Trust Me (32 page)

“Darlene,” Professor Zimmerman lamented into his hands. Max was watching in amazed fascination, and Carly thought that it
would be very unwise to tell him that this sort of thing happened regularly at her parents’ house. It would be better, she
thought, to let him figure that out on his own. Slowly.

She looked at her father. “Dad, do something.”

He looked unhappy. “Me?”

“I was so sure that this time it would be forever,” moaned Professor Zimmerman.

“Yes, Arthur, we were too,” Professor Martin said awkwardly, patting him on the shoulder. “They do say ‘third time lucky.’
Guess not, though.”

“Dad!”

“Hmm,” said George Martin. “Come on, old boy. Dessert can wait. Let’s go for a walk in the meadow. I’ll show you a new variety
of
Campanula prenanthoides
that I brought back from southern Oregon last fall, and you can tell me what happened and get it all off your chest.”

They walked off. Mrs. Martin began to direct the clearing of the table, and Carly turned to Max. “Sorry about that,” she said.
“Never a dull moment around here.”

“I’m getting that impression.”

“You look as if you were attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes,” she said. “We’d better put your shirt in the laundry before the
stain sets. Come with me.”

Max followed Carly to the little laundry room in the back of the house. It was about the size of the bathroom in his hotel
suite, but it had a window overlooking the olive grove, and the clean, comforting smell of soap and cotton. Carly pulled a
folded sweatshirt out of a wicker basket next to the dryer and handed it to him.

“This should fit you,” she said. “More or less. Dad’s smaller than you are, but it’ll do.”

“Thank you.”

She smiled mischievously at him. “May I help you with that?” She reached out and began to unbutton his shirt. Max felt a stirring
of desire, despite their surroundings. Carly had a way of making domestiticity seem attractive. He shrugged out of his shirt.
She took it, looked at it, and frowned. “This doesn’t have a care label.”

“It’s custom-made.”

“Shouldn’t it still have a label? Don’t people who buy custom-made shirts wash them?”

“No. We wear them once, then throw them out.”

She looked horrified. “Not really.”

“No, not really,” Max said, and grinned, in spite of himself. His dark mood had eased slightly in the warmth of the Martin
atmosphere. “I don’t know how it’s supposed to be washed. I always send it out.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does,” Carly protested. “It’s a nice shirt. I don’t want to ruin it.”

“It’s already ruined.”

“That’s true. Okay, I’ll put it in warm water and we’ll see what happens. Promise not to sue me.”

She turned to drop it into the washing machine, and Max eyed the curves of her body. She was wearing a navy blue cotton sweater
and snug, faded jeans. He stepped behind her, putting his arms around her waist, and began to kiss the nape of her neck. He
felt her shiver, and she leaned back against him.

“You have wine on your sweater,” he said.

“I do? How can you tell?”

“I can tell. You should wash it.”

She began to laugh, and he caught the hem of her sweater, tugging it up, over her head, and off. He threw it into the machine
on top of his shirt. She was wearing a lacy white bra, and her breasts rose enticingly out of the low-cut cups. Max ran his
hands up to caress them, feeling their weight in his palms, rubbing his thumbs over her nipples, firm under the thin fabric.
He kissed her neck, drinking in the scent of her.

She sighed with pleasure and turned within the circle of his arms to face him. “I feel like a teenager,” she said. “Messing
around in the laundry room. What if someone comes in?”

Max glanced at the door. “Does that lock?”

“Yes.”

“Lock it.”

She did, then came back to him, eager but uncertain. “The window…”

“Doesn’t have a view into this corner,” he said, pulling her with him as he stepped back against the far wall, where built-in
shelves held orderly piles of folded sheets and towels. Max felt their softness against his back and the fragrant warmth of
Carly against his chest. He kissed her until she seemed to be melting against him, and his own body ached with longing for
her. There was something about her that seemed to turn off his brain, and at the moment, it was a relief. He did not want
to think; he simply wanted her.

He unbuttoned the top of her jeans and felt for the zipper pull. Metal rasped as he lowered it, and Carly moaned against his
mouth as he reached into her jeans. The denim was rough over his fingers, and tight enough to press his hand against her.
He slipped his hand into her panties, his fingers quickly finding her most sensitive spot. Her knees buckled, and her nails
dug into his shoulders, stinging slightly, but he didn’t care. The pain was an indicator of how unaware she was of anything
but what he was doing to her.

“Oh, Max…” she said. “Oh, my God.”

“Sssh,” he murmured. “Don’t let anyone hear you.”

Her eyes were wide and dazed with desire. “This is crazy,” she whispered, and gasped softly. “Don’t stop.”

He could feel an instinctive rhythm taking control of her body as he touched her, sliding his fingers slowly back and forth
in the wet, hot core of her, feeling her tremble and tense. Her eyes closed, her lips were parted, and her breath was fast
and shallow. He watched her intently. The sight of her, helpless in his hands, completely abandoned to the pleasure that he
was giving her, was the most erotic thing that he had ever seen.

He slipped one finger inside of her, then another, slowly, carefully, loving the heat and the tightness of her. She cried
out, muffling the sound against his shoulder, and bit him gently. He felt the muscles of her thighs clench around his hand,
then she sagged against him. He held her as shudders wracked her body, and her breathing gradually slowed.

“That,” she said finally, into his chest, “was amazing. But it doesn’t seem quite fair…”

Max had already resigned himself to waiting. They were already well beyond the limits of hospitality, in his opinion, and
much as he wanted to push down her jeans and drive himself into her, right there against the laundry room wall, he had no
intention of doing it.

“I think we can find a better time and place to continue this,” he said.

“I suppose so,” Carly agreed reluctantly. She looked him up and down, and a conspiratorial smile touched her mouth. “I see
that it isn’t a lack of desire that’s stopping you, so it must be good manners. Very admirable.”

“Give me a minute,” Max said.

“Take your time. Here, toss me that other sweatshirt. We’re lucky that Dad lives in these things.” She put it on and smoothed
down her hair, looking flushed.

The doorknob rattled suddenly, and they both jumped. There was a knock. “Carly? Are you in there?” It was Anna, Carly’s littlest
sister.

“I’m here, sweetie,” Carly said quickly. “What is it?”

“Why is the door locked?” There was a pause. “Where’s Max? I can’t find him.”

“He’s here, too.” Carly went over to unlock the door. She opened it, and Anna peered in suspiciously.

“What are you doing?”

“Laundry,” Max said, pointing to the machine, and saw Carly suppress a smile.

“Laundry?” Anna said disdainfully, and rolled her eyes. “Give me a break. I’m thirteen, not three. I know how these things
are. So, are you coming out for dessert, or should I tell everyone that I can’t find you?”

W
e feasted through the day ’til sundown, but when the sun had set and darkness was upon us, the men laid down to sleep by the
cables of the ship…

Max stopped, and looked up from the text. He had been reading out loud for half an hour and had only a vague idea of what
he had said in all that time. It was Monday morning at the hospital, and he had a heavy, dark feeling in his chest. Something
had been nagging at him for days, lurking on the edges of his consciousness, teasing him, then slipping away when he reached
for it. And then, late last night, clear as a bell, it had come to him.

What about the dogs?

He had no idea why he hadn’t caught it earlier. He remembered his first time inside the Tremayne mansion, when he and Carly
had been flooded by a rush of dogs, with Lola in the lead. “Meet your grandfather’s security system,” Carly had said. Where
had the dogs been just one day earlier, when some stranger had dragged Henry Tremayne’s body into the house and left him at
the foot of the stairs? No sane intruder would enter a house filled with dogs. Either the dogs all had been in the backyard
that evening, or…

Or the intruder had not been a stranger.

Max put the book facedown on the bed.
Too many coincidences
, he thought darkly.
Every time I turn around, I’m blindsided by a new one.
Individually, none of them meant much, and each one could be explained away. But they were beginning to add up. At what point
did volume create significance?

He had always believed that his judgment would never allow him to be duped or manipulated by anyone. There was no person on
earth wily enough to fool him for more than a very short time. No person except—perhaps—himself.

Could he have fallen into some kind of pit of self-deception? Could he have been deceived not so much by Carly as by his own
longing for family, for connection, for the love and security that Carly had come to represent?

He had seen firsthand how easy it was to convince yourself that something was harmless when it was actually destroying you.
He remembered himself at nine years old, confronting his mother with tremulous courage.

“Mama, it’s bad to drink so much. It makes you sick. Gramma says—”

“Gramma!” His mother rolled her eyes. “Always Gramma. You two just get together and talk about how bad I am, don’t you.”

“No—”

She leaned close to him, her long black hair tickling his face. He could smell her musky perfume and the sharp tang of gin
on her breath. “Baby, she just talks bad about me because she wants you to love her and not me. She’s jealous because she
never had a son. But you still love me best, don’t you?”

He nodded silently.

“Aren’t you going to say it?”

“I love you best, Mama. But—”

“Butbutbut…” she said, mimicking him in a squeaky voice. She laughed and ruffled his hair. “How did I get such a serious
kid? You and your gramma, always worrying. It’s just fun, baby. It makes me feel good. It’s no big deal, so quit nagging me.”

She had still been beautiful then. But Max could now take the child’s memories and reexamine them through an adult’s eyes,
seeing the slight puffiness of her features, the thickening waist, the increasingly sallow skin. A dying woman, digging her
own grave with her eyes squeezed shut. It made him sick to think about it.

Was it possible, Max asked himself slowly, that his own desire to believe in Carly’s innocence had blinded him to the truth?
Perhaps the most important question to be asked was not whether he trusted Carly Martin, but whether he trusted himself.

Did he?

Yes, dammit
, he thought fiercely.
I know what I know.
Twenty million dollars would challenge the morals of many people, but Carly Martin was not one of them. He couldn’t be wrong
about her. He exhaled slowly and picked up the book again.

The Sirens, Odysseus was told, were demon-women who sang a song so sweet and thrilling that any sailor who heard it would
go mad with the desire to rush to them. To do so, however, was death. The Sirens sat in a meadow heaped with the rotting bones
of thousands of men. But Odysseus longed to hear their forbidden song, and he told his sailors to seal their own ears with
wax but lash him to the ship’s mast so that he could listen safely as they sailed past.

It seemed to Max to be a daring but foolish proposition. How could Odysseus be so sure that the influence of the song would
fade as his ship sailed away and left the Sirens behind? What if, once heard, the song and the longing stayed in your blood
forever? What if miles of sea and land between you and the danger were not enough to erase the memory of the desire? If so,
it would be like a wound that could not heal, and nothing would ever be the same again.

He felt his mood growing blacker. He was angry with Odysseus for his recklessness, and he had to remind himself that it was
just a story, an ancient Greek soap opera.

Henry had been much less agitated that morning, which was both a relief and a disappointment to Max. He had hoped that his
grandfather would utter something— anything—that might serve as a clue. But the turbulence of the previous week was gone,
and the old man had been quiet all morning. Henry generally drifted in and out of sleep several times over the course of a
visit, and now, as Max paused in his reading, he realized that the old man had been silent for some time. He glanced up, expecting
to see Henry sleeping, and was mildly surprised to see that his grandfather’s eyes were open.