by Amy Summers
It was late evening when they crossed the border at Mexicali. They were lucky. With David's California plates, the guards didn't even ask to see ID for once, and they didn't have to bother getting Madison a new tourist card.
It felt good to be back home, cruising California freeways again. Madison felt excited as the La Jolla off ramps began to appear on the freeway signs.
Home. There was such comfort in the word.
A few minutes on a winding road, and there was the ocean, shimmering in the silver light of the moon.
"It's right up here to the left," she told David, sitting on the edge of her seat, anticipating the sight of her parents' house.
And there it was, looking long and low from the street. You couldn't tell from that vantage point that it went down three stories along the front of the cliff, jutting out over the waves as they hit the rocks below.
"We're here." She turned and looked at David, her eyes shining. He'd done it. Her hero.
She knew Armand was still out there somewhere, and that he still wanted to grab the kids in order to use them to extort money out of her family, but she felt safe here. Especially with David by her side. They would find a way to keep Armand at bay. She was sure of it.
Her hand curled around his. "Thank you, David. Thank you so much."
His eyes were curiously emotionless, and he didn't answer. "Let's get the kids out," he said crisply, slipping his hand out of hers and turning to open the car door.
She drew back, not sure why he was rebuffing her this way. "Sure," she said and got out as well, reaching for Jill, while David gathered Chris into his arms.
She didn't have her key to get through the security gate, so she had to ring for one of the maids. Ilsa appeared in her terry cloth robe, rubbing her eyes.
"Miss Carrington, what on earth? We weren't expecting you to come back so soon."
"Sorry I didn't call you, Ilsa. It was a sudden decision to return."
"I see." Ilsa's sharp gray eyes took in David with Chris clinging to him and she nodded. "Shall I take the children up?"
"No, you go right on back to bed, Ilsa. We'll take care of things."
"If you're sure..."
"Please. And I'm sorry I had to wake you."
"No trouble at all. We're glad to have you back, miss."
"Servants?" David noted dryly as Ilsa disappeared down a corridor.
Madison barely gave him a glance. "Of course, servants. How could we run this huge house without them?"
"How many?"
"Three. That includes the gardener."
"Three servants to take care of the three of you?" His eyebrow rose. "Doesn't that seem a little weird to you?"
"Oh, here we go again." She led the way up the stairs to the children's rooms. “They're not here to take care of us so much as they're here to take care of the house. They have to be here even if we're not."
She opened the door to Jill's room and led her to her bed, pushing back the covers and swinging her legs under them.
In response to her last statement, David made a noise that wasn't very polite. She felt her jaw tighten. It was late. She was tired. And she was definitely losing her temper.
Whirling, she confronted him, sparks in her eyes. "What do you want me to do, throw them out on their ears? Then you could call me a cold and unfeeling exploiter of labor. At least this way they have jobs."
Turning, she started toward Chris's room.
"Ah yes, the old trickle-down theory." David came behind.
"Trickle-down jobs are better than no jobs at all."
She stopped, catching her breath. Here they were, snapping at each other. She put a hand to her forehead. “Come on, let's get Chris to bed. Then we can talk."
David looked at her, his eyes flat, like tinted glass. "I don't think we'll have any time to talk," he said evenly. "I want to get home myself."
She looked at him in surprise. She'd just assumed...
"You won't stay here tonight?" she asked.
"No."
"Oh." She frowned. She should have expected that, she supposed. After all, he had his life, too.
Chris was stirring in David's arms. She opened the door to his room and turned back his covers, and David laid him down, bending to kiss his forehead before he straightened again, looking down at him with a strange expression on his face.
The move surprised Madison, but then, everything he was doing was surprising her, ever since they'd arrived in La Jolla.
He followed her out into the hallway and stopped her with a hand on her arm. "Get your locks changed, Madison," he said calmly. "Do it first thing in the morning. Remember, Armand has your purse and everything that's in it."
She nodded, that was good advice, but there was something about the way he was giving it that she didn't like.
"And one more thing," he said, his eyes distant, like a stranger. "You need a man, Madison. Someone to take care of you and the kids. I'd feel a lot better if you had a man around.''
She reached out and put her hand softly against his chest, looking up at him. "Aren't you a man?" she said, searching his eyes.
His hand covered hers and slowly pulled it away. "I'm not the right man, Madison, and you know it."
Her heart fell. Suddenly she realized what was going on here. Her breath caught in her throat and a sense of dread filled her body. "You're not coming back, are you?" she asked him.
He stared at her for a long moment, and then he shook his head. "No," he said coolly. "I'm not."
Tears were stinging behind her eyes, but she couldn't let him see. She forced herself to smile. "I'm sorry," she said, amazed that her voice could be so steady when her heart was breaking. "I thought we made a good team."
Before he could answer, the door to Chris's room opened and the little boy stumbled out into the hallway, blinking his sleepy eyes. "David." He put up his arms to be lifted.
David hesitated a moment, but he pulled Chris up and gave him a hug. "Good night, kid," he said gruffly. "You get back in bed, okay?"
Chris swung around and looked at his mother. "Mama? What room is David going to sleep in?"
Tears were suddenly threatening and Madison blinked hard to hold them back. "David isn't going to have a room, Chris."
Chris shook his bead, uncomprehending. "There's lots of space in my room. He could stay there." He swung back and stared into David's eyes, his own wide and innocent. "You could sleep over."
There was an odd look to David's face, and when he spoke, his voice was curiously choked. "Thanks, kid, but I've got to get back to my own place." He kicked the door open and carried Chris back to bed, tucking him in snugly and kissing him again.
Chris stared up at him. "Will you come back tomorrow?" he asked.
David hesitated, then swung away. "Maybe you ought to give old Cubby a call and have him come over real soon," he suggested to Madison as he started across the room.
Chris's lower lip was trembling. His pudgy little fingers were clutching the covers. "I don't want Cubby," he said, his voice shaking. "David, I want you. Don't go." He sat up, the light of a new idea shining in his eyes. "Could you watch me on my bike?"
"One of these days," David said, his voice muffled.
"In the morning?"
He grimaced. "You get that head down and get some sleep, kid. We'll talk about it some other time. Okay?"
"Okay." Chris's head slipped back against the pillow. "Mama, don't let David go," he murmured sleepily. "Okay?"
David coughed. "Good night, Chris. I'm going to turn off the light."
His face had a look of desperation as he turned away from Chris's door. "I've got to get out of here," he muttered, starting to go. But Jill was standing in the doorway of her own room, and he was going to have to get past her to leave. Evidently, she had heard most of what was going on. Her face was set, showing no emotion. Madison bit her lip. The girl was so much like her.
David looked at her, his head going back, his face hardening. He tried to walk on by, but sh
e stepped out and stopped him.
"Do you have to go?" she asked, putting out her hand to take his. "Will you come back?"
David swallowed hard and tried to smile at her. "I'll see you again one of these days, Jill. You get back to bed."
But she wouldn't let go of his hand. "Do you think maybe you could baby-sit us again when Mama goes out?" she asked, her blue eyes luminous in the shadows. "We could come to your house." She shook her head. "We would mind you, honest. We wouldn't be bad."
David threw Madison a trapped look and bent to kiss Jill's head. "I don't know about that, Jill. We'll see," he said huskily. "Goodnight, now," he muttered, pulling his hand out of hers, and then he turned, escaping down the stairs.
Madison watched him go with a lump in her throat, but she still couldn't give vent to her emotions, not with her daughter standing so close, looking up at her.
"Come on, Jill, back to bed," she said with as much cheer as she could muster.
Jill didn't say a word. She looked into her mother's face and seemed to read exactly what was going on. Silently, she did as her mother said and slipped under the covers.
"Good night, sweetheart," Madison said, turning off her light and closing her door.
And then she stood for a long time in the hallway, leaning against the wall, steadying herself for a future without David.
Maybe it was just as well. After all, she hardly knew the man. Falling in love so quickly had its drawbacks. But it had its advantages, too, when things didn't work out. She hadn't made any major life-style changes based on loving him. This one should be relatively easy to get over.
But as she walked slowly to her room she knew she was kidding herself. She knew she was never going to be quite the same again.
As David drove away, a dark emptiness seemed to swallow him up, and he knew why. He'd left something behind— a very important part of his spiritual anatomy.
But—no matter. The weeks ahead would be full of all sorts of activities, and he would forget about these past few days, forget about Madison and her children. He had a business to run, a career to pursue, a life to get back into. Once he got rolling again the days would fly by. No real problem.
The trouble was, as he found out over the next week, the days didn't fly at all. They trudged, like toddlers in snow-shoes. Every day seemed to last a week. Every minute he was awake, he thought about Madison. And when he went to sleep, she was in his dreams.
His grandparents called a few days after he got back, and he apologized for having to close the cafe, but they would hear none of it.
"And the girl?" his grandmother asked eagerly when she took her turn on the phone. "Rosa says she's beautiful."
"What girl?" he said, trying to avoid the issue.
"The girl with the niño’s. Rosa told us all about her."
"Then you already know what she looks like."
"I just want to hear what you think she looks like."
"Okay," he said grudgingly. "She's beautiful."
"Ah, so you liked her, eh?"
"I didn't say that. I haven't seen her since I got back."
"Oh." The disappointment in his grandmother's voice was hard to take. He could have told her he'd given up his professional career to become an itinerant surfer, and she wouldn't have shown as much regret.
He changed the subject, but the sense of disappointment lingered in the air, and finally, after he hung up, he realized it was as much his own as his grandmother's.
But that was just too damn bad. He was an adult, and he would get over it. He threw himself into his work, getting to the office at dawn, staying until midnight, ignoring his friends, barking at his employees.
And then, a few days later, he saw her, purely by accident. He'd gone over to the University of California campus to participate in bidding on a landscaping project, and she was coming out of the building that he knew was named for one of her uncles. He was with two of his employees, wearing his best suit and sunglasses, and she was like a ray of sunshine surrounded by politicians and administration types. Evidently she'd just been involved in some sort of dedication ceremony. He saw her in the midst of the group coming toward him across the green, and his heart stood still.
She was so beautiful, dressed in a soft cotton suit and white gloves with her blond hair in a twist. She looked like a princess, someone royal, and that was the way the men around her were relating to her.
He stopped, watching her come closer. She looked up at the last moment and saw him.
"David," she said, reaching out. He barely touched her gloved hand, and then she was moving on, being swept along by the group she was in. She looked back. "Call me," she said, and her eyes had a look as haunted as they'd had that first night in Mexico.
But maybe that was just his imagination. Or better yet, his wishful thinking. Because that was exactly how he was feeling. Haunted. Only she couldn't see his eyes. Lucky he'd worn his sunglasses.
At any rate he called back as she was disappearing, "Sure," as though he would call. But he wouldn't. He couldn't.
And yet he did. One night, at ten o'clock, he was going nuts thinking about her, pacing the room, looking out at the traffic on the highway, drinking too much. He couldn't stop thinking about her voice, that low, silky wave of seduction that was so uniquely her own. He had to hear her voice one more time.
He dialed her number and waited for her to answer the telephone, his heart beating so hard he was sure she would hear it across the wire. She answered and he didn't say a word, finally hanging up and glaring at himself in the mirror.
"Great. Now you've sunk to terrorizing her for your own amusement."
This had to stop. He had to get out of this shell and become a real human being again. He took his friend Mitch up on an offer to double with him and his cousin from Dallas. She was a beauty—raven-haired, statuesque, funny. They went dining and dancing and he actually had a pretty good time, but when she made an obvious suggestion about coming up to her hotel room for a drink, he turned her down without a second thought. The very idea of making love to another woman didn't seem possible anymore.
Valentine's Day was coming and for the first time in his life, he was paying attention to it. How could he help it? Everywhere he looked someone was trumpeting the coming holiday. Funny—in years past, he'd never thought twice about Valentine's Day. He'd always considered it sort of a made-up holiday, something the card companies had invented to sell cards. But this year was different. He found himself buying things—a huge box of chocolates shaped in a heart, a stuffed cat with a big satin heart attached to its neck that he knew Jill would love, and a red fire engine for Chris. Then a stuffed bunny, and a cute little turtle with ears that wiggled. And cards—big, lacy cards with hearts and arrows and mushy sentiments that made him cringe.
Why was he buying these things? It was a compulsion. He couldn't stop himself. Soon he had stacks of cards and candy and stuffed animals at his condominium. Any more of this and he was going to have to rent another room for storage of all this junk.
What was he going to do with it? His trash can was going to look pretty silly on the fifteenth of February.
He wanted to be himself again, to go back to what he'd been like before he'd ever met Madison, but it didn't seem to be possible. At first he thought time would do the trick. But time wasn't working. Nothing was.
Even his secretary was beginning to notice that he'd changed. "I've just about had it with you," she told him one afternoon.
He looked up from his desk with a frown. "What do you mean?"
"You're so tense." She shook her auburn curls and looked him over. "You know what you need?"
He threw down his pen and leaned back in his chair. "I hate to ask, but I know you'll tell me anyway."
"You need to find a woman and settle down."
"What?" He felt as though she'd jolted him with an electric shock. How could she say such a thing? They'd known each other for years. She knew how he felt about these things. "Try again, Doris
. No cigar on this one."
"No, I mean it." She perched on the corner of his desk and looked at him pityingly. "You need someone to take care of you, David. I can read the signs."
"I can get a housekeeper for that."
"That's not the kind of care I'm talking about." She squinted at him. "Besides, that's not all you need. You need someone to take care of, too. It works both ways, David. Trust me. Gregg and I've been married for fifteen years. I know."
She got up and left his office and didn't mention it again, but her advice stuck with him, anyway. He kept remembering that almost the last thing he'd said to Madison was, "You need a man to take care of you." Only he'd opted out of being that man.
He'd been driving past her house. He had to do it. He had to make sure she was okay, though what he was going to learn from the street he wasn't sure. He saw the kids once, Jill, with her journal under her arm, disappearing into the house and Chris running in behind her, yelling, "Don't step on my..."
He didn't know what Jill wasn't supposed to step on, but the sight and sound of them brought memories back in a wave, and his eyes were stinging as he drove on.
And then it was Valentine's Day. It had become a sort of milestone in his mind. He kept thinking that if he could just get through Valentine's Day, he would be over the hump. Things could start getting back to normal.
But just because it was Valentine's Day he had to drive by her house one last time. It was early in the morning when he got into his car and started toward La Jolla. He wanted to catch Madison coming out with the kids. Just one long look. That was all he wanted.
He drove by slowly, glancing to the right, but there wasn't a sign of life at the house. No one was in sight.
A tiger-striped cat ran out suddenly from behind a parked car and he stepped on the brakes to avoid it. At the same time his gaze strayed to the left side of the road. What he saw chilled him to the bone. A small black van was parked there. Two men were sitting in the front seats. Though he only got a glimpse, he was sure one of those men was Ar-mand.
Armand. Someone must have smuggled him across the border. Obviously he was getting desperate enough about getting hold of those kids to risk being arrested.
