Читать книгу His Private Nurse - Arlene James, Arlene James - Страница 8

Royce leaned forward and placed his hands on the railing, staring into the silent darkness. On a warm summer night like this, nocturnal creatures usually kept up a steady chorus, crickets, coyotes and the occasional small owl on the prowl for an unwary field mouse or ground squirrel. Tonight, however, an unnatural silence reigned, and Royce knew why. Someone waited out there.

He gripped the squared edges of the wood railing. Rough and solid beneath his palms, it conveyed a sense of permanence, of ownership. Beyond the deck where he stood and the black, irregular skyline of scrubby forest that flowed down the hill upon which he had built his secluded home, San Antonio spread out in a rumpled quilt of white and amber lights, stitched together by the sinuously askew seams of major streets and highways. He often stood on the large, terraced deck, gazing out over the city he both loved and nightly escaped, a city he had helped to build, often with his own two hands. This night, however, he studied the ground below, the murky black shadows of lush forest cedar interspersed with spindly sprays of mesquite and squat, wicked cactus.

She was there. Somewhere. He could not see her, but she was there. He sensed her, still attuned even after these many, many months to his ex-wife’s volatile presence. Every time the kids slept over, she made some sort of scene, created some sort of crisis. He couldn’t believe that tonight would be the exception.

Quietly, so as not to disturb his daughter, whose room in the large, rambling house overlooked the deck, he turned and moved to the top of the steep, open stairs that would carry him down to the narrow drive that ran behind the house. The warm summer breeze made his T-shirt stick to his back and molded the thin pajama bottoms to his body. He did not want another confrontation, but this madness had to stop.

He was certain that she was there, stalking, watching, planning her next scene, her next outrageous demand, utterly determined to ruin his life, to punish him for failing to make her happy, for failing to make all her mad dreams come true. She was there, wanting, needing, his destruction. Most of all, she wanted to turn his children against him, to ensure that he did not see them if she could, to remove his influence from their sad, unstable lives and, if she could not manage that, then to ruin every visit, every cherished moment that he spent with them, because, more than she wanted money, control, someone to worship at her feet and make all her fears go away, she wanted to remove every vestige of the love she could not claim from his life.

Until he felt the hands at the small of his back, he did not realize that, even more than she wanted to punish him, she wanted him dead.