Discreet
The Discreet Duet: Book I
Nicole French
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or rendered fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
Copyright 2018 Raglan Publishing.
All rights reserved.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people without explicit permission of the author. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite book retailer and purchase your own copy.
Cover image courtesy of 6:12 Photography by Eric McKinney.
ISBN: 978-1-7239-6961-4
Published by Raglan Publishing.
www.nicolefrenchromance.com
Created with Vellum
To my mom, who loved the lake,
and
Patricia and Danielle, who loved Will more than anyone.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Also by Nicole French
From Legally Yours
From Bad Idea
Acknowledgments
Connect with Nicole French
Prologue
May 7, 2014
The New York Times
Fitz Baker, Actor, Missing After Boating Accident off Maine Coast
Fitzwilliam “Fitz” Baker, whose standout performance in last year’s “The Dwelling” earned him an Oscar nomination, disappeared off the coast of Maine last weekend. His catamaran was found wrecked off a particularly treacherous channel, and Mr. Baker’s body has not been recovered after an extensive search. He would have been 25 in June.
After more than a week of looking, the Maine Coast Guard finally called off the search. Emilio Adams, the detective assigned to the case, stated, “At this time we have no reason to suspect foul play. It appears to be a boating trip gone bad. We have no choice but to presume Mr. Baker dead.”
Mr. Baker grew up outside of Stamford, Connecticut, where he was discovered as a young talent in a local mall during an open call for child auditions. His early work in commercials led him to a part in the popular sitcom, “Bailey’s Life,” playing the child prodigy, Nick Bailey. The show was canceled in its fifth season after Mr. Baker’s mother, Tricia Owens-Baker, could not come to an agreement with the network about his contract renewal.
Mr. Baker, however, had already started moving on to consistent film roles and had his first breakout performance in the high school comedy, “Drama Camp,” at the age of 17. From there he began appearing in more serious roles, demonstrating his range in such films as the Boston legal drama, “City on a Hill,” and the Revolutionary War epic, “State of Liberty.”
But it was his last film, directed by legendary director Corbyn Creighton, that earned Mr. Baker his first major critical recognition with Golden Globe and SAG awards for Best Actor in a Drama, as well as a Best Actor Oscar nomination. After Mr. Baker’s performance as a recovering alcoholic and AIDS victim in “The Dwelling,” Creighton called him “this generation’s Brad Pitt” for the combination of humor, wit, and magnetism he brought to the screen. Creighton said yesterday that, “a light in the darkness of the world has been extinguished. Fitz will be dearly missed.”
But it wasn’t all bright lights and awards for the charismatic young actor. Mr. Baker had acknowledged publicly that he suffered from debilitating anxiety attacks, which often prevented him from taking part in major press events unless under the influence of some kind of substance. After suffering a near-fatal attack from an obsessive fan in 2011, Mr. Baker had become quite reclusive, traveling only with a large security entourage and generally keeping to his 25-acre compound in Vermont when not traveling for his job.
In an interview with The New York Times last month, he admitted that he was trying, for the first time in his life, to cope with the effects of his anxiety without medication, drugs, or alcohol. Mr. Baker stated, “I don’t want to live my life in a haze. For better or for worse, I need to face my life with my eyes wide open.”
Exactly four weeks later, his boat was found in pieces on the rocky Maine channel.
“It just makes no sense,” Tricia Owens-Baker, his mother, said in tears after the search was called off yesterday. “He was an expert sailor and swam like Michael Phelps. There is just no way he drowned out there. I don’t believe it.”
“We’ll never stop looking for our son,” added Michael Baker, his father. “Never.”
1
Dust flew into the air, a dry, hot flurry. I turned at the familiar fork in the road and the car kicked up even more.
Hot. Hellfire and damnation, hot. My skin was “glowing” if you were polite, which at the moment I was not, so really I was sweating like a pig. I’d been driving for three days at a breakneck speed from New York with a busted taillight and a broken air conditioner, but none of that had been an issue until I’d crossed the Idaho border into the city limits of my hometown: sleepy Newman Lake. And of course—of course—the last five minutes would be the worst. Because that was just the kind of luck I was having. That was just the kind of life I was having.
I rolled down my window, eager to let in some of the breeze off the lake where I grew up. I squinted at the sun-dappled surface, reveled in the low rustle of the cattails and shoulder-high tules, inhaled the brackish scent of lily pads abloom with massive white flowers. I wasn’t sure I could call it home anymore, since I hadn’t set foot anywhere near the West Coast in about six years, when I’d last visited home and given my mother an ultimatum: get sober or get a new daughter. But at the tail end of my trek and four years that would ruin anyone’s resolve, Newman Lake was the only refuge I had. Funny how ultimatums lose their potency when you’re equal parts broke and broken.
My humble Passat hatchback was packed with every belonging I had to take or couldn’t sell before leaving the city. My life was in that car, in more ways than one.
Clothes.
Books.
Guitars.
They were all locked away in their cases and had been for a while. Three weeks, exactly, since I last played, which was the longest I’d ever gone without tickling the strings since I’d picked up my first guitar at age seven. The old Yamaha was a birthday present Mama had found at a yard sale, and it was still one of the best guitars I’d ever had, sound-wise. Playing it used to make me feel like I was flying, but now just the idea was like dead weight.
Sometimes I could still hear my name blaring over the loudspeakers of the club. Maggie Sharp. Once a promising singer/songwriter, or so said my manager, Calliope Jackson, when she would announce me before my gigs. To A&R reps. Really, anyone who would listen. Now I was just that girl.
The one who ran off stage.
The one who ruined her entire career, all her dreams…over a man.
Flower…
The word drifted through my mind, his voice slithering between memories like the snake he was. Theo del Conte. I could still hear the pet names he used, feel the tender touch that gradually turned wicked. I turned a corner, past the ramshackle Barrett house with its yard full of daisies. Fear knotted in my stomach, though I knew Theo couldn’t find me here. I punched the gas, urging the bald tires to squeal on the pavement, blocking out the low thrum of his voice. Three more turns and I’d be safe at last. In a place where I could lick my wounds in peace. And, of course, in shame.
The truth was, coming back to Newman Lake was the last thing I ever thought I’d be doing. Ten years ago, if you had asked me where I thought I’d be at twenty-six, I would have said making music with the greats and hopefully on tour. Nobody plans on failing. Coming home to take care of an alcoholic mother. Figuring out what the hell to do with your life when all your dreams are nothing but a faint vapor.
At the top of the last winding curve, I turned onto the familiar gravel road that led down to three parking spots terraced into the side of a steep hill. Those were new—must have been put in when Mama got the idea to start the bed and breakfast a few years back. That was during her Alan phase. Mama had a phase for every man she was with, and they were good until they weren’t anymore. That was usually when I would get a phone call begging me to come home for a visit. Phone calls that were laced with gin; messages I’d guiltily erase before I heard all of them. Before they turned from pleading to nasty.
Everything about the old place looked the same. The tall pine trees scaling down the rocky hillside to the water, the thatches of nettles and wildflowers blooming from the crevices of massive boulders. The chicken coop just above the main house, the two small outer cottages surveying the rest of the property, and a sleeping shack perched on the point below. It was too big, really, for a single woman in her early fifties to maintain, the remnants of her grandfather’s dream of opening a grand resort with his prospecting money. The resort had gone bust in a matter of years, but the dream remained, along with the estate, passed down through the next two generations until landing in my mother’s lap.
I parked my car next to Mama’s old Pathfinder and inhaled a deep breath of the warm lake air, enjoying the familiar scent of pine trees, freshly turned dirt, and smoke from a barbecue somewhere. The occasional hum of a boat punctuated the soothing chime of waves while the chickens clucked from their roosts. I’d moved out eight years ago, and it had been six since I’d last visited. Six years since I told my mother she had to sober up before I’d ever return.
Just one more way I turned out to be a liar.
I grabbed my purse and a couple of duffel bags, then locked the car before starting down to the house. Seventy-three stairs. I only knew because I used to run them daily, up and down ten times every morning except during the winter. Track and swim were easy to practice when I was in high school, harder to maintain when I left. You can pretty much run anywhere, though I found myself doing it less and less often the longer I lived in New York. I hadn’t swum anywhere in that concrete menagerie.
But home didn’t hit me—didn’t really hit me—until I wound around the small concrete path at the bottom of the stairs and saw the small yellow house where I grew up. The deck looked the same, with two weathered Adirondack chairs facing the lake that shimmered through the willow tree boughs. There was a small terra cotta chimney in one corner, a gas barbecue in the other, and a variety of planters, all bursting with bright blooms and green foliage. Emmylou Harris crooned from the speakers mounted above the sliding glass doors, open except for the screen. Mama used to wonder why I ever wanted to be a musician. She never realized it was her record collection that inspired me in the first place.
The scent of roasting chicken wafted through the screen door. Well, then. At six o’clock at night, she was sober enough to cook. I took it as a good sign.
“Mama?” I called, dropping my bags.
“Back here!”
I walked around to the back of the house, where I found my mother, Eloise Sharp, struggling to move a huge plastic rain barrel under a drainpipe.
“Ouch!” she yelped, as she heaved again unsuccessfully and broke a nail in the process. “Dag nabbit!” She spotted me just as she stuck the wounded digit into her mouth. Nevertheless, her face lit up, and her hands flew to her hips. “Well, who’s come to visit? Is that my daughter I see there?”
I nodded, unaccountably flushed. “Hi, Mama.”
This was Ellie Sharp’s magic. She always had the power to make everyone she talked to feel like the center of the universe. Even if you hadn’t seen her in six years. Even if the last time she saw you, she was crying in a heap on the ground while you walked away, nursing a slapped cheek.
“You just wait there, baby,” she said before she replaced her glove, squatted back down, and shoved her whole body against the barrel. “Mama’s gotta finish her chore, and then I’m gonna give you the biggest hug and kiss you’ve ever seen.”
With a great grunt, she pushed again. The rain barrel stayed put.
“Mama, why don’t I help you with that?” I asked, starting toward her.
She waved a hand at me. “I can do it, Maggie Mae. Just give us a second.” She took a deep breath and stared down at the barrel with immense hatred. “I’ll admit, this is the kind of thing that makes me wish I still had a man around. Say what you want about Alan, but he did help me take care of the place, the goddamn bastard.”
I blinked. That was new. My whole life Mama called herself a church-going woman. Despite her more unsavory habits, she always said things like “heck” and “dag nabbit,” but now apparently had a mouth like a sailor.
As if the mild profanity inspired her, Mama gave one last almighty push and managed to reposition the barrel correctly under the spout. She swiped a handkerchief across her forehead under the fringe of carefully dyed brown bangs. The bones of her wrist pressed knobby through the skin. We were both thinner than we should have been.
With a sigh of relief, she weaved her way back to the deck.
“Let me look at you, baby girl,” she said as she shucked her gloves onto a bench and turned to face me.
She was a tall woman, with thin legs her best friend, Barb, always said looked like a stork’s. Her worn gardening pants that looked like they were probably Alan’s or some other lover’s hung loose on her hips. She reached out to take my hands, holding my arms open like a bird’s wingspan. Her familiar touch, which I hadn’t felt in so long, was electric.
“You’re too thin, Margaret,” she noted as she perused my spare frame. “I think you need a cookie. Or four.”
I pulled my arms back and held them around my ribs. I was several inches shorter than her, but we had the same delicate bone structure. She used to say I must have gotten my insides from her and my outsides—the skin that was tanner than not, the deep brown eyes, the unruly dark hair—from my father. Hard to say, considering I had no idea who the man actually was. But yeah, a few pounds gained or lost showed more on me than it did on her.
“You’re one to talk,” I retorted. “You must have lost, what, twenty pounds? Thirty since…everything?”
“And we weren’t exactly big women before, were we?” she agreed with a sad nod as she sat down in one of the chairs. “Well, that’s what having dirty, lying, good-for-nothing shitbags around does to you, don’t it? Sucks the life right out of you.”
I sank into the chair beside her. I didn’t know the whole story about what had happened with Alan—one never really did with Ellie Sharp. I’d never met the man, only heard the stories at first of how he’d wooed her, taken her to expensive dinners and on expensive trips, and slowly convinced her to share just about everything she had with him before he’d up and left. Everything but the house. I didn’t know if Alan was a
s bad a guy as Mama made him out to be. Maybe he just got tired of living with a drunk. Or maybe he was something worse.
I closed my eyes, breathing in the warm, familiar air of the lake. Mama wasn’t wrong. I did feel like the life had been sucked out of me. I felt like a shell of myself, and had for years now.
Mama looked at me sadly. She didn’t know the whole story that had happened with Theo, but she knew enough. Had heard my choked sobs over the phone. Had shared a few hushed phone calls with Calliope.
“I hate that you know what this feels like, but I’m glad you’re here.” She reached out and patted my hand. “You’re safe now, honey. We both are. Just have to keep tellin' ourselves that until we can believe it.”
Suddenly, I felt exhausted. The fatigue of the long car ride, the frantic goodbye to the friends who shoved wads of ones and fives in my pocket to help me get here, the fear at every gas station and rest stop that Theo would show up with some new threat, even if he was still in jail for what he did. But really, it was the loss that weighed me down the most. The loss, the complete and utter loss, of everything I had built since striking out on my own. The music—my music—was gone.
All of it came crashing down at once. A lone tear dripped down my cheek, quickly followed by more. It had been so, so long since I truly felt safe.
Discreet: The Discreet Duet: Book I Page 1