One More Time (3 page)

Leslie remembered the suitcase then, a bit later than was ideal, and a couple of points got together to make a line. “You’re leaving? Just because I don’t understand why you did what you did?”

She might not have spoken for all the response she got. Matt checked what looked like a computer printout before tucking it into his jacket pocket and reaching for the suitcase.

“There was a time when we would talk about things,” she said with some desperation. “There was a time when we would give each other a chance.”

“We were different people then,” he said softly, the murmured words breaking her heart.

She stepped after him, put a hand on his arm. “Where are you going?”

“To get Zach out of jail, of course.” Matt smiled then, looking more rakish than Leslie knew him to be. “But then, I doubt you’ll miss me anyway.”

“That’s not true...”

“No?” He considered her for a heartbeat, then suddenly caught her nape in his hand and kissed her. He tasted of alcohol and of himself. Leslie felt the stubble on his chin and smelled his cologne mingled with his own scent. she felt that old black magic stir between them once more. She had a heartbeat to realize that she wasn’t the only one savoring this long-overdue kiss.

Then Matt stepped away. “One last kiss,” he said, which made Leslie panic. He smiled that crooked smile, the one that melted her knees, which softened his retreat a little.

“Be good, or at least be careful,” he murmured as he ran his thumb along the line of her jaw. Leslie leaned into his caress without meaning to do so, loving the feel of his hand against her skin, yearning.

“Don’t go,” she whispered.

But he was gone, striding out the door with purpose, as if he had already forgotten her. There was an airline limo idling at the curb. Matt put the Samsonite in trunk, then made for the door to the back seat.

This had all been arranged in advance.

“Wait!” Leslie shouted. “Where are you going?” She was standing barefoot on her porch, which had a dusting of snow on it, her sapphire silk peignoir visible to all, and for once in her life, she didn’t care what the neighbors thought.

Matt turned back and grinned, as if he had been possessed by the devil himself. He gave her a look of such pure mischief that she dreaded his words. She always loved his affection for the truth, his ability to be candidly honest about everything, although right here right now, she realized she’d never been afraid of the truth before. “New Orleans.”

Leslie’s heart headed for her toes. “Are you coming back?”

“Why would I?” He waited two beats for her shocked response, then blew her a showy kiss—her husband’s cocksure twin—and stepped into the cab.

“You have to come back!” she shouted, but the cab was already at the end of the block and no one was looking back.

* * *

New Orleans wasn’t a city name that could be easily mistaken for another one. It didn’t sound at all like New York or New Haven or even New Hampshire, though none of those places would have been so threatening to Leslie.

She
lived in New Orleans.

Leslie eyed the glass in her hand and wished Matt had left her a sip of Scotch. She optimistically lifted the glass to her lips and tipped it, hoping to get the last drop out of the bottom, just as a casement window creaked overhead.

She looked up, unsurprised to find the elderly widow who lived next door studiously cleaning snow off the top of her window boxes. Mrs. Beaton did such an elaborate job of pretending to be unaware of Leslie that it was utterly unpersuasive.

She was tending her window boxes, at six-forty-five in the morning.

In January.

Leslie was tempted to ask her what was planted in there. Alpine tulips, maybe, or arctic phlox.

Instead, she squared her shoulders and did a passable imitation of her usually composed self. “Good morning, Mrs. Beaton. Looks like it will be a nice day, don’t you think?”

“Oh! Good morning, dear. Why, I didn’t see you there! You’ve given me a start.” Mrs. Beaton adjusted her glasses, the better to observe any damning details, and beamed. “I was just adjusting the window boxes, Leslie, and didn’t hear a thing.”

“And really, you can’t get them adjusted soon enough in the year,” Leslie said, without meaning to do so. She routinely thought such things, but never uttered them.

Funny how watching your husband walk out will throw your game.

Mrs. Beaton peered at Leslie, perhaps fearful that she was being teased. “Was that your husband leaving, dear?”

Leslie was tempted to claim that it was her Latin lover, that they had made boisterous love all night long, until he had begged allowance to go home to sleep for just a few hours. It would be interesting to see what kind of a reaction she’d get, but Leslie knew that the gossip grapevine would have a field day with that kind of tasty morsel.

There was no question that Mrs. Beaton would pass it along.

“Well, yes, it was. He’s off on a business trip.”

“Is that so, dear?” Mrs. Beaton’s gaze flicked tellingly to the glass in Leslie’s hand. She wasn’t going to assume that it had held apple juice, that was for sure. Her lips tightened and Leslie acknowledged one of the reasons she’d always hated this house: the neighbors were too close.

Or maybe more importantly, they were too nosy.

“I didn’t think Matthew traveled that much, dear.”

“Still happens once in a while.”

Leslie would have gone back into the house, but Mrs. Beaton cleared her throat. “I do so hope you haven’t had a fight, dear. Now, I know that it isn’t my concern and I would simply die rather than pry into a neighbor’s personal business, but I have become quite attached to you as neighbors.”

Leslie blinked, startled to have her own fears so closely echoed by a comparative stranger. “We’re not moving, Mrs. Beaton.”

“Well, if you got divorced, of course, you’d have to sell the house...”

“Mrs. Beaton, we’re not getting divorced!”

“If you say so, dear, but you never know what kind of people are going to move in when a house sells. I would miss you, of course, but I would worry terribly about new neighbors...”

“
We’re not getting a divorce!
” Leslie shouted this, which was precisely the wrong choice. Several neighbors en route to work looked up with interest.

“My goodness, dear, I never knew you were so touchy!”

“It’s a business trip, Mrs. Beaton, no more than that.” Leslie spoke so firmly, in her most fearsome Crabcake Coxwell voice, that an astute observer might have wondered who she was trying to convince.

Mrs. Beaton surely did. “Hmmm,” she said, taking another look at the empty glass.

“Have a nice day, Mrs. Beaton.” Leslie retreated into the house and shut the door behind herself, locking the deadbolt as if that could keep various nasty developments at bay.

Time for an executive summary. It would be ugly, but she could take it.

Leslie closed her eyes and leaned back against the door, summoning the familiar rhythm of Matthew of Paris, medieval chronicler and—for a medievalist like Leslie—an old friend.

• Item the first:

Leslie’s husband was heading to New Orleans, where his former fiancée lived, and had as much said that he wouldn’t be back.

• Item the second:

This would be the same former fiancée who had never married, the one who routinely enclosed personal letters with her Christmas cards to Matt every year, letters which he read over and over again.

• Item the third:

This would be the exotic beauty with legs up to her neck, a figure like a Barbie doll and a come-hither manner that made men salivate at forty paces.

• Item the fourth:

This would be the same husband with whom Leslie had not had intimate relations in a good three months.
And four days.
And twelve hours.

Leslie licked her lips and braced herself for the last detail.

• Item the fifth:

She had no correlating data confirming that Zach was even in New Orleans. Matt’s troublemaking brother had been in Venice, Italy, the last she’d heard and New Orleans wasn’t exactly around the corner from there.

And if Zach was in trouble in New Orleans, why hadn’t James gone to bail out Zach, as he usually did? It seemed very suspect that Matt would suddenly take on this fraternal responsibility—had that happened before or after he’d learned where Zach was?

Maybe Leslie shouldn’t have been so gracious about not reading Sharan’s Christmas cards. Maybe she shouldn’t have trusted her husband to have a platonic friendship with a bitably sexy and willing woman. Maybe she should have dragged him off to bed and wrapped her tongue around his tonsils, not matter how he had fought her en route. Any which way, he was probably going to be welcomed to the Big Easy with open arms and open thighs and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it now.

She set the glass down on the hall table with a decisive thump and halfway wished she had dropped it earlier. It would have shattered nicely, seeing as it was lead crystal, and that might have been satisfying.

It had been a wedding gift, too, so it might have been appropriate to shatter on this day of days.

“Is Daddy gone?”

Leslie jumped and turned to find her daughter peering over the banister with what was either hostility or suspicion.

Maybe both. Welcome to lucky thirteen.

“Annette.” She smiled as if everything was normal though it took some doing. “Good morning.”

“Where’s Daddy?”

“He just left.”

Annette used an expletive that Leslie would have liked to believe her daughter her never heard before, then fled to her room.

“Annette! Stop!”

Annette did not stop. Even taking the stairs three at a time wasn’t enough—her daughter had too much of a head start. Leslie heard the bedroom door slam before she reached the summit, and the key turned in the lock before she even started down the hall.

Leslie pounded on the door, just because it seemed the thing to do, and it felt remarkably good. “Annette! Annette, open this door.”

“No.”

Leslie didn’t like threats or recriminations much, and the severe tone of voice that worked so well on her students had never had any discernible effect upon her daughter.

So, she took a shaky breath and leaned against the door, rubbing her brow with her fingertips. With an effort, she summoned her usual demeanor, but it was tougher than she ever remembered it being. “Annette? Will you please open the door so we can talk?”

“I want to see Daddy.”

She forced herself to sound more patient than she felt. “Well, come and talk to me in the meantime.”

“No. I want to talk to Daddy, just Daddy.”

Leslie gritted her teeth, but still managed to keep her voice level. “Your dad has gone to the airport, Annette.”

“I know. He told me he was going away.”

That was news. “Didn’t he tell you when he’d be back?”

“No.”

At least her daughter didn’t have that morsel of information. “I don’t think he’s sure when he’ll be back,” Leslie said with an assurance she didn’t feel. “You could be waiting for him for a while.”

“I don’t care.”

Leslie leaned back against the wall and pinched the bridge of her nose. When she finally spoke, her tone of voice was amazingly cheerful, though it cost her in spades.

She would keep up appearances, even if it killed her.

“Fine, then you just wait there as long as you’d like. I’m going to brush my teeth and go to the bathroom and have a muffin for breakfast, then I’m going to have a shower and go to work. You can’t stay here alone all day, so the sooner you come out, the better your chance of getting a muffin yourself.”

It was a cheap trick, but she was short of options.

“You wouldn’t eat them all,” Annette whispered, her voice much closer to the door.

Aha. She
had
found a nerve.

“This morning, I just might.” Leslie paused, then twisted the proverbial knife. “They’re chocolate chip, you know, your favorite kind.”

Then she left her daughter to think about that. She tossed the newspaper in the recycling bin under the sink, determined to tell her daughter about this family tragedy in her own way.

What exactly that way might be wasn’t clear to Leslie at the moment, but with luck, Annette would fume for a while.

* * *

Life, Leslie decided in the midst of her second muffin and her third cup of instant coffee, was apparently a lot like childbirth. Just when you think you can’t stand any more, the universe will demand a bit more. Against all odds, you will be able to accommodate that additional increment of stress, which starts the whole process again. It doesn’t end, at least not soon enough to please the participants.

There’s always more pain to be borne.

And somehow, you always manage to take it.

There was a cheery notion, and one that wasn’t easily accommodated with only instant coffee for consolation. Leslie had labored thirty-seven excruciating hours to bring Annette into the world. Maybe the blessing was that she couldn’t quite remember all (let’s do the math) 2220 minutes—give or take—or every single one of those 133,200 seconds in glorious Technicolor detail any more.

On the other hand, Leslie could recall an awful lot of them. She drained her mug and considered the dubious merits of another cup of instant java. Even cafeteria coffee promised to be an improvement, which said nothing good about her abilities to boil water and mix it with little brown crystals.

Maybe there was nowhere to go from here but up.

Either way, it was definitely a La Perla kind of a day.

T
here are days when the business traveler should just give it up, hit the bar in the lounge in the airport terminal and wait for his or her luck to change. Matt Coxwell was having one of those days, and given events of the last twenty-four hours—and the quantity of Scotch swimming solo in his belly—was not in any condition to accept his fate amiably.

His marriage was over. He knew that. He knew that he had compromised all that he could compromise and his father had provided the reminder that it was never going to be enough. Leslie was like his father in that she saw only her own way, saw only what she wanted to see in him.