by Davis Bunn
Then the glittering guests all turned in unison, the quick jerking motions of people whose attention has been drawn by the unexpected. And he knew. Even before he turned, he knew.
Kayla descended the staircase with careless ease. She wore a simple frock of understated elegance. It flowed about her, revealing both her feminine form and her strength. A string of pearls glowed softly in the firelight. A hairpin shaped like a tiny ruby butterfly looked ready to take flight. But it was not merely her beauty that captivated the guests. Kayla’s presence was like a panther among caged and sheltered pets. Her tanned features were almost feral in the firelight. A distilled quality of strength and hard-earned wisdom emanated from her, stronger and far more alluring than perfume.
Adam watched her cross the gallery toward him and knew he was lost.
Dinner was served in the baronial hall. The maître d’ bowed them through the double doors and led them beneath a ceiling forty feet high. All the tables cast glances their way. Every one.
When they were seated and the leather-bound menus were on the table before them, Adam said, “You’re like some incredibly exotic bird that’s just happened to land in the midst of all these English sparrows.”
“Sometimes I feel so utterly foreign here. I don’t know if it’s the result of my mother insisting I be educated in America, or if I was just born without the ability to fit in anywhere.”
“I know just exactly what you mean.”
“In America I was too English. In Africa I had to prove to every native that I wasn’t another overbearing Westerner, driven to travel by my own selfish agenda. And here I am baffled by these people. I watch the English, and it seems like they dance to music I never hear.” She began rearranging her cutlery. “And they lie so well, with such polish and oily courtesy.”
Adam reached across and took her hand. “He’s not here, Kayla. Not tonight.”
She stared at his hand. “I feel a little undone right now.”
“I’m glad you still feel comfortable enough to tell me that.”
“Perhaps too comfortable.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“This afternoon leaves me feeling like I’ve opened a door and I can’t get it shut again. No matter how much . . .” She looked at him with naked appeal. “So no more questions tonight, okay? Don’t ask me anything. Just for a little while.”
“Whatever you want. Tonight it’s your turn. Ask away.”
“You say that too easily. You make it seem so . . .”
He loved finishing that thought. “Natural?”
The waiters all wore white dinner jackets and seemed to skate beneath the tall ribbed ceiling. Kayla ordered wild salmon on saffron rice, he the Welsh lamb. Upon the walls brooded portraits of ermine-robed nobles. The paintings were flanked by royal standards. They were seated opposite a fireplace large enough to swallow their table. The room was scented by crackling cedar logs. Tall leaded windows rose by their table. The night-stained glass reflected a wash of candles.
He turned from the window to find Kayla watching him. He said, “Back in the valley where we stopped for lunch. You know how the sky looked after the sun disappeared behind the ridge? Photographers call that blue light, after the sun is gone but while the illumination is still strong enough to shoot without flash.”
“Your mother taught you that?”
“It was her favorite time of day. A pro knows to tighten the aperture right down. That’s where amateurs make their big mistake, opening the eye up broad so they can hand-hold the camera. But blue light is subtle. The camera has to be coaxed to capture the hues. Tighten the aperture, use a tripod, hold the exposure for as long as it takes. The colors become strong and gentle at the same time. She told me all this after her trip to Africa.”
He stopped because the waiters arrived with their meal. They murmured pleasure over the food, traded bites from one another’s plates. Like normal people. Finally Kayla said, “Finish that thought about Africa.”
“Mom’s group landed in Dar es Salaam at dawn. She spent the day walking. When the day went blue, she shot a photo that almost mirrors the one on your father’s wall. You can’t imagine the shock I felt walking in and seeing it hanging there.”
“Actually, I can. The first year or so, I regularly e-mailed Daddy pictures. For the past nine months, I scarcely wrote at all. Then I walked into Daddy’s office and there they were. And over dinner that night I learned Honor was the reason they were there.” Kayla examined him intently. “How is it possible to talk with you like this?”
“I don’t know, Kayla. But I feel the same way.”
“I never discuss myself.”
“Two pros at keeping secrets, talking easy as daylight.” He lifted his hands. “It’s a mystery. But I like it.”
“Do you?”
“So much it scares me.”
But it was Kayla who shivered.
“So ask away, Kayla.”
“You’re sure?”
“Let’s see where it takes us.”
She took a breath. “Why don’t you ever mention your father?”
“He disappeared when I was four.”
“Oh, Adam.”
“Just walked out and never came home. My mother was working freelance for a couple of local newspapers and trying to build a portfolio. When my father left, all that was ditched. She switched to department stores shooting babies.”
“And lived her dreams through the Eve Arnold prints.”
“Mom covered the walls of our apartment with shots from a woman who had started out just as low and unknown.”
“But she got the break your mother never had. I’m so sorry.”
Adam was two people. The guy who spoke, and a guy who watched. Splintered by the impossibility of talking about things he never mentioned. And more than that. Wanting to speak.
And Kayla. This striking woman of force and shadow, a lady who feared his questions, was drawn so tightly she pushed aside the plates so she could reach across the table and take hold of both his hands. Pulling them together and enveloping them with her own. Adam looked at the strong tanned fingers gripping his. As though she had been doing it for years.
Natural.
Kayla said very softly, “Are you very close to her?”
“Not for a long time. But now. Yes. Very close.”
“What happened before?”
“When I was little, Mom made me promise I wouldn’t hate my father. She made it like the most important thing in her world, if I’d do this one thing. So I tried. For her.”
The intimacy was strong as the heat radiating off the fire. “But it didn’t erase the hate, did it?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“So you rebelled.”
“Not like you’d expect. Not the drugs or the tats or hanging with the losers. I just became a professional loner. My one goal in life was to never let anybody ever hurt me like my dad hurt my mom.”
“And you,” Kayla whispered. “He hurt you too.”
Unseen hands swept the plates off the linen tablecloth. The waiter disappeared. Adam replied, “And me.”
“You became an analyst.”
“It’s the perfect role for a loner. Lock myself in a room, study and fight against the world. Take all my money and gamble it on being the first. The smartest. The best.”
“And the acting,” Kayla said, walking right alongside him. “Letting you be other people. And getting paid for it.”
“That was such a trip.” He smiled at their collection of hands. “The television company came to my university acting class, saying they were looking for a local stud. That’s exactly how they put it. A young heartbreaker who liked the lights.”
Adam stared at his reflection in the window, his features flickering and flowing in the frosted glass. The night was filled with the immense prospect of becoming a different man.
Kayla tossed and turned all night. Adam’s voice echoed through her darkened bedroom.
The drive ha
d been bad enough. His presence had graced the bare winter landscape with an electric quality. But the dinner had almost done her in. Adam had not merely confessed. He had sent invisible magnets across the table that attached to her. Tore her through the carefully prepared barriers. Ripped open all the permanently sealed doors. Made her want to believe again.
She rolled over and turned on the bedside lamp. The light was a feeble wash that scarcely reached the room’s far corners. The ceiling above her four-poster bed was oak planks with massive crossbeams. In a happier moment, she might have imagined herself nestled within a ship of the night. Being carried off to some distant shore, where hope was not a painful barb, where the good life was hers to claim.
The painting on the wall opposite her bed caught her eye. It was just another portrait. The hotel contained hundreds. This one was of a maiden in an era of starched crinoline caps and languid smiles. Candles and torches and time had darkened the woman’s complexion and smoked away her clothes. In the lone bedside light, all Kayla could see clearly was the hand resting on her chin, a corner of her chair, and her face. Four spots of color in a broad canvas of black and gray. They held her, these glimpses of light in a sea of dark. A touch of hope that defied the surrounding night.
Kayla fumbled for the light switch and cast the bedroom back into darkness. But the woman’s smile would not be vanquished so easily. It floated in the night, just beyond the bed, smiling at her. Inviting her.
Kayla flipped the covers over her face. Adam’s smile floated before her eyes. Once again he held her hand upon the table-cloth, and once more her fingers hummed with the evening’s still-perceptible power. She hungered for a night without fear and a tomorrow lived in hope. She didn’t ask for gaiety or unending joy or a realm where all her dreams might come true. All she wanted was the simple gift of a good day. That and the touch of a man who reached for her in love.
chapter 14
They left Broadway the next morning. Adam drove through a monochrome day. Clouds loomed to the south, bunching tightly around the cliffs, poised to spill over and drench the valley. The sun had not yet crested the eastern ridge. The sky overhead was veiled with clouds not yet dense enough to blot out the day. Here and there Adam saw faint patches of blue. The river was the color of slate.
At Kayla’s direction, Adam took a small lane that meandered behind the village church and then began the ascent. Adam drove to a plateau and pulled into a small parking lot. He leaned over the wheel and stared up at a very steep hill.
Kayla asked, “Is that it?”
“Maybe. I won’t know until I reach the top.”
She looked so small, seated there beside him. Her normal force had shrunk to where she seemed scarcely able to claim the space her body required. Kayla said, “I hope you find what you’re seeking.”
The hill stood like a lonesome old man, isolated from its neighbors by a river. Adam crossed a stone bridge stained with lichen. The water murmured with the wind and the chattering branches. The hill stood solemn in its mantle of wintry brown. Adam hiked across a bowl-shaped pasture and began up the rise. Part of him kept repeating words in time to his tread, It’s only a hill. He would climb to the top and have a look around and return down and they would drive away.
But his mother’s softly spoken challenge buffeted him far harder than the wind. She had said he would be happy at the top of this hill, a grand future ahead of him.
He had the wintry path all to himself. The few remaining leaves rustled impatiently as he passed. The wind made a gentle thunder in his ears. The higher he climbed, the more the sky became covered with a dense gray froth.
He crested the rise and faced a tower gray as the wintry day. The structure was medieval in design, a lone watchtower, so old in appearance it might have heralded from the realm of myth and fable. A crown of stone teeth ringed the top. Adam stood and wished for the tower’s ability to ignore storm and winter and solitude.
He knew precisely why his mother’s dreams disturbed him so. They rocked his world. Not merely with the resonance they carried inside himself. With their challenge. Her gentle words always contained something that urged him to move outside the walls he had erected around his life.
The wind buffeted him as he turned slowly. He was encircled by other hills, barriers of stone and earth that mocked his own internal fortress.
To his left, a cluster of wildflowers had grown inside a crevice. The surrounding rocks had protected the blossoms from the season. The thistle had dried to perfection, awaiting his hand. He plucked four pastel goblets of lavender and turquoise and placed them under his sweater for protection. He took another long look around as a crow called a solitary salute. He stared down at where the Mercedes waited, the only car in the lot. He felt his chest rise and fall. He felt his fingers go numb. He felt the wind reach through his sweater and chill the sweat on his chest.
The words rose unbidden inside his heart and mind, a gentle whisper that drowned out the wind. If only he knew how to love her.
They held to a communal silence until Adam was back inside the Oxford Ring Road and heading through Summertown toward his boardinghouse. He said, “I’m sorry I’ve been so quiet.”
“You don’t need to apologize. Not for that. Ever.”
“I owe you an explanation. It’s just . . .”
“Adam.” She waited until he stopped at a light and could look over to continue. “You made the trip. You climbed the hill. But you didn’t find what your mother said you would. It’s only natural that you feel deflated.”
Behind them, a car honked. Adam turned his attention back to the rain-swept road. “It’s more than that. I feel like I let Mom down.”
He drove slowly and listened to the ticking clock and the tires slice through the wet. Adam expected her to come back with something about how he had done exactly as his mother had asked. How none of this was his fault. On the level of logic, he knew all this was true. Even so, he felt far more unsettled than when they had started off. Partly from what he had failed to find on the knob. But more because of what he had. He made the turn into Norham Gardens. The lane was quiet and empty beneath dark winter trees. Adam parked the car and glanced at the woman seated beside him. Six days.
Kayla said, “I have a problem. It’s about Honor.”
“Your father’s wife.”
Kayla avoided his gaze by fastening her attention upon the thistles he had brought down from the mountaintop. They were tied with her hair ribbon and set upon the dash. “This trip home is the first time I’ve seen Honor in over a year. The last time I came back was to tell Daddy that Geoffrey and I were getting engaged. I arrived to learn he was thinking about getting married again.”
“You didn’t come back again for your own father’s wed-ding?” When she did not respond, Adam said, ”That’s pretty cold, Kayla.”
“Daddy married for the second time four years after Mom died. I’ll never forget the way he told me about her. Nothing about who this woman was or how great she was. Only that he was lonely. I called her Mrs. Two. I know, it sounds horrid, but I was sixteen and angry that my father was being disloyal to my mother’s memory. That’s how it felt. And Mrs. Two was a nightmare. She was addicted to labels. She had the most wretched laugh. Like an old-fashioned cash register, you know how the keys clanged? That was her laugh. If she had any heart at all, it was measured in carats and hidden in the back of her jewelry safe. Ten months after they married, I used university in America as my excuse to flee. She lasted another year, then filed for divorce. She made all sorts of horrid claims, going for Daddy’s jugular. The only thing that saved Daddy was that Joshua had detectives tracking Mrs. Two for months. They discovered some fairly awful things.”
“Good old Joshua.”
Kayla was silent for a time, then turned and looked at him. “It’s so easy to break rules with you.”
“Go on with your story.”
“Honor was impossibly young and beautiful. And Daddy was so happy.”
“You
thought he was going down for round three. You felt you had to warn him. This is natural, Kayla.”
“It wasn’t like that. Well, maybe a little. I came home to talk about my love.”
Adam dropped his gaze to the hand held by both of his. “Your love.”
“Yes.”
“Geoffrey.”
“He said he was so fascinated with me and my project that he would toss aside his consultancy contract and take the managerial position without salary. He said . . .”
Her voice trailed off. Adam listened to rain spatter the car’s roof. “What does this have to do with Honor?”
“She warned me. Or tried to. She asked me questions that hurt.” Kayla’s words came in a sudden rush. “Was I right to trust him so fully after just coming to know him. Was he genuinely able to satisfy my lifetime longings. Was he a man who revealed his motives as well as his desires. I’d come home to tell Daddy how happy I was. Instead, I discovered him with a woman he had not been able to write me about, since he knew how much I loathed Mrs. Two, and he wanted this one to be genuinely different. And this new woman kept pressing me with questions.”
Adam read the rain’s trickling script on the front wind-shield. “You thought she was out to undermine you with your father. This strange woman who had inserted herself into your father’s life while you were away.”
Kayla stared at the rain and whispered, “I’m so ashamed.”
“I’ve only met Honor that one time. But it’s enough to know she hasn’t just forgiven you. She’s forgotten it.”
Adam knew she wanted to brush his words aside. So he was up and moving before she could respond. He stepped into the rain and firmly shut the door. Moved to the trunk and pulled out his battered grip. Went back to the driver’s door and watched her slip over the middle divider and start the car.
