Passion in Secret

Just as well. Sally needed something strong to bring the color back to her face. Come to that, he could use a stiff belt himself.

Depositing her on the couch, he covered her with a mo-hair lap rug draped over one of the chairs. She looked very young in repose; very vulnerable. Much the way she’d looked when they’d started dating during her high school sophomore year. He’d been a senior at the time, and so crazy in love with her that he hadn’t been able to think straight.

Even as he watched, she stirred and, opening her eyes, regarded him with dazed suspicion. “What are you doing?”

“Looking at you,” he said, using the back of the sofa for support and wondering how she’d respond if he told her she had the longest damned eyelashes he’d ever seen, and a mouth so delectable that he knew an indecent urge to lean down and kiss it.

Get a grip, Harrington! You’ve been a widower less than a week, and should be too swamped with memories of your wife to notice the way another woman’s put together—even if the woman in question does happen to have been your first love.

Her glance shied away from him and darted around the room. “How did I wind up in here?”

“I carried you in, after you fainted.”

“I fainted?” She covered her eyes with the back of one hand and groaned in horror. “In front of all those people?”

“It was the best thing you could have done,” he said, limping to the bureau and taking out a three-quarter-full bottle of Courvoisier cognac and two snifters. “You upstaged Colette beautifully. Without you to lambaste, she was left speechless.” He poured them each a healthy shot of the liquor and offered one to her. “This should put you back on your feet.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said doubtfully. “I haven’t eaten a thing today.”

“I wondered what made you pass out.”

“I haven’t had much of an appetite at all since…the accident.”

“Feel up to talking about that night?”

She sat up and pushed her hair away from her face. “I don’t know what else I can say that you haven’t already heard.”

Cautiously lowering himself into the nearest chair, he knocked back half the contents of his glass and, as the warmth of the brandy penetrated the outer limits of his pain, said, “You could try telling me what really happened, Sally.”

The shutters rolled down her face, cloaking her expression. “What makes you so sure there’s more to tell?”

“You and I were once close enough that we learned to read each other’s minds pretty well. I always knew when you were trying to hide something from me, and I haven’t forgotten the signs.”

She swirled her drink but did not, he noticed, taste it. Why was she being so cagey? Could it be that she was afraid the booze might loosen her tongue too much and she’d let something slip? “That was a long time ago, Jake. We were just kids. People grow up and change.”

“No, they don’t,” he said flatly. “They just become better at covering up. But although you might have fooled everyone else, including the police, you’ve never been able to fool me. There’s more to this whole business than anyone else but you knows, and I’m asking you, for old times’ sake, to tell me what it is.”

Just for a moment, she looked him straight in the eye and he thought she was going to come clean. But then the door opened and Fletcher appeared. “I expect you might need this, Jake,” he said, brandishing the cane. “And I wondered if Sally felt well enough for one of the chauffeurs to drive her home, before the cars fill up with other people.”

Masking his annoyance at the interruption, Jake said, “Can’t it wait another five minutes? We’re in the middle of something, Fletcher, if you don’t mind.”

“No, we’re not,” Sally said, throwing off the blanket and swinging her legs to the floor. “If you can spare a car, I’d be very grateful, Mr. Burton. I’m more than ready to leave.”

Frustrated, Jake watched as she tottered to her feet and wove her way to the door. Short of resorting to physical force, there was nothing he could do to detain her. This time.

But he’d see to it there was a next time. And when it happened, he’d make damn good and sure she didn’t escape him until he was satisfied he knew the precise circumstances which had finally freed him from the hell his marriage had become.

CHAPTER TWO

YOU’VE never been able to fool me, he’d said, but he couldn’t be more wrong. She’d fooled Jake about something a lot more momentous than the events leading up to Penelope’s untimely end. She was very good at keeping secrets, even those which had ripped her life apart, both literally and figuratively.

Guarding this latest would be easy, as long as she didn’t let him slip past her guard. And the only way to avoid that was to avoid him. Because, in her case, the old adage Out of sight, out of mind, had never applied to Jake Harrington. Just the opposite. No matter how many miles or years had separated them, he’d never faded from her memory. If anything, distance had lent him enchantment, and seeing him again had done nothing to change all that. The magic continued to hold.

He looked older, of course—didn’t they all?—but the added years sat well on him. The boy had become a man; the youthful good looks solidified into a tough masculine beauty. Broader across the shoulders, thicker through the chest, he cut an impressive figure, especially in his military uniform. A person had only to look at him to know he’d seen his share of trouble, of tragedy, and emerged stronger for it. It showed in his manner, in the authority of his bearing.

This was not a man to shy away from the truth or crumble in the face of adversity. And she supposed, thinking about it as she made her way along the crowded halls of Eastridge Academy on the following Monday morning, in that respect at least he wasn’t so very different from the-boy who’d stolen her heart, all those years ago, in this very same school. Even at eighteen, he’d possessed the kind of courage which was the true mark of a man.

Still, Sally couldn’t imagine telling him about Penelope. Male pride was a strange phenomenon. It was one thing for a man to climb behind the controls of a fighter jet and risk life and limb chasing down an anonymous enemy. And quite another to confront betrayal of the worst kind from the woman he’d married, especially if he discovered he was the last to know about it.

The senior secretary called out to her as she passed through the main office on her way to the staff lounge. “Morning, Sally. You just missed a phone call.”

“Oh? Any message.”

“No. Said he’d try to catch you later on.”

He? “Did he at least give a name?”

“No.” The secretary eyed her coyly. “But he had a voice to die for! Dark and gravelly, as though he needed a long drink of water which I’d have been happy to supply. Sound like anyone you know?”

Premonition settled unpleasantly in the pit of Sally’s stomach but she refused to give it credence. Plenty of men had dark, gravelly voices. That Jake could be numbered among them was pure coincidence. “Probably someone’s father calling to complain I give too much homework. If he happens to phone back, try to get a number where he can be reached. I’m going to be tied up with students all day.”

“Will do. Oh, and one more thing.” The secretary nodded at the closed door to her left. “Mr. Bailey wants to see you in his office before classes start.”

Oh, wonderful! A private session with the Academy principal who also happened to be her brother-in-law and definitely not one of her favorite people. The day was off to a roaring start!

“You asked to see me, Tom?”

Tom Bailey looked up from the letter he was reading, his brow furrowed with annoyance at the interruption of Very Important Administrative Business. “This isn’t a family gathering, Ms. Winslow. If you’re determined to ignore professional protocol, at least close the door before you open your mouth.”

“Good morning to you, too.” Without waiting to be invited, she took a seat across from him. “What’s on your mind, Mr. Bailey?”

“Margaret tells me you managed to get yourself invited to the reception at the Burtons’ on Saturday.”

“I prefer to say I was coerced—as much by your wife as anyone else.”

He leaned back in his fancy swivel chair and fixed her in his pale-eyed stare, the one he used to intimidate freshmen. “Regardless, let me remind you what I said when all this mess with Penelope Harrington started. Our school prides itself on its fine reputation and I won’t tolerate its being sullied by scandal. Bad enough you’ve been on staff less than a month before your name’s splashed all over the front pages of every newspaper within a fifty-mile radius, without any more shenanigans now that the fuss is finally beginning to die down. I did you a favor when I persuaded the Board of Governors to give you a position here, because—”

“Actually,” Sally cut in, “I’m the one who did you a favor, Tommy, by stepping in at very short notice when my predecessor took early maternity leave and left you short one art teacher.”

He turned a dull and dangerous shade of red. Subordinates did not interrupt the principal of the Academy and they particularly did not challenge the accuracy of his pronouncements. “You showed up in town unemployed!”

“I came home looking forward to a long-overdue vacation which I cut short because you were in a bind.” She glanced pointedly at the clock on the wall. “Is there anything else, or am I free to go and do what the Board hired me to do? I have a senior art history class starting in ten minutes.”

If it hadn’t been beneath his dignity, he’d have gnashed his perfectly flossed teeth. Instead he made do with a curt, “As long as we understand one another.”

“I’ve never had a problem understanding you, Tom,” she said, heading for the door. “My sister’s the one I can’t figure out. I’ve never been able to fathom why she married you.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. She’d been known as a wild child in her youth, but she liked to think she’d matured into a better person since—one for whom taking such cheap shots wasn’t her normal style. But “normal” had been in short supply practically from the minute she’d set foot in town again, beginning with the morning she and Penelope Burton Harrington had happened to run into one another in the Town Square.

“Sally!” Penelope had fairly screamed, rushing to embrace her as if a rift spanning nearly a decade had never crippled their friendship. “Oh, it’s wonderful to see you again! It’s been like living in a tomb around here lately, but now that you’re back, it’ll be just like old times, and we can kick some life into the place.”

The cruel irony of her words had come back to torment Sally during the long, sleepless nights since the accident. But thanks to Tom’s having hired her, at least her days were too busy to allow for much wallowing in useless guilt, which made her parting remark to him all the more unforgivable. To satisfy her own sense of fair play, the least she could do was seek him out later and apologize.

She had a full teaching load that day, though, plus a meeting at lunch with the nit-picking head of the Fine Arts department, and an after-school interview with a furious student who didn’t understand why copying an essay on Henri Matisse from the Internet was plagiarism and warranted a big fat F on his midterm report.

Somehow, the events of first thing slipped to the back of her mind and she forgot about Tom. She forgot, too, about that morning’s phone call from the man who hadn’t left a message.

But he didn’t forget about her. He came to her classroom just as she was stuffing her briefcase with the assignments she planned to mark that evening. By then it was after five o’clock and the building was pretty much deserted except for the cleaning staff. In fact, when she heard the door open, she was so sure it was the janitor, come to empty the waste bins and clean up the sinks, that she said, “I’ll be out of your way in just a second,” without bothering to look up from her task.

The door clicked closed which, in itself, should have alerted her to trouble. “No rush. I’ve got all the time in the world,” came the reply, and there it was: the dark, gravelly voice which had so captivated the school secretary earlier.

It didn’t captivate Sally. It sent shock waves skittering through her. The stack of papers in her hand flipped through her fingers and slithered over the floor. Flustered, she dropped to her knees and began gathering them together in an untidy bundle.

“I’d no idea teachers put in such long hours,” Jake said, his cane thudding softly over the floor as he came toward her. “Let me help you pick those up.”

“No, thank you!” Hearing the betraying edge of panic in her voice, she took a deep breath and continued more moderately, “I don’t need your help. In fact, you shouldn’t be here at all. If Tom Bailey finds out—”

“He won’t. His was the only car in the parking lot and he was leaving as I arrived. We’re quite alone, Sally. No one will disturb us.”

She was afraid of that! “Oh, really? What about the cleaning staff?”

“They’re busy in the gym and won’t get down to this end of the building for at least another hour.” His hand came down and covered hers as she scrabbled with the pages still slipping and sliding from her grasp. “You’re shaking. Are you going to faint again?”

“Certainly not!” she said, scooting away from him before he realized how easily his touch scrambled her brains and stirred up memories best left untouched. “I just don’t like people creeping up and taking me by surprise, that’s all.”

“I’m not ‘people,’ and I didn’t creep.” He tapped his bad leg. “It’s a bit beyond my capabilities, these days.”

“No, you’re the wounded hero come home to bury his wife, but if you insist on being seen with me at every turn, you’re going to lose the public outpouring of sympathy you’re currently enjoying, and become as much of a pariah as I have.”

“I’m not looking for sympathy, my lovely. I’m looking for information.”

My lovely…that’s what he’d called her in the days when they’d been in love; when they’d made love. And the sound of it, falling again from his lips after all this time, brought back such a shock of déjà vu that she trembled inside.

Late August, the summer she’d turned seventeen, just weeks before he started his junior year at university, two hundred miles away…wheeling gulls against a cloudless sky, the distant murmur of the incoming tide, the sun gilding her skin, and Jake sliding inside her, with the tall grass of the dunes whispering approval in the sea breeze. “I miss you so much when we’re apart,” he’d told her. “I’ll love you forever.”

But he hadn’t. Thirteen months later, she’d spent two months studying art in France. When she returned, she found out from Penelope that he’d been seeing a college coed while she’d been gone.

She’d been crushed, although she really shouldn’t have been. As her weeks abroad passed, there’d been signs enough that trouble was brewing. His phone calls had dwindled, become filled with long, awkward pauses. He wasn’t there to meet her as promised, when she came home again. He didn’t even make it back for Thanksgiving. And finally, when there was no avoiding her at Christmas, he’d shamelessly flaunted her replacement in her face.

“Jake Harrington’s a two-timing creep,” sweet sympathetic Penelope told her, “and you’re too smart to let such a worthless jerk break your heart. Forget him! There are better fish in the sea.”

But she hadn’t wanted anyone else. As for forgetting, it was a lot easier said than done for an eighteen-year-old who’d just discovered she was pregnant by the boy she adored and who’d passed her over for someone new.

The spilled assignments at last cradled in her arms, Sally struggled to her feet with as much grace as she could muster and crammed the papers into her briefcase. “We went over all this on Saturday. I’ve told you everything there is to know.”

“Okay.” He shrugged amiably. “Then I won’t ask you again.”

Elation flooded through her. “I’m glad you finally believe me.”

“Of course I do,” he said. “You’re not the kind of person who’d hold out on me about something this important, are you?”

Guilt and suspicion nibbled holes in her relief. “Then why did you come here to begin with?”

“Mostly to find out if you’ve forgiven me for landing you in such a mess an Saturday. If I’d known Colette was going to go after you like that—”

“You had no way of knowing she’d react so badly. Consider yourself forgiven.”

“A lot of women wouldn’t be so understanding,” he said diffidently. “But then, you never were like most women.”

Diffident? Jake Harrington?

She’d have laughed aloud at the idea, had it not been that the hair on the back of her neck vibrated with warning. He was up to something! She could almost hear the wheels spinning behind that guileless demeanor! “And?”

“Hmm?” Doing his best to look innocently virtuous, he traced a herringbone pattern over the floor with the tip of his cane.

“You said ‘mostly’—that you were here mostly to find out if I’d forgiven you. What’s the other reason?”

He tried to look sheepish. Would have blushed, if he’d had it in him to do such a thing. “Would you believe, nostalgia got the better of me? When I heard you were on staff here, I couldn’t stay away.” He leaned against one of the cabinets holding supplies and sent her a smile which plucked unmercifully at her heartstrings. “This is where we met, Sally. We fell in love here. I kissed you for the first time next to the lockers right outside this room. You had blue paint on the end of your nose.”

“I’m surprised you remember,” she said, warmth stealing through her and blasting her reservations into oblivion.

“I remember everything about that time. Nothing I’ve known since has ever compared to it.”

The warmth turned to melting heat. Against her better judgment, she found herself wanting to believe him. “You don’t have to say that. You shouldn’t say it.”

“Why not? Don’t I have as much right to tell the truth as you do?”

He sounded so sincere, she found herself wondering. Was he playing mind games with her? Trying to trip her up? Or was she seeing entrapment where none existed?

Deciding it was better to err on the side of caution and put an end to the meeting, she indicated the bulging briefcase and said, “I should get going. I’ve got a full evening’s work ahead.”

He eased himself away from the desk. “Me, too. I’m still sorting through Penelope’s stuff and deciding what to do with it, and the house. I don’t need all that space.”

Watching as he limped to the door, she knew an inexplicable regret that he accepted his dismissal so easily. So what if his smile left her insides fluttering? They weren’t teenagers anymore. First love didn’t survive an eight-year winter of neglect to bloom again at the first hint of spring.

Still, having him show up so unexpectedly had unsettled her almost as badly as seeing him at the funeral. He stirred up too many buried feelings.

His voice, the curve of his mouth, the latent passion in his direct blue gaze, made her hungry for things she shouldn’t want and certainly couldn’t have. So, rather than risk running into him again, she waited until his footsteps faded, and the clang of the outside door shutting behind him echoed down the hall, before she ventured out to retrieve her coat from the staff cloakroom.

The sky had been clear when she left for work that morning and she’d enjoyed the two-mile walk from the guest cottage at the end of her parents’ driveway and through the park to the school. Sometime since classes ended, though, the clouds had rolled in again and freezing rain begun to fall. The ramp beyond the Academy’s main entrance was treacherous with black ice.

Twice, she’d have lost her footing, had it not been for the iron railing running parallel to the path. But the real trouble started when she gained the glassy sidewalk and found it impossible to navigate in shoes not designed for such conditions.

Turning right, as she intended to do, was out of the question. Instead, with her briefcase rapping bruisingly against her leg, she lurched into the dirty snow piled next to the curb, three days earlier, by the road-clearing crews.

It was the last straw in a day which had started badly and gone steadily downhill ever since. Exasperated, she gave vent to a stream of unladylike curses which rang up and down the deserted street with satisfying gusto.

Except the street wasn’t quite as deserted as she’d thought. A low-slung black sports car, idling in the lee of a broad-trunked maple not ten feet away, cruised to a stop beside her, with the passenger window rolled down just far enough for Jake’s voice to float out. “Faculty members didn’t know words like that when I was a student here,” he announced affably. “Come to think of it, I’m not sure I knew them, either.”

“Are you stalking me?” she snapped, miserably conscious of the fact that she cut a ridiculous figure standing there, ankle-deep in snow.

“Not at all. I stopped to offer you a ride home.”

“No, thanks. I prefer to walk.”

“Oh,” he said. “Is that what you were doing when you came sailing into the gutter just now?”

“I temporarily lost my balance.”

“Temporarily?” He let out a muffled snort of laughter. “Dear Ms. Winslow, if you insist on wearing summer footwear in the kind of winter which Eastridge Bay is famous for, it’ll be anything but temporary. Stop being stubborn and get in the car before you break your neck. I’d come round and hold the door open for you, except I’m having enough problems of my own trying to get around in these conditions.”

She debated telling him what he could do with his offer, but her frozen feet won out over her pride. “Just as well you’re not inclined to play the gentleman,” she muttered, yanking open the door and climbing in to the blessed warmth of the car. “I might be tempted to knock your cane out from under you!”

“Now that,” he remarked, stepping gently on the gas and pulling smoothly out into the road, “is why some people—people who don’t know you as well as I used to—talk about you the way they do.”

“And how is that, exactly? I’m living in the guest cottage on my parents’ estate, by the way. You turn left on—”

“I remember how to get there, Sally,” he said. “I’ve driven you home often enough, in the past. And to answer your question, unflatteringly. They say you came back to town and brought a bagful of trouble with you. Are they right?”

“Why ask me? You’ll find listening to their version of the facts far more entertaining, I’m sure.”

“As a matter of interest, where have you been for the last several years?”

“At university on the West Coast, and after that, down in the Caribbean.”

He didn’t quite snicker in her face, but he might as well have. “Doing what?” he inquired, his voice shimmering with amusement.

“Well, not weaving sun hats from coconut palm fronds or singing in a mariachi band, if that’s what you’re thinking!”

“You have no idea what I’m thinking, Sally. None at all. And you haven’t answered my question. What kept you in the sunny Caribbean all this time?”

“The same thing that’s keeping me occupied here. Teaching, except the children down there were so under-privileged that working with them was pure pleasure.”

“Very commendable of you, I’m sure. How long did you stay?”

“Two years in Mexico, and two years on the island of St. Lucia after that.”

“Why that part of the world?”

“They needed teachers as badly as I needed to get away from here.”

“What?” His voice quivered with silent laughter. “You never yearned to settle down in picturesque Eastridge Bay? To follow in your sister’s footsteps and marry a fine, upstanding man of good family?”

Once upon a time I did, but you chose to put a wedding ring on Penelope’s finger, instead! “Not all women see marriage as the be-all and end-all of happiness. Some of us find satisfaction in a career.”