Paradise County (23 page)

“What, no ectoplasm?” Joe asked. He was standing a few feet away, one shoulder propped against the stone wall, his arms crossed over his chest as he regarded her with a faint smile.

“I saw something,” Alex said stubbornly. Then honesty forced her to add, “I think.”

“That’s okay, honey, I know where you’re coming from.” Despite the lurking smile, his voice was warmly sympathetic. “He used to talk about you, you know.”

Alex glanced at him quickly. “My father? To you?”

“Yeah. All the time, whenever he was here. We would be talking horses, and then, somehow, he’d always get going on his daughter. To tell you the truth, after a while I got kind of tired of hearing about Princess Alex. At least, that’s what I started calling you in my mind. He would go on and on about you, how beautiful you were, how smart, how you were going to run his company one day. It got so bad that whenever your name came up I’d pretty much tune him out.”

“Oh, Daddy,” Alex said with a catch in her voice, a wobbly little smile hovering on her lips. “He wanted me to come to work for him, you know. We were always fighting about that. I feel so bad about turning him down… .” Her voice faltered.

“No guilt, now. He was proud of you for doing what you wanted to do. He always said his little girl had balls.”

That sounded so like something her father would say that Alex was surprised into a laugh.

“Oh, Joe.” Alex walked toward him, stopping only a foot or so away. He straightened away from the wall, and his hands came up, automatically she thought, to grip her waist. Resting her hands on his upper arms, Alex looked up at him, her eyes dark with pain. His gaze met hers, inscrutably. “Will you show me where you found him? Please? Please?”

A quarter of an hour and much persuasion later, Alex stared down at the spot where Joe had found her father’s body. They were inside Whistledown’s barn. Although she, personally, was so cold she was shivering,
the interior of the barn was warm, and smelled of hay. Dust motes danced in the sunbeams that slanted down through the glass sides of the twin cupolas overhead. The horses had been turned out earlier, so except for a single lost sparrow perched on a rafter she and Joe were alone. Alex stood silently, her arms crossed over her chest to conserve body heat, as Joe talked. There was no physical reminder, no blood, no imprint on the spot where Charles Haywood had died, but despite the deliberately sparse description Joe gave her Alex could picture the scene all too clearly, and the picture in her mind made her feel ill.

“He didn’t drink anymore,” she said again, protesting one of the many parts of the story she found hard to understand. “He knew he was an alcoholic, and he had beaten it. He hadn’t had a drink for ten years.”

“Alcoholics fall off the wagon all the time,” Joe said, as he had once before. Only this time his voice was matter-of-fact. “I know from personal experience. Pop’s an alcoholic too. He’s promised to reform so many times I’ve lost count. I don’t think it’s going to happen in my lifetime.”

“Oh, God.” They looked at each other in mutual understanding. Then Alex burst out, “I don’t believe it. Daddy might—just might, mind you—have started drinking again because of all this stuff that was going on, but he wouldn’t kill himself. He just wouldn’t do it.”

She looked down at the ground again, and then, without even being aware that she meant to do it, she sank to her knees in the soft sawdust. One hand went out to flatten on the place where he had lain in death. Her father—for years he had been larger than life to her, an all powerful figure like the Wizard of Oz. But the man behind the curtain—what had
he
been like? Had she known him as well as she thought? She saw now that many of her life choices had been made because she was rebelling against being nothing more than billionaire Charles Haywood’s daughter. The college she had chosen, Fordham, was not one of the elite institutions he had wanted for her. Her career, photography, he had regarded with disdain. Briefly she wondered if Paul had been part of that syndrome, too. Her father had not liked Paul… .

Back in the days before her father’s death, when his lifetime, and hers, had seemed limitless, Alex had always thought that one day she and her
father would be granted the gift of time to spend together, real time, hours and days and weeks and months. When he was old, perhaps, he would slow down and stop traveling so much, and there would be room in his life for something besides young wives and the running of his business. Maybe, she’d thought, when she had babies of her own, he would make up for never having been there for her by being a doting grandfather to her children. He would love—would have loved—a grandson… .

It was this, this hypothetical son of hers that her father would never see, that brought tears welling into Alex’s eyes and spilling down her cheeks. She crouched there in the sawdust with her hand on the place where her father’s lifeblood had soaked into the ground, and wept for him, for the man he had been, for the man she had always wished he was, for the man he might still one day have become. Whatever his shortcomings, she had loved him.

He had been her father.

Unable to help herself, she cried for him with great gulping sobs that she couldn’t seem to control no matter how hard she tried, with torrents of tears that rained from her eyes to mark the spot where he had died.

“All right, come on.” An arm came around her waist, warm and strong. Barely aware of who the arm belonged to, Alex followed its lead blindly, allowing herself to be pulled to her feet, to take comfort from the fact that another human being was with her, holding her. She leaned against a warm solid wall and cried until there were no more tears left.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” she managed between deep shuddering breaths as sanity returned. She was leaning against Joe, her head tucked beneath his chin, weeping into the front of his ugly Michelin-man coat, a handful of silky nylon fabric clutched tightly in each fist. His arms were wrapped around her, and his breath stirred her hair as he murmured things like
shh
and
it’s okay.
“Until this happened, I never cried.”

“Feel free to cry all you want.” His voice was a low murmur in her ear. Alex was suddenly grateful to him, grateful for his kindness and strength and for his sheer physical presence that had given her refuge. Someone to lean on—that was what she needed in this, her hour of weakness. Always she had been the strong one; now she needed someone
else’s strength. Joe had strength to spare. “Everybody needs to cry sometimes.”

“It doesn’t do any good. Crying never cured anything. It won’t bring my father back.” She gulped and sniffled without looking up, and clung to his coat with both hands.

“No, it won’t do that. But it might make you feel better.”

I don’t want to feel better.
Alex didn’t say it aloud, but the sudden flash of insight was so patently true that it was like a shout inside her head. To feel better would be to be disloyal to her father. To feel better would be to start to let him go.

“He was only sixty-four. Even if he knew the company was going down the tubes, even if he knew he’d have to declare bankruptcy, that he would kill himself just doesn’t make any sense. That’s what I can’t get past: Why? Why?”

“I don’t have any answers for you there.”

She was still cradled against him, Alex realized, and realized, too, that being in his arms felt like the most natural thing in the world. She sighed, a deep and shuddering sigh that acknowledged the futility of asking questions with no answers, and looked up at him.

“Thank you,” she said, her fingers smoothing the damp place her tears had made on his coat.

“For … ?” The question was polite. His arms around her were warm and strong. Viewed at an angle, his jaw was square and, although she knew he had shaved just that morning, already darkening with five o’clock shadow. The plane of the cheek nearest her was brown and smooth. His nose was straight, his eyelashes and brows were thick and black, his forehead was high. His eyes as she looked into them were the color of the ocean where it nears the beach. He was handsome, sexy, and wonderfully comforting to be with, because he knew firsthand what she was going through.

“For being so kind to me—to us—to Neely and me—especially after …” Her voice trailed off guiltily.

“After you fired me, you mean?” There was the merest hint of humor in his voice, though his eyes were grave as they moved over her face.

Alex nodded.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve been fired before. I’ll survive.”

“Have you? When?” She felt drained, almost drowsy, in the aftermath of so much emotion. The warmth of his body surrounded her. His drawling speech was soothing, like a lullaby. She knew she should move out of his arms now, but oh, how she wanted to stay right where she was for just a moment or two more. She wanted the comfort of physical contact. She wanted to listen to the deep slow cadences of his voice.

“I’ll tell you about it some other time, maybe. Come on, let’s go back to the house.” His voice had taken on the faintest suggestion of a husky note, and as Alex frowned up at him his hands closed on her waist and he moved her bodily away from him.

“You okay?” he asked, meaning could she stand unassisted, and when she nodded he let go of her altogether. Surreptitiously she rubbed the sleeve of her coat across her still-damp eyes. Joe’s hands were in his pockets as, side by side, they walked back through the bright, crisp afternoon to the house. Small branches and leaves and lime green bumpy balls that he told her were called hedge apples littered the ground, the residue of last night’s storm. The faintest hint of woodsmoke tinged the air. A flock of geese flew overhead in classic V formation, honking madly. In the distance, past the black-fenced fields of horses, past Joe’s house and barn, two squat red ATVs could be seen charging toward the trees on the horizon. Neely was riding with Eli and perhaps Josh and Jenny were with them as well, Alex surmised. Neely at least was probably having the time of her life. Closer at hand, Cary was leaning on a fence just beyond Joe’s barn, watching Victory Dance as he grazed alone in a small, fenced paddock.

“When are you leaving, you and your sister?” Joe asked as they reached the house.

Unpleasantly reminded that she
would
be leaving, Alex frowned. The reason the thought was unpleasant, she realized, was because it meant that she would be leaving him. She would never have a chance to find out what he was like in bed… .

“Tomorrow. A little after noon. Neely will be going with me, of course. We’ll have to work something out about her ticket, but I’m sure it won’t be a problem.” She was climbing the stairs to the narrow porch that ran the length of the back of the house as she spoke, and he was behind her.

“I’ll drive you to the airport.”

“Thank you.” She gained the porch and looked back at him. A damp spot the size of a saucer was still visible on the front of his coat from her tears.

“You’re welcome.” His voice was dry. His expression was unreadable.

Alex opened the back door and went through a small utility room into the kitchen. He followed her, closing the door behind him. The house was quiet, hushed, and shadowy, but no longer forbidding. Or maybe she was just too distracted by Joe’s proximity to notice.

His boots were loud on the brick pavers. He paused just inside the door, watching her.

“Sit down, why don’t you?” She waved a hand at the pair of barstools that were pulled up to the center island. “Can I get you something to drink?” Crossing to the refrigerator, she opened it and looked inside. Without electricity, the interior was dark, with a dank smell. “I don’t trust the milk, but there’s Diet Coke. Or orange juice.”

“Water’s fine.” Unzipping his coat, he sat on one of the barstools.

“Do you suppose they’ll get the electricity turned back on soon?” Alex asked as she got a glass from the cabinet and filled it at the sink.

Joe shrugged. “Who knows? There are only a few people on our line, so they usually get to us last. That’s one of the drawbacks about living in the country. If it’s still out by tonight, you and your sister are welcome to stay over with us.”

“That’s very kind of you.” Alex handed him the glass.

“Oh, kind is my middle name.”

Was there sarcasm in his voice? His hand was curled around the glass, but he wasn’t drinking. As she looked at him he smiled, a wry, faintly self-mocking smile, and took a sip of water. His gaze met hers over the top of the glass, and something in his eyes—a darkness, a kind of veiled heat—made her pulse rate increase.

He was as aware of her as she was of him, she thought, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that he didn’t mean to do anything about it.

Right there and then, Alex made up her mind. She’d always heard that the things one most regretted in life were the things that one didn’t do.

His eyes narrowed as he watched her walk around the end of the counter toward him, and he turned slightly on the stool so that he was facing her as she approached. She didn’t stop walking until her thighs almost touched his bent knees. Their eyes were nearly on a level, and the heat in his was no longer quite so veiled. The glass of water sat forgotten on the counter beside his outstretched hand.

“Joe,” she said huskily, resting her hands on his broad shoulders. His mouth was long and sensitive and beautiful. She couldn’t stop looking at it.

“Hmm?” His hand on the counter closed into a fist.

Her gaze lifted and locked with his. For a moment they simply stared at each other while the air seemed to sizzle between them. Then she leaned forward and kissed that beautiful mouth.

Nineteen