When Lightning Strikes Twice (25 page)

“That would be Bulgaria. And no, I never felt that I belonged with Sharolyn. And vice versa, I might add.”

“Should I ask the obvious question or do you just want to go ahead and answer it?” Rachel asked wryly.

“I guess you mean, why did Sharolyn and I get married?”

“I guess I do,” she agreed.

“Without romanticizing the situation—because there was nothing romantic about my relationship with Sharolyn—we both had too much to drink at a party one night, we got careless, and I knocked her up. It was our third date, which would’ve been our last because neither of us was very taken with the other. We had nothing in common, not even much sexual attraction. Goes to show the power of vodka, hmm?”

Rachel winced. Was she supposed to agree? It didn’t seem like the time to mention that she’d never been drunk in her life, so she could not honestly attest to vodka’s
power. But it must be mighty to make a careful and calculating attorney like Quint careless.

“Sharolyn got pregnant that night?” Rachel quickly suppressed the image of a sexually out-of-control Quint with the woman who was Brady’s mother. It was oddly painful.

“Yes. Sharolyn came to me a couple weeks later with the positive results of a home pregnancy test.”

Rachel bit her lower lip. “And so you got married.”

He nodded. “And our marriage was just as lousy as we both knew it was going to be. We split up the week after the baby was born. Brady lived with her and I had visitation rights until she hooked up with the adventuresome travel guide. Child care paled in comparison to the lure of Eastern Europe. After all, who wants to change diapers when you can sunbathe in Albania along the Adriatic coast? And no, I’m not being sarcastic, Rachel, that’s a direct quote from Sharolyn herself.”

Rachel stole a glance at Brady, so adorable and loving, who was the product of that decidedly unromantic—not to mention unloving—union. “That’s not a nice story, Quint. I hope you’ll soften the edges when it’s time to explain things to Brady. He deserves better.”

“He deserves the truth. I don’t believe in lying to kids by spinning them a bunch of candy-coated fantasies. That’s the way my father operates, and it makes it too easy to develop a talent for self-deception. From there you progress to being able to rationalize anything, to doing whatever you want because you feel like doing it and to hell with everybody else. You have no problem with taking what you want because you feel you deserve it. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about, I’ve been there.”

She regarded him curiously. “But you’re not there now. You wouldn’t be in Lakeview, putting up with your father and Carla and looking after your little brothers, if you were. You wouldn’t be a good father to Brady, and you are.”

“Thank you for that. I had some hard lessons to learn, and it took me a painfully long time to learn them.” He pulled alongside the curb of her apartment building, just
behind her own sporty little car. “Of course, shock therapy can work wonders, too,” he added drolly.

“Shock therapy meaning your marriage to Sharolyn? And her—um—defection to Bulgaria?”

“You are a quick study, Rachel. You swap metaphors with the greatest of ease.”

“What were the other hard lessons?” She wanted to know everything.

“I’m tired of talking about myself. I think we’ve heard enough of The Life and Times of Quinton Cormack. You are infinitely more interesting, Rachel.”

He reached over and put his hand on her thigh, just above her knee, and began to draw concentric circles with his fingers. Each circle moved his hand higher along her thigh, and her legs parted reflexively, allowing him access. “Stay with me tonight, Rachel. Please.”

She put her hand over his, stilling its progress. “If you count the last two evenings we spent together, then this could be considered our third date, Quint. Something of a daunting parallel, don’t you think?”

He linked his fingers with hers. “That’s a low blow, Rachel. I confide in you and you use it against me.”

“I’m not using it against you, I’m just pointing out that you—seem to have a tendency to take things faster than I do. Fortunately, neither of us has been drinking tonight.”

“Because it would be too easy for you to say yes to me, Rachel?” He lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed his lips against her palm.

She thought about denying it. And couldn’t. “Yes,” she admitted achingly. “But I’m not going to, Quint.”

“I want to make you say yes.” He nibbled on her fingers and she quivered. “I can, you know.”

“But you won’t because you aren’t that kind of man, Quint,” she pointed out, her voice soft and earnest. “You aren’t able to rationalize everything, and you don’t do whatever you want, just because you feel like it. You don’t simply take what you want because you feel you deserve it.”

“Aaargh! Hoist by my own petard.” He shook his head ruefully. “Even worse, I’m starting to talk like a piece from the Living Chess Game.”

He pulled her over to him and kissed her, a slow deep kiss that lasted a long, long time. They were both breathing hard when he finally lifted his lips from hers. He kept his arms around her, holding her against his chest, unwilling to release her.

Rachel lay against him, listening to the thudding beat of his heart. It seemed to be pounding in rhythm with her own. She gazed up at him with limpid hazel eyes, her lips moist and swollen from their kiss.

“Have I changed your mind?” he asked huskily.

“You weren’t trying to.” She reached up to stroke his cheek. “That was a good-night kiss and we both know it.”

Quint grimaced. “When did you become so convinced of this alleged nobility of mine? Not too long ago you thought I had all the integrity and sensitivity of Pol Pot.”

“I’ve gotten to know you better since then.” She smiled up at him. “And to like you.” She moved out of his arms and grasped the door handle. “I’d better get Snowy home now, Quint.”

“If you insist.” He sighed his resignation. “I’ll move her car seat to your car. Have the door open.”

Instead of bristling at his take-charge attitude, Rachel found herself grinning. “Sir, yes sir!” she imitated a new marine recruit addressing the drill instructor.

Quint performed Snowy’s transfer with such speed and dexterity that the little girl opened her eyes only once before closing them again. When her car seat was safely buckled into the back of Rachel’s car, he came around to the driver’s side, where Rachel was already behind the wheel.

“I’ll follow you there.”

“Oh, Quint, you don’t have to. It’s not far and—”

“I’ll follow you,” he repeated firmly.

“I won’t be leaving their house right away,” she warned. “I’ll stay and talk to Laurel and Gerald for a while.”

He rolled his eyes. “Then I won’t wait around for you,
I’ll take Brady home. But if you should change your mind about coming over later—”

“Quint, I won’t.”

He ignored that. “You know where I live, and I’ll be home for the rest of the night. You don’t have to call first, just come.”

“I—I can’t, Quint.” Each refusal required extra effort.

She knew she had to get away from him before it became easier to comply than to keep saying no. “Good night, Quint. And thanks for everything today. Snowy and I had a lovely time.”

“I bet you’ve been spouting that polite little speech since high school.” Quint was sardonic. “It’s right out of the
Dating Tips to Teens
handbook: the girl should always thank the boy for a
lovely
time. Even when it wasn’t so lovely.”

“And how do you know so much about the subject?” Rachel hoped she sounded blasé, but it was rather deflating to realize that he was correct.

She really had been spouting that same polite little speech since the beginning of her dating career—which seemed to stretch back to another eon yet managed to remain depressingly the same after all these years.

Except for her nondates with Quint. That was different,
he
was different. And she was certainly different when she was with him.

“My sister played by the same book,” said Quint. “During her teens, that is. Then she outgrew it.”

Rachel was so surprised to learn he had a sister that she decided his subtle insult was vague enough to dismiss. “This is the first time you’ve mentioned a sister. Is she here in New Jersey, too?”

And where does did she fit into the Cormack scheme of things? Rachel left that question unspoken.

Quint shrugged, his expression suddenly enigmatic. “The rain is starting to come down harder again. Good night, Rachel. And thank
you
for a
lovely
time.”

W
ade Saxon seldom fell prey to doubts and self-recriminations, but tonight he felt as if he’d been hit with a full lifetime’s share of them. He sat next to Tim Sheely on the leather sofa—where he’d made love to Dana for the first time just a few hours ago—and tried to concentrate on the conversation going on around him. But it was hopeless. He kept drifting into the unhappy territory of guilt and uncertainty.

Performance anxiety. He’d heard the term but always dismissed it as nothing to do with him, certainly not sexually. But his performance with Dana earlier tonight—a half dozen strokes into her sweet wet heat which hurdled him into shattering orgasm—was definitely the kind to fuel anxiety.

He’d never lost it like that before; he was the master of his own passion and therefore of the woman he was pleasuring. He enjoyed his own control as much as he liked watching his partner surrender hers. He was a sexual virtuoso, but with Dana, the maestro had dropped his baton. So to speak.

As for Dana, she hadn’t minded at all. He trembled with vivid sensual recall, imagining himself deep inside her, her limbs locked around him, her blue eyes filled with warmth and affection. But not replete with sated passion.

Because he hadn’t satisfied her and he knew it. Worse, she
didn’t
know it.

She thought that the rushed act he had so ignominiously botched was sex as it was supposed to be. Wade took no comfort in the fact that she’d been a virgin, and therefore had no basis of comparison. Instead, that realization launched another wave of gloom.

Her introduction to sex by him—that he was her first lover had filled him with a totally unexpected possessive pride—should have been passionately earthshaking, at least a nine on the sexual Richter scale. Had he even rated a two?

If only they’d had time to do it again. If only, at the very least, there had been enough time for him to give her the satisfaction she deserved and he was eager to provide.

But Tim and Lisa’s unanticipated arrival, just critical minutes after his frantic eruption, scarcely left them time to dress and clean up—the sofa definitely needed some work—before the couple trooped in with little Seth and baby Mackenzie.

Deciding against a rainy night in a Mystic motel room and concerned about reports of possible flooding, the Sheely family had returned to find Dana and Wade Saxon in their house. Both Tim and Lisa expressed delight over their unexpected company, and Dana immediately turned into a doting aunt, lavishing attention on her young niece and nephew.

Wade followed her around, he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. Casual gestures she was completely unaware of making were seared into his very soul. Yet he was supposed to act like nothing had changed between them, that he was still her buddy, a sort of proxy for Tim.

Pretending to be friends who hadn’t moved on to that next crucial level had been Dana’s brilliant idea. While they’d been throwing on their clothes in a panicked frenzy, Tim’s and Lisa’s voices growing louder as they approached the house, Dana asked him to maintain the best-buddies charade. Wade had argued against it—he’d never concealed anything from Tim, and he didn’t want to keep his newfound
feelings for Dana a secret—but ultimately, she prevailed.

“Right now I can’t deal with any questions or jokes or anything they might say if they knew. It’s still all too new to me,” she’d whispered, gripping his hand, those gorgeous eyes of hers pleading with him.

He’d caved instantly. How could he refuse her anything? Especially after he had just deprived her of the physical pleasure he so desperately wanted to give her.

So here he was, pretending to be the same old Wade when he felt entirely different. Experiencing emotions that heretofore had been foreign to him, yet trying to appear unchanged. He probably couldn’t have pulled it off, had not the Sheelys been wholly and grimly preoccupied with the news he’d brought them from Lakeview.

Reluctantly, but realizing the necessity, he had told Tim, Dana, and Lisa about Shawn’s new friendship with Misty Tilden as recorded in the Lakeview police complaint. Lisa had the objectivity and distance of an in-law, but Tim and Dana, predictably, went ballistic. When they contemplated telling their parents, both looked ready to hurl either their dinners or any readily available object.

“I’ll call Shawn tomorrow and talk to him, man to man,” Tim decided. “No use dragging the folks into this when it might be not be anything to worry about.”

“I’ll talk to Shawn, too,” Dana seconded. “And I’ll tell Mary Jo and Tricia and Sarah what’s going on. I know they’ll all want to offer him some sisterly advice. Or make some threats,” she added, unsmiling.

“And the collective Sheely message will be for Shawn to stay away from this Misty Tilden person?” Lisa looked troubled. “All that interference could backfire in a big way, you know. Ever hear of Romeo and Juliet?”

“Misty and her millions must seem like a fantasy-come-true, irresistible to a kid like Shawn,” Wade pointed out.

Tim and Dana were not pleased with his comment and accused him of disparaging Shawn.
Their
brother would not be attracted to a lap-dancing sex goddess with an eight-figure
inheritance simply because she was … well, a lap-dancing sex goddess with an eight-figure inheritance. No, Shawn Sheely was sensitive and altruistic and not motivated by the forces of sex and money.

Wade made the mistake of laughing. Well, they were kidding, weren’t they?

Unfortunately not. That ardent Sheely blood loyalty of theirs had been fully activated, and Wade was relegated to outsider status. Lisa, who’d wisely managed to keep a straight face during the sibling accolades, was accorded neutrality.

Wade didn’t have a chance to talk privately with Dana for the rest of the evening. He was put up on a futon in little Seth’s room for the night and Dana bedded down on a mattress in baby Mackenzie’s room. Because the master bedroom was located between the two children’s rooms, and the uncarpeted hallway resounded with creaking floorboards, she was as inaccessible as a princess in a castle surrounded by a beast-infested moat.

Everybody was cordial at breakfast the next morning. By tacit agreement, neither Shawn’s nor Misty’s name was mentioned at all. The sun was shining and the water had receded from the streets by noon when Dana and Wade departed for Lakeview. Separately, in their own cars.

It wasn’t easy to keep his Mercedes restrained in the right lane behind Dana’s plodding little Chevy. After all, a thoroughbred racehorse wasn’t made to trail a mule on the track, mused Wade. Nevertheless, he followed Dana the whole way from Connecticut to New Jersey and because she didn’t veer from the right lane, neither did he. Not even when it seemed like every car in the state of New York had whizzed by them in the passing lane.

When she stopped at a turnpike rest stop for gas, so did he although he could’ve made it to North Carolina without stopping, thanks to his car’s magnificent fuel capacity.

He filled the tank of her car at the self-service pump and bought two cans of soda, root beer for him and Orange Crush for her. It was their first real chance to talk, and if
the location was not exactly a romantic site, at least they weren’t surrounded by other Sheelys.

“About last night,” he began, wishing he could think of a more original opener.

She blushed and immediately averted her eyes. “What happened, happened, Saxon. There’s no need for postmortems.”

Which had always been
his
morning-after attitude. Nothing turned him off faster than a woman who tried to manufacture a sense of intimacy out of a no-strings-attached act of pleasure. Dana knew exactly how he felt about that, of course, because he’d never been reticent about venting his morning-after irritation. Neither had she. She would call him an insensitive jerk and express pity for his misguided lovers, and often he would laughingly agree with her. Without a shred of remorse.

He was feeling remorseful now, for the all the things he’d said and left unsaid. As if caught in some kind of cosmic payback, he stood staring hungrily at Dana, wanting to feel close to her when she seemed set on establishing a disturbing distance.

She glanced at her watch. “We’d better go. I want to get home and call my sisters. We should come up with some kind of a plan before we confront Shawn.”

Frustrated, Wade returned to his own car and tried to console himself with the fact that a food-and-fuel stop really wasn’t the ideal place for the kind of conversation they needed to have.

He searched his mind for where the ideal place might be. Dana had been right on target when she’d accused him of being an unimaginative, unromantic date.

“When was the last time you took a date to the theater or to the symphony in Philadelphia, Saxon? For that matter, when was the last time you took a date to a restaurant that requires a tie? Or even to a first-run movie?”
He remembered their conversation in Riggin’s very well, though it seemed like it had taken place a lifetime ago.

Which in a way, it had. Back then, he had been carefree
and uninvolved with no intentions of changing. Now he was actually plotting where to take Dana Sheely on a serious, honest-to-God romantic date.

But he wasn’t the only one caught in a bizarre cycle of change. The Tildens were facing criminal charges, his aunt Eve had been dangerously disrespectful to the chief of police, and Shawn Sheely was Misty Tilden’s newest best friend. It was as if Lakeview had been transported to the Twilight Zone. Could things get any stranger than this?

Rachel had never been a proponent of drop-in visits, though she acknowledged they were occasionally necessary. This morning seemed to be one of those times. Her answering-machine tape played yesterday’s numerous calls from Wade and Aunt Eve, alluding to the Tildens and a visit to the police station. There were no details, but Rachel’s curiosity was definitely piqued.

She had tried to call both her cousin and her aunt, last night and this morning, but was unable to reach either one. Where could they be? Neither had mentioned any out-of-town weekend plans, but if they were in town, they weren’t bothering to answer their phones.

Which was a distinct possibility. And if they didn’t want to be bothered, she shouldn’t intrude on them.

Rachel replayed the messages and tried to put together a likely scenario.
Meet the Tildens at the police station to discuss a criminal complaint?
Not even a psychic could make sense of that! Her curiosity expanded from merely piqued to all-consuming.

She decided she had no choice but to pay a visit to her aunt, though she knew Aunt Eve would not be pleased. Eve Saxon took advance precautions against drop-ins by grabbing her coat before she opened the door and then telling the uninvited guest that she was just getting ready to leave so there was no time to visit.

Rachel drove to her aunt’s well-tended colonial-style brick house, half-expecting Eve to greet her at the door, holding her coat. But her knocks went unanswered, and the
newspaper was still in the driveway where it had been tossed by the carrier earlier that morning. Clearly, Aunt Eve was not at home.

At Wade’s apartment, she leaned steadily on the buzzer to rouse him, just in case he’d spent a hardy night carousing, before concluding that nobody could sleep through the infernal buzzing din. Wade wasn’t home, and she still had no idea what had happened with the Tildens.

She wondered if Quint did. She suddenly remembered his call Friday night, claiming he wanted to discuss the Tilden case. But he hadn’t mentioned anything about it yesterday, during the entire day they’d spent together. And neither had she, which seemed to portend something. Rachel didn’t let herself think what.

She arrived at Quint’s door, aware that her heart was beating a little too fast in anticipation. This visit fell into the professional realm, she reminded herself, and tried hard to focus on legalistic strategy instead of the thrill of seeing Quint again.

Quint opened the door holding Brady in his arms.

“Mom-mmee!” Brady squealed and launched himself at Rachel. She caught him and he wrapped his arms and legs around her like a little monkey.

“I know why Brady calls you Mommy.” Suddenly Dustin was there, standing between her and Quint, stuffing a chocolate donut into his mouth. “It’s ‘cause he doesn’t have a mother and you’re Quint’s girlfriend. My mom said so,” he added importantly.

Rachel’s eyes met Quint’s, and she carried Brady inside.

“C’mon, Brady, it’s our turn to be It.” Dustin tugged on Brady’s cotton overall-covered leg. “Austin is hiding and we have to find him. C’mon, count. One, two, three.”

“One, two, free,” Brady repeated, wiggling in Rachel’s arms. “Down,” he ordered, and she set him on his feet.

Dustin took his young uncle’s hand and the pair scurried out of the room, trailing donut crumbs in their wake.

Rachel and Quint faced each other.

“Carla is stressed and needed another break?” Rachel surmised.

“Carla and her mother are both suffering from migraine headaches and need a quiet day of rest, thanks to Frank Cormack, who blew in at dawn, drunk and reeking of perfume—not his own,” Quint said, his voice as impassive as his expression. “Carla’s mother told him to leave and when he refused, she—uh—evicted him at gunpoint. Frank retaliated by throwing a rock through the front window and banging a garbage-can lid against the hood of Mrs. Polk’s car. The police were called.”

“And so were you?”

He nodded. “The police suggested that Frank be locked up to sleep it off in the Lakeview jail, and, for a change, Carla didn’t balk. I think her mother would’ve clobbered
her
with the garbage-can lid if she had. The boys were dropped off here at nine A.M.”

He seemed remote and dispirited, and Rachel forgot she’d come to grill him about the Tildens and those mysterious phone messages. She felt the urge to put her arms around him and recognized that the impulse was not a sexual one. She just wanted to hug him, which was unusual for her; she’d never been hug-prone except for Snowy and now, little Brady.

Rachel gazed at Quint, so strong and capable, the invincible man. His dark eyes were hard and cold, the way they’d been when he argued a contentious point in the Pedersen trial. He certainly was not vulnerable and cuddly-sweet like Snowy and Brady, yet somehow he was evoking the same emotional reponses within her that they did. Maybe it was because she could imagine how he’d felt this morning, seeing his father drunk, listening to Carla scream, worrying about the effect on his little brothers….