by Nora Roberts
Never too late to look for love / Never too soon to find it.
They had been happy, Emma thought. They had been a family. Then, the next day they had given a party and everything had changed.
“Yes,” she said abruptly. “I want to go in.”
“Okay. Look, it might be better if they didn’t know who you are, about the connection, I mean.”
She nodded, and drove through the open gates.
Michael closed a hand over hers as they stood in front of the door. Hers was like ice, but steady. He put on his best smile as the door opened. “Hi. We were driving by and saw your sign. We’ve been house hunting for weeks. We’ve got an appointment to see another place in about an hour, but we just couldn’t resist this. It isn’t sold yet, is it?”
The woman, fortyish, dressed in countrywear of Bass loafers and Calvin Kleins, took a long, cautious look. She took in Michael’s work shirt, worn Levi’s, and scuffed high tops. But she was also sharp enough to note Emma’s discreetly expensive pumps and the casual Ralph Lauren skirt and blouse. As well as the Mercedes convertible parked in the drive. She smiled. The house had been on the market for five months without a firm offer.
“Well, actually we do have a prospective buyer, but the contract won’t be signed until Monday.” Her gaze swooped down to the small but elegant diamond and sapphire ring on Emma’s hand. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to show you through.”
She opened the door further, lifting a brow as Emma hesitated before stepping inside. “I’m Gloria Steinbrenner.”
“Nice to meet you.” Michael extended a hand and took hers. “Michael Kesselring. This is Emma.”
Ms. Steinbrenner gave them both a dazzling smile. The hell with the real estate broker, she thought. She’d opened the door to her own hot prospect, and intended to make the most of it.
“The place is in beautiful condition. I adore it.” She detested every board and brick. “It’s breaking my heart to sell, but—to be frank—my husband and I are divorcing, so we’re liquidating.”
“Oh.” Michael put what he hoped was an appropriately sympathetic, but interested, look on his face. “I’m sorry.”
“No need.” She waved a hand. “Are you from the area?”
“No, actually, we’re … from the Valley,” he said, inspired. “We’re just dying to get out, crowds, smog. Isn’t that right, Emma?”
“Yes.” She forced a smile. “It’s a beautiful house.”
“Thank you. The living area, as you can see, is magnificent. High ceilings, genuine oak beams, lots of glass and open space. It’s a working fireplace, of course.”
Of course, Emma thought. Hadn’t she sat in front of it? The furniture was new, and she hated it on sight. Pretentious modern sculptures and glossy enameled tables. Where were all the cushions, the funny baskets filled with balls of yarn and ribbon that Bev had arranged?
“The dining area’s through here, but this spot in front of the terrace windows is just perfect for cozy little suppers.”
No, that wasn’t right, she thought as she mechanically followed. Bev had put plants in front of those windows. A jungle of plants in old pottery bowls and urns. Stevie and Johnno had brought her a tree once, grunting and panting as they’d hauled it in. They’d done it as a joke, but Bev had left it there, and bought a silly plaster robin to sit on one of the branches.
“Emma?”
“What?” She jolted, dragging herself back. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, that’s quite all right.” The woman was delighted that Emma seemed to be mesmerized. “I was just asking if you cooked?”
“No, not very well.”
“The kitchen is up-to-the-minute. I had it remodeled just two years ago.” She pushed open the swinging doors and gestured. “All built-ins. Microwave, Jenn-Air range, a convection oven, naturally. Acres of counter space. A pantry, of course.”
Emma stared at the streamlined, soulless kitchen. It was all white and stainless steel. Gone were the copper pots Bev had kept shiny and hung from hooks. There were no more little pots of herbs on the windowsill. No high chair for Darren, no clutter of cookbooks or colorful apothecary jars.
The woman droned on, obviously considering the kitchen her pièce de résistance, while Emma stood, grieving.
When the phone rang, she closed a slick white cabinet door. “Excuse me, just a moment.”
“Are you all right?” Michael murmured.
“Yes.” She wanted to be. “I’d like to go upstairs.”
“Listen, Jack.” Ms. Steinbrenner’s voice had lost its cooing flow. “I’m not interested in your complaints or your lawyer’s threats. Got it?”
Michael cleared his throat. “Excuse me.” He offered the woman an easy smile. “Would it be all right if we wandered through?”
She waved them away and snarled into the phone. “Listen, asshole.”
“Sounds like she’ll be tied up awhile,” he said lightly. “You sure you want to go up?”
No, she wasn’t sure. She was anything but sure. “I can’t come this far and not finish.”
“Right.” Whatever her claims against fragility, he put an arm around her shoulders as they started up.
The doors were open—the bedroom door where her father and Bev had once slept. Where Emma had sometimes heard them laughing late at night. Alice’s room, which had always been so bland and neat, had become a sitting room with walls of books and a console television. Her room. She stopped, gazing in.
The dolls were gone, the Mickey Mouse night-light, the frilly pinks and whites that Bev had indulged her in. No little girl had slept there, dreamt there, in a very long time. It was obviously a guest room now. Silk flowers, a Hollywood bed plumped with vivid cushions, reading material carefully arranged. Roman shades had replaced the priscillas she remembered, and wall-to-wall carpeting the pretty, frivolous shag rug.
“This was my room,” she said dully. “There was wallpaper with little roses and violets, frilly pink curtains at the windows and a big white quilt for the bed. I had dolls on the shelves, and music boxes. I guess it was the kind of room all little girls want, at least for a while. Bev understood that. I don’t know why I thought it would be the same.”
He remembered a quote he’d read in college, one that had stuck. “ ‘All things change; nothing perishes.’ ” He shrugged self-consciously. He wasn’t the type of man who quoted. “It is the same, in your head. That’s what counts.”
She said nothing, but turned and looked down the hall to Darren’s room. The door was open too, as it should have been that night.
“I was in bed,” she said flatly. “Something woke me up. The music. I thought it was the music. I couldn’t really hear it, but I could feel it. The bass vibrating. I tried to guess what the song was, and what people were doing. I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to stay up for the parties. I heard something. Something,” she murmured, rubbing an annoyed hand on the headache that was building behind her temple. “I don’t know what. But I—footsteps,” she remembered abruptly, and her heart began to thud against her ribs. “I heard someone coming down the hall. I wanted it to be Da or Bev. I wanted them to talk to me for a while. Maybe I could con them into letting me go downstairs. But it wasn’t Da or Bev.”
“Easy.” He could see the sweat beading on her brow, and rubbed her hand between both of his. “Just take it slow.”
“Darren was crying. I heard him crying. I know it. It wasn’t a dream. I heard him crying. I got up. Alice had told me not to take Charlie in, but Darren liked to sleep with Charlie, and he was crying. I was going to take Charlie into Darren and talk to him for a while until he slept again. But the hall was dark.”
She looked around now, with the sunlight creeping into it from the bedroom windows. “It was dark, but it wasn’t supposed to be. They always left a light on for me. I’m so afraid of the dark. There are things in the dark.”
“Things?” he repeated, his brows drawing together.
“I didn’t want to go out in t
he hall, in the dark. But he kept crying. I could hear the music now, as I stepped into the hall, into the dark. It was loud, and I was frightened.”
She started to walk then, dreamlike, toward the door. “I could hear them, hissing in the corners, scraping along the walls, swishing on the rugs.”
“Hear what?” he said quietly. “What did you hear?”
“The monsters.” She turned and looked at him. “I heard the monsters. And … I don’t remember. I don’t remember if I went to the door. It was closed, I know it was closed, but I don’t know if I opened it.”
She stood on the threshold. For an instant she saw the room as she remembered it—cluttered with Darren’s toys, painted in bright, primary colors. His crib, his rocker, his shiny new tricycle. Then the picture dissolved into what was there.
An oak desk and leather chair. Framed pictures, glass shelves crowded with bric-a-brac.
An office. They had turned her brother’s room into an office.
“I ran,” she said at length. “I don’t remember anything except running, and falling.”
“You said you’d gone to the door. You told my father, when he saw you in the hospital right after it happened, that you’d opened the door.”
“It was like a dream. And now, I don’t really remember at all. It all faded away.”
“Maybe it was supposed to.”
“He was beautiful.” It hurt too much to face the room. “He was absolutely beautiful. I loved him more than anything or anyone. Everyone did.” Tears were blurring her vision. “I need to get out of here.”
“Come on.” He led her down the hall, down the stairs where she had tumbled that night years before. He sent a quick, apologetic glance to Gloria Steinbrenner as she hurried in from the kitchen. “I’m sorry, my wife’s not feeling well.”
“Oh.” Annoyance and disappointment came first. Then hope. “Make sure she gets some rest. As you can see, this house was just made for children. You wouldn’t want to raise a baby in the Valley.”
“No.” He didn’t bother to correct her, and steered Emma out. “We’ll be in touch,” he called, and took the driver’s seat himself. If he hadn’t been concerned with Emma’s pale face, and the prospect of driving a thirty-thousand-dollar car, he would have noticed the dark blue sedan that trailed after them.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured after they started down the winding roads.
“Don’t be stupid.”
“No, I am. I didn’t handle that well.”
“You did fine.” He reached over to give her hand an awkward pat. “Look, I’ve never lost anybody close to me, but you only have to be human to imagine what it would be like. Don’t beat yourself up, Emma.”
“Put it behind me?” She drummed up a weak smile. “I hope I can. I thought if I could stand there, right there, and think about what had happened, it would all come back to me. Since it didn’t …” She shrugged, then pushed her sunglasses back on. “You’ve been a good friend.”
“That’s me,” he muttered. “Always a pal. Hungry?”
She started to shake her head, then stopped. “Yes,” she realized. “I’m starved.”
“I can spring for a burger. I think,” he added, struggling to remember just what was in his wallet.
“I’d love a burger. And since you’ve been a pal, my treat.”
He pulled into a McDonald’s, and since he discovered the contents of his wallet included three singles and the phone number of a redhead he barely remembered, he put aside what he told himself was dumb macho pride. Emma didn’t argue with his suggestion that they make it to go, or with his casual assumption that he would continue in the driver’s seat.
“Thought we’d take it to the beach.”
“I’d like that.” She shut her eyes again and leaned back. She was glad she’d come. Glad she had climbed those stairs. Glad she was here, with the warm wind in her hair and Michael beside her. “It was sleeting in New York when I left.”
“There are colleges in sunny California, too.”
She smiled, enjoying the breeze on her face. “I like New York,” she said absently. “I always have. My roommate and I bought a loft. It’s nearly livable now.”
“Roommate?”
“Yes. Marianne and I went to Saint Catherine’s together.” Since her eyes were still closed, she didn’t notice his look of pleased relief. “We always swore we’d live in New York one day. Now we do. She’s taking art classes.”
He decided he was kindly disposed toward Marianne. “She any good?”
“Yes, very. One day galleries are going to be cutting their throats to get her paintings. She used to do the most incredible caricatures of the nuns.” She glanced over, noting his frown.
“What is it?”
“Probably just rookie-cop instincts on overtime. See that sedan, just behind us?”
She glanced over her shoulder. “Yes. So?”
“It’s been behind us since we picked up the burgers.” He switched lanes. The sedan followed suit. “I’d say he was tailing us, if he wasn’t so stupid about it.”
She let out a long, tired sigh. “It’s probably Sweeney.”
“Sweeney?”
“Bodyguard. He always finds me. Sometimes I think Da planted a homing device under my skin.”
“Yeah, it could be. I guess it makes sense.” But he didn’t care to be shadowed, so amaturely shadowed, on what he considered his first date with a longtime crush. “I could lose him.”
Emma tilted down her glasses. Behind them her eyes glinted with the first real laughter he’d seen in her. “Really?”
“I could give it my best shot. This little baby’s bound to leave him in the dust.”
“Do it,” she said, and grinned.
Delighted, Michael punched the gas, cut off a station wagon, and peeled up to eighty. “We used to race on the freeway—in my callow and misspent youth.” He swerved again, dodging between a pickup and a BMW, then with a twist of the wrist shot in front of a Caddy and let the Mercedes cruise at ninety.
“You’re good.” Laughing, Emma twisted in her seat and peered at the traffic. “I can’t see him.”
“He’s back there, trying to get around the Caddy. I pissed the Caddy off so he’s hogging the road. Hang on.” He swerved, spun, and jockeyed, then raced off an exit. One illegal U-turn, and the Mercedes’s powerful engine, and he was back on the freeway, heading in the opposite direction. They whizzed by the sedan, slowed to a decorous speed and sailed calmly down another ramp.
“Really good at it,” Emma said again. “Did they teach you that at the police academy?”
“Some skills you’re born with.” He stopped, then stroked the steering wheel. “What a honey.”
Emma leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Thanks. Again.” Before he could respond, she had snatched up the bag of burgers and was racing toward the sand.
“I love this!” Still laughing, she spun in a circle. “I really love the water, the smell of it, the sound of it. If they could just plop an ocean down next to Broadway I’d be in heaven.”
He wanted to take hold of her then, to grab her in mid-spin and find out if she tasted nearly as good as she looked. Then she dropped down on the sand and dug into the bag.
“These smell great, too.” She held one up before she realized he was staring at her. “What is it?”
“Nothing.” But his mouth was dry again. “I was, ah, remembering that I once wondered whether you ever got to go to McDonald’s. The first time I met you, at the rehearsal? Dad took me for a burger after and I wondered, with all the guards, if you ever got to go.”
“No, not really, but Da or Johnno or someone would sometimes bring takeout. Don’t feel sorry for me.” She groped in the bag again. “Not today.”
“Okay. Hand over the fries.”
They ate hungrily, leaving not even a crumb for the gulls. The breeze was up, carrying a mist of the sea. There were other people, a few families, young girls showing off tans and slender figures, the inevitab
le radios pumping out music, but for Emma it was one of the most peaceful and secluded interludes of her life.
“I could get used to this.” She sighed, stretched her arms up. “Sitting on the beach, listening to the water.” She shook her head so that her hair rained like gold dust down her back. “I wish I had more time.”
“So do I.” He had to touch her. He couldn’t remember not wanting to. When he stroked a finger down her cheek, she turned her head and smiled. What she saw in his eyes had her heart pounding in her throat, had her lips parting, not so much in surprise as in question.
She didn’t resist as he touched his mouth to hers. On a quiet moan she shifted toward him, inviting something she didn’t completely understand. A gentle nip of his teeth had her lips heating. When he entered her mouth, she heard the low sound of pleasure in his throat, felt his hands tense on her arms.
Without hesitation, she pressed her body to his and absorbed the sensation.
Would he have believed that it was the first time she’d been kissed, like this? The first time she felt like this? Warm, liquid, achingly sweet desire swam into her. Had she been waiting for this? Even as she wondered, her lashes lowered to help her seal the memory.
“You do,” he murmured, and kissed her again, gently, because it seemed the right way.
“Do what?”
“Taste as good as you look. I’ve wondered for a long time.”
She had to swallow, had to draw back. There were feelings growing inside her she didn’t know what to do with. They were too big, and came too fast. “It’s the salt.” Confused, she rose and stepped closer to the sea.
It was easy for a man to mistake confusion for casualness. He sat where he was, giving himself time. He had no casual feelings for her. Stupid as it might have sounded, he was in love. She was beautiful, elegant, and certainly accustomed to being wanted by men. Rich and important men. And he was a rookie cop from a middle-class family. He let out a long breath, rose, and tried to be as offhand as she.
“It’s getting late.”
“Yes.” Was she crazy? Emma wondered. She wanted to cry and laugh and dance and mourn all at once. She wanted to turn to him, but tomorrow she would be three thousand miles away. He was only being kind. She was the poor little rich girl, a tide she detested, and he—he was doing something with his life.
