Sunshine and the Shadowmaster

by Christine Rimmer

  Shortly, there was more. She submitted to it, riding it out, until she was heaving up nothing.

  She heard the door open. She moaned.

  “Oh, honey,” her stepmother said, crooning.

  Heather breathed deeply and moaned again. She heard water running, and then Eden was sitting on the floor beside her, rubbing a cool, moist cloth over her forehead.

  “Is it stopping?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “Oh, honey,” Eden murmured again. And they both waited, Eden stroking the soothing, cool cloth on Heather’s forehead and temples, Heather breathing deeply, a little more sure as each second passed that it just might be over—for now, anyway.

  “Well?” Eden asked.

  Heather nodded. “Yes. I think it’s okay. Yes.” She moaned. “My mouth tastes so awful. Like something died in there.”

  “We can take care of that.” Eden laid the wet cloth over the rim of the tub. Then she pulled open the door of the cabinet beneath the sink and produced a new toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. She quickly unwrapped the brush, squirted a line of toothpaste on in, and handed it to Heather.

  Heather dragged herself upright, leaned over the sink and brushed the foul taste away. She felt a little better, once she’d rinsed her mouth and wiped it dry.

  “Come back down here.” Eden, who was still sitting on the floor, held up her arms. “Come on.” Heather sank beside her again. Eden gathered her in and cradled her gently, rocking her a little, smoothing her clammy hair back with a tender hand and murmuring soft, wordless, soothing things.

  Heather went limp. It felt so good to be held. Lately, the world had seemed such a dangerous, hard-edged place. But now she was surrounded by loving arms. Safe. For the moment, at least.

  After a time, Eden asked gently, “How far along are you?”

  Heather dragged in a shuddering breath. She should probably lie, she knew it. Deny she was pregnant. Keep her secret, at least for now, when she didn’t know how she was going to handle it all yet. But she felt so tired of holding everything in. She needed someone to talk to. Someone she could trust. And she knew Eden was that someone, if anyone was.

  After a quick glance at the door to see that it was firmly shut, Heather cuddled close to Eden again and confessed, “About two months.” And then she laughed against Eden’s soft bosom. “It’s so pitiful. I thought I wasn’t very fertile, you know? We, um, didn’t use anything. It was only one night. And it was my safe time. But I guess no time is really safe, is it?”

  Eden went on gently rocking her. “No. No, it’s not.”

  “Oh, Eden. I just don’t know what to do. A baby. It was what I longed for. But not exactly this way.”

  “It’s all right. We’ll work it out,” Eden reassured her. “Have you decided what you want to do?”

  “Only that I’m going to keep it. Someway. Somehow.”

  “Is Lucas Drury the man?”

  Heather went still.

  Eden chuckled, a sisterly sound, full of love, acceptance and complete understanding. “Hey. Come on. He stayed alone with you during those awful three days when Mark ran away. And that was two months ago, so the timing’s perfect, right?”

  Heather burrowed closer to Eden. “Mmm.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Okay,” Heather breathed. “Yes, it was Lucas.” Lord, how it hurt just to say his name. “But promise me you won’t tell Dad.”

  Eden didn’t hesitate. “Of course not, if that’s how you want it.”

  “It is.”

  “All right then.” She smoothed Heather’s hair some more. “Have you told Lucas?”

  Heather groaned. “Oh, no. I haven’t. I couldn’t....”

  “Then it’s damn sure time somebody did.”

  Both women gasped at the sound of the cold, raspy voice.

  Heather sat bolt upright; Eden gave a little cry as she craned her head around.

  Jared stood in the doorway, his hand on the knob, his chest thrust out and his booted feet planted wide apart. Heather cursed her own thoughtlessness in not checking to see that the door was locked as well as shut. When he wanted to, Jared Jones could move with all the stealth of a stalking cougar.

  “Jared.” Eden’s voice was weighted with dread. “How long have you been standing there?”

  “Long enough to know what’s wrong with my little girl—not to mention who the hell’s to blame for it.”

  Both women stared at him, then shared a grim glance. Jared had that look. That ready-for-a-fight look.

  It was a look he used to get a lot, back in the days before Eden. But since he’d found love, everyone had thought the street fighter inside him was tamed.

  Apparently not.

  Heather tried to make her voice sound threatening. “You stay out of this, Dad. It’s not your business. It’s my problem and I’ll handle it myself.”

  “The hell you say. I’m leaving for Monterey. Right away.”

  “No!” Heather cried out.

  “Jared, please—” Eden began.

  But Jared wasn’t listening. “I want his address, Heather.”

  She scoffed. “Forget it. No way.”

  He glowered at her for a moment, then shrugged. “Fine. I know who else has got it. Marnie. I’ll get it out of her.” He started to turn.

  Heather scrambled to her feet and launched herself at him, managing to snare his arm. “Please, Dad. Don’t.”

  “Let go of me, Heather.”

  She looked up at her father, pleading with her eyes. But she knew she was wasting her time. Her pleas would do no good.

  The best she was going to be able to do was put a condition or two on his going. Because he would go. She could only mitigate the disaster he was determined to create.

  She agreed, “All right. I’ll give you Lucas’s address.”

  “Smart girl.”

  “Under one condition.”

  “No conditions.”

  “Hear me out.”

  Eden stuck up for Heather. “Yes, Jared. At least listen to what she has to say.”

  Jared looked at his wife, then nodded briefly at his daughter. “Say it. I don’t have all night.”

  “Take me with you,” Heather said.

  Jared considered, then told her, “No. If it gets too ugly, it won’t be good for you—in your delicate condition, I mean. You already threw up once tonight from yelling too much. You take it easy. I’ll handle this. Now let go of my arm.”

  Heather held on, furious at his idiotic, macho pigheadedness, but knowing her fury would do her no good. She tamped it down, her mind racing a thousand miles a minute to come up with another compromise. She had it. “Then take Grandpa Oggie—and I’ll give you the address.”

  Jared’s brows drew together. “What for? Why your grandpa?”

  Because if anyone can keep you two from killing each other, it’s Grandpa, she thought. But all she said was, “Take him. Please.”

  Jared considered again and this time he nodded. “Hell. All right. Call the old coot right now.”

  Eden stood. “I have a better idea. I’ll go over to Delilah’s and get him. You two wait here.”

  Jared leveled his suspicious gaze on one woman and then the other. But then at last he grunted, “All right. Go get him.”

  * * *

  Eden returned with Oggie twenty minutes later. Jared and Heather were waiting outside for them.

  “Good to see you’re all finally learnin’ who to come to in a crisis,” Oggie announced, when Eden stopped the pickup truck in front of the cabin.

  “Yeah, right,” Jared muttered.

  “Now what the hell’s the problem?” Oggie inquired.

  Jared had baby Sally in his arms. He held her out to Eden as she emerged from the truck. “Didn’t you tell him?”

  Eden took the child. “I said it was an emergency, that’s all. It’s Heather’s business, after all, Jared.”

  “What’s Heather’s business?” Oggie leaned out the passenger window
to shout the question so that everyone could hear him. “What is going on?”

  “Heather’s got herself pregnant and Lucas Drury’s to blame,” Jared said with his usual tact and finesse.

  “Oh, Dad,” Heather groaned. She wanted to cry. She wanted to hit her father on the head with a large, blunt object. Unfortunately there wasn’t one handy.

  Oggie let out a low whistle. “Well, what do you know? That is deep. That is moving.”

  Heather wondered if her grandfather might be losing it just a little. “What are you talking about, Grandpa?”

  “Life. Its mysteries, its wonders.”

  “This isn’t a wonder, Dad,” Jared muttered. “It’s a baby on the way with no husband in the house.”

  But Oggie’s rheumy eyes were misty. “No. It’s another of life’s wonders. More than forty years ago, I stole my beloved Bathsheba—God rest her sainted soul—from that dirty weasel, Rory. And now we’ve come full circle. Rory’s son will marry our Sunshine. The ugliness of the past will be put forever to rest.”

  Jared let out one of his disbelieving grunts. “You haven’t got the picture, here, Dad. He hasn’t said he’ll marry her yet.”

  “He doesn’t even know yet,” Eden said. “Be fair.”

  “Fine.” Jared shot back the word. “So we’ll see to it that he does know. And if he doesn’t make things right, then whatever happened forty years ago is nothin’ to the ugliness I’ll be showing you tonight.”

  Oggie shook his grizzled head. “Always with the negative. We’ll see, we’ll see.”

  “Fine. We’re outta here.” Jared turned to Heather, who’d been standing there slightly stupefied, telling herself that this couldn’t really be happening to her. “Sunshine, give me the address.”

  Heather bestirred herself. “I don’t have it with me.” She turned for her own car. “Follow me to my house and I’ll give it to you there.”

  At Heather’s, Jared and Oggie waited outside. Heather ran up the steps, let herself in the house and rushed to the phone to call Eden.

  “Eden, listen. I’m going with them. If Dad won’t take me, then I’ll follow in my own car. Will you do me a mammoth favor?”

  “Anything. Ask.”

  “Call Lucas for me. I know I ought to do it myself, but I don’t have the heart to. Besides, Dad’s got the engine running outside, so I don’t have the time, either.”

  “Certainly I’ll call him.”

  “Tell him—oh, I don’t know. Tell him that Jared Jones is coming to his house to bust his face in. Maybe he’ll get smart and clear out of there. But I doubt it. He’s as bullheaded as Dad.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll handle it. Somehow.”

  “Oh, thank you.” She gave Eden the Monterey number. “Tell him we’re on the way and say that... Oh, I suppose you’d better tell him about the baby. The mood Dad’s in, it won’t be a secret for long anyway. Okay?”

  “Count on me.”

  “I do, you know I do.”

  Heather thanked Eden again, then hung up, stuck her address book into her back pocket and headed out the door.

  Chapter Ten

  At two in the morning, Jared pulled up to the wrought-iron gate that barred the entrance to Lucas’s estate.

  “What the hell’s this?” Jared growled under his breath.

  “It’s a gate, Dad,” Heather told him.

  Jared shot her a surly look. “I don’t need any smart-mouth remarks from you.”

  “Now, now, you two.” Oggie chuckled. “Let’s not get testy.”

  Just then, a speaker in the brick wall not far away from the truck crackled to life. “Yes. What is it?” The voice was a woman’s voice, very clipped and impatient sounding.

  “It’s trouble, is what it is,” Jared announced. “Open the gate.”

  “Give me your name, please.”

  “Jones. Jared Jones. Here to have a little talk with Lucas Drury.”

  There was a pause, then the voice said, “Yes. All right. Follow the driveway. Go left when it forks, or you’ll end up at the stables.”

  Before them the gate slowly swung back.

  Oggie chuckled some more. “Yessiree. Rory’s boy did all right by himself, and that’s a fact.”

  “Rory’s boy is a dead man,” Jared muttered, and drove through the gate, which closed slowly and smoothly behind them. Ahead, the driveway twisted away into darkness.

  Heather glanced back and watched the gate disappear as they rounded the first bend in the road. They climbed a gentle incline, winding gradually upward through a forest of high, tangled eucalyptus trees, turning left, as they’d been instructed, when the road forked. After that, the forest of eucalyptus faded away on either side. Now the only trees were twisted Monterey cypress, reaching out their gnarled limbs to the night. Close-growing brush clung to the rocky hillside and Heather could smell the salty wetness of the ocean through Jared’s open window. Overhead, the stars seemed few and far between in the black, moonless sky.

  They saw the house well before they reached it. It was a sprawling Spanish-style villa, so well lit, even in the middle of the night, that they could make out the fanned designs of the panes beneath the window arches, the diamondlike pattern that embellished the iron railings, and the splashes of vermillion made by climbing roses in bloom. The tires of the pickup crunched on a bed of white pebbles as Jared swung around a huge stone fountain and pulled up twenty feet from the pillars and arches that framed the gargantuan front door.

  In the bleak silence after Jared turned off the engine, Heather stared up at the mansion where Lucas lived, dread like a cold block of ice in her stomach. Two powerful urges warred within her. She longed to lay her head down on the dashboard and sob out her shame and frustration—and to shove her father out of the way, jump from the truck and run back down the twisting driveway in the dark.

  Anything, anything to escape the mortifying, potentially violent scene that lay ahead.

  “Er, maybe you oughtta wait in the truck for a few minutes, Sunshine,” Jared suggested. “This could be ugly, I’m afraid.”

  Heather sent him a grim look. “Thanks for thinking of my feelings, Dad. But it’s a little late, you know.”

  “What’s gotta be has gotta be,” her father said sagely.

  “You’re enjoying this,” Heather accused.

  Her father didn’t even bother to argue. “A man does what he has to do.”

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  On the other side of Heather, Oggie started chortling again. “Face the facts, girl.” He patted her hand with his gnarled old claw. “Your dad’s a hooligan at heart, family man or not.”

  Heather turned on her grandfather. “Thanks, Grandpa,” she said with as much sarcasm as she could muster. “I made Dad bring you along to keep trouble from happening, not to stand by and philosophize about it.”

  “There’ll be no trouble,” Oggie said. “Wait and see.”

  “Enough talk,” Jared growled. “You coming or not?”

  “I’m coming,” Heather replied through clenched teeth.

  A pained looked crossed her father’s craggy face. It was obvious to Heather that, while Jared had no qualms about humiliating her, he wished she wouldn’t insist on watching him do it. “You sure?”

  “I’m positive.”

  “Fine. Then don’t dawdle.” Jared jerked the keys from the ignition, pushed open his door and stepped down, where he suddenly grew chivalrous and held the door open for her.

  She didn’t move.

  He commanded, “Stop foolin’ around.”

  On the other side of Heather, her grandfather had already hauled his old bones to the ground and was waiting by the truck patiently, leaning on his cane.

  “You comin’, Heather Jane?” her father asked again.

  In a totally meaningless gesture of defiance, Heather turned her back on him and slid out on Oggie’s side. When her tennis shoes touched the ground, she realized that what she’d thought were pebbles were actually thousand
s upon thousands of tiny, translucent white shells. She thought it strange and decadent that anyone would choose to pave their driveway with shells.

  They went up the tiled tiers of steps and under the wide, triple-arched portico. They rang the bell and the door was drawn back instantly by a thin, aloof-looking woman in her fifties who reminded Heather of upright, unimpeachable Nellie Anderson.

  “We’re here to see Lucas Drury,” Jared announced.

  The woman granted them a single, sweeping, thoroughly disapproving glance. “Of course. He’s waiting in the atrium. This way.”

  They left the huge entry hall from which a curving staircase spiraled upward and went down another hall, then turned left and went down another after that. Heather’s palms were clammy and it hurt to draw breath. Behind her, her grandfather’s cane tapped hollowly on the antique tiles of the floor.

  At last, the hall opened up to a two-story, skylit room.

  “Holy guacamole,” Oggie muttered as he and his son and granddaughter halted in a tight little knot on the edge of the room.

  Heather agreed with him. The room was spectacular. It could have graced the palace of some Moorish conqueror. The tiles underfoot shone with a rich patina of age. And there were more tiles, painted with elaborate, flowing designs, that continued halfway up the pure white walls. An arch on the wall opposite them was framed in an intricate plaster relief. Through the arch and an iron gate so splendidly worked that it resembled black lace, a swimming pool could be seen, gleaming and shimmering in the play of strategically placed artificial light, looking both eerie and magical at once.

  Overhead, below the five diamond-shaped skylights, an iron chandelier sent out twining arms on which black candle sconces perched, each one tipped in golden light. The rug was off-white, woven in squares. The couches were upholstered in a sky blue fabric. Thick, textured brocades covered most of the chairs.

  The majority of the tables and the wood-backed chairs on the edges of the room were fashioned of rich, reddish mahogany. But two chairs stood out from the rest. They were of ebony, with sweeping curved arms, their backrests carved in an intricate pattern of twining leaves and vines. The pair of black chairs faced each other, one toward the arch with the swimming pool glimmering behind it, one toward the entrance to the hall where Heather, Jared and Oggie stood.