Hale's Point

by Patricia Ryan

  He picked his cane up off the floor. Leaning on it, he again reached into his back pocket, this time for a pack of Camel cigarettes. He shook it until one slid out halfway, then brought the pack to his mouth, took the cigarette between his lips, and returned the pack to the pocket—all one-handedly, while the cane supported his weight. It looked like a well-practiced maneuver.

  Harley said, “Sorry, but that’s another thing that simply isn’t done here. Smoking. Your father doesn’t allow it in the house.”

  “But he smokes.” He brought forth a pack of matches. Again with one hand, he opened it, bent a match until it was doubled over, and thumbed it against the striking area. When it flamed, he lit the cigarette.

  “No, he doesn’t. Not anymore, anyway. Look, I know you’re his son, but he left me in charge of the house. And when it came to smoking, he made it crystal clear—”

  “Well, that hasn’t changed, at least. He always did like to make things crystal clear.” He took a relaxed draw on the cigarette, clearly with no intention of putting it out. “I can’t tell you how sick I got of his rules. By the time I turned sixteen, I’d heard enough about what is and isn’t done to last me a lifetime.”

  “Okay, fine. You don’t like to do as you’re told. No problem, except this is my job I’m talking about, and I am expected to do as I’m told. He told me not to allow smoking in the house.”

  “Did he tell you how you’re supposed to enforce that edict if someone absolutely refuses to obey?” He brought the cigarette to his lips again.

  “He didn’t have to.” She reached out and snatched the cigarette out of his mouth, then marched with it around the piano to the French doors leading to the patio. She didn’t look back at him, but she could hear him following her. “I told him I was going to keep cigarettes out of this house. And—”

  “And you always do what you say you’re going to do. Right?” He sounded amused.

  “Right.” It was cool for mid-June, even considering the hour, and the air was swollen with moisture. It would rain soon.

  She crossed the brick patio to the pool, crouched down, and dipped the cigarette in it. It extinguished with a sizzle.

  “When did he put the pool in?” Tucker was standing silhouetted in the open door of the solarium.

  “I don’t know. I never saw this house till two weeks ago.”

  “It’s a big sucker. Olympic-size?”

  She nodded. “Seventy-five feet.” She walked over to him and handed him the soggy butt. He accepted it with a bemused expression. “It’s all right if you want to smoke out here. Just not in the house.”

  He leaned against the doorframe, scrutinizing her, his gaze lingering on her mouth. When he met her eyes, there was something that looked almost like shyness hiding in them. “You’re not from Hale’s Point. I’d hear it in your voice if you were.”

  “I’m from…” That was a rough one. “All over. But I live in Manhattan now, on the Upper West Side. Except I’m subletting my apartment for the summer.”

  “What’s your name?” Seeing her hesitate, he added, “We’re going to be living in the same house. I should know your name. I think Emily Post would agree.”

  “Are you planning on staying here? What, till your father comes back?”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  A kind of panic seized Harley. She had no way of contacting Raleigh Hale, but she doubted he would approve of his estranged son just showing up in the middle of the night and moving in. Perhaps it would help to remind Tucker what it was like to live under his father’s many rules. “If you think you want to stay here, then you should know there are a few other things your father’s kind of picky about.”

  Wearily he said, “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  “He said no eating or drinking anywhere except the kitchen, dining room, or breakfast room. No dogs or cats allowed in the…”

  Shaking his head, Tucker turned and walked back into the solarium. With a sinking feeling, Harley noticed that his limp had worsened considerably since her attack with the baseball bat. He picked up his cap and put it on, then slung the duffel over his shoulder.

  “I honestly can’t imagine why I came here.” he said when she joined him. He shrugged his big shoulders. “Sorry I disturbed your sleep.”

  Bewildered, she walked behind him as he made his halting, pained way out of the solarium and through the house to the front door. He wasn’t staying? What was going on?

  Shivering, she followed him onto the porch and halfway down the steps. It really was getting chilly, and she could feel minuscule drops of rain, like pinpricks, on her face.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to La Guardia. Then home, I guess.”

  “Home? But you just—”

  “Just got here and I’m just going home. I know when to cut my losses. I haven’t forgotten that much in twenty-one years.”

  Harley looked around. “Where’s your car?”

  “Don’t have one. I hitched from the airport.”

  “You hitchhiked?”

  “And I’ll hitch back.”

  “La Guardia’s seventy-five miles away. Let me drive you.”

  “You’re not dressed.”

  “I can get—”

  “I don’t want to wait. I’m outta here.”

  “But it’s the middle of the night, and it’s starting to rain. What if no one picks you up? What about your leg?”

  “I’ll survive. I’m damn good at that.”

  She considered his battered body and wondered what, exactly, he had survived. She thought about his bad leg, and grimly speculated on how much damage she had done to the good one with that bat. Was he in a lot of pain, but just too much of a tough guy to show it? “Tucker—”

  “I wonder if R.H. knows just how lucky he is to have you watching after things for him.” The statement might have been taken as a compliment under different circumstances. As it was, his words, soft-spoken though they were, just made her feel that much colder. “You couldn’t be more eager to carry out his dictates. Your enthusiasm blows me away, it really does. You must love rules almost as much as he does.”

  Despite the implied criticism, there was no real rancor or arrogance in his tone, as if he knew she wasn’t responsible for her nature. Harley felt numb.

  “Loving rules is something I can’t relate to,” he continued. “My guess is you need them like you need to breathe. Any hint of disorder, anything messy or unexpected in your life, just won’t do.” Harley wanted to tell him he was wrong, but she knew he would see that for the lie it was. “That’s why you’re incredibly relieved that I’m leaving. I’m very messy and very unexpected, and you’re not entirely sure what the old man would think about my staying in the house. God knows, you don’t want to displease R.H. Everyone who knows my father craves his approval. I’ve been there.” He looked up at the enormous, whitewashed brick house, each window fitted with its own crisp, green-and-white-striped summer awning. “But I can’t go back.”

  He descended another step and turned to face her, their heights almost level now. “He’s lucky to have found you. You’re orderly and right-thinking and good at giving commands. You’re him! You’re Raleigh Hale, only— How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three,” she replied woodenly.

  “Only forty-five years younger, and…” He hesitated, then lifted a hand to her face, trailed his fingertips lightly along her jawline, and traced her lower lip with his thumb. “You have a much, much nicer mouth.”

  With a gentle pressure under her chin, he tilted her face toward his. He was suddenly very close to her. When he closed his eyes, so did she. Then she felt his warm mouth on hers, the rough sandpaper of his stubble grazing the soft skin around her lips.

  In a moment, the kiss was over. It had been fleeting, scratchy-sweet. A goodbye kiss between two people who had only known each other for ten strange minutes in the middle of the night and would never meet again. Harley was breathless, and her legs felt weak.r />
  “Goodbye.” He shrugged. “Whatever your name is.”

  She took a steadying breath. “Harley.”

  He smiled. “Harley. Thanks.”

  He turned and made his awkward way down the porch steps, then disappeared into the darkness without once looking back.

  ***

  Harley raced up and down halls and in and out of rooms, slamming windows shut against the sudden, torrential rain. It was like a living thing, a monster, rattling the sashes and soaking her with its spray as she struggled to keep it out of Raleigh Hale’s home. She grabbed a pile of towels from the linen closet and went from window to window, drying off woodwork, varnished floors, and the furniture she had so painstakingly polished the day before. She saved her own room for last.

  Tucker is out in this. According to the clock on her night table, it was 3:17 a.m. He had left two hours ago. During most of that time, the rain had been no worse than a light drizzle, yet even then, she had worried about him. And now…

  Through the closed windows she could hear the crashing of storm waves on the beach below the house and the scraping of wind-whipped branches against the roof. And, of course, the driving rain. She thought about his limp, about the obvious pain he was in, pain made all the worse by her attack with the baseball bat. A wave of guilt overcame her. How far had he gotten? Had he gotten a ride? The only logical road for him to have taken didn’t see a lot of traffic at night. And on a night like this… She pictured the road, bleak and deserted. No gas stations, no convenience stores, no shelter of any kind.

  Harley took her rain-dampened robe off and threw on the clothes she’d worn the day before. She looked in the mirror, at her mouth. The skin surrounding it still felt raw from the contact with his prickly stubble. She ran a finger over the sensitive skin, her mind unfocused. When she snapped out of it and saw herself in the mirror, she suddenly realized why she had gotten dressed.

  ***

  Tucker Hale leaned back against a chain-link fence, hunched over, and pulled up the collar of his denim jacket. He smiled ruefully. He had just left a dry house that he had traveled thousands of miles to get to—and the most attractive woman he had seen in a long time—so that he could stand out here in this hellish rainstorm in the middle of the night and get soaked to the bone. It was as if the rain were beating on him with a thousand little fists. Harley and her baseball bat couldn’t have done any worse.

  Harley. Until he’d heard her call the old man “Mr. Hale,” he thought she might actually be some new half-sister from a second wife. Or even the second wife herself. Rather young for a stepmother, he thought. And rather… Well, he would have had a hard time calling her “Mom,” that’s for sure.

  She was very pretty in an offbeat kind of way. Not a classic beauty, but she did have classic lips. Wide, full, naturally red lips. Incredible. Great hair, too—bronze shot through with gold, thick and shiny, a sexy, sleep-tangled mane. She had a sweet, all-American voice. It was hard to pin down her origins, but he doubted she was a native New Yorker.

  She had guts, too, facing him down with that bat. She’d been scared, but that hadn’t stopped her. Too bad she was such a martinet. He sensed in her the kind of officious, regimented thinking that had driven him away from R.H. and Hale’s Point two decades ago. She really did remind him of his father: everything by the book, nothing left to chance.

  He wasn’t only soaked to the bone, he was chilled to the bone, as well. God, his legs hurt—both of them now, not just the one. Every step made his right shin throb and sent a jolt of fire up to his left hip. Why hadn’t he stayed in Hale’s Point? Or at least let Harley drive him, or better yet, called a cab? It was that old bolting instinct. That urge to flee.

  He shook his head. What was the matter with him, anyway? Kids hitchhiked—kids too broke to get around any other way. He had no business being out here. He was thirty-seven years old and far from broke. His net worth probably exceeded that of his father at this point, and none of it, he reminded himself proudly, was inherited.

  It was beginning to look like he’d be spending all night out here. Cars were few and far between, and in this downpour, he’d be invisible.

  Headlights. The hell with it. He wrapped his arms tightly around his chest, lowered his head, and closed his eyes.

  Could you sleep standing up in a rainstorm? He tried to remember all the worst places he had slept. The hospital was pretty bad, with his leg in traction. But that wasn’t half as bad as that roach-infested oven of a cell in D-Block, with a 320-pound bunkmate who’d murdered his brother-in-law by suffocating him with a pillow while he slept. And then there was the time his pals had talked him into climbing that mountain in the Canadian Rockies and they’d had to rig up their sleeping bags so they hung vertically off the cliff face. That had been a trip.

  A horn honked somewhere…. Funny thing was, he’d slept like a baby that time. He could still remember the feeling, suspended high above the Rockies in the sharp, cold air, drifting, drifting….

  Honk. “Tucker!”

  He opened his eyes and raised his head. A car had pulled over. Its door stood open. Inside, it glowed with light.

  She was there, beckoning to him.

  Chapter 2

  TUCKER BEGAN STRIPPING the moment the front door closed behind him. Leaning on the hall table for support, he tossed his cap, cane, duffel, and denim jacket onto the tiled floor. Then, in one swift motion, he whipped his sodden sweater and T-shirt over his head and flung them on top of the jacket.

  Harley’s eyes grew wide at the sight of his bare chest—more in horror, he realized, than in appreciation. The ragged gashes carved into his flesh between his left shoulder and the bottom of his rib cage were an alarming sight—even to him. His back, on that side, was almost as bad.

  He took the towel she handed him, quickly dried his face, hair, and upper body, and draped it around his neck. Then he undid the button fly on his jeans. “Hope you don’t mind, but I’ve got to get out of these.”

  She turned around and headed toward the back of the house. “I’ll make up your bed.”

  “I can handle that. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I don’t mind.” Clearly Harley just wanted an excuse to get away from him while he undressed. That was okay. Still, he wondered whether it was the nudity or the scars that had unnerved her.

  He kicked off his wet, heavy jeans and added them to the heap on the floor. In the car, Harley had told him that the sensible thing was for him to come back to the house, catch a few hours’ sleep, and book a flight when it was convenient. Exhausted, drenched, and in pain, he had thanked her for her trouble and agreed to do the sensible thing.

  He wrapped the towel around his hips, bent to retrieve his cane, and followed Harley to the maid’s room, next to the kitchen. The maid wouldn’t be back until September, so he had decided to sleep there, instead of in his old room, in order to avoid the stairs. He didn’t think his leg could take any more abuse than it had already suffered tonight.

  She was bending over the narrow bed, making crisp hospital corners in the white cotton sheets.

  He said, “I want to be able to bounce a dime off that sheet, Private.”

  Her face stained pink when she saw that all he had on was the towel. She was uptight. Then her gaze dropped to his disfigured left leg, and she quickly returned her attention to the bed.

  “I’m going to take a hot shower before I turn in,” he said. He flipped the light switch in the little bathroom off the maid’s room, then turned on the water in the claw-footed tub, adjusting the knob to get it scalding.

  “I’m done here,” she said, turning to face him, her arms folded across her chest. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wore a white sweater and new jeans with an ironed-in crease; she looked like a schoolgirl. Except for her face. The hot color in her cheeks brought out the green in her hazel eyes. Even her lips seemed to blush a darker red.

  He was staring at her. He should say something. “Thanks for everything, Harley.
”

  “No problem. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  ***

  He couldn’t move. He lay on his back in the white sand and stared at the hot-pink sky and green palms, blue waves slapping the shore.

  Á shadow fell over him. It was her. He saw her lips, those amazing lips. She knelt down and leaned over him, and he thought she was going to kiss him, but instead, she said, “Does it hurt?”

  He looked down. It was Alaskan snow he lay on now, and it burned, it was so cold. The reason he couldn’t move was the jagged pieces of metal that pierced him all along his left side, pinning him down like an insect in a case.

  “Does it hurt?” she repeated. He was consumed with hurt. Pain was all there was and all there ever would be.

  “No.” he said.

  She stood. ‘‘Liar.”

  She was gone. He tried to sit up, to reach for her, and the metal tore at his flesh.

  “No!” he gasped. He sat up in bed, sweating and shaking. “No,” he whispered.

  He looked around. The maid’s room. Hale’s Point. Oh, yeah. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Wow.” He couldn’t even sleep without pain. Even in his dreams it pursued him.

  There was a digital clock on the night table. It was 8:05 a.m. Outside, the waves still lapped and retreated, but they didn’t sound right; too loud and too regular, just like they were in the dream.

  His bed stood against the back wall, a window within reach. He pulled the curtain back and pried apart the slats of the blinds, squinting against the bright sunlight. He could see all of the brick patio and most of the pool. The patio was scattered with teak furniture, including a large round table under an enormous square canvas umbrella. The pool took up a good part of what had been, in his boyhood, a flat expanse of broadloom lawn. The lawn ended fifty yards from the house in a low stone wall bordered with roses, lavender and creeping thyme.