Mischief 24/7 (27 page)

“Jade! Damn it, Jade—”

“J
ADE?
J
ADE, SWEETHEART,
wake up, we’re here.”

She blinked herself out of her unhappy dream and sat up straight on the rear seat of the Mercedes. “Here? We’re at Brainard’s house? What time is it?”

“About ten minutes later than it was when we pulled out of Sam’s driveway,” Jolie told her. “Man, you went
out.
Haven’t you been sleeping, Jade?”

“Not enough, I guess,” Jade said, avoiding Court’s knowing eyes as she climbed out of the car and stood looking at the closed gates to the Brainard estate. “Sam, your place is just as big, but for some reason, it seems five times more inviting than this place. There’s just something so… sterile about it.”

“Brainard doesn’t have Bear Man’s smiling face welcoming people to his humble abode,” Sam said, smiling. “Right, Bear Man?”

The gatehouse-keeper-cum-bodyguard-cum-chauffeur kicked the toe of his left shoe into the dirt at the side of the macadam roadway. “Now you’re embarrassing me, Sam. I’m gonna go take a walk, check the place out.”

Jade leaned close to Court. “Nobody ever said. What’s Bear Man doing here, anyway? I doubt Joshua Brainard is going to invite us all inside when he gets here.”

Jolie overheard her. “Yeah, look at all of us, and Jessica and Matt aren’t even here yet. We can’t all go trooping inside. We’d look like we were heading for a group toidy or something.”

Court threw back his head and laughed. “Maybe we should send Bear Man to quickly hunt up a dozen Vote Brainard buttons to help ease our way inside.”

“I’d rather chew nails,” Jolie said as she looked at her watch in the light under the streetlamp. “He’s probably still talking for the cameras. We’re going to be standing around here, waiting, for maybe another hour or so. Why don’t we get back in the car and go get some ice cream or something?”

“Ice cream?” Jade said, raising her eyebrows. “My sister wants ice cream? Since when does our weight-watching movie star eat anything that isn’t green and has more than ten calories per bowlful?”

Jolie looked across the narrow road to where Sam was peering through the wrought-iron gates at the house, Rockne on a leash beside him. “I get more… exercise now,” she said, and then ducked her head when Court laughed again. “Oh, go take a walk, you two. We’ll hold down the fort from the Mercedes. I don’t need to be seen standing out here, or some helpful citizen will put in a call to the TV stations that Jolie Sunshine is back in town.”

“Jolie Sunshine’s Back In Town. Sounds like a song title. My heart goes out to you, sis, it really does. It must be such a burden, being a big star,” Jade said, giving her sister a playful shove. “Go on, go hide. It’s too dark now for those sunglasses to be believable, anyway.”

“Come on, sweetheart.” Court took Jade’s hand, looking both ways before crossing the barely traveled roadway. “If you’re done ragging on each other, let’s do what Jolie says. If you know what you plan to say to Joshua Brainard, you can use me as your sounding board. You haven’t had much time today to rehearse or even build a strategy.”

They picked their way down the grassy verge between the roadway and the six-foot-high, gray fieldstone walls—there were no sidewalks this deep in suburbia—and turned left when they got to the end of the barrier to avoid being caught in the headlights of any car coming up the hill toward them.

“I wanted to be alone with you, anyway,” Jade said after they had walked a good thirty feet away from the road. “So much has been happening, and now, soon, maybe even tonight, it’s going to be over.”

“We hope it’s going to be over tonight. If I were a betting man, I’d say our chances are about fifty-fifty. You certainly had Brainard spooked today at the airport. But don’t count on it all being over so easily, Jade. The man isn’t stupid. He’ll know where we’re bluffing him.”

“I know that. I’ve pretty much given up the idea of threatening him with DNA evidence we don’t really have. We’ve been lucky so far with the other cases. Although I won’t say what happened tonight with Jermayne could in any stretch of the imagination fall under the heading of
luck.
You meant it, Court? You’re going to help us walk that poor, scared kid through the system?”

“Any way I can,” he said, letting go of her hand and slipping his arm around her back as they kept slowly walking down the slight incline alongside the stone wall to where it ended and a chain-link fence began. “Bad as it is, I have to tell you, Jade, Jermayne would have been much worse off if it hadn’t been for Teddy. The way he stepped in back then when Terrell died, took on the responsibility for both Jermayne and his grandmother? That was a hell of a thing to do.”

“You’re saying something nice about Teddy?”

“We had our differences, but I always knew he only did what he thought was right. I just didn’t agree that what he believed
was
always right. I doubt Sam would, either.”

“He was human.”

“That he was,” Court said, and they walked on in silence for another several yards. “He called the divorce lawyer, didn’t he?”

“Court…do we have to do this?” She sighed. “Yes, I suppose we do. Yes, Teddy called the lawyer, the very next day after you left to go back to Greece. I… I just sort of floated,
existed,
and let him do what he thought was best. But I never thought you’d sign the papers. I didn’t think you’d let me go so easily, not if you really loved me. But you did go back to Greece without trying to see me. I was so…confused.”

“Pissed. Admit it, Jade, you were pissed.”

She smiled sadly. “All right, pissed. At you. At Teddy. At the whole world, I think. And I didn’t appreciate being fought over like I was the prize at some county fair or something. I was hurting, mentally and physically, and I just wanted to crawl into a hole and pull it in after me. And then Teddy swore to me that if I’d just help him, he’d stop…”

“Yes? And Teddy would stop what? His drinking?”

Jade stopped short to look up at Court in surprise. “You knew about that?”

“I smelled it on his breath that last day I saw him—the day he and I almost went ten rounds. It was barely past noon. Yeah, I knew. You didn’t trust me enough to tell me, though, did you?”

“Oh, Court,” Jade said, stepping in front of him. “I never even told Jolie or Jess. He was such a proud man. Such a sad man. Father Muskie said he was clinically depressed, but even Father Muskie couldn’t get Teddy to see anybody, talk to anybody. He lost his wife, he lost the career he loved, and then, one by one, he felt he was losing his daughters.”

“You were all he had left, and then I came along.”

“I didn’t see that then, but yes, I see it now. I’ve seen it for some time now. It wasn’t all Teddy’s fault, how we all behaved. I helped build my own prison and then told myself I was happy. How could I blame Teddy for not wanting to lose what I’d always so freely given him? We even talked about it when he seemed stronger because I was…I was hoping then I might…I might go down to Virginia, to talk to you. But that didn’t happen. Teddy died.”

“I’m so sorry I couldn’t be there for you at the funeral, that you had to go through all that alone.”

“My regret is that you and he never really got to know each other. You were a threat to him, Court, to the last little bit of life he felt he had left. Did I think when I came home and saw him that last night, that he’d committed suicide? Because he was depressed, because I’d told him that I wanted you and me to see if we could maybe try again? God help me, Court, yes. Yes, I did. I was so
mad
at him. I was so shattered, I felt so powerless. That’s… that’s when I went upstairs to my room after everyone had gone and saw the Belleek-china pieces he’d given me. I couldn’t stand to look at them. I’d given him everything I could, given up my own happiness for him, and it still hadn’t been enough for him, he’d still destroyed himself. So I destroyed every beautiful thing he ever gave me. It… it was the most terrible night of my life.”

“Come here,” Court said, gathering her close against his chest, kissing her hair. “We can’t bring him back, sweetheart. And we couldn’t help him any more than he’d let us help him. Not you, not Father Muskie…nobody could fix what broke inside Teddy Sunshine a long time ago. But we’re going to do what you and your sisters need to do. We’re going to get him back his good name.”

Jade let herself melt into Court’s strong embrace, trying to draw strength from him, knowing what she felt around her were not just his strong arms, but the force of his love for her. The love she’d thrown away, if there really had been love between them when they were together a lifetime ago.

There had been immediate attraction, wild and urgent and undeniable. On both sides. But had there been love? Or did
real
love need time to grow, to mature? If they had gone more slowly, not rushed in like fools had rushed in since the dawn of time, would there have been a different ending to their story?

She’d wanted him then, believed she could not exist without him. But she had existed without him this past year. Existed, not really lived. The man who had stepped back into her life only a few weeks ago was not the same man who had walked out of it a year earlier. She wasn’t the same woman. What she felt for Court Becket now was light-years away from what she’d felt for him back then. Deeper, wider, truer.

How strange. Their love hadn’t seemed to be able to withstand the short separations during their marriage, but it had grown a hundredfold in the long year they’d been apart.

“By tomorrow this could all be over,” she said at last, her voice muffled slightly against his shirt-front. “What happens then, Court? What happens to us?”

He put his hands on her upper arms and held her slightly away from him, the better to look down into her face, deep into her eyes, she imagined, making sure she was listening. “If you close a door, I’ll break it down. If you run away, I’ll find you. I’m never letting you go again. You’re my life, Jade. More now than ever.”

“If… if Teddy hadn’t died, then would you…”

Court slowly shook his head. “Check the date on our divorce papers, Jade, before we burn them. On the fifteenth of next month that date would be exactly one year ago. I promised myself when I signed on the dotted line. One year, I’ll give us both one year. One year for us to get our heads on straight, for me turn over more of the daily operations of Becket Hotels and a few other things to competent managers, because I wanted to be a husband, not just a lover. Time for you to make your peace with Teddy and not feel as if you’d just suddenly abandoned a very loved, but very needy man.”

Jade blinked back tears that stung at her eyes. “And then? What were you going to do when that year was over?”

His smile made her heart skip a beat in her chest.

“Do you remember our little slice of Sodom and Gomorrah out in Vegas?”

“I could hardly forget it,” Jade said, sure she was blushing in the near-dark. “What about it?”

“The grand opening of the Jade Tower Casino and Spa is set for the fifteenth of next month. I think you’ll like it. It’s mostly glass, jade-green glass, of course. I’d already arranged with Teddy for the two of you to be flown to Vegas on the company jet to cut the ribbon.”

Jade staggered where she stood. “You
what?
You? And
Teddy?”

“It takes a big man to admit when he’s wrong, or at least that’s what we told each other. He also told me he was about to call me if I hadn’t contacted him first. He loved you,
Margaret Mary.
And, for some strange reason, even after I’d acted like such a horse’s ass the last time we were together, he’d decided that his little girl truly loved me.”

Jade’s bottom lip trembled uncontrollably as the threatening tears spilled down over her cheeks. “She does,” she managed, her voice breaking. “Teddy’s little girl loves you very much.”

“That’s good,” Court said, smiling almost sheepishly. “I was sort of counting on that. I wish we could go somewhere and be alone for two weeks at least, but we can’t, not until this is over. I understand that. And there’s something else you need to know now, before we move on with our lives. When we spoke, and we spoke a few times, Teddy told me he was, as he said, cleaning up his act, and he wasn’t going to wallow in self-pity any more.”

“He
was
getting better,” Jade told him sincerely. “He hadn’t had a drink in weeks, as far as I knew. And he seemed happy, even though the business was pretty slow.”

“You helped there, Jade. He was taking back his life, starting with some unfinished business he’d been neglecting. He was going to close the agency after you left—he believed we’d get back together. He’d live on his police pension and devote himself completely to some cases that had haunted him for a lot of years. So no, I wasn’t surprised when you told me about the cold cases or that he’d been pursuing them pretty actively. The hell of it is, by taking steps to take back his life, one of those cases ended up getting him killed.”

“He died a cop,” Jade said quietly, tears threatening again. “Not a failure, a cop. It’s what he would have wanted.” She looked up into Court’s face. “Thank you, Court. You just gave me back my father.”

He caught her sob with his mouth, holding her tightly as she slipped her arms up and around his shoulders, glorying in the sense of coming home, of finally being where she belonged. There was no passion in the kiss, not the sort of electrically charged physical reaction she was more accustomed to with Court. What she felt was an ache easing, an emptiness filling up. Two hearts, healed, another heart at last laid to rest.

There, in the dark, Jade and Court took their first step toward a new beginning.

But first, there had to be an ending….

“Come on, sweetheart,” Court whispered in her ear. “We should be getting back. It’ll soon be too dark to see anything out here, anyway.”

By the time they’d returned to the roadway, Jessica and Matt had arrived, Rockne was doing his usual I-thought-I’d-never-see-you-again frantic greeting and Jessica’s clear laughter was brightening the darkening sky.