Tempting Fate (13 page)

“If I'd been your crook,” Zeke said, climbing in behind the steering wheel, “I'd have gone after you when you tried to nail me with that bottle of mineral water.”

“You did go after me.”

He glanced at her, turning the key in the ignition. “Honey,” he said in an exaggerated drawl, “that wasn't going after you.”

There it was again, not just a rush of warmth but a flood. Dani shifted in her seat, reaching down onto the floor for her sneakers. She slipped them on and didn't bother tying the laces.

“Tell me, would you have thrown the skillet or just bonked me on the head with it?”

“I don't know. I guess it would have depended on what you did. I'm not a trained white knight. I have to operate on instinct—like when I walked into my room and saw it had been trashed. Since I don't carry a weapon, I used what was at hand.”

“Which was?”

She hesitated, then held up one red shoe as she had yesterday.

Zeke grimaced.

“It worked out,” Dani said, not defensively.

Without comment he pulled into the street and started down North Broadway toward the main commercial center of town. He seemed to give his driving his total concentration. Dani noticed the dark hairs on his forearms, the muscles, the tanned skin. His long fingers. For no reason she could fathom, she found herself wondering if he dreamed. Was he ever haunted by the past? Did he ever lie awake nights asking what might have been? She thought of the book Kate had told her about. Easy to guess that his brother probably hadn't come to a happy end.

Had Mattie known Joe Cutler? Did she know Zeke? Was that why she'd responded the way she had when Dani had told her about the burglary?

He turned down Circular Street, and Dani had the feeling he was letting her make the next move, giving her a little time to pull herself together.

Finally she decided just to get on with it. “I want you to leave the Pembroke.”

He glanced at her. “Why?”

“Because you haven't told me the truth.”

Following the traffic onto Union Avenue, he didn't argue or protest, but kept his eyes on the road.

“You have until tomorrow morning,” she said.

“Dani, you can't throw me out.”

She breathed deeply. “Yes, I can.”

“It'd end up in the papers.” He slowed for a traffic light, then came to a stop. “Enough reporters are on your case without you going toe-to-toe with an internationally recognized security specialist such as myself.”

There was a note of self-deprecation in his tone, of humor, but it was buried underneath the seriousness. Dani felt her mouth go dry. She should have found another way home.

The light changed, and he continued a short way past the racetrack and turned smoothly onto the Pembroke driveway. “A photographer caught you tonight, feather and all. Someone could easily have seen you get into my car. Imagine what a heyday the gossips would have if they found out that you'd given me the boot.”

“Are you threatening to tell them?”

“No.”

They passed the rose garden, the fragrance permeating the cool night air, easing Dani's confusion and nervousness. Zeke bore left at the fork in the road, onto the dirt road and over the narrow bridge. She could hear the trickle of the stream, smell its coldness.

“Why are you here?” she asked softly.

“I have my reasons.”

Which, his tone said, were none of her affair. “Do they have anything to do with the business you're in?”

He didn't answer, sliding his rented car to a stop at the end of the flagstone path that led to the front door of her cottage. “Do Hansel and Gretel show up every now and then?”

“Are you implying I'm a wicked witch?”

His expression was impenetrable in the darkness. Probably he wanted it that way. “Maybe not wicked.”

Dani bit the inside corner of her mouth, feeling unusually awkward, deeply aware—physically aware—of the man sitting next to her.

It would be so easy to back down, so easy to trust him. But she had no basis for trust, and she'd never been very good at backing down. “You have until tomorrow morning. I'll speak to Ira.”

She could feel Zeke's eyes on her. He seemed capable of seeing things people wouldn't want him to see, of penetrating not only thoughts, but souls. In his business, such sensitivity—such probing—could be an asset. He asked quietly, “Do you like living out here all alone?”

“I did until yesterday afternoon.”

“You know, you should lock your doors. It's often an effective deterrent.”

His tone was professional, neither critical nor patronizing, but Dani hated being told what to do. “How do you know my doors weren't locked?”

“I tried them.”

“When?”

“This morning. I wandered off on my own during a guided nature walk.”

She placed her hand on the door latch, her heart pounding. She could be gone in a matter of seconds. Was she crazy to be alone with a man she didn't know—a man who apparently knew more about her than she did him? He was from Mattie's hometown. He was staying at the Pembroke on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her mother's disappearance. He was an internationally known security consultant. Dani was torn by curiosity, but she felt she had no choice. She had no reason to trust him. It wasn't, right now, a risk she was prepared to take.

“I want you off my property.”

“So you've said.”

“Are you going to go quietly?”

A flash of sexy smile. “Honey, I don't go anywhere quietly unless I so choose. And that's probably the only thing you and I have in common.”

“Oh, no,” she said coolly, deciding on gut instinct to take him on then and there. “That's not all we have in common, and you know it. You see, Zeke, upstairs, in my bedroom, I have a blanket on my bed. It's dark green, pure wool, quite old. My grandmother gave it to me. She took it with her when she left home.” In the darkness, through the opened windows, she could hear the crickets and tree toads, the breeze soughing in the woods and meadow. “It was made in a woolen mill in Cedar Springs, Tennessee.”

Zeke didn't move a muscle or say a word.

“My grandmother's hometown,” Dani said in a near whisper. “And yours.”

She was off like a shot, racing up the walk and through her front door, slamming it behind her. Her wrist ached. So did her scraped shins and her feet from standing so long in her three-inch heels. But she hunted up her car keys and locked all her doors. Front, back, side. She hadn't bothered last night. What more was there for her thief to get?

She didn't lock her windows. She'd suffocate.

And she didn't call Mattie right away, although she was tempted. She wanted to think first. Get her perspective on tonight, on Zeke Cutler of Cedar Springs, Tennessee.

Groaning, pushing him out of her mind, she ran into her kitchen and got out the half bushel of peaches she'd been meaning to freeze for days. They were going soft. She filled her biggest pot with water and put it on the stove. When it was hot, she'd scald the peach skins to make them easier to peel. Or so the theory went. No matter what she did, the peel always seemed to stick.

As she worked, she considered, and finally admitted, what really had gotten to her tonight.

Zeke's confidence, his striking looks and his unexpected humor, cloaked as it was in his middle-Tennessee accent, had made her aware of the void in her own life. Riding next to him, she'd felt alone and needy—and that was unacceptable. It wasn't that he gave two figs about her or she'd ever want him to. He could have arranged the burglary yesterday just to unnerve her and get her to hire him. Given what she'd seen so far of the man, such underhandedness seemed out of character, but that wasn't the point.

The point was that something about him, or tonight, had made her feel empty. She'd found herself wanting closeness. Wanting love and romance and companionship.

And she remembered something her father had told her years ago, in a static-riddled phone call from some fleabag hotel in some hellish corner of the world. “The love of your life,” he'd said, “is the person who makes you forget what all your standards and preconceived notions about love and romance even were.”

If such a man existed, Dani hadn't met him yet. And the last thing she needed now was to mess up her life with pointless longing. Loneliness was not a choice she planned to make for herself.

And it was silly to let a dark-eyed security consultant stir up her deepest doubts about herself.

She grabbed fistfuls of peaches and dropped them into the pot, although the water wasn't yet scalding hot. But she was impatient, anxious to get moving on something, anything.

“Oh, God,” she whispered.

It wasn't just Zeke Cutler.

She watched the peaches bob to the surface of the water.

Had her mother ever peeled peaches? Had she ever made her own peach jam or known the satisfaction of pulling a peach cobbler from the oven in the dead of winter knowing it was made from fruit she'd frozen herself?

Dani couldn't remember. Or she just didn't know.

Twenty-five years tonight.

What happened to you, Mama? Are you alive? Are you dead?

Why did you leave me?

She dropped in more peaches, burning her fingers. She knew she might as well peel peaches until dawn, do up the whole lot of them, because there was no way she'd get any sleep tonight.

Z
eke drove back into Saratoga too fast for his own comfort. It wasn't the speed in and of itself that bothered him. It was how much he'd let Dani distract him. She could easily worm her way under his skin and bore a hole deep inside him before he'd ever realized he'd let down his armor.

Maybe she already had.

He slid his car to a stop across the street from the Chandler cottage on North Broadway. Kate Murtagh herself was hefting a folded table into a pickup truck, the evening's festivities now another Saratoga memory. Zeke wasn't sure what he was doing here. Waiting for answers to fall out of the sky?

Dani had gone after her burglar with a three-inch red high heel.

Definitely a hothead.

But she was also courageous and determined, and even now he could see her liquid black eyes shining in the darkness.

He could hear Kate speaking to her crew. “You sure we have everything? We leave so much as a gum wrapper out here, and Auntie Sara will have us back cleaning the place with a toothbrush.”

Auntie Sara.

Had Roger told his wife that Joe Cutler's little brother was in town?

“Hell, Naomi,” he whispered to himself, “I should have just pretended I never got your letter.”

But he had never been any good at pretending, and he was here.

Kate spotted him and marched over, boldly poking her head in through the passenger window. “So you're Zeke Cutler,” she said.

He smiled. “I know who you are, too.”

“I'm Dani's friend is who I am. You drove her home?”

“I did. She arrived safe and sound.”

“You didn't put that bruise on her arm?”

“I did not.”

Kate's brow furrowed, and she looked tired. It must have been a long night for her. “I hope not, seeing how she got in your car with you. But you listen here, Mr. Cutler—I'm on the case. I may slice carrots and whip up crème fraîche for a living, but this is my town, and I've got friends here.” She patted the car door. “I'll have my eye on you.”

Didn't these women know he was licensed to carry a gun? Zeke stared out at Dani's tall, attractive friend. “I can see why you and Ms. Pembroke are friends. You both eat nails for breakfast.”

“You hold that thought,” she said and marched back to her pickup.

In another moment, Sara Chandler Stone took her place in the passenger window. “It's been a long time, Zeke.” Her voice was quiet and ladylike, more so than it had been twenty-five years ago.

He nodded. “Yes.”

She smiled, a cool, sad smile that didn't reach her deep blue eyes. “Welcome to Saratoga.”

“Nice town.”

“Will you be at the Chandler Stakes tomorrow?”

“Maybe.”

Color rose in her cheeks, which looked even paler in the harsh artificial glare of the streetlights. “Even at thirteen you were laconic.” She touched a hand to her hair, still perfectly in place, and he saw the manicured nails, not too long, not too radically colored. “I'd like to talk to you—not tonight. In the morning?”

“Sara—”

“I'll be at the track for breakfast.”

She darted away as quickly and unexpectedly as a hummingbird, and it seemed to Zeke that she had become everything she'd dreaded becoming.

Maybe she should have run off with Joe and saved them both.

Zeke turned around in the entrance to Skidmore College up the street, then went back down Broadway through town, following the same route he had with Dani. He didn't have a plan—he was still just punting—but he knew what he had to do, at least for tonight.

He parked his car in the Pembroke's guest lot, wondering if come morning Dani would have it towed. But he'd take that risk. There was a part of him that was looking forward to having her try to toss his ass off her property—the part, he thought, that he had to keep under a very tight lid.

He followed a brick path through the darkness. In the distance he could hear an owl's hoot. Nearby, the purr of tree toads. The grounds were quiet, the jam makers and rock climbers gone to bed or to town to party. Leaving the walk, he found his way across gardens and lawns and down the hillside to the pink, mauve and purple cottage at the edge of the woods.

He sat under a pine tree in a small meadow of wildflowers that looked as though they'd been planted there intentionally. He had a good view of the side entrance, a reasonable view of the front and an excellent view of the side-garden entrance, but none whatsoever of its rear gate. Fortunately, it squeaked. And every window in the place was open. If somebody got in, he'd hear Dani yell. Provided she wasn't too stubborn to yell.

One day he'd discuss her attitude with Sam Lincoln Jones. Sam liked to analyze people's attitudes. He said it helped him think he was making use of his education.

Until then Zeke would just do some thinking and keep an eye on things, in case Quint Skinner made a return visit.

Just before dawn, her last peach safely in the freezer, Dani gave up on trying to sleep. She kept seeing her mother waving to her from the basket of Mattie's hot-air balloon and feeling herself catapulting across her own bedroom, feeling the terror of not knowing who'd pushed her, who'd burglarized her house.

And she kept seeing Zeke's dark eyes and thinking about what great shoulders and thighs he had. He was the kind of man who could make a woman melt.

Could make
her
melt.

She'd tried listening to the tree toads. Sometimes yoga helped, or a hot bath, or hot milk. But she knew nothing would work tonight. She threw on a sweatshirt and jeans and headed outside with a simple multicolored flat kite made of nonconductive plastic, slipping quietly into her meadow. The sounds and smells of the night and the cool, damp grass on her bare feet, between her toes, eased her tension.

She estimated the wind speed at five or six miles per hour. Fine for kite flying.

With the wind at her back, she tossed the kite into the air a few times, until finally she felt it pulling and let out some line. It rose above the usual ground-air turbulence, higher, higher. Then it was soaring.

She let out more line, grinning, not thinking about her mother, her loneliness, not even hearing the tree toads.

The sun peeked over the treetops in streaks of orange and red, edged with pale pink. In its center her kite was a bold dot of color.

Staring at the dawn, she suddenly could see her mother with more clarity than she'd been able to see her in years. Her generous mouth, her blue saucer eyes, her smile. She could smell her mother's French perfume and hear her laugh, not her delicate Chandler-lady laugh, but the throaty, exuberant laugh of the woman she'd wanted to become. It was as if she were telling her daughter not to hold back, not to let anything or anyone stand in her way, but to dare to go after what she wanted.

But I have,
she thought. She had the springs, the Pembroke, her friends.

She didn't have intimacy. There was no lover in her life. Zeke should have been the last man to remind her of the absence of romance in her life, but he had. Yet her mother had had a husband and a child, and they hadn't been enough.

Her kite continued to gain altitude, riding the wind from Dani's fingertips.

She could hear herself now as a little girl, promising to keep her mother's secret. She'd never tell anyone, she'd said, sincere, frightened as her mother towered over her, so beautiful, so frightened herself.

The memory was so vivid, Dani might have been back on that cold, dreary December afternoon when she'd visited her dying grandmother—her mother's mother. Claire Chandler had withered from an elegant society matron into a skeleton wrapped in sagging yellowed skin. Yet she retained her commanding presence, receiving her only grandchild in the cavernous living room of her New York apartment. She'd had her thinning hair fixed and wore a green silk robe, embroidered in red and gold at the sleeves, the one she wore every Christmas, not just this one, her last. It was way too big for her.

Dani remembered the strength in her grandmother's voice when she'd called her young granddaughter to her side. Christmas carols had played softly on the stereo. “The First Noel” and “Joy to the World.” A huge Christmas tree, strung with hundreds of tiny white lights, awaited decorating. Big white boxes, brought in from storage, were filled with ornaments of handblown glass, painted toy soldiers, fragile angels, silver snowflakes. Dani was permitted only to hang the wooden ornaments. She'd eyed the nativity set carefully arranged on a polished antique table. She wanted desperately to play with the beautiful Madonna and the little baby Jesus, and the sheep and the Wise Men, but even touching the English porcelain figures was forbidden. Also off-limits was the New England village set up on another table, with its steepled white church, colonial houses and old-fashioned carolers. Ordinarily Dani would have pressed her case, but her mother had asked her to be especially nice that afternoon.

Dani had dug into the pocket of her wool blazer and produced a paper snowflake. “I made it myself—it's origami. You can hang it on your tree if you want.”

Even now, she could remember her grandmother's trembling, bony hand as she'd taken the origami snowflake. “Thank you, dear. It's lovely. You're such a thoughtful child.”

The snowflake, Dani had known, would end up in one of the scrapbooks her grandmother kept, put up on a shelf to be preserved for Dani's own children. Her parents had stuck dozens of her origami snowflakes on windows, the refrigerator, hung them on the tree. But that was their style, not Claire Chandler's, and Dani had made the snowflake for her because she loved her, not because she wanted praise and recognition.

“And how was school today, Danielle?” her grandmother had asked, regal even in illness.

“Good. All the kids call me Dani.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Because I asked them to,” Dani had said without fanfare. “Danielle's such a prissy name.”

“Now, wherever did you get such a notion? Danielle's a perfectly lovely name.”

“Mattie said it sounds kind of prissy—”

“Mattie? Danielle, where are your manners?” Claire had coughed, her skin going from yellow to red to white in the course of a couple of minutes. “Next you'll be calling us all by our first names.”

“Oh, I'd never do that. It's just that Mattie hates to be called Grandmother.”

“Well, she is one, even if she'd rather not admit it. We all get old. We all die.”

And Dani had asked her, “Are you going to die?”

Her grandmother's sickly blue eyes had widened for a moment, then softened. “Yes, dear, I'm going to die—sooner, I'm afraid, rather than later. Please don't be sad. I've led a full, wonderful life, even in the relatively few years I've had on this earth. I wish only that we'd had more time together.” She'd smiled gently even as Dani's eyes brimmed with tears. “You're a remarkable child. I should have told you that more often. I should have told my own daughters that more often. It's not always easy…One does one's best.”

A maid had brought a tray of hot cider and gingerbread cookies, and Claire Chandler had permitted Dani to play with the New England village, although the nativity set was still forbidden, on the grounds that playing with religious figures was improper. Claire's only requirement had been that Dani gather up all the pieces and play with them on the carpet next to the couch, close to her grandmother.

By the time her mother arrived to pick Dani up, Claire had fallen asleep. Dani had leaned over and kissed her grandmother's sunken cheek, something she'd never done on her own before. “Goodbye, Dani,” her grandmother had said, and she seemed to try to smile.

On the elevator down to the lobby, Dani had noticed that her mother was crying. “Did Grandmother die?”

“No—no, not yet.”

When the elevator's polished brass doors opened, her mother had rushed out, sobbing. “I'm not going to end up like my mother, I swear I'm not.”

Left to follow, Dani had joined her mother on the street. The temperature had dropped, and the wind had picked up; a light snow was falling. Her mother had taken Dani's hand and began walking briskly in the opposite direction of their building.

“Where are we going?” Dani had asked, the wind stinging her cheeks.

“The subway station,” her mother said tightly.

Dani had made no response. She often rode the subway with Mattie, who would spout off about the virtues of public transportation and conserving the world's resources, but never with her mother.

Lilli had stopped abruptly. “You look cold.” Then she'd pulled off her pale gray cashmere scarf and wrapped it around Dani's neck for added warmth, tucking one edge up over her mouth and nose.

They'd taken the subway to Greenwich Village, her mother acting so much as if it was a grand adventure that Dani got caught up in her excitement. “Are we going to see Mattie?” she'd asked.