Tempting Fate

Sixteen

Mattie sat in the window seat on the train, Nick dozing beside her. The peaceful, scenic ride along the Hudson River had always brought her comfort. Looking at her former husband, she ached for him, for he did indeed look every second of his ninety years. The physical signs of age didn’t sadden her-the thinning white hair, the protruding veins, the brown spots, the wrinkles and sags-as much as the knowledge that he wasn’t always going to be around. Likely enough, the bold, charming man who’d captivated her on the Cumberland River more than sixty years ago would die before she did.

And she wasn’t ready. She’d never be ready.

He stirred. “What’re you staring at?” he asked, sounding cranky.

“You. How long has it been since I told you I love you?”

“Decades.”

She smiled. “Well, I do, you know. I always have.”

“Fine way of showing it.” But he patted her hand. “I’m cold as a fish. Circulation stinks.” He sighed and settled into his seat, hardly moving. He seemed utterly spent after his long-and so far insufficiently explained-cross-country flight. “Don’t you wish we had the sense fifty years ago that we have now?”

“What makes you think we have any more sense now? Nick, you haven’t changed. If you had the energy, you’d still be chasing women.”

“No.” His watery eyes fastened on her, as searching and intense as they’d been when she’d stood with her valise on the riverbank so long ago, aching for him to take her with him. “I’d know I had the only woman I ever wanted, and fidelity wasn’t too great a price to pay for her.”

Mattie was touched. Nick had never been particularly sentimental. “Oh, Nick, we’ve had a life together the only way we could. We were never meant to live all this time together under the same roof. It never would have worked. If you hadn’t been anyone but who you are, I doubt I’d have kept you a part of my life all this time. And, you know, it wasn’t all you.”

“You don’t say.”

But Mattie was serious. “If you hadn’t gambled and chased women, I’d have picked something else to gripe about, because I was meant to live on my own the way I have. I went from my father’s house to yours…it was important to me to have a house of my own.”

Nick nodded, but she wasn’t sure, in his exhaustion, he’d absorbed all she’d said. “Have you been happy?”

“For the most part, yes. Very much. I’ve come to rather enjoy being a screen legend of sorts. It would be ungrateful of me to complain.”

She held his hand; it was, indeed, awfully cold. She remembered well how warm he’d been in bed. They’d made love since their divorce. Even since his affair with her sister. Not often, but they’d accepted long ago that whatever bond existed between them-however else anyone might define or judge it-it was one that suited them, and would endure.

“And you, Nick?” she asked. “Have you been happy?”

He averted his gaze. “I’ve had some grand times-no question of it. But at what cost? Mattie, Mattie.” He coughed, looking pale and beyond tired. “I’ve made so many mistakes. I have so many regrets. Too many.”

“Nick, don’t.”

“Oh, I know. I’ve done some memorable films. I don’t deny that’s important and satisfying. I’ve given some good times to people who needed a break from reality. But when it’s all done, Mattie, when you’re an old man and the Great Beyond is beckoning, what’s any of that matter? I was-am-a poor father to my only son. My only grandchild doesn’t trust me, with good reason.”

Mattie hated to see her devil-may-care ex-husband so tortured. “But they both accept you. Nick, of course we have regrets. Those who don’t never stretched themselves, never took risks.”

He nodded, his eyes closed, the once-dark lashes almost nonexistent. “I’d planned a very different life for myself, Mattie,” he said in his sandpapery voice. “I didn’t expect to end up an old man living on the largesse of my granddaughter.”

“Now, don’t start being hard on yourself after all these years. You’re too old for that. You can’t change the past.”

“I should never have gone back to Cedar Springs.”

“Where would Naomi be if you hadn’t? At the bottom of the Cumberland River, likely enough. Would your staying away have stopped Joe Cutler from heading north to tell me my father was dying? Where does the blame begin-or stop? I can blame my father for my repressive childhood, but how did he become such a difficult man? We can keep digging into the past for explanations and excuses, even understanding. You could blame your flaws on a murdered, legendary grandfather who remained an elusive fantasy to you. You re-created him in two of your greatest films, made him both real and unreal. But Nick, ultimately we each have to take responsibility for our own choices and actions.”

He looked half-asleep, but instinctively Mattie knew he was listening. “Nick,” she went on softly, “if you’re going to assign blame, assign some to me as well. I can’t get off scot-free. If I’d never left home-”

His eyes opened. “You had no choice.”

“Of course I did. Darling, if that day we met on the Cumberland was meant, then so was the rest of it.”

“Joe Cutler and Lilli?”

Mattie sank back and stared out the window, the sun glittering on the wide, still Hudson. Joe had died in battle. Lilli-who knew? Still facing the window, she said, “You can’t think Joe was responsible for Lilli.”

Nick made no comment.

Her heart thumped, spreading pain through her chest; all she needed now was to drop dead of a heart attack. “Nick?”

“Someone knew about her role in Casino, Mattie. I was being blackmailed over it.”

Mattie felt as if she’d been stabbed. Turning to Nick, she saw he was deathly pale.

“I paid up to keep whoever it was quiet. Lilli couldn’t stand the thought of her family finding out about her role in one of my pictures-about her dream of becoming a movie star. Amazing, isn’t it? Hundreds of women would have done anything to get that role, and Lilli wanted to keep it secret, at least until she’d figured out if acting was really what she wanted in life. I guess when you think about it, hundreds of women would have liked to have been a Chandler heiress, too. The blackmail was amateurish-demands to have envelopes of cash left in Congress Park, that sort of thing. It just didn’t seem dangerous, or I’d have insisted we go to the police.”

“You never told me.”

“I didn’t think it was that significant.”

The train rocked slightly as it moved steadily north, and Mattie felt her stomach turn over as she realized she hadn’t been the only one with secrets. “Did you tell Lilli?”

“No. She had enough on her mind.”

“Do you think-could it have been Joe?”

Nick’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t know.”

Lilli had always been compassionate and generous, Mattie thought, if sometimes dangerously blind to other people’s faults. If she’d suspected Joe Cutler of blackmailing Nick, she’d have tried to help him-to save him from himself. He could simply have gotten in over his head, engaging in a harebrained blackmail scheme before he really got to know her. Mattie was sure his friendship with her daughter-in-law had been genuine.

Nick had closed his eyes, pretending to sleep. Mattie sat back, annoyed. From long years of experience she knew he was holding back on her. There was more he could tell her. She also knew, however, she couldn’t torture from Nicholas Ulysses Pembroke one word he didn’t want to tell her. Men, she thought, disgusted. They always spared women the wrong things. The truth she could handle. It was deceit she loathed.

But hadn’t she deceived her own granddaughter?

“I suppose it would be convenient to blame everything on Joe since he’s dead,” Mattie said, trying to control her impatience with Nick, with herself. “But would that account for why we’re on this train heading for Saratoga right now?”

Nick answered with a badly faked snore.

“If you weren’t so bloody old,” she said, “I’d give you a good kick.”

One eye opened. “You know, Matt, you always have been a hard-hearted old bat.”

“A good thing, or living with you would have killed me a half century ago.”

The train rocked and pressed on, and Nick settled back in his seat, and in a few more minutes his snores were no longer faked. Mattie sighed, wide awake. She wished she, too, could sleep. But that was impossible when all she could do-had done for the past few days-was to relive those days twenty-five years ago when she learned her father was dying and her daughter-in-law had disappeared.

“You got it bad, my friend.”

“Shut up, Sam.”

Sam grinned across from Zeke at a small table at a café on Broadway, drinking cappuccino. Zeke had ordered black coffee. “I only speak the truth.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“She’s only half Chandler,” Sam said.

“Half is enough.” We’re from different worlds, Joe had said about Sara Chandler. Zeke understood what he’d meant. “But that’s not even the point. Dani is a distraction I don’t need at the moment.”

“No doubt.”

“And she doesn’t trust me,” Zeke added quietly, almost to himself. “She doesn’t trust anyone right now but herself.”

“Can you blame her?”

Zeke checked his irritation, which was mostly with himself. After leaving Dani at Pembroke Springs, he’d worked hard to get his rage under control. What had Joe been doing in Saratoga four years after Lilli’s disappearance? Why hadn’t Zeke known? He was tangled up in a thousand threads with nothing to hold them together, nothing to make any sense or order out of them.

“Where is she now?” Sam asked.

“At the train station picking up Mattie and Nick.”

“Just what we need, a couple of old Hollywood types underfoot. Know why they’re here?”

“No,” Zeke said. He had to get himself back on an even keel. But finding Dani taking on Quint with a rock had thrown him off balance. And Ira. The poor guy had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Quint could have taken them both out without working up a sweat. Of course, Dani’s aim was pretty good…

Zeke pushed back his chair and stood up. “Quint’s staying in a rented house not far from here. I went by earlier, but he wasn’t home.”

“You leave a calling card?”

“I broke in and had a look around. He’ll know.”

Zeke had considered tossing the place, but he’d found bunk beds in one bedroom and dinosaur sheets in the linen closet. The owners probably thought they’d been fortunate to rent to a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.

“I’ll find him,” Sam said.

“Thanks.”

“What about John Pembroke?”

Zeke threw a few dollars onto the table in the sunny restaurant, its festive atmosphere so different from his own mood. “I think he’s relatively safe in the hospital. My bet is Quint took him out of the picture when he had the chance, or just didn’t want Pembroke to see him up at the springs.”

Sam’s eyes were hidden behind his sunglasses. “And Dani?”

“All my years in this business, Sam, and I’ve never met anyone-man or woman-so determined to get things done on her own, in her own way.”

“She’s a Pembroke. She courts disaster.”

“Yeah, well, she can wait until I’m back in San Diego fishing.”

Sam scooped up Zeke’s dollar bills. “Does that mean she’s on her own?”

“No,” Zeke said, “it does not.”

As he left he heard Sam laughing.

John felt like a little kid when his parents walked into his hospital room, both looking rumpled and exhausted. But nobody pretended they’d gone to all the trouble of getting to Saratoga just for his sake.

“You look awful,” Nick said.

“It’s all the dope they keep feeding me.”

Nick didn’t look convinced. Mattie kissed her only child on the forehead. He might have been nine, except his mother had never been one to hover. “How are you, darling?”

“Getting there.” He nodded to his father. “I thought you said the trip east would kill you.”

“Almost did.”

Mattie scowled at him. “You’re not ready for the glue factory yet, Nicholas Pembroke.” She straightened, effortlessly transforming herself from a solicitous mother into the independent, eccentric, tough woman who’d walked away from a stunningly successful Hollywood career. Her dark, still-beautiful eyes narrowed on her ex-husband. “Tell him, Nick. Tell him everything.”

Then she retreated to the waiting room, where Dani, discreet for once in her life, was keeping her distance.

Nick grumbled something about Mattie being more like her father than she’d ever admit.

“Tell me what?” John asked.

Sighing, Nick sat on the edge of his son’s bed and told him that he was being blackmailed over Lilli’s role in Casino when she disappeared.

John listened without interruption. It was just one more thing his wife and father had shared that he hadn’t. Shut up in his office in New York, trying to do the right thing, giving Lilli the space to pull herself out of her grief, John had been of no use to her or anyone else. Lilli must have thought him a bore who just didn’t give a damn about her. Nick, on the other hand, could never be faulted for lacking interest in a woman’s troubles.

But it was far, far too late to condemn Nick for being who he was, and there was time yet to go on condemning himself.

“Mattie knew?” he asked.

Nick grunted. “Not until I told her on the train.”

“I’m surprised she didn’t throw you off. Maybe she’s mellowing.”

“Don’t count on it. Next she’s going to make me tell Dani.”

John’s head vibrated with pain that zigzagged right down to his broken ribs. “She’s right, Nick.”

“I know it.” He coughed, a wet, sloppy cough the by-product of which ended up in John’s wastebasket. His father was clearly exhausted but insisted on getting to his feet. “There’s something I neglected to tell even Mattie-I’ll be damned if I know why. Not to spare her, for sure. I guess I just don’t know what to make of it myself.”

“What?” John prodded.

“Joe Cutler came to see me shortly before he was killed. He was on his way home via California and stopped in.”

“What for?”

His father’s eyes were watery, with spots of yellow clouding the whites, but utterly sane. “He wanted to know if I’d ever figured out who was blackmailing me.”

“You didn’t, did you?”

“Hell, I thought it was Joe.”

John sat up, pain shooting through him. “Nick-”

“But it wasn’t. And now I keep wondering if maybe he figured out who it was-or something. I don’t know.”

“I’ll talk to Zeke Cutler,” John said.

“Yeah. One other thing, John. There was never anything between me and Lilli. Not even a glimmer. I know it’s been on your mind. She treated me like a father-in-law.”

“Whom she adored and respected.”

“She came to me because she wanted to try something new-to stretch herself. That’s all. When she turned up missing, she hadn’t made up her mind, as far as I know, about what she was willing to sacrifice to realize her dreams. John-I swear, I just wanted to make her happy.”

John reached for his father’s bony hand. “I know, Pop. We all did.”

Dani flopped down onto a chair at the umbrella table in her cottage garden, kicked off her sneakers and put her feet up. Ira had reported that Pembroke security was on the alert; they’d already escorted several uninvited reporters off the premises.

She unscrewed the top off a bottle of lime-flavored mineral water she’d grabbed ice cold from her refrigerator. Nothing made any sense. Her mother, her father, Mattie, Nick, Joe Cutler, Zeke, movies, Tennessee, blackmail-how could she ever hope to put all the pieces together?

It was hot and sticky even in her garden. She rolled up the hem of her shorts, noticing the grass and dirt stains. She must look terrible. She ought to turn Magda loose on her.

Ira, semirecovered from his encounter with Quint Skinner in the woods, had insisted on greeting the two film legends like royalty when Dani arrived at the inn with Mattie and Nick. If Ira hadn’t had such a rotten day, he’d probably have drummed up a red carpet and a couple of crowns. As it was, he’d waltzed them off to the former ballroom-where Nick’s grandfather was so famously born-for a candlelight dinner and oohing and aahing by the guests.

Mattie and Nick pretended not to be fazed, but Dani wasn’t fooled. They loved every minute of the attention they received.

Nick had called her “urchin” when Dani had picked them up at the train station and acted as if she’d never yelled at him on the phone. Mattie had repressed her earlier hurt and decided Dani’s anger had been all to the good. “It’s wonderful that we can disagree and disappoint and still be friends. I never could with my father. We never even argued. When I told him I was going to California, he only said, ‘If you do, there’s no turning back. I’ll disown you.’ And he meant it.”

So even if all wasn’t forgiven, Dani and her grandparents accepted the reality of being stuck-and more often than not blessed-with each other for family.

None of which explained anything. The past and the present were intertwined, inseparable. Answers were elusive, she knew, if not nonexistent.

Zeke walked out of her kitchen onto the terrace carrying a tall glass of iced tea. He must have gotten in through the front. Dani hadn’t even heard him. “Iced tea’s probably a sacrilege around here,” he said, “but one more bottle of mineral water or natural soda and I’m likely to effervesce right into space.”

“How’d you get into my cottage? I’ve been locking my doors.”

“Locked doors are a specialty of mine.” He sat beside her, and she saw him take in her bare feet and everything else about her appearance. “I just left the inn. Your Pembroke grandparents are holding court, enjoying their decorative, healthy meal from what I could see.”

“They are a pair.”

“Imperfect but, to you, wonderful.”

She smiled. “My definition of a family. I’ve been pretty hard on them-”

“You’re hard on everybody,” Zeke said without condemnation. “Especially yourself.”

“If something had happened to either of them before I could make things right…” She shook her head and drank some of her flavored mineral water. “I don’t know.”

“They know how you feel. It’s obvious that you know they can do wrong and don’t care.” He looked at her, the lines at the corners of his eyes more prominent against the background of the increasingly gloomy sky. The air was pregnant with impending storms, heavy and still. “And you can’t make everything right, Dani. No one can.”

“I thought a white knight’s mission was to right all wrongs.”

He sipped his iced tea, looking distant. “I gave up on that a long time ago. Maybe when I started I wanted to make up for what Joe did-not just for my sake, but for his. What he became wasn’t what he was, Dani. I can’t explain. Anyway, I came to understand I can’t change the past.”

“So you live in the present. You isolate yourself from other people.”

His dark eyes penetrated her. “So do you.”

“Me? I have tons of friends-”

“What about marriage, children?”

His voice was soft and rhythmic, filled with challenge. Dani set down her bottle of mineral water. She could hear Kate-as she had a thousand times-telling her that she needed a man who wouldn’t be afraid to ask the tough questions. “I’ve been busy. You’re older than I am. What about marriage and children for you?”

He shrugged and said without self-pity, “They were what another Zeke Cutler used to dream about.”

“And now you make the world safe and secure for other people and let them dream your dreams for you.”

“You really have to get together with my friend Sam,” he said, amused. “The way I see it, I’m just earning a living the best way I know how.”

“Does that mean you’ve ruled out marriage and children?”

“Have you?”

“I know I can be happy without them. If they happen, they happen.”

The humor, always so unexpected, sparkled in his whole face, not just his eyes. “That’s awfully fatalistic for a woman who’s half Pembroke. Aren’t Pembrokes all about risk and adventure and taking chances?”

“I don’t take many chances with people.”

“You take chances with people all the time. The people you employ, the people who buy a Pembroke Springs product, the people who stay at the Pembroke or even stop at your rose gardens-they’re all in one way or another risks.”

“That’s different,” she said airily. She wasn’t going to lose this one. “It’s not like I sleep with them or brought them into the world.”

Zeke smiled, smug, as if he had her. “They’re still people and they’re still risks. So I rest my case.”

“You can’t just declare victory. You know it’s different. Okay, okay. Never mind. Let’s look at you. You take physical risks, but I don’t see you running around with a toddler on your shoulders.”

She stopped right there, her throat constricted as she imagined it. Zeke’s dark hair blowing in the wind and his laughter mingling with the squeals of the black-eyed baby riding on his shoulders. It was so vivid and real in her mind that she knew it was possible.

He put down his iced tea and got to his feet and lifted her into his arms. “No more talk.”

Her attraction to him, percolating under the surface all day, erupted. The man looked at her-talked to her-as if he knew her. What she was thinking and feeling. She was accustomed to keeping her inner workings to herself, unavailable, even undetectable, to others, but Zeke had worn down all her defenses. Or maybe it was just the timing. She was confused and frustrated and scared, and he happened to have shown up when she didn’t want to be alone. She didn’t know. She wasn’t even sure right now that she cared.

“Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

“Mattie and Nick should be making their entrance any minute.”

Zeke shook his head. “I had Ira give them my room.”

“Since when do you have Ira do anything? And those two have been divorced for almost fifty years-they’ll start fighting and wreck the place.”

“Oh, I think they’ll manage.” His arms tightened around her, so that she could feel the strength of him, and sense his own ambivalence. He lived in the present. Well, for now so could she. “Let’s go, Dani.”

She looked at him. “Don’t you want to hear about Nick’s being blackmailed during the filming of Casino?”

A muscle tensed in his jaw. “Upstairs.”

Although it wasn’t yet dark, Nick collapsed onto the brass bed in the small, attractive room on the third floor of the house his grandfather had built. He couldn’t have stayed on his feet if he’d wanted to. He was just too tired. It seemed as if answers, or perhaps just the right questions, were all around him, teasing him, eluding him, and if he could just be still and think, they’d come to him.

He could hear Mattie in the bathroom, washing up, brushing her hair, performing the nightly routine she’d had since she was a girl in Cedar Springs. Nick had never thought he’d live to see her grow old.

She came out, a towel draped around her neck, looking radiant. “You’re so quiet. Don’t you dare die on me.”

“Wouldn’t want to annoy you.”

Regret washed over her face, and she sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry-staying here must be strange for you.”

Ever since turning up the driveway to the Pembroke, Nick had felt as if he was touching the past. Everything triggered a memory. But memories did him no good, and he tried to repress them. His were all so old, back to a time even before Mattie. Most of the people he’d known in those days were gone. Yet, strangely, the beauty and possibilities Dani had discovered in the once-neglected property comforted him, and so did the memories that lurked always in his mind. In his granddaughter’s restorations he saw not just her stubborn, risk-taking nature, but also a bit of Pembroke determination. They’d been dreamers and survivors. His grandmother, too. Ulysses’s widow, a woman who’d chosen happiness over regret and despair.

Mattie slid under the crazy quilt with him, her body slim and small. “Stop thinking, darling,” she said, snuggling beside him. He felt like a pack of toothpicks. “Let’s just lie here a while and listen to the rain.”

Zeke fingered the Cedar Springs Woolen Mill label on one of Dani’s old blankets. “This was made when the mill first opened, I’d say.” He was sitting up, the muscles of his bare chest taut, his skin looking almost golden in the evening gloom. “That’s well before Joe worked there, or even my mother.”

Dani detected a note of nostalgia in his controlled voice. Lying alongside him, she asked, “Did you ever work there?”

He let go of the blanket. “No.”

A summer Adirondack thunderstorm was crashing around them. They’d left the windows open, the curtains billowing in the strong, suddenly cool breeze. Lightning flashed and cracked, followed almost immediately by an enormous clap of thunder that seemed to shake the entire cottage. The storm had to be directly overhead. Dani couldn’t think of a better time to make love. And she and Zeke had already, explosively. But that didn’t stop her from wanting to again. Her life, she decided, had become very complicated.

Outside there was a hissing sound that grew louder and louder, and then the hard, driving rain came, pounding and drenching the cottage. The wind was still blowing hard into the bedroom, bringing with it sprays of rain. Zeke jumped lightly off the bed and banged the window shut.

Watching him, Dani was struck again by how unbelievably sexy Zeke was. He looked so hard and capable, and she’d given up hope her attraction to him would ever wane. If he walked out of her life now and turned up again in another fifty years, it would still be there, one of those givens in life. Dani Pembroke would always want to make love to Zeke Cutler.

He caught her staring and smiled. “Like the view?”

“I didn’t realize white knights could be so sexy.”

He laughed. “And I didn’t realize hotheaded heiress entrepreneurs who like to climb rocks could be so sexy.”

“Ex-heiress,” she corrected.

“Once an heiress, always an heiress. It’s a matter of attitude, not money.”

She didn’t argue the point. Instead she enjoyed the idea of being sexy-of his thinking and saying she was sexy. To have him respond to her that way-even if just for now-felt good.

“Are there any other windows that need to be shut?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Good,” he said and came back to bed with her.

The rain crashed against the window, and there was another flash of lightning, then the rumbling roar of more thunder. The storm was moving fast.

Zeke slipped his arms around her, hooking one leg into hers. He was slippery and wet from the rain that had blown onto him, his skin cool to the touch of her fingertips, her lips. They kissed for a long time, slowly, tongues exploring. They paid no attention to the storm. The lights flickered. He cupped her bottom with his hands, then, in the same slow rhythm as their kiss, moved them up her sides, and she wondered what she felt like, tasted like, to him. Was she as new and exciting and different to him as he was to her? Was he as amazed and absorbed by what they were becoming to each other? She didn’t want the answers. Not now.

She pulled away from their kiss and lay back on the bed, and he moved his hands over her breasts, watching her as, with one finger, he traced a circle, so slowly, so erotically, around each nipple, not touching it. Then his tongue touched where his finger hadn’t. He dragged his hand down her abdomen, to her inner thighs, between her legs. Suddenly she was as out of control as the weather, until she couldn’t stand it anymore and pulled him against her, felt the strength of him, and the state of his arousal.

“I’m not holding back,” she whispered. “I want you to know that.”

He smiled. “I know.”

“Are you as afraid as I am?”

“Yes.”

His answer reassured her, although she didn’t know exactly why. She supposed it was because he shouldn’t have all the answers any more than she should, because she wanted him to feel the mystery and uncertainty she was feeling. Falling in love shouldn’t be simple and predictable. But was that what was happening to them? Dani felt a shiver of panic. Was she falling in love with this man?

But the storm was howling, and finally he was inside her once more, whispering words against sounds of the rain and the wind.

“I can’t hear you,” she said.

He brought his mouth close to hers. “It doesn’t matter.”

And it didn’t, she realized. For now, their bodies were doing all the communicating that, at the moment, needed to be done.

Later, when the skies were quiet and the rain had died to a gentle drizzle and Dani knew she wouldn’t sleep, she crept out of bed, wonderfully stiff. She raised the window, feeling the cool air on her overheated skin. She could hear water dripping into puddles in her garden. Chickadees played in her marble birdbath. She watched them for a few minutes, knowing her life would never be as it had been. Everything had changed, and not just because of the gold key and her mother. Because of Zeke, too, and the capacity for love she’d discovered in herself. She cared about him. What was more, she wanted him to care about her.

When she turned around, her bed was empty. She might have imagined their lovemaking, made up a white knight to carry her off into the sunset.

“Zeke?”

There was no answer. She wasn’t sure she’d expected one.

Pulling on her robe, she went back downstairs. No Zeke whipping up something in the kitchen. No note stuck to the refrigerator. How far could he have gotten without clothes? She took her stairs two steps at a time and checked the bedroom. He’d sneaked out with his clothes. With her right there in the room with him. Had she been catatonic?

“The bastard,” she muttered with a small laugh.

She should have waited until after they’d made love to tell him about Nick’s being blackmailed.

But she suspected his departure was his way of telling her exactly what she’d been thinking as she’d stared down at her rain-drenched garden-that what they had together was a wonderful dream. It just might not be real.