Silk and Stone (68 page)

Maybe he’d be angry. Maybe he’d take the hint. Either way, Sam was through playing easy-to-ignore.

Bo was stretched out on an old blanket in front of the fire. Sam prodded him gently with her bare toes.
Wake up. Look restless
. He snored.

She leaned back on the couch and tried to appear relaxed, though every nerve was on alert. A log sizzled and popped. On the coffee table sat two glasses and a bottle of champagne in a stoneware cooler filled with ice. The bottle shifted noisily in its melting bed. The fluorescent bulb of the lamp on the end table gave off a low humming sound along with seductive light.

There were only two silent hot spots in the whole house. The guest bedroom, and her body.

She was holding her breath. She’d jumped in over her head. She wore the white silk nightgown and matching robe she’d made for their wedding night. It would be either a life preserver or a cement overcoat, depending on his reaction.

She heard him walking swiftly up the back hall. Since she’d swiped his boots too, his bare feet made mellow thuds on the smooth wood floor. She hoped the rest of him was mellow.

“Samantha,
goddammit,
” he called loudly on his way into the living room. He strode through the doorway. The robe fit beautifully. Oh, how it fit. “Get my clothes—” he began. That was as far as he got. He halted, staring at her. So many emotions merged in one paralyzed moment. She wasn’t drowning alone.

Sam rose as gracefully as she could. Her legs shook. She moved toward him, hands clenched by her sides. He would have to touch her first. That was the only rule she wouldn’t break. “We never got to the champagne on our wedding night,” she told him in a ragged whisper. “Let’s forget about it tonight too.”

He was shaking as badly as she. He raised an arm across his chest, the back of his hand turned toward her. It was a far more self-protective gesture than threatening. Sam stopped close enough for him to slap her. She could barely speak. “You could hit me, but you’d never do that,” she told him. “I know it. Nothing you’ve hidden from me, nothing you think I can’t accept, can change what I know best about you. I love you. I will
never
stop loving you. And all I really need to know is that you still love me too.”

Ten years of separation shattered in a heartbeat as he pulled her to him.

The morning sun drew water from the soaked earth and turned it into a shimmering mist above the forest floor. Jake sat by his grandmother’s spring, blanketed in the floating silver haze, his bare arms propped on his knees. He wore only his jeans. He should have been fully dressed. He was sitting there as if the night had never happened, when he should have walked deep into the mountains. He should have bathed the heavy tenderness from his muscles, washed Samantha’s wonderful scent from his skin, her taste from his mouth. But he hadn’t.

He had broken promises to himself and to her, though she didn’t know it. The old, harsh voice inside him said nothing had really changed. They weren’t safe until the past was finished.

What line could he walk now? Half in darkness, half in light, unable to give up either one. Jake put his head in his hands.

He heard the front door slam open. He heard her shout his name brokenly—once, then again, agonized and searching. She thought he’d left her again.

He bolted to his feet and ran up the path. She was crumpled on the porch steps, the white silk robe sliding down her naked back and shoulders, her face hidden inside one tightly curled arm. She beat one fist against the porch floor. Her body shook with silent sobs.

The light was too strong now. He couldn’t do this to her.

She jerked upright at the sound of his footsteps. Jake fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around her. The relief in her eyes made him give a hoarse cry of apology. She took his face between her perfect hands and kissed him.

Wedged between the bottom of the sun-warmed steps and the cool, steaming earth, they held each other and rocked slowly, balanced for now, at least, on faith.

“Let go of my … hmmm, all right, don’t let go, but I
am
going to call Sammie this time.” Charlotte willed one hand away from the back of Ben’s head and searched for the portable phone again. It was lost somewhere in his bed. One of his more provocative activities made her take a quick, helpless breath and arch against him. Her shoulder pressed down into hard plastic, and the phone beeped shrilly.

“I shouldn’t have bought a model with a paging feature,” Ben grumbled. He raised his head from the general vicinity of her navel and squinted at her with mild reproach. “It’s not even eight o’clock. You’ll wake her up.”

Charlotte frowned and tapped a fingertip against his lips. “Here we are, going at it like wild bunnies, and I don’t even know if she came home last night. If she doesn’t answer the phone this time, I’m heading over there. Besides which, we’ve got to get out of this bed and talk about what we’re going to do. About those newspaper clippings of Jake’s.”

“We can discuss them in bed.”

“My dear Mr. Dreyfus, we’ve said maybe
two
coherent words to each other since we got here yesterday.”

“Well,
more
and
yes
are two of my favorite words.”

She smiled. “Set your broth on simmer for a minute.”

He propped himself on one elbow, gallantly slid the phone from beneath her shoulder, and presented it to her. “Hurry. I think my thermostat is broken.”

Her smile faded. As she punched the Cove’s number into the phone, she looked at him wistfully. “My sister deserves this kind of morning. She’s still sitting in the middle of the woods with nothing but her pillows to hug. It’s not fair.”

“It won’t do Sam any good for you to feel guilty about getting your bread buttered. In fact, you can help her more now that you’re my purring little love beast. Give her and Jake positive reinforcement born from your new attitude.”

“Purring little love beast,” Charlotte repeated dryly. She held the phone to her ear and listened as it began to ring at the Cove. “
Kitten with a whip
is more like it.”

“Hmmm. No whips. I might consider a soft pastry brush though.”

“You’re wicked. Wicked and creative. I like that in a cook. Damn. She’s not answering. I’ll give it a few more rings and then I’m … 
Sammie
?” Charlotte sat up. “Did I wake you up? Oh? No, you sound a little strange. I, uh, came by yesterday but couldn’t find you. Didn’t see Jake either.” A sardonic “as usual” stopped on Charlotte’s lips. Ben nodded approvingly, as if he knew she’d resisted. She barely noticed. She was too stunned by her sister’s reply. “Oh?” Charlotte stared at Ben, wide-eyed and distracted. “Uhmmm, okay. Bye.”

Charlotte dropped the phone in her lap. Ben sat up quickly. “What’s wrong? You look like you’ve been slapped with undercooked spaghetti.”

“Let me see if I can recreate Sammie’s side of the conversation—with soundeffects. I’m awake. Gasp.
Fine
. Thunk. Phone receiver hitting the bedpost.
Jake’s fine
. Voice about two octaves lower than normal. Breathless.
He’s right here
. Sound of someone kissing something.
I’ll call you back. In a while. Oh! Hmmm. Don’t come over until I do. Ah! It may be a few days.
”

Charlotte shook her head. “That was as far as it went. I felt like I’d called dial-a-moan.”

She and Ben traded a long, open-mouthed look. Finally he said, “I told you we’d inspire them. This is good. Must be something in the air. They’ll put a few dozen dents in the mattress, then they’ll start talking. He’ll explain his mysterious newspaper clippings, and we’ll all be happy.”

“What if he doesn’t? He didn’t exactly lay his deepest thoughts on a platter before he went hunting for Malcolm Drury.” Charlotte squirmed out of bed. “What if she gets blindsided by another round of his frontier justice?”

Ben grabbed her by one hand. “You make an excellent prosecutor but a lousy judge of character.”

“I’m going to pay a visit to the great circled one.” Her voice shook with nervous anger. “My cousin’s ex-wife. Are you coming with me?”

Ben cursed wearily, and nodded.

The passenger window of his rusty blue Escort was scattered in pebble-size pieces across the patched bucket seat. He couldn’t believe some bastard had the balls to rip off his crummy car in broad daylight on a busy city street while he was eating lunch in a deli not twenty feet away. That kind of shit happened in places like New York and Atlanta, not Raleigh.

“Hell, Bob, what’d they get? Your eight-track? Your collection of bottle caps?” A fellow reporter with standard-issue wise-ass newsroom sympathy peered over his shoulder as he unlocked the driver’s-side door and jerked it open. What was missing? What the hell could anyone want out of his rolling junkyard?

He knew the instant his gaze fell on the empty floorboard below the passenger seat. “My briefcase!”

“Aw, come on, why? That thing had more duct tape on it than leather. Even a crackhead with no brain circuits left wouldn’t go to the trouble to steal it.”

Bob slumped in the driver’s seat and banged the steering wheel in helpless fury.
But someone who wanted my notes on the Lomax story would
.

Chapter
            Thirty
 

“W
hat a dump,” Charlotte said sardonically. She and Ben left his car and followed a brick walkway across a pristinely landscaped yard shadowed by dogwoods. “Just your average quarter-million-dollar cottage in one of Raleigh’s finest neighborhoods. I hope she went through my cousin’s assets with a bulldozer.”

Ben glanced at her without a trace of appreciation for her acid humor. “I heard the divorce was amicable.”

“You heard what the Lomax publicity machine wanted you to hear. She probably got tired of Tim punching her around.”

“Interesting theory. Sam’s mentioned that your cousin has an ugly temper, but I don’t recall her saying he likes to beat up women.”

Charlotte bit her tongue and bounded ahead of him
up brick steps to a terrace before an ornately carved door flanked by narrow windows of patterned glass. She rang the bell. “Act casual,” she ordered. “We just dropped by to introduce ourselves to my ex-cousin-in-law.”