Blood Vines

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Friday, March 12

7:04 A.M.

Sunlight spilled across the bed. Alex opened her eyes. It all came crashing back. Reed. The night before. The things he had said about her mother. The way they had hurt. Their desperate lovemaking.

She moaned.

“Morning, sleepyhead.”

Alex shifted her gaze. Reed stood at the door to the bathroom. He wore his jeans and a towel looped around his neck. His hair was wet. “I took a shower, I hope you don’t mind?”

She told him she didn’t, watching as he toweled his hair, then disappeared into the bathroom, emerging a moment later without the towel.

She sat up, pulling the blanket to her chin. “What time is it?”

“Just after seven. I’ve got to hit the road.”

“I’ll make coffee.” She moved to climb out of bed.

“Stay put. I’ll grab a cup on my way.” He crossed to the bed, retrieving his shirt from the floor on the way. He pulled it over his head, then grinned down at her. “The drive’ll be a lot more pleasant imagining you here and naked.”

“It’d be a lot more pleasant here, if you’d call in sick and climb back in bed.”

“Wish I could.”

“Prove it.”

“Is that a challenge?”

She let the blanket slip away, revealing her naked torso. “You tell me.”

He bent and kissed her, softly at first, then deeply. Alex arched up to meet him, rubbing, hungry. Desperate.

She didn’t want to be alone.

He caught her hand and brought it to him. “See?” he murmured against her mouth. “I really do wish I could stay.”

“So, stay.”

He groaned and set her away from him. “Can’t. Sorry.”

“No problem. Your loss.” She tossed aside the covers and climbed naked out of bed. She stretched, then slipped by him on her way to the bathroom. She stopped in the doorway and looked over her shoulder at him. The view was having an obvious effect on him. “Be careful out there, Detective”-she lowered her eyes-“you’ve got a loaded weapon.”

He grinned. “I know what you’re doing, Alex.”

“Really? And what’s that?”

“Putting off the inevitable.”

“The inevitable?”

“Dealing with what I told you last night. About your mother.”

He was right, dammit. Not that she was about to let him know that. “First off, take a little more credit. A girl doesn’t need an excuse to want to have sex with you. Secondly, there’s nothing to deal with.” She tipped up her chin. “Because it’s not true.”

He studied her a long moment. To his credit, she didn’t read pity in his expression. “It all makes sense now, Alex. Her guilt. Her self-hatred. The way she hid the past from you.”

It did make sense. She hated that it did. “You don’t get it. She was my mother. Not perfect. Not even close. But she was mine, the only one I’m ever going to have.”

“Yeah, I get that, Alex. And I’m sorry. But all that doesn’t change what’s true.”

A knot of tears settled in her throat. “Not buying it.”

But she was. She knew it-and so did he, she could tell by his expression.

“Are you going to be okay?”

“I’m fine. You don’t have to worry about me.”

He nodded, started toward the bedroom door, then stopped. “Can I call you later?”

“If you want to.”

He didn’t respond and a moment later she heard the front door snap shut.

Alex used the bathroom, then crawled back into bed. She propped the pillows up behind her, leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. A long, thin crack ran from the room’s far right corner to the center light fixture.

She gazed at the imperfection. How had he known? How had he seen so easily through her? She had wanted him to stay so she wouldn’t be alone with her thoughts. To put off the inevitable, just the way he had said.

No putting it off now, she thought. No distractions. Just her, the things Reed had said about her mother, and the way those things made her feel.

Alex plucked at the blanket. Her mother had seduced her friends’ sons. Seduced? That was too nice a word for what Reed had described. Too soft.

Her mother had fucked them. She had fucked them individually and in a group. She had stolen their innocence. Initiated them into sex in a way that was perverse. Twisted and sick.

And she had lied to everyone: her husband, friends, her own daughter. Alex curved her arms around her middle. She’d been an adulteress. A user and a liar. Morally corrupt.

Tears flooded her eyes and she fought them off, angry. What did that make her? She had asked Reed that question, lashing out in pain. But it was true. Who was her dad? Some guy her mother screwed? A one-night stand? Hell, maybe some pimply-face teenager who hadn’t known any better.

What did that make her? she wondered again. She thought back on her life, on the number of guys she had been with, how for a time she had turned to sex for answers. To everything. Boredom, anger, rebellion, powerlessness.

Is that what her mother had been doing? Looking for answers? Filling up the empty places? Had she finally recognized how self-destructive that behavior was, the way Alex had?

Alex looked down at her hands, feeling helpless and disingenuous. If she’d learned so much, what was she doing sleeping with Reed? They didn’t have a relationship, they barely knew one another. Hell, she’d gone to bed with him when a handshake would have been appropriate.

No wonder he could so easily accept the story about her mother.

Alex realized she was crying and fisted her fingers. Why did her mother even have her? Alex wondered. Why have one baby, then another? It didn’t make sense.

Angry, she swiped at her tears. She wished she hadn’t come here. She wished she had never found the trunk with all its bittersweet mementos, never seen the photograph of her mother beaming as she held Dylan in her arms. Smiling with adoration at her husband. Looking for all the world like the perfectly content wife and mother.

Perfectly content. In love. Adoring of her husband and baby.

She couldn’t have faked that, Alex thought. Even the most accomplished actress couldn’t fake it one hundred percent of the time. Not in candid shots. The camera didn’t lie.

Candid photographs.

Lyla Reed, she remembered. The wine launch party. On the walls of “the trophy room,” as Reed had called it. His mother, offering her the opportunity to thumb through the family photo albums.

Alex wondered if that offer was still good. Acknowledging there was only one way to find out, she climbed out of bed and hurried to dress.