When he turned, Anne had to look away from the sudden vulnerability in his eyes. "When we met, the only thing I thought of was how pretty you were and how much I wanted to get into your pants." Her eyes shot to his, color flooding her cheeks. Neill gave her a lopsided grin and shrugged lightly. "Sorry. That's the way men think. Then I started to get to know you, and you were so nice and sweet, and you didn't want anything from me but my company. It was...nice, and I didn't want to risk seeing it change."
"Okay." Anne folded a pleat into the skirt of her robe, careful to make it perfectly smooth before releasing it. She understood better than he could know. Wasn't it the fear of having him suddenly look at her in a new way that had made her want to keep the truth of Brooke's death from him? "Okay, I can understand that, I think. But what about later? After we...after I..." She couldn't find the right word and finished the question by spreading her hands and looking up at him. "Why didn't you tell me then?"
"By then I knew about Brooke," he said simply. ''How could I tell you not just that I was a successful writer, but that I'd written about exactly the kind of thing that happened to your sister?"
"I would have understood."
"Would you have?" He sank down on his heels in front of her, putting his hands on the arms of her chair, boxing her in without touching her. "Anne, your whole family has spent the last fifteen years caught halfway between pretending Brooke never existed and turning her into some sort of icon of beauty and perfection. You don't talk about her, but she's always there. Your whole life has been...circumscribed by what happened to her. You stay safe in this little town where everyone knows you and watches out for you. You don't take chances or risks."
His tone was gentle, but the words stung like little stones against her skin. Her breath sharp in her throat, she pushed past him, turning in the middle of the room, one hand pressed to the base of her throat, her eyes shimmering with tears she was determined not to shed.
"Can you blame me?" she asked thickly. "Can you blame me for being afraid, for thinking that, if it could happen once, it could happen again?"
"It's not a matter of blame." Neill rose slowly and lifted one hand toward her, letting it drop when she stiffened. She reminded him of a doe at bay, her eyes wide and frightened, her breath coming too quickly. It was like a knife in the heart to know he'd put that look there. But it was time the wound was cauterized, even if she hated him for it. "What happened to Brooke was horrible. You'll never forget it. I'm not saying you should, or even that you could. But there's no reason to let it rule your whole life, either."
"I don't," she protested. "I...I have a life. Friends. You don't have to live in a city to have those things. I'm happy."
"Are you?" He walked over to the bookshelf and pulled down a title at random. "Travel Guide to Greece. '' Another book. "Europe by Rail '' Yet another. "Historic Manhattan.''
''So I like travel guides," she cried before he could pull another book off the shelf. "Lots of people do."
"You don't want to just read about these places. You want to see them."
Feeling as if he was stripping away all her protection, one layer at a time, Anne looked away from the demand in his eyes, hunching her shoulders as if against a blow. "There's time. I'll go someday."
"Someday?" Neill dropped the books on an end table. "When, Anne? Is there a magic age? Or a magic year? What are you waiting for? The world to suddenly become a safe place? It's not going to happen."
"I know that. I'm not a...a child." She was mortified when her voice hitched.
No, she wasn't a child, but she'd been kept as sheltered as if she were one. Not loved
, Neill thought, remembering the sharp look of triumph on her mother's face as she revealed the truth about his writing. No, Olivia Moore hadn't kept her daughter close out of love but out of a need to control. Maybe there was some fear mixed in with it, he admitted grudgingly. She'd lost one daughter in a particularly horrible way.
He turned abruptly away and found himself nose to nose with the fireplace mantel. Three strides the other way and he knew he would be in danger of walking through the front window. There wasn't a room in this house big enough to pace in. It was like a doll's house, he thought, frustrated. Or a fairy-tale cottage, surrounded by a moat of roses. And within its confines, Anne's family had kept her safely sleeping for more than half her life.
"How can you write about things like that?" Anne asked, and he turned to look at her. She had his book in her hand, looking at it for a moment before setting it back down on the table. When she lifted her eyes to his, there was confusion under the hurt. "Why would you want to? Isn't it bad enough that it happens? Why do you have to dig it up again?"
"To understand," he said simply.
"To understand what?" Anne asked, bewildered.
"Why it happens." Neill jammed his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched with tension. "When I was fifteen, we lived in Saginaw. My dad owned a dry cleaning business, and Mom was working part-time at a library. We lived next door to the Kensingtons." He spoke rapidly, as if the words were pushing to get out. "They had three kids—two boys and a girl. Lacey was just a few months younger than I was, and she was a tomboy. I was thirteen when we moved in, and she could run faster than I could, and hit a ball just as well, and she didn't hesitate to point it out. I hated her on sight, and the feeling was mutual."
He walked over to the window and stared out at the clear sunshine, his eyes looking into the past. "I avoided her like the plague, which wasn't easy to do, since we lived next door. But she didn't like me any more than I liked her, so, between the two of us, we managed to keep our distance. We did such a good job of ignoring each other that I just about managed to forget she existed until our junior year. It was the Harvest Dance, and she wore this dress. It was hot pink, short and tight, but sort of wrinkled or pleated or something."
Neill waved his hand vaguely up and down his body, at a loss for the right words. "I'd never noticed that she had breasts. I saw her walk into the gym, and that's the first thing I thought, Jesus, Lacey Kensington has boobs," His laugh held a rueful edge. "Fifteen-year-old boys aren't exactly the most poetic thinkers. I asked her to dance, and then I asked her to dance again. I took her home. I never did know what happened to her date, if she had one. But I took her home, and I kissed her goodnight."
He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked past her, his eyes on something she couldn't see. "I'm not saying I was in love with her or that I ever would have been, but I walked her to school every day that next week. I'd never walked a girl to school before. She wasn't exactly pretty, but she was fun, and she not only had breasts but she liked sports. Talk about your dream come true...."
"What happened to her?" Anne asked when he fell silent.
He shifted his gaze to her face, his eyes bleak. "A week after the dance, her father herded the whole family into the bathroom and killed them all with a machine pistol. Lacey, her brothers, her mother. He even killed the damned dog. Then he walked out to his car and drove away. He already had a suitcase packed and loaded in the trunk."
"Oh God.'' Anne pressed her fingers to her mouth as her stomach lurched. "Why?''
"When the police caught him a couple of days later, he didn't even try to deny it. Apparently his wife wanted a divorce, and he figured that alimony and child support would take most of his paycheck," Neill's mouth twisted bitterly. "It was a simple matter of economics, I guess. I was home when it happened. I heard the shots but didn't know what they were. Afterwards, I watched them carry out the bodies, all neatly bundled up in body bags, I couldn't understand why he'd done it. Even after they caught him and I found out that he hadn't wanted to pay child support, it didn't seem like reason enough. There had to be something more, something that would drive a forty-year-old welder with no record of violence to kill his wife and children and then walk away like it didn't matter. That was the first book I wrote."
"Did you find out why?"
Neill hunched his shoulders. "I was looking for logic, even for insanity, but I finally decided that the only real explanation is that there is such a thing as evil." He shrugged again, his eyes bleak, "It's an old-fashioned idea, but I don't know how else you explain it sometimes."
Anne thought of her sister, of her own desperate need to know why, to understand. That was one of the things that had made it so difficult—the fact that something so terrible had happened for no reason that she could grasp.
"Anne?" Neill waited until her eyes lifted to his. "I meant what I told your mother. I love you."
For the first time since her mother's arrival, Anne felt her throat close with tears. She shook her head helplessly and turned away, pressing her fingers to her mouth.
"Do you believe me?" He didn't touch her, but his voice was relentless. "Anne, do you believe I love you?"
"I don't know," she said finally. "I don't know what to think about anything right now." Sheer willpower forced the tears back, though her eyes were still too bright when she looked at him.
"Please. I'm so confused. I need some time to...just think things out."
Neill hesitated. He wanted to ask her how much time. He wanted to take hold of her and never let her go.
"A11 right, m give you whatever time you need. But I'm not going away, Anne. I'm staying right here until you're ready to admit that we belong together."
Without waiting for a reply, he turned and went back upstairs. When he came down a moment later, with his shoes on and his shirt partially buttoned, Anne was standing just where he'd left her. She looked...bruised, he thought, and felt his anger evenly divided between himself and her mother. If Olivia deserved the larger part of the blame, it was only because she hadn't cared about the hurt she was dealing.
"You know where to find me," he said, stopping next to her. When she nodded without looking at him, he felt something close to real terror. What if, after thinking about it, she decided she was better off without him? Sliding his hand under her chin, he tilted her face up and put his mouth on hers, kissing her with a fierce tenderness. She didn't lift her hands to hold him, but her mouth seemed to cling to his, and he took what comfort he could from that. "Don't think too long."
Anne stood where she was as he let himself out. She listened to his footsteps on the porch, then waited for the familiar whine of the gate and, a moment later, the muted ramble of the Vette's engine. Only when it had faded completely did she move.
Less than an hour, she thought, looking at the clock with mild surprise. Less than an hour ago she had been measuring coffee into the filter and dreaming dreams of a future that was vague but wrapped in rose-colored clouds. There was something Neill wanted to tell her, and that had niggled at the back of her mind, but he couldn't have held her and loved her the way he had if he was going to tell her he was leaving. Some men could, maybe, but not Neill. She didn't have to have experience with other men to know the difference between just sex and...caring, at the very least. So whatever he wanted to tell her, it couldn't be that big a deal.
And it hadn't been, she thought now, fingering the edge of the book on the table. Not really. He hadn't come here to research Brooke's murder, and he hadn't gotten close to her to get the inside story on what her family had gone through. He had lied to her—or let her believe something that was less than the truth—but she thought she could understand that. Perhaps she would have looked at him differently if she'd known he was successful and, she assumed, rich. Certainly she wouldn't have felt quite as comfortable with the author of four New York Times bestsellers as she had with the freelance writer she'd thought him to be.
So what was the problem?
she wondered. Why hadn't she thrown herself into his arms and told him that she loved him? He'd said he loved her, and she believed him. So what was she still afraid of?
Hesitantly, she picked the book up, and, opening it to the first page, she started to read.
Anne knew exactly where she would find her mother. She spent Tuesday afternoons arranging the flowers for the house, which meant she would be in the kitchen. As she let herself in the front door, it struck her that her mother must be a very lonely woman. She'd never made any effort to fit in with the local social life, had never made friends.
Before Brooke's death, Anne could remember her mother's friends visiting from Adanta, the soft southern drawls and her mother serving mint julep in the backyard but, for some reason, after the murder, the visits had slowed, and then stopped altogether. Looking back, she wondered if that had been her mother's choice, or if her old friends simply hadn't known how to deal with the enormity of her loss and so had distanced themselves from it.
***
Olivia looked up as she entered the kitchen, giving her a quick searching glance that revealed nothing of her own thoughts. Flowers were spread on the work island in front of her—proses and baby's breath, lilies, and other blossoms that Anne couldn't immediately identify. They were shipped to her every week, at enormous expense, and arranged in elegant vases throughout the house. Beautiful flowers in a beautiful home that no one but her mother ever spent any time in or cared about.
"I thought you might come up to the house," Olivia said, her slim fingers moving gracefully through the flowers, sorting and arranging.
"I called in sick," Anne said. "Since I haven't taken a vacation in the last couple of years, I figured they owed me one."
"I don't know why you bother working at all, really."
"Because I don't want to spend my days arranging flowers."
Olivia's fingers slowed for a moment, but she didn't look up. "ls he gone?"
"No." Anne set the book she was carrying on the comer of the butcher block table. "I asked him to give me time, and he agreed."
"Time?" Olivia arched one brow in cool surprise. "I can't imagine what you'd need time for. The man lied to you and used you."
Anne decided to ignore the comment. She tapped her fingers on the book. "When you came to the cottage this morning, with this, did you do it to hurt me?"
"Of course not." The tone was impatient, dismissive. Familiar, Anne thought. How many times had she heard that same tone from her mother? "I thought you should know what this man was really after."
"Did you care that I might be hurt?" Anne asked curiously.
"I'm your mother. Of course I cared." Olivia's fingers tightened infinitesimally around the stem of the rose she held, and then she was sliding it into place in the bouquet, stepping back to gauge the effect. Satisfied, she reached for a pair of floral shears.
"Why were you so determined to break Neill and I up? What made you go to the trouble of finding out what he wrote?"
"It was obvious that he was no good. A man like that, riding into town on a broken-down motorcycle. He couldn't possibly have any—" She broke off abruptly, but Anne had no trouble finishing the sentence for her.
"Any money?" Anne arched her brows. "But when you found out that he did have money, you still wanted to cut him out of my life. Why?"
"Well, once I found out the sort of books he wrote, it was obvious that he was just using you." Olivia dropped the shears, picked them up again and reached for a long-stemmed rose.
"Why was it obvious?"
Irritated, Olivia set the rose down and looked at her daughter. "Because what could a man like that possibly see in you?" When Anne flinched, she clucked her tongue in exasperation. "I don't mean to be unkind, but you have to admit that you don't have much to offer to a man who's spent as much time traveling as this one seems to have done. You've barely set foot out of this wide spot in the road. And it's got nothing to do with your looks, either, because you're really a very pretty girl. Not beautiful like—well, you're not beautiful, but you're pretty in a wholesome way."
Not beautiful like Brooke, Anne thought. And not pretty enough or interesting enough to tempt a man like Neill But she had tempted him, she thought on a sudden surge of fierce pride.
"Neill says he loves me," she said quietly.
"Well, of course he does. Men will say anything to get what they want."
"I believe him."
"I suppose you think he's going to marry you and take you away from here." Olivia waved the shears to encompass the town, or maybe the whole state. It was difficult to say just how wide an area her distaste covered.
"I hope so," Anne said calmly. "I think so. If he asks me, I'm going to go. You chose to stay here. Mama." The childish name came easily. "You hated this place, but you chose to stay here and be miserable, and you let everyone else know how miserable you were. I don't hate this place, but I think I could come to, and I don't want to be like you. I don't ever want to be like you."
Picking up the book, she turned and walked away, leaving her mother staring after her, ashen-faced and looking every year of her age.