Coming Home (Jackson Falls Series) Page 11

  But the babe in the black dress had him intrigued. She was tall and elegant, strikingly understated in pearls and a simple black number that had probably set her back half a grand. Her sleek blond hair fell past those elegant shoulders, and her makeup was subtle and artfully applied. Probably pushing forty, she looked about twenty-seven. And she’d been watching him ever since Emile had seated her.

  He refilled her water glass, and she studied him, sharp eyes missing nothing, including the gold ring on his finger. “Hello, gorgeous,” she purred. “What’s your name?”

  “Sigmund,” he said dryly. “Sigmund Freud.”

  Their eyes met, and he felt that tiny flash of recognition, that acknowledgment that they found each other sexually attractive. Ancient and rusty instincts creaked to life inside him. In a previous lifetime, he’d spent many an hour dallying with women such as this one. It had been one hell of a turn-on, back in those days, the way women looked at him, the way they touched him, and as often as not, he’d been the aggressor. The challenge of the pursuit, the inevitable acquiescence of the woman, had been as exciting to him as the sex itself.

  And then he’d met Casey, and he’d been transformed overnight into that most foreign of creatures, the monogamous male. Not that he was dead. He still looked at women, still found them attractive. But that was as far as it ever went, because he was a married man, crazy in love with his wife, and in four years of marriage, he’d been unfailingly faithful.

  The woman laid a manicured hand on his sleeve. “I’m from out of town,” she said, “and I don’t know anybody in New York.” Those slender fingers worked their way up his arm to his bicep. “I bet you could show me a few of the local hot spots.”

  “I’m married,” he said.

  “So? Why should we let a little thing like that stop us?”

  “I’m afraid that my wife would take a dim view of that philosophy.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I imagine she would. Not that I blame her. If you belonged to me, I’d keep you locked up.”

  Emile was watching him with narrowed eyes. Pretending he had an urgent errand in the kitchen, Danny swung through the doors and out of Emile’s sight. He set down the water pitcher and kept going, out the back door and into the alley beyond.

  He lit a cigarette and leaned against the building. It was a clear, cool night, and between skyscrapers he caught a glimpse of starlight, something as rare in New York as faithful husbands. It was the first time in four years of marriage that he’d actually been tempted, and the urge took him by surprise. So did the guilt that assailed him, guilt that was totally unwarranted. No court in the land would convict him on the basis of a few moments of libidinous fantasizing.

  He finished the cigarette. Tossing the butt on the ground, he went back to the dining room and busied himself clearing dirty dishes from a table where two middle-aged couples had just finished dissecting the newest Broadway show. Picking up the tray, he swung away from the table, and nearly collided with the blonde.

  Her eyes were brown, and she was just a few inches short of his six-four. In her hand, she held a folded greenback.

  “This,” she said, tucking it into his hip pocket, “is for you.” Her hand lingered, and through black cotton he could feel her heat. She sashayed back across the dining room in that tight black dress, pausing in the doorway to look back at him, and sweat pooled beneath his arms.

  He carried the tray to the kitchen and turned it over to Rory, the dishwasher. Behind Rory’s back, he reached into his pocket and withdrew the bill and something else, something solid. Heart thumping, he unfolded the hundred-dollar bill and gawked at the room key she’d tucked inside.

  Jesus Christ Almighty.

  For four hours, that greenback burned a hole in his pocket. There was no way he could keep her money and retain a shred of pride. He thought about leaving the whole kit and caboodle in an envelope at the front desk, but could imagine the raised eyebrows if he handed the desk clerk a room key and a C note and asked him to give them to the anonymous lady in Room 508. His wife, who worked the morning shift, would hear about it before breakfast tomorrow.

  There was only one thing he could do. He was going to have to return the damn money in person.

  When his shift ended, he took the back elevator to the fifth floor, avoiding the lobby and any chance of being recognized. When the elevator doors whispered open, he looked right and left before stepping out. If he got caught up here, his ass would be in a sling.

  It was past eleven, and his footsteps fell silently, muffled by the plush carpeting. Behind closed doors, he heard hushed conversation, an occasional burst of laughter, the drone of a television. He stopped before the door to her room, feeling like he was about to face his own execution. Knocked briskly, then waited, hands in his pockets, rehearsing what he would say. I believe I have something that belongs to you. Cool and sophisticated, with just the right amount of charm. He would let her down easy. He’d always been good at turning women down without making it seem like a rejection. Inside his pocket, he turned the key over and over in his hand, traced its jagged edge with his thumb.

  He heard her fumbling with the lock, and he closed his fist over the key as the door swung inward. Opened his mouth to speak, and the words died in his throat. She wore a filmy, diaphanous nightgown that didn’t even attempt to hide the slender hips and the firm, high breasts beneath. As the husband in him warred with the man who’d resided there longer, the key in his hand sliced through tender flesh and drew blood. “Hello, lover,” she said. “I’ve been waiting.”

  And Daniel Fiore the man stepped through the door, leaving Daniel Fiore the husband outside in the hall.

  ***

  At this time of night, he could almost think of this dump as home. Darkness went a long way toward making it tolerable. So did the fact that Freddie Wong had recently broken down and paid for an exterminator. The night sounds of the city drifted through the open window and mingled with Rob’s soft snoring. Casey had left the night light on for him in the kitchen. The clock read 2:10, and he wondered if she was asleep.

  Sweet, suffering Jesus. How the hell was he going to face Casey?

  He hadn’t meant for it to happen. There’d been nothing meaningful about the act. It had been brief and hard and violent, undiluted by emotion, the slaking of pure animal drives. When it was over, the woman lay trembling on the carpet, one slender arm thrown across her face, and he lay looking at her, chest heaving, not sure which of them he was more disgusted with. He’d gone into her bathroom and washed himself and made an attempt to straighten his clothes. When he returned, she was slumped against the foot of the bed, still naked, a lit cigarette in her hand.

  “Wow,” she said.

  He had pulled the hundred from his pocket and held it out toward her and released it. It fluttered slowly to the carpet, and those elegant eyebrows lifted in puzzlement. “What’s this?” she said.

  “I may be a son of a bitch,” he said, “but I’m not a whore.”

  He’d hit the nearest bar and pounded down Budweisers until he ran out of money and excuses. How the hell could he explain to Casey why he’d been unfaithful when he didn’t understand it himself? Casey thought he’d hung the moon. If she ever found out what he’d done, she would leave him.

  She would leave him.

  He stumbled in the darkness to the bathroom and locked the door and vomited. The booze didn’t feel much different coming up than it had going down. He flushed the toilet and turned on the shower and stripped.

  There was a soft knock on the door. “Danny?”

  Every muscle in his body went on alert. “I’m taking a shower,” he said.

  Was it something in his voice that made her hesitate? “It’s late,” she said through the door. “I expected you hours ago.”

  He wet his lips. “I stopped off for a few drinks before I came home.” It was the truth. Just not all of it.

  She hesitated again. “Is everything all right?”

  “I’m a litt
le hammered, that’s all. Go on back to bed. I’ll be along in a few minutes.”

  His trusting wife did what he asked, leaving him feeling like a life form lower than raw sewage. He adjusted the water temperature to scalding and scrubbed himself violently in an attempt to remove the smell, the taste, the memory of the woman from his body. When he was done, he stood wet and naked in front of the lavatory and brushed his teeth until his gums bled, wanting to hurt, to punish himself for betraying her trust. He caught sight of himself in the mirror and turned away in disgust, unable to face the accusation in his own eyes.

  By the time he crawled into bed, Casey had gone back to sleep. He lay stiff as a California redwood, feeling sullied and dirty, afraid that if he touched her, some of that dirt would rub off. Still asleep, she found him, pressing soft, round breasts close against his back, her damp heat radiating outward, into and through his resistant body. The coppery taste of fear flooded his mouth, a fear not unlike that he’d known in Nam. Then, it had been fear of death. Now, it was fear that he would lose this woman, and as a result, he would cease to exist.

  In the end, wasn’t it the same thing?

  ***

  It was raining outside the coffee shop, a driving rain that gushed in the gutters and flooded the storm drains. Cars passed with headlights on, their illumination bouncing off gleaming surfaces, while businessmen and secretaries scurried, huddling beneath umbrellas, sidestepping puddles.

  Danny looked like hell this morning. Of course, Rob mused as he sipped his coffee, even hell was relative. In spite of the rainslicked hair, the bloodshot eyes he’d hidden behind mirrored sunglasses and the whisker stubble he hadn’t bothered to hide, Danny still looked better than Rob had ever looked in his twenty-four years. He wondered what it would be like to be blessed with the face and the physique of a Greek god, but he didn’t expect to ever know.

  When Danny had offered to spring for coffee and bagels, he hadn’t given it a second thought. They often had breakfast together when Casey was working the early shift. Their hectic schedules usually overlapped, so when they could grab a few minutes together, they did. It helped keep the lines of communication open. But this morning, there was zero communication. Danny had paid for their breakfast and then sat staring out the window, and it was his silence that told Rob something was eating at him.

  He took a sip of coffee. “How’d it go?” he asked.

  Danny looked at him blankly. “The studio gig?” he prompted. “Backup vocals? Ring a bell yet?”

  Danny ran a hand through his wet hair. “It went fine,” he said. “I appreciate you giving them my name.” He broke off a portion of his bagel and concentrated on covering it with orange marmalade.

  Rob rapped his knuckles on the table top. “Okay, Fiore,” he said, “what’s eating you? You’re acting like your favorite dog just got run over by a sanitation truck.”

  Danny set down his knife and looked at him. “Three nights ago,” he said, “I cheated on my wife.”

  It took a moment for the meaning of his words to sink in, and even then, Rob thought he was joking. “Right,” he said. “And I’m the Prince of Wales.”

  Danny continued as though he hadn’t heard. “I made it with some blond bimbo upstairs at the Montpelier.”

  He realized then that Danny wasn’t kidding. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  Danny looked at his bagel. “I didn’t mean to do it,” he said. “I’m still not sure how it happened.”

  Rob’s stomach had gone sour. “Maybe I should draw you a picture,” he said. “Listen, Dan, I really don’t think I want to hear this.”

  “You’re my goddamn best friend! Who the hell else can I tell?”

  “What the hell do you want from me? Absolution?”

  “I love her, Wiz. I don’t know what to do.”

  Rob shredded a piece of bagel. “You should have thought of that a little sooner.”

  “If I don’t tell her,” Danny said, “I’ll be lying, and that compounds my sin. If I do tell her, she’ll throw me out.”

  Rob leaned over the table. “If you tell her, Fiore, I’ll drag you down to the bus station and shove your head in the toilet and hold it there until you stop kicking.”

  “I’m glad,” Danny said dryly, “that we’ve clarified whose side you’re on.”

  “What do you expect? That woman worships the ground you walk on.”

  “She’ll know anyway,” Danny said. “Even if I don’t tell her, she’ll know.”

  “How the hell will she know if you don’t tell her?”

  “Be serious, MacKenzie. This is my wife we’re talking about. Casey knows everything. She knows it by fucking osmosis!” They glared at each other, but he didn’t dispute Danny’s claim, because it was the truth. “She’s too good for me,” Danny said. “I don’t deserve her.”

  “No, Dan,” he said, “you don’t.”

  Something irreplaceable was slipping away from him. He’d always been slightly in awe of Danny Fiore, had always seen him as larger than life. But today, in a single instant, Danny had become bloodily, maddeningly human, and his sudden transformation shattered every one of Rob MacKenzie’s illusions.

  He cleared his throat. “I thought you and Casey were okay.” He’d never seen so much as a ripple on the surface of their relationship. If there’d been any problem, he of all people should have noticed.

  “So did I. Christ, Wiz, what am I going to do?”

  “What you’re going to do is forget this ever happened. For some unfathomable reason, she loves you. If you tell her what you did, it’ll kill her. And then I’ll kill you.”

  Danny looked at him silently. “Are you in love with my wife?” he finally said.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” Rob buried his face in his hands. “No!” he snapped. “Are you?”

  “You know damn well I am!”

  “Then stop acting like a nineteen-year-old stud. Keep it in your pants, for Christ’s sake!”

  “It wasn’t like that. I didn’t come on to her. It was her game all the way.”

  “There’s a word you need to learn, Fiore: no.”

  Danny looked at him in disgust. “Why did I bother to confide in you?”

  “Because I’m your goddamn best friend, that’s why!”

  “Yeah,” Danny said softly, “you are.”

  And there it was, the truth of it, laid out on the table between them. “Fiore,” he said miserably, “you’re a real shit.”

  Danny saluted him with his coffee cup. “I’m glad to see,” he said dryly, “that we agree on something.”

  chapter eleven

  Something was rotten in Denmark.

  She’d lived with Danny for four years, and Casey knew his moods, knew his quicksilver lights and darks, as well as any woman could know a man. Something was troubling him. She could feel it in the unspoken messages that leaped between them when they touched, could see it in his remoteness, could sense it in the purple aura he’d surrounded himself with. Something was terribly wrong, something that manifested itself in bizarre behaviors like his sudden coolness towards Rob. And his sudden rejection of her.

  Their relationship had always been intensely physical, and to be abruptly cut off with no explanation was, to put it mildly, mystifying. He went out of his way to avoid intimacy. He’d begun locking the bathroom door. Sleeping in an old pair of sweat pants. Erecting walls where there had been none. And she wondered, frantically, if he were having an affair.

  But it didn’t add up. His body still responded to her touch. Asleep, he still held her in his arms. The chemistry was still there between them, strong as ever. Danny hadn’t fallen out of love with her. Something else was wrong, something she hadn’t yet figured out.

  But Rob knew.

  She recognized it with the same certainty. After all, she’d known Rob for those same four years. Both men were hiding something from her, and that explained the coolness between them. Danny was in some kind of trouble, and Rob knew about it. And he wasn’t happy abou
t the knowing.

  She cornered him one afternoon in the kitchen. He was bent over the sink, shirtless, spray nozzle in hand, his vertebrae standing out in stark relief beneath his skin. “Let me do that,” she said, and took the sprayer from him. She poured shampoo into her hand and began working it through his hair. She’d never washed a man’s hair before, and it was a surprisingly sensual experience. Rob had beautiful hair, thick and wavy and full of body, and she massaged it with gentle fingertips until she’d worked up a rich lather. “Watch your eyes,” she said, adjusting the water temperature.

  “Jesus, woman,” he said, “be careful. You’ll drown me.”

  “If I drowned you, who would I eat fudge ripple ice cream with at three in the morning?” She worked her way slowly through his mop of hair until the soap was rinsed out, then poured a dollop of conditioner into her palm. “Brace yourself,” she said, “this is cold.” She plunged her hands back into his hair and worked the conditioner, strand by strand, from the roots down to the tips. Casually, she said, “I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what’s wrong with Danny?”

  He hesitated for just a moment too long. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Oh, Rob,” she said, disappointed. “Don’t lie to me. You of all people.”

  His silence was eloquent.

  “He’s hardly spoken a civil word to you in weeks,” she said. Sprayer in hand, she combed her fingers through his curls to remove the conditioner. “He’s so remote,” she added, “it’s like he’s living on another planet. And he hasn’t—I mean, we haven’t—” She floundered, uncertain of the propriety of discussing her sex life with him.

  But he saved her. “I think I get the picture, kiddo,” he said. “Gimme a towel.”

  She watched him dry his hair. Rob wasn’t an unattractive man. He had well-developed biceps and a dark triangle of hair on his chest that some women would find quite sexy. He just needed to fill out, to get some meat on his bones. She’d spent the better part of two years trying to fatten him up, but he was still lanky as an old mule.