by Mary Campisi
“And he offered to take your picture,” Sam said blandly.
She looked shocked. “Actually, yes, he did.”
“And you let him.”
“No, not voluntarily.” She blinked hard and continued. “He invited me to his home because he said I’d make a perfect subject.” Cyn shook her dark head. “And I believed him. Instead, he drugged me and then took pictures. For blackmail.” She bit her lower lip, locked her gaze on the collar of his shirt.
“Jesus.”
“I ended up on the lawn of Tula Rae’s. Of course, we went to the police but there wasn’t much they could do without evidence.”
“Did he…did you…?” Sam struggled with the words.
“No.” She dragged her gaze to his. “There was no sign of sexual assault. Just horrible humiliation.” Her voice dipped. “And a feeling of being dirty, no matter how many showers I took.”
Sam wanted to kill the bastard.
“He seemed so normal, but he’s been blackmailing unsuspecting women for years. When he tried to blackmail me, Derry stepped in and set him up.”
“What are you talking about?” Alec told him Derry had been with Steve Miller, too.
“She used herself as a decoy. She’s the reason the police arrested Steve Miller.”
“So, she wasn’t with him?”
“No, why would you think that?”
Because Alec has pictures. “I don’t know. You have to admit, she seems like the kind that might fall in with a guy like that.”
“I fell in with him, Sam. She pulled me out.”
“How?”
“Crushed valium in scotch.” Cyn stroked his hair, his cheek, his jaw. “I just want to start over. If I learned one thing from this trip, it’s how much I love you and the girls, and how good my life is, just the way it is.” Her voice dipped. “Can you forgive me, Sam? Can we start over, please?”
“I…” He blocked out the past six weeks. The fear of losing his wife, the pain of believing she’d slept with another man, the agony of rushing to the emergency room for his two daughters, the unforgivable behavior he’d exhibited with a stranger in front of Kiki. It was all too much. He needed to forget. “Yes,” he said, planting a soft kiss on her lips. “We’ll start over, just the two of us.”
He took her hand and led her upstairs. The girls wouldn’t be home for another three hours. Thank God. Sam closed the bedroom door and pulled Cyn into his arms. The need to come together burned through him as they clung to one another, lips and tongues intertwined. His hands roamed his wife’s body, cupping her buttocks, sliding inside the slim band of underwear, desperate to touch skin, make her part of him.
“I’ve missed you so much.” He dragged his mouth along the naked skin of her neck and she moaned. He lifted her shirt and knelt on the carpet, placing soft kisses on her belly. Sam held her gaze as he unzipped her shorts and slid them down. “I want you.”
She stepped out of her shorts and kicked them aside. “Come by the bed.”
He would have crawled on the roof if she’d asked him to right now. Sam made it to the bed in three steps. Cyn knelt beside him and slowly unbuckled his belt.
“I want you,” she murmured, sliding her hands inside his jockey shorts and pulling them down. She bent over and took him into her mouth. Sam groaned and jerked against her. “Cyn…you don’t have to do this.” He groaned again, unable to stand the sweet torture of her mouth on him. “I know you don’t like this…”
She answered by taking him deeper into her mouth. “Ah, Cyn.” He closed his eyes and moved his hips, harder, faster, burying his hands in her silky hair. Everything ceased to exist but her tongue on him. He lurched against her, once, twice, and when he felt his climax pulsing, he eased her onto the bed and spread her legs. “I need to be inside you.” He plunged into her, grabbing her buttocks as he moved with deep, intense strokes.
“Sam,” she moaned, her legs wrapped tight around him, pulling him deeper inside.
He let out a desperate groan as his climax overtook him, ripping at his self-control with a force both exultant and petrifying in its sheer rawness. Cyn moaned, thrashing her head from side to side, eyes squeezed shut as she convulsed against him. Sam collapsed next to her, his lips pressed to the hollow spot of her neck.
She was home, where she belonged.
They were starting over. He closed his eyes and breathed in the lilac scent of her. He loved his wife, and she loved him.
Nothing else mattered.
Chapter 24
Derry barely had time to pull the Navigator into the driveway when the front door flew open and Charlie came running out, his little legs moving like a tiny windmill.
“Mom! Mom!” He jumped up and down beside the SUV, a huge smile plastered over his tanned face.
He looked so much like his father. Derry smiled and climbed out of the Navigator. “Hey, big guy! I missed you.”
Charlie flung himself at her, his arms clutching her waist. “I missed you more!”
“I don’t know about that.” She buried her face in his hair, inhaling the green-apple scent. No matter what happened between her and Alec, Charlie would always be part of her. “I’ve got two bags of presents for you.”
His dark head popped up. “Can I have them now?”
“As soon as we unload the car.” She looked toward the house. “Where’s Grandma?”
“Inside, fixing lunch. Black beans and brown rice.” He stuck out his tongue. “She said I have to get more fiber.”
Derry laughed. “Maybe you can have a ‘no thank you’ helping with your peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”
Charlie grinned. “I’m glad you got home before lunch.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“At work. Why?”
She shrugged, fighting the disappointment that curdled in her stomach. “No reason.”
“Sheila’s inside though.” His face lit up. “She’s really cool.”
“Sheila?”
“Yeah, Dad said she’s some kind of relative.” His freckled nose scrunched up in thought. “I think she’s one of yours, but I can’t remember what Dad said.”
“She’s inside?”
“Uh-huh.” He pulled her toward the back of the Navigator and peeked through the window. “She’s been staying in your room so you might have to sleep in Dad’s room tonight.”
Alec hadn’t said a word about inviting a stranger to stay at their home. So what if she claimed to be Derry’s sister? So what if she ended up being Derry’s sister? She was still a stranger and he shouldn’t have involved Charlie.
“Her kids are older,” Charlie said. “Two boys and a girl.” Derry pressed the trunk release and he reached his scrawny arms inside to grab at a bag. “Is this bag mine?”
“Out of there, right now.” She snatched the shopping bag from him. “Not until we get the truck unloaded, young man.”
“I was only gonna take a quick look.”
“No, or I’ll make you eat a full serving of Grandma’s black beans and rice.”
“Gross.”
“Okay then. Crawl in there and push the bags to me.”
Charlie scrambled inside the SUV and scooted three more shopping bags and Derry’s suitcase to the edge. “You know what else I like about Sheila?” His blue eyes flashed with emotion. “She doesn’t treat me like a little kid like Grandma does.”
Derry hefted the suitcase off the Navigator and set it on the ground. “Oh?”
“Nope. She doesn’t try to part my hair when I wash it like Grandma does, and I got to pick the vegetables for dinner last night. Grandma always matches colors. Sheila didn’t care if there were two yellows on the plate. Corn and yellow rice,” he said grinning.
“Two of your favorites.”
“Sheila says they’re her favorites, too.”
I’ll bet. Derry lifted the suitcase and two bags. “You grab the other two, Charlie boy.”
“Okay. Hey, is that a soccer ball in there?”
“Out, do no
t peek or you know what you’ll be eating.”
He laughed and ran ahead of her, shopping bags banging against his skinny legs. “Wait until Sheila sees what you got me! She loves soccer!”
“Charlie, wait!”
But he’d already bounded up the stairs and into the house, yelling, “Sheila, I got a new soccer ball!”
Vivien appeared at the door, tight-lipped and agitated. “Thank God you’re home.”
***
Sheila Regati sat cross-legged on the floor, her long silver-black hair curling around her hips. She wore a chartreuse mosaic skirt with two metal belts crisscrossed over slim hips and a black gauzy blouse with Stevie Nicks’ sleeves flowing six inches from her wrists. Her body jangled from the spray of silver jewelry adorning her ears, neck, wrists, and ankles. Her feet were bare, and an indigo butterfly stamped the outside of her ankle.
Her face shone clean and her skin bore the dark, leathery quality of ten years too long in the sun. There was something about the shape of her nose and the high cheekbones that might mark her as Derry’s blood but really little else.
The woman fascinated Derry, even as she feigned indifference. When Sheila spoke, her green eyes glittered with passion, and remnants of another unidentifiable emotion. Pain?
“I know this must all seem so absolutely bizarre to you,” she said in a soft, husky voice that belied years of smoke and drink. “I’m sorry if I upset your—” she swept heavily ringed hands in the air— “very organized, suburban life, but I really had no choice.” There was that emotion fluttering across her face again as she said, “I had to find you.”
“Why?”
Sheila’s laugh rolled over Derry like a long sip of Southern Comfort. “Why would I want to find my sister?” She leaned against the back of the sofa and stretched a bare foot. “I think the better question is why wouldn’t I?”
“But how did you find me? My adoptive parents refused to tell me anything about my past.”
Her gaze drifted to the mosaic pattern in her skirt. “Patience is the great survivor. If you want the answer to a question bad enough and you wait long enough, the answer will come to you.” She lifted her green eyes to Derry. “Do you know my real name is Beatrice?” She laughed and threw her arms in the air. “Beatrice, for Christ’s sake.”
“So, how’d you come up with Sheila?”
“I was dating an Australian soccer player and Sheila means girl in that country. It seemed funny at the time and it really pissed off my father. Ah, I used to love to piss him off.” She sucked in a huge breath and shook her head so a mane of silver feathered her shoulders. “But that is indeed another story. What would you say, Derry Amelia Rohan, half sister of mine, younger by eleven years, if I told you that you were the one our mother wanted to keep, not her other two children?”
That made no sense at all. “I…don’t know what I’d say.”
Sheila shrugged. “It’s a bitch, but it’s true. She had an affair with a musician, a violinist from Austria who stayed with us one summer. He was seven years younger than she, and brilliant with blue eyes just like yours. His name was Gustaf. He stayed three months and when he returned to his home, she was heartbroken, and pregnant. She took to her bed and became so depressed the doctor worried she’d lose you.” Sheila sighed and plucked tiny peaks into her skirt. “She tried to leave us. I was ten at the time, my sister six. All she wanted was to be with Gustaf. When she told my father the baby wasn’t his, he slammed her into a wall, and punched her in the stomach.” She let out a small, choked laugh. “We were Catholic, so abortion was out of the question. I guess beating the kid to death wasn’t though. Imagine that.”
“I can’t.”
“You were born January 13th, close to midnight. She almost bled to death, but the nuns of St. Cecily cared for her and twelve days later she came home.”
“And that’s when she gave me up for adoption?”
Sheila’s green eyes pierced her as though she’d committed a sacrilege. “She didn’t give you up, he did. He forbade any of us to look for you, said if we did, he’d kill you, even if he burned in hell.”
“But he couldn’t do that.” This story had the makings of a Stephen King novel.
“Our mother tried once. She called the nuns and begged them to tell her where you were. He found out of course, and burned a cross on her stomach with a cigarette.”
“Jesus.”
“Jesus wasn’t around when all of this was going on. And He sure as hell wasn’t around when the old man threw her into a wall for trying to find you. She lost the vision in her left eye from that. Eventually, the doctor put her on enough valium so she just sat around all day, staring at the television. When a girl came on television who might be the same age as you, our mother’s eyes kind of glazed, and she’d get this silly little smile on her lips. It was damn pathetic.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died four years ago. I was in New Mexico and couldn’t get back for the funeral.”
“And your father?”
“Lung cancer two months ago, thank God.”
“Oh.”
“She looked a lot like you, you know? The hair, the mouth, the tiny nostrils. You look more like her than I do. I, unfortunately, bear an uncanny resemblance to my asshole father. She wanted you so bad.” Her voice dipped, filled with undisguised pain, “And she got stuck with us. Shit, I need a cigarette.”
Derry pulled a pack of Kools out of the desk drawer and handed it to her.
“Thanks.” Sheila fished in her pocket for matches. “I’m trying to quit.”
Derry found a seashell ashtray buried in the bottom drawer and handed it to her. “What was her name?” she asked quietly. All these years of self destruction, all because she’d been given away, and now, it turned out she was wanted. She’d been loved.
“Mary Elizabeth.”
“Mary,” Derry repeated.
“You’ve got another half sister, too. Rachel. She’s a big wig in Baltimore. Pediatric Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. Divorced twice, no kids.”
“And what about you?”
Sheila blew out a fine line of smoke. “No husband, two kids floating around somewhere between Los Angeles and St. Louis. I see them on the holidays.”
Derry, who lived by a tough guy attitude, felt an overwhelming surge of sympathy for this woman next to her. There was something sad and hollow about a person who could only give an approximation of her children’s whereabouts.
“Where do you live?”
Sheila’s thin lips pulled into a slow smile. “Here and there.”
“More here or more there?”
She laughed and said, “Do you think I’m crazy? I’ve got a Ph.D. in Abnormal Psychology from Berkeley and I taught there for ten years. I’ve published sixty papers and next year there’s a book coming out that I co-authored.” Sheila stubbed out her cigarette and tossed it in the ashtray. She reached for another and said, matter-of-factly, “I’m also schizophrenic and if I don’t take my medications it’s not a pretty sight.”
She didn’t look crazy. A 60’s flower child maybe, but a schizophrenic? And Alec had let her alone with Charlie.
“Oh, don’t worry, I won’t hurt you. Everyone gets that look when I tell them. I know how to control myself, and I do because I have no desire to end up in a straightjacket in some mental ward for five months again.”
“I don’t…know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything.” Sheila blew out another line of smoke. “I’ve waited forty years to see you, and you know what, it’s been worth the wait. You’re everything she could’ve hoped for. Maybe she knew you’d be the best of all of us.” She waved a thin hand and the air jangled with metal. “Look at you. The house, the husband, the kid. Charlie’s great by the way. And Alec, I don’t have to tell you what a fine specimen he is. You’ve got it all together, don’t you? You’re brilliant, and beautiful, too. When your mother-in-law heard I held a Ph.D. she made sure I heard about all of your succe
sses.” She laughed. “It’s touching really, to have such champs in your corner.”
Derry opened her mouth to tell her sister the truth. I feel as screwed up as you, my husband is divorcing me, Charlie isn’t my real child, and I’ve spent almost forty years running from the pain of being abandoned as a baby.
But she said none of this, because Sheila needed something to believe in, and for once, Derry was the one who could give somebody that hope.
“I’m glad you came,” was all she said.
“I had to,” Sheila murmured. “Can I just stay a little while? Maybe a few more days?”
“You can stay as long as you like.” Derry moved toward her sister, who sat like a fragile bird fighting descent. She pulled her into her arms and inhaled the sunflower scent on Sheila’s skin. “As long as you like.”
Chapter 25
“Thank you for agreeing to let me stay here.” Derry sat on the edge of the bed with her back to Alec.
“It’s only a few days.” He shrugged out of his shirt and tossed it on the bed.
“I know, but thank you.”
Alec stared at the back of her head, surprised at her diffidence, a term he’d never associated with his wife. “You’re welcome.” Then, because he didn’t want to deal with the actual sharing of the bed part yet, he said, “How’s your sister doing? She seemed pretty mellowed-out.”
Derry let out a small laugh and turned toward him. “You should’ve seen her at dinner. She had Charlie practically spitting milk through his nose with her stories. I think she wore herself out.”
“I’m sorry I missed it.” He’d planned it that way, of course. Anything to prolong seeing his wife again. So, he’d wandered to La Trattoria and suffered through a tedious dinner with his investment advisor about the next Amazon stock, most of which he tuned out. All he could think of was Derry in their house again, touching the same things he’d touched that morning, moving through the same rooms, breathing the same air.
Alec plodded through half his Veal Piccata, forcing his jaw to move with slow, mechanical precision. His senses were so full of Derry that he tasted nothing, and when the waiter brought a dessert tray lined with his favorite pastries, he declined.