THE beach was made of shale, gray blue shale on which the blue green waves were advancing and retreating. Like Cal’s eye color and her own, Marnie thought edgily. Finding a smooth boulder, she perched herself on it.
Cal bent and picked up a sliver of rock, then threw it so it skipped over the water half a dozen times before it sank. He said absently, “Kit loves to do that. Hers usually bounce more than mine—she’s really got the knack.”
Then he turned to face Marnie, his face clouded. “I knew she had a math test today, so I made her stay in last night to study when she wanted to be out with her friends. And do you know what she said? Her mother wouldn’t have made her stay in, her mother hadn’t been mean to her like me, she went on and on, and the irony is that Jennifer was stricter with her than I am. A couple of months ago, we went to a counselor, but Kit refused to even open her mouth. My best friend’s wife has done her best to draw Kit out—same result. I normally travel three or four times a year as an adjunct to my job, but I’ve even cut that out, figuring she needs me home.” His laugh was tinged with bitterness. “She needs me like she needs a hole in the head. It’s almost as though she hates me for being alive now that Jennifer’s dead.”
Her heart aching, Marnie ventured, “She seemed happy enough with her friends this morning. She did tell Lizzie you’d made her study, but she didn’t sound too upset about it.”
“I warned her she’d be off the school basketball team if her math marks didn’t improve. She’s their star forward, so she won’t risk that.”
Even though as an adult Marnie preferred solitary pursuits to team sports, she’d played basketball when she was a teenager, and now she helped out with the Faulkner Fiends, the junior high girls’ basketball team in her own school. One more link to Kit, she thought unhappily.
“Lately, she’s even…” Then Cal broke off, picking up another rock and firing it at the water. It hit at the wrong angle and sank with a small splash.
“Even what?” Marnie prompted.
Restlessly, he shrugged his shoulders. “Never mind. Tell me how the adoption came about.”
She winced. “What’s the point if I can’t see Kit again?”
“Maybe it’ll help me understand.”
“You don’t need to understand, Cal! Because I’m finally getting the message. I’ve got to go home and forget my daughter lives fifty miles down the road.”
“Why did you give her up, Marnie?”
The breeze was freshening, molding Marnie’s shirt to her breasts and teasing her hair. She stood up, rubbing her palms down the sides of her jeans. “I didn’t. My mother deceived me—I told you that.”
“So tell me more.”
She stared out at the horizon. Wisely or unwisely, she knew she was going to do as he asked. But because she’d never told anyone but Terry about her pregnancy, and because it was all so long ago and yet so painfully present, her voice sounded clipped and unconvincing, even to her own ears. “Terry and I were best friends all through school. Most of the kids either hated me or avoided me because of my mother. She owned the mill. Everyone in the town owed their livelihood to the mill. Try that one on for size in a small town. But I had Terry and his parents and a couple of girlfriends, so I was okay.”
“Were you in love with him?”
“With Terry?” she said blankly. “No! I’m sorry if best friends sounds corny, but that’s the way it was. Until the night of the first school dance my final year of high school. My mother and I had had a huge fight. She didn’t want me going with him—he was the son of a sawyer, after all. She locked me in my room, but I got out through the window and went anyway.”
“What floor was your bedroom?”
“I do wish you’d stop interrupting,” Marnie said fractiously. “The second floor. Why?”
“Did you jump?”
“I climbed down the Virginia creeper—the stems were thicker than your wrist.”
“You really don’t like being ordered around, do you?”
“Oh, shush! Anyway, we went to the dance. I had a couple of drinks too many, we drove to the lake to see the moon, and you can guess the rest.” She sighed. “Bad mistake, and I’m not just talking about pregnancy, I’m talking about sex. It ruined everything between us—the fun, the friendship. Terry and I avoided each other like the plague for the next few months.”
“Was it worth it?” Cal asked softly.
She gaped at him, feeling color creep into her cheeks. “Are you asking if it was good sex? How in the world was I supposed to know? I was sixteen, Cal!”
“You’ve been with men since then.”
She hadn’t. But she was darned if that was any of Cal’s business. Doggedly, she went on with her story, reciting it as though it had happened to someone else. “I didn’t tell my mother I was pregnant. I didn’t tell anyone. I wore baggy sweaters and let the waistband of my jeans out and forged a doctor’s certificate so I could stay away from gym class.”
“Were you that afraid of her?”
His voice was unreadable. “I was afraid she’d make me have an abortion,” Marnie said curtly. “So I kept it a secret until it was too late for that. She had tremendous power, Cal. She ran the town. She could give you one look and you’d find yourself doing exactly what she wanted. I hated that! Yes, of course I was afraid of her. Besides, she was as cold as—as the Atlantic Ocean in April.”
“She found out, though.”
“Oh, yes….” Marnie’s smile was twisted. “Now that was a scene, let me tell you. But in the end she got it out of me that Terry was the father.”
She kicked at the shale with the toe of her sneaker. “I was sent to a private clinic. The town was told I’d gone to a fancy girls’ school, and my mother said my cousin Randall from Boston would marry me when the baby was born.” She talked faster, only wanting done with this. “It was a hard labor, so I was out of it when Kit was born. When I came to, my mother was sitting by the bed. The baby was gone. She’d lied about Randall and the marriage, and she made me sign the consent forms by threatening to fire Terry’s father. She’d see he never got another job in the province, that’s what she told me. And if I ever tried to trace my child, she’d set a bunch of roughnecks on Terry and his brothers.”
Marnie shivered. “I knew she’d do it. I couldn’t risk anything happening to Terry or his family—they were the ones who’d taught me all I ever knew about kindness. So I signed.” As an afterthought, she added, “My mother also told me I was disinherited. As if that mattered.”
“How did you know your baby was a girl?”
“You sound like a lawyer for the prosecution,” she snapped. “One of the cleaning women told me. No one else would say a word, it was as if nothing had ever happened, as if I’d dreamed the whole pregnancy and birth. It was awful. I waited until I felt well enough, then I packed my suitcase and left via the window.” She glowered at him. “Ground floor this time. I wrote to my mother two or three times, and after that I wrote every Christmas and for her birthday. But she didn’t answer a single one of my letters, and I never saw her again. I found the paper with your name on it in her safe when I went back for the reading of the will. End of story.”
“It all sounds so feudal,” Cal said.
“So you don’t believe me.”
“I didn’t say that, Marnie.”
“You’re thinking it.”
“You’ve got to admit it’s an incredible story,” he said, frowning.
Marnie’s mind made an intuitive leap. “You think I’ve invented all this—straight out of a gothic romance—to cover up my guilt for abandoning my baby.”
“Dammit, I don’t! I don’t know what I think.”
Aware of an immense weariness, Marnie said, “It doesn’t really matter, does it? The fact is, Kit was adopted, your wife died, and it’s in Kit’s best interests that I stay out of the picture.”
“The fact is,” Cal said harshly, “that I don’t want you out of the picture. My picture. Despite Kit. Despite common sense and logic and caution. Explain that to me, why don’t you? Is that another scene from a gothic romance? I hardly think so.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t know what—”
“Don’t you, Marnie? Come on, tell the truth.”
Her heart was beating in thick, heavy strokes. “No, I don’t,” she said with a defiant toss of her head.
“Then let me show you.”
Cal’s footsteps crunched in the shale. His eyes blazing with an emotion she couldn’t possibly have categorized, he took her by the shoulders and bent his head. A wave collapsed on the beach in a rattle of stones. The tide’s coming up, we should get out of here, Marnie thought foolishly, and felt the first touch of his mouth to hers.
His fingers were digging into her flesh, his lips a hard pressure. Rigid in his embrace, she felt a shudder run through his body. Then gradually his kiss changed, questioning rather than demanding, and his hands left her shoulders, smoothing the rise of her throat and tangling themselves in her hair. Beneath her closed lids, the sun blazed orange.
As abruptly as he’d drawn her to him, Cal pushed her away. Marnie’s eyes flew open as he said in a staccato voice, “I shouldn’t have done that. Kissing you—Kit’s mother—it’s the stupidest move I could make.”
Marnie asked baldly, “Are you involved with anyone?”
“Are you kidding? In a town the size of Burnham with a twelve-year-old girl in the house? I haven’t slept with anyone since my wife died, and why the devil am I telling you something wild horses normally wouldn’t drag out of me?”
“I’ve had exactly one sexual experience in thirty years and that was with Terry.”
In sheer disbelief, Cal rasped, “Come off it, Marnie. You don’t have to lie to me.”
And quite suddenly, Marnie had had enough. The gamut of emotions she’d experienced ever since she’d bumped into a black-haired man in a parking lot in the middle of a thunderstorm now coalesced into pure rage. “I’m sick to death of your disbelieving every word I say!” she cried, wrenching free of him. “Let me tell you something, Cal Huntingdon. You think I’d jump in the sack with another man after what happened to me? For nine months I carried my child. That may not sound very long to you because you’ve had her for almost thirteen years. But to me that was a lifetime. Sure, I was terrified of being found out, and no, I had no idea what I was going to do or whom to turn to. It didn’t matter. I loved being pregnant. I felt fiercely protective of my baby and I knew I was going to be the best mother in the whole world.”
She realized through a haze of anger and pain that tears were streaming down her cheeks. Furious with herself for crying, she let her words tumble over each other. “And then she was taken from me. I never saw her. I had no way of tracing her or getting her back. I’ve never even known if she was loved.” Her voice broke. “How do you think that felt? I’ve lived with that loss for years, and if you think I was going to risk anything so terrible happening to me again just for the sake of a roll in the hay, you’re out of your tree. And I’m not crying!”
“Marnie—”
“Go away! Leave me alone. I wish I’d never met you,” she choked, and swiped at her wet cheeks with the back of her hand.
“It’s too late for that,” Cal said. “Marnie, don’t you see? The story you told me about Kit’s birth…the first time, you recited it like something you were reading out of a book, something that never happened to you, and frankly, I found it pretty hard to swallow. But this time, I really heard it. I’ve seen what it did to you.”
“You mean you believe me?”
He hesitated. “I’m a lot closer to believing you than I was before.”
“Gee thanks—you’re all heart.”
“For Pete’s sake,” he said forcefully, “the past twenty-four hours have thrown me right out of whack. Meeting you in a thunderstorm, your resemblance to Kit, the way I’m pulled to you—I feel like a boxer at the end of the tenth round.”
Marnie could relate to this. Again Cal hesitated. “Losing Kit like that, it must have been very difficult—”
“Don’t pity me, Cal.”
“I’m trying to understand.” He gave her a crooked smile. “I wish I’d seen you climbing down the Virginia creeper.”
Her breath caught in an undignified hiccup. She said irritably, “I was not wearing a frilly white nightgown. Anyway, gothic heroines have long, raven black hair. That sure lets me out.”
Cal said quietly, “You’ve got hair the color of fire instead.”
Had a man ever looked at her quite the way Cal was looking at her now? “You mustn’t talk to me like that,” she cried.
“I keep telling you I can’t help myself!”
Her shoulders slumped. “This has to be the craziest conversation I’ve ever had in my life,” she whispered. “Cal, you’re going to drive me back to Burnham right now so I can pick up Christine’s car, and then I’m going home. To Faulkner Beach. And I swear, this time I’ll stay away from Burnham. I mean it.”
“I don’t want you to,” he burst out. Raking his fingers through his hair, he added in total frustration, “But I haven’t got any choice, have I? My first responsibility has to be to Kit. I’m all the security she has. She’s so confused, so different from the happy kid she used to be. I’m sure I’m right in keeping you from her. I’ve got to be. I can’t risk making things any worse than they are.”
“She has to come first,” Marnie agreed, and found herself smoothing the lines in his cheek, feeling the slight rasp of his beard beneath her fingertips with a primitive thrill of pleasure that made nonsense of her words. She added with patent honesty, “It won’t be as difficult as I thought for me not to see her again…because I know now that she has a good father. One who really loves her.”
Cal’s face convulsed with emotion; Marnie’s throat tightened as she saw a sheen of tears glitter in his own eyes. He said huskily, “So you’re generous as well as honest. Thanks, Marnie.”
“If I’m honest,” she said, “I have to tell you I can’t take much more of this. I’m exhausted. Drive me back, Cal, please?”
“Yeah…we’d better get out of here.” His eyes roamed her face, where the strain of the past couple of hours was only too visible. With an inarticulate groan, he took Marnie in his arms, lowering his head. His lips were warm and by no means as sure of themselves as Marnie might have expected. They spoke to her of a side of him he hadn’t put into words, a gentler side that bypassed all her defenses and all the reasons she shouldn’t be doing this.
His mouth lingered on hers. Then he explored her cheekbones and her closed lids, his hands stroking her arms from wrist to shoulder. She heard him mutter something against her throat; then once again he kissed her on the lips. A slow heat spread from her belly to her limbs as though the sun were rising within her, bright and warm and beautiful. Her body swayed toward him, her palms pressing to his chest.
She could feel his heart thudding as though he’d run the length of the beach. His kiss deepened, and like a spring flower, Marnie opened to him, exulting in the astonishing intimacy of his tongue on hers. It was like nothing she’d ever felt before, nothing she could possibly have imagined. It was like coming home, she thought, where home was both safety and the wildest of adventures. Her hands slid up the hard, muscled wall of his chest, and linked themselves around his neck, brushing the unexpected silkiness of his hair. As she made a small sound of delight, Cal drew back, his eyes wandering over her dazed features and brilliant sea blue irises. “You’re so beautiful you take my breath away,” he said thickly, then pulled her the length of his body so they stood hip to hip.
His arousal both excited and terrified her. “Cal, I—”
“Don’t tell me you don’t want me—I know you do.”
“But I’m not—”
Again he closed her lips with his own, his hands traveling the long curve of her spine and the rise of her hips. In a sunburst of longing, Marnie forgot about caution and restraint, those two words that had kept her armored against men ever since Kit was born, and kissed him back with a passionate abandon that made him groan deep in his throat.
Finally, Cal raised his head. His eyes boring into hers, he said roughly, “There’s got to be a way out of this, Marnie. I can’t just say goodbye to you today, turn my back on you as if you don’t exist. I haven’t been to bed with anyone since Jennifer died, I told you that. You’re the only woman who’s made me want to change my mind.” He clasped her by the elbows. “You live fifty miles away—that’s a safe enough distance. No reason we couldn’t have an affair. If it’s been thirteen years since you’ve made love with anyone, you’re long overdue. And I know I am.”
Marnie stood very still and of all the emotions churning in her belly couldn’t have said which was uppermost. Desire? Fury? She said finally, “That would be so easy for you, wouldn’t it? Your daughter in Burnham and your mistress in Faulkner. Everything compartmentalized.”
“Easy? No. But I want you…and I need you as my mistress far more than Kit needs you as a mother.”
“No,” Marnie said.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean the opposite of yes,” she said vigorously. “I don’t want to have an affair with anyone. But especially not with you. Cal, you’re Kit’s father, for heaven’s sake!”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” he said sarcastically. “But that’s got nothing to do with what’s going on between us—you kissed me like there was no tomorrow.”
“Maybe I did. But a kiss is one thing, an affair quite another. I’m not a chess piece made out of ivory that you can move around a board. I’ve got feelings and a past. Spend a couple of hours a week in bed with you and then the rest of the week pretend you and Kit don’t exist? Forget it.”
“You told me you didn’t like to play it safe.”
“You’re asking me to jump in the deep end of the pool when I can’t swim!”
“Sometimes that’s the only way to learn!”
“Not for me. The answer’s no, Cal, and now would you please drive me back to Burnham?”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“An affair would be the mistake.”
His face, she saw distantly, had closed against her, his eyes like stones. “Fine,” Cal said, then carefully walked around her to climb the bank. As they got in the Cherokee, he said coldly, “You’d better put on your hat and dark glasses.”
As the vehicle jounced through the potholes, Marnie jammed her curls under the brim of her hat and tied the cord ruthlessly tight under her chin. At least her dark glasses hid her from Cal as well as from everyone else in Burnham, she thought, and sat in total silence for the fifteen minutes it took to reach the street with the coffee shop.
Only then did Cal speak. “If you ever need to get in touch with me, I’m head of the university engineering department.”
The engineering school at Burnham had one of the finest reputations in the country. So she hadn’t been wrong to sense Cal’s aura of power. “There’s no need for us to keep in touch,” she said. “It’s too risky.”
“I didn’t say we’d keep in touch. I meant if there was ever an emergency. Where’s your car?”
“It’s that white one.”
He pulled into the parking space ahead of Christine’s Pontiac and said flatly, “Take care of yourself, Marnie.”
“I will,” Marnie answered with a brittle smile, slid to the sidewalk and slammed the door. Blind to her surroundings, she walked out into the street to get in Christine’s car.
She’d lost Kit, found her and lost her again. Whereas Cal—a man different from any other she’d ever met—she’d merely found and lost.
All in less than twenty-four hours.
Dimly, Marnie heard a man yell something from the other side of the road; sunk in her own thoughts, she didn’t even bother looking up.
Then everything happened very fast.
The scream of rubber on pavement ripped through the quiet of the little side street. Someone seized her bodily and flung her into the space between the Pontiac and the Cherokee. She banged her hip, her elbow and her cheek on shiny dark green paint. Metal rasped on concrete so close Marnie squeezed her eyes shut; there was a loud clang, followed by several seconds of eerie silence.
“Stay here!” Cal ordered.
Her eyes flew open as he leaped from between the vehicles onto the sidewalk. Slowly, she straightened. So it was Cal who’d grabbed her and thrown her against the Cherokee.
A small blue truck was angled halfway across the sidewalk beyond Christine’s car. Its hood was wrapped around a metal pole, which explained the clang. Black skid marks scored the pavement; they’d come within two feet of where she’d been standing.
No wonder Cal had reacted with such speed and violence.
As if it were happening a long way away, Marnie saw Cal open the door of the blue truck and help the driver out: a man in his fifties who was sputtering incoherently about wheels locking and lost steering.
Lost.
Marnie stayed where she was. She hadn’t had the time to be frightened beforehand; now she wiped her damp palms down the sides of her jeans and felt her heartbeat racketing in her chest. A police car arrived on the scene. Cal spoke briefly to the officer, then strode back to her. He grasped her by the shoulders. “You okay? Sorry I was so rough, but for the space of five seconds I thought he was going to run you down.”
“You sure move fast,” Marnie said, rubbing her sore elbow.
He gave her a wolfish grin. “There are some situations where you act first and worry about the consequences afterward.”
She gazed at him speculatively. She’d learned a lot about Cal in those few moments. Decisiveness, lightning-swift reflexes, a total disregard for his own safety—he’d displayed them all. And he was still blazing with an energy he was unable to tamp down. “Did it occur to you that he could’ve hit you?” she asked in a neutral voice.
“Nope.”
She added thoughtfully, “What do you do for excitement, Cal?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re an engineer, a widower, the father of a twelve-year-old. But there’s a lot more to you than that.”
“Come off it, Marnie. Anyone else would have shoved you out of the way.”
Others might have tried, but Marnie rather doubted they would have succeeded with as much efficiency and panache as Cal. “You mentioned something about Third-World guerrillas yesterday—is that where you got your tan?”
“Kit and I went sailing in Tortola on the March break,” he answered impatiently. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“In other words, mind your own business, Marnie Carstairs.”
“Brains as well as beauty,” he said with another of those fierce grins.
But Marnie was quite unable to get angry with him. She said soberly, “Thanks, Cal. You took a terrible risk there.”
“Not really. He didn’t even touch your friend’s car.”
“You as good as saved my life,” Marnie said stubbornly.
“You’re sure you’re all right to drive?”
He wanted to be rid of her; that was the message. If he couldn’t take her to bed, he didn’t want her at all. Her heart like a boulder in her chest, she said steadfastly, “Yes, I’m okay. Goodbye, Cal.” Then she got in Christine’s car and drove away from the flashing lights on the police cruiser, from the small crowd that had gathered, and from Cal, who’d risked his life for her and who wanted a tidy, long-distance affair with her.
The whole way home, Marnie forced her attention to her driving, determined not to think about Kit, whom she’d seen so briefly and inconclusively, or to replay all the complexities of the episode with Cal at the picnic table. What had happened there had broken every one of her self-imposed rules. She’d talked about Kit’s birth. She’d allowed a man past her defenses.
Bad moves, both of them. Yet had she had a choice?