Читать книгу Once More, At Midnight - Wendy Warren - Страница 8

Chapter Four

“Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three, forty-four…”

Lilah pushed coins across the scarred butcher-block table in Sara’s kitchen. She counted all the way to forty-eight dollars, looked at the money sitting in front of her and slumped until her cheek rested on the old pine.

The heavy thump of her heart and steady march of black hands across a cow-shaped kitchen clock provided the only background music to the impending disaster that had become her life.

It was ten minutes to 12:00 a.m. Between sips of hot cocoa laced with Irish Crème Liqueur, Lilah had counted and recounted every crumpled dollar bill and every sticky piece of change she’d scrounged from the bottom of her purse. She’d have to make another with-drawal from her checking account soon.

Groaning, she pounded a fist on the table—just once, because she was exhausted.

When Grace was sick, Lilah had asked her coworkers to sub for her so many times that eventually the manager had hired someone else. Then there had been the enticing dinners she had bought from the gourmet market to tempt Grace to eat, and the aromatherapy candles and food supplements and Chinese herbal remedies and organic potions and all the other ways Lilah had fought to keep Grace alive, to pretend they actually had some power in an ultimately powerless position.

Lilah’s bank account had dwindled, and she hadn’t been able to catch up. Still, she would learn how to cook cardboard boxes before she’d spend what was left of Grace’s savings. She’d counted on getting a job at Ernie’s. Jobs were not plentiful in rural North Dakota.

“I’m screwed. I’m just screwed,” she said, shaking her head as she pushed away from the kitchen table.

She’d gone to bed around nine—before, thank goodness, Sara had come home from her final patrol of the night. Lilah simply hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone, not until she’d had at least a little rest and could make some sense of her situation. Unfortunately, she hadn’t slept a wink, and her situation wasn’t looking any more sensible at 12:00 a.m. than it had when she’d gotten home from the diner.

Heaving her exhausted body out of the chair, she shuffled to the pantry, wondering if Sara had any Scooter Pies. May as well ditch the diet she’d been on for the past twelve years. Her career was dead, her romantic life was a non-issue, and when everyone discovered the lie she had been living with for more than a decade, it was possible that no one, not even her own sisters, would want to speak to her.

Settling for a handful of Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries, she ate over the sink, listening to her teeth grind the cereal and watching pink Crunch Berry crumbs dapple the scratched porcelain basin. When she finished, she stared through the window at the high half moon. She’d come home for comfort.

She’d come home hoping that her sisters—and she figured Nettie was her best bet—would see that taking care of Bree was wearing her nerves down to nubs. Look at you, her baby sister would say, you’re exhausted. This is too much for someone who is not used to children. Let me help.

The thought that had brought transient relief on the drive to North Dakota now turned the cereal sour in her stomach.

Standing still, Lilah covered her face with her hands. She wasn’t the one who had died, wasn’t the one who had slipped unwillingly away from a daughter she’d raised and nurtured and needed like a star needs the night to shine. Yet here she was, filled with worry, feeling sorry for herself and wanting someone to rescue her.

When she saw Gus at the restaurant and heard that he was building a home and a business in Kalamoose, there had been a part of her that thought—for a split second—that perhaps fate had decided they were not through after all. Perhaps that angry boy who had been all wrong for her at seventeen, but whom she had never been able to forget, was going to be her knight in shining armor now that they were both adults.

Maybe, she’d thought before he’d mentioned a fiancée, everything that’s happened was supposed to bring us together again.

Turning on the faucet, Lilah splashed her face with cold water. “You have become a poor excuse for a woman with a brain,” she muttered.

Twisting the squeaky knob again and drying her hands on the dishtowel Sara left draped over the faucet, Lilah braced her arms against the sink and hung her head. Gus Hoffman had spent the past twelve years creating a life that would give him contentment while she had morphed from a girl who had planned to conquer the world into a woman who wished someone would rescue her.

Pathetic.

All night she’d been fighting the memory of his expression as he told her he was getting married. He’d looked proud, but more importantly, satisfied. In the past, albeit the distant past, he had looked that way only when he was with her.

Hot and restless, she pulled at the neck of her tank top then reached over the sink to open the window and let in some air. Grunting, she pushed ineffectively at the frame until she realized that Sara had installed some funky new lock.

Dang Sara and her security measures. This is Kalamoose, not freaking L.A.

The thought had barely formed in her brain when she saw a shadow through the window. The shadow of a person standing in their yard.

At 12:00 a.m.

Lilah’s first impulse was to yell for her sister, but she didn’t want to alarm Bree, and she felt a sudden surge of adrenaline that told her to fight, not flee. She lived in Los Angeles, for crying out loud; she’d had her car broken into three times. She could deal with one small-town Peeping Tom.

Racing barefoot to the kitchen door, she grabbed the battered baseball bat that had stood sentinel for years—ever since Sara had placed it there to threaten the raccoons that routinely made a mess of their garbage cans.

Dousing the lights, Lilah peeked through the curtain covering the kitchen door window. The helpful moon bathed the person in the yard in an eerie glow, outlining the silhouette of a rather large man. Clearly, he’d seen her through the window. Now that she’d turned off the lights, he appeared to be waiting, though for what she had no idea. He stood stock-still, neither approaching the house nor turning to leave before he was caught.

The arrogance, Lilah thought and then immediately was struck by a rush of déjà vu so strong she felt transported to another time. Another time…but the very same place.

Unlatching Sara’s collection of dead bolts, she turned the knob on the kitchen door and stepped outside. Cool air bathed her bare legs and whispered softly around her shoulders and arms. Still clutching the bat, she shivered.

I know this moment. She’d lived it thirteen summers ago, though without the baseball bat that time. Just sixteen, awake with the thrill of secret love, she had flown outside under the light of this very moon to her lover’s arms. She recognized him now, thought he’d thrown no stones at her window and showed no intention of running eagerly across the lawn to meet her halfway.

Tonight Gus merely watched her as she descended the porch steps and walked toward him slowly, feeling vaguely as if she’d fallen asleep at the table and was dreaming this whole thing.

She walked until she saw his face clearly, stopping a few feet away.

His eyes roamed down her body, taking in the loose, mussed hair, sleeveless nightshirt, bare legs. Then his gaze wandered up again while hers traveled over a muscular frame dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. They studied each other unabashedly, like naked lovers viewing their partners for the first time.

She felt the old heady recklessness that had pumped her full of life every time Gus met her at night—despite rules, despite curfews, despite being too young to deal with any consequences. The struggle to suppress the feeling seemed, rather, to inflame them more. For a moment, she wanted to forget everything, every excellent reason for keeping her distance from him now, and simply fall into a wordless kiss.

The idea that she might be willing to ignore the fact that he had a fiancée repulsed her. She had been a lot of things—selfish, dishonest, shallow at times—but she had never yet been an adulteress.

“You’re trespassing,” she informed Gus in a voice roughened by suppressed emotion.

He glanced to the makeshift weapon in her hand. “You’ve got a bat and a sister who’s the sheriff—you want me gone, do something about it.”

“What are you doing here?”

A long moment passed before Gus answered. She wasn’t sure he was going to respond at all, but then he smiled, and in that second he looked like the old Gus—cocky, irreverent, bad.

“The same thing all ex-cons do, Lilah,” he said in a silky voice intended to travel no farther than her ears. He took three lazy steps toward her, and the glint in his eyes was positively sinful. “I’m returning to the scene of my crime.”

“What crime would that be?” Lilah said, her heart beating against her chest as she strove to appear calmer than she felt. “I thought your crime was drag racing along Main Street.”

“You mean when I crashed my car into Old Man Hertzog’s grocery?” Gus leaned indolently against the doorframe. He crossed his arms, as relaxed as if they chatted about old times every night around midnight. “Not the crime to which I refer,” he said, a corner of his mouth hooking into a half smile. “I’m talking about the crime that happened a couple years earlier than that. The crime of falling for the sheriff’s niece.”

“It’s almost midnight,” she protested, mindful of Sara and Bree asleep—she hoped—upstairs. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I was never supposed to be here. Didn’t bother you before.”

“Seems like stating the obvious to say we’ve both changed since then.” She tugged at the hem of her tank top, ineffectively trying to make it stretch past the short tap pants she slept in during the summer. “What do you want?”

In lieu of answering, he poked his head over hers and looked around the kitchen. “Invite me in, Lilah. Do you know I’ve never seen the inside of this house before?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why? Afraid I won’t like the decor?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to come in this late,” she clarified tightly. “My sister…”

The gray eyes she used to get lost in so easily narrowed and turned cold. “Never liked me,” he finished for her. The relaxed smile around his lips tensed—not much, but enough for her to notice. “I have my own shower at home now, and my clothes are almost always clean. I don’t think I’ll offend anyone.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it!” Her face felt hot, but the bare wood of Sara’s kitchen floor sent a chill through her bones.

There was no point in contending that she’d never been offended by him, not by his clothes or his family or by any of the other things that had shamed him in his youth. There was no point, because it wasn’t true.

The first time she’d seen Gus, she’d been curious and a little scared. At the age of ten, she’d moved with her sisters from Seattle, Washington, to Kalamoose, North Dakota. The girls’ parents had died in a plane crash on their way home from a second honeymoon. Up to that time, the Owens sisters had lived a sheltered, gentle life. Raised by parents who had loved each other and adored their children, Lilah and her sisters had had no reason to expect anything but the joy to which they were accustomed. Lilah wasn’t sure about Nettie or Sara, but the accident that took her parents’ lives had changed something in her, something deep and crucial.

She wasn’t sure she could articulate the change even now, as an adult; she certainly hadn’t been able to do it as a child. All she knew was that her parents had left full of happiness, that they’d expected the best from life and had suffered the worst; they’d been torn from their kids, and at some point before they’d died there must have been a moment, a cruel and heartaching moment, when together they’d known, they’d never see their girls again.