Silverbridge (23 page)

He smiled. “That’s right.”

A door slammed somewhere, and Tracy retrieved her hand from Harry’s grasp. A moment later, Meg came into the morning room. “Ebony is sitting in your doorway, Harry, and she’s definitely not happy. She yowled at me when I went by.”

“She’s upset because I let the dogs come upstairs. She’ll get over it.”

Meg looked at the spaniels and laughed. “They look so smug.”

“You, on the other hand, look very pretty,” he said. Meg glanced cautiously down at her stomach. “My jeans are getting tight.”

“You’ll have to go shopping, then, and buy bigger ones.”

“A bigger size?” Meg’s eyes looked huge.

“That’s what getting better is all about, Meggie. More weight and bigger sizes. You know that.”

“I suppose,” she muttered, looking unhappy.

Tracy said, “I understand that Nancy is coming back to work tomorrow, Meg.”

“Yes.”

“Then I suppose that means you’re out of a job,” Harry said.

Meg’s face brightened, and for a moment she really
did look pretty. “Dave asked me if I would like to work with Nancy. He said I had a terrific eye for detail.”

Tracy said quickly, before Harry could object, “Meg, how wonderful. I’ll bet you don’t realize what a compliment that is.” She shot Harry a warning look.

After a moment, he said, “You were always an observant kid. I remember you were always the first one to notice if there were any strange lumps or bumps on any of the animals.”

“That’s true,” Meg said. Her eyes were shining.

“Speaking of animals,” Tracy said to Harry, “you must remind me to write you a check for Dylan’s board and training. I understand it’s due today.”

His dark blond brows snapped together. “What the devil are you talking about? You don’t pay Dylan’s fees.”

“I do now,” she replied calmly. “I bought him last Friday from Gwen Mauley.”

He looked stunned. “You
bought
him?”

“That’s right. She was here Thursday morning for a lesson with you, and she was very upset to learn that you were out of commission. Apparently she had seen a horse in Germany she liked, and she had decided to sell Dylan. I said I would buy him.”

He sat up straight, his eyes looking very dark. “What the hell are you going to do with Dylan?”

“I’m going to leave him here with you for training. I have to learn how to ride dressage before I can ride him myself. In fact, I was hoping you would give me lessons on Pendleton.”

He frowned. “What did you pay for him?”

She was sitting on the ottoman next to his chair, and
their faces were very close. “Thirty-two thousand pounds.”

He shook his head. “That’s too much. Gwen is taking advantage of you.”

“Well, you certainly charge top dollar for your services,” Tracy retorted. “You can’t blame Gwen for wanting to make money on Dylan!”

“I doubled my fees for Gwen,” he said. “And the horse isn’t worth thirty-two thousand pounds, Tracy.”

“You said he was a once-in-a-lifetime horse.”

“He
will
be. He isn’t yet.”

“Well,
then, you will just have to
work with him until he
is
worth thirty-two thousand pounds. Besides, I have no intention of selling him. I’m going to keep him.”

He ran his hand through his hair. “This is crazy.”

“I think it’s great,” Meg countered.

Tracy said, “Unfortunately, I can’t take lessons while I’m shooting the movie. Insurance stipulations—no dangerous activities.”

“Riding Pen isn’t dangerous,” Meg said indignantly.

“You’re hardly a beginner,” Harry said.

“I doubt that that will make any difference to the movie’s insurance company,” Tracy pointed out.

“Oh Harry!” Meg said, as if she had just remembered something. “What did the English Heritage office say about rebuilding the stable?”

“I haven’t heard from English Heritage.”

“
There was a letter for you.”

“I never got it.”

Meg frowned. “It came the day after you went back into hospital, and we decided to wait until you were feeling better before we gave it to you. I put it in your
room, on the mantel, so you’d see it when you came home.”

“I didn’t look on the mantel,” Harry said irritably. “And I wish people wouldn’t do things they think are for my own good.”

“Shall I go and get it for you?” Meg said.

“Yes.”

While she was gone Tracy said neutrally, “It was Meg’s idea to hold the letter until you got home. I think it’s a good sign that she’s thinking of other people and not just herself.”

Harry a
sked in a tight voice, “Did Howl
es—he’s the English Heritage officer—call here by any chance?”

“Not that I know of.”

“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” he said.

Meg came back into the room with an envelope in her hand. She gave it to Harry who ripped it open with his forefinger. He unfolded the linen paper, with its official letterhead, and stared at the print. When he had finished reading, he refolded the letter and put it back into the envelope.

“Well?” Meg said impatiently.

Tracy knew what the answer was before he spoke. She could read it on his face.

“I have to rebuild the stable with original materials,” he said.

“Oh no!” Meg sat cross-legged on the floor in front of Harry’s chair and looked up at him. “That’s so unfair!”

“I talked to that fellow How
l
es myself, and I thought I had him convinced to let me rebuild with mode
rn
building materials.” Harry crushed the envelope in his hand. “What the hell could have made him change his mind?”

“A large bribe, perhaps,” Tracy said.

Harry and Meg stared at her.

“Don’t look so shocked,” she told them. “It happens in the States all the time when big real estate transactions take place. I’m quite sure it happens here in Britain, too.”

“Mauley,” Harry said.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” she returned.
“Someone
burned your stable down, Harry, and the only purpose I can see for doing that would be to put you in so much debt that you had to sell those eight thousand acres. The more you have to pay to rebuild the stable, the greater your debt will be.”

“Shit,” said Meg.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Harry said bitterly.

“What will you do? Will you sell him the land?” Meg asked.

He replied very calmly, “I will sell every last painting and piece of furniture in this house before I sell that land to Robin Mauley.”

Tracy and Meg exchanged glances but did not reply.

Harry stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go to my office for a while.”

Don’t give yourself a headache poring over figures.
Tracy almost said the words but bit them back in time. She and Meg sat in somber silence as Harry left the room, followed by his faithful spaniels.

H
arry had not returned by the time the news was over, and Tracy went to bed wondering if he would come to her. She showered, put on some perfume, and
got into bed with a book, which she stared at but didn’t read.

She thought of Scotty. Would he understand what she was about to do? The answer was immediate,
Hell, yes.

She smiled. She had not been celibate for so many years because she feared Scotty’s displeasure. She thought of Harry’s words:
I think I have been looking for you all of my life.

It’s the same for me,
she thought with wonderment.
It’s the same for me.

Restlessly, she put her book back on the bedside table and went to look out of the window. She was still there when a soft knock came on her door. Breathlessly, she called, “Come in.”

The door opened and Harry was there.

23

H
e was dressed in the same casual pants and shirt he had worn in the morning room, but he had removed his jacket and his shoes. He looked at her, and said, “Do you have any idea how beautiful you
are?”

Her cloud of auburn hair was floating around her shoulders, and her eyes burned like sapphires in the moon-bleache
d
purity of her face. The color of her satin pajamas exactly matched the silk of the drapes, which framed her like a portrait in ivory.

“Lots of women are beautiful,” she replied gravely. “Hollywood is loaded with them.”

He shook his head. “Not like you.” He locked the door behind him, then turned back, and repeated softly. “Not like you.”

She stood as if in a trance and watched him approach. Then he was standing in front of her. He cradled her jaw with gentle fingers, tilted her face, and kissed her. He
kissed her and kissed her and went on kissing her and Tracy’s arms came up to hold him close while she kissed him back.

The thin pajamas she wore were no barrier against him. She could feel the hard strength of his body as it pressed against hers, and she melted into him. Her head fell back on his shoulder, and she opened her mouth. She felt the urgency of his desire, and held him even closer.

Finally, his mouth lifted, and he murmured in her ear, “Let’s go to bed.”

“Okay,” she whispered back, and he took her hand and led her toward the tu
rn
ed-down bed.

Nothing felt awkward, nothing felt wrong. Lying back on the bed, she pulled his shirt out from his waistband, slipped her hands under the soft cotton, and ran them up and down his rib cage. He was slim, but when she moved her hands to his back she could feel the strength of the muscles there. Her heart was beating so hard that it was making her breasts quiver, a fact he must have noticed since he had unbuttoned her pajama top and was kissing them.

It was not a long, exquisitely drawn-out lovemaking. She wanted him quite as badly as he wanted her and, once he realized that, he did not waste much time. His initial possession was hard and urgent, but once he was deep inside of her a sense of great stillness washed over them both. They lay there, joined together, and looked into each other’s eyes.

“Tracy.” He said her name as if discovering it for the first time. His brown eyes, which had been narrowed
with passion a moment before, looked luminous. “This is what I have been waiting for.”

She felt him so intensely, felt him inside of her, felt his weight on her, felt his wonderment at what was happening between them, and she was filled with happiness. “I know,” she whispered back.

Slowly the luminous look disappeared, replaced by the narrow-eyed intentness of passion. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m wonderful,” she replied.

“Thank God.” As he drove into her she could feel herself opening to him. Her body put no barriers in his way, yielding generously to his possession, surrendering, welcoming, passionate. When climax came, and her whole being was shuddering with pleasure, the name that she called out was
Harry.

He kissed her mouth very gently, and she turned her cheek into his shoulder and closed her eyes. It was a long time before either of them stirred, and then it was he who made the first move. “I’m too heavy for you,” he said, and rolled onto his side so that he was facing her. She looked into the face on the pillow
next to hers, at the thick, tou
sled, silky hair, the long-lashed brown eyes, the lines of the
beautiful mouth, and thought,
I
love him.

He sighed and reached out to trace her cheekbone with a gentle finger. “Do you want me to go back to my own bed?”

“No. Stay here.”

He buried his lips in her hair. “You won’t have to ask me twice.”

*
*
*

T
racy woke with the sense that someone was looking at her. She opened her eyes, turned her head, and saw Harry. He was lying propped on his elbows, his shoulders bare above the quilt, a strand of tawny hair caught in his eyelashes, the shadow of a golden beard on his cheeks and jaw.

“Good morning,” Tracy said, reaching out to brush the strand of hair away from his lashes.

“Good morning,” he replied.
He shifted a little so he could reach her nose with a kiss. “It’s five o’clock and we don’t have to get up for at least an hour.”

Tracy’s li
ps curved. She was totally awake, every nerve in her body attuned to every sinew and muscle in his. “How nice. Do you have any ideas about how we could pass the time?”

“Yes.” His voice was clipped, his face hard and concentrated. He pulled her toward him, and their mouths met.

How can a kiss be hard and soft, cool an
d burning, all at the same time
?
If Tracy has been capable of thinking, that was what she would have thought. But rational thought was far away; all she knew was feeling. Her fingers roamed all over his lean-muscled body, with its English-fair skin, learning him by touch the way a blind person would search out Braille.

“I
thought about you every minute I was in the hospital,” he muttered as his mouth moved from her breasts down toward her long, lovely waist.

“Harry.” It was the only word she was capable of uttering. Her fingers found a ridge of scar tissue on his left
shoulder and traced it with attentive precision. His hands and his mouth were moving all over her body, claiming every part of her, making her his. She held on to him as he entered her, opening herself even as her tense fingers bit into the strong muscles of his back. She gave a single, sharp cry as he slid home.

Harry.
No other word, no other name, was in her mind. She arched up toward him, holding on desperately as he drove into her. Back and forth, back and forth, and each stroke softened her, opened her, until the river of her response crested and poured through her in an overwhelming flood of sexual pleasure.

They lay pressed together afterward, and, even though they had physically disconnected, still Tracy felt such unison with him, such peace. She
felt
…
healed.

He shifted a little to bring their bodies into even closer contact, and she rested her hand on his head, possessively burying her fingers in his hair. “I love you so much,” he said, touching her throat with his lips.

“I love you, too,” she replied. His hair under her fingers felt absurdly silky, like a little boy’s, and she though
t
of Charles and his bright, glossy hair and widespaced dark eyes.

I wonder if this was what he wanted?
she thought.
Is this joining of Harry and me the way for him and Isabel to rise above the lost years, the anguish of separation? Will they rest in peace at last?

Harry said, “You smell so good, like the old-fashioned roses I have in my garden.”

“It’s a special perfume I have made up just for me. I love roses.”

He lifted his head so he could look into her face. “Do
you find this at all peculiar? This intense attachment when we have known each other for so short a time?”

“I don’t find it peculiar at all,” she said.

A faint line appeared between his eyebrows. “Neither do I. And that, perhaps, is the most peculiar thing of all.”

She hesitated, then brought out the question that she had wanted to ask him since before he went into the hospital.
“Harry
…
Jon said something that bothered me, and I wish you would clear it up.”

“What did lover-boy say?” His voice was heavily sarcastic.

“He said that Dana Matthews called you for help on the night she overdosed, and that you refused to go to her.”

“And do you believe him?” he asked neutrally.

“I think that perhaps there was a phone call made, but it was not as Jon interpreted.”

He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. “You’re right, she did call me, but I wasn’t home. I was out walking. By myself.” He shot her a look. “Needless to say, there were many people who chose to disbelieve me and think that I ignored her cry for help. It made for a good newspaper story.”

“Oh Harry.” She rose onto her elbow so she could look into his face. “I’m so sorry. It must have been terrible for you to hear her words and know that you were too late to save her.”

Two lines bracketed his mouth. “It was the most pitiable message, Tracy. I raced to her house as soon as I heard it, but she was already in a coma. I drove her
right to hospital, and they worked over her for a half an hour or so, but it was too late. She died.”

“I am so sorr
y.”

The
lines at the corn
ers of his mouth deepened. “It didn’t help that she left me a wad of money. You can imagine how that made me look—I don’t get to her house until an hour after her phone call, and she leaves me money. The scandal sheets had open season with that one.”

“What did you do with the money?” she asked softly. “Donate it to charity?”

The bitter look left his face. “Thank you, darling. Yes. I donated it to several drug-rehabilitation programs.”

“I just wanted to know, Harry. Jon made the story sound nasty when he told me, and I just wanted to find out the truth.”

“Well now you know.”

“Now I know. But I still loved you even when I didn’t know.”

He looked at her somberly. “Dana had auburn hair and a great smile. I think I mistook her for you.”

They looked into each other’s eyes, and both of them thought of the ghosts they had seen, but neither one of them said anything.

H
arry left at six o’clock, with great reluctance, and Tracy took a shower and dressed in jeans and sweater. They were shooting the second ball scene, and she was called for ten, which meant she had to be in makeup by eight. It would take almost an hour just to do her hair. She still had not got her new wedding picture, and all
her albums were at home, but her sister had sent her a snapshot, and now she took it out of the drawer, sat on the bed, and looked at it. It was a picture of a young man in a basketball uniform. His eyes and every strand of his wiry dark hair looked electric with joy. She had taken the photo on the day Scotty had signed a letter of intent to play basketball for the University of Connecticut.

“I haven’t forgotten you,” she said softly to the photograph in her hand. “I will never forget you. But I have a new love, Scotty, and I’m so very happy.”

There was no dimming of the incandescent happiness in the young face she was looking at. Some words of familiar poetry drifted into her mind:
Ah that it wer
e possible to undo things done
/
To call back yesterday.

How many times since Scotty had died had she thought of those lines? If only
…
if only
…
if only she could roll back time to before the accident. If only she were able to put out her hand, to stop from happening those few terrible seconds when her entire world had been shattered.
Ah that it were possible
…

She had never doubted that, if she were given the chance to call back yesterday, she would do it in a flash. To have Scotty back, she gladly would have wiped away all of her success as a movie star, would gladly have become the obscure high school teacher she had always thought she would be.

But would she do it now? Would she call back yesterday if it meant she would never meet Harry?

Her mind shied away from the question the way a dreamer’s mind shies away from the endless fall into the abyss.
I can’t think about that. It’s stupid to think about
that. I don’t have to choose between them. It’s stupid to torment myself with choices that don’t have to be made.

Scotty continued to smile up at her, and other lines of poetry came into her head:
Golden lads and gi
rls all must
/
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

It was true, she thought. Scotty and Charles, golden lads both, were dead. And in the ineluctable progression of time, she and Harry would one day follow them into the darkness.

But not now,
she thought. She felt her blood running strongly, mounting like sap in a tree, felt the beating of her heart, of her pulses.
Now is our time,
she thought.
Now is the time for us to “roll all of our strength and all of our sweetness up into one ball.
”

Slowly her eyes returned to Scotty’s face.
Go ahead,
his brilliant light-filled eyes seemed to be saying to her.
Grab happiness while you can, Trace. Don’t worry about me.

She stood up and, with the picture still in her hand, crossed to the window. A shock ran through her as she saw the carriage drawn by four black horses standing in front of the house. As she watched, wide-eyed and with racing heart, a man dressed in a long, caped coat stepped out and went down the steps that had been set for him by a footman. For a wild moment she thought the film company must be shooting a scene from the picture, but then she realized that there were no cameras, no microphones, no people except for this single man getting out of the carriage, and the attending footman.

“Jeremy!” She heard the name called because she had opened the window slightly before her shower. A
woman dressed in a long blue afternoon dress and wearing a shawl around her shoulders came into Tracy’s sight at the bottom of the stairs. “I am so glad that you have come!”

The man kissed the woman on the cheek in an unmistakably brotherly fashion, and said, in the English accent used by Charles, “What the devil has happened, Caroline, to cause you to send me such a message?”

“Come into
the house and I will tell you,”
Charles’s wife replied.

As Tracy watched, the brother and sister disappeared from her view on their way into the house, and the coach vanished in the direction of the stables.

Tracy put her hand over her pounding heart.
I’m afraid,
she thought.
I’m so afraid. What do all of these visions mean? Have they something to do with the fact that someone is trying to kill Harry?

B
efore Tracy left for her appointment in makeup, she called Gail with new instructions for the private detective. “See if he can find out if money was transferred from Robin Mauley’s account into
the account of a man named Howl
es, who works for English Heritage,” she said, and Gail promised she would relay the order.

The morning’s filming went badly. At first they were delayed because Greg couldn’t find Liza Moran, who was needed for the shoot.

“Did you check her dressing room?” Dave asked his assistant director tensely.

“I did,” Greg replied. “The door was closed, but I knocked several times, and there was no answer.”

“Did you hear anything inside?” Dave said.

Greg lifted his brows. “I thought I did, but no one answered my knock. I could hardly burst in on her, now could I?”

Tracy got up from her chair. She didn’t want to be delayed, she wanted to finish early so she could spend some time with Harry. And she was sick to dea
th of Liza Moran. “Perhaps you c
an’t, Greg, but I can,” she said ominously.

Everyone on the set stared at her.

“I’m fed up with Miss Moran and her nymphomaniac ways,” Tracy announced. “I don’t care what she does on her own time, but this is the third time I have been kept waiting while she indulges herself, and I’ve had it.” She looked at Dave. “I’ll get her.”

Speechless, he nodded.

As Tracy stalked off, Greg said to the electrician standing next to him, “I almost pity Liza when Tracy lights into her.”

Liza’s trailer door was still closed when Tracy reached it, and she ruthlessly pulled it open and went through. Inside, Liza was standing by the clothes rack, pulling her costume over her head. A young man was seated on the couch lacing up a pair of sneakers. Tracy said, her voice like ice, “We have been waiting for you for fifteen minutes already.”

Liza’s face emerged from her dress, and she stared at Tracy in stunned amazement. “What are you doing here?”

The young man, whom Tracy recognized as being one of the catering staff, charged by her with one
sneaker still untied and his shirt still open. He left the door open behind him.

In the same icy voice, Tracy said, “Since you didn’t respond to Greg’s call, I thought you might respond to
mine.
” She looked with disgust at Liza’s mouth. “Your makeup is smudged. It will have to be fixed.”

Liza had finally pulled hers
elf together. “How dare you,” sh
e shouted. “How dare you walk uninvited into my dressing room. Who the hell do you think you are?”