“A couple? R&D will not be happy.”
“Make it four. Just in case. Send them to me at Ma’s. The address—”
“I know your mother’s address. What do you want them for?”
“I have an idea.”
Brenda made a choking sound. When she spoke again, he knew she wasn’t talking to him. “He says he’s got an idea.”
Zeke recognized the answering groan.
“Quince wants to talk to you,” Brenda said.
“No. I don’t have time.”
“Zeke.” Quince’s voice came on the line. Zeke gave a fleeting thought to what it would be like to have an assistant who did what he told her. “This trip is strictly to keep you out of temptation’s way until the announcement. You are not there to have ideas. I can’t take any more of your ideas.”
“I’m not going to stop having ideas because you feel overworked, Quince. I want to see if—”
“I want to talk to you about these rumors.”
That stopped Zeke. “What rumors?”
“Rumblings someone might leak our news before the announcement.”
“They say that every time.”
“I know. But there’s something about these… My bad-news-is-coming knee is throbbing like hell. Just don’t say anything to anybody.”
“Who would I tell?”
“You’re in your hometown, you get relaxed, your guard comes down around people you trust.”
“Outside of Zeke-Tech, I don’t trust any—” It would have been untrue to say he didn’t trust anybody here. Two anybodies. Ma and Darcie.
“Who’d you tell?’” Quince demanded.
“Nobody.”
“Zeke, I know that tone.”
“I didn’t say anything except nobody.”
“That’s enough.” Quince sounded grim. “You’ve got to keep this quiet a few more weeks, Zeke. Don’t get tempted, just don’t get tempted. And don’t lose that laptop. Never should have let you take it in the first place.”
“I’ve gotta work,” Zeke protested.
“No, you don’t. That’s the whole idea of this trip.”
He hadn’t lied. He hadn’t told anyone. But he had given Darcie that disk with the trial program on it.
Thousands of techies would give a limb for a look at the new Zeke-Tech product before its official introduction. Darcie hadn’t said a single word.
“Warren?” Darcie peered at the boy in the gloom of the back hallway.
He jumped and spun around, putting a black gizmo resembling her cell phone headset behind him.
She’d come to peek into the dining room to see if everyone had left. She’d excused herself earlier, leaving the path clear for Jennifer and Zeke to pair up. But something wouldn’t let her risk stranding Zeke. Just in case. Possibly the something was the wrath of Chief Dutch Harnett.
“What are you doing, Warren?”
“Fixing the sound system.”
Sound system? Out here? “I didn’t know it had a problem.”
“I’d already fixed it,” he said. “I was checking it was okay.”
“Is it?”
A satisfied smile lit his pudgy face. “Yeah.”
“Good. Then you better get going before everyone leaves.”
“Yeah, okay.” He grabbed his bag and headed off.
She pushed the curtain open.
Neither Zeke nor Jennifer was in sight. The centerpiece controversy raged on. Her mother was trying to soothe the crowd.
Darcie edged around the room, heading for the exit. She did not want to get caught in this dispute.
She would make sure Zeke had left with Jennifer. So what if she might see Zeke with his hand on Jennifer’s back or looking down into her face with his characteristic concentrated attention.
She’d be glad they were together. She would. Because it would be good for Drago. Although it would be easier to be glad if she hadn’t had the dreams about the night they made love. Actually, twice.
He’d levered himself up, and the thought had torn through her like a sob that he would get up and act as if nothing had happened. Instead, he’d maneuvered around doing something in the dark that only later had she realized was disposing of the condom. Then he’d come back and put his arms stiffly around her. She’d curled into him, her face into his shoulder so he couldn’t see her expression, so she didn’t have to see his.
She had no idea how long they’d stayed like that. And no idea which of them started moving. It seemed, though, that with the first friction of skin against skin, the fire roared again.
Afterward she lay with his weight on top of her, and she knew then that she could live a good life, love other people, be happy. But she would never completely get over Anton Zeekowsky.
Chapter Five
“You ready?”
Darcie swallowed a gasp but couldn’t control her body’s jolt, an automatic reaction to Zeke’s voice from behind her shoulder. She spun around to him.
“We’re not going to stay here all day, are we?” His eyes were half-closed as he breathed in deeply through his nose.
“I thought you’d go with Jennifer.”
“Why? You and I, we have a deal. You brought me, I go back with you.”
All pretty simple to him, by that tone. The unfairness of it burned through Darcie. Because their deal didn’t include being dragged around like a third wheel.
She drove out under a twilight sky dotted with puffs of navy clouds trying not to grind her teeth.
“Darcie? Are you okay? I mean is there something…”
The length of his silence drew her gaze despite herself. “Something what?”
“You know, something wrong.”
“No, I don’t know. What could be wrong?”
He looked at her the way he’d looked at her back in chem lab when she’d recited poetry. Like there was something in front of him he didn’t understand, but, unlike unknowns in math or science, he wasn’t sure he wanted to try to understand. “You seem edgy.”
“I am not edgy.”
He fell into another silence. A silence during which he studied her in a way that made her edgy. She hadn’t been when he’d first said it. Not really. So she wasn’t going to amend her statement.
“Sometimes it’s just like when we were kids,” he said abruptly. “And sometimes it’s not.”
“Things were bound to be different after all these years.” But things would have been different even without all the years. Because some things changed a relationship forever. “You can’t expect the awkwardness to just go away.”
“You said that before. Well, not that exactly, but you said putting me in handcuffs got us past the first awkward part. What awkward part?”
Faced with such a direct question, she felt obliged to answer equally forthrightly. “Seeing each other again.”
He looked astonished. “Why did you think it would be awkward?”
“Gee, I don’t know,” she snapped. “Maybe because you never contacted me after…after—oh, hell, after we had sex.”
His forehead creased. “You knew I was leaving. The next day, for that summer program at Stanford. You knew I didn’t plan to ever come back. You knew—” His eyes widened slightly, as if he’d been hit by a recognition for the first time. “You knew better than anyone how much I wanted to get out of here.”
Wasn’t that just like him. He not only didn’t respond to her bringing up their making love, but he also ignored it completely.
“Sometimes, Anton Zeekowsky, you are one of the densest human beings on the face of this earth. Of course I knew you were leaving. I wasn’t expecting you to stay, for heaven’s sake. But a phone call? A letter? It is possible to have communication with those in Drago without being sucked back into its deadly vortex, you know.”
He squinted, as if he could see the past. “I guess I was so focused on what I was heading toward that I didn’t think much about what I left behind. Besides,” he added, “you were going to leave, too.”
Even if
she’d stayed at Penn State, he could have reached her at home over holidays and the summer. And if he’d ever tried, he would have known that she’d come back. All she said was, “Right.”
“Why didn’t you leave Drago for good, Darcie?”
“I told you.”
He shook his head. “If you’d really wanted to leave, if you’d wanted to leave as much as I did—”
“I didn’t.” They’d come to a stop sign and she looked at him, level and reasonable. “You wanted to get out no matter what. I wasn’t willing to get out at any cost.”
“What do you mean at any cost?”
She looked both ways on the highway, which meant she couldn’t look at him anymore. “You left and you never looked back.” She eased the car into the turn. “I’m not criticizing you, Zeke. You did what you felt you had to do. I’m pointing out our paths were different. We’re different.”
She refused to let this silence or the knowledge that he was studying her face—again—get to her. She paid attention to the road. Being distracted was the number one cause of accidents. So what if hers was the only vehicle around. Focus was good.
“Sorry, Darcie,” he said after too damn long. “Especially, I’m sorry you haven’t had a chance to pursue your dreams away from Drago.”
She shrugged. “Things work out for the best. Probably saved me from finding out I wouldn’t have made it. This way I can still dream about it.”
Wouldn’t have made it, his ass. Of course she would have made it. She had to know that. And she would know it if he had anything to say about it.
Zeke would have told her that right then if Darcie’s cell phone hadn’t started again. Mildred Magnus and some nonsense about ghosts. Somebody had a hang nail and they all expected Darcie to take care of it.
By the time she’d finished the call, they were at Lilac Commons and a swirl of people never let him alone the rest of the night. Who knew all those people would put on their winter coats to watch five goose pimpled teenage girls introduced as “royalty”? He’d been prepared to slip away when Mr. Carter, his old chemistry teacher, had stopped to say hello. Ma insisted Mr. Carter come back to the house, along with a “few friends.” He’d had a great talk with Mr. Carter and enjoyed seeing old neighbors, though he’d kept hoping Darcie would show up. She never did.
Lying in his old narrow bed later, his mind had gone back to Darcie’s comment. He’d decided showing her was far better than telling her. Words were messy, action wasn’t.
But even he had known action should wait until this morning. He slept, but woke early and crept out of the house silently.
Now, he hit speed dial for Brenda. His assistant could be pushy and maddeningly independent, but she’d find out everything he needed to know.
She didn’t answer. But then the sun hadn’t risen yet here in Illinois and it was Sunday. He left a detailed message and replaced the cell phone, shifting more comfortably on his perch on the top fence rail.
He’d been so focused on Darcie and his plans he’d barely taken in his surroundings, the whole reason he’d driven here at dawn.
“’Morning.”
The male voice jerked Zeke’s head around, but his muscles instinctively rebalanced him, so he didn’t tumble.
Under a blue baseball cap with a Chicago Cubs insignia, the man was white-haired and seam-faced. His right shoulder dipped lower than his left.
“Sorry. I’m trespassing. I’ll leave,”
“Didn’t say that. Just said ’Morning.”
Zeke relaxed some. “’Morning.”
The man nodded, then rested down-jacketed forearms on the top rail beside Zeke. “Nice spot.”
“I used to ride out here from town on my bike as a kid,” Zeke confessed.
“I remember.”
Zeke looked down at the man, who continued to stare toward the horizon. “You knew I was here?”
“Yup.”
Yet he’d never shooed away a trespassing boy he didn’t know.
“You weren’t hurtin’ anything,” the man said, as if he’d heard Zeke’s thoughts.
“Thank you. I used to come here to think.”
“Good place to do it. Been doing it all my life.”
Zeke looked at green plants rising from black loam. As a kid, he’d taken for granted that the earth could give so much. Seeing the hard red clay, thin sandy dust, rocky iron-dotted ground of other areas of the country had made him remember the rich black earth around Drago.
“Yes, it is a good place. You must love this farm to spend your life here.”
“Wouldn’t be worth much anywhere else.” The old man snorted. “Not worth much here anymore. Can’t run the place myself. My nephew was running it, but he’s gone, and his widow, she’s stubborn as the day is long, but she’s a woman.”
Zeke thought of Darcie, then his mother and Vanessa and Brenda.
“Don’t sell her short because she’s a woman.”
The farmer shook his head. “It’s tough going now. Not like when I started out. Most farms need somebody working another job. That’s what Anne would have to do, too—no matter what that stubborn woman says—if there were jobs for the getting ’round here.”
“Then she’d give up this farm?”
The man’s mouth twisted. “Nah. Even if she wasn’t born to it, she feels it. We do what we gotta do to keep it breathin’, even on a respirator.”
Zeke wondered about feeling that passionately about a place, as passionately as Darcie felt about Drago. Passion about ideas—that he knew.
“There she is,” the farmer said.
Zeke looked around, before realizing the farmer meant the sun. It crested the horizon, light streaming down rows of newly planted corn toward them like extended rays of a child’s drawing.
“That’s somethin’,” the farmer said. “That’s really somethin’.”
A man who must have seen this sight a thousand times, still felt its thrill.
“Yeah, that’s really something.”
“Mom? Mother!” Darcie called as she came in the back door.
No answer. She checked the kitchen, then went to the bottom of the stairs and called again. No Martha Barrett.
On her return trip to the kitchen to leave a note about the sudden need for two vegetarian plates at the ball after Ashley’s instant conversion when Cristina announced she no longer ate meat, light slanting across the glass fronts of her father’s cases in the library caught Darcie’s eye.
She hesitated at the doorway before stepping inside.
She huffed out a small breath. It actually looked like a library. Her mother had put in a pair of reupholstered easy chairs from the basement rec room with a floor lamp for each and a desk with another good reading light. Books filled the empty spaces in the cases that must have struck a blow at her mother each time she’d looked at them.
When Gordon Barrett had been alive, the cases had teemed with art he’d collected. A few small paintings, but mostly Japanese and eighteenth century French porcelains. He’d spent hours each night in this room with his collections, the door closed.
Everyone had thought his collections were a sign of how well the Barretts were doing. Darcie had known, at some level, they were a sign that he preferred inanimate objects to her.
After his death, they’d discovered how wrong they’d all been about the first premise. What her father had collected most successfully was debt.
She’d had no idea. Clearly, neither had her mother.
After Gordon Barrett’s death, Darcie had been torn. Wanting to return to school, unable to leave wraithlike Martha to make the decisions.
“I’m sorry, Darcie. So sorry. We’ll have to sell it all,” she’d said of the collections. “I’ll call Riesners.”
“No,” Darcie had said. Even with her limited experience, she had recognized that shock was behind Martha’s stunning declaration. “I’ll do it.”
True, they had to sell to relieve the debt. But Darcie couldn’t let her mother’s grief
and lack of business sense send her father’s lifetime of collecting to be unloaded through the local antique emporium for a pittance.
So Darcie had gone over his possessions item by item, contacting three galleries in Chicago and two in New York. Then another reality had hit. The paintings Gordon Barrett had bought were knockoffs, few of the porcelains were Japanese or French and none were eighteenth century. She adjusted her thinking and set about getting the best prices she could.
Her mother had artfully arranged the items of Gordon’s collection no one had been willing to buy in splendid isolation in the library cases.
“They look better this way,” Martha had said, a tear on her cheek.
That was the moment Darcie knew she couldn’t leave her fragile mother. She certainly couldn’t let the house be sold out from under her.
So Darcie withdrew from Penn State, enrolled at Mid-Northern Illinois as a commuter and used the bulk of her college fund to pay off the mortgage.
“Why did you do that? Why, Darcie?” her mother had asked, tears streaming down her face.
Darcie had shaken her head mutely, not having the words to explain without walking on her mother’s fragility like someone in army boots tromping on a sore toe. They had not talked about it again.
Even with being careful about household expenses, the remnants of Darcie’s college fund, which was all they had left, had dwindled shockingly by the time she graduated. If she’d left then, what would her mother have had to live on, much less pay taxes?
So she’d applied to the Drago Police Department.
After a couple months, she noticed her mother was spending less time at home, and the household account had barely budged. That’s when Martha told her the manager of the country club had asked her to help organize and arrange social events there, and he insisted on paying her.
“I know your father wouldn’t have liked it,” she’d said apologetically.
Darcie could almost hear Gordon Barrett’s cool tones. “My wife being paid to, in essence, serve our peers? Absolutely not.”
Tough. He’d landed them in this mess, so he’d forfeited any right to dictate, especially from the grave.
“Do you like the work, Mom?”
What Are Friends For? Page 9