by J. D. Robb
“Did he blame her for the boy’s accident?”
“Never, that I know of. That was all her thinking. But to be fair, I doubt there’s a mother in the world who wouldn’t feel the same. You feel responsible for everything that happens to your children.”
She turned and stood at attention for her mother’s approval. “How do I look?”
“Beautiful.” Her eyes lowered to the square-shaped diamond that hung from a chain and sparkled like a star from the hollow of her daughter’s throat. “Come closer.”
Touching the stone that her mother had worn for as long as she could remember, she walked to the bed. “Do you mind if I wear it?”
“Of course not; it pleases me. You know your father gave that to me when you were born.”
“I know,” she said softly as the doorbell rang below. They looked at one another for a long moment, savoring a connected-ness they’d both longed for, intensely, for years. “Is it too late to say I miss you, Mom?”
Adeline smiled through the tears welling in her eyes and shook her head.
“What about I love you?”
“No, my darling, it’s never too late to love.”
Maribelle Joy Biderman was feeling pretty darn happy with the world in general when she opened the front door to Ryan Doyle—and more specifically, thrilled to see him standing there.
“Hey.”
“Hi.”
They stood staring and grinning at one another like they each knew a secret the other was unaware of . . . unaware themselves that the excitement they felt was written all over their faces.
“I’d invite you in, but the batteries in my flashlight are weak, and I don’t have anything to drink but bottled water.”
“That’s all right. We have a reservation anyway.”
“Oh. Is what I’m wearing going to be okay?”
“You look great.” He made great sound like . . . mouthwatering or . . . scrumptious.
She turned to close and lock the door, hoping her face wouldn’t crack from the extreme pressure of her smile. She was conscious of the fact that computer geeks who spent so much time alone were notoriously bad dressers and let it speak to her ego that he’d donned navy slacks, a gray sports coat, and a silver-striped oxford shirt for their date—his one concession being the buttons undone at his throat.
“You do, too . . . Look great, I mean. I’m . . . ” She took a deep breath. “God, I’m nervous.”
A loud, surprised bark of laughter escaped him. “I feel like I haven’t been on a date since I was sixteen. I keep wondering what you’ll do if I try to hold your hand.”
“So you don’t date much?” She swallowed the word either just in time.
“An occasional blind date I haven’t been able to avoid, but since my wife died”—he shrugged—“I haven’t really had the desire. Until now.” For that one she’d let him hold her hand. She held it palm up between them, and he quickly zippered his fingers with hers. “I brought my car around in case you’d be wearing heels or didn’t want to walk, but it’s a nice evening, and the restaurant isn’t very far. . . . ”
“Then let’s walk. I enjoyed my walk down to King’s last weekend. Johnnie’s Bend has grown up so much since I lived here.”
There wasn’t a single lull in the conversation—not during their walk to the classic Italian restaurant on Main Street with its red and white checked tablecloths and Chianti bottle candlesticks—not throughout their fabulous dinner, which explained why the place was so crowded and reservations were wise—and not for the duration of the short meander they took to the park rather than to the movie theater, where they could continue talking and laughing and teasing during energetic games of miniature golf—her best two out of three.
“No, no. If you don’t know how long my beginner’s luck is going to last, then I’m quitting while I’m ahead. I’m not stupid, you know.”
“Oh, I know that.” His fingers slid over hers as he took her club and put both his and hers in the rack at the beginning of the course. “At least be a good sport and agree to let the loser buy you a coffee or a drink. How about dessert? King’s is open until eleven, and they have great homemade cobblers.”
It tickled her that he was trying so hard to keep their date from ending. She held her hand out, as she had in the beginning, and waited for him to take it, saying, “Can I have a rain check? By the time we walk back to the house and I drive home, it’ll be late, and I want to come back early again tomorrow.”
“You may have a rain check,” he said with great benevolence as he took her hand. But instead of simply holding it, he looped it over the bend in his elbow so they stood closer and walked arm in arm. “And a sun check and a snow check and a wind check and an earthquake check. . . . ”
She laughed.
“But tell me what you’ve been doing in the house. Something I can help you with?”
“No, not really, it’s just . . . well, it finally occurred to me that I’m actually the last Hedbo. And while I have no compunctions about tearing the house down and selling the land and the contents, I am having second thoughts about some of the pictures and papers. . . . I found some love notes my father sent to my mother and pictures of my only true blood cousin before he died. There’s a whole drawer full of original recipes that belonged to my Aunt Odelia—I’m thinking of finishing her cookbook for her.”
“Your favorite aunt?”
“I barely remember her.”
“Then why go to all that trouble?”
She shook her head. “Because I barely remember her? Does that make any sense?” She thought about her answer. “I told you my father died when I was four, and my mother remarried . . . three more times. I didn’t . . . I don’t have good sense of family. I don’t feel like I ever had one, really. Just about the time I started settling in, my mother would divorce and marry someone new. I’m in touch with Larry Biderman, who cared enough to give me his name and keep track of me for years afterward, and one of my stepsisters from my mother’s third marriage, but that’s not exactly family, is it?”
“It is, I think, if that’s what you’ve got. People make families with far less. It isn’t the legal or blood links you have to people that make them family, it’s the bonds you make with your heart that tie a family together.”
“That’s just it, though. I haven’t let many—any people, really—get close enough to me to make those kinds of bonds. And wandering around that old house, learning more about my mother and her sisters—who they were and why they made some of the choices they made . . . well, I’m learning a lot about me, too.”
“Like you want to publish a cookbook?”
She laughed. “No. That was one of my aunt Odelia’s dreams. I thought . . . I’d hate to die without seeing at least one of my dreams come true, wouldn’t you?”
“I would.” He studied her face as she watched the sidewalk in front of them. She could feel him preparing to ask about her dreams and decided to cut him off so she wouldn’t have to get explicit.
“And don’t ask me which dream I want to make come true, because now that I’m thinking about them specifically, it turns out I have several, and I haven’t decided between just one or maybe all of them.”
Playfully, he made his eyes big. “All of them?”
“I’m a very big dreamer.”
“Isn’t that a little greedy?”
“As it happens, I’m a lot greedy. You got a problem with that?”
“No, ma’am.” He grinned. “Not when it comes to dreams. As a matter of fact, I have a few of my own.”
The old streetlights were soft and cozy, protecting them from the night. They made it easy to see the spark in his eyes that made her heart quiver with the knowledge that at least one of his immediate dreams involved her.
Quite a coincidence, really, as her newly revised list of wishes contained his name in several places as well.
It was this coincidence, she supposed, that made actually verbalizing their desires unnecessary when
they stopped on the sidewalk in front of Hedbo House and turned to one another. He wanted to kiss her, and her smile gave him permission.
Lifting her face as he lowered his, their lips touched with a sweet, blistering need that both surprised and pleased them. The next kiss was deeper, more familiar, waking and feeding passions like dragons of old, with fire in their breath and wings that carried them to the stars.
“Holy . . . Wow,” she gasped, one hand to her throat to calm herself while the other clung to the back of his neck for support. His forehead came to rest on hers, and he murmured a soft, “Yeah.”
When they could hold their heads up and breathe and focus their eyes all at the same time, they laughed.
She put her hand in her pocket. “I guess I should get going. Thank you. I had fun tonight.”
“Me, too.” He turned with her and followed her slow walk to her car, parked at the curb in front of his. He let several long seconds go by. “I don’t suppose I could convince you not to drive home tonight.”
“There’s no electricity and it’s cold and I didn’t bring any overnight—”
“You wouldn’t really need any.”
“Oh! You mean . . . you know . . . with you.”
He grinned at her fluster, in his eyes a light of wicked delight at her sudden sexual unease. But she was no mouse who would play to his cat. . . .
“Well, I don’t know. Could you?”
He looked startled. “Could I what?”
“Convince me not to drive home tonight?”
His grin said that he’d do his best. Hers answered that it wouldn’t be difficult.
Okay, so maybe it was foolish to think she could sneak into the house around noon and not have anyone notice—it was like trying to slip dawn past a rooster.
“Ahhhhhh.”
“At last.”
“Now, don’t tease her. We may have something here. Darling, are you in love?”
“Look at her face. Of course she is.”
“You can’t tell by her face alone. What if he’s just really good in bed?”
“Is he?”
“Maybe,” she said, tucking her grin into her cheeks to present only a smug smile. “Maybe it’s both.”
“Ooooooh.”
“I knew it. The first time I saw him look at you, I knew.”
“And did you tell him about us, dear? Father always put a new face on things. Maybe we need a male perspective. Perhaps a man would know exactly what we’re looking for.”
“No, Odelia, I didn’t tell him.” She looked at each lady in turn, feeling her emotional high slip away to one simple truth: she’d lied to Ryan. But if she told him now, he either wouldn’t believe her and decide she was delusional or he’d be angry that she lied to him in the first place. No, the best solution was to help her mother and aunts find what they’d lost, quickly, and allow them to pass on to the Other Side—to end Jimmy’s fascination with them and to keep their existence as another family secret. “And I don’t plan to. We don’t need him. We’ll work harder at figuring out what you’ve all lost, and we’ll do it ourselves. I promise you. Now, instead of going over the past individually, I think we should spend the afternoon going over it together. You’re bound to see each other’s lives in a different light, and who knows what you might have forgotten that someone else remembers.”
And that’s exactly what they did. Even Odelia set aside her pies to sit at the kitchen table and reminisce over story after story from their past. People they knew and events they’d attended. They laughed and were sad and grew boisterous and then silent as they contemplated their lives until sundown, when the room became gloomy and dim and forced M.J. to finally go home.
Nine
“So when did you put your number in my cell phone?” Ryan asked early Monday morning when he called her at work.
“Yesterday when you went down to make coffee.”
“Here I thought I was going to be so smart taking it off my caller ID when you called last night to tell me you were home safe.”
She laughed. “I figured that’s why you wanted me to call, so I just beat you to the punch.”
“It wasn’t the only reason I wanted you to call. I like knowing you’re safe. I also like falling asleep with your voice in my ear.”
“Me, too.” Her voice was warm and cozy.
“I like having you here more.”
“Me, too.”
They went silent, remembering their night together—dreaming of the next one.
“I put you on speed dial. Cops, poison control, pediatrician, you, Jimmy’s school, my parents, my plumber, who also happens to be my best friend . . . ”
“I’m flattered.” She really was. Picking up her BlackBerry: “I see you’re already in my speed dial.”
“Number five,” he said in his defense. “In the middle, not too high, not too low, not too presumptive, easy access.”
She laughed, and the sound was so strange in the early morning quiet of her office—well, in her office, period—she thought the paint might crack.
“I’ll use it tonight.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
Still smiling, she sighed contentedly. She had someone waiting to hear from her—personally, not professionally. Elbows on her desk, chin on her fists, she entertained the notion of grabbing her purse and skipping out for the day until her eyes lowered to the Longwire files in front of her.
Her analysis of their financials was not going well, and her recommendations to Barren Electronics, who very much wanted to buy out Longwire, wasn’t going to please anyone—including, most likely, her bosses, who liked keeping their customers happy at all costs.
She settled into her chair to work—putting Ryan on the back burner until she went home and the sisters in the fridge till the weekend.
It rained on Thursday—not unheard of, considering the high humidity in northern Virginia in late summer—but as she’d worn her favorite summer silk suit that day, perhaps she should have taken it as an omen when the light intermittent sprinkles that were called for that day turned out to be a six-hour deluge.
Add to that the urgent call to her boss’s office before her first cup of office coffee and his anxious frown when she opened his door, and she should have known that her life was about to encounter some very slippery doo-doo.
Well, it was bad enough when he asked if she was ready to present her conclusions on Longwire Industries to the president and board of directors of Barren Electronics—they were eager and anxious and pressuring him for answers. Her deadline was still a few weeks away, but she had her deductions and barely enough time to prepare a PowerPoint presentation before the ten o’clock meeting. She was a professional. She could handle short notice. Her make-me-or-break-me moment was coming . . . and it was, just not in the way she thought.
To say the Barren board, especially the chairman, had a negative response to her due diligence on Longwire was an understatement. They seemed furious that she hadn’t been able to manipulate the numbers to make it appear a more favorable acquisition for their stockholders. The chair in particular kept trying to catch her boss’s eye to run interference, but he looked as if he was completely oblivious to the situation—giving her plenty of rope to hang herself with, she supposed.
But sometimes it has to be about more than just the job. She’d never cheated on a test, lied about her age, or submitted a false report in her life. And as nervous as she felt—nauseous actually—she knew her findings were accurate and her recommendations were the best for Barren Electronics.
She stood her ground for nearly ninety minutes, giving and regiving her presentation behind a calm facade she was far from feeling, with only the occasional twitching of her fingers to give her away.
When her cell phone began to vibrate on the conference table beside her laptop, she quickly turned it off, using steely determination not to look at the caller ID to demonstrate her commitment to her work to those around her. Five minutes later she was tested again, and she m
ade a mental note to ream her assistant for putting calls through when she was in conference.
But not five minutes after that, she had to admit she was as relieved as she was frustrated when same said assistant stepped into the room.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s a Ryan Doyle on the phone who insists on speaking to you. He says it’s an emergency.”
“An emergency? For me?” Three meetings, ten phone calls, one date, and one great night of sex, and he was calling her with an emergency? Was she ready for this? Well, that would depend on the emergency, wouldn’t it?
No, she decided in the next quarter second, a string of emotions busting loose in her chest. Concern. Happiness. Curiosity. Pride. Fear. An eagerness to respond. The hope of not failing him. It didn’t depend on the emergency at all. He was calling for her help, and she’d answer him as best she could. She loved him.
It was that simple.
“Excuse me, please. This’ll only take a moment.” Her eyes met the assistant’s. “Put him through again, please.”
Once again, the cell vibrated. She picked it up, turned her back to the board and her boss, and stepped to the long window that overlooked Route 123.
“Ms. Biderman? M.J.?” her employer’s voice seemed to come from far off when she turned back to the room. “Is everything all right? Has someone died? You look very pale.”
“No. No one died.”
“Are you going to be sick?”
“No.” She looked around the room until her eyes focused on him. “I’m just going.”
“But can’t it wait? What about Longwire and Barren Electronics? Your presentation . . . You have a responsibility here.”