by Fay Robinson
He agreed, reluctantly. It took him several minutes to hobble to the house and considerably more time to climb the concrete steps to the porch. Crossing the threshold, he swayed, reducing her life by at least ten years. She didn’t breathe normally until he’d safely reached the bedroom.
“Let me fix these covers,” she said, moving a pile of underwear to the antique dresser. The bed was unmade and the top sheet lay partly on the floor. She found the pillows wedged between the old iron bedstead and the wall.
Either he’d had a restless sleep the night before or he’d been playing with someone in bed. She could easily imagine it, that exquisite body of his in motion, thrusting, driven by passion, bringing some woman to the pinnacle of ecstasy.
“I can do that,” he said suddenly.
Her eyes widened.
“Do what?”
“Fix the bed.”
“Oh.” She almost laughed out loud at her foolishness. “That’s okay. I’ll do it.”
She quickly straightened the bed and helped him sit. He put the toe of one boot on the heel of the other and pushed it off his foot. “Oh, man, that hurts.”
“You’ll likely be sore for a long time. Are you going to need help getting undressed?”
His face reflected his amusement at the offer. “No, but I can pretend if you want me to.”
“Very funny.”
HIS HOUSE WAS OLD but hospitable. Kate went to the kitchen to get water so he could take his pill. She found ancient linoleum on the floor, so worn that in spots the rose-colored flowers in the pattern were no longer visible and the edges that met the baseboard had started to curl back and split.
Purple and pink African violets bloomed in small clay pots on the windowsill over the sink. A large wooden table took up most of the center of the room. Chairs, in a mishmash of styles and colors, flanked it.
Compared to Kate’s modern kitchen, the room was shabby, but she liked it better. This place had a feeling of home that her kitchen, her entire condo, had never given her, despite countless changes of decor.
Crayon pictures by some of the younger children at Pine Acres covered the refrigerator—drawings of horses and stick people with smiling faces, the sun peeking out from clouds above crudely drawn houses.
Kari loves Mr. Hayes, one child had scrawled across her drawing of a dog that looked like the ugly one still whining in the backyard.
Happy Father’s Day, another had wished him in carefully printed block letters.
Most of these children had reason never to trust an adult again, much less love one, yet it seemed Bret Hayes had somehow broken through their barriers of pain, sorrow and neglect.
“Finding everything?” he called from the bedroom.
“Yes, coming.”
Surprised to discover tears on her face, she wiped them away. She opened the refrigerator, intending to fix him something to eat, but it only held raw vegetables, a few condiments, a tub of butter and some canned drinks. Frozen microwave dinners packed the freezer compartment, but she didn’t think he was up to eating anything that heavy.
She smeared butter across some crackers she found in the cabinet and arranged them on a paper plate.
When she took him the crackers and a glass of water, he was sitting on the middle of the bed with his back against the headboard and his eyes closed, but he wasn’t asleep. He turned his head and looked at her as she approached.
She sat on the edge of the bed where she could face him. She put the plate in his lap, but she kept the glass, afraid he was too sleepy and might spill the water on the bed. “Here. Eat these. Taking medicine on an empty stomach isn’t good for you. I can fix you something more substantial if you think you can eat it.”
“No, don’t bother.” He ate one cracker with little enthusiasm and couldn’t eat another. “I can’t.” He sat the plate on the bedside table.
“Maybe that was enough.” She opened the bottle of pills and shook one of the gray-and-red capsules into his palm.
“What is this again?” he asked, peering down at it.
“Penicillin. To keep that gash from getting infected.”
“I’ll pass.”
“Come on. It won’t hurt you to take this, especially when you think of all the germs in a horse barn. All that manure. Ticks. Lice. Flies carrying all kinds of horrible—”
“All right, all right. Damn! I’ll take the pill. Would you mind putting some ice in this water? I’m hot.”
He did seem a little clammy. Beads of sweat had formed on his upper lip and his face looked flushed. “Do you have a fever?” Kate asked.
“No, it’s hot in here.”
“It isn’t really. A little stuffy, maybe, but there’s a cool breeze coming in the window.” She stood and pulled the string to the old fan overhead, putting it on the high setting. “How’s that?”
“Better, but maybe if I had something cool on my face…”
“Like a cool cloth?”
“Yeah, that sounds good.”
“Okay, I’ll get you one.”
She went to the kitchen for his ice water and a small bowl, throwing the crackers he hadn’t eaten out the back door. Sallie stopped growling to gobble them up. Kate felt sorry for her and threw out a few more. Then the rest in the pack. Then the rest in the box.
In the bathroom, she filled the bowl with cool water and found a washcloth. Quietly she opened the medicine cabinet to take a quick look. Nothing unusual there. The cabinet under the sink was the same way, cluttered and uninteresting. It looked like hers, except she didn’t buy adhesive bandages with cartoon characters on them.
She felt a bit guilty about prying, but this might be her one chance to have a look around.
Hurrying back to the bedroom, she searched for the pills, then remembered they’d been in her hand when she’d gone to get the water. “I guess I left your pills in the kitchen. Did I give you one already?”
“Mm-hmm.” He pointed to his mouth to let her know the pill was inside. When he’d washed it down, she wrung out the cloth and offered it to him to wipe his face.
“Do you mind doing it?” he asked. “My arms feel like lead.”
“No, I guess not.” Gently she wiped his brow, jaw and down both sides of his neck.
He’d unbuttoned his shirt while she was out of the room but hadn’t taken it off. His tanned chest glistened with sweat and drew her gaze to its muscular contours like metal to a magnet. She dared not look at it for long. And touching it with the cloth, even if it was only to help cool him, would surely unravel her already frayed emotions.
Repeatedly she went through the routine of dipping the cloth in the water, wringing it and wiping his skin. He watched her face, making her uncomfortable, but she pretended detachment. Follow the movement of the cloth was wiser than looking too long into his eyes.
“You’re not what I expected,” he said. “Sometimes you can be so hard to get along with, and other times, like now, you can be incredibly sweet.”
“Please don’t tell anyone about my sweet side. I wouldn’t want it to get around.”
He smiled. “Your secret’s safe with me,” he said. “Nobody would believe me, anyway.”
“Probably not. They’d swear the horse kicked you in the head, instead of the leg.”
“I’m not so sure he didn’t. Isn’t fraternizing with the enemy against the rules of war?”
“I believe so.” She tossed the cloth into the bowl. “But we have a truce, remember?”
“So we do.”
She glanced at her watch. “It’s after midnight. Did I miss my chance to make my pitch, or will you honor our deal?”
“Pitch away.”
“Now?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“But you’re groggy from that medication. I was thinking tomorrow.”
“Take your shot, Morgan. Tomorrow may be too late.”
“Okay, well…you were pretty candid today about your brother, and that tells me you might not be totally against helping me. So let me st
art by reminding you that I’m very good at what I do, my reputation is already established and I’m not out to make a fast buck or a name for myself like the writers who’ve told his story in the past.”
“If I say yes, what would I be committing myself to and what could I expect in return?”
“Talk to me and tell me the truth, and I’ll promise to leave your mother and sister alone and not to call them again for interviews. I’ll also let you read—for accuracy only—what I’ve already written and you can review the edited manuscript. You’ll know what’s in it before it hits the bookstores.”
“What if I don’t like something or don’t want it included?”
“Then we discuss it. If the information didn’t come from a confidential source, I’ll tell you where I got it and give you the opportunity to respond to it and even present your case to my publisher for excluding it from the book.”
“And if we still disagree?”
“Well, I can’t let you tell me what to publish, but I’ll seriously consider your arguments. And if after that I still feel the information is important and has to be included, I give you my word I’ll present it as fairly and honestly as I can.”
He took one of the pillows from behind his back and used it to support his leg. “This deal favors your side.”
“No, it doesn’t. Rejecting my offer won’t stop publication of the book. You already know I plan to go ahead. But accepting it will give you the power to influence what will be in it. I think that greatly favors your side.”
“What do you want from me? I’ve already told you what happened the night James died. Why isn’t that enough?”
“I need more. I believe he went through hell those last few years with the band, because of Lenny having to be institutionalized and Lauren’s suicide, and that’s why he turned to drugs. But I’m only guessing at the reasons. And I want to know more about his personal life.”
Bret’s guarded expression prevented her from reading his thoughts. She wondered if she’d killed her chances by mentioning Lauren Davis. More than once the gossip columns had linked the backup singer’s name with Bret’s, although she was also known to have been romantically involved with James.
“I promise I only want to write a balanced account of your brother’s life, and I believe I can do that without hurting you or your family. Deep down, don’t you believe that, too? Otherwise, why would you have volunteered so much information today?”
“Maybe I believe it, and maybe I don’t. You have a solid reputation, Morgan. I’ll give you that much. But I’m not sure I want to help you.”
“Don’t give me an answer now. Think about it for a few days, and when you’re feeling better, we’ll talk again.”
“I want to read the manuscript before I make up my mind.”
“I can arrange that.”
He shifted and winced, grabbing his hurt leg. “Damn.”
“Shouldn’t you call your mother and stepfather and tell them what’s happened to you?”
“No, they’ll only worry.”
“Someone else, then. A friend? Miss Emma?”
“No.”
“What about one of the hired men you mentioned?”
“They have work to do, and with me out, that work is going to double.”
“You should have help. Can’t you think of anyone?”
He looked away to hide the truth, but she saw it. He didn’t have anyone, other than his family. Not a soul here cared enough about him to lend him a hand. How incredibly sad. Her heart went out to him.
She felt his face. He was still hot, so she began the ritual again—dipping the cloth in the water, wringing it and pressing it to his skin. The rhythmic noise of the fan and her touch must have had a lulling effect; before long his eyelids fluttered, then closed.
She kept up her gentle attentions for a long time after he’d fallen asleep, unwilling to wake him now that he’d finally found relief from his pain. And she found she liked touching him. She liked looking at him when he didn’t know she was doing it.
A shadow of a beard had begun to show along his jaw and above his mouth, and his hair rejected style to fall in wayward curls across his forehead. Occasionally, when he smiled or made a certain gesture, his resemblance to James was uncanny. The shape of his head was the same. He had the same long dark lashes.
But Bret had a maturity that fate had denied James, and it was that maturity, or perhaps her own, that made him as attractive to a woman of thirty-three as James had been to a girl of nineteen.
James. Thoughts of him had sneaked into her head more than usual today. Putting the bowl aside, she eased carefully off the bed. The movement was still enough to wake Bret.
“Get some sleep,” she told him. “I’m going to bed, too. Call me if you need anything during the night.”
He said he would.
Once alone in the spare bedroom, she tried to wind down, but her emotions were in turmoil. As she often did late at night, she took out the Post article she kept in her wallet. The copy had creases and was falling apart; over the years she’d opened and refolded it a thousand times.
The accompanying photograph was of her and James. How young they both looked. Back then, Kate would never have guessed his fate, or that she’d write a book about him. She certainly would never have imagined she’d one day sleep in his brother’s house.
She put away the article, undressed and turned off the light. The bed was old, but comfortable.
She’d started this day not liking Bret, but had come to realize there was much about him to like—his dedication to the kids at Pine Acres, for one.
His reasons for not adopting didn’t make sense, though. He was hiding something, something she was determined to ferret out. If she could keep her mild attraction for him under control, she might succeed.
He was cute. Okay, she admitted with a sigh, more than cute. And she was more than mildly attracted. But she couldn’t let either interfere with the job she had to do here.
Maybe she was allowing her admiration for James to trick her into feeling something for Bret that didn’t exist. James’s friendship, although it had only lasted a few hours, had meant a great deal to her. She could be transferring her admiration for one brother to the other.
That was probably it. Or maybe she’d wanted to be charmed. Heaven knows, she was long overdue. She hadn’t felt such curiosity about a man in a long time. Not since…
Closing her eyes, she tried to call up Bret’s face, but it was James who appeared.
“Please, not tonight,” she whispered to him in the dark, knowing it would do no good. He would invariably haunt her dreams…as he’d haunted them so often in the past fourteen years.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SHE’D BEEN NINETEEN and James twenty-four the weekend he gave a concert in Manhattan and came into her life, unknowingly altering it. One day, just one tiny thread in the unending fabric of time, but she’d carry the memory in her head and her heart forever.
Away from home, living in a strange city and dealing with the recent death of her mother from cancer, she’d never felt more alone or afraid. In James, she’d seen herself as she might be: confident, fearless, able to handle the problems that came with being considered gifted.
He’d offered her friendship when no one wanted to be her friend. And brief as that friendship had been, it had gotten her through one of the most difficult periods of her life.
Having graduated with highest honors from DePaul University two years early, she’d entered the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, still in her teens, way too bright and too young to ever hope to fit in. She’d begun to see her intelligence as a curse. Always on display, humiliated if she made a mistake, she learned not to make mistakes.
Outwardly, she was an adult, but emotionally she was still a child. When things got too rough, she lost herself in the music of James Hayes, because she believed he somehow understood her pain. She conjured up a mystical connection with him through his music,
and that connection sustained her during the bleakest moments.
The things some people said about him, that he was a little wild and drank too much and always had a different woman at his side, didn’t matter. In truth, those things were exciting. Everything about him was exciting, from the way he looked to the timbre of his voice. But it was his talent Kate admired the most. His lyrics were poetry and the music touched her soul. He spoke to her directly in his songs; she was certain of that.
To meet him, to be able to sit and talk to him face-to-face, was a dream she harbored but never expected to come true. When it happened, she convinced herself that divine intervention was the cause. In reality, it was nothing more than his band manager Malcolm Elliot’s idea of a publicity stunt….
PEOPLE FROM THE college and members of Hayes’s band and entourage packed the suite. “I see him,” one of the other students said with excitement, craning his neck to look over the crowd. The others surged forward. Kate fought to retain her position in front, but she was soon at the back of the group.
“Everyone,” she heard Mr. Elliot say, “this is James Hayes. Jamie, these are the scholarship students I told you about.” At the man’s prompting, four of them rattled off their names and hometowns. “And…where’d the young kid go? There she is.” He reached through the other people, grabbed her above the elbow and pulled her forcefully toward him.
Someone stuck a foot out, or maybe she simply stumbled. With the sickening realization that she was about to make a fool of herself, Kate flew forward and out of Mr. Elliot’s grasp. She landed hard against the chest of James Hayes, nearly knocking him down.
“Whoa!” he said. His arms came up to steady her.
She looked up to find herself staring into extraordinary eyes that reminded her of a cloudless sky on a warm spring day. The apology she should have offered flew right out of her head. “Stupid idiot,” she blurted, instead.
Until one of the other students groaned, she didn’t realize she’d said the words out loud.
“Oh, no, I meant me!” she explained, horrified.
James smiled softly with understanding. “I can’t think of a nicer way to meet a pretty lady than to have her fall into my arms.”
