Snowflakes on the Sea (11 page)

She shuddered. If she did that, people would say she’d bought the girl off, and believe ever after that Nathan had indeed fathered Renee Parker’s child.
Nathan.

The name was like a plea, torn from her heart.
Forgive me,
she thought.
Oh, forgive me—

He’d tried to tell her, and she hadn’t listened to him—she hadn’t
listened.
She picked up the newspaper, still resting on the seat, and read the article again, objectively.

And the last line quivered, jagged, in her mind like a wounding spear.
Mr. McKendrick was unavailable for comment, according to his press agent, Diane Vincent.

“Fool,” she whispered brokenly. “Oh, Mallory, you
fool!
”

With that, Mrs. Nathan McKendrick started the journey back to Seattle, and self-recriminations dogged her every inch of the way. Again and again, she heard Nathan recite that last line of the article, heard him say,
“Mallory, does that tell you anything?”

She was crying when she surrendered the Mazda to a worried-looking George and rushed into the one elevator that would take her all the way to the penthouse.

Her hands trembled as she unlocked the door and stepped into the entry hall, and she knew that Nathan wasn’t there long before she called his name and got no answer at all.

Pacing the study in his house at Angel Cove, Nathan was drawn to the telephone again and again. Where was Mallory now? What was she thinking? Feeling?

God knew what kind of reception she’d gotten from Renee Parker, whoever the hell she was. What if there had been some kind of ugly scene and Mallory was shaken up and driving? What if she’d been hurt? What if, even now, she was in some ditch along the road, bleeding—?

He caught himself on one raspy swearword, and started when the telephone rang.

“She’s back,” Pat said coolly. “I just talked to her, so why haven’t you?”

Nathan sighed, sank into his desk chair and twisted the phone cord in his fingers. “She knows where I am,” he bit out, his relief at knowing that Mallory was all right completely hidden by his tone.

“Nathan, you ass. Will you call the woman, please?”

“Hell, no. She wanted time—she gets time.
I,
as it happens, want time.”

“For what?”

“To think.”

“About what?”

“About whether or not I want to stay married to a woman who obviously has such a low opinion of my morals.”

“It’s your
brain
that I hold in question. Nathan, do you love your wife or not?”

He sighed as a savage headache gripped the nape of his neck. “You know I do.”

“Then why don’t you act like it?”

“Because I’m mad as hell right now, that’s why.”

“Poor baby,” Pat crooned in an obnoxious manner that conveyed all her scorn. “Damn you, Nathan,
grow up!
”

Having imparted this message, Pat hung up with a resounding crash. Nathan glared at the receiver in his hand for a moment, and then chuckled ruefully. The hell of it was, he reflected as he replaced it in its cradle, that she was right. He was sulking.

Ten minutes later, Nathan was on board the ferry and on his way to Seattle.

After imbibing two glasses of white wine and stalking back and forth across the penthouse living room until she thought she’d shout with frustration, Mallory fell on the telephone that waited beside Nathan’s chair and forced herself to dial his number. One ring, two, three—no one was there, not even Mrs. Jeffries.

Tears smarted in Mallory’s eyes as she hung up and then tried the other number in desperation—the one that would ring in her own house on the other side of the island. There was no answer there either.

Mallory ached inside.
Good Lord,
she thought hugging herself in her anxiety.
If I don’t talk to somebody, I’ll die.

Just then she heard a key in the lock and stiffened in sudden panic. As desperate as she’d been to reach Nathan, she didn’t know what she would say to him now. She hurried to the bar and refilled her wineglass, and when she turned around, he was there, his dark eyes piercing her. But were they accusing or pleading?

His name caught in her throat and came out as an unrecognizable sound.

He came to her in long strides, removed the glass from her hand and set it on the bar with an authoritative thump. “Take it from one who knows, pumpkin—that stuff won’t solve your problems.”

“I—I saw her today—I talked to her,” Mallory faltered miserably, needing to speak rationally with this man standing so disturbingly close. “Renee, I mean.”

Nathan raised one dark eyebrow, his expression unreadable. “Does she have two heads?”

“Sh-she’s a child, really. Scared—”

He was being stubbornly silent; refusing to make the conversation easier, to reach out. He stood still, his arms folded over his chest, waiting.

Mallory lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Are you?” he drawled, and there was no love in the words, no warmth. “What, exactly, transpired in Eagle River?”

“Eagle Falls,” Mallory corrected him, still unable to meet his eyes. “Nothing much happened. She insisted the baby was yours to the end. She also hinted that someone had paid her to say so.”

“A contradiction in terms,” Nathan observed blandly, still keeping his distance.

Mallory made a sound that might have been a chuckle or a sob, and dashed at the tears burning her eyes with the back of one hand. “Renee is nothing if not a walking contradiction. Would you believe she asked me to autograph that old
TV Guide
cover? She wanted me to write, ‘To Renee, from Tracy.’”

Nathan placed his hands gently on her shoulders, drawing her close. His lips were warm in her hair. “Did you?”

Mallory began to tremble violently, and hysteria bubbled up into her throat and escaped in a series of racking sobs. Nathan lifted her into his arms, carried her to a chair and sat down, holding her in his lap like a shattered child. He continued to hold her until long after the sobs had subsided and the trembling had stopped.

“We’re in a lot of trouble, you and I,” he said, at length.

“I know,” Mallory responded, her head resting against his shoulder. And she knew he wasn’t talking about the paternity suit or Renee Parker, but about the chasm that had grown between them.

As the sun went down, they agreed to separate.

E
ven though the initial stir had died down, there were a few press people posted in the lobby that evening when Nathan and Mallory set out for the island. Nathan was coldly uncommunicative; he had never, under the best of circumstances, been overly fond of reporters. But Mallory recognized a number of these people, and considered them friends. There wasn’t much she could say without betraying things that were necessarily private, but she did manage a few polite, if inane, words, and she kept her chin high and her shoulders square.

On board the ferry, Mallory and Nathan remained in the Porsche, dealing in silence with their thoughts and feelings. Mallory’s car would be delivered in the morning.

The silence looming between them had reached ominous levels by the time Nathan drew the luxurious, high-powered automobile to a stop in front of the house they both thought of as Mallory’s.

Was there nothing that was not specifically his or hers, but theirs? Mallory wondered brokenly.

Still at the wheel of his car, Nathan flexed his hands and sighed, his eyes carefully avoiding his wife’s. “I still love you,” he said, his voice so low that it was almost inaudible.

“And I love you,” Mallory replied.

He turned his head slightly to study her with eyes that were both wounded and angry. “Then what the hell are we doing?”

Mallory couldn’t answer. She got out of the car, thus forcing Nathan to do so, too, and her gaze locked with his over the black vinyl expanse of the vehicle’s roof. Her throat worked painfully, and she swallowed.

“Is it okay if I come in for a little while?” Nathan asked gruffly, again avoiding her eyes.

Mallory nodded, despairing, and wondered why she couldn’t talk to this man, why things couldn’t be straightened out with a few rational words.

The next half hour was a tense time, and Mallory was grateful for the mechanics of reopening the house. While Nathan started a fire in the stove, she unpacked her clothes.

Though her back was to the door, Mallory knew immediately when Nathan entered the bedroom. She stood very still and did not turn around to face him.

He said nothing, and the silence again seemed infinite and eternal.

Mallory was both stricken and relieved when Nathan withdrew and busied himself in the living room. She could not bear to follow, but she knew that he was dismantling the January Christmas tree.

Long after the unpacking was finished, Mallory ventured as far as the kitchen. She was grateful that Nathan hadn’t made coffee; it gave her something to do. All the same, an unbearable sadness clutched at her heart as she grappled with the small task.

Beyond the window, the dwarf cherry trees looked grim without their lacy trimming of snow, and the sky was a bleak and threatening gray. Mallory was sure that she would carry a jagged and hurting piece of that sky in her heart forever.

She was sitting at the kitchen table, sipping coffee, when Nathan came in. Without a word, he set the gifts he’d given Mallory on the far end of the counter and folded his arms.

Since even a screaming fight would be better than this blasted silence, Mallory said the first thing that came into her mind, and her voice was brittle. “Why do you suppose Diane didn’t try to head off those reporters?”

Nathan went to the stove, poured himself a cup of coffee. “I fired Diane.”

Mallory closed her eyes. So he did lay Renee Parker’s lawsuit at Diane’s feet. She wondered why that knowledge didn’t make her feel better. “Oh,” she said woodenly, when she wanted to scream,
Don’t leave me, don’t let this happen, I love you.

“No cries of joy?” he pressed, without apparent bitterness, but Mallory was angered all the same.

For a moment, she forgot her anguish, her desperate need to make peace. “What you do with your employees is your business,” she parried coldly.

Nathan came to sit at the table across from her, his hands cupped around his coffee mug, his dark, accusing eyes fixed on Mallory’s face. “How long are we going to keep this up, Mallory?”

Mallory looked down at her own coffee; it was half-gone and she hadn’t tasted it at all, had no conscious memory of drinking it. “How long are we going to keep what up?” she retorted.

Nathan spat a swearword, tilted his head back, closed his eyes. “Mallory, I didn’t fire Diane for the reason you’re thinking,” he offered, in the tones of one offering sanity to a raving maniac. “I don’t need her anymore.”

“Define ‘need,’ if you don’t mind,” Mallory ventured, aware of the caustic note in her voice but unable to alter it.

The dark eyes were suddenly riveted to her face, hurting where they touched. “Damn it, talking to you is like sparring with a shadow! And kindly stop trying to switch this conversation off into all my imagined transgressions!”

Mallory sat back in her chair, folded her arms stubbornly across her chest and waited.

Nathan gave an irritated sigh and shook his head. “I’m trying to tell you that I don’t need Diane because I don’t need a
press agent.
I’m retiring, Mallory.”

Nothing he could have said would have startled her more. Mallory’s coffee spilled onto the tablecloth as she put it down with a jolt.
“Retiring?”
she choked. “Nathan, why didn’t you tell me?”

He scowled, his gaze fierce, challenging. “If you hadn’t rushed out of here in a huff, I would have. And then at the penthouse, if you’ll remember, we weren’t into heavy discussions.”

Mallory remembered all right, and she yearned for that stolen, glorious time. Perhaps, even if their marriage somehow survived this agreed separation, they would never soar like that again, never share souls and bodies quite so fully. She was mourning when she spoke again. “Aren’t you a little young to retire?”

“Why shouldn’t I retire?” he shot back sharply. “Do we need the money?”

Mallory might have laughed if the situation hadn’t been so serious. Nathan had been wealthy long before their marriage, and money had never been an issue. “What do you intend to do with your time?” she hedged.

Nathan’s eyes were brooding, defying her to discuss the subject they were skirting. “I didn’t father that baby, Mallory,” he said bluntly.

Mallory knew he hadn’t; the confrontation with Renee Parker had convinced her of that much. But something inside her insisted that she deny what she knew to be truth, that she use the issue to keep Nathan at a safe distance.

“Mallory.”

She met his eyes. “Assuming that someone really paid Renee to file that suit—”

“
Assuming?
Mallory, she as much as told you someone did! And that someone was, undoubtedly, Diane Vincent.”

“She might have been scared—Renee, I mean—”

“The baby
isn’t mine!
”

“Okay,” Mallory said in a voice that was at once agreeable and frantic.

Nathan was obviously frustrated. “My God, you still don’t believe me, do you?”

Suddenly, despite her earlier certainty, Mallory didn’t know the answer to that question. All her instincts told her that Nathan was and always had been a faithful husband, but she could not fully trust them. Wishful thinking, in a situation like that one, was an easy trap to fall into. Maybe she’d done just that that morning, when she’d sought out Renee. Maybe she’d only believed Nathan innocent because she couldn’t bear not to.

“We’ve been apart so much, Nathan,” she said reasonably, sanely. “Women offer themselves to you as a matter of course. You’d be superhuman if you—”

But Nathan was on his feet so suddenly that his chair overturned with a crash, and his hand was hard under Mallory’s chin. “I’ll tell you about me, Ms. O’Connor!” he cried in a controlled roar. “I love my wife! And while I may have been tempted to bed the occasional groupie, I never have!”

Instantly furious herself, Mallory thrust his hand aside and stood up. “Damn it, Nathan. Stop!” she screamed. “You would hardly confess to an indiscretion when you have every reason to believe that I would fall apart before your very eyes!”

Something violent contorted Nathan’s big frame; Mallory could feel it even though they weren’t actually touching. When it passed, he spoke again, in ragged tones. “If I were callous enough to sell you out like that, Mallory, I wouldn’t care how you reacted, would I?”

Now tears were smarting in Mallory’s eyes. “Maybe you just didn’t plan on getting caught!”

A muscle moved in Nathan’s jaw, and ominous rage made his throat work, but he said nothing. He turned away from Mallory and stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind him.

Mallory sank back into her chair and dropped her head to her trembling arms, too shattered to cry. The separation of the McKendricks was off to a less than tender start.

Probably unable to refrain any longer, Trish knocked on Mallory’s kitchen door bright and early the next morning. One look at her friend’s tear-swollen face brought her scurrying across the uneven linoleum floor to offer an embrace.

Mallory cried, and so did Trish. But neither spoke until they had left the house and walked down the muddy path through the orchard to the Sound. The tide was in, and it did much, in its ancient and dependable way, to soothe Mallory.

After an interlude of reflection, Trish bent, slender in her worn blue jeans and red Windbreaker, to pick up a small piece of driftwood and fling it into the bubbling surf. “What happened, Mall?”

Mallory overturned a barnacle-covered rock and watched dispassionately as the tiny sand crabs living beneath it rushed in every direction. “I’m not sure,” she said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

Mallory abandoned the pandemonium she’d created in the sand to sit down on a bleached-out log and wriggle the toes of her sneakers in a tangle of wet kelp. “You read about the paternity thing?”

Trish nodded, letting the low tide surge around her ankles. “You must know that’s a crock,” she observed, squinting in the springlike sun.

Mallory swallowed miserably. “The crazy thing is, Trish, I
do
know that. I think I knew it from the time the story broke. But instead of saying that, and standing my ground, I drove up to Eagle Falls and confronted her.”

Trish sighed. “I guess I would have done that, too,” she conceded finally, though she clearly disapproved. “Was Nathan upset about it?”

“He saw it as a lack of trust on my part.”

“And?”

“And we can’t seem to talk about it without fighting, Trish. My God, even when I wanted to say that I believed in him, I couldn’t. It was as though that part of me had been shoved aside.”

Trish came to sit beside Mallory, her hands cradling her knees. “Do you love him?”

Mallory nodded glumly.

Trish’s soft blond hair danced around her face as she studied her friend. “But still you wanted to keep him at a distance, didn’t you, Mallory?”

Mallory’s mouth dropped open, but before she could say anything, Trish went bravely on.

“You know what I think, Mall? I think you’re trying to hold onto your old life—the life you had when your parents were still alive. Look at you—you’re married to a millionaire, for God’s sake, and you
insist
on living in that little cracker box of a house because that way you won’t have to let go of Mummy and Daddy.”

Mallory shot to her feet, her cheeks crimson, her throat closing and opening spasmodically over a surging fury. “That’s a lie!”

“Is it, Mallory? You’ve been married to that man for over six years and I’ll bet you haven’t spent more than two or three nights at Angel Cove in all that time! And if it weren’t for that damned soap opera, which everyone knows makes you
miserable,
you probably wouldn’t set foot inside the penthouse, either! And then there’s your name—”

“Shut up!” Mallory shrieked.

Trish stood up calmly, faced her friend. “Your parents are dead, Mallory. Dead. Gone. And, baby, it’s forever!”

Mallory was trembling; she wanted to turn and run away from Trish, from all the hurtful things her friend was saying, but she couldn’t move. It was as though she’d become a part of that beach. Tears coursed down her cheeks, and her throat ached over screams of protest.

And Trish hugged her. High in the azure sky, a lone gull squawked in comment.

Mallory sniffled inelegantly and moved to dash at her tears. “How can you—say such—things—?”

Trish shrugged, her hands firm on Mallory’s shoulders. “Mallory, grow up. You love Nathan—fight for him.”

Drawing deep restorative breaths, Mallory shook her head. “We’ve agreed to separate for a while, Trish. And I th-think we need the time apart.”

Trish shook her head in angry wonder. “You’ve had too
much
time apart already, don’t you see that? Go to him, tell him everything you’re feeling—contradictions and all.”

But Mallory was drawing back inside herself, refusing to hear the reason in Trish’s suggestion, refusing to think that she didn’t belong in the small house beyond the orchard anymore.

And after that, there was no reaching her.

Nathan stood at the living room windows in his own house, looking out over the peaceful vista of sea and sky and mountains. Angel Cove itself was sapphire blue and sun dappled that day, and boats with brightly colored sails bobbed in the distance. Beyond them rose Mount Rainier, snowy and impervious even as she favored lesser beings with a rare view of her rugged slopes.

“Mr. McKendrick?”

He started slightly, having forgotten that he wasn’t alone. Even though the band was gone for the time being—some of them hadn’t taken the news of his retirement any better than Diane had—the housekeeper was always in residence.

Mrs. Jeffries stood in the center of the spacious room now, carrying a china coffeepot with steam curling from its spout and looking nervous. The stains in her cheeks, no doubt, were the result of the scandal and shame served up by the ever-vigilant press.

“What is it?” Nathan demanded, none too politely.

“Th-there’s a man at the door, asking to see you.”

“Who?”

Mrs. Jeffries actually shuddered, and the coffeepot was in peril. “I think he’s a process server!”

Nathan sighed, exasperated and weary. “Show him in, please. And put down that coffee before you burn yourself!”