Crush (9 page)

He accompanied them to the plane. “I’d fly back with you, but I have to meet the band in Tokyo for the second leg of our tour. Our schedule is fairly tight, and I’m afraid I can’t deviate from it.” He rested his hands on her shoulders. “I’m not ready to say goodbye to you, Miranda.”

She stared at the asphalt. If she looked into his eyes for one second longer, she would never be able to get on the plane. Most men had a way of cloaking their feelings, either by avoiding eye contact or by lying outright. Lucas’s eyes hid nothing. His emotions were naked and honest and, for Miranda, overwhelming.

“Did you have a good visit?” he asked.

She finally lifted her face. “I had the best sleep of my life.”

“I hope that wasn’t the highlight,” Lucas remarked. The sky was overcast, as it often was in the north of Wales, and the absence of sun left the air chilled. Lucas didn’t mind the grey sky or the cold, not with the bright shine of Miranda’s magical eyes on him.

She smiled, unwittingly giving herself a firmer hold on Lucas’s heart. “It wasn’t.” Having Fenway Franks in a seven-hundred-year-old kitchen had been nice. Knowing that he’d slept with her—without
sleeping
with her—had been really nice. But the best had been sitting in his arms beneath the full moon and having him genuinely listen to the secret contents of her heart. “I had a very nice weekend,” she said. “The commute stinks, but other than that…it was perfect.”

“Do you think Mr. Reilly had a good time?”

Miranda nodded toward the limo. The driver and one of the flight attendants were trying to pry Bernie’s fingers from the frame of the door. “I think he wants to stay.”

“Conwy could use a good music reviewer. And a sports writer.”

“The perfect gifts for the man who has everyone,” Miranda joked somberly. “
Thing!
” she blurted. “I meant—”

The backs of his fingers tickled over her temple as he brushed a windblown tress from her face. “I know what you meant.”

She wanted to kick herself for ruining their farewell with a lousy Freudian slip, and there was nothing she could do now but to end it quickly. She held out her hand. “I had a great time. Thank you. And thank you for helping me at the concert. For saving my life.”

He took her hand in both of his and gave it a warm squeeze. “It was my pleasure, Mir—” was all he got out before she tossed an arm around his neck and drew him in for a kiss. He jumped on her lead, deepening the kiss as he wrapped his arms around her and brought her into his coat. Her hands moved through his hair, luxuriating in its softness while she savored the heat and taste of his mouth. Her fingertips played over the lean planes of his face, memorizing the feel of him, and she let herself go lightheaded rather than break their kiss to breathe.

Go
, the sensible part of her brain told her, but her heart was too busy with its gymnastics routine to listen.

Go
,
girl!
her brain insisted, even as her hips pressed more firmly into Lucas.

Jordan
, her brain sang matter-of-factly. The name was like a bucket of ice water, and Miranda abruptly backed away from Lucas, leaving him bewildered and panting.

“You changed your mind about kissing me,” he gasped. Her kisses had stolen all but the obvious.

“What harm can it do?” She touched her lips, which were ripe from his kisses. “I’ll never see you again. Goodbye, Lucas.” She turned and fled up the portable staircase that had been parked alongside the plane.

“You’re wrong about that, love,” he whispered as she vanished inside the plane.

Chapter 5

Miranda stared at her sister from across the table. Calista Penney lived up to the meaning of her name, “most beautiful.” Like their mother, she was
negro branca
, and her long, thick hair was more curly than wavy. Her black eyes, another gift from their mother, crackled with vitality. Calista had a lush bosom, full, rounded hips and a small waist; basically the body of Salma Hayek and the brain of a financial planner, which she was.

She tried not to, but Miranda envied the way her younger sister moved even while performing the mundane task of laying out refreshments. Calista had all the fire and feistiness of their mother’s roots in Bahia, Brazil. She oozed passion and vitality, everything intoxicating about being Latina. From her soft, floral perfume to the way her hair floated on the slightest breeze, Calista always seemed to be dancing to some secret rhythm only she could hear. Unlike Miranda, who’d inherited her father’s eyes, mouth and lanky, angular build. There was no inner music when Miranda moved. She was more like a broken marionette than the Queen of Carnivale.

Miranda turned her attention to her sister’s labors. Calista had layered the white, wrought-iron table with all the tabloids, newspapers and magazines that had run cover stories on Lucas Fletcher and his “crush,” Miranda Penney. The papers and periodicals covered the five-week span since Miranda’s weekend in Wales, but each story had basically the same photos, the shots of her and Lucas in London exiting Harrods, in varying degrees of clarity.

“Lucas was very cool about the photographs,” Miranda said. “His people did a good job of keeping our plans private. The only paparazzi we ran into were at Harrods.”

“I read Bernie’s article about the date online.” Calista set out a plate of freshly baked
biscoitos de maizenas
, the Brazilian cornstarch butter cookies Miranda loved. “He did a really good job of conveying the romance of the date without over sentimentalizing it.”

“I didn’t realize that he’d noticed so much.” Miranda stuffed a cookie into her mouth, her jaw jutting out as she tried to chew and talk at the same time. Calista daintily handed her big sister a paper napkin with lacy embossing on the edges. “Bernie was all about Bernie over there. He’s a crackerjack writer, though. I’ll give him that.”

Calista wore beige cotton twill Capri pants, a burnt-orange twin set and a pair of jute-colored espadrilles. The garden boxes in her enclosed back deck overflowed with mums in russet, butterscotch, goldenrod and rust. Against the riot of rich fall colors, Calista looked like a junior version of their mother. “So tell me what really happened in Wales,” she said.

Miranda didn’t answer right away, although she stopped chewing her second cookie. Her eyes fixed on one of the magazine covers, and she could almost feel Lucas’s arm around her, steeling her to face a crazed mob of Karmic Echo fans.

“You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?” Calista said.

“Who?”

“Lucas Fletcher.”

Miranda snorted and finished her cookie. Calista patiently leafed through a magazine. “How could you tell?” Miranda finally said, rolling her eyes.

“You get a gooey look on your face when you hear his name.”

“I do not.”

“Lucas Fletcher.” Calista abruptly leaned forward and pointed at her sister’s face. “That’s it. That’s the look.”

“I came all the way down to Silver Springs to help you choose the menu for your big Penney-Henderson engagement dinner, not to talk about Lucas What’s-His-Butt.” Miranda wiped her hands on the leg of her jeans before she gathered the publications from the table and set them in Calista’s recycling bin. She went into the spotless kitchen, retrieved a pile of menus from the counter beneath the wall phone, and thumped them down in the middle of the deck table.

“Okay,” Calista said matter-of-factly. “I can keep this up as long as you can.”

“Keep what up?” Miranda groaned.

“Not talking about your date with Lucas.” Calista opened a bridal magazine that was as thick as the Baltimore phone directory. “According to
Psst!
, you and Lucas were secretly married on a private beach in a moonlit ceremony in Northern Wales. The bride wore overalls, I assume?”

“Shows how unreliable their informants are.” Miranda flipped through the pages of a magazine. She was halfway through it before she noticed that it was one of Alec’s baseball weeklies, and not a bridal magazine. “I’m still very single.”

“But there was moonlight?”

“There was a moon.”

“And there was a private beach?”

“Yeah. So?”

Calista marked her place with a pink Post-It and clapped the magazine shut. “Moonlight. Private beach. Lucas Fletcher. You! That sounds like a recipe for romance to me.”

“I suppose.”

“You kept him at a distance, didn’t you?” Calista asked knowingly.

“He was a perfect gentleman. I didn’t have to hold him off.”

“I don’t mean physically.”

Miranda feigned interest in a story about the latest Japanese pitching sensation. She knew what her sister meant. “Don’t you ever have doubts? That maybe getting married is the worst thing you can do?”

“I love Alec,” Calista said, her expression, to use her word, gooey. “He loves me. When he proposed to me, I felt complete. I knew he was the one for me the first time we met.”

Miranda pushed her magazine aside. She had been covering the baseball game that night eighteen months ago in New York, when star right-fielder Alec Henderson had proposed to Calista. Right there on the mound during the seventh-inning stretch, he had asked Calista to be his wife. Jordan Duquette, Alec’s teammate and best friend, had handed him the ring and had lead the audience in the applause once Calista had accepted. Jordan had never been more of a phony than in that moment—applauding his friend’s commitment knowing that he himself was a devout two-timer.

Miranda rested her elbow on the table and played with her gold stud earring. “Didn’t that scare you, knowing from the start that Alec was someone you could fall in love with?”

“Now I know for sure that you really like Lucas.”

“Who?” Miranda raised her guard just as quickly as she had lowered it.

“You know who. The man you seem to have fallen for.”

“It’s not worth talking about. It would never work out between us.”

“Because he’s famous, like Jordan, or because you think he’s
like
Jordan?”

Miranda avoided looking her sister in the face. “This has nothing to do with Jordan.”

“You’re right, it doesn’t. It has to do with you and your inability to trust.”

“I trust you,” Miranda fired. “I trust Bernie.”

“Not every guy you meet is like Jordan. Just because Lucas is famous, it doesn’t mean that—”

“Fame just gives men more opportunities to be cockasses.”

Calista gave her sister a glassy smile. “Of all the foul words you’ve picked up in that sports department, that one has to be the blue-ribbon prizewinner.”

“Sorry,” Miranda sulked.

“Every man you meet isn’t like Dad, Miranda.”

Calista’s soft, measured tone didn’t soften the impact of her words. “Wh-What do you mean?” Miranda stammered.

Calista smiled sadly. “I think you know, Andy. You grew up in that house, too.”

“You know about dad’s affairs?”

Calista nodded and opened her magazine again. “I caught him in the equipment shed with our softball coach when I was fifteen. It was the day you hit that three-run homer and won us the state championship. Up until then, I thought Dad had gone to all of our games because he liked seeing us play.”

“He did.” Miranda’s stomach turned. “He was proud of us. He called you Rocket, because of your pitching, and he called me Slugger, because I could hit. Damn it, Callie, he was cheating with Coach Kiley, and you knew about it? You’ve known all this time that Dad was an adulterer? I only found out a few years ago.”

“I’m sorry, Andy.” Calista went to her sister’s side of the table and hugged her. “I thought you knew, too.”

Bile bubbled to the back of Miranda’s throat. “How could I have known? I was too busy thinking that I had the perfect father. He sure made an idiot of me. How could he love us, and take such pride in us, yet regularly betray Mom?”

Calista stepped into the kitchen to get Miranda a cup of coffee. “Is that why you stopped coming home for holidays?”

“I work on holidays. Usually. Thanksgiving is a big day for high school football in Massachusetts. I always volunteer to work so one of the guys with a wife and kids can spend the holiday with his family.”

“You have family, too, Miranda. You could have come home for Thanksgiving last week. You haven’t been home for Christmas in seven years. Mom said you stopped coming home because you two had a fight.”

“It wasn’t a fight.”
At least I don’t remember it that way,
Miranda thought. “I told Mom that she should think about leaving Dad.”

“She won’t. She’s…stuck, or something.” Calista set a steaming mug before Miranda, then sat back down. “She misses you. She says she misses us being a family.”

Miranda laughed bitterly. “Like we were ever a real family.”

“Come on, Andy, be fair.”

“It was a lie, Callie. On the surface, it was flawless, but underneath it was totally rotten and fake.”

“I don’t remember it as being bad. Dad’s cheating didn’t affect us.”

“It affected me!” Miranda slapped her hands flat on the table and vaulted to her feet. “He does it over and over again, and Mom
allows
it. She goes on as if what he does is acceptable.”

“I found out about Dad when I was a kid, so maybe I’ve had enough time to come to terms with it. You were an adult, so maybe that’s why it’s so hard for you take. Did you really think that Dad was perfect?”

“Infidelity is one hell of a flaw, Callie! I never thought that anyone I loved so much could hurt and humiliate me so deeply.”

“Is this about Dad or Jordan?”

“It’s about me,” Miranda said. “And how stupid I am to trust men who claim to love me.”

“Not every man will hurt you, Andy. There are some good ones out there.”

“Oh really?” Miranda challenged. “Bernie can’t find a good man, and he works at it full time.”

“Speaking of Bernie, I thought he wanted to come down and help us pick out wedding favors.”

“He’s still reaping the rewards of his big cover story on my weekend in Wales. He got sent to the European Music Awards in Madrid. I’ve been assigned to high school wrestling for the foreseeable future as punishment for taking Bernie instead of Meg with me. It seems that every man involved in that date got something out of it. Me, I get the short end. I’m a carpet, just like Mom.”

A fine furrow appeared between Calista’s elegant eyebrows. “She wanted to keep her family together. She handles her life the only way she can.”

“What about you? How will you handle it when Alec cheats on you four months into your marriage? Why don’t the two of you just live together for a while before Alec pushes you over the broom?”

“I want to marry Alec,” Calista said. “I want to be his wife.”

“Se o casamento fosse bom, não precisava de testemunhas,
” Miranda muttered.
And I agree
, she thought to herself:
if marriage were a good thing, it wouldn’t need witnesses
.

“
Avó
Marie Estrella was married five times and she never got it right,” Calista fired back. “Of course she would think that. And quit quoting
Avó
Marie Estrella like she wrote one of the gospels.”

“From April to September, Alec is in a different city every week,” Miranda persisted. “You don’t know what he’s doing or who he’s doing it to. He’s just like—”

“Dad?” Calista cut in. “Jordan? Alec isn’t like them, Andy. I look like Mom, but I’m no more like her than you are. Stop trying to scare me just because you’re scared.”

Miranda tucked her fists under her arms and retreated to a corner of the screened deck. “Why does everyone keep accusing me of being scared?”

“Because you are. You’re scared to fall in love, especially with Lucas Fletcher.”

Miranda listened to the whisper of Calista’s turning pages and the random twitters of a family of sparrows living in the yews in the backyard. Miranda had always thought herself the bumbling Oscar Madison to her sister’s well-appointed Felix Unger. Despite their differences in personality, appearance, style and temperament, they had always understood each other. Miranda returned to the table, surprised that Calista knew her better than she had realized. “It’s been a month and he hasn’t tried to get in touch with me,” she said after a pensive silence.

“He’s on the road,” Calista said. “According those magazines, when he left Wales he had to play thirty-five shows in twenty-one cities in forty-two days. That’s got to be exhausting.”

Miranda drummed her fingertips on the tabletop. “He had his publicist call the paper when he wanted to reach me before.”

“He’s coming back to Boston to make up the show they had to postpone because of the crush,” Calista said. “He’ll get in touch.”

Calista had voiced Miranda’s fondest hope. “You sound so sure that he will,” Miranda said.

“I know he will.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because he’d be a total cockass not to.”

Miranda chuckled. Her sister’s faith was formidable, and the right medicine to soothe her anxious soul. Miranda sat down beside her and shared her magazine. “That’s a nice dress.” She pointed to a straight, floor-length gown made of ivory silk with white embroidering on the skirt.

“I don’t have the figure for that one,” Calista said. “I have too much bust and hips. This dress would look good on you, though.”

Miranda mustered a weak smile. “Me getting married…I can’t even picture it.”

“I can.” Calista touched her forehead to her sister’s as she hugged her. “The bride will wear Patriots blue and Bernie will be your maniac-of-honor.”

* * *

“What’s up, baby?”

Miranda, who had been poised to unlock the door to her apartment, whirled around. Startled by the deep voice issuing from the dark recesses of the corridor, she struck a fight pose, her right fist drawn and ready to fracture the windpipe of the tall, broad and shadowy figure approaching her.