At first she’d been stiff, but Michael could tease the starch out of a shirt. Soon they’d been laughing and talking as easily as if they were best friends. She’d had another moment of stunned awkwardness when he’d asked her to have dinner with him; she was acutely aware that Mama wouldn’t approve. There was nothing upper-crust about Michael McFane. But she had agreed, and to her surprise, he had cooked dinner himself, grilling steaks in his backyard. He lived now on the small farm where he’d grown up, with the closest neighbor a mile down the road, and Monica had felt relaxed by the quiet solitude of his rural home.
Relaxed enough, after they’d eaten and danced to country tunes on the radio, moving slowly around his small living room, to let him take her into his bedroom. She hadn’t planned to let him, hadn’t even considered that he’d try. But he’d started kissing her, and his kisses were warm and slow, and for the first time in her life she felt the curl of desire deep in her body. Alarmed by what was happening, and the speed of it, she had nevertheless stood in his bedroom and let him unzip her dress, then unhook her bra and remove it. No one had ever seen her bare breasts, but all of a sudden Michael had not only seen them, but was busy sucking on them. The drawing pressure of his mouth had made her go wild, and they had tumbled to the bed. Not for him a discreet pumping, with trousers barely lowered. Soon they were both naked, locked together on the cotton sheets, and that curl of desire had exploded into a wantonness that still alarmed her.
No
lady
would act in such a manner, but then Monica had always known she wasn’t a lady. Mama was a lady; Monica had been trying all her life to be like Mama, so Mama would love her, but she’d always fallen short. Mama would be horrified and disgusted if she knew her daughter spent several hours a week in bed with Michael McFane – the
sheriff,
of all people! – screwing like a rabbit.
Sometimes Monica felt resentful of the strictures that had been drummed into her from the cradle.
Gray
hadn’t been subjected to, and confined by, all the things that ladies didn’t do. It was as if Mama had written Gray off as a lost cause from the moment of his birth; he was a male, therefore
she expected him to act like an animal. Because she was a lady, she had ignored the sexual escapades of both father and son; such things were of no interest to her, and she expected her daughter not to be interested in them, either.
It hadn’t worked that way, though Monica had tried. She had tried really hard, for the first twenty-five years of her life. Even after Mama had withdrawn from them, after Daddy left, Monica had kept trying, hoping that, if she was good enough, Mama wouldn’t feel so bad about Daddy being gone.
But she had always hungered for more. Mama had always been so reserved and cool, perfect, untouchable. Daddy had been warm and loving; he had hugged her, tussled with her despite Mama’s disapproval of such rowdiness with her daughter. Gray was even more physical than Daddy; he had always burned with an inner fire that Monica had recognized at an early age.
She remembered once, when Gray had been home from college, they had lingered around the dinner table, talking. Gray had been lounging in his chair with that big-cat grace of his, laughing as he described a prank some of the football players had pulled on one of the coaches, and there had been… she couldn’t quite describe it… a sort of sensual wildness in the tilt of his head, the motion of his hand as he picked up his glass. She had glanced at Mama and found her staring at Gray with an expression of revulsion on her face, as if he were a disgusting animal. He
had been
an animal, of course, a healthy, rambunctious teenage boy, blazing with the testosterone pumping into his body. But there was nothing repulsive about him, and Monica had felt resentful of that disapproval, on his behalf.
Gray was a wonderful brother, she didn’t know what she would have done without him, in those awful days after Daddy left. She had been so ashamed of her own attempted suicide that she had sworn then she would never again be that weak, that much of a burden to Gray. It had been a struggle, but she’d kept that promise to herself. She had only to look at the thin, silvery lines on her wrists to forcibly remind herself of the price of weakness.
Seeing Faith Devlin in the parking lot at the grocery store
had shocked her so much that, for the first time in a long while, she’d fallen into the old habit of running to Gray, expecting him to take care of her problems. She was disgusted with herself for falling to pieces the way she had, but when she had seen that dark red hair, such a rich color that it was almost wine-colored, her heart had almost stopped. For a wild, dizzying moment, she had thought,
Daddy’s back!
because if Renee was here, then surely Daddy
was, too.
But Daddy was nowhere in sight. There was only Renee, looking even younger than when she had left, which was pure injustice. Someone as wicked and trashy as Renee Devlin should wear her sins on her face, so everyone would know. But the face staring back at Monica had been as exquisitely complexioned as ever, without a wrinkle in sight. The same slumberous green eyes, the wide, soft, sensual mouth – nothing had changed. And for a moment, Monica had been again the hurt, helpless girl she’d been before, and she had gone running to Gray.
Only it hadn’t been Renee; the woman in the parking lot was Faith Devlin, and Gray had been oddly reluctant to use all his influence against her. Monica couldn’t recall much about Faith, just a vague memory of a skinny little girl with her mother’s hair, but that didn’t matter. What wasn’t vague was the twist of pain at seeing her, the rush of memories, the old sense of betrayal and abandonment. She had been afraid to go to town since then, afraid she would see Faith again and feel the sting of salt in the reopened wound.
"Monica?" came Michael’s lazy voice. "You go to sleep in there, honey?"
"No, I was just primping," Monica called, and ran the water in the basin to give credence to her lie. Her reflection looked back at her. Not bad, for thirty-two. Sleek dark hair, not as black as Gray’s, but not a silver strand in sight. Her face was fine-boned, like Mama’s, but she had the Rouillard dark eyes. Not overweight, and her breasts were firm.
Michael was still sprawled naked on the bed when she left the bathroom, and a slow smile lit his face as he held out his hand to her. "Come snuggle," he invited, and her heart
turned over. She crawled back into bed, and into the warmth of his encircling arm. He sighed with contentment as he settled her against him, and his big hand moved to squeeze one resilient breast. "I think we should get married," he said.
Her heart didn’t just turn over this time, it almost stopped. She stared up at him, eyes round with both panic and astonishment. "M-Marry?" she stuttered, then crammed both hands against her mouth to hold back the hysterical giggle that bubbled up. "Michael and Monica McFane?" The giggle erupted anyway.
He grinned. "So it sounds like we’re twins. I can live with it if you can." He thumbed her nipple, enjoying the way it peaked at his touch. "But if we have a kid, its name will start with anything but an
M."
Marriage. Kids. Oh, God. Somehow she had never envisioned that he might want to marry her. She had never even thought of marriage in connection with herself. Her life had gone into deep freeze twelve years ago, and she had never expected it to change.
But nothing is static. Even rock changed, ground down by time and the elements. Alex hadn’t disrupted the even rhythm of her life, but Michael had blazed through like a comet.
Alex. Oh, God.
"I know I don’t have much to offer you," Michael was saying. "This house sure ain’t nothing like what you’re used to, but I’ll fix it up any way you want; you just tell me what to do and I’ll do it."
Another shock. She had lived her entire thirty-two years at Rouillard House. She tried to imagine living anywhere else, and couldn’t. Twelve years ago the entire foundation of her life had crumbled, and since then she hadn’t dealt well with any change, even a relatively minor one such as getting a new car. Gray had finally forced her to give up the one she had been driving since she was nineteen, just as, five years ago, he had forced her to redo her bedroom. She had been heartily sick of the little-girl decor for years, but the thought of changing it had made her feel even worse. It had been a
relief when Gray had brought a decorator in one day while she had a dentist appointment, and returned to find the wallpaper already stripped off and the carpet removed. Still, she had cried for three days. So little of her former life had remained the way it was before Daddy left, and it hurt to give up anything else. After she stopped crying, and the decorator was finished, she loved the room; it was the transition that was so wrenching.
"Honey?" Michael said now, hesitation creeping into his voice. "I’m sorry, I guess I thought – "
Fiercely she put her hand against his mouth. "Don’t you dare put yourself down to me," she said, low and violent, aching inside that he would think for a minute that she would consider herself too good for him. The reverse was true; Michael was too good for her. Only two days ago she had lain on the leather sofa in Alex’s office and let him screw her. Ugly word. Ugly process. It had nothing in common with Michael’s lovemaking. She had felt nothing, except pity, and relief when it was over.
If Michael knew about Alex, he wouldn’t want her any longer. How could he? For the past year he had thought she was his alone, and all the while she had been letting an old family friend screw her, just as she had for the six years before.
She hadn’t felt any guilt at all, on Alex’s behalf, when Michael had become her lover. She didn’t feel any connection with Alex; how could she? It wasn’t even her he was doing it to, but her mother. But she was eaten alive with guilt when she went to Alex, because it was such a betrayal of Michael. She would have to tell Alex that it had to stop, but the old terror was still there, buried deep. If she stopped letting him do it, would he leave? Would it matter if he did? She wasn’t a hurt, confused girl any longer, she didn’t need Daddy – or his stand-in.
But what would happen to Mama if Alex stopped coming to the house? He loved Mama, but could he bear to see her, so lost to him, if he didn’t have the release of pretending that he was making love to her?
"I love you," she said now to Michael, and tears trickled
from her eyes. "I just – I never thought you’d want to marry me."
"Silly." He wiped the wetness from her cheeks, and a crooked smile lit his grown-up Opie face. "It took me a year to work up the nerve, is all."
She managed a smile of her own. "I hope it doesn’t take me that long to work up the nerve to say yes."
"That scary, huh?" he asked, and laughed.
"Any… any change is hard for me." She swallowed, terrified at the prospect, and of telling Mama about Michael. Gray knew about him, of course; it was no secret that they were seeing each other, but no one suspected they’d been sleeping together for a year. But since Mama never went to town anymore, and didn’t have any friends over to visit, she knew nothing about what went on these days. She wouldn’t like it on two counts. One, she wouldn’t like the idea of Monica marrying anyone, because that would mean her pristine daughter would be subjected to a man’s disgusting touch. Two, she especially wouldn’t like it if that man were Michael McFane. The McFanes had never been anything but poor farmers, certainly not in the same social stratum as the Graysons and the Rouillards. The fact that Michael was the sheriff wouldn’t raise him any in her estimation; he was just a public servant earning a nice but unspectacular salary.
And she would have to tell Alex.
"It’ll be all right," Michael said comfortingly. "I’ll get started on fixing up the house. It should be finished in, say, six months. That’ll give you enough time to get used to the idea, won’t it?"
She looked up into his beloved face and said, "Yes." Yes to it all. Her heart was pounding wildly. She would manage. She would tell Mama, and face that chilly disapproval. She would tell Alex that she couldn’t meet him again. It would hurt him, but he would understand. He wouldn’t abandon Mama; it was silly of her even to think it. She had to look at things as an adult, not a scared girl. Alex hadn’t remained a friend because she’d allowed him to stick his thing in her; he was Gray’s legal representative, and a friend even before
she’d been born. Probably he had just gotten into the habit of using her. Maybe he’d be glad of an excuse to stop, maybe he felt as guilty about it as she did.
She had to make things as right as possible. Not even one little thing could be wrong, or it would all unravel. A normal, happy life loomed before her like the golden ring on a carousel, and she could grab it if she could just manage to do everything right. The last time, Renee Devlin had wrecked her dream.
Her thoughts jolted. Even as Michael was hugging her exuberantly, a face swam before her eyes: sleepy green eyes, a sensuous mouth that drove men wild. Renee was still there, in the form of her daughter.
Faith had to go. Mama would be much happier if Faith left town. She might even approve of Monica, if she were the one to make Faith leave. And if Michael were involved, too…
Her hands pushed at his bare shoulders. "There’s a problem."
He released her, sighing with disappointment. The reason for his disappointment twitched in his lap. "What?"
"It’s Mama."