Father Fever

Lex turned to Athena in surprise. “She did it! I didn’t think she’d do it!”

“Of course she did it. She always comes through for us. She’s just not as foolish as we are. Look!”

Athena turned her sister toward the kitchen from which a Musketeer emerged with a champagne glass in each hand. Without prompting, Lex placed herself in his path. “Hello!” she said. “Is one of those for me?”

The Musketeer handed her the glass and gave her his full attention as she tucked her hand in his arm and began to chatter as they walked toward the sofa.

Athena wandered through the dining room, then the kitchen, in search of the third Musketeer. Her heart was pounding in her chest. Though she’d denied it to Gusty, this scheme was chancey, but since the direct approach wouldn’t work, she couldn’t think of any other way to find out who David Hartford was, why Sadie had left him her home, and whether or not he’d had anything to do with her death.

DAVID TOOK ANOTHER antihistamine, knowing it would do nothing to combat the exhaustion he felt. After being up half the night getting ready for the party, a pill that would make him even drowsier was the last thing he needed. But he’d been sneezing nonstop since before the party started half an hour ago, and he was afraid he was besmirching the heroic image of the literary Musketeer.

He replaced his itchy wig, adjusted his beard and mustache and put on the mask. Then, with a flourish to put himself back in character, donned his hat.

He was halfway down the stairs when he spotted her.

From his vantage point some distance above her, all he could see was red hair trapped in some kind of beaded net, the tip of a pert little nose, and the soft, beautiful swell of breasts rising out of the top of her dress. The breath caught in his throat and his heart lurched. For a moment he couldn’t move. All he could do was stare down on her and take in the exquisite perfection of the view.

Then she turned as though she sensed his presence and caught his eye.

Not that he could see hers, or she his—not behind the masks. But there was something in the way she turned to look up at him, something in the small smile that curved her lips that told him she’d been waiting for him.

Probably not deliberately, but now that she’d seen him, she wanted to know him. Just as he wanted to know her.

He walked down the stairs and around the railing to where she stood. He removed his hat, again with a flourish, and gave her the bow he’d seen in movies.

“Mademoiselle,” he said. “D’Artagnan at your service.”

She smiled teasingly. “Technically, D’Artagnan wasn’t one of the ‘three’ Musketeers.”

He made a tsking sound. “But we’re not being technical tonight, we’re being fanciful.”

“My apologies, monsieur.” She curtsied, arms gracefully held out. “I am…Constance.”

Well. D’Artagnan’s love. She was willing to play his game.

And the rest of her—what he could see of her—was just as beautiful as his aerial view had been.

Her face was oval shaped, her lips like a small heart above a pointed little chin. She wore a black ribbon with a cameo on a slender neck fringed with fiery red tendrils of hair that had escaped the beaded headpiece.

He peered into her mask. “Blue or green eyes?” he asked. “Ah. Blue. Dark blue. But no freckles with that hair?”

She laughed lightly. He loved the sound of it.

“No, mercifully,” she replied. “Though there are a few on my back.”

“You must show me,” he teased.

At which point she turned and obligingly lowered her head, revealing slender shoulders dusted with little honey-colored dots.

It was all he could do to stop himself from lowering his lips to a small scar he saw there. He’d been celibate a long time, but he hadn’t realized it had been this long.

“Are you hungry, Constance?” he asked briskly.

He saw her blink once. “Famished,” she replied.

“Then come with me.” He tucked her arm into his and walked her toward the buffet table in the dining room. He handed her a plate.

The spread was impressive. There were large succulent prawns on ice, fancy meat and pastry roll-ups, several fruit salads, vegetable sticks and luscious chocolates.

While she pondered the table, he went into the kitchen to snatch two glasses and open a bottle of champagne. He returned to find her plate holding a very modest amount of shrimp and raw vegetables.

He led the way back to the stairs, walked halfway up, then settled them comfortably on a carpeted stair, letting his legs stretch down to make room for hers.

“Tell me, Constance,” he said, placing the glass on the stair and pouring champagne, “Are you a member of the historical society?”

She bit a shrimp in half, then shook her head as she chewed. “No. But I’m glad I happened to be here for the party.”

“You don’t live in Dancer’s Beach?”

“I’m…visiting.”

“Family?”

“Friends.”

“Friends are important,” he said. “I value mine.”

She nodded. “The other two Musketeers?”

He laughed. “You noticed. I guess the costumes are corny, but we saw them and sort of related, I guess.”

“To the fight against despotic evil?”

“Nothing so noble,” he denied candidly. “To the camaraderie, the tankards of ale, the wenching.”

She tsked. “Wenching isn’t healthy.”

“Yeah, well, like a lot of men, I talk more than I do.”

He drank his champagne to cover his close observation of her as she admired the elegantly carved stairway. He was trying to imagine her without the mask.

“I don’t recall that the Musketeers had such elegant surroundings,” she said.

“Mmm.” He refilled her glass, then his own. “When we’re not Musketeering, we need someplace comfortable to be.”

“But this is so big.”

“I know. It needs children, parties.”

“Do you have them?”

He smiled. “The children? No. No wife yet, either, but I’m looking.”

“Ah.” She took another bite of prawn. “The prospective Mrs. D’Artagnan might be here tonight.” She pointed with her glass toward a very attractive woman dressed as Cleopatra. “The Queen of Egypt is very fetching.”

He glanced at the woman, agreed with a nod, then turned back to his plate. “But there are all those palace intrigues and I understand she has something going with the Emperor of Rome. Are you single?”

She nodded absently, then asked, “Do you know anything about the history of this wonderful house?”

“Just a little,” he replied. He didn’t want to talk about the house, he wanted to talk about her. And him. “It was built before the turn of the century by someone who married into the Buckley family that founded Dancer’s Beach.”

“It’s nice to have a house with history. Are you the owner?”

“I’ve just recently moved in with a couple of friends.” All he could think about was how beautiful this woman was, even with half her face covered. “We’re not very settled yet, but we’re working on it.”

“What do you do, Mr…?”

“D’Artagnan,” he replied, liking the mystery. He didn’t have to share his past, his fears, his regrets. “I’m a defender of France, a—”

She put a hand on his arm to stop him and he felt the small, sizzling jolt of it go right to his heart.

“No,” she said seriously. “What do you really do?”

There was a subtle urgency in her voice that alerted him to something, he wasn’t sure what.

But she smiled sweetly at him, and he decided it was the sudden rise in volume of the room’s noise level. Too many years as a secret agent had left him with a certain paranoia that was difficult to shake.

The musicians had arrived and set up in the conservatory off the living room. Their tuning up rivaled the laughter and conversation of the hundred or so guests moving through the first floor.

A mellow mood settled over him and suddenly the last place he wanted to be with this woman was wedged on a stair in a room grown so loud that conversation was becoming difficult.

“Will you come upstairs with me?” he asked.

It wasn’t until he saw the flash in her eyes, even behind the mask, that he realized how that abrupt question must have sounded.

“No, no, no,” he assured her quickly. “I meant upstairs to the sitting room. I can’t even hear myself think down here.”

She continued to look suspicious.

Oh, no, he thought. She’d been so warm and interested in what he had to say a moment ago. That careless question couldn’t mean the end of what had seemed so promising.

He remembered her interest in the house—though he was suddenly having a little difficulty focusing on the details that might interest her—and said quickly, “And I have more to tell you.”

“About what?” she asked a little stiffly.

“About the house. About…why I’m here.”

She sat still for one more moment, then she picked up her plate and stood. “All right,” she said. “I’d love to hear more.”

AT LAST! Athena thought. The prospect of information she could use!

She preceded him up the stairs, then waited at the top for him to take the lead. He’d left the little reading alcove near the head of the stairs, she noticed, a half-moon-shaped spot where the railing looped out to look down on the floor below.

Her aunt’s cane-seated rocker was gone, but in its place was a high-back leather chair and matching ottoman. The stained glass lamp depicting birds in flight, which she’d always admired as a child and had looked forward to sitting beside one day, stood nearby.

But D’Artagnan was moving along the corridor to a room at the far end. They passed several bedrooms on the way, but she knew that the sitting room he was heading for connected to the master bedroom.

His step was unsteady, she saw, as he changed course ever so slightly to avoid collision with the doorway. She wondered what accounted for that. He’d had several glasses of champagne while they were sitting on the stairs, but the glasses were small. He hadn’t eaten, though, and champagne did have more of a kick than other types of alcohol.

There was a green futon where the gold brocade settee had been. Her aunt used to read them bedtime stories in this room when she and her sisters were very small, then they would all scamper off to their own bedrooms.

She put her plate on a low bamboo table and sat down.

He refilled their glasses, sat beside her on the futon, then raised his glass to hers. “To new discoveries,” he said.

“Discoveries?” she questioned.

He clicked the rim of his glass to hers. “You. I’ve been looking for you.”

She felt a moment’s trepidation. Did he know her plan? He couldn’t possibly. “You have? Why?”

He put a hand to the beaded headpiece that covered her hair and touched gently. “Because I need you,” he whispered, suddenly urgent, intense. “Where…have you been?”

There was sincerity in what she could see of his eyes. Tenderness in his touch. Response rose in her, instinctive and as urgent as he sounded.

She put her glass down and reminded herself sharply of why she was here. And that this could be the man who’d coerced her aunt out of her home, possibly even caused her death. At the very least, he was one of Hartford’s friends. She had to know more.

She took a prawn from her plate and put it to his lips. “I think you need something to eat,” she said. “Come on. Take a bite.”

He nipped the edge of the prawn with his teeth and drew it into his mouth. “I don’t remember these being this good,” he said, “until you touched them.”

“You were going to tell me about the house.” She drank from her glass to encourage him to drink his, on the principle of in vino veritas.

He obliged her. “It’s a place,” he said, his voice very quiet as he concentrated on her, “for lots of children. For visiting grandparents. For friends to sleep over and for club meetings and loud Christmas parties.”

For a moment she couldn’t reply. She’d always thought that, too, but as long as she’d been coming here, it had housed only Aunt Sadie and a cook-housekeeper. She’d looked forward to herself and her sisters and their families giving it the bursting-at-the-seams hilarity it deserved.

But did he own it? Was he Hartford? “Then, it’s your home?” she asked.

He didn’t seem to have heard her.

“I never had that,” he went on. He took her glass from her and put it with his on the table. He sloshed a little and she reached forward instinctively to mop up the liquid with a napkin, but he stopped her, catching her hand in his and leaning her back into his other arm.

“My house was empty. Of everything. Three times bigger than this but…” He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. “No laughter. No music. No voices in the dark.”

Athena was struck by that description. She could hear the silence he described. And for one surprisingly clear moment, could imagine a small boy alone in a big, dark house, surrounded by that silence.

She could feel his loneliness.

He tugged at her headpiece. “Can we take this off?” he asked.

She forced her mind away from him and back to what she was trying to do here. She pulled off the headpiece and let her hair fall.

“It’s…beautiful,” he said softly, pulling her into his arms and rubbing his cheek against it. She was beginning to lose her focus. She didn’t want to know that he’d had an empty, lonely childhood. She didn’t want to feel sympathy for this man.

She wanted to know if he owned the house, and if so, how he’d gotten it and whether or not he’d had anything to do with the plane crash that killed Sadie.

“D’Artagnan!” she said sharply, for want of his real name.

“Here, Constance,” he said, falling onto his back and bringing her with him. “I’m yours.” He held her face in both his hands and kissed her.

He smelled of toothpaste and champagne and an herbal aftershave. He was ardent and tender at the same time, and even in this slightly tipsy state, he was completely competent and masterful.

Then, while she was distracted by her own loss of equilibrium even though she was the sober one, he slipped up her mask and smiled as he looked into her face.

“I knew it,” he whispered. “Beautiful. Beautiful.” Then he winced, closed his eyes and muttered a quiet expletive.

She pushed up against his shoulders. “What?” she asked in concern.

He ran a hand over his face. “Allergy…medication,” he said, shaking his head as though trying to clear it. “Champagne. Bad.” He expelled a sigh as he held on to her with one hand, trying to sit up.

She tried to help by pulling on his arm but didn’t have sufficient leverage. He caught a fistful of her slip, exposed by her awkward position, and tried to draw himself up with it, but the combination of medication and alcohol was too strong and he fell backward, ripping off a large piece of silk.

Athena punched his shoulder once. “Wake up!” she demanded. “I want to talk to you!”

His eyes opened languidly and he caught her fist and kissed it. Then he was out like a light.

She could have wept with frustration.

She reached for his mask, wanting at least to know what he looked like, sure that would help her somehow. But she heard voices on the other side of the door. And it wasn’t locked.

She looked at the state of her costume, her host and the fact that she wasn’t even invited to this party, and decided that retreat was the wisest course of action.

At a knock on the door and a questioning “Hello?” she bolted, heading for the French doors that she knew led out to a veranda with stairs down to the backyard. Thanks to the rainy February night, the party would not have spilled outside.

She heard the sitting room door open when she was halfway down the stairs and ran through the darkness without looking back. She knew the way. She’d run down this road where she’d left the car a hundred times as a child.

But never with a man’s kisses stinging her lips, and a piece of her slip still caught in his hand.

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