Despair at how easily she’d fallen into the trap he’d laid dammed the words in her throat and she couldn’t finish. Couldn’t bring herself to admit what an utter fool she’d been. But she’d said enough to lead Fran to all the right conclusions.
“Are you telling me the two of you made love, Camille?”
“Not quite.” She bit her lip and cursed the tears stinging her eyes. “According to him, all we did was have sex. Unfortunately, I chose to read more into it than that. Silly me, huh?”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. I’ve seen the way he looks at you and I’d bet money that he’s not exactly…let’s see, how do I put this delicately? He’s not exactly unmoved by your charms. That ought to bring you some comfort.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Well, add it up for yourself, dearie! You’re the adoptive mother of his son, he wants to play an active role in his son’s life, and the pair of you are halfway in love with each other. If that doesn’t balance out to the ideal equation for a marriage of convenience, I don’t know what does!”
“You seem to forget that one part of the equation is already married to someone else.”
Fran blew out a frustrated breath. “It’s not that I’ve forgotten so much as I’m having a hard time believing it. Are you sure you didn’t misunderstand?”
“I know what I heard, and I know what I saw. He’s married, and he loves his wife.”
“You’re certain of that?”
Caught in the vicious treadmill of memory, the words she’d overheard echoed relentlessly inside her head.
I’ll sit with your wife…
I love you, Mike…
I love you, too, honey….
“Absolutely,” she said.
Three hours before, the sun had rung down the curtain for Kay in a great orange ball of splendor. Now, nothing but a carpet of more stars than he could count in a lifetime filled the sky. No mist crept up from the ocean to shroud him in privacy as he stared emptily out at the view; no sympathetic cloud shadowed the bright moon.
Not that he gave a damn who saw him or what they might think of a man slumped on a park bench, with only a plastic bag containing a dead woman’s personal effects for company. He was past caring about anything at all except the wicked waste of a life burnt out long before its time.
It was all very fine for the priest who’d administered the last rites to tell him that she’d found peace at last. He hadn’t been the one who’d stood by helpless to erase the fear in her eyes before she sank into final unconsciousness. Nor had he been the one she’d turned to at the last and begged, “Take care of my baby, Michael…promise me you will.”
He would, of course. But he didn’t fool himself that it was going to be easy. No one had been able to tell him how Camille had found her way into Kay’s room. Nor did it much matter beside the far greater issue of her having discovered the truth from someone other than himself.
Superimposed over his grief for Kay, the memory of Camille’s pained shock when she’d come face-to-face with him in the hospital corridor bedeviled him. What he wouldn’t have given for the right to take her in his arms and just hold her without any need for words.
Tomorrow, there were arrangements to be made—the tying off of all the loose ends still connecting Kay to a world where she no longer belonged. He’d take care of them first because there was no one else to do the job. Then, in a few days, when he had himself under better control, he’d go to Camille and find a way to atone for the hurt he’d dealt her, and at the same time try to honor his last promise to Kay.
It was the least he could do. Even though she’d died without his ever discovering why she’d cast him in the role of villainous husband, his anger had long since been swallowed up by pity. Her wrongdoing had caught up with her in the end and exacted a terrible price.
Once Jeremy and Nori were safely stashed in the Knowltons’ cottage up the coast, Camille waited, knowing it was a matter of time only before Michael showed up. She kept the gates closed, the security system armed, and for three days paced the house, steeling herself for the showdown. Rehearsing what she’d say. Promising herself she wouldn’t be swayed by anything he might throw at her: not by outrage or misery, and most of all not by sweet talk.
Then, just after ten on the morning of the fourth day, the intercom buzzed and her heart rate went into overdrive. But the closed-circuit television screen showed only the maintenance crew come to clean the pool. As soon as they left, she activated the remote lock to secure the gates again.
If there was to be a final confrontation, she intended to take charge of it from the outset and be ready for him. He’d caught her off guard for the last time. Or so she thought.
But he tricked her again, appearing so silently from the shrubbery surrounding the pool deck that she wasn’t even aware of his presence until his shadow fell across the open book in her lap.
“Before you raise the alarm, I come in peace,” he said, dropping into the chaise next to hers. “And if you’re wondering how I got past all that fancy electronic equipment undetected, I parked down the road and slipped through the gates on foot when that van left. I knew you wouldn’t let me in otherwise.”
He wore black denim jeans and a short-sleeved white shirt unbuttoned at the neck. His face looked thinner, giving cleaner emphasis to the hard line of his jaw. Furrows of fatigue radiated from the corners of his eyes. His mouth was curved with sorrow, and the sun glinted off a few threads of silver in the hair at his temples.
He looked so wretched, so utterly defeated, that she was reminded of a beautiful wounded angel condemned to a hell she couldn’t begin to imagine, and it was all she could do to remain impervious to his pain.
“Why wouldn’t I let you in?” she said, finding some solace in the fact that she didn’t sound a fraction as disconcerted as she felt. “I’m not afraid of you. If anything I pity you. Even a man of your shabby morals deserves a hearing, guilty though you are of the most contemptible deceit.”
“I doubt anything I have to say is going to cut much ice with you at this stage, Camille.”
“I doubt it, too. But you are the man who once told me confession is good for the soul, are you not?”
He sighed and looked around, his expression so wretched that despite everything he’d done, a twinge of pity stirred the cold ashes of the passion he’d once aroused in her. Before it took too firm a hold, she reminded herself that the hell he was in was of his own making and if she let him draw her into it, too, she deserved all the misery she’d undoubtedly reap.
Affecting an indifference she was far from feeling, she said, “Well? Is there anything you have to say, or shall I call the police and have you arrested for trespassing?”
If he’d come back with an apology, or cut to the chase and simply told her the truth, no matter how ugly it might be, she might have been able to hang on to her dignity.
But he did neither. Instead, he cast a searching glance over the garden and said, “Is Jeremy here?”
CHAPTER NINE
HE WASN’T off to the best start.
“No, Jeremy is not here!” she fairly shrieked, bolting out of the chair and flying at him.
Before she could rake her fingernails down his face, he fended her off with one hand and said, “Calm down, for Pete’s sake! The only reason I asked was I didn’t want to chance him overhearing us again.”
“So you say!” she spat. “But we both know that’s just a smokescreen to get you what you’re really after.”
She was petrified, he realized. Her eyes were huge as saucers, their pupils dilated with fear. “Honey, I don’t know why you think I’m here—”
“Don’t you ‘honey’ me!” she said, aiming a kick at his shins which he avoided by calling on soccer skills he hadn’t used in a long time. “I’m not your ‘honey’ and I never was. Save it for your wife Rita, though if she’s as easily taken in by your endearments as I was, I feel sorry for her.”
“In fact she was my ex-wif
e, but it’s a moot point now. She died on Sunday afternoon, moments before I ran into you outside her room.”
He conveyed the news less to arouse sympathy than to deflate her anger because, as things now stood, trying to engage in a reasonable conversation was a lost cause.
The ploy worked. The fight went out of her and her voice was hushed when she said, “I’m sorry. I could see how ill she was, poor thing. I’m sure you must be very grieved.”
“I am,” he admitted. “A lot more than I expected, given that we’ve been divorced nearly five years and hadn’t been in touch once in all that time until very recently.”
“Oh, please!” The fire in her eyes erupted again as quickly as it had died down. “If the only reason you’re here is to add another lie to the pile you’ve already told, I don’t want to hear it.”
He frowned, puzzled. “What lie? You’ve known from the beginning that I’d been married, Camille. Why are you making such an issue of it now?”
“Maybe because I heard you tell her you love her. And I heard the nurse refer to her as your wife. In my book, neither adds up to your being divorced.”
“At the stage she was at, I’d have told her whatever I thought she wanted to hear because, by then, it was all I could do for her,” he said. “Sure she’d made some mistakes and done some terrible things, but she was already paying for them big time and I didn’t see it as my job to add to her load. There comes a time when a guy has to move past all the anger and resentment that’s been eating him alive. For me, that time came on Sunday.
“As for the nurse calling her my wife….” He shrugged. “It was a harmless mistake on her part and I’m sorry if it bothered you, but frankly I had bigger things on my mind right then than setting a comparative stranger straight on my marital status. I’d have thought, considering what you’d just learned, that you would have had, too.”
“Adultery isn’t something I can just brush aside as being of no consequence.”
She was sticking to her position of woman wronged, but it was costing her. He could tell by the way her tone lost some of its starch, plus the fact that she couldn’t quite meet his gaze.
“We didn’t commit adultery, Camille,” he said, lessening his hold on her wrist and snagging her fingers in his. “I know I’ve kept things from you, but I’m being completely up-front with you on this.”
He’d have done better to keep his distance. She snatched her hand away as if he’d stubbed out a burning cigarette on it. “I can’t imagine why you think I’d believe anything coming out of your mouth!”
He raised both arms in surrender and backed off a couple of yards. “All right, let me put it to you like this—if a stranger tells you what an adorable kid Jeremy is, do you feel obligated to point out that he’s adopted?”
“Don’t be ridiculous! Of course I don’t.”
“You confide it only to people who matter?”
She flushed. “Oh, all right, you’ve made your point! So you weren’t lying about being divorced. Congratulations, I’m sure! But that hardly mitigates your other deceptions.”
“I’m aware of that,” he said. “And if you think they haven’t weighed heavily on my conscience for quite some time now, you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
“I don’t know you at all!” she said scornfully. “You never intended that I should, or you’d have been open with me from the start.”
“How so? By marching up to you the day we met and saying, ‘Hi, that’s my son you’re parking on the merry-go-round, and if it’s all the same to you I’d like to get to know him, so how about I come to your house tomorrow and we’ll work out a visitation schedule?’”
“At least I’d have known where I stood. We might have been able to arrive at some sort of agreement.”
“Come off it, Camille! I’m supposed to be the liar here, not you. You’d have tried to have me thrown in jail, and we both know it. And I can’t say I’d have blamed you, given the story Kay had fed you.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “Who’s Kay?”
“My ex. Until she married me and took my name, she was Rita Kay Osborne, but everyone called her Kay. She didn’t start using the name Rita until after the divorce.”
“Probably because she wanted to disassociate herself from you as thoroughly as possible. You were a rotten husband.”
“I’m sure I made my share of mistakes but contrary to what she might have led you to believe, walking away from my son isn’t one of them. If I’d known she was pregnant, I’d have provided for her and the baby.”
“And?”
It was pretty clear what else she was asking, and he wasn’t about to compromise his integrity any more than he already had, even if this was the one time she’d have preferred him to lie. “And he’d never have been put up for adoption on the black market.”
“I knew it!” Her voice trembled pitifully and it was all he could do not to haul her close and kiss her fears into oblivion. “This is where you’ve been headed all along, isn’t it? It’s why you seduced me—because you thought, if you softened me up, I’d let you…trample roughshod over my entire world.”
“That isn’t why, Camille,” he said. “If you believe nothing else, know that the one thing I’ve most wanted to avoid is hurting you.”
“Well, you didn’t succeed!” she cried, her eyes streaming. “You’ve taken my life and chopped it up into little pieces. And you’re not done yet, are you?”
Dealing effectively with a woman’s tears was something he’d never mastered. Despite her Irish ancestry, his mother’s equable temperament had seldom crumbled in the face of adversity, and Kay’s way of retaliation when things hadn’t gone her way had been the silent treatment. At his wit’s end, he said, “Now what sin have I committed? For Pete’s sake, Camille, it seems I can’t do anything right with you, no matter how hard I try.”
“Oh, stop it! Stop it! I know why you’re here, and it’s got nothing to do with trying to make things right. You’ve come to take my son away from me.”
“Huh?”
He must have looked as stunned as he felt, because she came at him again, all spitting fury. “What’s the matter, Michael? Do words escape you for once? My goodness, when someone beats you to the punch, you’re not quite as nimble with the glib replies, are you?”
Unless he found a way to calm her down, she was going to tip over the edge into full-blown hysteria, something he knew he’d never handle. “Sweetheart,” he said, trying once again to take her in his arms and placate her, “you’ve got it all wrong.”
She slapped him away. “Save it, Michael. You’re going to have to come up with something a lot more original than a repeat performance of the same old smooth moves if you seriously expect me to hand my child over to you. I’ll see you in hell first!”
“I have no intention of trying to take Jeremy away from you.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I hoped we could behave like the two mature adults we’re supposed to be. I hoped that, instead of leaping to irrational conclusions, you’d at least listen while I offered the explanations I know are long overdue. But given your present frame of mind, it doesn’t look as if that’s going to happen.”
“No, it isn’t,” she said. “I’m not feeling very rational right now. I’m feeling distinctly threatened because I’ve come to realize that, with you, there’s always a hidden agenda.”
“Not anymore, Camille,” he said, his patience at an end. The last few days had been rough; the nights even rougher. Answers he’d hoped to find, Kay had taken to the grave, and the ensuing frustration was wearing him down. “The gloves are off. You’re looking at a man who promised a dying woman that he’d take care of her son, and I’m telling you up-front that it’s a promise I intend to keep.”
“He’s not her son!” she cried, her face contorting in pain. “He’s mine. And I can look after him without any help from you, so take your promises and choke on them!”
He could hav
e tried persuasion. He could have soothed her ruffled feathers by spelling out his intentions and thus proving that he had nothing diabolical up his sleeve. But when a woman had made up her mind not to listen, no matter how reasonable the idea being presented, a man’s best recourse was to keep his answer short and succinct. So he planted his feet apart, folded his arms, and drowned her out with a resounding, “No!”
Her mouth fell open in pure shock, leaving him to suspect that not many people had dared say “no” to her in the past. That she managed to look adorable, whether she was sobbing, raging or gaping, hadn’t escaped his notice either, but it was fast losing its charm. He was tired of being manipulated by the women in his life. It had been too late to do much about it by the time he learned what Kay had been up to behind his back, but he was damned if he was going to let Camille lead him around by the nose.
“You don’t have any choice,” she told him, recovering quickly. “You don’t have the right to come charging into his life and taking over. I’m his legal parent, not you. I’ve got the papers to prove it.”
“Don’t make me play hardball, Camille,” he said softly. “We both know I’ve got a strong case, should I choose to pursue the matter through the courts. As for your having papers!” He let out a snort of disgust. “Hell, we’re talking about a child here, not a pedigreed pooch, though I suppose, given that you cut your teeth on the theory that money can buy just about anything you set your heart on, it shouldn’t surprise me that you see my son as just another commodity.”
At that, the little witch stepped close and poked him hard in the chest with her finger. Twice. Cripes! “Well, it certainly didn’t take long for you to show your true colors, did it, you great overgrown bully?” she seethed. “I can’t believe I ever bought your Mr. Nice Guy act.”
“I’m exactly the same person I’ve always been, Camille. A man cheated out of knowing his own son by my desperate former wife and your sleazy excuse of a husband.”
“Ex-husband!”
“Now, perhaps,” he amended, pretty steamed himself by then. “But he wasn’t when he drew up that shady adoption agreement, was he? He was married to you, and you both stood to gain by the arrangement he made. Trouble was, he couldn’t live with what he’d done and took refuge in the bottle. But you never had a problem, did you? Even though, by your own admission, you thought the whole deal smelled to high heaven, you just held your nose and kept right on playing the perfect mother and poor, long-suffering wife.”
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