Liberating Lacey (21 page)

“I’m going out,” he said casually.

“Okay,” she said, not pausing in the act of running water into her kettle to make a cup of tea. “I might run to the mall later. Just let yourself in if I’m not here.”

“Lock up behind me.” He fished his keys from his jacket pocket. She followed him to the door. A quick kiss and he left.

* * * * *

Hunter pulled into one of the angled parking spaces lining the brick-paved streets of SoMa, the city’s trendy, outdoor shopping district bordered by Sorrell and Mason. It looked like a gigantic hand had lifted Whole Foods and shaken the same groups of people out onto SoMa’s sidewalks and alleys. Hippie kids clustered around a boy strumming away on a guitar, the case open at his feet to expose a few bills and some coins resting on worn red velvet. The kid was probably busking without a permit but he’d leave that to the guys from the Eastern. More useful to the economy, women in designer jeans and sunglasses walked by in groups of two or three, shopping bags dangling negligently from their arms.

Before he left Lacey’s bed earlier in the morning he’d taken a quick look at the tag on the comforter cover he’d ruined. At his apartment he’d Google’d the brand. Only one store in the city carried the bedding. Bells tinkled as he opened the door to Sweet Dreams, a store that, according to their website, sold nothing but luxury sheets, pillowcases and other bedding.

This looked like a place Lacey would shop. The walls of the tiny store were lined, floor-to-ceiling, with cedar shelving stocked with fabrics in all the colors of the rainbow.

A wooden ladder on rails ran the length of the walls, to reach the higher cubbies. Two tables in the middle of the space held more stacks of sheets and pillowcases. A hint of something floral lay over the cedar. Lavender, maybe. Soft music played from the CD

player over the sales counter.

“May I help you?” the sales woman asked.

Relieved this was going to be easy, he pointed at Lacey’s comforter cover, prominently displayed in the center of the largest table. “I’ll take one of those.” 156

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“The Chatelaine duvet cover. It’s truly a work of art. Each one is made from the finest silk and hand-embroidered in France,” she said, as if he hadn’t said he was going to buy one. “What size?”

“King,” he said. “In the green.”

“Yes, the Silky Seafoam,” she said, deftly extracting an untouched comforter from the bottom of a drawer in the table. “May I help you choose anything else? Shams?

Pillowcases?”

“That’s it,” he said and reached into his inner coat pocket for his wallet.

Still smiling at him over her red half-rim glasses, the sales woman scanned the bar code on the package as he pulled out his Mastercard and tapped it on the counter. He handed it over when she looked at him expectantly then glanced at the digital display of the total while she swiped the card.

1459.26, lit up in green on the register’s display.

Holy. Shit.

He froze as he stared at the amount, for a brief moment praying the card wouldn’t get rejected.

“Would you like this gift wrapped?”

“No.”

He was close to his limit, within a thousand bucks or so but maybe the last payment had cleared… The machine spit out the receipt for him to sign, then a copy for his records.

As he scrawled his name at the bottom of the biggest charge he’d ever made, the sales woman wrapped the duvet cover in tissue, tied it off with wide red ribbon and tucked it into a cream shopping bag.

“Would you like the receipt with you or in the bag?”

“The bag,” he said.

She handed him fifteen hundred dollars worth of embroidered silk. “Enjoy it,” she said with a smile.

He automatically noted the time when he got back in the Charger. Five minutes had passed in the store. He’d just spent fifteen hundred dollars in five minutes. That was a record. Fifteen hundred dollars was three payments on his car, plus a bike payment. It was an entire month of living expenses. Rent, groceries and food, insurance, utilities, phone, cable and Internet.

The streets of SoMa were filled with pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages, so he paid close attention as he drove out of the shopping district and into the streets of downtown. From there the car seemed to drive itself, down along the river and out to the scenic overlook at the city’s botanical gardens. Cops from the Eastern came here to write reports or make calls but for now the lot was empty.

He angled the Charger so the rear end backed to a retaining wall but he could see the river flowing south and east. For a long time he sat there, the engine running, the 157

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radio tuned to an alternative rock station that broadcast from the local university. The weakening fall sun cast the bluffs in stark shades of buff, tan and black. Searching for the path of least resistance, the river flowed in a channel carved from the soft rock, doubling back on itself where the marshy ground gave way.

After a while he opened the bag and carefully unwrapped the tissue from around the duvet cover. The silk shone dully in the setting sun, faintly rough under his finger as he traced the embroidery, intricate trees and flowers rippling along the edge of the material, then cascading to the center where one large tree spread roots and leaves.

Even to his untrained, largely disinterested eye, it was beautiful. Luxurious in its simplicity. Perfect for Lacey.

He thought about Whole Foods, Eggs Benedict, twenty-thousand dollar engagement rings, and BMWs. He thought about sex, about trust and emotions, about friendship and love, about uniforms and fifteen hundred dollars of hand-embroidered silk. He thought about who he was, what he had to offer, how he felt and what Lacey needed.

Thinking changed nothing. It never had. Neither had wishing or dreaming. There was reality and cold, hard facts. He operated in a black-and-white world defined by accumulated experience, where he acted based on his experiences.

It was time to act.

The sun was a half circle of red haze in his rear view mirror before he put the car in first and drove slowly out of the lot. His route back to Lacey’s house took him past La Cucina and Juana’s, past the Metropolitan Club, past Memorial Park, the scene of several walks and soul-altering sex in the rain. But eventually, he pulled into Lacey’s driveway, then made his way up the two white steps to her front porch.

* * * * *

From her position at the sink Lacey heard the front door open shortly after five. She shook off the suds into the dishwater, then dried her hands before opening the fridge to remove the platter holding the marinating steaks.

She set the platter on the counter before shouldering through the kitchen door.

Hunter stood in the foyer, his dark head bent, hands shoved in his front jeans pockets.

His demeanor was such a contrast to his usual alert, observational attitude she came up short in her progress to greet him, stopping behind the sofa, a few feet from the foyer.

“Hi,” she said. “Everything okay?”

Then she saw the bag from Sweet Dreams, on the floor beside his gym bag. For a moment emotions warred inside her, tenderness, dismay, gratitude, respect. But the bottom dropped out of her stomach when he lifted his head and looked at her. She’d seen that look before, two years earlier, in Davis’s eyes.

Suddenly cold, she folded her arms across her chest and looked away for a few seconds. “Hunter, you didn’t need to do that.”

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“Yes I did,” he said, pulling his hands from his pockets as he said it.

When he spoke in that quiet, firm voice, there was no option other than, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

He still wore his jacket, had his keys in hand. The powerful wings stretched out, ready for the launch into flight.

If she kept talking, he wouldn’t leave. “Are you coming in?” Both by birth and by training, she suspected, Hunter kept his emotions close to his chest. Right now his face was carved from stone, his eyes as impenetrable as the forest, an expression suitable for a head of state’s security detail.

Or a man ending a relationship. Was that the other secret lesson men learned in health class, how to remain perfectly stoic when you walked away from a woman?

“Not tonight.”

“Ever?”

His nostrils flared as he drew in a slow breath. “Lacey, I just don’t see this going anywhere long term.”

Here it was, the ending she’d known would be coming from the moment she looked over her shoulder at Buff and saw the man she wanted to take to her empty bed.

But knowing the end would come didn’t mean she wouldn’t fight it.

“I do.” There, she’d said it, not what she meant, not what she’d learned last night, but close enough for him to guess her meaning. If he wanted.

“Me and you?” He shook his head. “It’s a nice thought. Maybe in the movies, but not in real life.”

“Why not?”

“Because women like you don’t stay with men like me.” The words cost him something, maybe more than he thought they would, because his jaw snapped closed, his hand tightening convulsively around his keys.

This was new. This was weird and she had no strategy for dealing with it.

“How do you know that?” she asked, hearing the desperation in her voice. “I agree there are no guarantees in life, but I don’t exactly have a history of flitting from man to man. If Davis hadn’t left me, we’d still be married.”

“You’ll find someone else. Someone like him,” he said, as if that would reassure her. “There’s a doctor or lawyer or banker in this city who will give you what you deserve.”

“What do I deserve?”

“Someone who can take care of you the way you should be taken care of,” he said with a nod at the bag from Sweet Dreams.

“I take care of me, Hunter.” Now she sounded as flat as he did. “I make my own money. There are very few men in this city who out-earn me and I have a very large 159

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trust fund, leaving me with a very small pool from which to choose if my goal were a man who could support me. I married for love the first time and if I marry again, it will be for the same reason. Never for money.”

One hand on his hip, he palmed the back of his neck, then shook his head. “You make it sound like the money doesn’t matter and maybe when it comes to buying things, it doesn’t. But it does matter, Lacey. It matters because you went to private schools and I went to public schools. You know things about wine and food and music and the world. The people you hang out with know those things, too. I don’t. I read three books about Thermoplyae two years ago and haven’t read a book since. I can’t make small talk. I work nights and weekends and holidays, cleaning up after the ugly, brutal things in the world you’re protected from.” She couldn’t decide who he insulted more, himself or her. Either way she wasn’t listening to another word. “That’s enough.”

The whip-like quality in her voice made him look at her, his gaze sharp. A vibrating silence reigned for a long moment, then he lifted his hand to his chest and rubbed the base of his thumb against his breastbone. “Lacey, we have a good time together. But physical compatibility isn’t—“

“Physical compatibility? You think the sex was so shockingly good because our pheromones are a good match, not that we are?” She shook her head in disbelief. “I didn’t deceive myself into thinking I was the first woman to ask you to play bad cop, but I envy you if sex is that wonderful every time you have it.”

“I told you. It isn’t.” This time his voice cracked into the room.

“Then what? I don’t understand. This isn’t where you want to be anymore?” she said, hearkening back to their conversation at Juana’s.

“That’s not it.”

She stood her ground. “I like you. I think you like me. What more do you want?”

“It’s not about what I want.” For the first time in three months, she saw frustration, irritation as Hunter shoved his hand over his crew cut. “It’s about what you’re going to want, what you need, what you deserve.”

“Stop saying that. This isn’t about me. I’m where I want to be and I know what I want. I want you.” Her voice broke. She realized she was holding on to the back of the sofa in a grip so tight her knuckles were white. She swallowed and released the sofa frame. “This is about you. Don’t push it off on me.” More silence, broken by the tick-tock-tick-tock of the grandfather clock, while he stared at her and she stared at him.

“If you want to go, then go,” she finally said. She wanted to say
I love you, please
don’t go, I’m begging you
but experience had taught her it wouldn’t make any difference and she needed her pride intact. Something would have to keep her on her feet after he walked out the door.

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“I don’t want to go,” he said. It sounded like ground glass, not his vocal cords, formed the words. “But I have to. This won’t get any easier.” He picked up his gym bag and opened the door, pausing in the frame to look back at her, his eyes bleak green pools in his stony face. Cold air swept in from outdoors. For a brief, irrational moment her fingertips tingled with the horrible, horrifying urge to snatch a paperweight from the end table and hurl it at his head.

Once again, a century’s worth of breeding saved her, but not even a straight line of descent from the Mayflower through the Memphis Greenwoods could make her respond when he said, “Bye.” She let the door close behind him to silence.

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Hunter braced his hands on a length of drywall stretched between two sawhorses and blew his breath out, hard. “I screwed up the cut, Dad.” With a jerk and zip, Michael Anderson retracted his tape measure into the case and met his son’s gaze. “Measure twice and cut once. You heard that instead of nursery rhymes. Where’s your head?”

His dad’s teasing tone softened the caustic words, but Hunter knew he’d prematurely ended the day’s work with the mistake. Getting more drywall to rebuild the kitchen wall around a new breakfast nook and three season room was on his dad’s list of things to do. Tomorrow. With the right cut, a few screws and some drywall tape and mud, he worked a full day and stayed on schedule. As things stood now he was done at three in the afternoon.

But Hunter’s head wasn’t in the work and they both knew it.

“Toss me the keys to the truck. I’ll run to the lumber yard,” Hunter said. “It won’t take an hour.”

His dad yanked the power cord to the nail gun out of the wall outlet. “Never mind.

I’ll make it up tomorrow. Jorge’s back from vacation and I’m ahead on the Saunders job.”

“You sure?” It wasn’t like his dad to quit early.

“Yeah,” Michael said as he shrugged out of his suspender tool belt and rubbed his shoulders. “I must have lifted something wrong. My neck and back have been killing me the last week or so.”

Hunter looked more closely at his father. “You seen a doctor about it?”

“Nah. I’ll take some aspirin, get a massage, see if that helps.” He sat down on an overturned bucket emptied of drywall mud. “So what’s up? That’s your second mistake in a couple of weeks. Usually you’re sharper than that.”

“Nothing,” Hunter said. “Work, eat, sleep, repeat.” A sharp look from his father told him his days of ducking the tough conversation were over. “You still seeing Lacey Meyers?”

“No.”

That was a half-truth. He still saw her, but only at night, in dreams. For the most part, they were simple images of her sitting on her deck with a book in her lap, or walking in the park, her red hair lit from behind by the setting sun. But every few nights he had an intensely erotic dream, more feverish and simple than the warrior dream. Buried inside her slick, tight pussy, in his mind he tortured them both with achingly slow thrusts, watched her go pink under him, her face tighten, her teeth clamp 162

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down on her lower lip as he relentlessly drove her to orgasm. He saw her face wrench with ecstasy, felt the contractions around his cock, heard her satisfied gasps. He felt her hands on his nape and lower back, her legs wind around his hips, welcoming his rough, heated plunges into her body as he barreled toward his own climax.

To his teeth-grinding frustration he always woke up seconds before he came, the orgasm pounding in the head of his cock. It was his punishment for walking out on Lacey, to satisfy her in his dreams but wake up so hard he could pound nails with his dick.

What he needed was to imprint another body in his mind. He knew a couple of girls who wouldn’t care that he hadn’t called for months and wouldn’t expect anything the next morning. But he couldn’t bring himself to scroll through his contacts for the numbers, let alone push Talk and make the call.

“What happened?”

“Just died a natural death, Dad,” he said, but the scrutiny made him squirm.

Another lie. He’d killed it and for the rest of his life he would remember the white pain on Lacey’s face when he walked out her front door.

He’d done that to her. He owned his actions, knew it was the right thing to do, but he felt like a thousand kinds of shit for doing it the day after the role play. What good was staying the night after a bar hookup if, three months later, he cuffed her and made her beg, then walked away?

Ten thousand kinds of shit, no doubt about it.

But it had to be done. It had to. End it now, before he passed the point of no return, before they both got hurt. Worse.

He was lying. He was a coward, a fucking
coward
, too scared to face his fears, too scared to move on.

His father took a deep breath, the full-chested inhales more frequent the last few times Hunter had see him. “You know, kid,” his dad said, very conversationally, “at some point in time you’re going to have to trust someone besides me and other cops.” He meant someone not bound to Hunter by blood or the brotherhood. He meant a woman. But just because he knew what his father meant, knew why he kept people at arms’ length, didn’t mean he could just turn on a dime and be someone else.

“Sure. No problem,” Hunter said, trying for flippant. The words fell flat in the stark, echoing space.

“I’m not saying it has to be Lacey Meyers. But the last couple of months—“

“Dad.”

“You had a life,” his father said, ignoring the warning in Hunter’s voice. “You weren’t work, sleep, eat, repeat.”

“Dad. It’s over.”

“Hunter…”

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His father almost never called him by name. He used Hunter’s name when he was in so much trouble as a teenager he wouldn’t go anywhere but school-work-bedroom for weeks. His dad called him “kid”, or “son” when he was proud of Hunter.

Graduations, mostly. High school, college, the Academy. But right now, based on the look on his father’s surprisingly pale face, he wasn’t proud of his only son.

Hunter wasn’t in trouble, either. Michael Anderson was worried about him, his six-foot-two-hundred-and-twenty-pound-police-officer offspring. Great. Just great. He’d hurt Lacey so bad she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, even say goodbye to him and now he was adding to his father’s stress.

“I know I’ve been off the past couple of weeks, Dad. It was…harder than I thought it would be. But I’ll be fine. Just…cut me some slack, okay?”

“You don’t need me to cut you some slack, Hunter. You need to cut yourself some slack. Take a chance.”

“I know. I know,” he said. “I will.”

Eventually. Just not with Lacey. Not that Lacey would spit on him if he was on fire after what he’d done. But he would take that chance. Some day. With someone safer than the woman who made his heart beat static-filled messages to him before he went to bed at night, when he was zoned-out in the car, driving his sector, seeing what was going on. He still hadn’t figured out what it meant, but he was getting used to it as part of the background noise of life.

Like Lacey was for a little while. At least he still had this remnant of her in his heart.

But it was over.

Life went on. He stood and unbuckled his tool belt. “Come on,” he said to his dad as he hefted the belt. “Let’s clean up and go to a movie.”

* * * * *

“Hold on a minute, hon!” Lacey shouted into her BlackBerry, hoping Claire could hear her over the quintessential New York City street cacophony. A minivan with Missouri license plates had blocked the box at the intersection of Fifty-Seventh and Fifth in front of Tiffany and Co, and an ambulance stuck behind several yellow taxis was trying to get through. The taxi drivers laid on their horns and the combined honking almost but didn’t quite drown out the ambulance’s siren. Lacey turned and pushed back through the Fifth Avenue entrance into Tiffany to wait out the noise.

“Having fun, sweetie?”

She found a plush chair near the exit to Fifty-Seventh Street and sank into it. “Oh, yes,” she said, trying to match the artificially bright tone in Claire’s voice. “I’ve had a great time so far. I went to the theatre last night and do you remember that tiny burger place at the corner of Eighty-Fourth and Madison, underneath the secondhand shop where Jackie Kennedy took her clothes? I had a burger there, too, then spent the 164

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afternoon walking through Central Park. Tonight I’m ordering room service, though, because I’m exhausted…”

She ran down, like a windup doll on its last turn of the key. Silence reigned on the other end of the phone, then Claire said, “Oh, sweetie.” Lacey got to her feet and pushed through the heavy brass revolving door, striding briskly east on Fifty-Seventh, away from the Midtown traffic mess. It was the sharp November wind that brought tears to her eyes, not the kind sympathy in her friend’s voice, not the fact that Hunter had been gone for two weeks and she ached more with every passing day. “I’m fine, Claire. I’m fine. He left and I’m fine. Really.”

“Of course you are.”

“Because we both knew this wasn’t permanent. It wasn’t like we had a relationship or anything. We had sex. Lots of it. That’s not a relationship. It was just sex. And that’s all I wanted. Sex.”

The anonymity of the city made her forget that other people could hear her. When a businessman moving at approximately her pace gave her a quick glance, then another, she blushed and looked away, but not before she noted a nice face, softer than Hunter’s, with curious, amused blue eyes and full lips. The breeze caught his Burberry raincoat and gorgeous silk tie, buffeting both around his lean body. Investment banker? Lawyer?

Fortune 500 exec? All of the above were thick on the ground in Midtown Manhattan.

He’d obviously heard her. They stopped for the light at Madison Avenue and this time the glance lasted longer and came with an interested smile.

“I know, sweetie,” Claire said, recalling her to reality.

“And now I’m done having casual sex,” she said into the phone, looking her new admirer straight in the eye.

“My loss,” he said whimsically, then stepped out into the stalled traffic. He moved with a confident, easy grace that almost made her call him back. Almost. Instead she bit back the words and a hysterical laugh.

“You’re not cut out for casual sex,” Claire said, oblivious. Away from the honking and siren Lacey could now hear baby Lanie fussing in the background. “You have to keep sex like that on your terms and you’re just too soft to do that.”

“I did keep the sex on my terms,” she replied as she reached the far side of Madison and continued east on Fifty-Seventh. “We did everything I wanted to do and I mean everything.” Oh God, that whole-house role play that went so far beyond a teasing
Are
you a bad girl?
Would she ever be able to look a police officer in the eye again? “Things I’ll never ever do again with anyone else. But that’s the problem. I did those things because I felt something for him, something I’ve never felt before, not even with Davis.

But it was just more sex to him.”

Her throat went tight as she said it, but she fought down the swelling, the tears.

She’d come to New York for a long weekend of shopping, theater, live music and restaurants to get away from the painful memories surprising her in every corner of her house. In the past Claire would have joined her for the trip. This time she was alone.

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“I could kill him,” Claire said conversationally. “Guys like him know the rules of the hookup. Hell, they
write
the rules. He broke them. No jury in the world will convict me for the pain I’ll inflict on him if I ever see him.” The thought of feisty Claire smelling of spit-up and baby powder while she went toe-to-toe with Hunter made Lacey let out a half-laugh, half-sob as she came to a halt at Park Avenue. “Don’t go to jail on my account,” she said.

“I’d do it for you,” Claire said. “Just say the word.”

“Thanks, but not necessary. I’m partially to blame. I knew the rules, too.” At the next lull in traffic Lacey crossed partway, stopping in the median separating the northbound and southbound traffic on Park Avenue. Light from the illuminated Christmas trees standing in the wide, fallow planter shone on the creases in the cheeks of the quick-witted businessman. He studiously focused on the river of taxis, livery cars and personal vehicles streaming by inches away, waiting for a break in traffic, or the light.

Claire’s next words came over baby Lanie’s wails, now reaching a crescendo. “I have to go. Love you.”

“Love you, too,” Lacey said.

She slipped her BlackBerry back in the pocket of her quilted Talbot’s jacket. After a morning of shopping she’d left her purse in the hotel room safe and taken the Lexington Avenue line north to 86th Street for the burger, then walked the thirty blocks south through the park. The day had been bright, clear and crisp, perfect walking weather. The carefully designed winding paths of Central Park gave her plenty of space to meander and empty her mind. But she’d kept the BlackBerry with her. Just in case.

The Burberry-clad man looked south, his profile clean and sharp, his sandy brown hair ruffling in the breeze. He turned and quirked an eyebrow at her.

“Hi there.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Where I live there aren’t any people on the sidewalks.”

“Not from around here, then.”

“The Midwest,” she said, not eager to give out specifics.

“In town for business?”

“Pleasure, actually,” she said. “A long weekend.” He looked up and down Park Avenue, then back at her, a small smile on his mouth.

“Either way, sounds like you could use a drink.” Is this how it always started? Over a drink in a bar? “A drink sounds lovely,” she said. “I’m staying at Hotel 57.”

“The Opia’s a nice bar,” he said. Just like that they were crossing the street together.

“Will Thompson,” he said.

“Lacey,” she said.

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He looked at her, open amusement on his square-jawed face. “You have a last name, Lacey?”

Oh, God.
“Not just yet,” she replied, smiling to soften the implied rejection.

“Fair enough, Lacey-with-no-last-name.”

He wasn’t Hunter, but he had a nice smile and an air of confident experience she found comfortable. He held the door for her and put his hand at the small of her back to guide her into the lounge area, a touch that was less off-putting than she might have imagined. He bought her a glass of wine and talked easily about his work as an investment banker and living in the city, then bought her another glass and asked all the right questions about commercial mortgages, her business, her background. A Yale grad with an MBA from Wharton, a full partner at Goldman, he was thirty-eight, unmarried and clearly captivated.