The Edge of Forever

by Bretton, Barbara

  Huntington Kendall IV rolled his eyes. “First you don’t recognize my illustrious name, and now you negate my art. You wound me, Margarita.”

  “What in hell were you doing hiding in the bushes?”

  “I wasn’t hiding in the bushes.”

  “Don’t lie. I saw you and another guy.”

  He threw back his head and laughed, his long light reddish hair bobbing around his bony shoulders. “I’m afraid not, dear Margarita. I’ve been inside all evening.”

  “I know what I saw."

  “That’s my village out there,” he said.

  “Your what?”

  He sighed and probably would have rolled his eyes if she hadn’t been threatening to hurt him. “The citizens of my imaginary village.”

  So maybe he was just crazy and not a career criminal. But crazy people did crazy things and she breathed a sigh of relief at the sound of the police cars snaking their way up the leaf-strewn driveway.

  “Just stay there,” she said, unlocking the back door for the cops. “We’ll let the police straighten this out.”

  Huntington Kendall IV smiled up at her, closed his eyes, then promptly fell over in a dead sleep.

  #

  The next afternoon

  “You can let me out here.”

  The cab driver, rotund and garrulous, glanced at Joe through his rearview mirror. “That’s one heck of a walk up that driveway,” he said as he pulled over just outside the gates to Lakeland the next afternoon.

  “That’s okay,” Joe said, handing him a twenty and waving off the change. “I need the exercise.” The truth was, the cabbie’s nonstop monologue on why he left the wilds of Brooklyn for the wilder wilds of the White Mountains was slowly driving Joe nuts.

  The cabbie turned around in his seat. “Suit yourself. Wouldn’t catch me walking if I could ride.” By the look of his mountainous belly wedged behind the steering wheel, that was no lie.

  Moments later Joe, suitcases in hand, watched the beat-up cab turn on to the main road and disappear from sight. The headache that had been gathering just behind his eyes disappeared along with it, and he started up the driveway toward the main house where he and Meg would be staying. Most of the leaves had fallen from the white birch and sugar maple trees scattered amid the pines, and he crunched his way along a carpet of crimson, burnt orange and vivid yellow. The day was crisp and clear, the kind of sharply beautiful autumn weather that New England was justly famous for, and if he were a different man he’d be feeling pretty good.

  Actually he did have reason for optimism. Somehow he had managed to crank out the outline Renee had demanded and a few chapters beyond that. It wasn’t about to win a Pulitzer but the pages did contain the kernel of a terrific story. If his damned internal censor would just shut the hell up, he might even be able to get it written.

  He reached the top of the steep driveway, pleased to note he wasn’t even breathing hard. Lakeland House was still a football field away, serene and beautiful, bathed in the early afternoon sunlight. The curtains and drapes were open, and a thin curl of smoke drifted lazily from the main chimney. McCallum had told him Meg was already there, and it seemed she had things in hand.

  There would be no Anna Kennedy to greet him, no loving friend to guide him, but he’d made his peace with that. It was enough to know he would be able to finish her work.

  And that Meg was waiting to finish it with him.

  #

  The warmth from the blaze in the hearth and the two glasses of wine with lunch had combined to make Meg lazier and more mellow than she’d felt in ages. She was stretched across two pillows near the fireplace, letting her mind drift, while Huntington Kendall IV, sober now and motivated, worked on a series of sketches of her.

  She covered her mouth and yawned, then started to stretch.

  “Don’t move!” Hunt ordered. “I’m trying to capture that line across your shoulders.”

  “Slave driver,” she muttered, returning to her original pose. Normally she hated being captured on film or canvas but she was far too lazy right now to care.

  They’d spent the morning inspecting Hunt’s sculptures, which were scattered around the property. The two figures she’d spotted last night near the back door were actually life-size plaster-cast sculptures, just two of the fourteen that perched on the limbs of sturdy oaks, sat behind the wheel of an abandoned Dodge, and peeped into uncurtained windows. Hunt, unmarried and likely to remain so, had decided to populate an entire town with the children of his imagination, and these fourteen offspring were the beginning of the project. At Anna’s request, Patrick had invited Hunt to remain at Lakeland an additional two weeks in order to complete this segment of his work. His talent was quirky and undeniably brilliant, and despite their rather unconventional meeting, Meg found she liked the man as much as she admired the artist.

  Now he wanted to add Meg to his “family,” and she was too lazy and content at the moment to protest.

  “You’re moving again,” he said, tearing a sheet of paper from his drawing pad and crumpling it up. “How can I capture the proportions if you keep moving?”

  “Picasso found a way,” she said, giving in this time to the urge to stretch her long arms skyward.

  Hunt favored her with one of his lopsided grins. “And you see the way his models ended up. Is that how you want to be immortalized?”

  She grinned back at him. “You’re not Picasso yet.”

  He began to sketch again. “And you’re hardly an artist’s model. Now stay still, damn it.”

  She resumed her position, then winced.

  “What’s wrong now?”

  She sat up and rubbed the back of her neck. “My muscles are all bunched up.”

  He put down his sketch pad and vine of charcoal and went to her side. “Lie on your stomach,” he said, flipping her over before she could react.

  “What are you going to do?” She tried to look back over her shoulder but the painful muscle stopped her.

  “Not to worry. It’s an old Hindu method.”

  He knelt over her, one knee on either side of her hips, and began to pound and pull at the muscles along her shoulders and neck. At first it was painful, but suddenly the pain gave way to relief and then relief quickly slid into pleasure.

  “Oh, God, that’s wonderful,” she said, burying her face in the fire-warmed carpet. “I’ve never felt so good.

  Across the room a man cleared his throat. “Hate to interrupt this fascinating scene. I tried knocking, but you both were—“ he paused for dramatic effect “—otherwise occupied.”

  “Joe!” Meg reacted as if she'd been hit with a cattle prod. She bolted upright, knocking skinny Huntington on his butt. “Hunt was just massaging away a muscle cramp for me.”

  Joe’s dark brows were knotted in a borderline scowl. His gaze went from Meg to Huntington and back again. It was clear he didn’t believe a word she said. “I would’ve knocked again, but—“

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Huntington, who had already picked up on the tension between herself and Joe, unfolded his lanky limbs and stood up. He towered over Joe, whose muscular body was more compact. “I’m Huntington Kendall IV.”

  Hunt extended a bony hand to Joe, and Meg watched Joe hesitate before shaking it.

  “Joe Alessio.” He tore his gaze away from Meg. “You’re the sculptor who’s staying an extra week.”

  Huntington nodded.

  “How did you know about that?” Meg asked, pulling her hair away from her face and quickly braiding it. “I was taken by surprise last night.”

  “So I heard,” Joe drawled. “Let’s just say having the police call Patrick about a burglary jogged his memory.” Joe took out a cigarette and sat down on the couch near the fireplace.

  “Too bad,” Huntington replied, gathering up his sketch pad and loose vines of charcoal. “And here I was hoping my artistic reputation had preceded me.”

  Joe chuckled. It was obvious he was beginning to recalculate the situation as his
gaze was drawn again to the blue eye shadow and matching jumpsuit Hunt was sporting.

  “It may have,” Joe said more easily, “but I don’t keep up on new artists the way I should.”

  “You won’t believe some of the sculptures Hunt’s done,” Meg said, relieved that the situation had lost its crackling tension. “That’s why I called the cops last night. I thought they were real.”

  Hunt groaned and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Dear girl, I wish you’d stop calling them sculptures. They’re alternative citizens of an imaginary village.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said.

  “Please do.” Hunt walked toward the front door. “I can tell I’m not going to finish the preliminary on you this afternoon, Margarita.” He brushed some dust from the gilt frame of a tiny Renoir sketch near the piano. “But do let me borrow you for an hour tonight.”

  Meg nodded. The young artist was a force that couldn’t be denied.

  “And you,” Hunt continued, looking at Joe, “I’d love to do a few studies of you. I need a macho type for my civil-unrest tableau.”

  Joe looked amused but not all that interested. “I’ll think about it.”

  Hunt flashed them his loony smile, rapped his knuckles on the glossy molding around the door, and disappeared down the hallway.

  As soon as they heard the heavy front door swing shut, Joe let out a loud laugh. “Is he for real?” he asked, stubbing out his cigarette in an ashtray on the small end table. “He reminds me of a cross between the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz and Cyndi Lauper.”

  “Don’t be too quick to judge, Alessio. His work is brilliant.”

  “An eccentric genius?”

  “He just might be, if he gets the chance.”

  Joe reached for another cigarette, then hesitated. “Do you mind?”

  “Does it matter? You seem to smoke the way the rest of us breathe. I don’t think you could do without.”

  “I could smoke in the bathroom,” he said, that delightfully wicked grin she remembered flashing across his face.

  She stood up and straightened her soft apricot sweater over her faded jeans. “You’d do that?”

  “If it bothers you, yeah. Besides, guilty pleasures are the best kind.”

  “Far be it from me to deny you your guilty pleasures,” she said, “but since this is your house, too, I don’t think I have the right to forbid you to smoke.”

  “Maybe what we need are some ground rules.” Joe stood up and approached her. He was slightly taller than she remembered, but of course this time she was in bare feet, not heels. She couldn’t help it, but her eyes lingered on the biceps straining the sleeves of his black sweater and danced appreciatively over the way his jeans rode low on his hips. He carried himself with the same barely contained energy the men in his novels possessed and Meg found herself suddenly mixing fantasy and reality.

  “Ground rules,” she said, yanking herself back to the subject at hand. “I think ground rules are a great idea.”

  They stared at each other for a long moment.

  “Okay, I’ll start,” Meg said. “If you could limit your cigarettes to one an hour when we’re together, I think I could handle it.”

  “Agreed," he said. "We start work at nine and end at three.”

  “With a break for lunch,” Meg said.

  “No break. We work straight through.”

  “Sorry, no deal. I want my lunch.”

  “So how about a working lunch. I need my evenings free.”

  “For what?” she asked, unable to control her curiosity. “You’ve only been in town half an hour. You can’t possibly have hooked up with someone already.”

  “I write in the evenings.”

  "Well, I’m a morning person. I start fading around nine p.m. I guess I can always use the late afternoon to let Hunt do his preliminary sketches.”

  “There’s one more thing,” he said.

  “Shared kitchen privileges? Who makes morning coffee? Who files and who types?”

  “I don’t want him calling you Margarita.”

  “It’s my name,” she said, trying to ignore the way pleasure was snaking through her body. “What’s he supposed to call me?”

  “Meg, Maggie, Margie—anything. Just not Margarita.”

  “Patrick calls me Margarita,” she said, enjoying herself more than she would have thought possible. “Do you want me to tell him to stop, too?”

  “Yes.” Joe’s voice was calm and certain.

  “You have to admit this is a weird request, Joe.” She paused, observing him closely. “Why should I ask that of them when it doesn’t bother me at all?”

  A muscle at the side of his neck twitched. “As a favor to me.”

  “Sorry.” She shook her braid free until her hair spilled over her shoulders. “That’s not good enough.”

  He stepped closer and rested his hands lightly on her shoulders, the palms covering her straight silky hair. He smelled slightly of cigarette smoke, which she didn’t like, but it was overpowered by the clean, fresh smell of his skin, which she did like. Probably too much. “Margarita is a beautiful name and I want to be the only one who calls you that.”

  Heat, sudden and powerful, rose from her feet to her scalp. “I’ve never liked the name myself.”

  He drew his fingers through her hair, almost but not quite grazing her cheek. “It suits you.”

  She was lost, and she knew it. He exuded such incredible intensity, such strong sexual magnetism, that she nearly reached for the phone to call Elysse and tell her the fifty dollars was hers.

  “Are you always this pushy?” she managed finally.

  “When I see something I want, I go for it. If that’s being pushy, then yeah, I am.”

  “I don’t like being pushed. It brings out the rebel in me.”

  “I’ll remember that.” His hands still rested on her shoulders. The sensation, added to the wine she’d had at lunch, made it hard to think clearly. "I'll do it on one condition,” she managed.

  “Which is?”

  “That I can call you Angelique.”

  He started to laugh and then she followed and whatever magic had been building between them disappeared.

  Just in time.

  “So when’s lunch around here?” he asked.

  “Whenever you want to make it,” she shot back, enjoying the look of surprise on his face.

  “So I get stuck with lunch detail?”

  “I’m the morning person, remember? I'll handle breakfast. Coffee, eggs, bacon, pancakes, I can do it all.+”

  Joe winced as she followed him into the kitchen. “How about black coffee and an extra hour sleep.”

  She took a seat at the enormous maple table in the center of the room and watched as he opened the fridge and pulled out ham and Swiss their invisible housekeeper had thoughtfully provided for them.

  “Were you always a morning type?” he asked as he hunted around in the fridge once more and pulled out a loaf of rye bread wrapped in plastic. “Most of the artistic types I know are nightowls.”

  “I’m not an artistic type any longer,” she said easily. “Too bad.” He dropped all the goodies in the middle of the counter. “I hate to see talent being wasted.”

  She met his eyes. “So do I.”

  “So why the limo?” He laid the bread out on the cutting board and started to assemble the sandwiches.

  Meg reached over and snagged a piece of Swiss off the top of the stack. “Would you believe I have a rare talent for driving?”

  “Not after talking to Patrick.”

  “No accidents, no moving violations, just one parking ticket that was totally unjustified.”

  He spread mustard on a slice of rye, slapped it down on top of a sandwich stack, then pushed the whole thing toward Meg. “Patrick said you won the Institute of Photography’s Rising Star Award two years running.”

  “Patrick has a big mouth,” she mumbled swallowing a bite of food, then reaching across the table for more mustard.
“That’s really not terribly important news.”

  Joe finished his first sandwich then began to build another. “In the framework of world events, no,” he said, “but it is important to the history we’ll be putting together.”

  Meg got up for milk. “A footnote, maybe. Not much more than that.”

  “You had a hell of a lot going for you, Margarita. Why’d you let it all slip away?”

  “I didn’t let it slip away.” She sat back down at the table, forgetting the glass of milk on the counter. “I made a decision to stop. That’s all.”

  “Why stop before you’ve begun?” The open curiosity in his voice grated on her. “You win two contests, and you call it quits?”

  “Listen, Joe, my best friend’s a psychologist. I don’t need any free-lance therapy, if you don’t mind.”

  He didn’t back off. “Maybe it was growing up comfortable. I have a theory that the more you have as a kid, the less you achieve as an adult.”

  “I don’t think the political Kennedy family would agree with that analysis. They could almost be classified as overachievers.”

  “Not the new generation,” he said, undaunted. “Maybe if you’d had it tougher as a kid—“

  “Maybe you should mind your own business.” Meg thought of the lonely days and nights growing up in her sister’s shadow. A pleasant two-family home on a pleasant tree-lined street hadn’t come close to making up for the love she craved. She bit into her sandwich and pretended it was Joe’s throat. “Where’s your ambition, Angelique? Could there be a reason you hide behind so many pseudonyms?”

  #

  Bingo.

  The second Meg’s words popped out, Joe knew she’d won the round, hands down. First he asked her if he could call her Margarita; then he tried unlicensed psychoanalysis. If he kept letting his curiosity, both personal and professional, get the better of him, this month would turn out a disaster.

  He shut up and focused his intensity on lunch but she wasn't finished with him yet.

  “You realize if we keep up like this, it’s never going to work.” She put it out there as a statement, not an accusation.