She nodded mutely. She had never seen him so animated, and she didn’t quite know how to take it.
He went on. “Of course, I can’t just work those few muscle groups. I’ve got to get the whole body into condition if I want to be really fast. When I was competing, I was a bullet in the water. No one could touch me. I’m going to train the way my swim coach had me train back then. An hour of weight work a day, in split sessions, alternating upper- and lower-body work. Plus, every day, a hundred crunches and a hundred push-ups. He also used to have us run five miles, but I’m going to substitute forty-five minutes on the rowing machine. And, of course, laps, as many as I can manage. My goal is a hundred. So what do you think?”
“I think—I think you’re gonna be in pretty good—”
“I think I’m gonna be a monster.” He took her chin in his hand, gave her a quick, hard kiss, and stood. “Oh! I almost forgot why I came in here.” He reached into the right-hand pocket of his gym shorts, pulled out a half-empty pack of American Spirits, and handed it to her. Then he pulled an unopened pack out of the left-hand pocket and handed that to her, as well. “I want you to hide those from me.”
“You’re quitting?”
“You need lungs to swim,” he said, on the way to the door. “All the strength in the world won’t help you if you can’t breathe.” He stood in the doorway and grinned at her.
Adopting what she hoped would pass for an unconcerned smirk, she reached behind her, grabbed the corner of a plump down pillow, and flung it as hard as she could in the direction of his cocky grin. He pulled the door closed, and it landed with a whump and dropped to the floor.
Harley fell back into her pile of pillows, forgetting about the gap left by the one she had just thrown. Her head slammed into the wall and she yelped at the sharp pain. She sat up and rubbed the back of her head, wondering just exactly what she had gotten herself into.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SHORTLY AFTER BREAKFAST the next morning, Tucker took a phone call from Phil.
“You know that old white Victorian house just off the town square in NoMo, the one next to the bookstore?” Phil asked, NoMo being local shorthand for the village of North Moon Bay. NoMo was where the local businesses were. The elite little offshoot peninsula of Hale’s Point was zoned to be pretty much exclusively residential, with an acre as the minimum lot size. “It was a funeral home when we were kids, then an antiques shop?”
“Yeah. This doesn’t have anything to do with my Jag, does it?”
“No, no, no. Doug Ralston bought it. You remember Doug.”
“Sure,” Tucker said. He was in the study, which, despite having his father’s stamp all over it, had always been his favorite room of the house by virtue of its clubby, masculine ambiance. Through the open window facing the front yard, he watched Harley walk back from the mailbox at the road, flipping through a stack of letters and magazines. Her hair was still wet from her morning swim, which she had insisted on taking, and she wore her white terry-cloth robe and no shoes. She had a naturally graceful, loose-hipped walk that he found impossible to look away from. “Is he in the antiques business now?”
“Doug? Not likely. No, he turned it into a club called Moondance. Folk rock, mainly, but there’s a jazz saxophonist who plays there on Monday nights.”
“NoMo has a night-spot?” Tucker said. Harley dropped a letter and bent to pick it up. As she did so, the front of her robe gapped slightly, revealing the pale, rounded tops of her breasts. That she was naked under the robe came as a surprise; Tucker had assumed she still wore her swimsuit.
Phil said, “Yes, believe it or not, quaint little North Moon Bay has a nightspot. It’s a good one, too.”
“And the point of all this...” Tucker prompted. Harley pulled out one of the magazines and smiled at the cover. Tucker ached with curiosity to know what had made her smile. He shook his head. Who cared? What was the matter with him?
“The point,” Phil answered, “is that tonight’s band has canceled, and seeing as how it’s Friday, and the place will be packed, that’s not a good thing. Luckily, he’s got backup entertainment on reserve at all times. Bet you can’t guess who that is.”
After a moment’s thought. Tucker said, “You’re not serious. Not Rob and Jim and those guys? They can’t still have that awful band after twenty years.”
“Well, not Jim. He’s doing entertainment law in L. A. But Rob and Paul are still here. Rob does public relations and Paul teaches history at Stony Brook. They play together every chance they get. They’re not awful anymore, either. Pretty good, in fact. Folk and blues. They even write some of their own stuff now. Why don’t you come check them out tonight? Say, around nine? It’d be like a reunion. And ask Harley if she wants to come.”
She was close now, on the front walk, her nose buried in the mail, completely unaware that he had been watching her. “Harley!” he called. He held the phone away from his mouth, but resisted the impulse to cover the mouthpiece; he wanted Phil to hear this.
She looked around briefly before squinting at the screened window. “Tucker?”
“You want to go listen to some live music with me tonight? As my date?”
“Damn it, Tucker!” came Phil’s tinny voice over the line. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
After a pause, she shrugged. “Sure. That sounds like fun.”
“Great.” said Tucker. “I’ll drive us there—” he held the phone close to his mouth and enunciated very clearly “—in my new Jag.”
Harley, looking puzzled, walked away, while Phil said, “You think you’re so smart. You may have your new Jag, but I’ve got something better. I’ve got a medical degree. I am a doctor! A genuine, six-figure M.D. Ain’t no car in the world can compete with that, even yours. Which is not to say I don’t still want it. I definitely am still willing to trade you my house for it. I just want you to know it takes more than a great car to win over a girl like that.”
“What does it take, Phil?”
“It takes a stack of credit cards so fat you could wrap both hands around them and your fingers won’t touch. It takes Lord & Taylor, Bloomie’s, Saks, Bergdorf’s, and about a zillion more. Oh, but I forgot! You don’t believe in credit!” He laughed maniacally. “You lose!”
“Tell you what,” Tucker said. “I feel sorry for you, so I’m going to find you a date. Matter of fact, I’ve already got someone in mind. You’ll love her.”
“Who? Not Marie. She’s cute, but she’s not my type.”
“Let me decide what your type is. I’m an excellent judge of these things.”
“Tucker, don’t go inviting some—”
“I’ve got to go now. Harley needs some help with the Coppertone.”
“Tucker—”
“See you tonight.”
After hanging up on Phil, Tucker looked up the Tiltons’ number in R.H.’s massive black leather address book, the same one he’d had when Tucker was a boy.
“Marie? Tucker Hale. Listen, some friends of mine are gonna be playing at Moondance tonight. Harley and I are going, and we wondered if you’d like to join us. And there’s someone else I’d like you to bring....”
AROUND ONE O’CLOCK, Tucker left for the afternoon, saying he had to finish his business with the Jaguar dealer and run a couple of other errands. While he was gone, Harley attended to the pool maintenance and briefly exercised R.H.’s eight sports cars, which he had asked her to do twice a week. Then she took her afternoon run, but her energy had been sapped by the heatstroke, and she ended up exhausted.
When she climbed up from the beach, his Jag was in the driveway. On the kitchen table she found a couple of onions, a head of garlic, a bag of yellow corn-meal, a jar of ground ancho pepper, and various other spices and canned goods. Passing by his room, she saw on his bed a scattering of bags and boxes.
Upstairs, the door to R.H.’s suite was ajar and she could hear a repetitive metallic scraping accompanied by labored breathing and an occasional grunt of effort. She closed th
e door to her room, stripped, slipped between the cool cotton sheets, and fell asleep.
A HAND GENTLY KNEADED her bare back. She opened her eyes to find Tucker sitting on the bed, murmuring, “Wake up. Chili’s ready.”
The sheet covered her only to her waist, but thankfully she was lying on her stomach. Even if she weren’t, he’d seen it all before, she reminded herself. She had the sense of having slept deeply.
“Come on, honey,” he said, smoothing her hair off her face. “Up and at ‘em.”
“You leave and I’ll get up and at ’em.” she mumbled. She twisted her head to look at him. “And don’t call me hon—” The rebuke stuck in her throat, and all she could do was stare dumbly. He looked completely different. He looked like a stranger. “You cut your hair,” she finally said.
“There’s a barber in NoMo.” He ran a hand over it. It was very short all over; almost, but not quite, a buzz cut. It an unforgiving cut, unflattering on most men, but Tucker wasn’t one of them. The absence of hair showed off the pleasing shape of his head and the sharply carved bones of his face. He looked both aristocratic and military, like a young Roman emperor.
Standing, he draped her white robe over her inert form and headed toward the door. “Wake ’em and shake ’em, babe. Cold chili’s a bummer.”
Finding her voice as he closed the door behind him, she yelled, “And don’t call me babe, either!”
The chili and corn bread were ridiculously good, and Harley surprised herself by having seconds of both. She offered to clean since he had cooked. Tucker consulted the kitchen clock and said, “Okay. That’ll give me some time to do a few laps before we swim. Then we should still make it to the club by nine. Can I, uh... can I borrow your... stopwatch?”
Harley allowed her stunned expression to metamorphose into a self-satisfied grin. “Of course,” she said with mock graciousness, unbuckling the watch and handing it to him.
He accepted it with a sheepish grin and disappeared into his room. A few minutes later she heard the French doors open and close. When she looked out the kitchen window, she saw him striding in the dusk to the brightly lit pool, clad in a black jammer-style Speedo, which he must have bought that day. Designed for maximum speed in competition, the suit hugged him from just above his knees to about six or eight inches below his navel, exposing the hard-cut vee of his lower abs and drawing her gaze inexorably downward.
“Damn, Tucker,” she whispered, chuckling at herself when she realized she’d said it out loud. Normally she wasn’t the type of female to leer at hot men, but...
Damn.
He had his back to her as he fiddled with the stopwatch, so she felt free to continue staring. Okay, leering.
He stood with careless grace, his weight resting on his good leg. His shoulders were well muscled, squaring off a broad back that scooped down to narrow hips and a compact butt. His short hair and long, powerful limbs completed the image: injuries aside, he looked not so much like a Roman emperor as a Roman god, carved in marble at the edge of a temple’s reflecting pool.
He moved to the edge of the deep end, crouched in proper starting position, clicked the stopwatch, and sprang into the water. As he did so, she saw his grimace of pain, and winced.
She left him—swimming slow, laborious laps—to change into her white maillot, then joined him in the pool. For about forty minutes he continued his laps, checking the stopwatch periodically, while she lazily backstroked from one end to the other.
Now he’s the driven one and I’m just hanging out, she thought as the stars drifted past overhead.
His voice interrupted her reverie. “Ready to try this again?”
They took their positions. “One... two... three... go!”
He made it a little farther into the deep end before she touched the deck, but not much. Nevertheless, he seemed exhilarated, which she knew owed less to endorphins than to anticipation, the prospect of catching her and collecting his prize. Shivering, she ran upstairs to shower and change for the club.
HARLEY HATED not knowing the right thing to wear. She had never been to a folk-rock club, or any other kind of club, for that matter. Did women wear jeans and T-shirts or nice dresses?
Scanning the half-dozen outfits carefully laid out on her bed, she chastised herself for her lack of self-confidence. Wear whatever you want, for God’s sake! Why should you knock yourself out, anyway? Imagine how Tucker will look. The idea of walking into a public place on the arm of a man in faded army surplus only added to her distress, so she put it out of her mind.
In the end, she chose a flowy blouse and patterned skirt. She had bought the skirt on impulse, having fallen instantly in love with its sheer, gold-flecked layers of teal, eggplant, and midnight blue. But she had never worn it, having had no place to wear it to—until now.
One of the advantages of being small on top was having the option of going braless if the spirit moved her. She exercised that option now, so that she could loosen the drawstring of her blouse and push the neckline down off her shoulders, as she had seen it displayed on the mannequin in the store. There. Now she didn’t look like little Miss Fiscally Conservative M.B.A.
She rarely wore makeup, but tonight she thoughtfully applied some mascara, brushed on a light dusting of powder, and painted her lips shell pink. After brushing her hair out loosely, she put on her best silver-and-onyx earrings, then appraised the results in the mirror and smiled. She tossed a few things into her smallest handbag and went downstairs.
The door to Tucker’s room stood open, and she saw that some of the bags and boxes that littered the bed had been opened. She didn’t see Tucker himself until she stepped into the room, and the sight of him drew an astonished gasp from her.
He stood in front of the full-length, freestanding mirror, holding two linen ties up to his chest and frowning. One was floral, the other a pattern of free-form brushstrokes, both in shades of brown, gray, and a pale, muted green that exactly matched the green of his crisp, button-down shirt. He wore new-looking dark jeans, and his belt and shoes were of soft, brown kid. A putty-colored summer blazer hung over the back of the chair in the corner. When he looked her way, all she could say was, “Wow.”
His unblinking eyes took her in, head to toe, and then he smiled a smile of immense satisfaction. “That’s my line. You look... Wow, you look spectacular.”
Harley bit her lip, not wanting to look too pleased with herself. “So do you,” she said. “You look so... different.”
“I didn’t want you to feel embarrassed to be seen with me.”
“I—I wouldn’t have.”
He grinned skeptically. “Ooh, you’re a ba-a-ad liar.”
“I am not! I mean—”
“It’s good to be a bad liar. It means you have an honest heart.” He held the ties up for her inspection. “Which one?”
She considered for a moment, then picked the brushstroke one. He tossed the other one on the bed and, turning back to the mirror, threaded it through his collar and swiftly tied it. When he was done, he loosened it and unbuttoned the shirt’s top button, saying, “Mustn’t get too carried away.” He paused and reached a hand out to stroke her cheek. “You really look incredible.” Tucking her hair behind one ear, he said, “Those are nice earrings, but with your coloring, you should really wear gold—yellow gold. And rubies.”
She shrugged. “I like silver. Besides, rubies aren’t exactly in my budget.”
His hand trailed down to her mouth, and he patted her lower lip gently with his index finger, then examined the little smudge of shell pink on his fingertip. “Do you ever wear red lipstick?”
“Ugh, no.”
He took his jacket from the chairback and tunneled his long arms into it. “That’s probably for the best. If you did, I think you’d send me completely over the edge.”
CHAPTER NINE
HARLEY SPENT THE SHORT RIDE through North Moon Bay holding her hair in a knot at the nape of her neck to keep the wind from whipping it into a rat’s nest. Most of the
trip was along one-lane roads that twisted up and plunged down. Whenever Harley had to make this drive, she found the experience harrowing, especially in the dark, but Tucker seemed completely unperturbed. With one hand on the wheel and the other on the stick shift, he maneuvered the convertible as smoothly as if he were a part of the machine itself.
Harley found the antiquated buildings of North Moon Bay very charming in a peculiar, off-kilter kind of way. Once a haven for sailors and smugglers, its population now ranged from billionaires to the working class, and everywhere in between.
Tucker drove up to a warmly lit ivory gingerbread Victorian overgrown with flowering vines. From the lamppost dangled a small wooden plaque with the man in the moon painted on it. He parked on the narrow street at an acute downhill angle and raised the roof, then came around and opened the car door for her. Another “absurd” souvenir from his Hale’s Point upbringing? For a nonconformist wild card, Tucker Hale could be quite the gentleman.
No sooner had they entered the club than a deep male voice boomed, “Tucker Hale, you son of a bitch, where’s my Nine Inch Nails CD?” A bearded, red-haired giant threaded his way toward them through the milling patrons.
“I don’t have your Nine Inch Nails CD, Doug, I told you that!” Tucker bellowed back.
“Then who does?” Doug demanded, looming over them.
“Ask Rob.”
Harley’s head spun. This man probably hadn’t set eyes on Tucker for decades. As near as she could tell, the two men had just slid back into a twenty-year-old argument.
“Let’s do that,” the giant thundered, turning and motioning them to follow him to a large back room. She could tell it had once been a formal dining room, since a crystal chandelier still hung from its ceiling.
In the corner, on a small stage set up with a piano, two men, one blond, one dark, were testing microphones. “Rob,” Doug roared, and the blond man looked up, grinning broadly when he saw Tucker. “Do you have my Nine Inch Nails CD?”
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