Night Moves: Dream Man/After the Night (24 page)

But the pretense hadn’t held up for long. The horrible shock of that day had forever changed something inside her, and she had accepted that things would never be perfect. Daddy wasn’t coming back; he’d preferred living with that slut rather than living with his own family. He didn’t love Mama and never had.

Alex loved Mama, though. Poor Alex. She couldn’t remember when she had first realized how he felt, when she had seen the devotion and sadness in his eyes; it had been several years after Daddy had left, though. It was about the time he had first coaxed Mama to eat dinner with them. He could do more with Mama than either she or Gray could; maybe it was the gentle, devoted courtesy with which he treated her. God knows Daddy had never been like that with her. He had been polite, and gentle, but you could tell he was just going through the motions and didn’t really care. Alex cared.

She remembered the night it had first happened. Gray had been in New Orleans on business. Mama had come down for dinner, but despite Alex’s cajoling, had been more depressed than usual and had really made an effort just to eat with them. She had gone back to her room almost immediately, despite his pleas. When he had turned back to face Monica, she had seen the desolation in his eyes, and impulsively reached out to put her hand on his arm, wanting to comfort him.

It had been a chilly winter night. There was a fire in the parlor, so they had gone in there, and she had set herself to easing that look from his eyes. They had sat on the sofa in front of the fire, talking quietly of many things while he
sipped an after-dinner brandy, his favorite. The house was quiet, the room dim, with only one lamp on. The fire had softly snapped. And in the firelight, she must have looked like Mama. She had worn her dark hair in a twist that night, and she always dressed in the conservative, classic style Mama preferred. For all those reasons, the brandy, the solitude, the darkened room, his own disappointment, her resemblance to Mama—it had happened.

A kiss had become two, then more. His hands were in her hair, and he was groaning. Monica remembered how her heart had pounded, in fear and an almost painful sympathy. He had touched her breasts, almost reverentially, but only through her clothes. And he had pushed up her skirt only enough to bare the essential part, as if he didn’t want to violate her modesty more than was necessary. She had a confused memory of naked flesh, unseen but felt, as he pressed himself to her, then a sharp sting of pain and the quick pumps into her. Unfaded by time, however, was the memory of how his voice had broken as he murmured, “Noelle,” in her ear.

He didn’t seem to know he’d been the first. In his mind, she’d been Mama.

And in her mind, God help her, he’d been Daddy.

It was so sick that she was still disgusted at herself. She’d never had any sexual feelings for Daddy; hadn’t had any at all, until Michael. But in the tumult of emotion that night, she’d thought, Maybe he won’t leave, if I give him what Mama won’t. So she had taken her mother’s place, offering herself sexually as a bribe to keep Daddy at home. Poor Alex . . . poor
her.
Both of them surrogates for something neither one could ever have. Freud would have had a field day with her.

But that night had been the first of many, over the past seven years. Though not that many, come to think of it. Michael had probably had her more often in just a year than Alex had in seven. Alex had been so ashamed, so apologetic. But he had come to her again, helplessly needing the pretense that Noelle would ever lie in his arms, and Monica had let him have the ease that he needed. He never
approached her when Gray was home, only when he was out of town on business.

The last time had been just two days ago, when Gray had been in New Orleans. She had gone to Alex’s office that night, as she usually did, and he had done it to her on the sofa there. It never took long. He never undressed her, or himself. Seven years he’d been doing it to her, and she’d never seen him naked, had actually only seen his thing a few times. He was still apologetic about his need, as if she really were Mama, and thought the process was nasty. So he finished as fast as he could, and Monica cleaned herself and went home.

It wasn’t like that with Michael. She still didn’t know what had attracted him to her, or how she had actually allowed things to progress so far. He’d grown up in Prescott, so she’d known him, to put a name to his face, to speak to, all of her life. He was five years older than Gray, and already a deputy with the sheriff’s department when she had finished high school. He’d married his high school sweetheart and had two little boys. They’d been like Ward and June Cleaver, and then she’d up and left him, right out of the blue. She had moved to Bogalusa and remarried a couple of years later. His sons were seventeen and eighteen now, and he had a good relationship with them.

Michael had a good relationship with everyone, she thought, a smile curving her mouth. That was why he’d been elected sheriff when Sheriff Deese had finally retired three years ago. He was a true good old boy, disdaining suits in favor of a uniform, and wing tips in favor of boots. He was a lanky six feet, with sandy hair and friendly blue eyes, and a smattering of freckles across his nose. Opie, all grown up.

One day, a year ago, she’d been in town and decided to eat lunch at the courthouse grill, which made the best hamburgers in town. Mama would have been horrified at such a plebeian taste, but Monica loved hamburgers and treated herself occasionally. She’d been sitting at the little table when Michael had come in, gotten his own hamburger, and was on his way back to a booth when he suddenly paused by her table and asked if he could join her. Startled, she’d said yes.

At first she’d been stiff, but Michael could tease the starch out of a shirt. Soon they’d been laughing and talking as easily as if they were best friends. She’d had another moment of stunned awkwardness when he’d asked her to have dinner with him; she was acutely aware that Mama wouldn’t approve. There was nothing upper-crust about Michael McFane. But she had agreed, and to her surprise, he had cooked dinner himself, grilling steaks in his backyard. He lived now on the small farm where he’d grown up, with the closest neighbor a mile down the road, and Monica had felt relaxed by the quiet solitude of his rural home.

Relaxed enough, after they’d eaten and danced to country tunes on the radio, moving slowly around his small living room; to let him take her into his bedroom. She hadn’t planned to let him, hadn’t even considered that he’d try. But he’d started kissing her, and his kisses were warm and slow, and for the first time in her life she felt the curl of desire deep in her body. Alarmed by what was happening, and the speed of it, she had nevertheless stood in his bedroom and let him unzip her dress, then unhook her bra and remove it. No one had ever seen her bare breasts, but all of a sudden Michael had not only seen them, but was busy sucking on them. The drawing pressure of his mouth had made her go wild, and they had tumbled to the bed. Not for him a discreet pumping, with trousers barely lowered. Soon they were both naked, locked together on the cotton sheets, and that curl of desire had exploded into a wantonness that still alarmed her.

No
lady
would act in such a manner, but then Monica had always known she wasn’t a lady. Mama was a lady; Monica had been trying all her life to be like Mama, so Mama would love her, but she’d always fallen short. Mama would be horrified and disgusted if she knew her daughter spent several hours a week in bed with Michael McFane—the
sheriff,
of all people!—screwing like a rabbit.

Sometimes Monica felt resentful of the strictures that had been drummed into her from the cradle.
Gray
hadn’t been subjected to, and confined by, all the things that ladies didn’t do. It was as if Mama had written Gray off as a lost cause from the moment of his birth; he was a male, therefore
she expected him to act like an animal. Because she was a lady, she had ignored the sexual escapades of both father and son; such things were of no interest to her, and she expected her daughter not to be interested in them, either.

It hadn’t worked that way, though Monica had tried. She had tried really hard, for the first twenty-five years of her life. Even after Mama had withdrawn from them, after Daddy left, Monica had kept trying, hoping that, if she was good enough, Mama wouldn’t feel so bad about Daddy being gone.

But she had always hungered for more. Mama had always been so reserved and cool, perfect, untouchable. Daddy had been warm and loving; he had hugged her, tussled with her despite Mama’s disapproval of such rowdiness with her daughter. Gray was even more physical than Daddy; he had always burned with an inner fire that Monica had recognized at an early age.

She remembered once, when Gray had been home from college, they had lingered around the dinner table, talking. Gray had been lounging in his chair with that big-cat grace of his, laughing as he described a prank some of the football players had pulled on one of the coaches, and there had been . . . she couldn’t quite describe it . . . a sort of sensual wildness in the tilt of his head, the motion of his hand as he picked up his glass. She had glanced at Mama and found her staring at Gray with an expression of revulsion on her face, as if he were a disgusting animal. He
had
been an animal, of course, a healthy, rambunctious teenage boy, blazing with the testosterone pumping into his body. But there was nothing repulsive about him, and Monica had felt resentful of that disapproval, on his behalf.

Gray was a wonderful brother; she didn’t know what she would have done without him, in those awful days after Daddy left. She had been so ashamed of her own attempted suicide that she had sworn then she would never again be that weak, that much of a burden to Gray. It had been a struggle, but she’d kept that promise to herself. She had only to look at the thin, silvery lines on her wrists to forcibly remind herself of the price of weakness.

Seeing Faith Devlin in the parking lot at the grocery store
had shocked her so much that, for the first time in a long while, she’d fallen into the old habit of running to Gray, expecting him to take care of her problems. She was disgusted with herself for falling to pieces the way she had, but when she had seen that dark red hair, such a rich color that it was almost wine-colored, her heart had almost stopped. For a wild, dizzying moment, she had thought,
Daddy’s back!
because if Renee was here, then surely Daddy was, too.

But Daddy was nowhere in sight. There was only Renee, looking even younger than when she had left, which was pure injustice. Someone as wicked and trashy as Renee Devlin should wear her sins on her face, so everyone would know. But the face staring back at Monica had been as exquisitely complexioned as ever, without a wrinkle in sight. The same slumberous green eyes, the wide, soft, sensual mouth—nothing had changed. And for a moment, Monica had been again the hurt, helpless girl she’d been before, and she had gone running to Gray.

Only it hadn’t been Renee; the woman in the parking lot was Faith Devlin, and Gray had been oddly reluctant to use all his influence against her. Monica couldn’t recall much about Faith, just a vague memory of a skinny little girl with her mother’s hair, but that didn’t matter. What wasn’t vague was the twist of pain at seeing her, the rush of memories, the old sense of betrayal and abandonment. She had been afraid to go to town since then, afraid she would see Faith again and feel the sting of salt in the reopened wound.

“Monica?” came Michael’s lazy voice. “You go to sleep in there, honey?”

“No, I was just primping,” Monica called, and ran the water in the basin to give credence to her lie. Her reflection looked back at her. Not bad, for thirty-two. Sleek dark hair, not as black as Gray’s, but not a silver strand in sight. Her face was fine-boned, like Mama’s, but she had the Rouillard dark eyes. Not overweight, and her breasts were firm.

Michael was still sprawled naked on the bed when she left the bathroom, and a slow smile lit his face as he held out his hand to her. “Come snuggle,” he invited, and her heart
turned over. She crawled back into bed, and into the warmth of his encircling arm. He sighed with contentment as he settled her against him, and his big hand moved to squeeze one resilient breast. “I think we should get married,” he said.

Her heart didn’t just turn over this time, it almost stopped. She stared up at him, eyes round with both panic and astonishment. “M-Marry?” she stuttered, then crammed both hands against her mouth to hold back the hysterical giggle that bubbled up. “Michael and Monica McFane?” The giggle erupted anyway.

He grinned. “So it sounds like we’re twins. I can live with it if you can.” He thumbed her nipple, enjoying the way it peaked at his touch. “But if we have a kid, its name will start with anything but an
M.”

Marriage. Kids. Oh, God. Somehow she had never envisioned that he might want to marry her. She had never even thought of marriage in connection with herself. Her life had gone into deep freeze twelve years ago, and she had never expected it to change.

But nothing is static. Even rock changed, ground down by time and the elements. Alex hadn’t disrupted the even rhythm of her life, but Michael had blazed through like a comet.

Alex. Oh, God.

“I know I don’t have much to offer you,” Michael was saying. “This house sure ain’t nothing like what you’re used to, but I’ll fix it up any way you want; you just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

Another shock. She had lived her entire thirty-two years at Rouillard House. She tried to imagine living anywhere else, and couldn’t. Twelve years ago the entire foundation of her life had crumbled, and since then she hadn’t dealt well with any change, even a relatively minor one such as getting a new car. Gray had finally forced her to give up the one she had been driving since she was nineteen, just as, five years ago, he had forced her to redo her bedroom. She had been heartily sick of the little-girl decor for years, but the thought of changing it had made her feel even worse. It had been a
relief when Gray had brought a decorator in one day while she had a dentist appointment, and returned to find the wallpaper already stripped off and the carpet removed. Still, she had cried for three days. So little of her former life had remained the way it was before Daddy left, and it hurt to give up anything else. After she stopped crying, and the decorator was finished, she loved the room; it was the transition that was so wrenching.