Same old nightmare…Mommy…
“And I realized that I was ten again, and I hadn’t taken any first-aid classes, and your head was bleeding and there was nothing I could do, nothing! It was happening all over again!”
Same old nightmare, happening all over again…
“Shhh.” Katherine rocked the sobbing girl gently. “It’s all right, it was only a dream,” she said soothingly, even as her mind was racing. Maybe it wasn’t Stacy’s subconscious sending her a message about Katherine’s impending departure. Maybe it was more than that. Had Stacy seen something awful the night her mother had died, back when she was ten?
Helena, perhaps—lying on the bathroom floor with her head bleeding, having stopped breathing.
Dear God.
Cancer, Trey had told her. And yet there had been something in his eyes, some flicker that had made her think he was leaving some of the details out. She’d thought that change in his eyes had been because the truth was too hard to deal with. She hadn’t imagined that truth might include Helena dying while bleeding on her bathroom floor.
No, that was absurd.
She’d had a feeling there was more to Helena’s death than Trey had told her, but this was a little extreme.
Still, Stacy’s words had been chilling. Happening all over again…
Impossible. Trey Sutherland had not killed his wife. The man who was her lover was completely incapable of killing anyone. Or was he? He was so fiercely passionate, so wildly intense. Katherine knew that firsthand, after making love to him all night long. He’d liked it when she’d urged him to be a little wild with her. Theirs had been no slow, reverent joining, that was for certain. Each time they’d made love had been an explosion of desire, a violent, raging storm of passion.
If he’d been as passionate with Helena, mightn’t it be possible some kind of awful accident had happened?
No. Katherine refused to believe it. Trey wasn’t the type of man who wouldn’t have faced up to killing another human being, accidentally or otherwise. And it wouldn’t have happened any way but accidentally. She believed that much about him, absolutely.
Still, Stacy’s nightmare warranted a certain amount of discussion with Trey. Katherine would have to tell him about his daughter’s dream. Ask him about it outright, inquire as to what it could mean. He would tell her the truth, and that would be that. There was no need to turn this into some lurking gothic mystery.
Likely as not, it would turn out she was making somewhat wild assumptions based purely on a thirteen-year-old’s vivid imagination.
Except, how did one go about posing that sort of question? I know you didn’t kill your wife, but…is it possible Stacy saw her lying, bleeding on the floor? No matter how she said it, it would come out as, I know you didn’t kill your wife, but did you kill your wife?
Stacy’s breathing was still ragged, but her eyes were closed. She roused slightly as Katherine tucked her back into her bed. “Sit with me for a while, Kathy?” she murmured sleepily. “Don’t leave me yet. Please?”
Katherine brushed back the girl’s hair. “I’ll be right here.”
Her meeting with Trey would have to wait.
Eleven-fifty.
Kathy was late.
Trey checked the candles in the bathroom, checked his reflection in the mirror, bumped the thermostat up another few degrees, checked the temperature of the water in the Jacuzzi and then tried not to pace.
Eleven-fifty-two.
Watching the clock wasn’t going to help, but he’d been watching the clock all day. Why stop now?
Eleven-fifty-three took forever to come. Where was she?
Of all his skills, patience was low on his personal list.
Trey opened the door to his bedroom and looked down the tower stairs. The hallway below was dim and silent. He went back inside and tried not to pace again. Still 11:53. He’d give her another five minutes, and then he’d go looking for her.
But what if she’d changed her mind?
Trey rejected that thought immediately. There was no way Kathy was going to change her mind. Not after the way she’d kissed him in the kitchen while they were cleaning up after dinner. Not after the way she’d smiled at him and touched his foot under the table as they’d both played a game of Monopoly with Dougie in the playroom earlier this evening.
Of course, there was always the possibility that sanity had set in. It was possible Kathy had come to her senses and realized that this craziness she and Trey shared wasn’t bringing her any closer to her goal of marriage and family. It was possible—
Eleven-fifty-five.
To hell with the five minutes. He’d had enough of waiting.
He blew out the candles in the bathroom and started down the tower stairs.
And found Kathy. On the sofa at the foot of the stairs, outside his office door. Just sitting.
She stood when she saw him.
“How long have you been sitting there?” Why was she sitting there?
She looked tired. Her face was pale and there were shadows beneath her eyes. He’d kept her from sleeping last night, and now he was going to keep her from sleeping all over again.
She made a vague gesture. “Just a few seconds, really. Stacy had a nightmare, and I had to stay with her for a while and…”
Trey had to force the words out of his throat. “If you want, we don’t have to…” God, he wanted her so much, he couldn’t believe he was saying this. “If you’re too tired, we can—”
“Would you mind putting your arms around me?” she asked in a very small voice.
She must have known he’d never deny her a request like that, because she moved toward him as he reached for her. He tried to hold her gently, tried not to let it be about sex. If she needed to go back to her room to get some real sleep tonight, then so be it. He’d just have to deal with it. He certainly didn’t want her feeling pressured by him in any way.
She was so soft in his arms. And so small. She’d made love as if they were physical equals, but in truth, she was tiny and so very fragile compared to him.
“I was sitting there,” she whispered, her cheek resting directly over his heart, “trying to figure out a way to ask you a difficult question without making it sound as if I were accusing you in any way.”
“Accusing me? Of what?” But as soon as Trey said the words, he knew. This was about Helena. God, he’d forgotten about the rumors and innuendo. He’d assumed Kathy had dismissed them, that she put no weight in them. Apparently he’d been wrong. He felt himself go very, very still.
And Kathy felt it, too. She pulled away from him. “Please, may we go upstairs to talk?”
His arms felt cold without her enfolded within them. And the stillness was replaced by a surge of anger and frustration. “Are you sure you want to come up there with me? You never know, I just might kill you, too.”
She drew herself to her full height, and her gray eyes were almost stern—Mary Poppins at her toughest. “Don’t be foolish,” she reprimanded him. “I don’t believe for one second that you killed Helena. It’s obvious that you loved her very much.” Her voice broke slightly and she sat back down on the sofa, rubbing her forehead as if she had an awful headache. “I’m actually jealous of her, can you believe it?” She looked up at him, and the whirl of emotion in her eyes took his breath away. “I’m jealous of a woman who’s dead. How pathetic is that?”
She loved him. Kathy loved him. She didn’t have to say the words aloud. He knew.
And his anger was replaced by sheer, screaming terror and crazy exhilaration. She loved him. Somehow his heart wedged tightly in his throat as he gazed down at her and even though her question was rhetorical, he couldn’t have answered it if he’d had to.
But he could kiss her. Could and did.
He knew he shouldn’t. He knew that doing so gave her false hope, made her think he might someday love her, too.
But he sat down beside her anyway, pulled her into his arms and kissed her softly, sweetly. The w
ay a woman deserved to be kissed when she’d revealed the fragile contents of her heart. He kissed her tenderly, hoping that she’d know from his kiss how much her honesty meant to him. How honored he was that she’d entrusted him with her deepest secret.
And he knew she deserved to know his secrets as well. And maybe then she’d understand why he couldn’t risk giving her his heart.
“Come upstairs,” he whispered, kissing her chin, her throat, her ear. “We can talk.”
She sighed as he kissed her again, moving his hand so it covered her breast. “Would you mind very much if we waited to talk for about an hour?”
Oh, God. Four minutes ago, he’d wanted nothing more than to make love to her again. As soon as possible. But now he knew that she loved him, and that to her, making love was not just a euphemism for sex.
But what was he supposed to do? Now that he knew that she loved him, was he just supposed to never touch her again, for fear of hurting her?
She opened her eyes and looked up at him, her hand on the inside of his thigh. She had such beautiful eyes. “Perhaps if I said please?”
Her hand moved higher, and he laughed at himself. Yeah, like hell he’d ever be strong enough to resist this woman. It probably wasn’t the right thing to make love to her knowing it would mean so much more to her, but there was no way he’d be able to keep away from her. No way. Especially not when she was touching him like that.
His voice was raspy and he had to clear his throat. “Please will get you just about anything you want.”
She pulled free from him, taking him by the hand and tugging him toward the stairs. “Please…?”
She didn’t have to drag him. And she didn’t have to ask him twice. He followed her up and into his bedroom, locking the door behind them before he kissed her again. Slowly. Sweetly.
She trembled as he unbuttoned her shirt and slipped it off her shoulders. She sighed as he deepened his kiss, still keeping it slow. Deliberate. Languorous.
How could something so wrong be so completely right? Trey gave up trying to analyze it. He refused to feel bad about it. There would be plenty of time to feel bad later. Now was only about feeling good.
And everything about this felt good. Very, very, very good.
Last night he didn’t believe it was possible he could make love to Kathy without losing control. Every time they so much as touched, he’d exploded with near frantic passion. But tonight, he knew he’d been wrong. Tonight, he was going to love her slowly. Tonight, he was going to savour every shiver, every sigh.
He picked her up and carried her to his bed.
When she tried to help him take off her jeans, he gently pushed her hands away. This was his show. He only moved quickly to rid himself of his own clothes and then he lay down beside her, taking his sweet time as he touched the perfect smoothness of her skin. He touched her everywhere, and he knew that making love to her slowly this way was as much for him as it was for her. She was so deliciously beautiful, and she belonged to him.
Completely.
The thought didn’t scare him quite so much with her legs looped around him, with her breast filling his hand, her fingers in his hair. He followed his hands with his mouth, kissing his way down her body, tasting her, breathing in her sweetness.
He covered himself and entered her tantalizingly slowly, and she opened her eyes and smiled.
Trey felt electrified as he held her gaze, as if a circuit had been completed. She pulled him down to kiss him, moving with him, still so exquisitely slowly. And when she finally shattered around him, he followed in slow motion. Fireworks ignited behind his eyelids, colors exploding, spinning him completely and totally into outer space, well beyond all previously charted territory.
And he knew he’d been wrong. When he was with Kathy, he was never quite in control.
Katherine listened to the steady rhythm of Trey’s heart.
It would be so easy just to drift off to sleep. To ignore the rest of the world, the realities of the past. To simply sink into the intense pleasure of here and now.
The here and now in which she had just made the most beautiful love to Helena Sutherland’s husband.
Reality forced her eyes open and she sighed.
It shouldn’t really matter how Helena had died, but it did. Until they talked about it, the uncertainty would be here, lying between them, almost as if Helena herself were in this bed.
Trey shifted beneath her, loosening his grip around her, as if anticipating her need to pull free. He sighed, too, as if he knew what she was thinking, knew this quiet moment had come to an end. And then he spoke, his voice soft in the dim light.
“Helena was diagnosed much too late for treatment,” he said, almost as if he were starting in the middle of the story. “I can remember sitting in the doctor’s office and listening to him say terminal. I heard the word, but it seemed impossible. She looked a little tired and she’d recently lost some weight, but…He initially gave her two months, if that.”
Katherine closed her eyes, imagining how hard that must have been for Trey to sit there and be told that the person he loved was going to be taken from him. His heart was still beating beneath her ear, steady and strong. But she knew it was a heart that had surely been damaged, perhaps to the point of no repair.
“She wasn’t very strong,” he told her tightly. “She’d never been very strong. She was one of those people who quit smoking about twelve different times in a single five-year period. She was in a lot of pain toward the end, and it was very hard for her.”
Katherine wanted to touch his face, but his eyes were so distant—he was back three years in the past. He was Helena’s husband again, and it didn’t seem right to touch him any more than she already was. “It must have been hard for you and the children, as well,” she murmured.
His arms tightened around her. “She asked me to help her die.”
Katherine pulled back to look at him head-on, searching his eyes. “Oh God, Trey!”
“Damn it, it still makes me so angry. And guilty, and…” His eyes were anguished. “I think, how could she have asked that of me? And then I think how could she not have asked? I was her husband. She knew that I loved her. God, if she knew anything at all, it was that.”
“Did you…?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t. I couldn’t. The one time she actually asked something of me, and I couldn’t deliver. So she ended up asking Mae—our nanny—to tell the pharmacist that she’d dropped her bottle of pain medication in the toilet. Mae got the prescription refilled, and Helena did it herself. She took all the pills she had at once. And she ended up dying alone. On the bathroom floor.”
“Oh, Trey, I’m so sorry.”
He held her gaze as if it were a lifeline. “I just couldn’t do it for her, Kathy. I knew she was dying, but all I could think was that she’d already lived nearly a month longer than the doctor had thought. Maybe the cancer would stop growing, and she’d live another month or two or—God, if it were me, I would’ve never stopped fighting. I just…I couldn’t help her quit.”
There were tears in his eyes, but he blinked them back.
“But it was her choice,” he continued softly. “And I feel so guilty, and so angry at myself, too, for not being there when she needed me—for not being strong enough.”
“But if you’d helped her,” Katherine pointed out gently, “you’d feel guilty about that, as well. Trey, there was no wrong or right in that situation.”
He laughed, but it had nothing to do with humor. “Yeah, it was a real lose-lose scenario, wasn’t it? And I’m the biggest loser of all.”
“You had to go with your own beliefs.” Katherine sat up, determined to make him listen. “Helena believed it was time to die. You believe it’s never time to die. In order to help her, you would have had to compromise something you believe in absolutely. And if you had helped her, you would have had to live the rest of your life wondering what if. What if you helped her and two days later someone found a miracle cur
e?”
“They didn’t.” Trey put his arm up, over his eyes. “It’s been three years and—”
“But you didn’t know that at the time. And those months and years would have been hell because even if you had helped her, you wouldn’t have stopped believing she was giving up too soon.”
He was silent, and she knew he was listening to her.
“But you’ve got to try to see it from Helena’s side, too,” Katherine continued. “She was in pain. You have no idea, really, what that had to have been like for her. And she wasn’t strong, you say. She wasn’t a fighter. So her choice was to give up, to die. Even without your help. Trey, you’ve got to forgive her for that. You’ve got to forgive her for asking you to do the impossible, and you’ve got to forgive yourself for being stronger than she was.”
He managed a crooked smile. “Easier said than done.”
“Why do you let those rumors continue?” she asked him gently. “There are people in town who honestly believe Helena was murdered—and that you’re the murderer.”
“She killed herself, Kath,” he said. “Suicide. It’s such an ugly word. I didn’t care—she was gone, and I didn’t care about much else at the time. But her parents didn’t want the news getting out. They didn’t want her name connected to that word—suicide. So we just never released any kind of statement about cause of death.”
He sighed, rubbing his eyes with his hands. “But it got complicated. She must’ve hit her head on the vanity in the bathroom when she collapsed. There was a lot of blood, and the ambulance and the police came. I had blood all over me because I…I tried to revive her. God, I did everything but walk into hell to get her back. But she was gone, and on the surface it looked as if it might’ve been foul play.
“I was a suspect for all of three hours, until the police chief was contacted at his vacation house. He was close friends with Helena’s father, and he knew exactly what had happened, knew how sick she was, knew I didn’t kill her.” He looked up at her. “The autopsy report backed us both up—I can show it to you, if you want—and he was able to keep the results private. My mother had connections and she kept the story from running in the newspapers, but the local TV news had already reported that I’d been brought in for questioning. They did an interview with the ambulance driver who used words like murder and suspect. I think the rumors first started because of the way the story just disappeared. Helena was dead, I was a suspect, and then suddenly—nothing. People who remembered thought I’d somehow bought my way free.”
Undercover Princess Page 20
