Dangerous Attraction

by Melinda Cross

  ‘Don’t tell me, it’s your mother’s car, and she left it behind on her last visit,’ she said drily.

  ‘Good guess.’ Marcus stepped on the gas hard, throwing her back into her seat as they sped past the outbuildings and up the incline into the forest.

  The slanted rays of the sun penetrated the thick woods in bands of golden light that rippled across the car’s glossy hood. Rebecca watched the light show, mesmerized by it, barely noticing when the soft strains of classical music filled the car’s interior, it seemed so appropriate.

  Eventually her gaze lifted to the brilliant canopy above, and her lips curved softly upward.

  ‘It’s a half-hour drive to the hospital,’ Marcus’s voice broke through the magical spell woven by the music and the scenery. ‘You mind telling me why we’re going there?’

  She glanced over to see his gloved hands firm on the wheel, his eyes narrowed and fixed on the winding road, his mouth drawn down into a stubborn line. ‘I want to talk to the nurses who were assigned to Charity. The doctor who treated her is out of town, but it’s my guess the nurses will be more talkative anyway.’

  He shook his head in disapproval. ‘Aside from her medical condition, I can’t imagine what you expect them to tell you. If you’re thinking Charity might have taken one of them into her confidence and blabbed the truth about what happened here, you’re sadly mistaken. She’s not that stupid.’

  Rebecca sighed noisily and wriggled back into the comfortable seat. ‘Maybe not, but it’s a place to start. After the hospital, we’ll go to the sheriff’s office…’

  ‘Now wait just a minute. It’s one thing to poke around the hospital, it’s quite another to start interrogating the law. The media’s been camped on their doorstep ever since that damn book hit the shelves. They don’t need another amateur hammering at them with questions. For God’s sake, this is a wild-goose chase. No one at the hospital can help. No one at the sheriff’s office can help. They don’t know anything. They weren’t there—’

  ‘Tell me about Johnny,’ she interrupted, and for the first time his eyes jerked sideways to look at her.

  ‘What about Johnny?’

  She shrugged, trying to be casual, although the dark look he’d given her was fraught with warning.

  ‘He’s a major player in this story. I need to know more about him.’

  ‘You don’t need to know anything about him. He’s not a major player; he dies in the first scene, remember?’

  Rebecca steeled herself, staring straight ahead. ‘Not in the screenplay I intend to write.’

  She’d learned by now that for the most part Marcus’s silences meant he was trying to control his temper. She waited patiently.

  ‘Johnny has nothing to do with this,’ he said finally.

  ‘Johnny has everything to do with this film. Without him, there wouldn’t be any story at all.’

  ‘Dammit, I don’t want some Hollywood jackass making a poor job of playing Johnny on screen!’ he bellowed, and Rebecca had to bite down on her own temper, reminding herself that she’d touched the sorest spot of all.

  It seemed ironic that Marcus was being publicly castigated for betraying his friend. He was so damn loyal to Johnny Rivard, you hardly dared speak of the dead man. Perhaps in his own way Marcus was still trying to save his friend from the ugliness of Charity Lauder’s lies.

  ‘Protecting Johnny’s memory isn’t going to help him now,’ she said quietly. ‘If he was a fine enough man to deserve your loyalty, he was fine enough to deserve a better memorial than Charity’s book.’ She turned on the seat to face him, her tone as persuasive as she could make it. ‘She gave him a bit part, Marcus, and I think he was probably better than that.’

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw his fingers open and stretch, then close around the wheel again, but more loosely now. ‘He was my best friend,’ he said simply.

  ‘Then you must know a lot about him. Tell me.’

  For the next twenty minutes she listened in absorbed silence as Marcus told a halting tale of a friendship that had spanned thirty years. He and Johnny had grown up on the same block of a poor tenement district of New York City. They’d been toddlers together, then boys, then young men, dreaming of fame and fortune the way only the very poor could, making it happen through sheer force of will more than anything else. The bond between the two boys, and then the two men, had been very nearly invincible, forged by privation and nurtured by shared experience. Even when their holdings had multiplied into millions, they had never drawn up formal partnership papers, and, listening to Marcus, Rebecca could understand why. The partnership between these two men had formed before they’d seen the inside of a gradeschool. A contract would have been insultingly redundant.

  ‘We worked every after-school job we could find, pooled our resources, and started playing the stock market before we were teenagers. We were damn lucky.’

  She smiled at that. ‘I remember reading that your company made its first million before you two were twenty. That doesn’t sound like pure luck.’

  He shrugged. ‘We helped each other make good decisions, and stopped each other from making bad ones. That’s all it takes. Once you’ve got a stake of that size, doubling it, tripling it…that’s the easy part. The money just kept piling up.’

  ‘And then you bought Sugar Ridge.’

  The corner of his mouth tightened in what might have been a smile. ‘Johnny was humoring me. The only reason he bought half was because we’d never bought anything separately. He thought it would be a bad omen, or something. A place in the country was my dream, not his.’

  ‘So what was Johnny’s dream?’

  Marcus’s expression hardened. ‘The impossible one. He wanted to belong.’

  Rebecca hesitated, sensing that he didn’t need prompting any more.

  ‘He didn’t have much of a home life; his mother walked out when he was just a baby, and his father thought everything you needed to know about childraising could be found in a broad leather belt.’ Rebecca winced at that, but said nothing. ‘Wealth was my ticket to space, to clean air, to living away from the squalor and the noise…it was Johnny’s ticket to acceptance. Inside, long after we’d made it, he was still the poor kid who couldn’t get into a decent restaurant because he didn’t own a tie. But money buys a front-row seat in almost any segment of society these days, and that’s where Johnny wanted to be. That was his dream. A harmless one, really. Certainly not one worth dying for.’

  Rebecca sat quietly, staring out at the vibrant beauty of a world that knew nothing of bitter childhoods and fortunes made and lost and love given and taken and thrown away. She wondered if that was why Marcus had really retreated to the isolation of this wilderness-because the pain of the human condition seemed so pale, so fleeting in the awesome shadow of the land’s longevity.

  For the first time, the silence between them was comfortable as they drove through a last stretch of woods, on to a yellow ridge, and then down into the late afternoon shadows of a picturesque river town. On the other side of a covered bridge, a suprisingly modern hospital dominated a small plateau, its heliport pad strangely out of place in its quaint surroundings.

  ‘This is it,’ Marcus said as he guided the car into a space marked ‘Reserved’.

  ‘Do they know you here?’

  He smiled strangely. ‘You might say that.’

  ‘Then don’t come in.’

  He turned to frown at her. ‘Why the hell not?’

  ‘Because I don’t want the people I talk to watching what they say just because you’re there. Stay in the car. I won’t be long.’

  She pulled the coat close to her body as she walked from the car to the canopied entrance. A freshening wind was whipping down from the north, chilling her legs and face, carrying the icy clean scent of snow. Her head tipped slightly inside the hood, listening for the angry sound of Marcus’s door closing, certain he would never stay in the car, if only because she’d told him to. She was a little surprised when she gla
nced over her shoulder at the door and saw exhaust still rising from the back of the car, yellow parking lights still painting gold cones on the black asphalt.

  An older woman behind a polished reception desk looked up and smiled pleasantly. ‘May I help you?’

  Rebecca smiled back. ‘I certainly hope so.’

  Almost an hour later, a wad of hastily taken notes stuffed in the coat pocket, she paused at the entrance door and looked out through the glass, surprised to see that darkness had fallen over the world like a black blanket.

  The Rolls was still in the same reserved space, the engine was still running, and Marcus’s silhouette behind the wheel was outlined by the sodium vapor lights that circled the parking lot. He was slumped down in the seat, his head tipped back on the headrest, obviously asleep.

  He’s exhausted, she thought, remembering the haggard look around his eyes when he’d been talking about Johnny. Her head tipped to one side as her mouth and eyes softened in sympathy. She was beginning to feel the creeping edge of physical and emotional weariness herself, and decided that perhaps they’d done enough traveling for one day. Besides, she had enough to think about after talking to the nurses; a lot to consider before adding whatever information she could glean from the sheriff’s reports.

  Marcus’s eyes opened to slits as Rebecca hurried toward the car, her back bent before the increasingly cold wind. He rolled his head sideways when she opened the passenger door and climbed in, bringing with her the fresh, icy scent of coming winter.

  Her cheeks were flushed, and her hair crackled with static as she pushed back the coat’s hood. ‘Sorry it took me so long.’ She smiled timidly, rubbing her hands together briskly to warm them.

  ‘Where are your gloves?’ His voice was thick.

  She went still, then fished in one of the coat pockets and held them up, grinning proudly. ‘Don’t worry. I didn’t lose them.’

  He looked at the gloves, then back up to her face. ‘I wasn’t worried about that, Rebecca. Where do you want to go now?’

  The pleasant warmth of the car elicited a delighted shiver as she fumbled at her seatbelt. ‘Home.’ She sighed happily.

  His right hand froze on the gearshift. ‘Home?’ he repeated tonelessly, his eyes unblinking, fixed straight ahead.

  ‘Home.’ She nodded firmly. ‘The sheriff’s office can wait until tommorow.’

  He remained motionless and silent for such a long time that she looked at him with a curious frown. ‘Is something wrong?’

  His head moved mindlessly back and forth as he continued to stare through the windshield. ‘No,’ he said at last, so quietly that she had to lean toward him to hear. ‘Nothing’s wrong. Home it is.’

  Rebecca faced front, then froze, her breath caught in her throat as he guided the car slowly out of the lot.

  Home. Oh, God, she’d told him she wanted to go home. She could have said any number of things—that she wanted to go back to Sugar Ridge, back to his house—but that terribly wrong word had just slipped out, and there was no way in the world she could call it back again.

  All that silly posturing, all that blustering certainty that she could leave her emotions behind and keep her dreams at bay, splintered into fragments with the thoughtless utterance of a single word. Her subconscious had automatically yielded to her heart, and her heart had already decided where home was.

  Her fists clenched in her lap as she wondered if Marcus had noticed that tiny, tiny slip of the tongue, then she remembered his hesitation, his hand freezing on the gearshift, and she closed her eyes in dismay.

  When she opened them again, the headlights were illuminating the inside of the covered bridge, and it looked as if they were driving into a container of golden air.

  The Rolls-Royce’s engine purred quietly as the car climbed away from the village lights. Enclosed in the warm interior, within arm’s reach of a man who seemed destined to break her heart, Rebecca felt like an anxious mouse trapped in the belly of a powerful, contented cat.

  While the car consumed the miles between the hospital and Sugar Hill with smooth, ladylike grace, she continued to fret silently about that slip of the tongue that had referred to Marcus’s home as if it were hers. She worried less about what he thought than the degree of her own attachment to this place and this man, and how it would affect her when she had to leave.

  You’ll survive, she berated herself. Besides, you knew the emotional risks when you made the decision to stay, and you accepted them. So stop worrying about how you’re going to deal with heartache down the road, and start concentrating on what needs to be done.

  She squared mental shoulders and opened her mouth to start telling him what she’d learned from the nurses at the hospital, but the words froze in her throat and all thoughts flew from her head.

  It was snowing.

  ‘Oh,’ she breathed, leaning forward against the seatbelt, awestruck by the sight of tiny, filigreed flakes sticking to the windshield. She jerked back when the windshield-wipers suddenly sprang from their hidden nest to sweep the flakes aside. ‘Oh, please don’t. Don’t do that.’

  Marcus gave her a sidelong glance, then returned his attention to the road. ‘I thought you were asleep.’

  Rebecca was leaning forward again, her eyes sweeping frantically with the wipers, trying to memorize snowflake shapes before they were whisked away. ‘No, no, I’m not asleep; do you have to do that? Can’t you let them stay on the glass, just for a minute?’

  The car slowed noticeably, and the wipers slipped back into their hiding place with a soft thunk. Rebecca’s eyes darted this way and that, intent on examining the pattern of one flake, only to be immediately distracted by the arrival of another close by. She was too entranced to notice the smile in Marcus’s voice.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never seen snow before.’

  ‘Never,’ she whispered, her own smile barely visible in the reflection of the dashboard lights.

  ‘You’ve got mountains in California. Some of the best skiing in the country, in fact.’

  ‘I’ve never been to the mountains,’ she murmured absently, making him frown.

  The car continued to creep along the whitening strip of tar, until finally the windshield-wipers made another sudden appearance. ‘Sorry. I can’t see well enough to drive without them.’

  Rebecca leaned back with a stricken expression.

  ‘Do you want me to stop? You could get out, if you want…’

  ‘Will it still be snowing when we get there?’

  Marcus suppressed a smile. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Promise?’

  She’d sounded like a child, demanding an adult’s oath to control nature on command. Marcus worked hard to keep his smile under control. ‘Promise. We’re supposed to get at least an inch or two, although it will probably be gone by tomorrow.’

  She turned to look at him with distress. ‘Gone? So soon?’

  He shook his head and chuckled. ‘It’s only October, Rebecca. The leaves haven’t even fallen yet. We have some warm days coming yet, and up here we’re grateful for every one.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her lower lip slipped out a fraction.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’ll last the night, at least. You’ll have a few hours to enjoy it.’

  She brightened momentarily, then sighed again, despondent because everything good in her life only seemed to last for a few hours. Still, focusing on the disappointment to come was nearly impossible with the miraculous transformation taking place just outside the cozy car. Within seconds she was leaning forward again, lips parted in a wondering smile, mesmerized by the swirling tornadoes of white caught in the golden cones of the headlights. ‘It’s a miracle,’ she whispered.

  Marcus squinted through the thickening snow, telling himself that the road would be grease-slick before long, that the last few miles of this trip home would be nerveracking and dangerous—but his gaze kept darting back to Rebecca’s profile, to the innocent wonder in those blue eyes that saw only a miracle.

  They wer
e both silent for the rest of the trip. As conditions worsened, Marcus became rigid with concentration, hands and feet compensating for the slip of a tire, the beginning of a skid on the narrow, twisting road. Rebecca, on the other - hand, was totally enchanted by what was happening on the other side of the glass, so absorbed by the sight that all her other senses seemed to have shut down.

  When they finally reached the top of the steep hill that wound down into the Sugar Hill’s valley, Marcus’s hands flexed and tightened on the wheel in preparation. As he had expected, the moment the car’s nose dipped over the lip of the hill, the back end began to swing to one side, trying to force the car down the slope sideways. Rebecca made a small sound as she was flung unexpectedly against her door, but Marcus was too busy even to glance at her. Hands inching the wheel against the slide, his foot gently increasing the pressure on the gas pedal, he scowled fiercely out the windshield, willing the car to straighten. When it did, he kept the pressure steady on the accelerator and they plummeted down the hill like the world’s most expensive toboggan.

  Too fast, too fast, he thought, his attention riveted to the almost invisible road, his hands guiding the speeding car by memory alone, barely aware of Rebecca making that noise again. The iced trunks of trees seemed to race past them as they plunged down the slope faster and faster, until all Marcus could see was a curtain of white whipping past the edge of his vision. He was so intent on controlling the car that he barely noticed when it began to slow on the lessening grade near the bottom, finally coasting politely up the drive in front of the house.

  He slipped the gearshift in park, then dropped trembling hands to his lap and took a deep breath. The noise Rebecca was making penetrated his brain slowly, and when he recognized it for what it was he turned to look at her with amazement.

  She was leaning forward clutching the dash with both hands, hiccuping, giggling, and trying to talk all at the same time.