by Carol Arens
“What do you say, Clark? We might not have a pond, but there’s a slick of ice outside and a full moon.”
“I say, first one to land on their bottom owes the other a favor.”
“Challenge accepted.” She dashed out the front door ahead of him, down the steps and onto a patch of snow that had melted and refrozen into a large, smile-shaped ice sheet.
“I have to warn you, Clark. I’m a wizard on skates.”
Cold air nipped her cheeks and moonlight glinted in her hair. If he didn’t know better he’d swear that the great bright ball in the night sky was laughing along with her.
“That may be, but we’re not on skates.” He slid across the ice on his shoes, windmilling his arms and spinning in a fancy circle. “I’ve had lots of practice walking on ice.”
“That was impressive, I do have to admit.”
Lilleth demonstrated her own abilities by lifting the hem of her skirt in one hand and reaching toward the stars with the other. She twirled about twice on one foot without falling.
He’d have to work to gain that favor.
“Copy this, then,” he challenged, and ran three steps, then glided thirty feet.
He nearly fell at the end of his slide, but he caught the glint of victory in her smile and managed to keep himself upright.
Lilleth shrugged. “You don’t walk that well on dry ground.”
That stung! It was Trace competing in this game, not Clark. If he wanted to keep his secret, and he was beginning to wonder if he could, he would be forced to take a tumble...but not just yet.
“Let’s see what you’ve got, Miss Preston.”
This time she lifted her hem high, anchoring it in both elbows so that her stockings flashed white to her knees.
He’d never known Lils to allow maidenly modestly to stand between her and victory.
She ran four steps, looking like a fairy tiptoeing over the ice, then slid past him with a laugh.
He reached for her hand, intending to keep her from gaining more ground than he had. When his fingers closed around her wrist, she lost her balance. She went down with a screech and a flounce of lace and wool.
“That, my friend, was cheating,” she announced, reaching one hand up to him for help.
“Down is down.” He shook his head, happy for the victory, even though she was right about the cheating.
He clasped her cold palm to pull her up, but she yanked, catching him off guard. His shoes grappled for purchase. He thumped down beside her.
“Down is down,” she echoed.
“You took the first fall.”
“Only because you played unfairly. As I see it, we ought to grant each other favors.”
“I’ll have a song,” he said, wanting a kiss.
“And I’ll have a waltz in the moonlight.”
“Agreed.” He stood and helped her to her feet.
He took her in his arms. She looped her hands around his neck and clasped her fingers together. He slid half a step to the left and she followed, her ribs shifting under his fingertips. He guided her in a circle. As it turned out, this slow dance over the ice was not a waltz so much as a moving embrace.
She looked up at him with her eyes reflecting moon glow and his smile. An instant later he swore that she looked into him rather than at him. She must know who he was.
Slowly her hand slid from his neck to his chest. She had no way of knowing that her fingers traced the shape of a heart over his scar.
Then she sang for him. Her beautiful voice told the story of a love, long lost but never forgotten.
It was about the two of them, many sad, long years ago.
He dipped his head to her shoulder. To keep up the appearance of a dance, he spun them in another slow circle.
He knew why grown men cried when she sang a love song.
When she finished, he lifted his head from her shoulder, took her cheeks in his hands and brushed his lips across hers.
What he wanted was to delve into her mouth in a seduction that would end with him delving lower. What he wanted couldn’t be.
Even if he did admit the truth, it wouldn’t solve his problem. Lilleth would hate him. The deception that he had played upon her was beyond forgiveness.
“I want to know why that song brought a tear to your eye,” she whispered.
“I loved a girl a long time ago. Your song reminded me of her.”
“Tell me about her.”
He couldn’t help it; he looped a red curl about his finger and felt it wrap his calloused skin in a caress.
“She was just like you.”
She was you!
Lils frowned. Starlight winked a crimson crown in her hair. A gentle breeze washed the air with the scent of crisp, cold cedar. “You ought to try and find her, Clark. I think you still care for her.”
She was wrong about that. He didn’t simply care for Lilleth. He loved her more now than he had years ago.
“I care for her very much.”
The time had come to choose. His career and the poor folks at Hanispree? Or the woman who was bound to hate him regardless of what he decided?
Without warning, his foot caught in a bank of snow. He toppled, carrying Lilleth down with him.
He landed on top of her, but she didn’t struggle to be free of his weight. She touched his hair and wiped a smattering of snow from it.
“You fell,” she whispered. “I get another prize.”
“I hope you want a kiss.” He felt her breasts rise in a sigh against his chest.
She shook her head. His hopes were dashed.
“I want you, Clark...all of you.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“You’re not a librarian.” She plucked the glasses from his nose and tossed them somewhere. “I know you don’t need those.”
Her breath touched his and spun to fog in the inches that separated him from the kiss he wanted.
“Close your eyes,” he whispered, and she did. “Listen to me, to the sound of my voice. You know who I am.”
He kissed her. He touched her throat and her waist, wanting to give her all that she wanted. But he had to give it as Trace, not Clark.
“Don’t you know me, Lils?” he asked. “It’s me...it’s Trace.”
Chapter Twelve
“Ballentine?” She shoved at his chest and wriggled out from under him.
She knelt beside him, gazing down at the man lying in the snowdrift with his hair tumbled over his forehead in disarray. Slivers of ice clung to the dark tips and began to melt against his face.
This was not Trace Ballentine. He had disappeared into the mists of time. A boy cherished and hidden away in a secret, precious part of her heart.
This man looked nothing like her Trace. Her Trace had cheeks as smooth as her own. This was a grown man with hair on his face.
She peered hard at him while he pushed up on his elbows then sat up.
“It’s me, Lils. It’s Trace.”
No, he was not. Trace had been slim. This man was lean, ripped with muscles. The boy had laughing, friendly eyes. This fellow stared at her, somber-eyed.
Something about his voice, though, made her listen closer instead of stomping on him where it would hurt the most.
Her Trace’s voice had just begun to deepen when her mother had torn them heartlessly apart for the sake of her new, soiled love. But there was something...there in the tone. It was the same in the man and the boy.
“Say something,” she demanded.
“Stars shine bright, sleep tight tonight.”
Her heart slammed against her ribs. Blood throbbed in her ears.
“You might have heard me say that in my sleep.”
“It’s me, Lils.” His gaze bored into
her, clearly pleading with her to look back over the lost years and see him.
A rush of emotion flared in her chest, tightened her throat. It couldn’t be true. This was impossible!
And yet it seemed that her lost love sat beside her with snow melting in his hair and dripping down his nose.
She stared into the face of a miracle and nothing short of it.
“Trace!” She tossed her arms about his neck and squeezed. “My Trace...” Now she began to sob. She felt like a little girl whose fairy king had returned. The boy had become— “Clark!”
Trace recoiled when she shouted in his ear. “That fool doesn’t exist.” He reached for her, but she stood up and backed away. “I can explain if you’ll let me.”
“I will not. Not another word, you...you deceiver.”
This stranger gazed up at her, pain clearly etched over his handsome features. “If I’d ever guessed I would run into you, there would have been no Clark,” he declared.
Of course there had been a Clark. He had been as real to her as Trace had been. She had admired him...trusted him.
She had been ready to share her bed with him!
“Clearly, you are no longer the Trace I knew. That boy was honest and a good friend.”
Or so she remembered. She’d thought the same of Clark, who was all of a sudden nobody.
“I think you are an impostor.” She didn’t, not really, but she wanted to.
“Do you want proof?”
“I certainly do not!”
But the stranger on the ground gave it to her anyway. He opened his shirt and exposed a scar in the shape of Trace’s wound.
Words failed. She might deny who he was until she froze out here in the snow, and he would still be Trace Ballentine...or some form of him.
Not the one she had loved, though. Her Trace was dead and gone. Her Clark had never been.
What was she to do? She needed this man’s help. Until a few moments ago she had wanted his love.
While she stood in the snowbank, stupidly gazing down, she thought of the girl she had been. Back then, she had always known what to do. She let the child in her out now.
She stooped and snagged a fistful of snow. She pounded it into a ball, then tossed it at the stranger’s face as hard as she knew how.
He grimaced and shook his head. Beside his nose a red welt began to swell.
She hoped it turned black-and-blue by morning.
“Go back to your library, Mr. Ballentine.” She gazed down her nose at him. “Or Mr. Clarkly, whoever you are at this particular moment.”
With her heart feeling as heavy as the low note in a tragic song, she mounted the cabin steps.
She held her head high, though, while she lifted the soggy hem of her skirt.
Trace was not the only one who could put on an act. If she looked aloof and uncaring in the face of his confession, so be it. He didn’t deserve to know to know how much he had hurt her.
Once inside, she shot the lock home, then tripped over to the fireplace, where she crumpled to her knees. She folded her arms on the hearth and buried her head in them. She wept, silently and bitterly, for the loss of her fairy king...and her librarian.
* * *
Alden Hanispree’s collar grew tight. Anger pooled in his throat until he felt that he was choking on it.
He stood outside a rear window of the whorehouse, shivering in the night air. He would have come in the front door, but Willow would have charged him something. Thanks to Lilleth Preston, his bank account was not as big as a man like him deserved.
There was no sense in paying the madam for nothing, for the privilege of stepping on her carpet and looking at her girls as he passed.
The word was, Perryman had returned. He’d slunk back into town and had been hiding and whoring for two full days.
If he didn’t need Perryman, Alden wouldn’t hesitate to strangle him. That the fool could come straight here without reporting what he had learned was beyond maddening.
Alden pounded his fist on the icy windowpane. This wasn’t the first time he had been left outside Slender Sadie’s window waiting for Perryman to finish his business. She was the only whore who allowed the idiot to indulge in his favorite, disgusting vice.
“Open up, Perryman!”
“Not now,” his voice grunted in reply.
“Don’t make me break the glass.”
Just as he’d figured, Slender Sadie’s skinny hands lifted the window. She wouldn’t want the cost of the glass to come out of her pay.
Perryman sat at a table beside the window in his long johns, with Sadie sitting across from him. A crimson shift hung off the whore’s shoulder revealing one small, sagging breast. A bowl of bugs, some dead and some still squirming, sat between them.
“Want one?” Perryman asked, retrieving a live worm from the bowl and sucking the slimy creature through his lips.
“What I want is to know if you found the brats.”
“Don’t know. Could be.”
Alden breathed frigid air through his nose, but it didn’t help cool his roiling temper.
Too enraptured by his feast to notice that he was about to be slammed by a blast of anger, Perryman licked his lips. He poked his squirming feast with one long, bony finger.
Sadie stood up, walked quickly to the door. Her hand shook when she went out and closed it behind her. Someone, at least, remembered the last time Alden had been unable to hold his temper in check.
He took three deep breaths. He couldn’t afford to lose Perryman as an ally.
“Climb out the window and tell me what you know.”
“I’ll climb out once my balls warm through.”
Not a soul on earth could rile him like Perryman could.
“I’ll rip them off you and bury them in the ice if you don’t tell me what you found out.”
Perryman blinked his eerie-looking, coal-black eyes. “I found out that you don’t hide in an outhouse if you want to keep your man-parts healthy.”
Alden reached through the window and slapped Perryman’s face. He couldn’t help it. The only reason he regretted it was that now he’d have to have act snivelly and sorrowful or Perryman might close his mouth on any information he had gained. The man could be stubborn as a rock and just as dumb.
“I’m sorry,” Alden grated through his teeth. “I appreciate that you were nearly unmanned. Please sit inside where it’s warm while I stand out here and freeze my balls off.”
“Nothing to keep you from crawling through the window.”
Nothing but a revolting bowl of bugs, an idiot, and a fee he didn’t feel he ought to pay. He clenched his fingers into fists and shivered. “Please...do tell me what you found out.”
“I saw a lady, figured she was the one, since she had the kid and the baby with her. I followed her home one night, but then it snowed. That’s when I got trapped in the latrine.”
“It could happen to anyone,” Alden lied.
“After all that, it turned out not to be her.” He bit a dried roach in half. “When she came out to do her business, it was some other lady. This one had a passel of little girls and a big husband.”
“How do you know that?”
“She said so, after she knocked me over with a shovel.”
“Did you see the girls? Did the husband come out when she discovered a stranger in her outhouse?”
“Only thing I was seeing were stars from when she walloped me. If I’d been myself I’d have given her what for and left the remains for her husband to scrape off the snow.”
Idiot! Idiot! Idiot! Alden bit his lips to keep from shouting it out loud.
“From what I’ve heard of Lilleth Preston, she can get the better of a man. No need to feel too bad about it.”
“This woman w
eren’t her. She had a voice like sand.”
“Only one way to make sure.” This was the very last thing Alden wanted to do, but maybe he could handle it if he wasn’t alone. “I’m going to Riverwalk to see for myself, and you are coming with me.”
“I’m staying here.”
“Remember what I said? When we get my brother’s money we’ll buy this place.”
Perryman’s head snapped around. He got up to investigate something crawling in the corner.
“Don’t mind things the way they are,” he said. “Sadie let me eat bugs off of her—”
“I’ll give you the singer,” Alden said quickly. He truly didn’t want to know about the insects. “I’ll put her in the room with her sister. You can have them both. Eat bugs from between their toes, for all I care.”
Perryman stood up and snatched his clothing from the floor. After he dressed, he folded his long frame through the window and stepped outside.
“Get me a warm room at the Riverwalk Hotel and it’s a deal.”
They would both stay in the hotel. There was no way Alden was going to go anywhere near his insane asylum.
Ghosts probably drifted over every inch of those grounds.
* * *
Three days had passed since Trace Ballentine’s betrayal. Plenty of time to dry her eyes and decide that she did not need his help in rescuing Bethany.
She would do it on her own. That had been her plan from the beginning, after all. She hadn’t spent all her life depending on herself only to rely on someone else to do something so important.
A great deal of heartache might have been avoided had she done so all along. She would still be Lilly Gordon and Trace would have remained Clark Clarkly, strangers who could bid each other good day and never give the other a second thought. Ships that pass in the night.
So here she was this fine sunny morning, sailing her lone ship up the steps of Hanispree Mental Hospital.
She opened the front door and walked up to a desk with a name plate on it reading Nurse Goodhew. A bored-looking woman glanced up at her.
Lilleth wondered what secrets she kept behind her indifferent gaze. Did she know about Bethany? Did she care?
“I’m here to see Mr. Alden Hanispree.”