The Key Trilogy

by Nora Roberts

  He leaned against the bar, casually elegant in his black sweater, with her homemade candle flickering between them. “Then there was Malory. Of course, I didn’t know her yet, but there was something that made me stop and think, made me look a little closer.”

  He paused, and tucked two fingers under Zoe’s chin. “Then there was this face. This incredible face. I could hardly breathe for looking at it. I was undone by that face. I had to have that painting. I’d have paid anything for it.”

  “It’s part of the connection.” Her throat was dry, but she couldn’t lift her glass to drink. “You were meant to have it.”

  “That may be true. I’ve come to believe it’s true. But that’s not the point I’m making. I had to have the painting because I had to be able to look at that face. Your face. I knew every angle of it. The shape of the eyes, the mouth. I spent a lot of time studying that face. Then you walked into the room that day, and I was staggered. She woke up, and she walked out of the painting, and there she is.”

  “But it isn’t me in the painting.”

  “Ssh. I couldn’t think. For a minute I couldn’t hear anything but my own heart beating. While I was trying to think, while I was trying not to grab you just to convince myself that you weren’t going to vanish like smoke, everyone was talking. I had to speak to you, to pretend everything was normal when the world had done a very fast one-eighty on me. You can’t imagine what was going on inside me.”

  “No. I guess—no,” she managed.

  “You said you had to get home for your son, and you might as well have stabbed me in the throat. How could she belong to someone else before I get a chance? So I looked down, saw you weren’t wearing a ring, and I thought, Thank God, she doesn’t belong to someone else.”

  “But you didn’t even know me.”

  “I do now.” He leaned in, took her lips with his.

  “Man. Are you going to do that all the time now?”

  Brad eased back, brushed a kiss against Zoe’s forehead, then turned to Simon. “Yes. But I don’t want you to feel left out, so I’ll kiss you, too.”

  Simon made spitting noises and danced to safety behind his mother’s stool. “Kiss her if you’ve got to kiss somebody. Are we going to eat soon? I’m starving.”

  “Big fat steaks about to go on the fire. So, kid, how do you like your frog?”

  AFTER dinner, and the video rematch, after Simon’s eyes drooped shut as he sprawled on the game room floor, Zoe let herself slide into Brad’s arms. Let herself float into the kiss.

  There was magic in the world, she thought. And this night had been some of hers.

  “I have to take Simon home.”

  “Stay.” He rubbed his cheek against hers. “Just stay, both of you.”

  “That’s a big step for me.” She rested her head on his shoulder. It would be so easy, she knew, to stay. To just let herself be held this way. But big steps should never be easy.

  “I’m not playing games with you, but I have to think about what’s right.” For all of us, she thought. “I meant what I said about wondering how I’ve ended up here. I have to be sure about whatever happens next.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not going to hurt either of us.”

  “I’m not afraid of that. No, that’s a lie. I am. But I’m afraid I could hurt you. I didn’t tell you what happened last night. I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Simon.”

  “What is it?”

  “Can we go in the other room? In case he wakes up.”

  “It was Kane,” Brad said as he walked her into the great room.

  “Yes.” And she told him.

  “Is that what you wanted, Zoe? To live in New York, work in a high-powered job?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about New York. Could just as easily have been Chicago, or Los Angeles, anyplace that seemed important. Anyplace that wasn’t where I was.”

  “Because you were unhappy, or because there were things you wanted to do?”

  She started to answer, then stopped. “Both,” she realized. “I don’t know that I thought about being unhappy, but I guess I was a lot of the time. The world just seemed so small and set where I lived. The way I lived.”

  She looked out the windows, across the lawn to the dark ribbon of river. “But the world isn’t small, and it’s not set. I used to think about that, to wonder about all that. The people and the places out there.”

  Surprised at herself, she turned back to see him watching her, quiet and steady. “Anyway, that’s off the track.”

  “I don’t think so. What made you happy?”

  “Oh, lots of things. I don’t mean to sound like I was sad all the time. I wasn’t. I liked school. I was good in school. I liked learning things, figuring things out. I was especially good with numbers. I did Mama’s books and her taxes. I took care of the bills. I liked doing it. I thought maybe I’d be a bookkeeper, or even a CPA. Or work in banking. I wanted to go to college, and get an important job, move to the city. Have things. Have more, that’s all. Have people respect me, even admire me, because I knew how to do things.”

  She gave a little shrug, wandered to the fireplace. “Used to irritate my mama, the way I talked about it, and how I was fussy about what belonged to me because I wanted to keep it nice. She said how I thought I was better than anybody else, but that wasn’t it.”

  Her brows drew together as she stared at the flames. “That wasn’t it at all. I just wanted to be better than I was. I figured if I was smart enough, I could get that good job and move to the city, and nobody’d look at me and think, There’s that trailer trash from over in the hollow.”

  “Zoe.”

  She shook her head. “People did think that, Bradley. They did because it was true enough. My daddy drank too much and ran off with another woman, left my mother with four children, a stack of bills, and a double-wide. Most of my clothes were what somebody’d given us out of charity. You don’t know what that’s like.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t know what it’s like.”

  “Some people give you things out of goodness, but a lot of them do it so they can feel superior. So they can sit smug and say, Look what I did for that poor woman and her children. And you see it on their faces.”

  She glanced over at him, her cheeks flushed with the heat of both pride and shame. “It’s hateful. I didn’t want anybody giving me anything. I wanted to get it for myself. So I worked, and I squirreled money away, and I made big plans. Then I got pregnant.”

  She looked back toward the archway to make certain Simon was still out of earshot. “Didn’t realize I was until I was into my second month. Thought I had the flu or something. But it didn’t go away, so I went to the clinic and they told me. I was about nine weeks already. God, nine weeks along, and too stupid to know it.”

  “You were a child.” And one he ached for. “You weren’t stupid, you were a child.”

  “Old enough to get pregnant. Old enough to know what that meant. I was so scared. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t tell my mother, not right away. I went to the boy. He was scared, too, and maybe he was a little angry. But he said we’d do the right thing. I felt better after that. I felt calmer. So I went home and told Mama.”

  She drew a deep breath, pressed her fingers to her temples. She hadn’t meant to speak of all of this, but now that she’d begun, she would finish. “Oh, I can still see her, sitting there at the table with the fan blowing. It was hot, awfully damn hot. She looked at me, and leaned over and slapped me.

  “I don’t blame her for that,” she said when Brad swore. “I didn’t blame her then, I don’t blame her now. I’d been sneaking out behind her back to be with that boy, and now I had to pay the price for it. I don’t blame her for the slap, Bradley, I had it coming. But I blame her for after. For finding satisfaction in knowing I’d gotten in trouble, the same as she had with me. For making sure I knew I was no better than she was, for all my ideas and plans. I blame her for making me feel cheap, and makin
g the baby I was carrying into a punishment.”

  “She was wrong.” It was said simply, in a matter-of-fact tone that had Zoe’s breath hitching. “What happened with the father?”

  “Well, he didn’t do the right thing, as he’d called it. I don’t want to talk about that right now. There’s this business in my clue about forks on the path. I chose my direction back then. I quit school, and I went to work. I got my GED and my beautician’s license, and I left home.”

  “Wait.” He held up a hand. “You went out on your own, alone, when you were sixteen? And pregnant. Your mother—”

  “Didn’t have any say in it,” she interrupted. She turned, facing him with the fire snapping behind her. “I left when I was six months gone because I was not going to raise my baby in that goddamn trailer. I took my direction,” she said, “and maybe that path started me on the road to the Valley, and the Peak, and all of this.”

  Maybe she had to say it all, she thought now. Maybe she’d needed to go back, step by step so she could see it all.

  And so he could.

  “I wouldn’t be here if I’d chosen another, if I hadn’t loved a boy and made a baby with him. I wouldn’t be here if I’d gone on to college and gotten that good job, and flown off to Rome for the week. I have to figure out what that means, about the key. Because I gave my word I’d try to find it. And I have to figure out if that’s why I’m here, with you. Because God knows, it doesn’t make any sense for me to be here otherwise.”

  “Whatever brought you here, it makes perfect sense.”

  “Were you listening?” she demanded. “Did you hear a word I said about where I came from?”

  “Every word.” He crossed to her. “You’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever met.”

  She stared at him, then lifted her hands in exasperation. “I don’t understand you at all. Maybe I’m not supposed to. But there’s something we both have to consider. Because the world isn’t small, and it isn’t set. And, Bradley, there isn’t just one world for us to worry about here.”

  “It circles around,” he said with a nod. “And it intersects.”

  “And because it does, are you the choice I’m supposed to take or the one I’m supposed to turn away from?”

  He smiled, but it was sharp and it was fierce. “Try to turn away.”

  She shook her head. “And if I turn toward you, and something starts between us, something real, what happens if I have to choose again?”

  He laid his hands on her shoulders, slid them up until they framed her face. “Zoe, something’s already started between us, and it’s very real.”

  She wished she could be so sure.

  When she rode home through the night sprinkled with the light of a quarter moon, nothing seemed quite real.

  Chapter Eight

  CHAMPAGNE and lobster and limos, oh my,” Dana exclaimed as they maneuvered the wrought-iron baker’s rack they’d bought into its place in their communal kitchen.

  “Very classy,” Malory agreed. “Maybe Brad will give Flynn lessons on how to prepare dinner for a woman.”

  “That’s part of the problem. I’m the beer, burger, and station-wagon type. It was wonderful, absolutely wonderful, but the way a really good dream is.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Dana demanded.

  “Nothing.” Zoe puffed out her cheeks, slowly expelled air. “But I’m starting to get some very serious feelings about him.”

  “I repeat. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Let’s see, where should I start? We’re barely from the same planet. I’m trying to get a business started, which is going to involve every minute I can squeeze out of the day, and that’s after raising Simon, for about the next ten years. I have three weeks left to find the last key to the Box of Souls, and if we were playing Hot and Cold right now, I’d have frostbite on my ass.”

  “You know, you never hear about people getting frostbite on the ass,” Dana commented. “I wonder why that is.”

  She selected one of the fancy tins of tea she’d decided to carry and set it on a shelf of the rack. Turned her head this way, that way to critique its position.

  “On a more serious note.” Malory’s voice was dry as she placed a hand-thrown bowl from her new stock on a shelf. “Neither the business nor Simon is a reason not to have a man in your life, if you’re attracted to the man. If you believe he’s a good man.”

  “Of course I’m attracted to him. A woman in a coma would be attracted to him. And he is a good man. I didn’t want to believe he was, but he’s a very good man.”

  Zoe put one of her scented candles on the shelf. “It would be less complicated if he wasn’t. Then I could probably carve out just enough time for a hot, sweaty affair, and we’d both walk away from it without any regrets.”

  “Why are you already thinking about walking and regrets?” Malory asked her.

  “I’ve had one constant in my life, and that’s Simon. I’ve got another now, with both of you. They’re both like miracles. I’m not banking on a third.”

  “And people call me pessimistic,” Dana muttered. “Okay, here’s an idea.” She set another canister on the rack. “Consider Brad a big boy, so if you both decide to have that hot, sweaty affair, you’re both responsible for the outcome. Oh, and don’t forget to fill us in on all the deets. Next, remember that you may be up to bat for this round of the quest, but the three of us are still a team, which means you’re not the only one courting frostbite at the moment.”

  “Good points,” Malory agreed as she put a hand-painted tray on the rack, then nodded in approval at the apothecary bottle of hand lotion Zoe added. “I think it’s time for an official meeting. We’ll put six very good heads together and see what kind of storm we can come up with.”

  “Maybe it’ll break the logjam in my head.” Zoe added a dish of fancy soap, another candle, then stepped back as Malory set a long, slim vase and a pair of white porcelain candleholders on the rack.

  “Not such a jam,” Dana disagreed. “You’re pursuing theories, thinking things through, lining things up. It’s taking on form, like this rack. A little here, a little there, then you step back and look at the whole, see what needs to be added or adjusted.”

  “I hope so. Needs books,” Zoe commented, with a nod toward the rack.

  “First shipment next week.” Dana moved beside her, rested an elbow on Zoe’s shoulder. “Jeez, I know it’s just a kitchen rack, but, damn, it looks terrific.”

  “It looks like us.” Pleased, Malory slid an arm around Zoe’s waist. “And you know what’s going to look even better? When people start buying.”

  UPSTAIRS , Zoe stood on the stepladder to hang the storage cabinets above her shampoo bowls. As she worked, she ticked through the chores she’d set for herself that week.

  She needed to log some more time on the computer. Not only for research but to try her hand at designing the menu of services for the salon and day spa.

  She wondered if she could get paper close to the same color as her trim. Something distinctive.

  And she was going to have to decide, once and for all, on her prices. Did she undercut the rates of her competitor in town by a few dollars, or did she charge a few dollars more and make a reasonable profit?

  She was using higher-end products than the other salon in town, and they cost more money. She was certainly offering her customers a more attractive atmosphere.

  And the other salon didn’t serve the customers—clients, she corrected, “clients” was more sophisticated. The other salon didn’t serve its clients iced mineral water or cups of herbal tea as she planned to do. And it didn’t give them a heated neck roll filled with relaxing herbs while they had their nails done.

  She hung the cabinet, swiped her forearm over her brow, and started to back down the ladder.

  “What a wonderful color.”

  Caught off guard, Zoe grabbed the ladder and stared down at Rowena.

  “I didn’t hear you . . .” Pop out of thin air?


  “Sorry.” Rowena’s eyes danced as if she guessed Zoe’s thoughts. “Malory and Dana told me to come right up. I’ve been downstairs admiring what you three have done. I wanted to see your space. As I said, the colors are wonderful.”

  “I wanted them to be fun.”

  “You’ve succeeded. And what did I interrupt?”

  “Oh, I was just finished. Storage cabinets, for shampoos, conditioners, that sort of thing. My shampoo bowls will go right here.”

  “Ah.”

  “And, well, the stations for the stylists.” She gestured. “The stationary hair dryers over there, the reception counter, the waiting area. I’m going to put in a sofa, a couple of chairs, a padded bench. And that room that angles off down there, that’s for nails. I ordered this heated massage chair for what I’m calling the Indulgence Pedicure. The standard pedi will be good, but this one’s going to be a knockout. It’ll include—you couldn’t possible care.”

  “On the contrary.” Rowena wandered over to look at the area, then moved through to another room. “And this?”

  “One of the treatment rooms. Massages or facials. Across the hall’s for the wraps. I’m going to offer a detoxifying wrap and a really terrific paraffin job. And I’m using the big bathroom for exfoliating treatments.”

  “It’s very ambitious.”

  “I’ve been planning it in my head for a long time. It’s hard to believe it’s really happening. We plan to open by December first. Rowena, I haven’t neglected the key. I just haven’t figured it out.”

  “If it was easy, it wouldn’t be important. You know that,” Rowena added, giving Zoe an absentminded pat on the shoulder as she wandered back to the main salon. “None of this was easy.”

  “No, but it was just work. Step by step.” She smiled a little as Rowena turned, lifted a brow. “Okay, I get it. Step by step.”

  “Tell me, how’s your son?”

  “Simon’s fine. He’s with a friend today. We had dinner at Bradley’s last night.”