Death's Excellent Vacation (24 page)

She arched her eyebrow suggestively. “I guess I was a little too much for him.”

Tim could have taken that any number of ways, but the eyebrow made it clear what she meant. In his mind he could practically hear Kirk’s voice even now, calling her every filthy thing he could think of. When he had imagined the woman on the receiving end of those words, she had been nothing like this lovely creature on the balcony. As beautiful as she was, she seemed sweet, even charming.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Tim said.

“It’s a morning for sad stories, I guess,” she said. “My name is Diana, by the way.”

“Tim,” he said.

“Sorry if we kept you up last night, Tim.”

He grinned, feeling himself flush even more deeply, and glanced away. If he had seen the comment coming, he could have prepared, pretended to have slept through it all, but her directness had sneaked up on him.

“Nah, it’s fine. I mean, not for long—”

Diana pouted. “I think I might be insulted.”

“—no, no, that came out wrong,” he stammered. Then he laughed at his own embarrassment. “I’m a pretty sound sleeper. And who hasn’t been on the other side of thin walls at least once, right?”

Her eyes seemed to dance with merriment. “Exactly. That’s so true.”

She sat up to take a sip of her coffee, her breasts straining against the thin fabric of her bikini top, a single strand of her blond hair—loose from the ponytail—hanging across her face.

“So, are you going to tell me why you’re in Santa Monica?”

Her boldness impressed and entranced him. As he thought about it, he could see this woman being the honest, passionate, carnal lover whose voice he had heard through the wall the night before. Yet Diana had many facets, and he saw one of them now, as a kind of sorrow filled her eyes.

“I don’t mind sad stories. I’ve got a whole catalog of them myself. Go ahead. I’m a big girl. I can take it.”

Something in that last line made him wonder if she had said it to tease him, but he might have imagined it, added a pouty, sexy insouciance to it that was really only an echo of the night before.

“You might think it’s a little strange,” he ventured.

Diana turned her chair slightly, basking in the sun even as she transformed their two balconies into a strangely intimate confessional.

“I like strange.”

Tim thought about Kirk, the idiot who had apparently left this woman after a night like they’d shared last night. What kind of fool must he be?

“All right,” Tim said. He turned down the page in his book and laid it across his chest, staring out at the ocean for a moment before returning his focus to Diana’s curious gaze. “I’m on a kind of tour, I guess. I’ve been to New Orleans and Montreal and to Martha’s Vineyard, off Cape Cod. I even went down to this little village on the Gulf of Mexico. They’re all places that were important to my wife, Jenny, and me during the years we had together.”

The kindness in Diana’s eyes broke his heart all over again. “She’s gone?”

“Just over a year ago. Pancreatic cancer. It was agony for her, so it was probably good that she went quickly, but I didn’t have time, you know? No time to get used to the idea of life without her. It’s taken me this long to accept that I’ve got to live my life. I know she’d have wanted that for me. I’m only thirty-seven. There are a lot of days ahead, if I’m lucky. So I’m on vacation, but it’s also kind of our farewell tour.”

“Wow,” Diana whispered, almost wistful. “That may be the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. You’re, like, the perfect husband.”

A familiar guilt filled him. It had grown like rust on his heart over the years. After he had betrayed Jenny, he had spent every day trying to make it up to her. He doubted he would ever have been able to, really, no matter how much time they had been given together. But he had wanted more time to try.

“Far from perfect,” Tim said, staring out at the Pacific.

“No, you’re a good guy. I can sense those things,” Diana said. “And you’re lucky, too.”

He frowned. “Lucky?”

The mischief returned to her eyes, and she stood, adjusting the strap of her bikini top.

“You said you were a sound sleeper,” she reminded him. With one hand on the handle of the slider, ready to go inside, she glanced over her shoulder at him in a pose so sexy it was painful to behold. “I always have trouble falling asleep. I need someone to tire me out. The only way I can really sleep well is if I’m so exhausted that I’m a quivering mass of jelly. And with Kirk gone . . .”

Diana glanced away, almost shyly, before looking back at him with renewed boldness. “I don’t know what I’ll do tonight.”

Tim could not speak. He dared not move for fear that she would notice the effect she had had on him, if she hadn’t already.

Obviously pleased by his speechlessness, Diana opened the sliding door into her room. “Enjoy your day, Timothy.”

He managed to croak, “You, too,” before her door slid shut.

Shaking his head in amazement, he went back to his book, the erection Diana had caused—the second in a very short time—slowly subsiding. After a few minutes he realized that his thoughts were straying and he had not understood a word he’d read, and he laughed softly at himself. Had that really been an invitation? Did she mean it?

Not that it mattered. As arousing as it was just being in the presence of this woman, Tim knew that any sexual trysts were still in the future for him. In another life he would have climbed mountains for an opportunity to sleep with a woman like Diana, and he knew that he would remember what he had overheard last night for years, maybe forever. Maybe someday he would even regret being faithful to a woman who was now only a memory, but this trip was about him and Jenny, and he would honor that, no matter what. He wanted to start a new life, but not quite yet.

He laughed again, thinking of Jenny. If she were alive for him to tell her the tale, she would have mocked him with love but without mercy. Men, she had often said, were pitifully simple and predictable creatures. Pavlov had used dogs to test his theories about programmed responses, but all he would have had to do was put a man in a room with Diana, and there would have been no need to experiment further.

This final stop on his farewell tour was by far the strangest.

How Jenny would have teased him. God, he missed her.

THE phone woke him. In the darkness he searched for it, fingers scrabbling on the nightstand, and only managed to find it when it rang a second time. As he pressed the receiver to his ear, he saw the faint glow of the alarm clock.

Twelve seventeen A.M. After midnight.
Who the hell . . .

“Hello?” he said, voice full of gravel.

“I can’t sleep,” she whispered.

It took him a moment, and when the pieces clicked together, his breath caught in his throat.

“Diana?”

“Hey,” she said in a sleepy voice.

Tim had come back to the hotel around eight P.M. and eaten a late dinner alone in the restaurant downstairs. Afterward he had held his breath walking past her room, heart racing. Their conversation on the balcony that morning had stayed with him all day, and he had caught himself fantasizing about her, wondering if her thinly veiled invitation for tonight had been more than just flirting.

It hurt his heart. This whole strange vacation had been meant to be about Jenny, and his not being able to get Diana out of his mind seemed a dark stain on pure intentions. But, Christ, he was only human.

“Did you have a nice day?” she asked, when he didn’t reply.

“Yeah. I guess. Do you . . . do you know what time it is?”

Even her laugh had that soft, sleepy intimacy about it.

“I do. I’m sorry. I told you I have trouble falling asleep.”

They both let that hang in the air for a bit. Lying in bed in the dark, hearing her voice in his ear, Tim found his memory of the previous night returning with perfect clarity. He could practically hear the thump of the headboard against the wall behind his head, and now that he knew what she looked like, the images in his mind were more than imagination.

“Listen, Diana, I enjoyed talking to you this morning—”

“Can I come over there?”

Tim squeezed his eyes shut. How come this couldn’t have happened to him before he met Jenny, or sometime in the future? Six months—hell, one month—from now, maybe his mind would have been in a different place.

“I’m sorry, I just . . .”

You can put it anywhere you want.

Holy God, how was he supposed to handle this? His heart slammed in his chest. His face felt flushed, and once again this woman had given him a painful erection, this time with nothing but a whisper. He felt like a fool for having so little control of his body.

“Tim, hush,” she said. “Think about this. You’re trying to forget, right? I can give you that. We can help each other. I can make you forget, and you can help me get to sleep.”

“It isn’t that simple.”

“But it is.” She laughed that sweet, soft laugh again. “Honey, trust me, I’ll make you forget your own name.”

There in the dark, he felt himself grin. “I have no doubt you would. And you have no idea how tempting it is—or, actually, you probably do. But this isn’t about forgetting Jenny . . . I never want to forget her. It’s about making peace with the fact that she’s gone, and . . .”

He trailed off. The rest was too personal. He didn’t know Diana.

“And?” she whispered.

Tim took a breath and turned onto his side, phone pressed between his cheek and the pillow.

“I betrayed her once. This would feel too much like doing that again.”

“She’s been dead over a year, you said.”

“Not to me. I need to finish saying good-bye. Whatever life has in store for me after, I’ll embrace it, but not here. This place was part of us.”

“Please?” she said in a little-girl sort of voice. “I can’t sleep.”

His words dried up in his throat as the reality of the conversation struck him hard.
Please,
she’d said, and now that he reminded himself what she was pleading for, what she wanted from him, he could barely think. It could be the night of his life.

But he would never be able to enjoy the memory of it.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Good night, Diana.”

As he reached out to return the phone to its cradle, his hand hesitated involuntarily for just a moment. But if she said anything more, he did not hear it. He hung up and laid his head back down with a mixture of relief and regret.

His arousal subsided and a peaceful sort of contentment filled him. Though he half expected the phone to ring, it did not. He closed his eyes and burrowed down into the bed. Sleep had fled, but only for a while, and soon enough it began to envelop him again.

“Tim.”

He came half awake, lost somewhere in a dream.

“Tim.”

Now he blinked and opened his eyes. In the darkness he reached out to search the rest of the huge hotel bed to make absolutely certain he was alone there. She sounded so close.

“Are you awake?”

She wasn’t in the room; her voice came through the thin wall, a lover’s whisper, though she must have been speaking up in order for him to hear her.

He considered replying but then thought better of it.

“Think of something you’ve always wanted to do but never dared to ask of a woman,”
she said.
“You don’t have to ask me. You could do whatever you want, and I won’t stop you. I won’t say no. Better than that, I’ll ask for more.”

Scenarios played out in his mind instantly, and once again she had him captivated.

“Please,”
she said.
“I need you.”

She began to tell him in great detail every little thing she would be willing to do, and have done to her, and how much she would enjoy it. How she would moan, even scream.

Then, at last, when he did not reply, she sighed.

“All right. I’ll just have to call room service. But you’re to blame for what happens.”

You’re to blame?
What the hell was that supposed to mean?

Tim pulled a pillow over his head to block out her voice, but it seemed she had surrendered at last. Yet still her promises echoed inside his head. He lay curled on his side, unable to make his erection go away, unable to deny his arousal, and yet filled with more sorrow and missing Jenny more than he had since the day he had lost her.

At some point he drifted off, temptation still burning in him.

A sharp rap at the door snapped him awake. His eyes burned and his head felt full of cotton. What little sleep he’d had tonight had been shallow and restless. In the blackness of the room he threw back the covers and started to climb out of bed.

Gotta be her. Crazy woman,
Tim thought.
I’ve got myself a stalker.

“Who is it?” Diana called.

Tim froze, brow furrowed. Had the knock been at his door or at hers? With the walls so thin, it was difficult to know.

A muffled voice replied. He heard Diana unlocking her door and, out of curiosity, pressed his ear to the wall again. The rattle of a room service cart was followed by a murmur of voices. Tim fancied he could smell food—a burger, maybe?

He glanced at the nightstand. In the pitch dark of his room he could barely make out the glow of the alarm clock, which he’d turned away from him. Now he felt his way onto the bed and crawled over to it, turning the clock around to read the time.

Room service at two thirteen A.M.? Did this hotel even have twenty-four-hour room service? Or had Diana persuaded someone to break the rules for her? Tim had a feeling Diana had spent her entire life tempting and cajoling and getting exactly the result she desired.

A spark of irritation ignited within him. Though he felt a now-familiar stirring at the thought of her, his frustration at this long night of broken sleep trumped any lingering arousal.

From next door he heard the sound of a door closing, and he assumed the room service guy had left. But a moment later the murmur of voices began again, both hers and a man’s, and then they moved nearer and he heard the creak of weight upon the bed.