by Sandra Field
Travis wasn’t safe.
She pulled on her nightgown and prowled around the room, picking up some of the heavy marble statuettes and putting them down again. Why was a bedroom in a fake medieval castle decorated with naked Greek goddesses, an Elizabethan four-poster and imitation Louis XIV chairs? Travis was right. Too much hard cash and too little restraint.
She was thinking about Travis again. As the soft fabric of her gown brushed her nipples, she shivered, wondering what it would be like were he to touch her breasts. His fingers were long and lean, and his strength and lightning-swift reactions she’d already experienced. When had she ever felt such helpless and overwhelming hunger for a man’s touch?
Never. She’d been too busy keeping each and every man she met at a distance. So why didn’t that work with Travis?
With an impatient sigh, Julie put a simpering marble nymph back on the mantel of the Victorian tile fireplace. She’d eaten too much, that was her problem; and her brain was as restless as a squirrel in a cage. She carefully opened the glass doors to the balcony, which was screened with lush Virginia creeper and scented with the climbing roses espaliered below her window. What had Corinne called them? Evangeline?
The soft swish of waves on the shore soothed her ears; a delicate crescent moon was couched on an array of sparkling stars. And then she heard something else: the scrape of chairs on flagstone, and voices. All too familiar voices coming from the patio two stories down. Her body tensed.
“I fail to understand why you didn’t warn us you were coming,” Charles said furiously.
“Because I knew you’d tell me to stay away,” Travis said.
“You’d have been right. Don’t you realize that tomorrow night all my friends will be here? That we’ll have to make up some kind of story to account for your presence?”
“Tell them the truth, Dad. That I’ve come home to make peace with you.”
“You must see that your father couldn’t possibly do that,” Corinne interposed. “You abandoned us all eighteen years ago, Travis. You can’t expect to walk in as though nothing’s happened.”
“Abandonment can go two ways, Corinne.”
“Nonsense! You always had a home here.”
“The minute my mother died, I was parceled off to boarding school. I wasn’t even allowed back on the island the first two summers.”
“That was before my time,” Corinne said fastidiously.
“Boarding school was the best place for you,” Charles snapped. “You never liked the Boston house. And out here you were running wild. Spending day after day on the cliffs watching seagulls when you should have been playing football.”
“Stick to the facts. You didn’t want me around.”
“Boarding school made a man out of you.”
“Was that what it did? So why did you kick me out of the house when I turned sixteen?”
“You know the answer to that—you’d smeared my name in all the papers, made a laughingstock out of me. And then to cap it all you stole the family ring.” Charles’s voice roughened. “Where is that ring, Travis? Did you sell it?”
“I never took it.”
“It disappeared the same night you did… I’ve never forgiven you for stealing it like a common thief.”
“If you knew me at all, Dad, you’d know that I might stab you in the chest, but never in the back. It’s not the way I operate.”
Brent said smoothly, “So your opportune arrival this evening doesn’t have anything to do with the lawyers who are going to rewrite Dad’s will in the next couple of weeks?”
There was a small, deadly silence. Julie held herself painfully still, knowing she shouldn’t be listening, afraid that if she retreated to her room, they’d hear her. “No,” Travis rapped. “This is the first I’ve heard of it. I don’t need Dad’s money, I’ve got my own.”
“What you earn as a doctor?” Brent mocked. “Come off it, brother dear—we’re talking big bucks here.”
“Are you forgetting I inherited my share of Grandad’s money when I turned thirty? You’ll do the same, Brent. Or can’t you wait that long?”
Corinne said sharply, “Stop it, you two! This has gone on long enough. You’ve come back, Travis, but in view of all you’ve done, reconciliation is impossible. You must leave in the morning. I’ll order the launch first thing after breakfast.”
“No, Corinne,” Travis said, so quietly Julie had to strain to hear him.
“Of course you must leave!” Charles blustered.
“I’ll make that unanimous,” Brent said lazily.
Travis said evenly, “I left when I was just a kid. Barely sixteen. I’m thirty-four now, and I’ve changed. I don’t want your money, Dad, I never did. But I do want my family back. You back. It’s that simple.”
“You ran away,” Charles fumed. “For six weeks we didn’t even know if you were alive or dead. And you took the ring with you.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch. But I was young, and just as headstrong as my father. As for the ring, all I can say is that I never touched it. For heaven’s sake, Dad, I knew what that ring meant to you.”
“You trashed me in the press.”
“You were hiring illegal immigrants in your factories and paying them a pittance,” Travis said, exasperated. “I spoke to you about it, begged you to increase their wages and approach immigration so they could get their papers. But you refused. So yes, I went to the press. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You’d do it again, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d find some other way of dealing with it now.”
“You haven’t really changed,” Charles said in a hard voice.
“The past is the past. Can’t we let it go?”
“Corinne’s right… you must leave in the morning.”
“Unless you’re prepared to set Bertram and Oliver on me, I’m staying,” Travis said with a lightness that didn’t quite ring true.
A chair was pushed back. Corinne said briskly, “Why don’t we all sleep on it? I’m sure in the morning you’ll have reconsidered, Travis, and see our point of view. Are you coming, Charles? Bertram will clean up. Good night, Brent.”
“Good night, Dad,” Travis said.
“Humph,” said Charles. The patio door closed with a decisive click.
“In disgrace again, Travis,” Brent said lightly. “Just like old times.”
“What did you do with the ring, Brent?”
Brent hesitated just too long. “Nothing!”
“Somebody took the ring, and it wasn’t me. That leaves you. Did you hide it somewhere? Come on, you were only ten. No one’s going to hold it against you after all these years.”
“It won’t wash, Travis. Why don’t you just confess? Who knows, Dad might even forgive you.”
“He loved that ring. Tell me where it is.”
“Lay off,” Brent said in a furious whisper. “And lay off Julie as well. She’s my date, not yours.”
“I don’t know Julie very well, but I do know one thing— she’s got a mind of her own. Why don’t we let her decide whose date she is?”
“Stay out of my way—I’m telling you!”
“I don’t take orders kindly. Especially from you… good night, Brent.”
Again Julie heard the soft swish of the patio door. Then, making her jump, a glass suddenly shattered, as though Brent had hurled it against the stone wall. A chair clattered to the floor. Once again, the door clicked shut.
She took a long, shaky breath. How was she ever going to behave tomorrow as though ignorant of all she’d overheard? No wonder eavesdropping wasn’t recommended.
She now knew why Travis had left the island, and why he hadn’t been welcomed home. After the public exposure of his father’s labor practices and a stolen heirloom ring it was little wonder his family wasn’t embracing him.
But her mind seethed with other images: a tousle-haired boy watching the gulls soar by the cliffs. The same boy exiled to boarding school and not allowed ba
ck to his island home for two long years. Tears pricked at the back of her eyes.
Oliver and Bertram, she’d be willing to bet, didn’t believe Travis had stolen the family ring. But if he hadn’t, who had? Brent?
She gave a heavy sigh. Bed. That’s what she needed. Bed and a good night’s sleep.
Would she wake in the morning to find that Travis had reconsidered? And once again had left the island?
Eventually Julie did fall asleep. She dreamed about Travis, first that they were driving full speed on a gravel road to an island where they would dig for hidden treasure, gold rings and rusty, iron-studded suits of armor; and then, abruptly, that they were making impassioned love on a blanket of roses called Evangeline. The dream slid into wakefulness, into a flicker of candlelight and a man’s hand fumbling for her breast. Travis, she thought in a flood of delight, and turned to face him, opening her eyes.
Travis didn’t have blond hair.
It wasn’t Travis. It was Brent.
She shoved herself backward in the bed, hit her wrist on one of the four posts and tumbled off the edge in a welter of sheets. Frantically she struggled to extricate herself. “For Pete’s sake, Julie,” Brent hissed, “what are you trying to do? Wake the entire household?”
She tugged at her nightgown, covering her breasts. “Get out of here—right now.”
He rolled off the other side of the bed as she scrambled to her feet; he was bare-chested, she noticed with the small part of her brain that appeared to be working. “How did you get in?” she demanded. “I locked the door.”
“Bertram keeps a set of spare keys in the pantry.”
“I locked it for a reason,” she blazed; after all the stresses of the evening before, it felt very liberating to lose her temper. “I’m not your lover. I never have been and I never will be.”
“You’re old enough to know the score, Julie. Why do you think I invited you here for the weekend?”
Travis’s reasoning exactly. She told the exact truth. “Because I’d told you how homesick I get for the ocean.”
“Sure,” he jeered, “your little miss naive act.”
“It’s no act. I don’t do casual sex. Maybe you should have checked that out before inviting me out here.”
“So you’re all come-on and no delivery.”
In a cold fury she said, “I haven’t encouraged you in any way to think that I’d get into bed with you.”
“That dress you had on when you got here, all bare shoulders and cleavage—you don’t call that a come-on?”
“It’s a perfectly ordinary sundress and why are we standing here in the middle of the night discussing my wardrobe?” She grabbed the nearest marble statue, a particularly nubile Aphrodite. “Get out of here, Brent, or I’ll scream the place down. I have very good lungs, believe me.”
“So is it Travis you want?”
“I don’t want either one of you! Head for the door.” For a moment he hesitated, the muscles bunched in his arms. She tensed, wondering if she’d have the nerve to hit him with a solid marble goddess; to her great relief, he took a couple of steps away from the bed.
“What a little Puritan you are.”
“Out,” she said.
He sauntered over to the chair, picked up his shirt and crossed the room. “Just stay out of my way for the rest of the weekend,” he said.
“You haven’t got a worry in the world.” All she could think of was how he’d entered her room while she was asleep and watched her, leisurely taking off his shirt in the meantime. It made her feel dirty all over.
As the door closed softly behind him, Julie let out her breath in a ragged sigh. There was no point in locking it. Grunting with effort, she dragged the cedar chest from the foot of her bed until it was lodged against the panels, and sat down hard. Now that Brent was gone, she was trembling with delayed reaction.
She’d find Oliver in the morning and go back to the mainland with him on his first crossing. She’d had her fill of the Strathem family! And that included Travis just as much as the rest of them.
She didn’t need seducing, even in her dreams.
CHAPTER FOUR
Travis was wide-awake at 5:00 a.m. He hadn’t been given his old room up in the tower, but rather one of the guest suites. Another message that he wasn’t welcome here, he thought with a wry twist of his lips. And another reason why he’d had one of the worst night’s sleep in his life.
But not the main reason. Not if he were honest.
His room was down the hall from Julie’s. He’d sat on a rock by the shore for a long time after that scene on the patio, then come up the back stairs to go to bed. In consequence, he’d had a ringside view of Brent leaving Julie’s bedroom in the middle of the night. His brother’s shirt had been casually looped over his arm, the night-lights gleaming on his bare chest.
Even now, several hours later, Travis’s gut clenched at the memory. Julie had been lying to him all along. Swearing that she belonged to herself, not to Brent. It had been an act. An impressively credible one, moreover. Her big green eyes had been so full of sincerity, had met his so unflinchingly… but she’d been deceiving him from the beginning.
He sat up in bed, running his fingers through his hair. Twenty-four hours ago he hadn’t even met Julie. Hadn’t known she existed. So why did it matter so much that she’d lied to him?
The thought of her in Brent’s arms, making love, was more than he could stomach. Jealousy, hot and lethal, surged through his veins. He wanted her for himself. Himself alone.
Not likely. If he didn’t believe in casual sex, even less did he believe in sharing his lover with another man.
Particularly when the man was his brother.
Corinne was right, Travis thought sickly. There was no point in him staying here. Charles still resented him for going to the media, an action Travis had regretted as he’d aged and gathered experience; there must have been a better way of dealing with that situation. But he’d been young and hotheaded and deeply angry with the man who’d exiled a little boy from the island he’d loved, and so he’d acted without thought of the consequences.
What really hurt was that Charles still thought him capable of stealing the family ring.
He’d take Corinne’s advice, and leave on the first boat this morning. Reconciliation was impossible, a pipe dream. He’d been a fool to come here, stirring up all the old animosities.
Restlessly Travis got up from the bed and stared out the window. The launch wouldn’t be leaving for another four hours. He could at least walk along the cliffs to the lighthouse before he left. Feeling minimally better for this decision, Travis hauled on his jeans and a T-shirt, and padded down the corridor in his socked feet, his sneakers in his hand. He let himself out the west door, taking a deep breath of the cool morning air. The grass was wet with dew, the birds singing as though this was the first morning of creation. After doing up his laces, Travis set off.
It took a full five minutes to get clear of the painstakingly tended gardens and lawns, another five to cross the equally artful natural garden, the trees carefully placed, the stream rerouted beneath a whimsical bridge. But finally he reached the edge of the forest, and the track that he’d blazed himself many years ago. Although it had grown over considerably, it was still passable.
When a redstart flitted through the maples, he stopped to admire its black and orange plumage. Next he startled a rabbit, then a red squirrel dropped a pinecone on his head. Laughing, he tossed it back up the tree. The squirrel scolded him indignantly; for the first time in hours, Travis felt like a human being. Shutting his mind to family and Julie alike, he strode on, feeling his muscles loosen and watching the rising sun spear through the thick spruce boughs.
A perfect day for his father’s party. Even if he himself wouldn’t be in attendance.
Fifteen minutes later Travis emerged at the brink of the granite cliffs on the offshore side of Manatuck. Bear Island, the next island beyond Manatuck, belonged to him, willed to him by his grandfa
ther. It, too, was very beautiful.
He might just build a cabin on it. Use it as a getaway when his job got too much for him. If he placed the cabin carefully, he wouldn’t even have to see Castlereigh.
He tramped along, gulls and kittiwakes swirling like tossed white papers over the turquoise sea. At the foot of the lighthouse that warned of the reefs further east, he threw himself down on the wet grass. How often had he lain here as a young boy, listening to the thunder of the surf?
He laced his fingers behind his head and closed his eyes. It wouldn’t have to be a very big cabin. A wharf would be essential; but there was a perfect natural harbour at the southwest end of the island, so that wouldn’t be a problem… mentally he started cataloging all the birdcalls he could hear, amused to discover that he hadn’t lost his old talent. Gradually his mind quietened. He was almost asleep when a new noise startled him, the snapping of twigs along the path. Remembering that occasionally a deer would land on Manatuck after swimming the channel, Travis twisted over onto his stomach.
It wasn’t a white-tailed deer that emerged into the clearing behind the lighthouse; it was Julie.
She was wearing bright pink shorts and a white shirt; she hadn’t seen him. As Travis surged to his feet, he watched her whirl, as startled as any deer.
“Travis, you frightened me—I wasn’t expecting to see anyone.” Then she smiled at him, a generous smile full of delight. “Isn’t it a glorious morning?”
All the emotions of the last twelve hours coalesced into a flame of rage. Travis crossed the wet grass, standing very close to her. “I’m surprised you’re up so early,” he grated. “After making love to Brent half the night.”
Her smile was wiped from her face; he could almost see her brain working. “You saw him leave my room,” she said in an unreadable voice.