by Kimball Lee
“Maddie, I’m crazy about you and more than that even, it’s happened fast between us, but you’re safe with me. Your heart is safe, and you can say whatever you need to say without worrying that it will change things.”
“Okay then, here goes… Charlotte. Physically, Charlotte and your mother are similar, like they were touched by the God’s with this beauty that the rest of us mortals can only admire from afar,” she said, and she watched a look of pain cross his face. It was gone in an instant, and he smiled and kissed her passionately, fanning the flame of lust that could burn Maddie into his soul.
They rarely left the guest house while they were on the island. Once they went to a secluded cove to snorkel, and they ended up fucking in the sand. Then he moved down her body and tasted the salt of the sea mixed with the sweet taste of her pussy, and when they returned to the resort they were sunburned and satisfied.
*
“I want you to come with me to California,” Bly said, as he wandered through Maddie’s flat in London.
The apartment was cold, and she’d asked him to light a fire in the bedroom fireplace, but he wanted to get back on the jet and fly away from the dreary, freezing rain. He held a match to a pile of logs, then looked around while she was busy sorting through her mail and watering comatose pot-plants. There were pictures of her in war-torn countries, brown, bleak, inhospitable looking cities. She was smiling in every one of them, her blonde hair fell gently over one eye, or her head was tossed back in laughter. In most of them she knelt beside ragged, dirty-faced children, her hand ruffling their hair. In one she held a baby while an old woman cried over the broken body of a bloodied soldier at her feet.
“Hey,” she said, leaning in the doorway, “quite a reality check, huh? London in winter after our island paradise.”
He stood and placed his hands on either side of her against the door and she wondered how she could already be so deeply in love with him.
“I love you,” he said, “I’m in love with you, Maddie. Everything about you, and I know it’s too soon and you think I’m on the rebound, but that’s not it at all. I love your face and your heart and your body and your humor…”
“Okay,” she said, lifting her mouth to his, as tears ran down her cheeks, “I’ll go to California with you, I’ll go to the moon with you, I’ll go anywhere you want to take me.”
*
Maddie had always heard how the notoriously wealthy lived their lives in Paris, but surely Evangeline Bly put a whole new spin on the concept. Her townhouse on the Avenue Foch was what the French referred to as “ancien.” Meaning it was old, as in two or three hundred years old, as well as huge, and scandalously decadent. She couldn’t imagine how many rooms there were in the lavish residence. When she told Alex she was afraid to sit on the magnificently embroidered duvet in their bedroom, he pushed her onto it and made love to her, and the evidence of their love left a stain.
“I’ll know not to marvel over the fine furnishings in your mother’s townhouse from now on, and by the way, this “townhouse” is five stories high and enormous!” she said, when they lay side by side, sweaty and panting.
“Was it really that awful?” he asked, smiling and pulling her up to stand and look out the tall, narrow French doors at the view of Paris.
“It was really unbelievable, and I’m kind of picturing that gilded daybed in the first floor library now,” she said, and truth be known, she felt as she was suddenly living in a fairytale.
She was with Alexander Bly, and he loved her and she wanted to live happily ever after with him, or never wake up if she was dreaming. They made love, “fucked,” as he liked to call it, because he said it was too intense to call it by any other word. They fucked a lot, and she came a lot, and she was so stupidly in love with him, that she didn’t care about her career or world peace or anything accept the smell and taste and feel of him.
Once in a while, when Maddie watched his sleeping face, so handsome that it took her breath away, she wondered if he still dreamed of Charlotte. They were both so beautiful, Alex and Charlotte, so implausibly attractive, as if they were two parts of a single being. She worried that someday Charlotte would look at Alexander Bly and realize she belonged with him.
“The daybed was made for Louis the fourteenth or fifteenth, I can’t keep my mother’s furniture sorted out in my head,” he said, grinning at her, as they continued to admire the city, “but I’d definitely be willing to give it a try with you. It doesn’t look very comfortable or sturdy and if it breaks beneath us and scars that sweet ass of yours, I’ll never forgive my mother for buying rickety antiques.”
“Shut up,” she said, smiling and kissing him and feeling his heart beat against her heart, and sinking with him onto the priceless rug.
*
“Something’s different about West,” Maddie said later, after they’d fucked on the Aubusson rug, then dressed and gone out to dinner at a restaurant with Evangeline, “did you notice?”
“He’s sleeping with her and I don’t want to talk about it,” Bly said in a tone she hadn’t heard him use before, he sounded both angry and resigned.
“Alright,” she said, as they walked along the sparkling streets of Paris, “what do you want to talk about?”
“Let’s go on to San Diego, honestly, I’ve had enough of Europe. I need to get back to work, of course I don’t actually have to go to work, because that’s the power of the internet. Alexander Bly doesn’t ever to have to show up anymore, with just the tap of my finger on a screen, billions of dollars continue to pour in, and I’m basically useless,” he said, as he stood at the base of the Arc de Triomphe and buried his face in her hair as she hugged him.
“What is it really, Alex? Tell me, please.”
“I love you, and I haven’t been very lucky in love and you’ve never said… how you feel about me,” he said, his voice falling to a whisper at the end of the sentence.
She looked up at him, tall and handsome with that insanely sexy dimple in his chin and his incomparable blue-green eyes, and she couldn’t believe he didn’t know.
“I love you. Of course, I love you, I don’t mean of course like I have to, but I do. I’m in love you, I thought you already knew,” she rambled on in her very ‘Maddie’ sort of way, and he began to smile and even laugh as he kissed her.
“Enough to marry me?” he asked, holding up a small box from his coat pocket. He opened the box and on a cushion of velvet, a brilliant canary diamond sparkled, catching and reflecting the lights along Champs Elysees. He plucked the ring from the box and held it in front of him, waiting for her answer.
“Yes, enough to marry you as many times as you ask me to. I love you Alexander Bly, more than you can imagine. Now let’s go home to America because you’re needed there to run your business, and I need for you to meet my parents, and my mother is going lose her mind over you!” she said, and he slipped the ring on her finger and they knew it was meant to be because it was a perfect fit.
*
“So, I’m giving you my resignation, but I have someone to take my place. I know you’ll like him and he’ll do a great job, no hard feelings, Alex, please?” West was standing in the study near Evangeline’s bedroom and Bly was tapping his foot wishing he was anywhere else in the world.
“I don’t suppose you’ll need a job reference, looks like you’ve found someone to “work for,” Bly said, and gave West a hard look.
“She’s ten years older than I am, Alex, it’s not that much. You can only see her as your mother, but there’s so much more to her than that. I love her, if it makes any difference,” West said, and as Evangeline walked through the room and sat gazing coolly out the window, Bly watched West’s eyes come to rest on her, and he could tell that it was damn well true.
It was also true that his mother was elegant and graceful and unreasonably beautiful… just like Charlotte. So how could he blame West for being a victim of love.
CHAPTER SIX
“I know I don’t want to live
in that house,” Charlotte said, as they drove from New Orleans to Pass Christian.
Her father had given her the key to the grand old house and a cashier’s check for a stupefying amount of money. The key and the check were from the law firm that had mishandled her grandmother’s estate. JP and Amanda met them at the Royal Sonesta in the French Quarter the night before, and Charlotte had gotten falling down drunk at the Old Absinthe House. Charlotte recounted every detail of her trip to the Crescent City with her mother years before. She had cried several times and Amanda had drunkenly cried with her, until their husbands finally put them both to bed and went back to the bar.
It was the first week in April and the hour long drive was straight out of a postcard for the Old South. Dogwood trees were in riotous bloom, along with magnolias, camellias, gardenias and all manner of flowering vines. Confederate jasmine, wisteria, Lady Banks roses, morning glories and trumpet vines tangled in trees and the scent was mixed with the mysterious smell of the swamps and bayous. Charlotte had insisted on a convertible from the rental car agency, and Finn drove while she pointed out every type of native vegetation and made them all inhale the heady aroma of her childhood.
The car’s tires crunched on the long gravel driveway, and they looked up with wonder at the willow trees arching overhead. The old trees were so dense they blocked out the sky, and so heavy with Spanish moss, Finn and JP could reach up and grab handfuls. When the McCall house came into view, Charlotte began to cry again.
Everything was just as she remembered from the short time she’d spent there as a thirteen year old. The historic society had maintained every pristine inch of the house, and it looked as if her smartly dressed and bejeweled grandmother might walk right up at any minute and slap Charlotte in the face.
“Old bitch, fucking cold-hearted, uptight asshole, close-minded whore…” Charlotte shouted, as she tried to stop her hand from shaking and get the key in the lock.
“Here you go my love, let me do that and you shout to the heavens about the cock-sucking witch,” Finn said calmly, taking the key from her and holding her against him with one arm as he opened the door.
She laughed then, and Amanda laughed with her, and then JP, and finally Finn. Charlotte stumbled into the living room and lay across the sofa she was laughing so hard, and the others followed and fell into chairs and clutched their sides until the insanity burned itself out.
“I need a drink!” JP said in the quiet moments that followed their delirious laughter, “I’m going to find a liquor store, anybody want anything?”
“You’re a fucking drunk, John Paul,” Charlotte shouted as he walked toward the door.
“I know, what can I get for you?” he asked, looking back at the little group.
“Vodka, tonic, and lime,” Charlotte and Amanda said at the same time.
“So what are you going do with this old place, I mean, it’s gorgeous but its huge and in the middle of nowhere,” Amanda asked, when JP had returned from the liquor store and they walked down to the Gulf, drinks in hand.
“Her father would like for us to live here, he’s moving back to New Orleans at the end of the year and he doesn’t want to be away from Atticus,” Finn said.
“Oh my God! This sand is like powder, it feels amazing,” Amanda said. “Would you really leave England?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, being here does make me miss living in the states. Then I picture Atti in the little English schoolboy uniform someday, you know, speaking with an irresistible British accent like his daddy,” Charlotte said as they walked along on the soft sand with the warm Gulf washing over their feet.
“I’m pretty sure the kid will pick up the accent from Shakespeare over there,” JP said, nodding toward Finn. “Amanda and I are settled into a great little house in La Jolla, we think you should come home. Come back to San Diego, I’ve already started my own law firm representing Veterans with disability claims. We always said that’s what we’d do, Finn, when we quit the covert ops shit, come on, we’ll be partners.”
“We’ll talk,” Finn said, “Charlotte and I will talk it over, right my love?”
“What about your mother?” Charlotte asked, “Would she want to move back here? Atticus couldn’t live without her.”
“I’m certain she’d love to be near my sisters again,” Finn said. “Okay, back to the McCall house, we were tossing around the idea of a bed and breakfast. I think it’s a good idea, we can hire someone to run it and we can come visit in the summers, and let Atticus dig his toes into southern soil.”
“A bed and breakfast and a great venue for weddings and special events!” Amanda yelled, stopping dead in her tracks and grabbing hold of Charlotte. “Weddings and baby showers and debutante bullshit, and I know just who can have their wedding here!”
They went into Pass Christian and bought sheets and towels at Bed Bath and Beyond, then stopped for dinner at the Half Shell Oyster Bar. They ate and drank and Amanda filled them in on Bly’s love life.
She said the couple was blissfully happy, Bly had proposed when they stopped off in Paris to see Evangeline, before returning to California. Maddie was living with Bly now, and she and her mother had the entire wedding planned except for the location. They were looking for the perfect spot somewhere between northern Florida and southern California, and the McCall house in Pass Christian was it! By the way, she said, West was no longer working for her brother, Billy Kipling had taken over his job when West resigned. West was living in Paris with her mother and they were obviously doing the wild thing twenty-four-seven. Amanda rolled her eyes and said Bly had been livid over the whole thing and he’d acted like a total asshole at first.
“At first?” Finn asked.
“Don’t go into it, Amanda,” JP said, as they left the oyster bar and started back to the house.
“So Bly has issues with Evangeline sleeping with his former bodyguard, that’s fairly archaic,” Charlotte said.
“I know,” Amanda said, “but Mother said he finally came around because he and West had a big heart to heart. West basically admitted that he’s been desperately in love with our Mother for years and Alex should certainly understand what that’s like… oh shit.”
*
Finn and Charlotte put sheets on an antique canopy bed in one of the guestrooms that faced the Gulf. They’d opened the doors to let the salt-breeze in and the ghosts out. Charlotte handed a bag of new linens to JP and Amanda and told them to pick any room they wanted, but she was not going to sleep with the past. She wouldn’t sleep in her grandmother’s bed or Sally’s room or the room filled with the sports trophies and memorabilia of the boy who’d died at fourteen.
When they were snug in the canopy bed, listening to the waves on the beach below the back verandah, Finn pulled her to him and looked into her eyes.
“I can live with him loving you, but just barely,” he said.
“My mother’s family was Catholic,” Charlotte said softly, after she kissed his ravishing mouth and settled against his smoothly muscled shoulder. “She raised me to believe in the power of prayer and the truths in the bible and to make my own decisions about Adam and Eve and the serpent and stories such as that. I used to need to have sex when I was mad and the adrenalin was pumping, I needed sex as a release. With you I want to have sex in any mood, happy, sad, mad, whatever. I want sex and I need it, too, and it completes me because you’re my love as well as my lover. I think God really did take a rib from Adam to make Eve, and when the right woman and the right man find each other, it’s like finding their missing part. I’m going about this in a round about way, but I want you to know that the first time you touched me, that must have been how it was for the first man and woman. That first shock of human contact, the discovery of pure joy, and I think when it’s right, the thrill doesn’t ever go away.”
“My love my love,” he whispered, his hand smoothing her hair as she lay against him, and they could feel each other smiling in the dark as their bodies found just where they belon
ged.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Bly’s sprawling mansion was coming to life, Maddie had always wanted to own a dog but traveling for work had kept her from it. She looked at every website that Bly showed her, urging her to pick a Labrador or Golden Retriever or even a miniature dachshund. When the call finally came from the Border Collie rescue shelter, she was ecstatic, and she could barely sit still as they drove to pick up the pair of abandoned dogs. They drove the Range Rover that Bly had given Maddie when she moved in with him, and as they neared the rescue shelter, she was almost as excited as if she was going to have a baby.
It worried her, that she hadn’t become pregnant. They both wanted children, and although their wedding wasn’t until June and it was only April, they weren’t using any form of birth control. They were never careful, and they hadn’t been apart since New Year’s Eve.
Maddie shook the silent fear from her mind, it had only been a few months after all, and she concentrated on the lively dogs that were waiting for them. Curly and Mo were good names they decided, even though the dog’s hair was sleek black and white. Curly was a female and a little older than Mo, and Maddie thought they would have had adorable puppies one day, but it was policy at animal rescue that they were spayed and neutered.
Bly felt sorry for them at first, that someone had just gotten tired of the dogs and put them up for adoption. His mother had Standard Poodles for years and even when she didn’t have time for him or Amanda, she’d been devoted to Fifi and Gigi and all the other dogs who followed.
After the dogs settled into their new home, Bly and Maddie took them walking on the beach below the mansion every day. They threw tennis balls and Frisbees for the dogs to fetch, and they were incredibly smart and loving. Bly found himself looking forward to their enthusiastic greeting whenever he walked through the door. It always made him smile, whether he’d stepped outside for ten minutes or had been gone all day, they were just as happy to see him.