Always You (6 page)

Chiara dropped her gaze to her feet. “I stopped over before I came here.”

“Did Almadine give you a big ol’ kiss and hug?” Cady teased.

“I didn’t run into her.”

“You’re a little old to be climbing in windows, aren’t you?”

“I really needed to see John.”

Chiara shifted her gaze from Cady’s, but not before she saw the understanding there. Cady, perhaps better than any of her other sisters, knew the importance of finding a strong shoulder—the best shoulder—to rest your head on in times of grief. Their Grandma Claire’s death had been a time of unbearable sorrow, but from that painful soil, Cady’s beautiful family had grown. And continued to grow, Chiara acknowledged with another glance at Cady’s barely noticeable abdomen.

“John’s been around a lot since he moved back here to start USITI Junior,” Cady said. “He has dinner with us almost every Sunday.”

“He loves Mama’s cooking.”

“He loves you,” Cady said. “When are you two finally going to stop pissing around and get mar—”

Chiara abruptly stood. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed. See you guys in the morning.”

She ignored Cady’s loud whisper calling her name as she hurried to the opening of the stairwell and disappeared through the trapdoor. She bypassed the bedroom where her nieces seemed to have quieted for the night. She caught a glimpse of her mother reading in bed, but rushed by her open door without a word to her. Chiara kept going until she’d reached the kitchen where she retrieved her coat. She pulled it on as she moved through the darkened dining room and foyer. Silently, she opened the front door and slipped out of the house.

Once outside, she took a long, deep breath of the frigid air. It refreshed her but did nothing to rid her of the tension coiled in her neck and lower back. Nor did it clear away the anxiety tightening her chest. She trotted to her rental car and hopped into it. As she was pulling her left leg in, she happened to glance down.

Long footprints in the snowy street held her gaze. The new snow had erased the evidence of her movement in or out of the car, yet someone with big feet had been near her car recently. The prints were dusted over with snow, but they were clear enough to make the fine hairs at the back of Chiara’s neck stiffen. She studied them closer, reading the pattern of them, and what they revealed chilled her blood.

The footprints began at her driver’s side door. As if their owner had exited the vehicle soon after she had.

Chiara leaped out of the car and peered into its darkened interior. The tiny backseat of the Mazda was empty. She whirled around, her heart thundering in her ears, looking around her. Her neighborhood slumbered peacefully, a few lights in the upper floors of the houses glowing warmly into the night.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Nothing other than the big footprints leading from her car to the sidewalk in front of her mother’s house.

* * *

“I didn’t call you to make you come here.” Chiara opened the door to her hotel room wider and retreated a few steps, allowing John to enter. “You should be at home with your family.”

“So should you.” He closed the door behind him, then turned the thumb latch and bolted the security lock. “Your family’s a lot more pleasant to be around than mine, so I really don’t understand why you ended up running to a hotel in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve.”

“It’s Christmas now,” she said sullenly. “And there was no room at the inn. My mother’s house is full, and I didn’t feel like bunking with my nieces.” She led him into the living room section of her suite.

John whistled under his breath when he took in the view from her wall-length window. The St. Louis Gateway Arch, gleaming like a 630-foot stainless steel ornament, practically stood in her living room. “I hope you’re charging this to your USITI expense account.”

“I’m on my own dime tonight.” Chiara curled up in an ornately styled wing chair. She’d changed into an oversized T-shirt, and the garment rode up high on her thighs as she folded her legs under her. “I asked for a standard room, but the front desk guy was feeling the spirit of the holiday and upgraded me to a junior suite.” She pointed to a counter, where a black platter sat at the edge of a sink. “He even sent up a bottle of champagne and a plate of fruit and cheese, all compliments of the hotel.”

John squatted before Chiara and lazily drew his hand along the bare skin of her knee. “I’m sure the booze and the cheddar squares are delicious, but why are you here, Chi? Honestly.”

“I…” The lone syllable trembled from her lips, but then she shook her head and fixed her gaze on his. She had known him for so long, had shared so much with him. She willed him to see the convoluted knot of emotions strangling her from the inside out. The fading footprints had scared her, if for no other reason than they’d brought out a streak of paranoia that she’d never known herself to possess. And Kyla had been obnoxious to her, but that wasn’t unusual. Why had it upset her so much more tonight than it had over the past twenty-five years of her life?

And that chip…Why did thoughts of the deliberately misplaced master microchip made it feel as though battery acid churned in her stomach?

She slid off of the chair and into John’s arms, wrapping her own tightly around his neck. He stood, bringing her to her feet, and noticed the shiver in her small frame. He held her, pressing kisses to her hair and murmuring comforting words of nothing to her.

“I’m in trouble, John,” she gasped, and the desperation in her confession tugged at his heart.

He couldn’t stop himself from chuckling. “I wish I had a dime for every time I’ve heard you say that.”

Her hold on him tightened. “I’m in real trouble this time, because of Zhou. Because of that master chip.”

“Baby, you can’t worry about that. You had no idea what Zhou was doing. From the looks of things,
he
didn’t know what he was doing. You can’t waste your time worrying about something someone else did.”

“Someone…s-someone followed me tonight,” she said haltingly.

John took hold of her shoulders and pulled her away just enough to meet her eyes. “What do you mean?”

“At my mother’s I saw footprints leading away from my car. I think someone was in my rental.”

John’s eyes flashed as silvery grey as the Arch dominating the view. “Are you sure?”

“I saw the footprints in the snow, John. They started at my car. They led away from the driver’s side.”

“Maybe you just parked where someone had crossed the street. There was a lot of activity on your street tonight. Your mother wasn’t the only one having a party.”

“Maybe…” Chiara admitted, thinking about it. It was entirely possible, really, that she’d parked in a spot that had been freshly vacated by someone else. Her overeager imagination, already sparked to life by John’s possession of the master chip, had conjured a scenario that now seemed impossible: that someone had been in her car or had followed her to her mother’s.

* * *

John couldn’t decide which was more beautiful—Chiara as she’d been when he’d first spied her peeking into his mother’s dining room window, or Chiara as she was now, lying nude in his arms, snuggled deep under whispery cotton sheets and goosedown. Her head was pillowed on his chest, her thick, dark hair blanketing his shoulder and neck. Her upper body languidly rose and fell in the telltale way of deep slumber, but John didn’t dare move to see if she were actually sleeping.

He would do nothing to disturb the perfect peace of this moment.

Though he kept his gaze fixed on the grayish-pink sky which was sprinkling fluffy, fat snowflakes over St. Louis, he remained acutely aware of the woman wrapped around him. Chiara was one of the most incredible people he’d ever met, and certainly the most remarkable woman. Where she was a complete enigma to her family and even the few people she considered friends, John had always understood her with perfect, unerring clarity.

At least he thought he had, which was why he’d come to her at the hotel, and why he lay awake now, his forehead tense in thought.

Chiara, who had always been the stronger of the two of them, the more poised, the more confident, certainly the more fearless, was scared. He’d hardly recognized her at first when she’d let him into her suite. Her deep brown eyes had seemed to shine a bit too brightly; her full, luscious lips had pulled into a brittle, anxious smile. Even her body language had been all wrong. She was the smallest of the Winters sisters at a neat five-feet and two inches, but she’d always seemed taller and mightier and moved with the elegant power of a trained dancer. Tonight, she seemed to have collapsed in on herself a bit.

John shifted her in his arms. Chiara’s arms and legs tightened around him, as though in sleep she was afraid he would let her go. He kissed the top of her head and locked his hands together around her shoulder, mutely assuring her that he wasn’t going anywhere.

Chiara’s head moved, settling more comfortably on the hard muscle of John’s chest. She knew he wasn’t sleeping. As often as they’d shared a bed, she could tell when he was sleeping and when he was awake. Sleep pulled at her, but she forced her eyes to remain open, to stare unblinking at the patterns the reflections of the falling snow made on the pale duvet cover. Her problem had brought John to her, and now it was keeping him from getting a good night’s sleep. It wasn’t fair for her to doze when he was surely turning her situation over in his mind.

John’s steadiness, his calmness and his generosity with her had been a constant source of strength for her through the years. In some ways, he was the flip side of herself. Where she might have sat in the wing chair all night tearing at her fingernails in sick anxiety, John had eased back her fears with his silent acceptance of them. He’d stripped off her nightshirt and black panties and settled her into bed before piling his own clothes on top of hers and joining her there. He’d held her, covering her legs with one of his, allowing her to nestle into the solid warmth of him. He used his body to cloak her from the chill night and the scary things it contained.

Heart to heart and belly to belly, at that moment John had no interest in sharing anything more physical with her, other than his need to protect her. And Chiara selfishly drank up every bit of it even as tiny sharp claws of guilt tore at her at the thought of what she might have gotten him into, all because she couldn’t pull Zhou’s troubles out of him before they left Tokyo.

Zhou’s actions were stuck in a permanent loop in her head. With each replay, she tried to discern what had caused him to fall apart as he had, but nothing he’d said helped. Nothing other than his warnings about Emmitt Grayson.

He watches…he listens…he spies…

The words echoed in Chiara’s head until they became a sinister sigh ushering her into a troubled, broken sleep.

No sooner had Chiara shoved her key into the deadbolt on her mother’s front door than the door swung open, revealing Abby Winters in full battle regalia. She had one of her everyday, utility aprons cinched around her waist instead of the festive holiday one she’d worn on Christmas Eve. Both fists were balled on her hips, a long wooden spoon clutched in the left one. Her right foot, dressed in the old pink slippers she wore around the house, bounced up and down like a metronome counting out the beats of her anger.

“Where’ve you been?” she demanded.

Chiara couldn’t tell if the hectic roses in her mother’s deep brown cheeks were the result of her temper or the hot stove she’d likely just abandoned.

“Good morning, Mrs. Winters,” John said smoothly, stepping into view on the front porch. “Merry Christmas.”

John’s presence flipped the right switch. At the sight of him, Abby replaced her frown with a wide, easy smile. She hugged him and accepted a kiss high on her cheekbone. Abby wrapped her arms around one of his and drew him into the house. She continued her tirade against Chiara, but softened it for John’s benefit.

“I called the girls down for breakfast and they said they hadn’t seen you all night,” Abby gently accused over her shoulder as Chiara hung her coat on the full tree just inside the dining room.

“I checked into the Adam’s Mark late last night.” Chiara followed her mother and John into the kitchen. She undid one more button of her white and blue striped shirt in anticipation of the wave of heat that would wash over her once Abby swung open the kitchen door.

But her mother hesitated. “Wha…” Her words faded, and her face pulled into a mask of confusion. She freed John, who shook his arm to restore feeling to it. “Why?”

Chiara pushed past her mother and John, placed her ear against the kitchen door and said, “Because I’m thirty years old and I didn’t feel like listening to a bunch of little girls giggle all night.” She raised her head, balled up her fist and hammered it against the door. A shriek of pain sounded on the other side.

“That hurt!” Danielle cried out as she pulled the door open from the kitchen side. She bent over to retrieve her wire-rimmed glasses from the floor. “And I’m not a little girl,” she protested, despite her wardrobe of hot pink Power Puff Girls pajamas. “I’m thirteen!”

“Stay out of it, little girl,” came her mother’s voice, carried on a burst of heat from the kitchen. “Morning, Chiara,” Clara called to her. “Have you had breakfast yet?”

Chiara slipped past Danielle and threaded her way through the congested kitchen. Half of Zweli protruded from the refrigerator, and Abby skirted around that half to drag John to the back door, to show him the plans for the new rear patio Santa Claus had given her through her sons-in-law. Abigail and Ella were propped on stools at the prep island, nursing glasses of orange juice. Still in their pajamas, the girls seemed to wriggle with the energy they were saving to open the presents heaped under Abby’s 10-foot Christmas tree.

Chiara found her oldest sister, Clara, manning the pots and pans pleasantly steaming and bubbling at the stove. She embraced Clara, who had been stirring cinnamon and honey into a pot of Cream of Wheat. “You didn’t have to go to a hotel,” Clara said, her voice low so that only Chiara could hear her. “You know you could have stayed at my house last night. Christopher and I have plenty of room.”

Chiara took the wooden spoon from Clara’s hand to sample a steaming bit of the hot cereal. “I’ll bet Kyla and Zweli did too, considering they holed up here last night.”

“Mama told me that you and Kyla got into it.” Clara began dishing the cereal into ceramic bowls. “You can’t let her bother you.”

“She didn’t, not really,” Chiara admitted. “There are some things going on at USITI. I thought coming home would help.”

“It will,” Clara smiled. “Once you fully acclimate. It took me a while to get used to being home, once Christopher and I moved back. I didn’t realize how overwhelming the Winters clan can be when you’re here full time.”

“It’s always been different for you,” Chiara pointed out. “You’re the oldest. Mama and Grandma Claire always let you do what you wanted. I always had a houseful of bossy broads telling me what for.”

“Aunt Chiara hurt my ear,” Danielle whined to her mother as she accepted a bowl of cereal.

“You had that coming, DNN,” Zweli called as he turned from the refrigerator with a pre-made bottle of milk. “You need to stop eavesdropping on people.”

“DNN?” Chiara questioned when Zweli neared her to use the microwave to heat the cup of water he’d use to warm the baby bottle.

“Danielle News Network,” he chuckled under his breath. “She’s out of control with the eavesdropping and gossiping.”

Abby, her remodeling show and tell complete, took center stage in front of the sink. “Finish your breakfast, kids, I need my kitchen back,” she announced. “We’ve got people coming at three and we need to be ready.”

“Grandma, it’s nine o’clock,” her namesake said with a swing of her long, dark braids. “You have plenty of time.”

“What do you mean ‘you’?” Abby challenged. “I said ‘we.’ I still need the cranberry sauce made.” She began ticking her needs off on her fingers. “I have to put the bourbon butter glaze on the turkey and stick it back in the oven, I need the russet potatoes peeled, the sweet potatoes wrapped in foil, the eggs deviled, my eggplant sweated, my shrimp shelled—”

“Are you making the ginger shrimp recipe I e-mailed to you from Thailand?” Chiara broke in.

“No,
you’re
making the ginger shrimp recipe you e-mailed to me,” Abby said, her response a seamless part of her litany, which continued with, “my cabbage shredded, the cherry and apricot glaze brushed onto my ham, the cranberry vinaigrette made, my squash stuffed—”

Danielle, a blush brushing her cashew cheeks in brick red, covered her mouth and giggled.

“Is there something the matter with you?” Clara asked pointedly.

“Grandma said that she needed her squash stuffed,” Danielle repeated through a fresh round of giggles.

“Why is that funny to you?” Clara asked.

“It’s funny to Uncle Zweli, too,” Danielle said.

Zweli, his wide, devilish smile frozen on his face at being called out, zoomed from the kitchen with, “I gotta feed the baby.”

Clara pursed her lips and turned back to the stove. She used a rubber spatula to stir Abby’s cherry-apricot glaze. “That girl’s mind has been in the gutter ever since she turned thirteen. Ever since she started junior high, all she thinks about is boys and sex.”

“It’s normal at that age,” Chiara said. “At least she’s giggling about it out in the open. You should be worried when she tries to hide it and starts sneaking around to explore things on her own.”

Still stirring furiously, Clara grudgingly smiled. “You sound like a mother. I suppose you’re right. But still…” She chanced a look at her youngest child, her only daughter, and her brown eyes softened. “I was hoping my baby would stay a baby just a little while longer. Instead of turning into an MTV/BET-obsessed human Bratz doll.”

“Just be honest with her,” Chiara said. “You always were with me, and look how I turned out.”

Clara chuckled, her full lips pulling into a warm smile. “Yes, look at you…staying out all night with John Mahoney.”

“I know why you didn’t want to sleep with us last night,” Danielle called from her stool at the prep island. “There was someone else you wanted to sleep with.” She moved her index finger in a tiny point at John.

Armed with a bright red hand towel trimmed in green ribbon, Clara swept across the kitchen to shoo her daughter out of the room. “Get upstairs and get dressed!” she shouted, her words nearly drowned out by Danielle’s hysterical laughter.

“Who did you sleep with last night, Aunt Chiara?” Abigail asked, her dark eyes wide with genuine innocence. “I slept with Ella and her icy cold feet.”

Ella tugged at one of her glossy, blue-black braids. “I forgot to put my socks on.” She put her foot on Abigail’s knee. “My feet are nice and warm now.”

“Ugh!” Abigail groaned.

“You two go on and get dressed, too,” Abby instructed, prompting them with a hand on their backs. “The sooner you get dressed, the sooner you can open your presents.”

“Aren’t we waiting for Troy, C.J. and Clarence to come over?” Abigail asked.

“They should be here by the time you finish dressing,” Abby smiled. “Now get a move on.”

Chiara watched her nieces, their matching braids merrily swinging, exit the kitchen. When she turned to find John again, she was startled to find her mother standing directly behind her.

“So who
did
you sleep with last night?” Abby asked quietly.

* * *

John fought the need to shiver in the early darkness. When “the husbands”—Christopher, Lee, Keren and Zweli—went to the back porch after dinner to collect beers from Abby’s big coolers, John had decided to accompany them, rather than remain in the living room with the wives, children and Winters family friends.

The husbands had barely popped the caps on their bottles of gourmet brews before they began to interrogate John as to whether he’d popped the question to Chiara.

“Abby said that she had a feeling you were going to,” said Christopher Holtz, Clara’s husband. Even though he’d had laser surgery to correct his vision, Christopher still had the habit of pushing at the bridge of his nose, as if he still wore the glasses John was so used to seeing propped there.

“It’s a hard step, I know,” Zweli said, his breath condensing in the freezing air. “Believe me, I know. But when I proposed to Kyla—”

“Which time?” laughed Lee Clark, Ciel’s stocky fireplug of a husband.

“Each time,” Zweli chuckled. “I knew that I was doing the right thing. I knew from the first moment I saw her that I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life.”

“Perhaps it’s different for John,” Dr. Keren Bailey considered. Cady’s husband looked perfectly comfortable in a thickly cabled rust-colored sweater. “John and Chiara have been together for so long, they’re practically common law. Maybe they don’t feel the need to get married the way we all did.”

“Hold on a minute,” Lee said, his tail up. “I can tell you right now, there’s no way Abby Winters is going to let her baby girl shack up with any man, not even John Mahoney.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” John asked.

“Abby thinks the world of you, you know that,” Lee said. “She would have orchestrated an arranged marriage for you and Chiara if—” He abruptly went silent and took a sip of his beer.

“If what?” Zweli asked.

It occurred to John that Zweli, the newest addition to the Winters family, probably wasn’t fully aware of the Mahoney-Winters feud.

“If Almadine,” Christopher said, his blue eyes dimming in the faint porch light.

“Good ol’ Almadine.” Lee raised his beer in a mocking salute.

“Don’t invoke her name,” Keren said. “Sorry, John.”

“It’s cool,” John said. “She is what she is. And you all know what she is.”

“I don’t,” Zweli said. “What, does she not like Chiara?”

“She hates her,” John said.

“She hates the whole family,” Lee added. “Always has.”

“Why?” Zweli asked.

“Because…” John struggled for the simplest way to explain his mother’s feelings for the Winters family. “She thinks they’re not as good as she is,” he shrugged. “My mother is a snob.”

“How did you turn out to be so decent?” Zweli asked.

John smiled. “I spent as much time as I could here at Chiara’s house. The decency rubbed off.”

“I hear that,” Lee agreed. “So when are we going to get the chance to officially welcome you to the family?”

“Cady figured you’d have asked for Chiara a long time ago,” Keren said. “Either that, or you’d have moved on to someone else.”

John looked at Keren as though he’d suddenly sprouted antlers and a shiny red nose. “Moved on?”

“Fallen in love with someone else,” Keren clarified.

John laughed out loud. “I wouldn’t even know how to go about it. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love—” A blush rose in his cheeks, and it was strong enough to chase away his shivers. Too late he realized that he’d said too much.

“Oh, you better propose to her now, before she flies off to Timbuktu, or wherever it is that company of yours plans to send her,” Lee advised. “You gotta catch Chiara between flights, you know.”

“I’m not too sure about that,” Christopher said, fastening the top button of his plaid flannel shirt against the chill. “Chiara might have her own plans for her future. They might not even include John.”

Horror danced in the eyes of the other husbands.

“What I mean is this,” Christopher began in the voice that he once used during his long-ago days as a physics professor. “Chiara has always done her own thing. What we took as spontaneity was simply her reluctance to give advance notice of her plans. She’s never felt the need to share her feelings with her sisters, or even her mother. Of course, being the youngest of five probably has a lot to do with that. Chiara has her own life now, and she probably wants to keep it that way. By marrying John, one of her family’s oldest friends, she’ll be pulled back into the Winters collective.” Christopher pushed at his imaginary glasses. “It’s like the Borg, on
Star Trek: The Next Generation
. There’s no true individuality—”

“Do you feel a chill?” Lee interrupted, asking no one in particular as he briskly rubbed his arm. “I feel a chill. I think it’s time for me to go back inside and see what Abby’s got going for dessert.”

“Me, too,” Zweli said. “I want a piece of that raspberry-peach cheesecake before my nieces eat it all up.”

“I just don’t want hear about the Borg,” Keren chuckled. “See you inside, man,” he said to Christopher before strolling back into the house with Lee and Zweli.

After a moment of silence, John looked at Christopher and said, “I always liked
Star Trek: TNG
. I wrote a paper about it in high school comparing Jean-Luc Picard, the pragmatist, to James T. Kirk, the crusader. I got an A on it.”

“I only brought up
Star Trek
because I couldn’t think of a better way to get the other guys to give us some privacy,” Christopher said. “I wanted to ask you about Chiara.”