by Nancy Martin
“There will be plenty of loopholes in Madeleine’s estate,” Groatley said. “I’m sure we can find a little something extra for you, Nora.”
I could feel the pressure in my chest start to tighten, and it wasn’t because of the lawyer’s embrace. “You mean, if I stop asking questions?”
“I think you could redirect your energy, that’s all,” he said. “Wouldn’t you like a little extra cash? You have problems with your house, I hear. Maybe you’d like me to arrange to have a few things fixed.”
“I can fix my own house.”
He guided me off the floor and behind a pillar that provided us a small amount of seclusion from the rest of the ballroom crowd. The next thing I knew, we were spinning down a corridor reserved for the hotel staff. I bumped into a cart loaded with dirty dishes, and Groatley released me so abruptly that I had to catch my balance with a hand on the wall.
Pinning me against the wall by leaning over me, he said, “Let me give you a word of warning, Nora. You’re in over your head.”
I held my ground, although my heart thumped an erratic beat. “What does that mean?”
“Madeleine did have many secrets. I think she wanted to keep them deeply buried—even after her death. She wouldn’t want to cause any pain to her friends or family.”
“Are you referring to all the money Madeleine was taking in?”
“What money?”
“I think you know, Simon. Madeleine was earning tens of thousands of dollars every month before she left town. How, exactly? Do you know?”
“I know nothing about any criminal activities, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”
“Then why are you so anxious for me to stop digging into Madeleine’s past?”
“I merely believe you’ll cause yourself more distress by asking questions. Distress not only for yourself, but also for your family.”
“Is that a threat?” I demanded.
“Certainly not,” he shot back, putting a hand next to mine on the wall and pressing even closer. “I merely think it’s time for you to stop asking a lot of silly questions about things that might stir up trouble. And I’m willing to make it worth your while. Think of how you can most benefit from all this.”
“The thing I want most right now is the truth.”
Wrong answer. He dropped his hand onto my bare shoulder, fingers biting into my skin. I tried to shake off his grip, but he tightened it. A second later, he pulled me close again—as if we were dancing. Except there was no music in the back hallway.
“Stop it,” I said. Before he could try to kiss me—I saw it coming—I stepped hard on his foot, digging my heel into the top of his shoe.
He grunted in pain, but instead of releasing me, he suddenly gripped my shoulders with both hands. The mood changed in a heartbeat. I saw the anger flash across his face. I tried kneeing him in the groin, but he used my instant of being off balance to whirl me around and push my face into the wall. He pinned me there with his full weight so hard he drove all the air out of my lungs. I felt his knee jam between my thighs, forcing them apart. Breathing hard on my neck, he used one hand to gather up the bulk of my long skirt.
I gave up trying to wrestle free and instead flattened both of my hands against the wall. I pushed with all my strength and almost succeeded in shoving him back. I couldn’t—but I finally had enough air to let out a yell. To shut me up, he slammed my head against the wall. Pinning me there again, he said crude things in my ear. Called me names.
I had always thought I could fight off a cruel grope. I’d taken classes, and I wasn’t weak. But he was very strong. And practiced. He had his bruising moves down to a science—he knew exactly how to overpower me.
Except he picked the wrong place.
A waiter suddenly appeared from a doorway, summoned by my shout.
“Hey,” he said. “You can’t do that here.”
He must have thought what Groatley was doing was consensual, because he didn’t sound very firm. But I let out a gasping cry for help, and suddenly the waiter figured out what was happening. He grabbed Groatley by the arm.
The lawyer broke off immediately. He stepped back, and I felt my skirt slip down to cover my legs again. I was trembling so hard I could barely manage to turn myself around. I leaned against the wall, shaken. And humiliated.
Groatley had a disgusted expression on his face—as if I were the one who deserved loathing. “You slut,” he said.
He turned on his heel and walked back toward the ballroom, smoothing his hair and the front of his tuxedo.
“You okay?” the waiter asked me, half embarrassed by what he’d seen. He was a youngish man—younger than me—with a ponytail neatly tied back. He glanced down at the neckline of my dress. Groatley had managed to drag it down too low, and I used both trembling hands to pull it up again.
“Thank you,” I managed to say. “Thank you very much.”
“No problem,” he said. “But you shouldn’t do that stuff back here. Get a room, lady.”
He headed toward the ballroom, too. Even my rescuer assumed I’d been at least partly responsible for what had just happened.
I stayed there, flustered and steadying myself while the meaning of what Groatley had said to me sank in. Had I misunderstood?
No, I was sure he’d threatened me. He wanted me to stop asking questions about Madeleine. He had offered me a bribe first. And when I hadn’t responded, he’d attacked me.
Still shaken, I headed back to the ballroom and took a drink from the tray of the first waiter who happened past me. I drank it down without tasting the liquor and felt slightly less nauseated.
Madeleine’s own lawyer was a crook and a horrible person, I knew now.
But the question that was searing my brain? Could he have killed Madeleine?
I’d experienced his lightning-fast metamorphosis from anger to punishing rage. Had Madeleine been his target, too? Only she hadn’t been as lucky as I had been?
I found my handbag and phone. I rescued my wrap from the hotel coat check and slipped away from the ball before anyone could remark upon the change in my mood. I even heard Delilah laughing uproariously in the hallway, so I took a detour to avoid seeing her again. I telephoned Reed, and he picked me up in front of the hotel.
If Reed noticed anything different about me, he didn’t say so. The evening must have still seemed routine to him, while I felt as weak as a child from the shock of what had happened upstairs.
After Reed helped me into the backseat of the SUV and walked around to get behind the wheel, I saw Shirley van Vincent exit the hotel.
A chauffeured car awaited her, and she walked toward it. I couldn’t help noticing that Shirley looked ill—weak and pale. Much the way I imagined I looked.
“Anywhere else tonight?” Reed asked.
“No, thank you,” I said. “Home, please.”
At Blackbird Farm, finally feeling more outraged than feeble, I let myself in the back door and found Michael sprawled on the kitchen floor, cursing.
“What on earth is wrong?” I asked.
He peered out from under the sink and glowered up at me from his prone position. He had a wrench in one hand and a dark expression on his face. “It was either get roaring drunk or take out my frustrations on the plumbing.”
I knew Michael didn’t get roaring drunk, not ever. If he had more than three glasses of wine with dinner, that was a big night. I felt my own problems evaporate. “I gather your evening with Carrie went badly?”
He sat up and threw the wrench onto the floor with a noisy clang. An adorable smear of grease streaked down one cheek.
He said, “That doesn’t begin to describe what a crapfest we had around here tonight. After Carrie left, both your sisters stopped by, not to mention the man in Emma’s life. What’s his name? Heart Stopper?”
“Emma and Hart Jones came back?”
“Yeah, they came to pick up some clothes for her. That guy wants her bad, Nora, and she’s hot for him, too. Trouble is, any min
ute he’s getting married to the rich girl who can do his career the most good, and believe me, I know all the wedding details, because while I made dinner for the whole crazy bunch of them, he stormed around here yelling about his wedding and why Emma should go to some island with him this weekend. And what the hell are shrimp shooters?”
“They’re an appetizer. It’s a cocktail shrimp with sauce, in a shot glass. It’s very pretty, actually, but—why an island?”
Michael’s glare intensified. “Because his mother has a beach house there, and Heart Stopper thinks it’s a dandy place for Emma to hang out while she waits for the baby to come. He thinks his fiancée won’t look for a girlfriend in the Caribbean, I guess. If I’m any judge of character, that guy plans on having both women at his beck and call.”
“Did they talk about the baby?”
“Yeah. He wants the kid, which I guess is a point in his favor. Or maybe he just wants everything.” Barely holding back his temper, Michael said, “The son of a bitch has had his life handed to him on a silver platter from the get-go.”
After my manhandling by Simon Groately, I found Michael’s disapproval of Hart very endearing. “Hart wants to marry Penny and keep Emma on the side?”
“And he’s completely up front about that. He’s such an asshole he doesn’t see what it does to Emma. He wants her available for the booty call, nothing else. His wife, though, plans on being the perfect mother to the baby. They’ve got lots of plans, all the way to the kid’s first year at Harvard.”
“Emma’s not the kept-woman type,” I said, half to myself.
“She’s thinking with her hormones right now.” Michael seemed to realize he was upset. “Sorry. It’s been a bad night.”
“Where are they now?”
“They have a suite at a hotel.” With a pained expression, he added, “There was a lot of talk about pregnant sex from your sister Libby that I’d like to wash out of my brain with a fire hose, but it gave Emma and Heart Stopper some great ideas they couldn’t wait to try.”
“I should probably make an effort to talk some sense into Emma. And make sure she’s safe.”
“If you can talk some sense into her, you deserve a medal. As for her being safe? I sent the crew to watch the hotel. And I gave her a number to call if she wanted them to bust down a door.”
Until that moment, I hadn’t realized the checkpoint at the end of my driveway wasn’t in place. After the evening I’d had, it suddenly felt good to have the house to ourselves.
I put my bag on the kitchen table and stripped off my wrap. I extended my hand to him and helped Michael to his feet. I gave him a kiss on his clean cheek. “What went wrong with Carrie?”
He shook his head as if to dispel a tornado of woes. “What didn’t go wrong with Carrie?” He sighed. “You think I should maybe get a pipe and one of those Mr. Rogers sweaters with the buttons up the front, and I’d magically turn into some kind of television dad? I’d like to know all the answers and say the right things. I just don’t see another way of getting the father gig right as long as things are going the way they’re going right now.”
“I’m sorry you’re upset.”
“I am,” he admitted. More seriously, he said, “She’s not going to get the promotion she wants, you know. Not after the army figures out who the hell her father is.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” It broke my heart to say so.
“I was as honest as I could be with her without risking an indictment. She doesn’t see the whole picture yet, but she will. If I had a couple more years to clean things up, I might come across looking okay. But right now? Just out of jail? With all the family stuff going down, I make your average terrorist look like a clown at a birthday party.”
“That’s not true,” I said gently. “You’re exaggerating.”
He turned the water on in the sink and set about washing grease off his hands. But I knew he was mostly right. If Carrie’s promotion depended on her having an upstanding citizen at the top of her family tree, she was headed for disappointment. The kind of disappointment that would jeopardize any future between father and daughter.
Michael reached for a towel. “Most people start with a puppy, you know? Work up to the parent thing gradually. Me, I’m barely housebroken myself.”
He tossed the towel onto the counter, and I eased myself into his arms. I stroked a ragged tuft of his hair off his forehead. “Did you eat any dinner? I could make you some peanut butter toast.”
He shook his head. “Not hungry.”
“Or I could pour you a beer?”
“I had a beer. It didn’t help.”
“Well, then,” I murmured, “how about if we go upstairs—all by ourselves for once—and you can help me off with my dress?”
His smile flickered at last. “What about the new underwear you promised me?”
At that moment, I almost told him about what Simon Groatley had done.
But I knew how Michael would react. At best, he’d go into a rage. At worst, he’d order a hit on Groatley’s life.
Neither option appealed to me just then. All I wanted was to feel cherished and valued and desired.
So I said, “I think we can skip the underwear and go straight to something else.”
I coaxed him with a soft kiss, then a few more.
A minute later Michael chased me up the staircase.
It was after midnight when we heard a noise downstairs.
I lifted my head from Michael’s shoulder where I’d been comfortably listening to him talk in circles about Carrie. A world away from a ballroom filled with people whose minds I understood but whose hearts were a mystery to me, here I had listened and heard the truth in the heart of a man both gentle and lawlessly passionate. I felt my love for him as an ache inside myself. More important was knowing I was the one to whom he could say the things he would never speak to anyone else.
But at the rattle and clunk from downstairs, I stilled him with my hand on his chest.
“Did you hear that?”
He lay quiet, listening. “Yeah. You think Emma’s come back?”
“If she really went to a hotel with Hart, she won’t be back for days.”
“Then who—?”
Again, something bumped far away in the great house, and we both sat up in the dark. I clutched the bedclothes around me.
Michael rolled easily out of his side of the bed and made a grab for his jeans. “Oh, boy,” he said. “I hope it’s some idiot breaking in. I’ve been looking for a way to burn off some frustration since I got out.”
“I thought that’s what we just did.”
He leaned across the bed and kissed me hard. “Sweetheart, sometimes a man just needs to pop somebody in the teeth.”
I scrambled out of the bed. “Let me find my bathrobe. I’ll call 911. I don’t want you to risk—Michael?”
He was already out on the landing and heading downstairs—a hungry animal hunting prey. I might try to tame the beast, I thought fleetingly, but there was something in Michael that nobody was ever going to control.
Hurtling barefoot down the stairs after him, I called his name again. But by the time I made it down to the first floor, I heard a tremendous crash and somebody yelped like a kicked puppy.
I skidded into the dining room and flicked the light on in time to see Michael jamming someone up against the door to the butler’s pantry. It was a man, dressed entirely in black, but limp as a rag doll. His head snapped back and bounced hard off the door.
The man in black wore a ski mask over his face. Gasping for air, he squirmed against Michael’s grip. One of the dining chairs lay in splinters on the rug.
Michael kicked a heavy object, and it skittered across the floor in my direction. A gun. I recoiled as if it might go off at my feet.
Then Michael ripped the mask off, and the threatening man turned into my cousin.
“Sutherland!” I cried. “Michael, stop! Don’t hurt him!”
“Help,” Sutherland squeaked at me, his ey
es bugging out.
Cursing, Michael didn’t release him. Not until I tugged on his arm.
My cousin slithered to the floor, his legs turned to jelly. He sprawled on the carpet. For an instant, I thought he had fainted.
I knelt down and tapped his cheek with my fingertips. “Sutherland, darling? Are you okay?”
Above me, Michael said, “He just broke into your house with a gun, and now he’s darling?”
“He’s harmless,” I said. “He’s my cousin, the one I told you about.”
Sutherland’s eyes flickered to life, and he blinked at me, then up at Michael. Scrambling on his back like a turtle, he tried to make an escape, but ended up huddled against the wall. Hoarsely, he said, “What happened to the skinny kid?”
“What skinny kid?”
“The one who was here this afternoon. I thought he was your boyfriend.” He glanced past me up at Michael again and gave an involuntary flinch of terror. “Who’s he ?”
“The kid was a friend of Emma’s,” I explained. “This is Michael Abruzzo. Michael, this is Sutherland Blackbird.”
“If it’s all the same, I’ll skip shaking his hand.” Michael loomed over us. “What the hell are you doing here in the middle of the night, moron? With a gun?”
Sutherland cleared his throat. “Would you believe me if I said I was merely dropping by to—to—”
“To steal the silver?” I asked tartly. I sat back on my heels.
Sutherland looked embarrassed and tried mightily to hide it. “May I get off the floor? It’s a little uncomfortable.”
Michael growled, “I can show you uncomfortable, pal. Give me thirty seconds, Nora.”
“Don’t be silly. Help me get him up.”
With a grunt of displeasure, Michael hauled Sutherland to his feet. My cousin tottered over to a chair and sat down heavily, gently massaging his neck where Michael had pinned him like a bug to the door.
I tightened the belt on my bathrobe and stood before him. “You have some explaining to do, mister.”
“I—I—”
“If you want the truth out of him,” Michael said, “there’s a thing I can do to his knuckles, no problem. There’s a hammer in the kitchen.”
