No Place Like Home (22 page)

Tell the truth, Kaye,
she ordered.
You aren’t particularly interested in the glass. You want to stand there in the front hall and remember the first time he kissed you!

She had a key ... but if she used it, she’d be trespassing. She had no possible excuse for being in there.

But who is going to make a fuss?
the other half of her mind questioned. The
For Sale
sign was still on the lawn. The lockbox was still on the front door. No one would ever know she’d been inside.

Take a risk, Kaye. Live a little.

She stood on the sidewalk with her hands in the pockets of her light jacket. Winter had slipped away in the last few days, and spring had tiptoed in. Their stolen day of summer was already no more than a dream, distant and faded. The only reminder that she had gone with him, had made love with him, was inside her, in this tremulous new desire to stop life from passing her by, to give up the safe path sometimes and strike out across the unmarked wild.

She looked up at the house for a long moment, and then she reached into her handbag for the key.

She wouldn’t have been surprised if it hadn’t worked at all; it would have been only sensible for the bank to have changed the locks. But the tumblers clicked open almost noiselessly, and the door swung silently open under her hand, almost as if the hinges had been oiled. She stepped across the threshold with her heart in her throat.

She had been right about daylight making a difference. High on the stair landing, the rose window gathered the light and then shattered it into rainbows that cascaded across the falling wallpaper and down the stairs, over the faded roses on the old hall carpet and right to her feet. The sheer loveliness of it caught at her, and she blinked tears away—tears, she told herself, that had nothing to do with the memories of the other time she had stood here, safely sheltered in Brendan’s arms.

No wonder that Nora loved this house so, she thought. And what a shame that no one else seemed to see the potential here. Kaye did—but it was out of the question for her to do anything about it. A larger apartment was one thing, but that was a long way from taking on the financial burden of a sixteen-room house in desperate need of restoration.

She tore herself away from the rose window and walked on into the big double parlor, with its golden oak mantel and the huge bay window, and for the first time she noticed the scratching noise that was coming from the back of the house. It had been there all along, she concluded, just at the edge of her consciousness. It must be a branch scraping against the outside wall, driven by the March wind. But it was awfully loud for a branch. Had another window been broken out?

She reached the kitchen and saw the dark outline of a person silhouetted against the window, and only then did she realize that a prudent woman would have gotten out while she could. The house, warm and deserted as it was, might have attracted all kinds of intruders, from homeless tramps to neighborhood kids to criminals in hiding—

Too late to run, she thought.

“
What are you doing here?” she challenged.

The man turned, and for an instant she couldn’t breathe at all.

“
I have a key,” Brendan said quietly. “What’s your excuse?”

“
You’re in Wisconsin, fishing!” she said idiotically.

“
I had to come back sometime.” He didn’t sound as if it mattered much. “How did you get in?”

“
Nora kept a key. I talked her out of it, so I could give it to you.”

He looked her over unemotionally—the same way, she thought, that he would inspect a cracked wall. “You obviously weren’t expecting to see me when you came in,” he said, finally. “So what are you doing here?”

“
I just came in to look around, all right? Must you be so hateful? If I’d known you were here, I wouldn’t have come within a mile of the place.”

“
No,” he said, “I don’t suppose you would. You left no doubt about your opinion of me.” He kicked at a piece of fallen plaster; the gritty substance sliding across the flagstone floor made the same scratching sound that had drawn her into the room. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, she noticed; he looked as if he’d just come in off a lake somewhere.

“
Look,” she said, with an effort to be cheerful. “I was really upset when I said those things, and I was scared to death we were going to miss that plane, and I took it all out on you. It was unfair of me, and...”

“
Would it have been so awful?” It was a husky whisper. “To have been left behind in Nassau?”

It would have been the most beautiful thing in my life,
she thought.
And I wasn’t smart enough to see it, or to trust you.

She was trying to gather her courage to tell him that, when he went on, “That’s an unfair question, isn’t it? Forget I asked it.”

“
I didn’t really mean all that stuff,” she said uncertainly. “About you being irresponsible and selfish, and a playboy, and just like my father...” Her voice trailed off as she saw the angry sparks in his eyes.
Dammit,
she thought,
I’m trying to apologize. Why should that make him angry?

“
What happened, Kaye? Did you take a good look in your mirror, and decide that it wasn’t smart to throw rocks at others for taking part in the same pastimes you were indulging in?”

“
What does that mean?” She was aghast at the suppressed fury in his tone.

“
I thought you were misguided, and confused about what you wanted. I never dreamed you could be so cold-bloodedly open about what you were doing.” He sounded bitter. “You call me a playboy, but at least I wasn’t cheating on the person I plan to marry.”

“
Graham?” she whispered.

“
Do you have another fiancé in the wings?” he mocked. “So you’re going to marry him, Kaye. You’ll have your big house and your afternoon bridge clubs and your trips all over the world. I’m sure you’ll manage to give him a blonde baby or two to photograph and put on the jar labels, just to keep your position secure. But what are you going to do when all that gets old, Kaye—when you’re bored with it all? Don’t call me when you want to indulge yourself in an afternoon fling. I’m not proud of my part in what happened.”

“
You’re
not proud?” she whispered. “How do you think
I
feel?”

“
Have you made a full confession to Graham? Or are you afraid to tell him, for fear of losing your comfortable niche in life? I wonder just how much Graham will put up with from you.”

Kaye’s temper was at white heat. It was no more than she had expected, to have him fling these hateful things at her. But it hurt, nevertheless. It felt as if his words were tiny razors, each one slicing another fragment from her heart. “Have you finished?” she demanded.

“
Not quite. You accused me of being selfish and using people. I think, myself, that you’re the champion when it comes to that sort of thing. You’ve got the innocent face of an angel, my dear, and underneath it is the scheming heart of a—”

She slapped him, as hard as she could. He didn’t even flinch, but the imprint of her hand stood out as clearly on his cheek as if it had been painted there.

“
Thank you,” he said. “It needed only that. You haven’t disappointed me yet, though an audience would certainly have improved the dramatic value of the scene.”

Her palm stung from the impact. She clenched her fist in her pocket, trying to hide the pain. But the ache was more in her heart than in her hand. “It’s not true,” she whispered.

“
You went straight back to him,” Brendan said. “After what we shared, you went straight back to him.”

“
What had we shared?” She was almost screaming. “A quick romp in the sack, which didn’t mean a damned thing to you.”

“
How in the hell would you know what it meant to me? You wouldn’t listen to me—you wouldn’t stay there with me—”

“
Just what would it have solved if we had spent two more days in bed? And as for me going straight back to Graham, look at yourself, Brendan. The whole thing was so unimportant to you that you went fishing in Wisconsin!”

“
I did a whole lot more thinking than fishing. And I didn’t go fishing immediately.”

For the life of her, she couldn’t understand why that had anything to do with it. “It doesn’t matter when you went. You can’t make me believe that you were desperate to talk to me when you didn’t even stick around and dial a telephone!”

“
What point was there in that? You’d made your choice.” He rubbed a hand across the back of his head. It left a streak of plaster dust across his dark hair.

“
What a fool I was,” he said, “to think that any ordinary guy could take you away from Graham Forrest. But I thought I could. It was pretty conceited of me, wasn’t it, to believe that in the end you’d prefer me to Graham and his millions?”

“
What?” It was a bare whisper.

“
You must have found it very amusing,” he said harshly. “You see, I thought you really were the innocent and lovely girl you seemed to be. I believed you were only engaged to Graham because you’d never really understood what love could be, and I was arrogant enough to think that I might be the man to show you.”

But you did,
she thought, and tried to speak. Her throat was too tight to form the words.

He went on relentlessly. “Graham was stiff competition, and I didn’t think you’d believe me if I told you I’d fallen in love with you over a Reuben sandwich at the Wolfpack.”

She made a sound that was something like a harsh croak.

“
I didn’t recognize it, then, of course. I didn’t know it till the day you and Graham came to look at that house in Henderson Heights, and you were wearing his ring. You called me a damn fool that day—do you remember?”

She nodded.

“
I was, Kaye. I looked at you, and at that ring, and I knew that if I stood aside and let you marry him, I would never have a day’s peace again. But what was there for me to do? How the hell could I make you believe I was what you really wanted? You would have laughed at me if I’d said it. The only thing I could do was make you question your engagement, in the hope that some day you’d turn to me.”

She was trembling. She reached out carefully to the nearest wall and put a hand against it, and then was afraid that the vibrations of her body might knock it down.

“
That day you came running to me here, I thought you’d seen what I was trying to show you—that you could never be happy with Graham. But then, when I kissed you, you backed away, and I knew I’d gone too fast. I was afraid that I’d blown everything, and afraid that the reaction would send you straight to him.”

She put her hands to her cheeks. Her fingers were icy against the hot blood pounding in her face.

“
So I was back to walking the tightrope again, and I knew that I had very little time. The moment you found a house you liked, there would be no stopping you.” He broke off and looked at her with anger in his eyes. Anger, and sadness, too. “I was a fool, wasn’t I, Kaye? Tell me, did it amuse you? Did you know what was going through my mind?”

She shook her head numbly.

“
That day in Nassau when you came to me, I thought you had realized that you could never love Graham. But then you announced that you were going back to him.”

“
I didn’t say anything of the sort,” she protested automatically.

He didn’t seem to hear. “I still didn’t believe that you were capable of cold-bloodedly seducing me. I tried to believe that you were just confused, and frightened of making a mistake. I knew that security was important to you, and you certainly made it plain what you thought of me, and my way of life.”

She tried to swallow, and couldn’t.

“
And then I remembered what you’d said, and it gave me hope. You said,
I ought to marry Graham.
I thought that must mean just the opposite, that you knew you shouldn’t—and that you just needed a little space, and some time to think it over.”

She had said that. She remembered it now.

“
So I stayed away from you the day after we came back, and I did some planning of my own—how to convince you that I’m not as unsettled as you seemed to believe, and that you wouldn’t be spending your life being dragged from one place to the next if you married me.”

She gasped a little, and whispered, “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you go away, instead?”

“
I was on my way over to the travel agency to talk to you, and I was planning to stand on the sidewalk and shout if I had to, to get your attention. But just then you and Graham drove up in his car, and the two of you stood there in front of the shop.”

She closed her eyes in pain, remembering just how they had expressed that final goodbye. “You saw that?” she whispered.

“
Half of Henderson saw it. And only then did I realize what an utter, stupid fool I had been, to ever dream that you might give up that brand of security for me.” He scowled, and kicked at the plaster again, and so he couldn’t see her face.

The same sort of stupid fool I was,
she thought,
not to know that you were incapable of using me and throwing me aside. The same sort of stupid fool who never dreamed you might feel inferior to Graham, and threatened by his very presence—because I saw you as so much more than he ever could be
.