Tempting Fate

by Carla Neggers

  It was disconcerting to see Zeke there. This was her space, and she wasn’t used to having a man like him there. Or, these days, a man at all. He’d pulled out a bag of dried pasta, an onion, cans of tuna, tomatoes and tomato sauce, jars of herbs. He had a pot of water coming to a boil on her little gas stove and half the onion cooking in a frying pan and was rummaging in drawers. In a moment he emerged victorious with her handheld can opener. He said, “Everything’s up to date in the Pembroke kitchen, I see.”

  “Space is a premium.”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed.”

  He opened the three cans, drained the tuna and the tomatoes into the sink, checked the onion. “You wouldn’t have a bottle of wine squirreled away here somewhere, would you?”

  She pointed to the wooden wine rack on top of the refrigerator, and he pulled down a bottle of chardonnay she’d forgotten she had. He went back to the same drawer where he’d produced the can opener and got out her corkscrew. Dani quickly set the table while he opened the wine.

  She sat down and looked at the pigeon outside her casement window. “I have a lot of questions.”

  “It’s your nature.”

  “And you think you know my nature, do you?”

  “In my business,” he said, filling her wineglass at the table, “you have to learn to size up people fast. Not the nuances of who they are, just the bare bones. You’re honest and open by nature and very direct—some would say blunt. You make a lot of demands on yourself and the people closest to you, even if you’re incredibly tolerant in general and—again in general—a lot of fun to be around.”

  She looked at him, dubious. “You figured all that out just since Thursday.”

  “Yep.”

  “No way. You’ve just been talking to Kate.”

  The humor in his dark eyes made her want to smile, in spite of everything. “Nope.”

  “Ira.”

  Zeke filled his wineglass. “Well, he is indiscreet, but no, I’ve just been observing you.”

  Dani tried her wine, which was smooth and very dry. “My father.” From Zeke’s look, she knew she was right. “He just thinks I’m hard on him. Any other daughter would have let him rot. Me, I put him up for the night, and he repays me by sneaking off at the crack of dawn—”

  “He says he shouldn’t have to check in with his own daughter. He’s not in junior high.”

  She snorted. “He might as well be.”

  “You see? You’ve got that hard-nosed Witt streak.”

  Sipping her wine, Dani studied the man dumping pasta into the boiling water. Could she size up the bare bones of Zeke’s character? He had a sense of his own limits. A sense of duty and honor. A sense of humor. But those were guesses. There was so much about him she didn’t know. So much she wanted to know.

  “You know my great-aunt,” she said.

  He nodded, giving the pasta a quick stir. He’d already dumped the tuna and tomatoes and tomato sauce into the frying pan with the onion; she’d missed that. He stirred the sauce, too. “I’ve known Naomi Hazen all my life.”

  She was real to him, a person. “I hardly even knew she existed—and I didn’t know about the affair she and Nick had.”

  “It happened even before you were born. If you were Mattie, is it something you’d tell your only grandchild?”

  “That’s a fair point,” Dani conceded. She watched Zeke take a dish towel by the ends and lift the bubbling pot, then empty the pasta into a colander in the sink. She lost his face in the steam. She asked, “What’s Cedar Springs like?”

  He set the empty pot on the stove, not answering.

  “I don’t mean to pry…”

  “No, it’s okay.” He walked over to the table and picked up the two plates, taking them back to the counter. With a slotted spoon he scooped out the spirals of pasta onto the plates. “I just don’t think about Cedar Springs every day, and I haven’t lived there in a long time. I guess it’s pretty much an ordinary middle Tennessee town. It’s got oak-lined streets, magnolias, dogwoods, a slew of churches, good people, bad people. It’s changed since your grandmother was a kid. I barely recognize it these days myself.”

  “Is the house Mattie grew up in still standing?”

  He spooned sauce over the pasta and brought the plates over to the table, setting one in front of Dani. “I suppose I should have picked a few flowers on my way in.”

  She smiled. “Not around here. Too many stray dogs.”

  Sitting opposite her, the pigeons fluttering at the window, he drank more wine. “Yes, the Witt house is still standing. It used to be the fanciest house in Cedar Springs, and Jackson Witt was about as rich a man as any of us could imagine. But he wasn’t rich at all. Well off, but not rich—not by Chandler standards.” He shrugged. “I reckon the Witt house hasn’t changed a bit since he built it.”

  His southern accent had become more noticeable, whether deliberately or unconsciously Dani didn’t know. She tried to picture an oak-lined street and a fine old southern house, but she knew the image in her mind was mixed up with fantasy and stereotypes and probably wasn’t accurate at all. She’d never even been to Tennessee. “Mattie’s never told me much about her childhood.”

  “I don’t blame her,” Zeke said.

  “I don’t, either—”

  “Yeah, you do.”

  It wasn’t an accusation but a simple statement of fact.

  She tried the pasta. It was surprisingly good. “I’m trying not to.”

  “Mattie and Naomi had a tough childhood. They had money, which a lot of people in those days didn’t, but their mother died when Mattie was eight and Naomi just a tot, and their father wasn’t fit to raise two little girls by himself. He was a complicated, difficult man. But the Witts did a lot for Cedar Springs. They started the woolen mill to give people work, planted trees, paved streets, donated land for a public library, kept their church going.”

  “Then he wasn’t a total bastard,” Dani said.

  Zeke shook his head. “Maybe it would have been easier if he had been. Dani, Jackson Witt was the most unforgiving man I’ve ever known. He was deeply religious, but he missed or plain didn’t get the lessons on forgiveness. His expectations of other people—especially his own children—were unrealistic. He demanded Mattie and Naomi fit his ideal of feminine perfection—subservient, obedient, soft-spoken, religious, industrious within very proscribed limits of acceptable work.”

  Dani shuddered, trying to imagine her grandmother living under such conditions.

  “He forbade them to wear pants or cosmetics or fix their hair in ways he considered inappropriate, never mind offensive. They couldn’t dance, play games, ride bicycles, read popular novels. He despised movies. Anything they did for fun was done behind his back. They were supposed to be an example to the rest of the town, proof of his own holiness, I suppose. It’s one thing to live a puritanical life out of choice and conviction, to teach your personal values and principles to your children. But he crossed the line into psychological abuse.”

  “You’re a lot younger than Mattie and Naomi. How do you know all this stuff?”

  “Everyone in Cedar Springs knew.”

  “So if they were to have lives of their own, they had either to believe in their father’s rules or break them.”

  Zeke nodded. “There was no middle ground.”

  “But it still must have been hard for Mattie to leave.”

  “With the particular kind of abuse her father dished out,” Zeke said, staring into his wine, “she had to have suffered enormous guilt. Add to that leaving a little sister behind. Naomi was just eleven when Mattie took off with Nick. It’s been rumored around town for years that she tried to get Naomi to go with her, but she wouldn’t leave. Anyway, Naomi found her own way out from under her father’s thumb.”

  “Nick again,” Dani said.

  Drinking his wine, Zeke studied Dani over the rim of his glass. She felt warm under his gaze, but not uncomfortable. That surprised her. He said, “Naomi married the vic
e president at the mill. He was a widower, considerably older than she, and about as hard to live with as her father. Rumor has it he beat her. I’m not sure if she knew that going in or not. Probably. She’s always been remarkably clear-eyed about people. Her affair with Nick—it lasted barely a summer—allowed her to be free and still stay in Cedar Springs.”

  Dani shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

  “Once her father and husband had disowned her, they also relinquished any control over her. By breaking their rules, Naomi could live on her own terms. She couldn’t have left the way Mattie did. She loved Cedar Springs, belonged there.”

  “Mattie’s never talked to me about her. And I mean never.”

  “Maybe she couldn’t,” Zeke said. He set down his wineglass. “Don’t judge her, Dani. Naomi never has.” He smiled warmly, sadly. “You should go to Cedar Springs one day. It’s a pretty town. Naomi will serve you peach pie, and you’ll never guess she ran off with a rake of a Hollywood director and her sister’s ex-husband while she was married to another man.”

  For all Zeke’s toughness and competence, Dani was struck by how thoughtful and perceptive a man he was. That comforted her. With all her confusion and anger—the mind-numbing mix of emotions brought on by the last few days—she appreciated that gentle side of his spirit. But she didn’t want to look to him for answers, for a cure for what she was feeling. And there were the questions about his brother and the gold key, questions about her mother. About her father lying in a Saratoga hospital. She needed to call him, find out how he was doing.

  Zeke pointed at her with his fork. “You’d better eat.”

  She looked at him, suddenly grateful for his solid presence. “Thank you.”

  He grinned, sexy, irreverent. “I can scramble an edible meal together on short order.”

  “I’m not thanking you for the cooking,” Dani said, “but for talking.”

  She didn’t think it was his long suit, but that was fine. These days, listening didn’t seem to be hers.

  After dinner Dani popped on Tiger’s Eye, the movie that had transformed her grandmother from an overnight sensation into a true star. When people thought of her, they tended to think of the woman in Tiger’s Eye, young and sexy and beautiful—so incredibly beautiful—and still a little vulnerable, a little awed. Dani and anyone else who’d come to know her grandmother in her “retirement” had had to reconcile the eccentric, independent, mature Mattie Witt with this glamorous movie star.

  Now Dani had another Mattie Witt to bring into her understanding of her grandmother, the young woman who’d freed herself from her strict, unbending father. She tried to imagine Mattie’s childhood in the stifling, repressive household of Jackson Witt, to imagine her leaving behind her eleven-year-old sister. Had that been an act of courage or selfishness—or simple desperation?

  Because Mattie had left Cedar Springs, Joe and Zeke Cutler had gone to Saratoga, and now, twenty-five years later, Zeke was back.

  Tucking her feet up under her on the big comfy chair, Dani lowered the volume with her remote. Zeke was standing at her living-room window, looking down at the courtyard.

  “There’s so much I didn’t know,” she said.

  He glanced back, his eyes reaching hers, but he said nothing. In trying to imagine Mattie’s life in Cedar Springs, Dani had also tried to imagine his. But she and Zeke were from two different worlds, brought together by the life of a woman Dani loved but no longer was sure she understood. And where did her mother fit in? Where did Zeke’s brother?

  She had to know.

  On the television screen, the Mattie Witt of fifty years ago smiled, the red ostrich plume in her hair.

  “Mattie never mentioned the book on your brother to me. It won a Pulitzer, but I’d never read it—I’d never even heard of it.”

  “You were just a kid when it came out.”

  “Fifteen. It didn’t seem so young then. I don’t know, I’ve always half believed my childhood ended when I was nine. After my mother disappeared, I thought I could take anything. I guess I thought that was what everyone else believed, too. But now I see there were those who tried to protect me. My Chandler grandfather, for one. And Mattie.” She pulled her gaze from her young, dazzling grandmother and turned it on Zeke. “Did Nick know you and your brother were in Saratoga?”

  “You should talk to him about that.”

  “It breaks one of your rules?”

  “More than one, I imagine.”

  She dropped her feet to the floor, her impatience instantly reignited. “Zeke, you know more than you’re telling me.”

  He didn’t even turn his head from the window.

  “I have a right to know—”

  He faced her. “It’s not a question of rights.”

  It was as if someone had wiped the humor and fatigue and gentleness from his face, the qualities she’d seen over dinner that drew her to this complex man more than the muscles in his shoulders—which were impressive—and the sexy figure he cut in a pair of jeans. Now he looked distant and professional.

  Her muscles tightened against another onslaught of shaking from anger and frustration—and fear.

  He didn’t react. “Dani, there are just some things you’ll have to discuss first with your family.”

  “Fine, then.”

  She jumped up, banged off the television, so aggravated she could have pulled books off the shelves and thrown them in handfuls at the too-controlled, too-appealing man who’d invaded her space. “I’ll find out the rest on my own. I don’t need your help or your cooperation.”

  She headed for the kitchenette and dumped dishes into the dishwasher, put the cap on the olive oil and tucked it back on the appropriate shelf. Zeke continued to stare out the living-room window. He wasn’t like Ira, who talked all the time, or Nick or her father, who’d try to sneak off when she was irritated. He wasn’t like any of her male business associates, who treated her with reserve, and he wasn’t like the men who worked for her at Pembroke Springs, and he wasn’t like—he was nothing like—the men she’d dated over the years, who’d talk her out of feeling miserable and take the credit when she was feeling happy.

  They’d just stand there when they knew she was mad.

  But Zeke didn’t work for her and he wasn’t a business associate and he wasn’t a relative and he wasn’t a date.

  So what was he?

  A complication, she thought, shutting the dishwasher. A man who scared her just for the very questions he presented and the doubts he created. Not just about her mother, Mattie, what was happening in Saratoga. About herself.

  She hit the start switch on the dishwasher and wiped off the counter. She had no intention of letting him clean up after he’d cooked dinner.

  “You’re welcome to stay.” Her tone wasn’t exactly invitational. “Talk to the pigeons all night if you want. I’m out of here.”

  He hadn’t moved a millimeter. “Where are you going?”

  She made it all the way down the hall to the elevator.

  Then he was there beside her, silent and so controlled.

  She couldn’t not look at him. If the rest of him wasn’t giving away a thing, his eyes were. They told her he did care. They told her he, too, was afraid of what he’d stirred up by coming to Saratoga—of what he’d find there.

  They were so different, she and this man from Cedar Springs, Tennessee.

  “You need to rest,” he said. His tone was neither patronizing nor demanding, but simply observational. Probably it didn’t take any great insight into her character to notice that she was ready to collapse. She could feel the exhaustion curling up her spine, dragging her down. Only tension kept her on her feet.

  She banged the down button. Somewhere within the bowels of the building, she could hear the elevator creak and groan. “It’s so frustrating.”

  “Keep your focus on the present.”

  “Is that your professional advice?” she asked, not meaning to sound so sarcastic.

  “My perso
nal advice. I’ve had a few extra days to adjust to asking the kinds of questions you’re asking.”

  His eyes had become distant again, a closed window to a part of him she could no longer deny she very much wanted to see and understand. What was he like inside?

  “I want answers, Zeke.”

  “So do I.”

  “Talk to me.”

  But he merely stood there.

  The elevator clunked to a stop at her floor, and the doors slid open. “I should get back to Saratoga and see my father—and I need to apologize to Mattie. I was pretty hard on her. I’ve never gotten mad at her like that.”

  “Maybe she’s relieved you finally did. Now she’s merely mortal in your eyes.”

  The elevator doors were closing. Dani reached to stick her arm in and stop them, but Zeke touched her wrist, just below her slowly healing bruise. Awareness sizzled inside her. She forced herself to remember the stolen key, ransacked room 304, her father. They weren’t coincidences.

  “You wouldn’t get to see your father until morning.” Zeke’s voice was raspy and low; he rubbed the soft, sensitive skin on the inside of her wrist. “Hospitals do have their rules.”

  She pulled in her lower lip and bit down hard. “Zeke, I wish I knew—”

  “I know.” His mouth lowered to hers, his lips brushing hers, soft and so damn sweet, promising nothing but the moment. He smiled into her eyes. “Will you stay?”

  She tried to laugh. “Another minute and I’ll be a pile of warm Jell-O.”

  The humor returned to his dark eyes. “Not me.”

  Zeke had intended to read her the riot act about being reckless and hotheaded and thoroughly Pembroke when they got back to her apartment. He’d intended to tell her to let him do the heavy lifting—which would surely set her off—and go tend her mineral water and mud baths. He would be cool, distant, professional. Then he’d get out of there.

  But there was no lecture, no getting her steamed and he didn’t leave.

  At least not so far.

  “I’d like to take a shower,” she said. “To calm down as much as to get clean. I don’t know when I’ve spent so long on edge.”