Too Lucky to Live
Page 17
“No. I’m going. If I wait, I’ll lose my nerve. And if I take more time, it’ll only make things worse.
***
I paused for a long moment outside of Jake’s Lounge, remembering the night of my first big off-the-rails adventure. Ulysses Night. I was checking for threats this time, too. I figured that there had to be at least one: Tom. I had never felt more vulnerable, more out of excuses and bright ideas. More alone.
Show some guts, Allie. Whatever this is going to be, you earned it all by yourself.
Jake’s was lively with drinkers and socializers. Quite a few of them took note of my bedraggled appearance as I passed among them and several of those gave me a second, raised-eyebrow glance based on the change in the air. I inspected them right back. I wasn’t trusting anybody anymore. Not even effete, upscale barflies.
Tom was sitting at the glowing bar with his back to me, a glass of something brown with melting ice in front of him. I couldn’t tell whether he recognized my step or was startled by the smell, but his back tensed as I walked up.
I tensed, too. He wasn’t alone.
“Allie.”
This “Allie” was serene and distant. I had an inkling of what he was feeling. His face said he’d already laid my memory to rest. It would be a long hike back from that cemetery.
It seemed premature for him to have found a new girl so soon after my demise, however. And a gorgeous one, at that. She’d been whispering to him as I walked up, a low purr of seduction. Weaving a pheromone web of attraction between them.
My arrival didn’t break the connection.
“Allie,” Tom repeated, his tone formal. “This is Diana. Diana Wiles. She’s a colleague of mine at the university.”
O.M.G. Jake’s Lounge was so destined to be my “Case of You” bar. Diana. Diana? But of course. The mystery ringtone. Things were adding up.
I was shocked it wasn’t playing.
“Nice to meet you, Diana.” I started to extend a hand and then rethought when she drew back. Kind of like Princess, only better-groomed.
“Sorry. I had an incident with some fragrance earlier this evening.”
Tom made a sound I was unable to interpret.
I gave this Diana Wiles the onceover. She was everything I always wanted to be—more, even, than blond, sleek, and professional, like Officer Bob Clark’s impeccable Marie.
Diana: Dark. Mysterious. Dangerous. Sophisticated. Sickeningly beautiful. Augh. As a younger, less-enlightened woman, I had secretly longed to make other women queasy with my beauty. Diana was payback for that uncharitable wish. I wanted to throw up.
I knew Tom could not be moved by the vision of raven hair falling straight down over an ivory cheek, but the silky would translate fine for him. The creamy complexion, glistening lips, flawless manicure—my fingers curled themselves self-protectively into my palms—gorgeous figure gift-wrapped in fluid black charmeuse. The smooth of her, the flawless touch, the tactile of Diana Wiles was a formidable rival.
Yeah, she was nauseating.
She laid a well-lotioned hand on Tom’s arm and kept it there, stroking. A caress. Possessive. She turned to me as if unpleasantly surprised to discover me still there, and gleamed at me through slightly narrowed big, dark, lustrous, brown eyes.
Right there, right then, I had a lightning strike of what Tom’s supernatural sixth sense must be like. I could sense the tension in the air. Feel it. The pulse of desire.
My brand new spidey sense pinged. “Spider!”
Diana’s voice had Tom’s honeyed echo of the South. “Allie, it is a pleasure to meet you. At last.”
Then she leaned into him, locking me the rest of the way out of their private encounter, and murmured, her perfect lips almost touching his ear, “I’m going now. Think about what I said. It could be good, Tom—very good. It could be everything we always wanted. From the beginning. All of it. So think about what that could be like.”
“I already have.”
Three little words.
My heart took a direct hit.
Diana picked up Jake’s sparkly martini glass off the bar in front of her, drained its quicksilver liquid, and set it back down with a force that severed its base from the stem with a crisp chink. She held up the glass at eye level and tipped it in my direction, a toast, and said, “Oh my, how very careless of me. Or perhaps I should say—” She turned it upside down and set it on the polished surface “how very fragile of it.”
She slid off the leather-upholstered barstool in a hiss of charmeuse that made me think of static electricity and snakes, and left the bar to the tune of a lot of admiring glances from the guys around there. She wobbled somewhat at the end of her runway, but I guess Manolos will do that to you.
Geez.
I was done. Defeated. Whatever was going to happen would happen. I had not a Manolo to stand on. I was plain. I was badly dressed. I smelled like a busload of hookers—high-priced hookers, let me say. It was Jo, after all.
I needed a shower. I needed to sleep. I had screwed up like there was no tomorrow. Now there wasn’t going to be one for Tom and me. I wanted to die. Maybe cry myself to death. I touched Tom on the shoulder.
“I’m going up. I need a shower. We…. Maybe we can talk…in the morning. I…I can’t tonight.” The tears were on the move again.
“Fine.”
Cold, cold, cold.
Let this day be over now, Lord. And make me a better girl. Amen.
And that was it for Tuesday.
Chapter Thirty-five
Wednesday, August 26
That was not it, however, for very, very early Wednesday morning.
It was a little after eleven when I got back to the room. I started to cry as soon as the door clunked shut behind me, and I didn’t even bother to try and stop myself. I figured I didn’t deserve much but I did have the right to cry as hard and as long as I liked.
So I did. I sobbed and blubbered my way into the shower, stood under the hot spray, leaned my head against the tile, and didn’t even bother to wipe my nose. I let it all out. Every time I moved wrong and jarred my damaged shoulder, I let go and cried more. It was as if my one possession in the world was the permission I’d given myself to shed all these tears and not feel ashamed.
Oh, I did feel plenty ashamed about how stupid and thoughtless I’d been. Everything I’d put Tom through tonight.
Just not about bawling my eyes out.
And then, of course, here was Diana. I now knew for sure that Tom was in a relationship with another woman. A woman far more sophisticated and attractive…and sexier, no doubt…than me. I cried about that. A lot. And for how all my pretty dreams could be snapped apart as easily as a sparkly glass.
After a while the tempest died down, and I concentrated on scrubbing every perfumed inch of me about six times. I washed my hair, the full shampoo, rinse and repeat, twice.
When I gave up and shut off the water, I was a mere husk. As hollow as a chocolate Easter bunny. I toweled off as dry as I could and eased my sore self, naked, under the smooth, white Marriott sheet, a body at peace in its shroud. I figured I was as safe as a dead girl could be. I closed my eyes.
They opened back up again all by themselves. I looked at the clock. 11:45. Breathe, Allie, let this night pass. Breathe.
That went on for a while and I got a small amount calmer. No Tom appeared at all. Would he get another room? Come in the morning and pick up his beautiful blind-associate-professor things and his fabulous white tee-shirts? And move out? To another hotel? Another city? Would I ever see Rune again? My calm faded. I peeked at the clock. 12:05 a.m. Praise the Lord. Tuesday was over.
Breathe.
I heard the card key slip into the lock.
I lay very still.
Click.
The door opened. The door closed.
Tom said, “Al
lie. Come here.”
I got up as ordered, regretting now that I hadn’t bothered to dig up something, anything, to wear. I didn’t have a leg to stand on, but I would have appreciated some dignity.
“Tom?”
“Allie.” Tense. Harsh. Not in any way good.
He put his hands out and found my arms. I gritted my teeth against the spike of pain from my shoulder.
“You…you’re…you aren’t…you don’t have anything on.”
“I didn’t think I should borrow your stuff when you’re so angry with me.”
It crossed my mind that perhaps that had been a small, somewhat unconscious, last-ditch deviousness on my part. I’ll get even with you, Tom Bennington III, PhD, I’m not good enough to wear your shirt but I’m good enough to be irresistibly naked.
Not irresistible it appeared.
“Angry? Angry doesn’t begin to cover how I feel. How I felt when you didn’t come back. You didn’t call. And you’d turned off your phone?”
“I know. Tom, I’m sorry. You were busy. Working. I figured you wouldn’t miss me—”
“Sorry? Sorry? You’re sorry. Really.”
A voice hard and cold as iron. My new spidey sense was on full alert now. He was radiating rage. The vibration of it was on my bare skin.
“You assume because I’m busy, or maybe just because I’m blind and can’t see the sun setting, that I don’t know what fucking time it is? I measure my life in time, Allie, I orient myself by it. I touch my fucking watch and it tells me what time it is.
“On August twenty-fifth in Cleveland the sun sets at 8:10 p.m. You should have been gone an hour and a half. That was six hours ago. You think I didn’t know you were somewhere—I couldn’t imagine where—in the goddamn dark? Lost? Kidnapped? Dead?
“So if you think being all sad and sorry will fix this, You are…just…so fucking wrong.”
He shook me and his hands were on the same tender, bruised spots where the scary, disgusting guy had grabbed me, and the shaking wrenched my shoulder all over again. That did it. I was naked. I was wrong. I was sorry and now I was sobbing again. Dignity was clearly not going to be mine tonight.
“Okay. Okay! Tom. Stop! Ow! Stop! I was wrong. I screwed up. I…broke my promise. I scared you. It’s…unforgiveable. I can’t ever make it right. You’re done. I get it. Let me go. Just let me go. I’m scared. You’re hurting me.”
“Good. I was scared, too, dammit. I thought I’d never…see you again. Do you know what that meant to me? The way I’d trusted myself to you. Letting you in. Letting myself see you—know you—the way I did?”
He gripped my bruised flesh harder. My shoulder screamed and reminded me of how terrified I’d been. How alone. How the things he’d worried about were the things I thought were about to happen to me. I cried out and tried again to pull free but he spun me around and pinned me up against the door.
Then something unexpected happened.
He kissed me.
This was not a tender, loving kiss. Until that moment I had no idea that there was such a thing as a furious kiss. Or how that would work.
It was furious, all right. Furiously hot. Hungry. Punishing. The taste of whiskey on my tongue. His chin was rough, his hands running all over me now. Possessive. Angry. And, yes. Exceedingly hot.
I stopped trying to resist. I returned the kiss—hungry, punishing, possessive, angry—in equal measure. I pulled away long enough to hiss, “I was lost and you were with that Diana!”
“Shut up. You don’t know anything about that.”
“And whose fault would that be?”
“Shut up. Just shut up. Don’t try to divert me. I’m still mad at you. I’ll still be mad at you tomorrow and probably next week. So shut up now. And prove to me you’re alive.”
He was still going to be mad at me next week?
This was terrific news. I set it aside to enjoy later. I had now been dragged into the heat of his rage. My hurt and dismay about finding him in the bar with a tactile-ly appealing woman while I had been missing and presumed dead, was fueling my own emotional instability.
We were a human torch.
I gave my throbbing shoulder a silent order to butt out and pulled him back across the room to the bed. I lent him a hand stripping off his shirt and pants. The playing field was more even now. I laid my naked self all along the naked heat of him. He rolled me onto my back, kissing me hard, moving into me like some wild, dark storm. I wrapped my legs around him.
I could see that the up-against-the-door part was all the foreplay there was going to be.
Fine.
By.
Me.
In the breathless moments after the fire had finally burned through all the accelerant, he murmured against my ear, “Alice Jane. If you ever scare me that badly again, I swear I’ll kill you.”
I dug my fingers into his neck, arched my back and tightened my legs around him and said, “Okay. I promise I’ll let you.”
An exchange of vows as sacred as any vows can be.
And then we fell asleep, still angry, still in each other’s arms.
Chapter Thirty-six
“I know you hate all this.”
“Yes.”
“And you blame me for the total mess I made of yesterday.”
“Yes. No. It’s not—okay. Yes. For yesterday. You bet. Yesterday, for damn sure. You promised. You and I agreed that you wouldn’t go off on your own looking for…for pieces of plaid.”
“Well, technically, I said I was going to pick up some clothes ‘and stuff.’ The plaid was the stuff.”
“I assume the tanker truck of Jo Malone was stuff as well? Whatever. I have to be mad at you for how scared I was.”
What he had fully communicated to me in his rage the night before was how much selfish carelessness I’d jammed into the heart of our relationship. How I’d damaged him in the absolutely—everything—of himself that he’d given to me, like a gift—and trusted me not to destroy. I didn’t know when, if ever, he was going to forgive me for that, but it was going to be a deep, dark hole of regret in the middle of my chest for a long, long time.
The only bright spot for me this morning was that, in addition to being way beyond sorry, I was also a little flattered. He valued me at the level worthy of a first-class freak out. This was nice.
We were having a very careful Scarlett-O’Hara-meets-Rhett-Butler-the-morning-after-for-breakfast-at-David’s-in-the Marriott. I gave my plate of the special a disrespectful poke. Scenes from the aforementioned yesterday were ratcheting around in my head.
I had a lot to process over congealed Eggs Benedict.
At least my shoulder was feeling better. I had filled Tom in on what happened at my house, but I’d downplayed the Big Scary Attack as much as I could. I mentioned the arm bruises but not the shoulder. Ibuprofen was my friend. The specter of Diana Wiles was perched up there on the sorest spot, whispering that I could be replaced. I was casting about for some way to heal the damage I’d caused when Tom said, “Allie.”
In that voice.
I injected as much abject remorse as would fit into my feeble little, “Yes?”
He cleared his throat. “Allie. I’ve been thinking.”
Uh oh. Here it comes.
“That first night with you. I felt more alive than I’ve been in a long time. Remember I said I left Atlanta because my parents couldn’t let me be independent?”
“I do.” So far this was better than what I was expecting.
“That independence I moved 700 miles to get? That willingness to take a risk for a good reason? As careful as I am to manage everything about my life, that freedom is something I’ll never give up, even if sometimes I forget how much I need it. And you. You bring that with you. It’s part of the Alice Jane package. Even with everything that’s happened, I still feel—”
“I still feel so—”
I smashed my fork into the yolks Benedict and watched them ooze yellow-ly up between the tines. Patience, Allie. Sit. Stay. I held my breath.
“I love you, Alice Jane.”
I exhaled. “You must, Tom Bennington. Or you’d be long gone by now.”
“If I led you to believe I’d ever be gone—ever—that was wrong. I was mad. Scared to death and mad.”
His beautiful hand was lying quiet, palm up, on the tabletop, and I laid my guilty little paw in the cradle he’d made for it. His fingers closed around mine, and I felt something that had been locked up in my chest let go. I could breathe both in and out again.
“Listen. Allie. We’re in big trouble here. You and me? We’re our own little crime wave. It wasn’t you who opened the door to 550 million dollar’s worth of train wreck. That was all me.”
“I suppose in one way you did. But that was not you, Tom. You did not commit premeditated serial-murder-by-jackpot. You can’t blame your intention, which was all good and kind. Winning like you did? That was lightning striking. Although the odds for hitting the Mondo are way worse than lightning. It’s a million times more unlikely than being struck twice in one lifetime. Seriously. That’s a fact. I checked.”
I got the improved smile I was waiting for, not yet entirely happy but welcome all the same. “Ah, so that’s the burning sensation in my chest.”
“No, that’s love, remember? Love for me in spite of—” I sure didn’t want to enumerate. “—everything.”
“Stop. I forgive you for almost everything. Just don’t do it again. Or, as you recall, I’m sure, I’ll have to kill you.”
“I know.”
Oh, yeah. Our sacred vow. And he was remembering that moment, too. I could tell by the flush of color on his fabulous cheekbones.
That angry embrace, fusing us to each other in spite of everything.
“But you need to not talk like that in David’s. We’re getting a reputation in here.”