taken last summer when Jenny was with Tess.
For all her oddities, Tess was probably still the warm, comfortable woman Charlie had grown so close to in college. It was hard to know: Charlie had changed, wouldn’t Tess have, too? In the last few years, they had drifted into speaking only at Christmas and again in the spring to arrange Jenny’s schedule. Charlie touched the image of her smiling daughter in the photo and wondered if she and Tess would have bothered to stay in touch at all if it hadn’t been for Jenny. Jenny, the teenaged enigma in Charlie’s life.
Charlie knew she hadn’t spent enough time with Jenny. Years ago, she had let herself become swallowed up by a busy life of charities and gallery openings and round-robins at the tennis club—anything to pretend her life was full and happy, anything to try to gain the respect and acceptance of Elizabeth Hobart. Anything to prove to herself that she could have a better life than her own mother did. Her mother who had been tied to a drafty old house by the bondage of diapers and never-ending worries, and who, even today, clipped food coupons and bought a new dress only for special occasions.
Being awarded the scholarship to Smith College and then landing a man like Peter had been Charlie’s greatest achievements, her way out. But Elizabeth had quickly tainted the dream, and instead of enjoying her success and her well-earned comforts, Charlie had found herself struggling to keep peace, struggling to live up to Elizabeth Hobart’s demands, to become the kind of woman Elizabeth wanted for a daughter-in-law: Someone more like the woman Peter’s brother John had married. Ellen was pretty and sweet and soft-spoken, and always knew how to act, what to do. The fact that she had been brought up “well-moneyed” allowed her to glide into Hobart life with seamless ease. Ellen and John’s two children were, of course, equally flawless. So Elizabeth Hobart had coddled and spoiled them. She had not coddled Charlie. And she had not spoiled Jenny.
A shiver ran through her. Charlie stood and looked back to the suitcase on the bed. No, she thought, Jenny was not like the others, any more than Charlie was, had been, or ever could be. But Jenny had been lucky enough to escape each autumn to school, and each summer to Tess. And Charlie was left behind with her guilt.
She straightened the navy straight skirt of her custom-tailored suit and prepared to go downstairs. Ellen undoubtedly had arranged for tea to be served, as Elizabeth would have expected.
The library was as silent and somber as Charlie’s mood, filled with the tense rigidity of the deceased that prevailed from beyond the grave. She stepped onto the century-old Persian carpet and swallowed a scream before it could leap from her throat. Peter rose from the sofa, his six-foot, lean frame as starched as the air in the room. He extended his hand to her, then drew her toward him and placed a polite kiss on her cheek. His brother John also stood, as did John’s twelve-year-old son, Darrin. It was all very proper, all very refined, and all very unlike the Irish wakes of Pittsburgh, where tears flowed in buckets, whiskey splashed on carpets, voices boasted old memories, and love filled the room.
Williamson was seated at the long cherry desk. He looked up from his papers and nodded at Charlie.
Ellen was poised—posed—on a Louis XIV armchair by the door. She smiled a small, pink-lipped smile. Ten-year-old Patsy, so like her mother, stood beside Ellen’s chair and flashed the identical smile.
Charlie did not have the strength to smile back. Instead, she looked toward the tall, heavily draped window where Jenny stood, her slim body stiff, her gaze fixed outside. Charlie followed her daughter’s eyes out the window to the wide, circular driveway. There was nothing there. Jenny was, Charlie suspected, daydreaming as usual, about things at which Charlie could only guess. Her horses, maybe, or boys. Had Jenny yet crossed the emotional bridge from horses to boys? Surely, at fourteen, she must have. Another unsettling wave of not knowing Jenny washed through her.
Williamson cleared his throat. Charlie sat beside Peter. Her eyes fell on the silver tea set on the cocktail table and a small plate of scones next to it that seemed untouched.
“We all know why we’re here,” Williamson began. “Despite the amount of money involved, Elizabeth’s will is relatively simple.” The attorney put on half glasses and picked up the papers in front of him.
Peter shifted beside Charlie. John coughed. Ellen held her pose, appropriately expressionless, hands folded in her lap.
“The endowment to Amherst College was finalized five years ago,” Williamson said.
Amherst College, Charlie thought. A picture of Peter’s dorm swept into her mind. It was a two-story, brick, old New England-style house, set back from the quaint town green that had turned golden with the crisp shades of autumn. T
he house had tall shuttered windows, a large wooden door, and a dark, cozy interior that whispered of history and echoed of scholars. It was there, at Amherst, alma mater for Peter, his brother John, and father Maximillian before them, that Charlie had been introduced to Peter by Tess. For an instant now, Charlie longed to feel young again—the Smith College sophomore for whom the world beyond the steel mills and soot of Pittsburgh was finally coming into focus.
Williamson interrupted her thoughts.
“To my elder son, Peter Hobart, I bequeath the manor.”
Charlie was careful to show no emotion. But inside, her heart warmed. The twenty-four-room mansion would be theirs now, theirs, to do with as they wished. Maybe she could convince Peter to sell it, to build a newer, brighter, more contemporary home … more like the one Elizabeth had given John and Ellen when they were married. Away from this mausoleum, Charlie would truly be free, the ghost of Elizabeth Hobart exorcised once and for all.
“However,” the attorney continued, “if my son chooses to change residencies, proceeds from the sale of the house will be turned over to the Hobart Foundation.”
The Hobart Foundation? Charlie blinked. A bolt of pain vise-gripped the back of her neck. The Hobart Foundation? Elizabeth had no right …
“My remaining shares of Hobart Textiles,” Williamson droned, “will be divided equally between my sons Peter and John Hobart. It is my wish that the board of directors elect Peter to fill my vacancy as chairman.”
Peter straightened in his chair. He tucked two fingers beneath his white collar and tugged the starched fabric from his throat.
A numbing sadness filled Charlie’s heart. She studied Peter’s deep brown eyes, glossy from his contact lenses, distant since Elizabeth’s death three days ago, as though when his mother breathed her last breath, Peter had put on a mask, erected a wall, and hung a Do Not Disturb sign on his emotions. Yet Charlie had known him, loved him, and been married to him for too many years not to see through his armor and notice that his eyelids were puffy from his private tears.