by Rae Renzi
Abruptly, she pushed the flowers away.
She absolutely had made the right decision, but it had been hard at first, especially because it seemed as though every time she turned on the television or stood in line in the grocery store, she saw Jack and his wife. To make matters worse, there’d been much media speculation about a Mystery Woman stranded with Jack, brought about by a telephoto shot of the helicopter when Jack had arrived at the landing strip. Fortunately, all that had been visible was a halo of hair, so Casey’s identity was safe. Unfortunately, the refusal of Jack and the two pilots to comment on the issue only fanned the flames.
Casey had avoided his films, but, one time after she was married, she’d gone out to dinner with friends who spontaneously decided to go see a new movie. She hadn’t realized the movie starred Jack—Dylan Raines. Hearing his voice, seeing his eyes, knowing with certainty the feel of his touch—she’d left in the middle of the movie, saying she was sick, which was only the truth.
A slight noise sounded behind her. A chill ran up her neck. She stood and slowly turned toward the door. Her heart attempted to crawl out her throat.
Jack materialized out of the shadowy hallway and walked into her office. He closed the door but came no farther. Silent as the night, he leaned on the wall, his hands in his pockets, his face serious and unsmiling. Waiting.
Casey blinked and looked into his eyes. Was she dreaming? Or remembering in a particularly graphic way? No, it couldn’t be a memory—he had clothes on now, more than she’d ever seen him wear, actually. His cream linen shirt was open at the neck, the familiar leather-and-gold necklace disappearing down his chest. His sleeves were rolled up off his wrists, barely showing the edge of his tattoo. Loose khaki pants, not shorts, covered his legs. His shoes were a rich brown woven leather, worn and comfortable-looking, and his beard was gone, which made him look like a stranger, like the posters of Dylan Raines.
But his eyes…his eyes were all Jack.
She shook her head, trying to clear the vision from her mind. But he was still there, quiet and still, with a strange mix of trepidation and predatory intent on his face.
A ghost of a smile touched his lips.
Casey’s control shattered, and long-suppressed anger flooded through her. Oh, yes, he could smile. He hadn’t waded through the agony and confusion of cold, calculated betrayal. He hadn’t watched his dream break into a million pieces.
She snatched the beautiful flowers out of the vase and hurled them at the man who’d given her everything her heart had wanted, and then had tossed it away. “Take them and get out. Take your fake flowers and your fake emotions and…and…just go!”
Jack’s eyes flashed. He pushed off the wall and walked toward her. Her knees went weak. A hundred thoughts slid through her mind. Things she needed to say to him, words to make him go away, words to make him stay. A hundred questions she didn’t know she’d saved for him, all of them shifting around in her mind like tumblers in a complicated lock, waiting for the key to line them up and click them into place.
She tried to get a grip on herself, but it was hopeless. She held up her hands to forestall him but he didn’t stop. His arms went around her, he bent his head to hers, and then his mouth devoured her. His hunger drove her against her desk, his passion erupting like a volcano that had smoldered deep underground, quietly building up heat and pressure until a small shift in the earth released it, brought it to life, engulfing her in a fiery cascade.
“Is this fake, Casey?” he growled. His hand slid behind her neck, forcing her closer still. “Does this feel fake to you?” he whispered raggedly against her lips. Then he kissed her as if his life depended on it, as if she were the only thing sustaining him.
Her own raging emotions surged inside, destroying the paltry barriers she’d erected against him. She opened to him, poured herself into his kiss, hot and deep.
As he turned her to liquid fire, the small center of reason within Casey objected. What the hell am I doing? This is wrong, wrong, wrong. I’m married, and so is he! Before she could push him away, a noise butted its way into the pulsing silence of the room.
It was her intercom. “Casey, your husband is on line three.”
Jack froze and, a beat later, pulled away from her with glacial slowness, his eyes downcast, a frown creasing his brow. “Husband?”
The word hovered between them like a malignant creature, all teeth and claws, ready to tear to pieces any happiness, any closeness they’d re-created.
Breaking away from him, Casey pressed the intercom button and, clearing her throat, croaked, “Yes, please tell him I’ll call him back.” She ran her fingers through her hair, disoriented.
Jack, with visible effort, got control over himself. His shadowed eyes looked into Casey’s, his face immobile. He reached for her left hand and glanced down at her fingers.
On her left ring finger was the diamond Reed had chosen as her wedding ring.
On her middle finger, she still wore Jack’s ring. Jack ran his thumb across the rings, both of them. He looked up at her, pain and resignation in his eyes. “You told me you trusted me.”
“You lied to me. You told me I was the only one.”
“I never lied to you. You were the only one in my heart. You still are.”
“Your marriage—”
“Has nothing to do with my heart, Casey. It never did. It had to do with sex, deception, recklessness and pregnancy. And now it has to do with not wanting to lose my daughter.”
Casey felt like she’d been slapped. She struck back. “And somehow it never occurred to you to tell me you were married and had a child? Even if you didn’t lie, you let me fall in love with you and then—”
“And then I fell in love with you. It was the first time in my life I felt that way. I didn’t want to lose you. I thought—” He broke off and shook his head. “I don’t know what I thought. Being on the river…it confused me.”
Casey closed her eyes. She’d experienced the same suspension of reality on the river. It had been so easy to imagine they were in an entirely different world. So easy to imagine the only rules that mattered were those that kept them alive and well, day to day.
She took a deep breath. “Context. It was all about context. We were on the river, we were alone, you were all I had. For all I knew, you were all I would ever have. Context is everything, Jack, I see that now.”
He gave her a sad smile, dispelling the hateful tension between them. Pulling her close to him, he said softly, fiercely, “No, you’re wrong, Casey. Love is.”
Then, with a last tender kiss, he melted into the shadows and was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Casey stood for what seemed like a very long time looking at the empty doorway, at the flowers scattered on the floor. Was she losing her mind? Maybe the flowers had triggered some deeply hidden fantasy. She shook her head. A hallucination. That’s what it was. Working too hard, not enough sleep. Hallucination.
She spied a small black velvet bag on her desk. Okay, not a hallucination, then. She hesitated. Jack had left it, obviously. Should she open it? She had an irrational impulse to pitch it out the window, fearing it belonged to the class of things that were best not revealed.
Her curiosity got the best of her. Untying the gold rope at the top with exaggerated care, she tipped the contents of the bag into her hand. The embodiment of moonlight spilled into her palm. Pearls. Luminous pearls of different shades shimmered in her hand, strung together into a necklace with moonstones and smoky topaz.
Pearls. He’d remembered.
She covered her face with her hands and let the tears come.
After a few rocky moments, her sense of self-preservation kicked in. She roughly wiped the tears from her cheeks.
That creep! How could he do that? How could he show up, upend her world and then vanish like smoke? She sat back heavily in her chair and dashed a hand through her hair. She needed help, and this was far beyond the therapeutics of chocolate. She picked up the phone.
“Speak.”
“Ditsy, I need help.” Ditsy was her best friend. She was like a champagne truffle covered in nuts, but hiding a solid heart of sweet, rich chocolate.
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“I’m not talking clothes here, Ditsy, I’m talking real emotional crisis. Maybe mental crisis, I’m not sure.”
“Hmm. I’d say the very fact you’re uncertain qualifies you for both, kiddo.”
Casey held the phone out and looked at it, a frown on her face. Putting the phone back to her ear, she said, “Not helpful, Ditsy.”
“Okay, okay. My place or yours?”
“Yours. Definitely yours.”
Casey called home and left a message to tell Reed she was with Ditsy and would be home late, just in case he cared where she was—not a given these days. Then she locked her office, and went to her car.
Ditsy was an oddity. Her official name was Edith Tarkington, Viscountess of Cromleigh, one of the many titles in her British family. The family line was so old and so rich that old and rich no longer mattered to them. They were all, as Ditsy told it, barking mad.
Ditsy had been entranced with all things American since she was a small girl, so when it was time to send her to boarding school, her parents couldn’t really see any reason not to send her to the colonies. She had a thing for cowboys and was certain they still existed somewhere in America, probably Texas. So off to Houston she went, to an exclusive boarding school for the ridiculously wealthy. Later she and Casey met in graduate school, where Ditsy took a degree in art history.
Casey pulled up to Ditsy’s exquisite townhouse in Georgetown. The door was opened by Ditsy herself, wearing baggy gray sweatpants and a pale pink T-shirt adorned with a picture of an armadillo. Her doll’s face was topped with bright russet hair tied up with what looked like an old sock. She wasn’t tall, but she didn’t look childlike, either. Even her baggy clothes couldn’t hide a lush figure that called to mind the great movie stars of the forties and fifties.
She waved Casey in, eyed her up and down, and headed down the hallway. “You’re holding up reasonably well for a woman in full-blown emotional crisis.”
Casey shuffled behind her into the living room. “I’ve already downed a quarter pound of chocolate. Do you remember Jack? From the river trip?”
“Oh, right. Like I’m going to forget. Jack, aka—to the rest of the world—Dylan Raines?”
“Yeah, him.”
“I wondered when you were going to spill.”
“What do you mean?”
“My dear Casey, it’s fairly obvious. This isn’t exactly impenetrable calculus. You’ve been twisted around about him since you came back.”
“I haven’t said a single word about him!”
“Exactly. How many women do you know who would stay mum if they so much as laid eyes on the person of Dylan Raines?”
“I have no idea.”
“Right. How about women who actually touched Dylan Raines? Do you think they wouldn’t shout it out to the world?”
“Okay, I get your point.”
“It was telling that after spending two weeks with the man you didn’t share with me, your best friend, anything except that he wasn’t what you expected. That’s all? Yet you wear his ring, and he wears yours. Something happened on the river.”
Casey stared at her, shocked. “He still has my ring?” She hadn’t noticed it on his hand, but she hadn’t looked. “How did you know about the rings?”
“Really, dear, it wasn’t so difficult. If you hadn’t avoided every single pictorial representation of the man, you might have noticed this.” She marched over to the pile of magazines on the floor near the sofa. After digging around for a while, she made a small triumphant noise and held out the cover of a popular magazine. “Look.”
In a close-up, Jack was leaning against a rock wall, wearing worn blue jeans and an unbuttoned shirt, arms crossed on his bare chest, melted-chocolate eyes looking at the camera.
Casey took the magazine. Her eyes traveled over the picture, noting a hint of desired intimacy in his gaze, a look very familiar to her. Could he turn it on at will? She frowned. Was it a well-developed habitual response to women in general, or to a camera? She touched his face with her fingers. She wondered…
Ditsy rolled her eyes. “Casey, pay attention!”
“What?”
Ditsy pointed to his hands. “Take a close look, Case. What do you see on his hands?”
Clearly visible on his left hand was a distinctive ring, one square of golden topaz and one of peridot, offset and angled and held into place by irregular gold wires like lashings across the corners.
“How many rings like this do you think there might be in the world?” Ditsy tapped the photo with her finger. “I know of one, commissioned by a certain friend of mine. A one-of-a-kind ring made by a talented fledgling jeweler who happened to need some money.”
“Okay, you’re right, it’s my ring. But how did you figure all this out, Ditsy?” She was a little worried, because if Ditsy figured it out, other people might also. Like Reed.
“Well, the titillating fact that you wouldn’t talk about the trip was my first clue. It would have been fine if it looked as if you were suffering from PTSD or amnesia. But you merely refused to talk. And occasionally, when I prodded you for an explanation, you got a sad little smile on your face.”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh yes, my girl, you did.” Ditsy took the magazine, tossed it on the table, Jack side up. “The second clue was that you had a ring on, but it wasn’t yours. Your initial story of the chap—unnamed—whom you pulled out of the river being grateful almost sounded right, but your own ring was missing. Hard to credit.
“So, once you admitted it was Dylan Raines you’d rescued from the clutches of the river, I did some digging. I found some big pictures of him that showed his jewelry—and a lot of him, incidentally. The ring you’re wearing now—”
“Only because it’s pretty—”
“—looks like one he wore in the photo spread for GQ a few months before the river trip. That led me to search for a photo of him taken after the river trip. There were, of course, a zillion of those. So, are you going to tell me what’s up with the rings? Or do I have to keep searching. Not that I mind actually. It’s entertaining.”
Casey sighed. Exorcism wasn’t really what she had in mind, but maybe it was what she needed. Banish the ghost of the past before it ruined her future. She walked across the room and flopped down on the sofa. The furniture was as comfortable as it was stylish, because comfort, Ditsy maintained, was the primary requirement for furnishings. Otherwise, why bother?
“Ditsy, you’re never going to believe it. I’m not sure I believe it, actually.”
“Oooh. Juicy.” Ditsy smiled, her blue eyes twinkling. “Chocolate?”
“Pizza?” Casey countered.
“Right-o.”
Thirty minutes later, they settled cozily in the living room with pizza and beer on the plush Isfahan rug. Ditsy maintained the advantage of such rugs was that spilled food and drink cleaned up like a dream. The fact that each rug cost thousands of dollars was irrelevant to her.
When they were at least one piece of pizza toward comfort, Casey launched into the story of Jack and their time on the river, including the marriage ceremony. Then she told her about finding out he was married.
Ditsy—who undoubted already knew Jack was married—nonetheless groaned gratifyingly. “Oh, sweets, that had to be so painful! I am so sorry.”
“It’s okay. It was all a wild, survival-mode-induced fantasy. I got over it.” Casey glanced at the photo of Jack next to her plate of pizza, then reached over and turned it face-down.
Ditsy was silent for a heartbeat. “Tell me you didn’t marry Reed on the rebound.”
“No, Ditsy. I didn’t. Reed had already raised the idea of marriage before I went on the river trip.”
“But you hadn’t accepted. That’s why you went on the river tri
p. You couldn’t decide.”
“True. And it worked. After that experience, I knew marrying Reed was the right thing to do. We’re good together. A good team. That’s why I married him.”
“Within thirty days.”
Casey shrugged. They fell into contemplative silence.
“And why, exactly, are you still wearing the ring? Please don’t repeat the nonsense of it being pretty.”
“I wear it to remind me of what an idiot I was.” Casey had a quickly squelched suspicion there was another, less defensible reason, but allowed self-righteousness to bury it.
“What made you decompress tonight after all this time?”
Casey slapped her head. “Oh. Jeez. Forgot to mention, he—Jack—showed up in my office this evening.”
“What! Dylan Raines was in your office? Get out!”
“Only for a few minutes. With flowers.”
“Damn. Romantic and sexy. He has it all.”
“Including a wife,” Casey reminded her friend.
“Yes, there is that small inconvenience. Which is, in fact, the problem.”
“Along with the fact that I’m also married.”
“Less of a problem.”
“Ditsy…”
Ditsy eyed the pizza, snagged another piece. “Fact. Still, it was bloody cold of him to slip in and then slip out. Both times. Why did he do it? Tonight, I mean.”
“I think he’s been trying to reach me. At least, someone from Los Angeles—where I know absolutely no one—has, but I’ve blocked the calls. I guess he decided on direct action. I don’t think he knew about my marriage.” She told Ditsy about the intercom, and his reaction. “After he left, I found this on my desk.” She leaned over and yanked the velvet bag out of her handbag and poured the contents onto the rug.
They both looked at it in reverent silence. Ditsy wiped the pizza grease off her hands, then picked up the necklace and fingered it with the expertise of someone who knows jewels. “Top notch. God, Casey, can’t you have a clandestine affair? For my vicarious sake?”
