Presumed Guilty & Keeper of the Bride (7 page)

“I can understand that. It’s a nice house.”

He sounded sincere enough, but his words struck her as patronizing. The lord of the manor extolling the charms of the shepherd’s hovel.

Suddenly annoyed, she sat up. The abrupt movement made the room spin. She clutched her head for a moment, waiting for the spell to pass.

“Look, let’s be straight with each other,” she muttered through her hands. “It’s only a two-bedroom cottage. The basement’s damp, the water pipes screech and there’s a leak in the kitchen roof. It’s not Chestnut Street.”

“To be honest,” he said quietly, “I never felt at home on Chestnut Street.”

“Why not? You were raised there.”

“But it wasn’t really a home. Not like this house.”

Puzzled, she looked up at him. It struck her then how rough around the edges he seemed, a dark, rumpled stranger hulking in her mauve armchair. No, this man didn’t quite fit on Chestnut Street. He belonged on the docks, or on the windswept deck of a schooner, not in some stuffy Victorian parlor.

“I’m supposed to believe you’d prefer a cottage on Willow Street to the family mansion?”

“I guess it does sound—I don’t know. Phony. But it’s true. Know where I spent most of my time as a kid? In the turret, playing around all the trunks and the old furniture. That was the only place in the house where I felt comfortable. The one room no one else cared to visit.”

“You sound like the family outcast.”

“In a way, I was.”

She laughed. “I thought all Tremains were, by definition,
in.
”

“One can have the family name and still not be part of the family. Or didn’t you ever feel that way?”

“No, I was always very much part of my family. What there was of it.” Her gaze drifted to the spinet piano, where the framed photo of her father was displayed. It was a grainy shot, one of the few she still had of him, taken with her old Kodak Brownie. He was grinning at her over the hood of his Chevy, a bald little gnome of a man dressed in blue overalls. She found herself smiling back at the image.

“Your father?” asked Chase.

“Yes. Stepfather, really. But he was every bit as wonderful as any real father.”

“I hear he worked for the mill.”

She frowned at him. It disturbed her that Chase was obviously acquainted with that detail of her life. A detail that was none of his business. “Yes,” she said. “Both my parents did. What else have you heard about me?”

“It’s not that I’ve been checking up on you.”

“But you have, haven’t you? You and your family have probably run my name through some computer. Criminal check. Family history. Credit report—”

“We’ve done no such thing.”

“Personal life. All the hot and juicy details.”

“Where would I find those?”

“Try my police record.” In irritation she rose from the couch and moved to the fireplace. There she stood focused on the clock over the mantelpiece. “It’s getting late, Mr. Tremain. Annie should be here any minute. You’re free to leave, so why don’t you?”

“Why don’t you sit back down? It makes me nervous, having you up and about.”

“I make
you
nervous?” She turned to him. “You hold all the cards. You know everything about me. What my parents did for a living. Where I went to school. Who I slept with. I don’t like that.”

“Were there that many?”

His retort struck her like a physical blow. She could think of no response to such a cruel question. She was reduced to staring at him in speechless fury.

“Don’t answer,” he said. “I don’t want to know. Your love life’s none of my business.”

“You’re right. It’s none of your damn business.” She turned away, angrily clutching the mantelpiece with both hands. “No matter what you learn about me, it’ll all fit right in with your image of the mill worker’s daughter, won’t it? Well, I’m not ashamed of where I came from. My parents made an honest living. They didn’t have some trust fund to keep them in caviar. Like some families I know,” she added, leaving no doubt by the tone of her voice just which family she was referring to.

He acknowledged the insult with a brief silence.

“I’m surprised you fell for Richard,” he said. “Considering your attitude toward trust-funders.”

“Before I knew Richard, I didn’t
have
an attitude problem.” She turned to confront him. “Then I got to know him. I saw what the money did to him. For him. He never had to struggle. He always had that green buffer to protect him. It made him careless. Immune to other people’s pain.” Her jaw came up in a pose of proud disdain. “Just like you.”

“Now you’re making the assumptions about me.”

“You’re a Tremain.”

“I’m like you. I have a job, Miranda. I work.”

“So did Richard. It kept him amused.”

“Okay, maybe you’re right about Richard. He didn’t need to work. The
Herald
was more of a hobby to him, a reason to get up in the morning. And he got a kick out of telling his friends in Boston that he was a publisher. But that was Richard. You can’t slap that rich-boy label on me because it won’t stick. I was booted out of the family years ago. I don’t have a trust fund and I don’t own a mansion. But I do have a job that pays the bills. And, yes, keeps me
amused.
”

His anger was tightly controlled but evident all the same.
I’ve touched a nerve,
she thought. An acutely sensitive one. Chastened, she sat in a chair by the fireplace. “I guess—I guess I assumed a few too many things.”

He nodded. “We both did.”

In silence they gazed at each other across the room. A truce, however uneasy, had at last settled between them.

“You said you were booted out of the family. Why?” she asked.

“Simple. I got married.”

She looked at him in puzzlement. He had said the words without emotion, with the tone of voice one used to describe the weather. “I take it she wasn’t a suitable bride.”

“Not according to my father.”

“The wrong side of the tracks?”

“In a manner of speaking. My father, he was attuned to that sort of thing.”

Naturally,
she thought. “And was your father right? About those girls from the wrong side of the tracks?”

“That wasn’t why we got divorced.”

“Why did you?”

“Christine was too…ambitious.”

“Hardly a flaw.”

“It is when I’m just the rung on the social ladder she’s trying to climb.”

“Oh.”

“And then we had some lean years. I was working all the time, and…” He shrugged. Another silence stretched between them.

“Richard never told me what kind of work you do.”

He leaned back, the tension easing away from his face. Unexpectedly he laughed. “Probably because what I do struck him as so damn boring. My partners and I design office buildings.”

“You’re an architect?”

“Structural engineer. My architect partners do the creative work. I make sure the walls don’t come crashing down.”

An engineer. Not exactly a fluff career, she thought, but a real, honest job. Like her father had.

She shook her head. “It’s strange. When I look at you, I can’t quite believe you’re his brother. I always assumed…”

“That we’d be a matched set? No, we were definitely different. In more ways than you’ll ever know.”

Yes, the more she knew about Chase, the less he seemed like a Tremain. And the more she thought she could like him.

“What did you ever see in my brother?” he asked.

His question, voiced so softly, was jarring all the same. It reminded her of the ghosts that still hovered in this house.

She sighed. “I saw what I wanted to see.”

“Which was?”

“A man who needed me. A man I could play savior to.”

“Richard?”

“Oh, it
seemed
as if he had everything going for him. But he also had this…this vulnerability. This need to be saved. From what, I don’t know. Maybe himself.”

“And you were going to save him.”

She gave a bitter laugh. “I don’t know. You don’t think about these things. You just feel. And you fall into it….”

“You mean you followed your heart.”

She looked up at him. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Didn’t it seem wrong to you?”

“Of course it did!”

“But?”

Her whole body sagged with the weight of her unhappiness. “I couldn’t…see my way out of it. I cared about him. I wanted to be there for him. And he’d string me along. He’d tell me things would work out, as long as we both had faith.” She looked down at her hands, clasped together in her lap. “I guess I lost my faith first.”

“In him? Or the situation?”

“Him. I began to see the flaws. It came out, after a while. How he manipulated people, used people. If he didn’t need you, he’d ignore you. A user, that’s what he was. An expert at making people do what he wanted.”

“Then you broke it off. How did he react?”

“He couldn’t believe it. I don’t think anyone ever left
him.
He kept calling me, bothering me. And every day, at work, I’d have to face him. Pretend nothing was going on between us.”

“Everyone knew, though.”

She shrugged. “Probably. I’m not very good at hiding things. Annie knew, because I told her. And everyone else must have guessed.” She sighed. The truth was, she hadn’t cared at the time. Love, and then pain, had made her indifferent to public opinion.

They said nothing for a moment. She wondered what he thought of her now, whether any of it made a difference. Suddenly it mattered what he
did
think of her. He was scarcely more than a stranger, and a hostile one, but it mattered very much.

“You’re not the first one, you know,” he said. “There were other women.”

It was a cruel revelation to spring on her, and Chase didn’t know why he did it. He only knew that he wanted to give her a good, hard shaking. To shatter any rose-colored illusions she might still harbor about Richard. She might say the feelings were gone, but deep inside, might a few warm memories still linger?

He saw, by the look in her eyes, that his words had had their intended effect. Instantly he regretted the wounds he’d inflicted. Still, shouldn’t she know? Shouldn’t she be told just how naive she’d been?

“Were there many?” she asked softly.

“Yes.”

She looked away, as though to hide the pain from view. “I—I think I knew that. Yes, I must have known that.”

“It’s just the way he was,” said Chase. “He liked being admired. He was like that as a boy, too.”

She nodded. And he realized, yes, she did know that about Richard. On some level she must have sensed his unquenchable thirst for admiration. And tried to satisfy it.

Chase had done damage enough. Here she was, demoralized and wounded.
And I pour on the salt.

I should get out of here, leave her alone.

Where the hell was Annie Berenger?

Miranda seemed to shake herself back to life. She brushed her hair off her face, sat up and looked at him. So much torment in those eyes, he thought. And, at the same time, so much courage.

“You never told me why you’re here,” she said.

“The doctor thought someone should watch you—”

“No. I mean, why did you come in the first place?”

“Oh.” He sat back. “I was at the
Herald
this afternoon. Talked to Jill Vickery, about the Stone Coast Trust article you mentioned. She says it was never written. That Richard never got that far with it.”

Miranda shook her head. “I don’t understand. I know he had at least a few pages written. I saw them on his desk, at the
Herald.
”

“Well, I couldn’t find any article. I thought maybe you’d know where to look. Or maybe you’d have it.”

She looked at him in bewilderment. “Why would I?”

“I assume Richard was a frequent visitor here.”

“But he didn’t bring his work. Have you checked the house?”

“It’s not there.”

She thought about it a moment. “Sometimes,” she said, “he’d drive up to the north shore, to write. He had a cottage…”

“You mean Rose Hill. Yes, I suppose I should check there tomorrow.”

Their gazes intersected, held. She said, “You’re starting to believe me. Aren’t you?”

He heard, in her voice, the stirring of hope—however faint. He found himself wanting to respond, to offer her some small scrap of a chance that he might believe her. It was hard
not
to believe her, especially when she looked at him that way, her gaze unwavering, those gray eyes bright and moist. They could rob a man of his common sense, those eyes, could sweep self-control right out from under him. They awakened other sensations as well, disturbing ones. She was sitting more than half a room away, but even at that distance her presence was like some heady perfume, impossible to ignore.

She asked again, softly, “Do you believe me?”

Abruptly he rose to his feet, determined to shake off the dangerous spell she was weaving around him. “No,” he said. “I can’t say that I do.”

“But don’t you see there’s something more to this than just a—a crime of passion?”

“I admit, things don’t feel quite right. But I’m not ready to believe you. Not by a long shot.”

There was a knock on the door. Startled, Chase turned to see the door swing open and Annie Berenger poke her head in.

“Hello, cavalry’s here,” she called. She came in dressed in an old T-shirt and sweatpants. Blades of wet grass clung to her running shoes. “What’s the situation?”

“I’m fine,” said Miranda.

“But she needs watching,” said Chase. “If there are any problems, Dr. Steiner’s number is by the phone.”

“Leaving already?” asked Annie.

“They’ll be expecting me at home.” He went to the door. There he paused and glanced back at Miranda.

She hadn’t moved. She just sat there. He had the urge to say something comforting. To tell her that what he’d said earlier wasn’t quite true. That he
was
starting to believe her. But he couldn’t admit it to her; he could scarcely admit it to himself. And there was Annie, watching everything with her sharp reporter’s eyes.

So he merely said, “Good night, Miranda. I hope you’re feeling better. And Annie, thanks for the favor.” Then he turned and walked out the door.