The World is a Stage (36 page)

He didn’t want to have to turn on the charm to get an apology out of her.

He’d been unwilling to play the role of rogue charmer the night they’d made love—it was too important that she see who Michael O’Leary really was, that she let him catch a glimpse of the real her in return. And it had been incredible.

They’d remained under wraps almost the whole time—the April wind was much too strong to cast all the blankets aside and really explore her body the way he wanted to—but never before had he seen a woman so exposed. She’d come to life underneath him, responding to the smallest kindness in his touch, as if no man had ever dared take the time to get to know her before feasting on what her warm and generous body had to offer.

He’d wanted to know her. He’d wanted to feast on her. He’d wanted to experience just a small piece of the incredible generosity she blanketed over her sister every day.

Which was why he was still so unwilling to play the role of rogue charmer now.

He was Michael O’Leary, the man who saw sex as a game and a battle and nothing but fun. He was Michael O’Leary, famed for his ability to wrap any woman around his balls.

Rachel Hewitt was the woman who crushed all of that. And then she went ahead and crushed the rest of him too.

“Can’t you convince her to stay?” Dominic repeated.

“Not me, bro,” Michael lied. “I can’t make her do anything. She’s too much for me to handle.”

Dominic sighed. “I was afraid of that. I guess I need a new leading lady.”

Michael held up the bottle in a one-sided toast. “And a new leading man.”

The hell if he was ever going to do this again.

Lily’s grave was covered in fresh-cut flowers, surrounded by a few drawings that had dampened on the early morning grass. It was difficult to make the exact pictures out, but Rachel could see the crayon scribblings of a baby with the wings of an angel making its way up into heaven.

So Molly had confessed all, and they’d made a cozy family visit.

Rachel really wanted to tear up those pictures. It was a horrifying thought, even to her, but there it was. She couldn’t pretend she didn’t feel it—couldn’t pretend she wasn’t standing here, sobbing over the grave of a child who probably would have grown up to hate her as much as everyone else.

Rachel was an emotionless monster. It said so right in her file.

There wasn’t a whole lot in there that had come as a surprise. She’d gotten good grades in school or with her tutors, depending on where her mother had been touring at the time. Never got into trouble, did no extracurriculars that didn’t involve theater or the arts. College had been much of the same, a list of grades and activities that read like an encyclopedia entry. Top honors, leading role in the school’s senior production of
Steel Magnolias
, which she’d been mortified to participate in, but it had been either that or nothing.

The only indication of any trouble at all was in her relationship with Dominic, which went on school records the day after her graduation. It had been the university’s policy for all faculty members to log relationships with former students. It was a ridiculous policy, especially since they all knew it had started some time before that.

All those statistics, those facts—they had been harmless. It was a little mortifying to think she’d gone this long without once rubbing elbows with the wrong side of the law, but she could hardly be faulted for keeping her nose clean.

It was the rest of Nora’s findings that had been the real problem. Most of them were just quick scribbles that had been jotted down, small observations that cut right to Rachel’s dead, icy bones. The first one was dated a few days after their initial meeting, when Molly had been a few months post-baby and found solace in the company of a man who had no job but seemingly unlimited funds.

Few close female friends. Male friends seem limited to sexual acquaintances. No pets. Constantly on the move for work. Primary address is a PO Box. This is a woman who avoids ties, both emotional and physical.

After that first job, Rachel had come back, wanting to look into a friend of Molly’s who she swore she’d seen on “America’s Most Wanted”.

Fixation on sister’s activities seem to have little to do with actual sister, more to do with Client leveraging self into a position of control. Power-hungry.

That was when she’d started considering Nora her friend. Her friend, for crying out loud. Not some psychoanalyst watching her every move.

Return visits indicate Client addresses only symptoms, never the deeper problem. Unable to communicate true feelings or motivations to family members or PI, even in social setting.

But then came the real knocker.
Client purposefully endangers relationships. Unless addressed, antagonistic behavior may require a termination of future services.

There it was. Nora’s professional opinion. They were just a few sentences, but they had done more to damage Rachel’s ego than a hundred negative theater reviews could ever do.

Rachel Hewitt was a royal bitch. Everything she gave up for her sister didn’t count. She loved no one, and no one loved her.

Even Nora had indicated that she was close to done with her. How low did a human being have to sink before a private investigator, someone who saw humanity at its backstabbing, spouse-cheating, drug-trafficking worst, shook her head and said, “I give up on this one”?

“Well, Lily,” Rachel said, trying out her almost-niece’s name. It felt wrong coming out of her mouth, like she was an ugly stepsister forcing her feet into Cinderella’s shoes.

She reached down and touched the grass instead. It was wet and cold and her fingers numbed almost instantly. She wished it was so easy to turn off the rest of her.

“I guess this is good-bye for a while. You tell your mom ‘hello’ for me, okay?”

Rachel sniffled, the cool morning air and her run combining to do a number on her sinuses. This would be her last visit for some time. Her bags were packed, a measly half-hour task that indicated just how accurate Nora’s observations were. She stuck a handful of rehab pamphlets in the freezer where their mother kept the vodka, along with a note offering to pay for the entire thing. And that was it. Her life was wrapped up and ready to move on in less than twenty-four hours.

She was a woman with no ties, emotional or physical, and there was no point in staying here one minute longer.

No point at all.

Which was why it was so silly that her legs hit the pavement and immediately started going in the opposite direction they were supposed to.

She wound out of the cemetery the same way she’d come in, but instead of turning back toward her mother’s house, she found herself looping around one of the busier streets, heading right for the track and field area of the abandoned high school that had become a battle zone of mud pits and outlandish rope climbs.

They probably weren’t even practicing right now. With Nick in jail and Eric just getting back on his feet, it would be silly for them to bother. Team Win didn’t stand a chance, and if there was one thing Rachel understood very well, it was knowing when to throw in the towel and move on.

She almost skidded to a halt when she turned the corner to find Michael and Julian, Eric and McClellan, all of them on the ground and doing pushups to some strangely Scottish sounding song in a range of deep baritones.

“About damn time you got here!” Julian was the first to look up and find her gawking. “We’re officially down a man now, so there’s no sub. We’ve got work to do.”

He gestured with one of his arms, continuing to push up off the ground with the one he had left. She had no idea human beings were capable of that outside the movies.

A blur of pink moved past her peripheral vision. It was the kind of pink fluffiness that could only belong to one of two children. The sound of her sister’s voice calling the pink fluff into order confirmed it.

There was a very large part of her that contemplated sprinting away—and she probably could have gotten away with it. No one was going to bother following. She went so far as to turn on her heel and gauge the distance to the street, but the piercing cry of a whistle filled the air, and she was trapped by it, ensconced in a bubble of sound and defeat.

“Twenty minutes late means a twenty-lap warm-up. Go.”

Michael’s voice shattered any illusions she might have had that she was getting out of there alive. It was his dominant voice, his commanding voice, but it was a lot more than that too. There was no playfulness to it, no joy, and she doubted anything she said or did would wipe the look of cold, hard hatred from his face.

“Twenty-one laps,” Michael warned. “The longer you stand, the higher it goes.”

It was a ridiculous command, almost six miles that would leave her no time to train with the rest of the team. She’d be here, among them, but ostracized and punished like an old-time harlot in the stocks.

Like an old-time harlot who deserved every minute of her punishment, every egg thrown at her face. She had no idea what the men were doing, why Eric wasn’t in her face screaming at her to leave. She’d read too many of Shakespeare’s plays not to know what happened to those who betrayed the people they loved.

She blew out a long breath. Maybe it meant they’d never loved her. Maybe it meant the worst was yet to come.

Screw it. If doing laps meant she could at least be in the same place as Michael for a few blissful minutes, it was worth it.

With a deep breath and a resolve not to let her eyes stray from the movements of her feet, Rachel ran.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Not for Such Contempt

“No!” Michael shouted. He grabbed the rope and hooked his good leg around the bottom, lifting himself off the ground as he anchored it in place. “You have to stabilize it first, or you’ll swing too much to get any upward movement. All your strength will be lost in the momentum.”

He detached himself and threw the rope at Rachel. “Try again.”

After three hours of practice, Michael could see she was barely holding on by a thread, let alone a rope. Her loose gray T-shirt, layered over a black tank top 1980s-style, was drenched with sweat, forming a long and drooping vee down her front and the back. She’d discarded a pair of warm-up pants for some tiny shorts, and even then, he could see the moisture slick along her legs.

Finally. He was getting his hot and sweat-soaked vision. Too bad the only interest he had in those legs now was how much further he could push them. How far he could push
her.

She hooked her leg the way he’d shown her and grunted as she used her arms to try to move her body upward. She got a few feet up the rope, exactly to the point where her ass was at eye level, Michael so close he could lean in and bite it.

No, dammit. He would not cave in to the Lycra temptation.

“All right. Get down.”

Everyone else sprawled out on the grass behind him. Well, everyone except Peterson, who sat up, watching Molly and the girls climb the bleachers over and over again. He refused to acknowledge Rachel was working out with them, wouldn’t even look at her unless absolutely forced to.

“It’s not going to do any good to start a fight with your kids and Molly watching,” Michael said when Rachel first started doing laps. It was strange, seeing her show up without a word of apology or explanation, but she was there and she was running. That had to mean something.

Peterson wasn’t happy about it, continually muttering, “She’s got some nerve, showing up here like this.”

Michael couldn’t agree more. Balls of steel, that one. It was a trait he never knew he’d admire quite so much in a woman.

If only admiration were enough.

None of them were exactly sure what her plan was—if she was seeing her commitment to Team Win through to the end or even if she was trying to find a way to sabotage things even more. Peterson voted for the latter, vehemently and with purpose.

“I want her gone, Mikey,” Peterson warned. “I know I should have stepped up to the police a long time ago with the truth, but that doesn’t mean what she did was okay. You don’t rat out the people you love—I don’t care how much you like her. She’s cold.”

Michael laid a heavy hand on Peterson’s shoulder and looked him straight in the eye. “I know, Peterson.”

“But?”

Michael shrugged. He didn’t have the answer to that question. Half of him was so angry that just looking at her made his body tense and his vision blur. Her betrayal had gone above and beyond the ordinary, worse than Cleopatra because Rachel wasn’t playing with politics—her attack was personal.

But then he’d catch sight of her face when she thought no one was looking, and all of those sensations went away, leaving him with nothing but hurt. His hurt—and hers. There didn’t seem to be any way to tell where one started and the other stopped.

“You know I would do anything for you, Peterson. I’ve always stepped up when you asked, and I’d do it all again in a hot second.” Michael dropped his voice. “But it’s my turn to ask the favor.”

Peterson’s breath was sharp, the line of his mouth firm. “That’s asking a lot, Mikey. I’m not sure I can do it. Even for you.”