Woman in Black (38 page)

“By that, I assume you mean marriage?” He nodded, to which she responded with an arch look, “Let me get this straight: We haven't even gone out on one date, and already you're talking marriage.” It had the desired effect of defusing the tension somewhat. Karim laughed, and she added, smiling, “Besides, both my parents are dead, so you'd be out of luck. Anyway, why should it be up to them? Doesn't the woman get a say?”

“Yes, of course. In most cases, she is free to reject anyone she deems unsuitable.”

“And after the wedding? Who's in charge then?”

“The man may rule his kingdom, but it's the woman who rules the household,” Karim said with an enigmatic smile.

“Well, since I'm not exactly a whiz when it comes to running a household, I wouldn't last very long in your culture,” she said with a self-effacing laugh.

“Yet you're very capable at running this one,” he pointed out, gesturing around him.

“Only because I never forget who's boss.” She thought once more of Abigail and how watchful she'd been, feeling a cold finger of apprehension trace its way up her spine.

Karim stood looking at her a moment before he said softly, “You still haven't given me an answer.”

Lila felt herself tense slightly in response, even as a part of her—the gooey part at the center—shivered in delight at the prospect of an evening out with Karim … and possibly more. “I'm not sure I'm ready for this,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “Maybe in another time or another place. But Karim, I just lost my husband. I don't want to get involved with
anyone
, not just you.”

He kept his gaze leveled at her, eyeing her as if he knew something she didn't. “Then I shall just have to be patient.”

“It may be a long wait. I don't know that I'll ever be ready.” Reflecting on the complications of grieving for a husband whom she alternately missed and was furious at, she sank down heavily on the unmade bed. “Sometimes I think there are three of us buried in that grave. What you're looking at right now is a ghost. And ghosts don't get to live normal lives.”

Karim sat down next to her, putting his arms around her. Before she could pull away, his mouth was closing over hers. Held captive by the warmth of his lips, the tip of his tongue gently teasing hers, she felt blood rush up into her head … and to her lower regions as well. Ghost, indeed! She felt dizzy, breathless, the snow sizzling against the windowpanes blending with the white noise inside her head. She was sixteen again, making out with Ben Caruso at the beach at St. Simon's, on fire with more than a sunburn, the sand in her bathing suit not the only thing making her itch. She was as delirious as when she'd gotten drunk for the first time, on champagne at her cousin Vicki's wedding. She'd made a fool of herself then, and she was going to make a fool of herself now.

She was helpless to resist when he tipped her back onto the bed and pushed her sweater up to kiss her naked belly. Karim might not have had much practice at “dating,” however his culture defined it, but it was obvious he'd had his share of experience. Loose Western women, no doubt. Which she was in danger of becoming herself if she didn't put a stop to this.

But Lila found she couldn't stop. It all seemed so unreal as she lay there with her eyes closed, Karim's lips moving over her bare skin with kisses so feather-light they might have been mere breaths of air, that she half expected to open her eyes and find herself in her own bed, just woken from a sexy dream. She made no protest when his hand insinuated itself past the waistband of her jeans—
It's only a dream
, she told herself. The nether regions of her body, whose wants and needs she'd been doing her best to ignore these many months, as she would a pesky child's, sprang to life with the brush of his fingertips, and all the pent-up longing that she'd suppressed came rushing in like a tidal wave.

It wasn't until Karim started to unzip her jeans that she came to with a rude jolt. This was no dream. And she wasn't in her own bed. This was
Abigail's
bed, where she was lying half unzipped and in disarray, like some teenager up to no good while her parents were out.

Lila immediately bolted upright. “What are we doing?” she croaked.

Karim sat up, his face briefly registering disappointment. But there was no hint of apology or embarrassment in the smile he gave her. “I just wanted to know what it was I'm waiting for.” He ran a fingertip over her exposed belly button, his voice low and husky.

She jerked her sweater down. “This is crazy.”

“Is it?” he murmured.

“Anyone could have walked in.”

“No one's home.” He tilted his head to look at her. “Unless there's another reason you're afraid.”

“I told you, I'm not ready for this,” she said. The words sounded decidedly less convincing than when she'd first spoken them. “In fact, if you had any sense, you'd run from me like the plague. Look at me; I'm a mess. I'm also a lousy bet. If I'd been a better wife, maybe my husband wouldn't have—” She broke off, feeling a shudder pass through her.

“I promise you, Lila, I'm nothing like your husband.”

Lila leaped off the bed. “Don't talk to me about my husband! You don't know anything about him!” She knew she was overreacting, but that did nothing to temper her emotions, which were running high. “You've only known me a few months. That's nothing. I was married to Gordon for almost twenty years. We had a
life
together.”

“I meant no disrespect.” Karim frowned as he rose to his feet, wearing a troubled look. “I'm sure he was a good man for you to have loved him. I only meant that I would never hurt you.”

“He never meant to hurt us, either. Whatever his faults, he loved us. I never doubted that.”

“Then wouldn't he have wanted you to be happy?”

She didn't have an answer for that. Karim was confusing her with his words. Lovely, sinuous, sensuous words, like in the book of poems he'd given her, which coiled like smoke from an opium pipe to cloud her reasoning. But she couldn't allow herself to be seduced by them. If she gave in to Karim, it would be for all the wrong reasons. And didn't she owe it to herself to be certain, if and when the time came, that it had nothing to do with her feeling lonely and vulnerable?

“I can't have this conversation right now,” she told him. “I have work to do.” She turned away and began stripping the bed—the bed to which she'd come so close to falling victim—her movements brisk as she tossed pillows onto the carpet and jerked sheets from their moorings.

Karim stood watching this furious burst of energy from the sidelines for a minute or so, his arms crossed over his chest, wearing a bemused look, before he said with a sigh of resignation, “All right, as you wish. Until you decide otherwise, we shall be as chaste as Layla and Manjun.”

She straightened to look at him. She dimly recalled the famous story of frustrated lovers from a course in Middle Eastern literature that she'd taken in college. “Didn't they both die in the end?”

“Only after Manjun had been driven mad.”

Lila couldn't help breaking into a smile at his scholarly way of driving his point home. Relenting the tiniest bit, she said, “Well, the only place I'll be driving you is to the benefit on Saturday night. That is, unless you'd rather we took your car.” Seeing him brighten, she hastened to add, “I meant what I said before, but that doesn't mean we can't be friends.”

He nodded respectfully. “Neal is welcome to come with us if he likes.”

“Thanks, but I'm sure he'll want to ride with Phoebe.”

Karim murmured something in response … or perhaps it was just the keening of the wind outside. She was bent over, gathering up the sheets off the floor, and when she straightened, he was gone. She stood there, holding the sheets bunched to her chest, listening to the muffled tread of his footsteps on the staircase. A minute later, she heard the sound of a car trunk slamming shut outside.

The groceries. She'd forgotten all about them.

She sank down on the mattress, her legs suddenly too weak to support her. Her heart was beating much too fast, and her breathing was coming in shallow little bursts.

I might be a ghost
, she thought,
but I'm far from dead
.

Early the next
morning, Lila took the train into the city to visit Vaughn. He was between rounds of chemo and feeling energetic enough to take a long walk, so they hoofed it all the way up to Rockefeller Center, despite the threat of another snowstorm. By the time they arrived, it was almost noon and the sun was peeking out from behind the clouds. It was just warm enough to sit outside, with all the layers of clothing they had on, so Vaughn bought some soft pretzels from a vendor and they sat down on a bench to eat them.

“Look at you. You look almost human,” she said. She watched him break a piece off his pretzel and toss it to the pigeons that had gathered at their feet. Her brother's hair was starting to grow back; it looked like the pale fuzz Neal had sported as an infant. He'd put on some weight, too; he no longer looked as if he were drowning inside his clothes.

Vaughn turned to smile at her. “As opposed to what, a dead man walking?”

He spoke lightly, but she heard an edge in his voice that caused her to grow alert. Was there something he wasn't telling her?

“That reminds me—how did it go at the doctor's yesterday?” she asked in what she hoped was a normal tone of voice. She was eager to know the results of Friday's postchemo checkup and had only kept a lid on it until now because she knew how much he hated it when she hovered. But she couldn't take the suspense any longer. One way or another, she had to know.

“I start my next round of chemo in two weeks,” he informed her. His tone was so dispassionate, he might have been reporting on the weather—
fair conditions, with a high-pressure system building to the north
—but she knew him too well. This was how he acted when he was scared.

“What does that mean?”

“The short answer is, I'm far from a lost cause … but I'm not out of the woods yet, either.”

“Can you be a little more specific?”

Reacting to the trepidation in her voice, he reached for her mittened hand, squeezing it to reassure her. “See, this is why I wasn't in a hurry to tell you. I knew you'd jump to conclusions. And it's not bad news.”

“It doesn't sound like good news, either. Vaughn, is there something I should know?”

He gave her a long look, no doubt wondering if there was a way to wriggle out of this one. But he must have known that Lila had his number and that she wasn't going to let up until he'd told her everything, so he surrendered at last with a sigh. “There's no reason to panic, okay? Just this one little area that lit up on my PET scan. Other than that, I'm clean as a whistle.” He tossed the last of his pretzel to the pigeons and rose languidly to his feet. “And now, since it doesn't appear that I'm in any immediate danger of kicking the bucket, why don't we table this discussion and talk about something else instead?”

Lila longed to browbeat him into giving her every detail, but she knew that would only make him clam up tighter. He'd told her all he was going to for the time being. She would just have to sit tight until further word and trust that his doctors knew what they were doing.

“What do you want to talk about?” she asked, getting up to walk beside him.

He shrugged. “I don't know. You tell me.”

Something in his voice made her say, “You say that like you think there's something
I'm
keeping from
you
.”

“Is there?” He turned his head to give her a probing look.

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious. You still seeing that Karim fellow? Nice guy, by the way. I really liked him.”

She frowned. “I'm not
seeing
him. I told you, we're just friends.”

“So there's no one else?”

“Of course not. Don't you think I would've told you if there were?”

“Not necessarily. Not if he was, say, a married man.”

“Why on earth would I be seeing a—” She clapped a hand over her mouth, suddenly realizing what he was driving at. In fact, a lot of things she hadn't understood before were becoming clear to her now. “You've been talking to Abby, haven't you?” When Vaughn didn't deny it, she went on, “So
that's
why she's been following me around like she thinks I'm up to something. She suspects there's something going on between Kent and me? God, I can't believe it.” She gave a harsh laugh. “What's even more unbelievable is that you actually bought into it. How could you think for one minute that I'd sink that low?”

He had the decency to look contrite. “I wasn't accusing you of anything, Sis. I just had to know for sure.”

“Well, now you know.” Truth to tell, her anger was directed more at Abigail than at Vaughn. Of all the mean things to accuse her of! “And as far as Abby goes, I suppose it's only the pot calling the kettle black. If anyone should be worried, it's Kent.”

Vaughn shot her a narrow look. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“You know perfectly well. Are you going to pretend that the only reason you've been spending so much time with Abby is because you have nothing better to do?”

“I'm not sleeping with her, if that's what you're implying,” Vaughn growled.

“I didn't say you were. But clearly you've thought about it, or you wouldn't have been so quick to deny it. And while we're on the subject, what exactly
is
going on with you and Abby?”

His eyes flashed her a warning. “I don't owe you an explanation.”

“Maybe not. But I think you owe Gillian one.”

“Why? It's none of her business, either.”