Beautiful Stranger (7 page)

“There's more. Hang on.” Marissa dashed into the kitchen, pulled the kettle off the burner and dashed back out. Pushing the authentic push-button fixture for the overhead light, she moved to the stairway. “This earned him an article in
Old House Journal.
” She knelt and touched the tiny, intricate carving of leaves and flowers. “Some kids lived here for a while at one point, and there were a lot of parties from what I gather. He had to re-carve about half of it.”

He bent close to examine it. Marissa settled on the third step up, bracing her elbows on her knees, and admired him as he admired the wood. A lively dance began to play and she tapped her foot in time to it, wondering if he liked dancing.

She liked everything about the way he looked—the straightness of his limbs, the darkness of his glossy hair, the blade of his nose, which was almost too thin to be attractive. Idly she admired his mouth, thinking it would be lovely to kiss.

As if he felt her examination, he looked up. It was as it had been this morning, their faces close enough that it wouldn't take much to close the gap, and she blinked slowly, letting him see that she wouldn't mind if somehow they found themselves in a nice hot kiss. He wanted to. A little movement of his mouth, a slight shift in her direction told her he was thinking about it. His lids flickered downward, eyes touching her face, her neck, her décolletage. Lingered.

He stood up suddenly, backing away. “Your dress…uh…” He tapped his chest, pointed at her. “It's…uh…gaping a little.”

Marissa looked down and realized he'd probably had quite a view from above her. “Oops. Sorry about that. I knew it was a little big.”

“No apology necessary, trust me.” He cleared his throat and stuck his hands in his pockets, looking anywhere but at her chest.

She hooted with laughter. “No wonder all those men were being so nice to me tonight!” She stood, pulling the shoulders up and back a little. “You were the only one gentlemanly enough to tell me about it.”

His attention was snared by something across the room. “Holy sh-er-cow.” He pointed. “Do you mind if I look at that?”

Even in her giddy state, Marissa suddenly felt wary. “Go ahead.”

Reverently Robert moved to a stained-glass screen. Light from the living room and kitchen struck it from both sides, setting the wisteria ablaze, not a simple purple and blue, but touches of rose and yellow, and colors she couldn't even name.

She crossed her arms, eyes narrowing to see what he'd say. Everyone who came in the house admired it—thought it was beautiful, unusual. They admired it like a nice stand of roses, then went on.

But by the way Robert bent, by the way he kept his hands behind him like a museum visitor, by the wonder in his face when he turned to her he knew that it was not just beautiful, but priceless. The long dark eyes were alight. Quietly he said, “It's not a copy, is it?”

Marissa shook her head.

“Good God,” he said in a hushed voice. “A Tiffany screen. I've read about them, but I've never seen one.”

“Now you have.”

He moved around it, mesmerized by the shifting colors. “No one has ever come close to his work with glass. Nowhere close. It's my hobby, you know, stained glass. I've seen it all over the world, all the cathedral windows,
all the museum collections.” He moved again, narrowed his eyes, inclined his head. “Then you walk into the Metropolitan Museum in New York and there's that window, and you know.” Very seriously he raised his eyes. “Nobody will ever touch him.”

Marissa had gone from wary to amazed during this long speech. First that he'd spent so much time abroad—it shamed her, that this fact had stunned her. And second that he'd just strung more words together in a string than he usually put together in an hour. “You like old glass?”

He nodded, still a little distracted by the screen. “Stained glass is my big thing, and I'm not as well versed in some as others. Tiffany, I know. Chagall. A few others.” He bent close, peering at a cluster of wisteria. “The colors, the grace of it…” He shook his head. “This is unbelievable.”

She grinned. What were the chances that Red Dog, the wild soldier who'd had a taste for bourbon and wilder women, would be the one person she'd met in years who could identify an original Tiffany? “If you think you can tear yourself away from the screen, I think you might like seeing some other things I have.”

“More?”

“Glass is my hobby, too,” she said. “Collecting, not doing.”

That bothered him, though Marissa wasn't sure why. His eyes narrowed slightly, and for a minute she thought he would make an excuse and leave. Instead, he followed her, his face serious.

She led him into the den, a room she loved, which she'd exquisitely restored. Cherry wood shelves lined three walls, and she'd had lights and glass doors installed, in order to display her treasures in safety and
beauty. On the fourth wall was a bay window with a seat covered in chintz, where her three-year-old black cat, Damien, slept all the time—thus the safety precautions. He blinked when they came in the room, his eyes bright green.

“Hi, sweetie,” she said, patting him distractedly, and clicked on a switch that turned on the lights in the cabinet.

“A black cat,” Robert said. He sounded disturbed.

“Are you superstitious?”

“No.” But he frowned as he moved to look at the cabinets. His expression softened, grew nearly as iridescent as some of the glass within. He pointed to the perfume stopper she'd shown him earlier, now displayed on a small round of black wax. “That's the piece you found today. Is it valuable?”

“Oh, yeah.” She pulled open the doors to give them both access, and pulled it off the shelf. “Rene Lalique, who is by far my favorite. He did a series of perfume bottles for D'Orsay, Houbigant, Worth. I haven't looked this one up yet, but I gave the woman three thousand dollars for it, and it was probably a steal at that.” Marissa drew one finger along the curve of it, smiling. “She was going to sell it to me for fifty cents.”

“Amazing.” He leaned forward to look at a bowl. “Now, this one I know,” he said. “Quezal, right? About 1919, 1920?”

“I'm impressed,” Marissa said honestly. “How did you learn so much about it?”

He raised a hand, put it down and Marissa said, “You can touch them. This isn't a museum. A lot of these pieces aren't even particularly rare or valuable. I just like them.”

He picked up a glass-and-enameled metalwork dresser
box. “It's such a frivolous art form,” he said quietly, touching the piece with gentle awe, as if he could imprint the beauty on his fingertips, “and that's one of the things I like best about it. There is no reason for a window to be colored or a bottle to be anything but a container. Only for beauty.”

“Beauty matters,” Marissa said. “It feeds our souls.”

“Yeah.” Carefully he replaced the piece, a shadow blotting out the wonder on his face. “I guess.”

“You disagree?”

“Not exactly.” There was anger in his eyes. “It's just so much more available to some people than it is to others.”

“Is it?” she challenged. “Can we only find beauty in expensive things?”

With a faint scowl he backed up. “Look, thanks for sharing your treasures, princess, but this was a mistake. I gotta go.”

She crossed her arms and lifted one eyebrow in imitation of him this afternoon. “Did I scare you, little boy?”

“Don't,” he said in a dangerous voice. “Don't play with me.”

“Is that what I'm doing?” Her voice, too, had dangerous registers.

“Sure looks like it from here. Slumming. Isn't that it? Isn't that what you've always done? Dated bikers and bad boys?”

How did he know that? And how did she answer it when it was essentially true? Instead she took the offensive. “You know, I thought you were different.”

“Different?”

“Yeah, like maybe because you've been a victim of
labels all your life, you might be a person who might be able to look past them with someone else.”

“Am I supposed to feel sorry for you, princess? Brokenhearted that you didn't want for a damned thing your whole life?” Real anger sparked in his eyes. “The only walls you faced were the ones you put up yourself.”

That stung. Not because it was true, but because he was putting her in the same little box—a glass cage—that everyone else did, never seeing
her,
only what she represented. But she'd be damned if she let him know he had the power to wound her. Not tonight. Not ever again.

Lifting her chin, she said in a low, hard voice, “Do you wear war paint, Red Dog? Do you have a breech-cloth at home? Can you teach me about the Great Spirit? I know you guys are so much more spiritual than we are.”

The flesh across his cheekbones went tight, and his nostrils flared. Good, she thought darkly. One good box deserved another. She didn't back away, didn't look down, just met his furious gaze with her own fury.

“I'm sorry,” he said abruptly. “That wasn't fair.”

Now she did look away, afraid he would see the sudden brightness of tears. He took a step closer, but Marissa kept her arms crossed, her head down.

He said, “I'm standing here, thinking about my imitation leather belt, you know?” He stepped into the room. “I'm thinking about my ten-year-old truck and the hole in my sock, and it makes me feel like I did when I was a kid. I hate that, feeling small and unimportant because I don't have money.”

She looked up. “And I hate that people think they have to worry about ten-year-old cars in my presence.” Her arms were still tightly crossed, and she felt one hand
in a fist. What was at stake here, to put her in such a defensive posture? “I get tired of apologizing for where I was born. I didn't pick it, any more than you picked.”

“Marissa,” he began, taking another step.

“Let me finish. I love what money can do. I'm not going to lie and say I wish I were poor, because that would be stupid. I love having that Tiffany screen in my living room, and I loved seeing your face when you looked at it and knew what it was—that you should see something you wouldn't see anywhere else, and you appreciate it. And it makes me happy you know glass, and I don't have anyone to share that with, and I liked it, feeling that for ten seconds I had something in
common
with someone.”

“Marissa,” he said again, firmly. He put his hand out, his open palm landing half on the upper swell of her breasts, half on the fabric of the bodice itself. “It's really gaping.”

Electric light, not that soft ghost of blue that it had been, but a bright, sharp, white-blue of lightning, shot between them, almost audible, when his flesh touched hers. A tumble of blistering emotions bolted through her at once—humiliation and terror and desire—and she knew all of them burned in her eyes as she looked at him. Before he could take his hand away, she put hers on top of it. Holding it there, she stepped close and stood on her toes.

He bent at the same moment she lifted up and their mouths met in a violent kiss. Not even a pretense of gentleness, only open mouths colliding, tongues thrusting deep. Marissa's head was bent backward under the force of it, and she heard herself make a little, hot noise when a tooth struck her lip.

Deep thrusts of tongues that wanted a lot more,
mouths wide open. No sweetness, no ease of greeting, just that fierce, pure expression of overwhelming sexual alignment.

It stunned her, and she put a hand out to push him away at the same moment he broke away. Shocked, they stared at each other, both panting. There was a painful sense of recognition in it, a chemical reaction neither had expected.

“We can't do this,” Robert said hoarsely.

“No. I know. Crystal—”

“Oh.” He backed up a step, covering his eyes. “That's why I came over here.”

“Why?” Instantly sober.

“She's at the clinic tonight. She's okay now, I guess, but she went into labor early. They stopped it.”

“Oh, no.” She put a hand on his sleeve. “I'm sorry. I was so selfish tonight, and you had this worry.”

He looked down at her. Closed his eyes. “Damn it, Marissa. You've got to do something about that dress.” Suddenly he just turned on his heel. “I have to go.”

Marissa didn't even see him to the door. It seemed wiser not to somehow.

H
e'd tried to be a gentleman. He really had. The dress was not just delectable, it was dangerously sexy. Made of some thin fabric that clung and moved around her body, the top was supposed to be fitted against her breasts. It was supposed to be sexy. It was low-cut in an elegant kind of way, designed to display generous swells of breasts, maybe a nice diamond necklace.

But Marissa had worn no jewelry. She didn't need it. Her skin was flawless, poreless, perfect, the twin rise of breasts all the adornment necessary.

He wasn't, strictly speaking, a breast man. He liked legs, hair, hands. He noticed lips, and had a thing for a pretty backside, which Marissa definitely had.

Breasts in general were all pretty nice, in his opinion, the most female of attributes in whatever size or shape they took. He'd never been particularly attracted to a woman's body because of the size or shape of her breasts—it had even seemed odd to him that men would
rate them. It was like rating a woman because she was a woman.

Or something. He rubbed his face. Damn, she got to him.

But when she sat there on the stairs, he'd had a long, electrifying look down her dress, and he'd been astonished to discover that he'd just never got it before, why men went so nuts. Her breasts were beautiful, that white, white, supple skin rising in such plushness. The bra she wore beneath the bodice was one of those wispy, barely there deals, a kind of glittery transparent blue, and the edges of her nipples showed through, a very dark color. The colors—dark blue on the dress, transparent blue shimmer, milk-white skin and dark nipples—had gone straight to his sex and burned there.

Still, he managed to keep it together. Tell her it gaped, get himself under control. Once she straightened, with that surprisingly lusty hoot of laughter, he saw that the bodice wasn't all that bad. He could still see a lovely, rich valley that screamed for his tongue. He was sure it was that valley that those men had been eyeing at her party.

But he couldn't get the vision out of his mind. It wasn't so much now what he could see, but what he wanted to see. That tiny transparent thing embracing all that alluring flesh, the dark nipples. The vision burned right at the base of his groin, a hurried, steady pulse that pumped blood all too fast into his willing servant.

Out in the biting night, with a wind blowing down off the snow that was still piled in dark places at higher elevations, he shivered and hunched his shoulders. What was he running from here?

He turned the ignition key and let the truck warm for a few minutes. Through the windshield, he stared at the
house. Light shone through the leaded glass that graced the top third of the arched front windows set into solid, sturdy brick. It promised stability, that house. Stability and protection and calm.

On the second floor, a light clicked on, and Robert imagined Marissa in her bedroom, unzipping that amazing dress and tossing it onto some massive, carved four-poster bed. He imagined her dark hair tumbling down in a glossy swath to her flawless white shoulders, thought of her, dressed in that elegantly transparent bra and a similarly elegant silk slip, padding on manicured feet into a bathroom with a claw-footed tub and original wood on the walls.

And with every cell in his body, he wanted to be in there with her, putting his hands on that flesh, climbing into that tub, that bed with her. He thought—no, he knew—that she would like it. That kiss had told him that much.

What would it hurt? He'd get up before dawn and Crystal would never know.

But he knew why he wasn't about to go back to her door. Not only because Crystal would scent the subterfuge. Not only because he sensed that Marissa was somehow dangerous even if he didn't care to examine in detail just why.

He wouldn't go back to that door because he thought of his scarred, tattooed hands on her smooth, perfect shoulders, and in reverse, her small, neat hands against the marks and scars of his chest.

Different worlds. Way too different.

He drove home.

 

Sunday morning, Marissa stopped by the grocery store bakery and picked up a selection of bagels, doughnuts
and croissants, some hefty paper cups of latte and a quart of orange juice, then drove to the clinic to see Crystal. She'd dithered over her clothes the slightest bit, finally—rather to her amusement—choosing a crisp, no-nonsense pair of khaki slacks and a similarly crisp cotton blouse.

To her relief, Robert had not yet arrived. Crystal was ensconced in bed, flipping channels desultorily with a remote. “Want some company?” Marissa said, poking her head around the door. “I brought goodies.”

“Hi, Ms. Pierce.” She looked a little confused and surprised. Wary. She was always wary. “Come in.”

Marissa grabbed a rolling table and started taking things from the grocery bag. “What's your pleasure? It would make me very happy if you'd eat that chocolate-covered doughnut so I can stop thinking about it.”

A tentative smile. “I guess I can take it off your hands.”

Arranging the pastries in an attractive way on the bag, Marissa said, “My mother used to hide doughnuts from me,” she said, and picked up a cruller defiantly. She held it up, admiring the slanted grooves where glaze had caught, letting her mouth get truly ready for the completely nutritionless, absolutely magnificent flavor. She would eat half of it, and throw the rest away. It was one of the tricks she'd picked up—rather than abstaining from sinful foods, she indulged in them when she really wanted one, but only ate half. Now she bit into it, closing her eyes in pure pleasure. “Mmmm.”

“Jeez, Ms. Pierce. You should be on a commercial.” She gingerly ate a tidbit of her own. “Why'd your mother hide doughnuts?”

“Because I was fat and she wanted me thin.”

“You were fat?”

Marissa grinned. “Oh, yes.” She put down the cruller,
wiped her fingers carefully on a napkin and opened her purse. “This is me, two years ago.” She gave Crystal the picture of herself and Lance Forrest, dressed up for a country club dance.

“Oh, man!” Crystal stared at the picture in disbelief. “I wouldn't even have known it was you.” She scowled. “Why'd you cut your hair, though? It was so long!”

Marissa took the picture back and looked at herself. In the picture, her hair tumbled in thick, glossy waves past her waist. “I got tired of hiding behind it.”

“What were you hiding from?” The dark eyes were intent.

Marissa thought of the windbreaker Crystal wore and the way her hair hid her face, and took a moment to consider her answer. It wasn't something she'd articulated before, but it was probably time. “The world, I guess,” she said slowly. “My father told us from the day we were born that men would only want to marry us for our money.”

“So you decided to be fat so they'd have to really love you,” Crystal said. It wasn't a question.

“Very wise, my dear.” She'd reached the halfway point in the cruller, took a teeny tiny little crumb more, then wrapped it up in a napkin and threw it away. “I think it was also a way of sort of controlling the world, you know what I mean? My sister and I had no freedom at all, but they couldn't control what we ate.”

“So why don't you have to hide anymore?”

“You know—” she picked up her paper cup of latte “—I don't know. Maybe I just decided to take my chances with the world. Be happy anyway.” She sipped her coffee. “Now you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. What are you hiding from?”

Crystal touched the rise of her belly, an almost protective gesture. “Bad people, I guess.” Absently she stroked the round. “When I was little, my favorite movie was
The Invisible Man
because I thought that would be such a great thing, to just be able to be invisible.”

“It's not so bad here, though, is it?”

Her face shuttered instantly. “Not at home.”

“School is bad.”

A shrug. Subject closed. Accepting it, Marissa leaned back comfortably, letting the quiet fall. Beyond the hospital window, aspens shimmered in an invisible wind, pale green against the blue backdrop of mountains.

“Do you like movies?” Crystal asked, eyeing the doughnuts.

“Have another. Please.” She pushed the table a little closer. “I love movies. My sister and I watched them by the zillions.”

“Yeah? Me, too. The video store was right around the corner and my mom used to rent big ole stacks for me even when I was really little. All the ninety-nine-cent ones, you know?”

“Sure! Keep 'em for five days.”

Crystal actually smiled, and sat up a little. “She put the VCR in my room with this little TV that was kinda small, but had real good color, you know? It was like totally safe and quiet and nobody bugged me.” She picked out another doughnut, sitting up completely straight now, more animated than Marissa had ever seen her. “Then this boyfriend of hers? He rigged up cable to the apartment and even found this little box to get the pay channels, so I could watch movies twenty-four hours a day.” She took a bite of doughnut, gestured with her hands. “I watched all the big ones you know, the first day they came out on Pay-Per-View, and in between I
saw everything else—even those ones with the little box with English in them, you know what I mean?”

Tickled at such an outpouring, Marissa nodded. “Subtitles.”

“Right. The French ones are pretty boring most of the time, but I liked some of the Japanese ones. You ever see them?”

“Sometimes.” She considered and decided to be honest. “I actually like the French ones. They make a lot of historical romances.”

“Yeah, some of those are okay. There was this one? A queen and this poor guy in France during some disease? It was
so
sad. They fell in love and all that, and then he got killed at the end. I cried for a day.”

“
Queen Margot!
I love that movie!”

“Yeah, that's it! You like the sad ones?”

“Some of them.” Marissa frowned. “I don't like it when there's no reason for it to be sad, just bang, somebody dies. But I love it when there's some lesson in the sadness.”

“Exactly!” Crystal tossed her hair back. “Like in
Dangerous Liaisons,
he dies because he did something awful and that's part of the lesson, that if you treat people like that, you know, take advantage of real love, then you have to pay the price.” She licked a little sugar from her finger. “And in
Romeo and Juliet,
the parents are so stupid that their kids get killed over it.” She paused a moment, narrowed her eyes. “And sometimes it's a message—what's the word? Maybe like a metaphor?—to make something real to you that wouldn't be. Like in
Titanic,
if he had lived, it would have still been a good romantic story, but he stands for all those people who did die. You know? And so you
get
it. Your heart is just
trashed because you want him and all those other good people to live.”

Marissa blinked, then grinned broadly. “Wow—that's the best summation of the purpose of tragedy that I've ever heard, Crystal.”

Not even this seemed to deter her. “I think about it a lot,” she said, nodding. “Tragedy kind of makes the bad stuff make sense sometimes, you know? Like this teacher said once that stories create order in our lives.”

“What order do you find in tragedy?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Well,” she said slowly, looking into the distance as if the answer were written there, “there are lots of different kinds, you know? Like there's the ones when somebody gives something up for somebody else, and the ones when the tragedy is the reason the whole story happens, and the ones that the death or whatever seems really sad, but it really shows that the character grew somehow. Like in
Last of the Mohicans,
when the sister steps off the cliff?” She put her hand to her chest. “I cry and cry and cry over that one, every time, but it's really beautiful in a way, you know, because she showed how brave she was by doing it.”

A shiver of excitement and amazement crawled up Marissa's spine. She'd known Crystal was bright, but she obviously had a very literary bent of mind, a sense of structure and the meaning of literature, all gleaned from movies. It was tragic that Crystal hated school so much.

Marissa would have to figure out some way to gently illustrate all the possibilities awaiting such a mind, and she was doubly excited that her sister was coming to town. It seemed almost fated.

Now she said only, “Do you like only the sad ones?”

“No way.” She grinned. “I like
all
of them. Funny, sad, happy, silly. Scary. All of them.”

“What's your number-one favorite?”

Her eyelids fell, and the shoulders almost imperceptibly hunched forward. “I have a lot.”

“You don't want to tell me?”

She lifted one side of her mouth and rolled her eyes. “It's not that. It's just that everybody gets it wrong, why I like it, because they think it's my age, that I'm just stupid, that I don't know about good movies or that I have some crush.”

“You don't have to tell me if you don't want to.”

From the door came a raspy, low voice, laced with amusement. “I think you should tell her, babe.”

They both turned to see Robert coming in, a paper bag from the bakery in his hands. Marissa had been lost in the conversation, enjoying it so much that she forgot to anticipate his arrival. The sight of him sent a thick, hot ripple over the surface of her skin. Dressed this morning in a simple, long-sleeved Henley and jeans, his hair gleaming in its braid, a quirky smile on that wide, mobile mouth, he looked like everything good in life.

His dark eyes tangled with Marissa's for a single second. Marissa flashed on the taste of his tongue against her own. She looked away.

“More doughnuts!” Crystal said, laughing. “I haven't seen so many doughnuts since I was little!”