by Sandra Brown
When he heard a motorized vehicle turning into the lane off the main road, he had assumed it was Mike returning. He remembered hoping that Mike hadn’t forgotten to get a bag of bite-sized Milky Way bars.
When he saw Maris behind the wheel of the approaching golf cart, his heart had sputtered and knocked like an ailing engine.
Subconsciously, had he been watching for her, pining like a grass widow searching the horizon for sight of her sailor’s ship? He hated to think of himself as some wretched, pathetic figure waiting for Maris to grace him with her presence. God, had he sunk that low?
But he realized now that that’s exactly what he’d been doing since she’d turned her back on him and stalked out of the cotton gin. Since that morning, he’d been steeping in his misery, stewing in his jealous sweat, sucking on whisky bottles, and nursing his fantasies.
Torturous fantasies of her with Noah.
Delicious ones of her with him.
At night he had erotic dreams in which she clutched him and chanted his name in breathless, urgent, orgasmic whispers. During the daylight hours, he occupied himself with visions of her caressing him, of her fingertips skimming his chest and belly, of her mouth silkily sliding—
“Was it Todd’s?”
He jerked upright as though his wheelchair had goosed him. “Huh?” He cleared his throat and shook off the sexual reverie. “Pardon?”
“The baby that Mary Catherine miscarried. Was it Todd’s?”
“What do you think?”
“It’s suggested. Do we ever know?”
He shook his head. “I think it’s better to leave it with just a suggestion. Let the reader come to his own conclusion.”
“I agree.” She thumbed through the pages again, stopping occasionally to reread a passage. “He’s a remarkable character. Roark, I mean. He’s so… well, heroic. As Mary Catherine says, he’s nice.”
Parker grimaced. “He’s not too nice, is he? I don’t want him coming across as a saint. Or worse, a puss.”
“He doesn’t.” She smiled reassurance, but he continued to frown doubtfully. “Trust me, Parker. I’d tell you if he were nice to the point of being dull.”
“Women readers aren’t turned on by nice heroes any more than male readers lust after heroines who are too virtuous. There should be at least a hint, maybe even a promise, of corruptibility.”
“You don’t have to worry about Roark in that regard. Women readers will love him, for this scene alone if for no other. He’s very male. His responses are instinctually masculine. He looks at everything in a sexual context first, before expanding his viewpoint to include other factors, like morality.
“At the same time, he’s sensitive to Mary Catherine’s needs. He declined her invitation to have sex, demonstrating that he knows where the lines of decency are drawn. Without hitting the reader over the head with his goodness, you imply that he has a strong conscience and moral fiber. He upholds a code of honor, a…” She glanced up and caught him silently laughing at her. “What?”
“You really get worked up over this stuff, don’t you?”
“That’s my job.”
“I understand your need to get excited over it. But at the end of the day, it’s still only a book, Maris.”
“Not to me it isn’t.” She spoke softly and a bit shyly. “When I really love a book, the characters become real to me. I think it stems from losing my mother at such an early age. I needed people around me, so the princes and princesses I read about became my adopted brothers and sisters.
“I lived in palaces and on pirate ships. I climbed mountain peaks and hacked my way through dark jungles. Captain Nemo’s submarine became as familiar to me as my own bedroom. The characters in my books took me along on their adventures. I laughed and cried with them. I was involved in their lives. I was privy to all their secrets. I knew their hopes and dreams as well as their fears. They became like family.”
She straightened a bent corner of one of the manuscript pages and gave a small, self-conscious, self-deprecating shrug. “I suppose that passion for fiction carried over into adulthood.”
For several ponderous moments, she kept her head down. Eventually she looked across at him. He leaned toward her and spoke very softly. “If you can get that turned on by a book, I’d like to know what else you have a passion for.”
She knew exactly what he was thinking. Their minds were moving along the same track. He could see it in the way her eyes turned smoky and hear it in the catch of her breath.
“The f word turns me on,” she whispered.
“The f word?”
“Food.”
He threw back his head and laughed. It rumbled up out of his chest and felt so good it startled him. For the first time in years, his laughter was spontaneous. It wasn’t tinged with bitterness and cynicism.
She fired a fake pistol at him. “Gotcha.”
“I concede. You’re hungry?”
“Famished.”
“Mike will never forgive me for being such a rotten host. I suppose I can put together some sort of meal, but you have to help.”
“Lead on.”
They moved into the kitchen and, working side by side, assembled BLTs. “Avocado?” he asked, as he set the microwave to cook the bacon strips.
“Yum.”
“You have to peel it. Mike says I can’t do it without bruising it.”
“One thing I like about you, Parker—”
“Only one?”
“—is that you own up to your shortcomings.”
“Well, there are so few of them, I can afford to be humble.” She threw a Frito at him.
They ate the chips out of the bag and pickles straight from the jar. “Different from what you’re used to, isn’t it?” he asked around a mouthful.
“Obviously you have me confused with a pampered, spoiled brat.”
“No,” he replied honestly. “You work too hard to fit that description.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re dedicated.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You get the job done.”
“I try.”
“So is that why you came back? Am I a job you left unfinished?”
“I came back to deliver the letter of agreement along with your signing check for fifteen thousand.”
“You never heard of Federal Express?”
“I wasn’t sure a carrier would deliver to St. Anne.”
He gave her a look that said he knew better, and she got busy picking at the crust on her bread. “Okay, we’re being honest. I wanted to make sure you were writing, Parker, and if you weren’t, to prod you along. My dad advised it.”
“Oh, so you came back because your daddy thought it was a good idea.”
“Not exactly.”
“Then why, Maris? Exactly.”
She looked over at him, opened her mouth to speak, reconsidered, and began again. “We had quarreled before I left. I wanted to clear the air between us. Otherwise our working relationship would—”
He bleated a sound like the buzzer on a TV game show. “To you this might look like the backwoods, but believe it or not, we’ve got telephones, e-mails, faxes, various methods of communication.”
“But you wouldn’t take my calls or answer my e-mails and faxes.”
“Eventually I would have.”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“Yes, you were.” He ended the parley there by holding up his hand and stopping her next argument. “You hopped that jet plane because you wanted to see me again. Admit it, Maris.”
Her chin went up defiantly, and he thought she might deny it. But she surprised him again. “All right, yes. I did. I wanted to see you.”
Folding his arms on the tabletop, he leaned toward her. “Why? Not because of my natural charm. We established early on that I have none.” He stroked his chin. “So I’m wondering, did you and your hubby have a spat? Afterward, you thought, I’ll show him. I’ll trot myself down to Hicksville and have a fling with
a gimp. Is that why you came back?”
He figured she would storm from the room, retrieve her things from the guest cottage, then hightail it to her golf cart and leave him in a wake of epithets. But, again, he guessed wrong. She remained where she was and addressed him in a remarkably calm voice.
“Tell me, Parker, why do you insist on being cruel? Does being mean to people make you feel stronger and more manly? Do you use meanness to cancel out the wheelchair? Or do you deliberately piss people off in order to keep them at arm’s length? Do you hurt them before they have a chance to hurt you? If that’s the case, then I’m truly sorry for you. Indeed, for the first time since I met you, I pity you.”
When she did leave the table, her pace and posture were dignified. Her back was straight, her head high, and as Parker watched her disappear through the kitchen door, he felt like the lowest life-form on earth.
He had accused her of using him to get to Noah, when precisely the opposite was at play. He was using her to get to Noah.
Afraid she would leave before he could apologize, he backed his chair out of the kitchen and quickly rolled it down the central hallway and through the front door. He was relieved to find her on the veranda, leaning into one of the support columns, staring out at the giant live oaks that stood sentinel on both sides of the front path.
“Maris.”
“I’ll leave in the morning.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
She laughed softly but without humor. “You don’t know what you want, Parker. To write. Not to write. To be famous. To be a recluse. To have me here. To send me away. You don’t even know whether or not you want to go on living.
“Whatever the case, I shouldn’t have come back. My reasons for returning were muddled at best, even to me. I should have stayed in New York where I belong and left you alone to luxuriate in your anger and bitterness and to keep boozy company with a ghost. You can get back to your pathetic pastimes tomorrow after I leave.”
He rolled his chair directly behind her and placed his hands on either side of her waist where it flared into hips. “Don’t leave.”
Leaning forward, he pressed his forehead into the small of her back. He rolled it to the left and right of that shallow depression while his fingers flexed, tightening his grasp on her.
“I don’t give a damn why you came back, Maris. I swear I don’t. Even if you are here just to make your husband angry, I don’t care. You’re here, and I want you to be.”
He moved his hands around to her front, where he rested them for a time on the knot of her shirt before slipping them beneath it and touching her skin. Massaging gently, he gradually drew her backward.
She spoke his name plaintively, part statement, part query, part sigh of resignation.
He continued to draw her backward until her knees bent and he settled her onto his lap. He turned her, draping her legs over an armrest of his chair so that he was cradling her like an infant.
She looked up at him with concern. “Is this all right?”
He sifted her hair through his fingers. He stroked her cheek with his thumb, then dragged it across her lower lip. “This is perfect.”
Chapter 23
It required all his willpower not to kiss her then. He knew she expected it, which was one reason he didn’t. The other was because he was still feeling guilty over suggesting that her motives weren’t pure. As though his were.
“Want to go for a ride?” he asked.
“A ride?”
“Down to the beach.”
“I can walk.”
“You can ride.”
He disengaged the brake and navigated the wheelchair down the ramp off the veranda onto a paved path that led through the woods. “This is convenient,” she remarked.
“I had the paths laid during the reconstruction of the house.”
“Mike said you never even considered using a motorized chair, that you like doing things the hard way.”
“Self-propulsion is good exercise. Mike feeds me well. I don’t want to go to flab.”
“What is that wonderful smell?”
“Magnolia.”
“There aren’t any fireflies out tonight.”
“The lightning bugs think it’s going to rain.”
“Is it?”
“We’ll see, won’t we?”
The paved path went as far as the sand dunes, where it connected to an elevated path constructed of weathered wood planks. Sea oats brushed against Maris’s legs as they went over the dunes. Beyond them, the path expanded into a platform exactly eight feet square. Parker stopped and set the brake on the wheelchair.
The deserted beach spread out before them. From this stretch of it, the mainland couldn’t be seen. It looked as primordial as it had been when it was formed. The moon was obscured by the dense cloud cover, but it shed enough light to see the surf as it broke. It left a silvery residue that sparkled briefly before dissolving into the sand. The breeze was as soft as the breath of a sleeping baby, and the only sound was the redundant swish of the tide.
“This is an amazing place.” Maris spoke in a reverential whisper usually reserved for church. “Dense forest growing right up to the beach.”
“And no high-rise hotels to spoil the view.” Rather than appreciating the view, he was rubbing a strand of Maris’s hair between his fingers, studying the texture, enjoying the feel of it.
She turned her head to look at him. “What kind of narcotics?”
“Ah. I should’ve known you’d catch that slip of the tongue.”
“I did. And it’s been on my mind ever since. What kind of narcotics did you take?” Her expression wasn’t censorious, simply interested. Sympathetic, maybe.
He let go of her hair and lowered his hand. “Pharmaceuticals. Painkillers. Great big quantities of them. Heaping handfuls.”
“Because of your legs?”
“It was a long recovery.”
“From what, Parker?”
“My own stupidity.” After a short pause for emphasis, he continued. “I underwent several operations, first to reconstruct the bones and replace the missing pieces with plastic or metal. Then the muscles and tendons had to be reattached. After that, the skin.…
“Hell, Maris, you don’t want to hear all that, and I really don’t want to talk about it. Bottom line, I was in the hospital for over a year, then in… other facilities. I went through years of physical therapy. It was a bitch. Like hell must be, only worse. That’s when I got hooked on prescription painkillers. When the doctors refused to prescribe any more, I bought the pills off the street from independent vendors.”
“Drug dealers.”
“With whom I became bosom buddies.” She didn’t appear to be shocked, but she might be if he told her the depths to which he had sunk in order to maintain his stash. So he summed it up. “I was a mess.”
“But you pulled yourself out of it.”
“No, I got grabbed by the balls and yanked out of it.”
“Mike.”
“Mike,” he repeated, shaking his head over the miracle of it. “For reasons I will never understand, he befriended me. He appeared one day out of nowhere. Through the blurred vision of a drugged-out stupor, I saw him standing there amid the squalor, looking at me as though trying to decide if I was worth the effort it was going to take to save me from myself.”
“Maybe he was sent to you.”
“A guardian angel? Fairy godfather? At least he wasn’t the Grim Reaper. Although in the weeks just following his rescue, I sometimes wished I was dead. Before I knew what was happening, he seized my stash and slapped me into detox.”
“That couldn’t have been pleasant.”
“You don’t want to know. Believe me. When I got out, he enrolled me in more therapy, physical and emotional. Cleaned me up, installed me in an apartment outfitted for the physically challenged, asked what I intended to do with the rest of my life. When I told him I had an itch to write, he set me up with a computer.”
“
He started you writing.”
“He put it in the form of a dare.”
“Which gave you a reason to go on living.”
“No, by then I had decided I must go on living.” I had a damn good reason to, he thought darkly.
“Can I ask a very personal question, Parker?”
“You can. You might regret it.”
“Is Roark you?”
He’d known she would get around to it sooner or later. She was too smart not to have pieced it together. A writer writing about a writer. Naturally she would see the parallel and ask. The answer he had ready wasn’t a lie, just not the whole truth. “Not entirely.”
“Loosely based upon?”
“Fair to say.”
She nodded solemnly but pried no further. “Did you start writing the mystery series right away?”
“No, I tried several genres. Devised and discarded a dozen plots a week for almost two years. Several thousand acres of trees went into my trash can before the Deck Cayton character clicked. He was the first thing that held my interest, that took my mind off my physical limitations.
“When I had what I thought was a publishable story, I retained an agent and told her she could submit the manuscript if she swore on her life and the lives of her children never to reveal my identity to anyone.”
“And Mackensie Roone came to be.” She touched his cheek. “It was a rebirth for which we can all be grateful. I’m just sorry for the suffering you had to endure to get there.”
“In the long run, it’s going to be worth it.”
The moment the sentence was out, he realized he’d spoken it in the present tense. He feared Maris might notice and question him about his ultimate goal, but she had turned her head away from him and was gazing out across the surface of the water. The lights of a tanker winked on the horizon.
Raindrops began to fall, creating wet dimples in the sand. They fell on the wood platform in light spatters. Parker heard them even before he felt the sprinkles on his skin. They felt as warm and soft as tears.
“Parker?”
“Hmm?”
“Remember that first day I came to the cotton gin, you suggested that Noah had married the boss’s daughter to further his career?”