Ann waited, sure that there was a point to this ramble and sooner or later Heath would get to it.
“Now I was fond of Elsie—she was the one relative who lived near enough to visit and take the occasional interest in me. She happened to arrive the day after your abrupt departure on one of her periodic checks to see if my father was still alive, and I’m afraid in my distress I blurted out the whole ugly tale of our somewhat star-crossed relationship. So Elsie was very interested when, one week after you decamped, she found herself typing up forms for her boss that released to you the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. The person countersigning the form was none other than your father.”
Ann looked back at him, baffled, trying to follow him. What the devil was this?
“Quite a payoff for dumping the boyfriend, wasn’t it, Princess? I knew you were desperate to get away from your father, and taking off with me was one way of doing it, but in the end it must have been impossible to give up all the fine things that the Talbot money could buy.... Why settle for a Georgia hut with a teenage mechanic husband when a plush boarding school in stately New England awaits you, with the cushion of a hundred grand to make dumping the grease monkey worth your while? You found a way to get away from your old man and actually have him finance your exit! I applaud your ingenuity, Ann. I never would have guessed you had it in you.”
Ann was speechless, trying to put together the pieces of the puzzle. Suddenly, she remembered.
“You’re talking about the trust fund,” she said.
He studied her, his expression glacial.
“My grandmother had set up a trust find to finance my education and made my father the trustee. The tuition at the Hampton school was much higher than at my previous school and so my father petitioned the trustee to release the money to me, on condition that I use it for my boarding school tuition and put aside the remainder for college, which I did.”
He said nothing.
“Don’t you see? He wanted to pack me off but he didn’t want to pay for it himself. Invading the trust fund was his neat, financially sound solution. The timing of it was just a coincidence. I didn’t know his plan for footing the bill. My father didn’t pay me off to leave you, Heath, he was just using my grandmother’s money to stash me away in Massachusetts! If I had tried to use a penny of it to get back to you he would have been on the phone to the police in a second. I’m sorry if you thought the money was a bribe, but that simply isn’t true.”
He stared back at her stonily. She might as well have been talking to herself.
“You still don’t believe me, do you?” she said sadly. “You haven’t really changed at all. Eleven years ago you could never quite accept that I would throw in my lot with you, and when I didn’t show up the night we had planned to run away, you were only too willing to jump to conclusions and think the worst of me.”
“So it’s all my fault now?” he said. “You’re a blameless angel and I’m the bastard who had no faith in you?” He laughed bitterly and looked away, shaking his head, as if she were just too ridiculous to credit.
“I loved you, Heath. I have never loved anyone like that again. The only thing that could have separated me from you was fear for your safety. If you choose to think otherwise, there isn’t much I can do about it, is there?”
He signaled for the waiter to bring him another drink. “It’s interesting how you’ve made yourself the heroine of our grim little drama,” he said. “It’s even more interesting that nobody is left alive to contradict you. Hardly more than a decade has passed and, except for us, all the major players have died—your father, your mother, even poor, deluded Luisa.”
“Amy is alive.”
“Amy will say anything you tell her to say.”
Ann gave a brief, mirthless laugh. “You don’t know Amy very well.”
“Apparently I didn’t know you very well, either. I fell lite a ten-ton weight for your poor-little-rich-girl act and you used me for your own purposes until you got exactly what you wanted.”
“And what was that, in your estimation?” Ann asked quietly, her eyes never leaving his face.
“Escape!” he said. “Escape from Casa Talbot, where your crazy old man ruled you and your mother like Draco.”
“Escape to a boarding school in New England that was more like a jail than an institution of higher learning! I would rather have been in a tar-paper shack with you, Heath, and that’s the truth.”
“Yeah, I’m sure it was hell,” he said sarcastically. “I’ve seen pictures of that place they sent you. I remember the layout—lots of grass, lots of trees, a green campus dotted with white-columned mansions separated by brick pathways. It sure looked like marine boot camp to me.”
“Appearances can be deceiving,” Ann said.
The waiter appeared with a fresh drink for Heath and said, “Ready to order now?”
“I’ll call you when we’re ready to order,” Heath snarled, not looking at him.
The waiter looked startled, glanced sidelong at Ann, then beat a hasty exit.
“Look,” Heath said, “I’m not going to sit here and listen to you defend what you did, especially when you characterize it as a selfless gesture to keep me out of jail. Actually, I can’t believe you have the nerve to try to pass this bogus story off as the truth. You must think I’m still as stupid as I was back when I thought that old Harley and you were all I needed to be happy. This highly inventive tale must be an example of your writer’s imagination.”
“You know I’m a writer?” Ann said.
“I have your first book.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I’ve always kept track of you, which is obviously more than you can say about me.”
“It was too painful to hear anything about you, Heath. The only way I could survive was by burying all of it.”
“Here’s to the buried past,” he said, saluting her with his liquor glass.
Ann pushed her chair back from the table. “Heath, this is pointless. You don’t want to hear anything I have to say.” She picked up her purse.
“If you leave, I will get on the phone and cancel everything I did for your brother this morning,” he said calmly. “All it takes is a word from me and he stays right where he is.”
Ann resettled in the chair. “It must be wonderful to have such power,” she said.
“I earned it,” he replied. “Since you seem anxious to leave, I think I should lay out the terms of our agreement.”
“Oh, by all means.”
“We will be getting married on Friday afternoon of this week,” he began.
“Friday?” she gasped. “So soon?”
“Do you need time to buy a trousseau?” he asked dryly.
She said nothing.
“I have already arranged an appointment with the clerk’s office for the ceremony. We can do the blood tests tomorrow. Joe Jensen and his wife can serve as the witnesses at the wedding.”
“Joe Jensen of Jensen’s Marina?”
“He works for me now.”
“So you didn’t forget all of your old friends.”
“Only the ones who forgot me,” he shot back.
Ann sighed and bit her lip. How much more of this could she take? More importantly, could she take it every day? But the alternative was too horrible to contemplate. She was trapped.
“You will keep up appearances,” Heath went on. “Serve as my hostess for the annual Christmas party for my employees, accompany me to the social functions I must attend in consideration of my position as CEO of Bimini. No one is to know how things really stand or I will consider it a breach of our pact.”
Ann listened dolefully, not looking at him.
“And in case you’re loath to raise this delicate subject, I want to make something clear. Ours will not be a marriage in name only. You will sleep with me anytime I want, in any place I want, just like a dutiful little wife.”
“That is a marriage in name only, Heath. Without a relationship to back it up, sex alon
e doesn’t make a marriage.”
“Giving advice to the lovelorn now? Why don’t you write a column for the papers, like Dear Abby? You apparently have the talent for it.”
“What else?” she asked tersely, ignoring the gibe.
“You will live with me in my house, and not take off every five minutes for visits to relatives or whatever else you can think of to get away from me. I expect you to be around and available, do you understand?”
“Where do you live?”
He drank deeply. “I bought the Curtis house on Prospect Boulevard,” he said.
Ann was silent. Duncan Curtis had been a friend of her father’s, the owner of a stucco, Spanish-style waterfront mansion that was arguably the only home on Lime Island more impressive than Henry Talbot’s.
“I didn’t know that Duncan Curtis had moved away,” she finally said.
“He retired to Southern California two years ago to be near his daughter,” Heath replied shortly.
“And you rushed right in and bought his house.”
“Why not?”
“I see now why you want to marry me, why torturing me outside the bonds of holy matrimony would not be sufficient for you,” Ann said quietly.
“What are you talking about?” he replied, swallowing the rest of his drink in one gulp.
“It’s all part of the master plan, isn’t it? The plan to show the Lime Island old-timers—whoever’s left, anyway—that the poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks has made good, big time. The best house on the island, the billboards for Bimini plastered on every available surface, the good works documented in the newspapers, and now marriage to the daughter of the most prominent man, the one they all remember from the country club in the old days. It has little to do with me—I’m just a means to an end.”
“It has everything to do with you,” he said quietly. “Make no mistake about that.”
“They really hurt you, didn’t they, Heath? Those golf playing snobs in their pastel polo shirts. More than even I suspected.”
“They never hurt me as much as you did. They couldn’t. You were the only one I ever loved, the only one I ever let get close enough to see that I had those feelings. And you made sure that you threw it all back in my face.”
She put her hand over his on the table.
He withdrew his hand immediately.
“Do you understand what I want?” he inquired tonelessly, his features immobile.
“Perfectly,” she replied.
“Good. Will you be staying here at the inn until the day of the wedding?”
“Yes. Since my brother’s disgrace, all doors seem closed to me. I imagine you know the feeling.”
“Very well. I’ll call you to arrange a time to go for the blood tests.”
“Am I dismissed?” she asked crisply.
“Not quite yet. We have to discuss the honeymoon.”
“The honeymoon?” Ann said faintly.
“Of course. Don’t you want go somewhere secluded and romantic to enjoy your new husband?”
“No.”
“Too bad. Because I plan to get my money’s worth, starting with a week in Caneel Bay. We’ll fly out right after the wedding.”
“You’re enjoying this immensely, aren’t you, Heath?” Ann said quietly.
“This?”
“Torturing me.”
“Not many people would consider a week at a Caneel Bay resort to be torture,” he said mildly.
“And am I supposed to play the role of the ecstatic honeymooner?” Ann demanded.
“That shouldn’t be too much trouble for you. As I recall, you’re very good at role-playing. You convinced me that you were madly in love with me without too much difficulty.”
She looked away from him. “Is there anything else?” she said tensely.
He nodded. “The Curtis house, which is now the Bodine house, is at 1223 Prospect. If I were you, I would arrange to have anything you want from your apartment shipped there. Do you have anyone in New York who can pack for you?”
“I left a key with a neighbor. I can ask her to put together a few things for me.”
“Good. Better ask her to send them express—we’re booked on a flight out to the islands Friday night.”
“Should I sublet my apartment?”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll buy out your lease if you like.”
Ann smiled thinly. Having money obviated quite a number of considerations.
He must have known what she was thinking because he said, “Turnabout is fair play, no?”
“I don’t think you know much about fair play anymore, Heath,” Ann replied.
He stared at her for a long moment, then said neutrally, “You may go now.”
Ann rose on shaky legs and walked out of the dining room.
Chapter 7
Ann’s wedding day dawned beautiful and clear, as if nature were playing a joke at her expense. She had purchased a lovely suit for the occasion, off-white with a fitted jacket embroidered at the cuffs and along the shawl collar with tiny seed pearls, worn with a silk camisole and a short, slim skirt. She donned the outfit on Friday with grim determination, vowing that she would not show up for the ceremony bedraggled and weeping; she would not give Heath the satisfaction. She piled her hair on top of her head, added her mother’s pearls to her ears and neck, and picked up her purse.
Heath might hate her but he would never be able to say she was a coward.
She had just walked down the front steps of the inn when his sleek Italian sports car glided to a stop at the curb. He got out and held the door for her, saying, “No luggage?”
“I only brought one bag from New York. I didn’t think I would be staying on Lime Island very long.”
“I’ll send somebody for it,” he said shortly. He was wearing a conservative suit that made him look more dashing than ever; the contrast between his businesslike clothes and his dark, almost piratical coloring was devastating.
Ann slipped into the bucket seat of the car and stared straight ahead, thinking that he seemed to have an army of minions with nothing to do but his bidding.
The ride to the registry office was short. They walked up the steps to the concrete building side-by-side in silence. Ann had expected nothing different; they had completed the blood tests and license application while barely exchanging a word.
Inside, the Jensens were sitting together on a bench. Joan held a large orchid corsage in a florist’s plastic box on her lap. They both rose when they saw Heath and Ann come through the door.
“Well, there she is!” Joe Jensen caroled, and enfolded Ann in a backbreaking bear hug. “Prettiest little girl I ever saw. I always tell Heath that.”
When he released Ann, Joan kissed her on the cheek and handed her the corsage. “We’re so happy to be part of your special day,” she said, beaming.
Ann looked at Heath, who turned away.
He had obviously not told the Jensens the details surrounding this happy event.
Ann stood patiently while the older woman pinned the corsage to the shoulder of her wedding suit and then patted the flower with satisfaction.
“There now. That’s just the touch you needed,” Joan said. “I knew Heath wouldn’t think of it.”
Mercifully, the door to the registry office opened and the clerk called their names.
The spare, paneled walls of the judge’s chamber did little to lift Ann’s spirits once they were inside. Someone had decided to get a jump on Christmas and had hung a huge green wreath decorated with holly berries and a fat, glittering silver bow over the registry desk. Ann stared at it as the justice put on his glasses and examined their documents, then began to read. As he droned on, Ann tuned out, and so she was surprised when Heath suddenly took her hand and slipped onto her finger a slim, etched gold band. She hardly had time to recover from the thought that he had selected it for her when she found herself accepting a thicker band from him and putting it on his finger. Her eyes met Heath’s and he held h
er gaze for a second, then looked back at the person marrying them. Ann felt her throat tighten as she heard the justice talk a little more and then say, “You may now kiss the bride.”
Heath turned to her and kissed her.
Ann hadn’t felt the touch of his lips in eleven years, but the memory was so strong it seemed like eleven minutes. Despite the circumstances she felt herself yearning toward him, and when he pulled back she felt such a sense of loss that she had to turn away to mask her expression. She blinked rapidly, sniffing, until the tears had vanished from her eyes.
Afterward, Ann remembered little of the ceremony’s conclusion. It had been such a far cry from the wedding she had dreamed of as a girl that she blocked it out, accepting the congratulations and warm wishes of the Jensens with a wooden smile. Heath must have said something appropriate to them because they melted away with cheerful waves and she found herself back in the car with him in a matter of minutes.
“What did you tell them?” Ann asked as he shifted gears and gunned the motor.
“I told them we had been apart so long that we wanted to get right on with the honeymoon.”
“Didn’t they think that was rather a sparse wedding for a multimillionaire?” she inquired.
“They know I value my privacy,” he replied shortly.
Ann let her head fall back against the leather headrest, wondering where they were going. Her life seemed to be out of her hands since she’d met Heath again.
Her question was answered as he turned down Prospect Boulevard and then pulled into the long, curving driveway of the house which had once belonged to Duncan Curtis. The landscaping was different, more elaborate than Ann’s memory of it. Curtis had never made the estate a showplace to be envied, but it was clear that Heath wanted Lime Island residents to know that its new owner was a man who had definitely “arrived.”
Heath used a remote control to open one of the triple garage doors and pulled the sleek car into the middle bay. The garage was antiseptically clean, a tier of shelves against one plaster wall containing antifreeze and motor oil the only color in the whitewashed environment. The bay to the right contained an RV; the one to the left, an elaborate Harley Heath could never have afforded in his Jensens’ Marina days. Ann was sure there were several boats anchored out back in the lagoon and maybe even a plane stashed somewhere.
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