by Nicole Baart
“Did you just say vivacious?”
“Don’t make fun of me.” Adri didn’t realize that she was pinching his arms until her fingers began to tingle. David hadn’t given any indication that she was hurting him, but Adri suddenly sat back and massaged her knuckles. “This is great, David. And you know that I’m loving every minute of it. But if we’re going to end badly, I need us to end now.”
“What makes you think we have to end?”
“You’re in love with Harper.”
David slid out from underneath Adri, his hands on her waist, and set her on the bed in front of him. They sat cross-legged, knee to knee, and because Adri couldn’t quite endure it, because she couldn’t face him like this, she pulled the sheet against her chest and held it close like a child with a blanket.
“Adrienne Claire Vogt.” David said her name as if he meant it, as if each syllable held a weight so dear it deserved his attention. “I am not in love with Harper and I never have been.”
“You spent three years flirting with her, David.”
“Harper’s an incurable flirt.”
“So are you.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t flirt with her anymore now, do I?”
“No, but—”
“But nothing, Adri.” David took her hand and kissed the knuckles that she had rubbed only seconds before. “What do I have to do to convince you? Harper is a good friend. But I am madly in love with you.”
He had never said it before, not like that, and Adri found herself at a loss for words.
“I love you, Adrienne.” David repeated himself, and this time when he said it there was a note of surprise in the declaration.
“I love you, too.”
David cupped her face, his thumbs tracing Adri’s jaw as if he was trying to commit every inch to memory. “What do we do with that?”
“We run away,” Adri whispered. She didn’t believe him, not entirely, but for now it was enough to savor the moment and hope that someday, when they had been together for longer than this, he would mean what he said. “Remember?” she asked, hopeful that he did, that he wanted it, too. “I want to leave this place.”
“Because you aren’t who everyone thinks you are.”
“Sometimes I hate the farm,” Adri blurted out. “I can’t stand the cows and the smell of manure. And the way my dad has such high hopes for me.”
David laughed. “How dare he have high hopes for you.”
“It’s too heavy,” Adri admitted, shaking her head. Her words began tumbling out, one after the other, as if she couldn’t say them fast enough to capture all the things that she wanted to express. “He wants the world for me and I’m afraid I’m going to let him down. I hate it that he sees my mother when he looks at me. It kills me that no matter how much he loves me, I’ll never quite measure up.”
“Sam doesn’t feel that way about you.”
“Yes,” Adri said. “He does.”
“You’re being a brat.” David gave her arm a flick.
“Excuse me?”
“I used to watch you.” He ducked his head almost guiltily. It was so endearing, and so uncharacteristic, that Adri reached out to brush his hair back from his forehead. But the motion was somehow maternal and Adri let her hand fall into her lap, embarrassed.
“What do you mean?” she asked, clearing her throat.
“When I figured out who you were and where you lived, I used to ride Bard to the bluffs and try to catch a glimpse of you on the farm.”
Adri punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Shut up. You did not.”
“I did. I was a total stalker.” David fanned his fingers like claws. “I only saw you once or twice. At least, I think it was you. Unless Will was partial to pink shirts.”
“I wasn’t partial to pink shirts.”
David ignored her. “I was jealous of you,” he said. “Everything looked simple from the hills. Your neat little farm, a dad who loved you, a brother who watched out for you. Maple Acres was everything Piperhall was not.”
“I think you might be idealizing my life a bit.”
“You mean like you idealize mine?”
Adri sighed. “So this is what we do. We posture and pretend.”
“We expect too much of each other.” David said it quietly, and Adri knew that he was thinking of his own mother. Her expectations. And his father, the man she had never known but who had left his mark on David like a scar. The man who terrified her as a child because he was larger than life, so formidable that one of her picnic games was to never allow less than a stone’s throw between herself and Liam Galloway. It made her feel unaccountably sorry for David.
They didn’t really need to say anything else. Adri didn’t have to tell David how much she loved her father, in spite of the pressure she felt, or that while she loved Will, too, it was hard to live in the shadow of a twin—particularly a boy as irresistible and charismatic as her brother. For a moment they just understood each other, as completely as one person can fathom the soul of another.
“Let’s leave,” Adri said again. “Just the two of us. We could run away.”
“Where would we go?” This time, there was an edge of adventure in David’s voice. A sense that maybe they could do exactly what Adri proposed.
“Somewhere off the map,” Adri said. “Southeast Asia.”
“Brazil.”
“New Zealand.”
David grinned. “Africa.”
“Absolutely.” Adri grinned back.
And then David said the last thing that Adri ever expected. “Marry me.”
There was nothing for Adri to choke on, but that’s exactly what she did. Her throat collapsed and she felt herself go hot and panicky. But David meant what he said and he pulled her close, tipping her sideways so that she could sit on his lap, her head tucked underneath his chin. He said it again, “Marry me, Adrienne. Let’s do it.”
Adri said yes.
There was no ring, at least, not at first. And then, when they decided to make the engagement public, Adri refused to let David buy her a ring. “I want my mother’s ring,” she told him.
Either because their arrangement was so far from what he had always expected or because he loved her and wanted to give her what she wanted, David complied. He officially asked Sam for his daughter’s hand in marriage a couple of weeks after the spur-of-the-moment proposal, and though her father was skeptical, he granted it. David slid the ring on Adri’s finger as she sat at the table in the farmhouse kitchen, with Sam across from them.
When she showed it to Harper later that night, she realized that two weeks was the longest time that she had ever kept anything from her best friend. She hadn’t breathed a word about David’s proposal. It didn’t feel exactly like a secret. It felt like a lie.
The sun was a stain on the horizon when Will finally turned to go. They hadn’t said much of anything for the long minutes while they watched the sun set, and when darkness began to descend from the eastern sky like a fog, Will broke the silence by slapping the pillar where he leaned. “I can’t believe you’re leaving this place,” he said.
“Blackhawk?” Adri said.
Will gave her a cynical look. “Everyone knows you always wanted out of Blackhawk. I’m talking about Piperhall. David’s home. Your home.”
Adri shrugged. “I don’t know that it would have been our home.”
“Oh, come on. You think Victoria would’ve let David leave?”
“You think David would have let Victoria tell him what to do?” Adri countered.
“Touché.” Will descended a few steps, but Adri could tell that for some reason he was hesitant to go. She thought at first that he was simply reluctant to leave her when they had so few days left, but before she could speculate further, he said, “We were pretty messed up, weren’t we?”
“Who?”
<
br /> “The five of us. All of us pretending to be something we weren’t.” Will glanced over his shoulder at Adri, and the look in his eyes was so raw that it caught her by surprise. She wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but she walked down a few of the stairs so that she could be beside him. “We tried to be like David, and he pretended to be like us.” He shook his head. “We all would have followed Harper off the edge of a cliff. And there were times I think she would’ve loved nothing more than to lead us there.”
“I don’t know, Will. Sometimes I think it’s our fault. Me and David. We ruined everything.”
“No,” Will said. “We were ruined long before you ever fell in love.”
His smile was self-deprecating, wry, and he bumped her shoulder with his own as if to smooth over the offense of his words. But Adri was already scoffing, the harsh sound surprising her, even though she was the one who made it.
The tears were there, so close to the surface they almost spilled, but Adri controlled herself. “I don’t know if I was ever in love with him, Will. I look back and it all seems like pure fantasy. I think I knew it then, too.” She let her words hang in the dusk.
Will put his arm around her shoulders, and gave her a brotherly hug. She felt herself melting into him, folding into the comfort of his embrace more eagerly than she would have liked. There were many things she wanted to confess to him. So much she wanted to say.
And she almost said it. Almost.
But she couldn’t.
14
HARPER
“We’re going in to the city tonight,” Sawyer said, not bothering to turn from his computer.
Harper could just see over his shoulder, and what she glimpsed on the screen of his laptop made her stomach pitch. He was editing one of the series he had taken just that morning, the morning she received Adri’s email.
In her mind it would forever be That Morning, capital T and M, because it marked the exact moment that her world cracked open like an egg. She hadn’t realized that it was so fragile, or that she would welcome the hairline fracture that threatened everything she knew. Nor could she have predicted how much it would pain her after the fact to watch what Sawyer was doing. The way he shaded the sweep of her hair just so or added depth and detail to features made her skin crawl. Of course, Harper had never enjoyed what Sawyer was doing, but she tolerated it because she figured she had no other choice. Now, only hours after reading Adri’s unexpected message, the very sight of him manipulating photographs of her body made her feel unhinged. Violent. She wanted to walk up behind him where he sat at his walnut slab desk and take him by the throat, her fingernails digging into the soft skin beneath his jaw. Her hands unforgiving.
Not that she would ever do that.
Not that it would actually work. Sawyer was much stronger than her.
“Did you hear me?” he called, this time looking over his shoulder.
“The city,” Harper parroted, swallowing her disgust like bad medicine. “Of course.”
Sawyer turned away. “Wear that yellow dress I like. The backless one with the long sleeves. And the heels with the ankle straps.”
“The gladiator heels?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t walk in them.”
She could hear the smile in his voice. “It doesn’t matter.”
Harper crossed the room behind him and closed the door to the bedroom they shared as noiselessly as possible. She was used to obeying Sawyer’s every command, but something about Adri’s email made his orders chafe. Of course, the note was only two lines, it didn’t really mean anything at all, but to Harper it was an invitation. A summons. A cry for help. Harper ached to go. But it wasn’t that easy and she knew it.
Harper didn’t dare to lock the bedroom door, but she knew that if she dressed quickly she could probably get out of the apartment without another of Sawyer’s photo shoots.
It hadn’t always been like this. In the beginning they were just a couple, and though Sawyer’s appetites shocked Harper, it didn’t cross her mind to deny him. He was too handsome. Too charismatic. In her darkest, most self-loathing moments, she figured she deserved everything she got. And later, when he told her that he knew a guy who knew a guy who would pay good money for a couple of classy boudoir shots, she didn’t really think twice. It was her modus operandi; she was the party girl, the wild child, the sexy minx who would try anything once. But Sawyer set the hook deep, and before Harper had a chance to realize what was happening, what he had done to her, it was too late.
Boudoir photos were a happy memory.
Officially, Sawyer Donovan was the founder and president of a small but wildly successful advertising agency and marketing firm that specialized in interactive campaigns. At least, that’s how he introduced himself. “I guess you could call me the Don Draper of Minneapolis—and the twenty-first century.” It was a well-rehearsed line that somehow came off as spur-of-the-moment, and even a little diffident, as if he was still baffled by the extent of his success. Humility was particularly charming on Sawyer, though Harper knew that he didn’t have a meek bone in his body. And she found it disingenuous that he claimed to know so much about the industry when he was so disconnected from his own company. Agency 21 was run by Sawyer’s employees.
Sawyer’s real passion was his photography. He was a self-proclaimed artist, a shutterbug who had taken his hobby to a whole new level when Agency 21 took off and he could step back to supervise rather than make each and every business decision. When Harper first met him, he had glossed over the details of his second job, disappearing from time to time for photo shoots that he didn’t bother to explain. And she didn’t ask. What had she thought Sawyer Donovan was doing? Posing some high school senior with a basketball on the tip of his finger? Cracking jokes to make a grumpy kid laugh in a family photo? Sometimes she hated herself for being so thick. For not walking away when she had the chance, when they were still just a couple instead of whatever they were now.
After he took those first few pictures, everything had changed. To Harper, the sound of the digital shutter on his camera was the click of handcuffs snapping shut.
For reasons she couldn’t quite ascertain, Sawyer had chosen to keep her close. Harper didn’t know whether to be comforted or horrified that she was “the one.” There were others, there had to be, for Sawyer still locked her in the apartment when he went to other photo shoots. Harper didn’t have to clean; a cleaning service took care of the apartment and Sawyer made sure they were out for those weekly visits. And he would never allow her to get a job. But Harper had to fill her days somehow, and since Sawyer tolerated her cooking, she spent long hours in the kitchen. She pored over gourmet cookbooks and then tried her hand at the complicated recipes. What else was there to do? Once in a while she would pick up a pen, but the words that she scrawled were too angry, too raw to be trusted. They made the walls of her prison echo, and Harper feared she’d lose her mind.
She was so alone. No one else lived with him. No one else penetrated the inner sanctum of his so-called intimacy. How many were there? Women? Men? God forbid, children? What else was Sawyer up to? Film? These were thoughts Harper couldn’t focus on for more than a second or two. They made her suddenly and violently sick and she broke out in a cold, panicked sweat.
“I’ll tell everyone what you’ve done,” Sawyer said when she fought. And even though there was no such thing as an “everyone” to Harper, there were several someones. Her mother, her father, Adri. To a lesser extent, Jackson. And Will, the boy she sometimes dreamed about when her subconscious was so heartsick for someone safe that she trembled in her sleep. Harper couldn’t stand the thought of disappointing them, even if she didn’t really know them anymore. She died a little at the thought of the looks on their faces if they knew who she truly was. What she had become.
And when Harper cried—a rare but not unheard-of occurrence—Sawyer told her, “It’s
because I love you so much, baby. It’s because you’re so beautiful, so incomparable. It just feels wrong to keep you to myself. We’re making art. The most beautiful kind of art.”
Change quickly. The yellow dress was hanging in the very back of Harper’s closet, but as she reached for it, her hand passed over a little black cocktail dress. And as she brushed the silky fabric, the thought bolted through her like a flash of lightning: Black is better for hiding.
Harper froze, her fingers clinging to the black dress like a lifeline. Sawyer wouldn’t stand for it. He had already picked out her dress, her shoes. He wouldn’t tolerate a change in costume so late in the game. But suddenly the black dress felt like her only, immediate hope. She had to wear the black dress. Black could disappear into the shadows. Black could sink into nothingness, into a place where she could stop being the girl that Sawyer Donovan used. If that was even his real name. She doubted that it was.
Yellow? Yellow was the siren call of neon. Police tape. A beacon calling him to her.
Yanking her T-shirt over her head, Harper grabbed the black dress. It was thinner than the yellow one, sewn from a sheer material with tiny spaghetti straps that required a strapless bra. And it was cold outside, or, at least, cool. She would need a sweater. Better yet, some sort of a shrug or shawl that she could drape around her bare shoulders.
Sawyer wouldn’t understand why she was wearing the black dress, and as she unzipped her jeans and let them fall to her ankles, she realized there was only one way to get away with it and not pique his attention.
Unhooking her bra in the back, Harper slid the straps off her shoulders and yanked it out of the top of her dress. She tossed it on the floor of her closet. Then she snagged a pair of red peep-toe heels from the shelf and stuck her feet in them. A wide, charcoal wrap completed the ensemble, a long, finely woven piece with silver thread shot through the soft pattern. Harper could kick off the shoes easily enough. Ditch the scarf. It would be easier to run in bare feet, to flee with her shoulders free from the burden of tangled fabric. She would be cold, but it didn’t matter.
