666 Park Avenue (16 page)
Authors: Gabriella Pierce
J
ane wrapped her coat tightly around her body as she
pushed through the hospital’s large, wheelchair-accessible revolving doors to the street, almost walking directly into the side of a screamingly red Porsche parked in the center of the ambulance lane. The passenger window was rolled down, and Malcolm was clearly visible in the driver’s seat. “Please get in,” he begged, his voice hoarse.
She backed up determinedly and set a new course for the sidewalk. “Get away from me,” she ordered, not bothering to turn around. She felt her shoulders set tensely in her sleeveless dress, and wondered if he could tell she was afraid.
“Jane.”
His desperate, pleading tone stopped her short, and she turned to face him before her mind fully registered what she was doing. His dark eyes were wide and wild, and his jaw was clenched so firmly that she could see the muscles standing out under his skin. In spite of his obvious ability to deceive her—or perhaps because she was so familiar with every facial expression that accompanied his lies—she instinctively recognized this face as a genuine one. Her body responded to it with absolute certainty before her mind could go through all of the necessary calculations to make a decision. She opened the passenger door and slid onto the creamy white leather of the seat, for no other reason than that she was exhausted and didn’t know where else to go. Malcolm, not giving her a chance to change her mind, threw the car into gear. They left the hospital far behind in a matter of seconds.
The flat brick and concrete façades of buildings flew by them in a blur until they reached the first red light. The stillness inside the car while they waited for the light to change was painfully awkward, and Malcolm proceeded more slowly from then on, taking advantage of the timed lights on Lexington Avenue so they didn’t have to stop again.
“Where are you taking me?”
At the sound of her voice, Malcolm jerked the car onto a narrow side street and cut the engine. When he twisted to face her, his dark eyes were intense. “You didn’t let me finish back in the park.” His voice was almost a growl. “Jane, I’m in love with you.”
She rolled her eyes. She’d fallen for that ploy once, but it was kind of lame to try it again. “Malcolm, I’m exhausted. Did you actually have anything to tell me, or are you just stalling for the hell of it?”
She had to give him points for committing to his line; he didn’t even blink at her frosty tone. If anything, the lines of his face became even more sincere. “I know I’m just an asshole who lied to you now, but I need to fix this. I mean it, Jane. I am desperately in love with you, and I can’t let anything happen to you.”
“So you’re delaying my timely escape?” she asked incredulously.
“Jane, you can’t just run off with the clothes on your back and no plan.” He shook his head. A golden curl landed on his forehead, and he flicked at it in a frustrated way. “She’ll catch you, and she’ll know you’re on to her, and I really don’t want to think about what she’ll do then.”
He had a point. She made a quick tally of the items in her little vintage beaded clutch: Givenchy Maharani Rose lipstick, three safety pins, a metal-free hair elastic, a $20 bill, and her MetroCard. She didn’t even have an ID, since she had dismissed her passport as “too bulky.”
Genius move.
“I’m listening,” she told Malcolm stiffly, trying to sound as unconvinced as she could, in spite of the huge amount of sense he was starting to make.
“Stay,” he said simply, and she frowned. “Stay, and act like nothing’s changed.”
“But things
have
changed,” she pointed out, feeling some of her earlier anger beginning to bubble back up. How could he think that she could just let the night’s revelations go? There was only one person who would be served by that, and it wasn’t her. Jane narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “And your solution is to go along with Lynne’s bizarre plan, except with her victim’s consent this time? Your thinking is that I should just give up and do exactly what she wants? How convenient. Why shouldn’t I believe that this isn’t just some last-ditch con you and your mother cooked up between Central Park and here?”
He seemed to be considering her question for a moment. “Have you ever heard my thoughts?” he asked after a long pause. “Because you could try reading my mind.”
Jane shook her head truthfully. “I’ve never gotten a thing from you.”
Malcolm looked thoughtful. “Too bad, but I’m not surprised. Magic is its own security. You won’t be able to read actual witches at all, and it seems that I’ve got enough magic in my blood to make it pretty tough. It would take a lot of power and control, and you’re still new.”
Jane thought of the soothing mental silence of the Dorans’ home.
One more thing about magic I didn’t know.
She cursed herself for wasting the past month enjoying the quiet and ignoring her inheritance. Even if she hadn’t been able to break through her prospective in-laws’ mental barriers, she might have at least learned enough to be suspicious of them. “So I guess your mother can read your thoughts?”
“Why do you think I’ve stayed away so much? Mom started seeing you in my mind a lot more than she thought was healthy. You’re a pretty memorable-looking woman, you know. Especially tonight,” he added with a pointed look at her cocktail dress. She kicked herself mentally for registering his compliment with a blush. Now that they were in a tiny, enclosed space together, it was difficult to keep up her icy reserve. He might be a sociopathic liar, but he was also Malcolm.
“She can’t get into your head,” he continued, “which she hates, by the way. But given what she’s seen in mine . . .” His face hardened and he gripped the steering wheel fiercely, and Jane wondered just what sort of things Lynne had been privy too. “Which is why I need to leave. Tonight.”
Her first impulse was to scream at him. To yell and sob about his betrayal of her at every level, to ask how he could dump all this on her and then just run away. But her sense of danger trumped her fury: no good could come of Malcolm being around his mother. A cab flew past them on the otherwise empty street.
“Where are you going?” Her own voice was so calm and rational that she didn’t immediately recognize it.
“It’s better that you don’t know that.”
“How long?”
“Awhile. I need to plan, to move money, book flights, get forgeries, buy real estate. To get everything ready so that when I get you out of here, it’s to a life that’s worth having.”
“How much time?” she asked again.
“I just want to keep you safe, and I need time to make that happen.”
His voice was so intense that she suspended her disbelief for long enough to avoid a cutting response. She didn’t have a plan that was better than his, and she certainly didn’t have his resources. Besides, her instincts—her damned, faulty instincts—were telling her to trust him.
“We have a perfect excuse to leave New York in just over a month. Together, and with no one asking any questions, or expecting to hear from us for weeks.”
“The honeymoon,” Jane breathed. They were supposed to be going to Belize. “You want to go through with the wedding?”
In the faint light from the street, she couldn’t see if he was blushing, but the slightly strangled note in his voice made her think that it was likely. “I love you, Jane,” he repeated, more awkwardly this time. “Enough to leave you after we escape if you can’t bear to be around me. But I can’t lie to you—not anymore. I want to be with you for the rest of my life, no matter where that life ends up being.” Something glinted between them, and she realized that it was her engagement ring. “Losing you, even for just a couple of hours tonight, was torture.”
She took the ring from him, turning it curiously between her fingers. She knew intellectually that it was the same ring she’d thrown at him in the park, but she found herself looking for subtle changes—a flaw here, a nick there.
It hasn’t changed,
she reminded herself, tracing the arc of the band.
I have—and so has our relationship.
This time around, she and Malcolm would finally have a true partnership: they were in this together, united against his mother. And she certainly couldn’t fight Lynne without him.
She met his dark eyes and slid on the ring, feeling the familiar click of it against the plain silver band on her next finger. “I can’t make any promises, but we can try.”
Malcolm nodded and reached for the Porsche’s keys. His fingers trembled.
Impulsively, she reached out and took the keys. “Wait,” she insisted. All of a sudden, she couldn’t bear to let him leave like that, so cold and formal.
We have to start over now,
she thought as she unbuckled her seat belt.
We have to make new promises. We have no one but each other, and we need to have each other completely.
She slid her right leg over the gearshift and across his body, following it sinuously until she was straddling Malcolm. The shock was evident on his face, but so was the relief—and desire. She kissed him deeply, savoring the familiar hot-champagne taste of his mouth, and fumbled blindly for a few moments until her right hand found the switch that laid his seat out horizontally. “Give me a real good-bye,” she whispered, feeling the shock of their contact running under her skin like an electrical current. It felt like the hum of magic in her blood, and she felt it harden her nipples even as it spread lower, bringing warmth and wetness between her legs before Malcolm had even had a chance to move. She shifted her hips against him and smiled hungrily as she felt his erection through his tuxedo pants: he was obviously more than ready to do as she asked.
He slid his warm hands underneath the skirt of her cocktail dress. The magic was burning under her skin now, drawing her toward Malcolm like a million tiny magnets. Their pull only relaxed when he pushed into her, and they were as close as was physically possible. She rocked back and forth on top of him, enjoying her thrumming power, until his fingers dug hard into her hips, and they came together while sparks from the overhead streetlamps showered ecstatically around the car.
It was a good-bye and a new beginning, all in one.
“
. . . substitute in
peonies
, as if that would be remotely
acceptable.” Lynne dropped her fork onto the porcelain plate for emphasis, and reached for her delicate teacup. The kitchen smelled of eggs, muffins, and turkey bacon, with just the slightest soupçon of black truffle. Sofia wiped down the marble counter and placed another kettle of water on the stove.
Lynne, who oddly (and unfortunately) seemed to like the kitchen as much as Jane did, had been rambling on about wedding plans for nearly twenty minutes without pausing. Jane widened her eyes into what she hoped would be an appropriately shocked expression, but she was only barely following the saga of Lynne’s many wedding-related frustrations.
Jane stifled a yawn and gladly accepted a steaming mug of imported Colombian coffee from Sofia before the maid scuttled out of the kitchen. Last night, heavy feet—Charles’s?—had shuffled back and forth in front of Jane’s door. She’d tossed and turned, trying to decide if it would be too paranoid to move some furniture to block it. And, if not, which of the heavy wooden antiques in the room she could even budge. Malcolm probably could have slid the huge mahogany bookcase across the doorframe, but he had gone straight to JFK after dropping her off at the forbidding stone manse. She had tried to keep reminding herself that she was safer with him away from the house, but as she lay alone in their canopied bed, it sure hadn’t felt that way.
“. . . level of incompetence in this city is astounding . . .”
To hear Lynne rambling on about corsages as if she weren’t a powerful and bloodthirsty witch was absolutely surreal. The fact that this woman, in her prim, high-necked lace blouse and plum pencil skirt, was a witch at all was surreal. Jane blinked, trying to find any trace of the villainess who had brutally attacked Maeve, but as far as she could tell, the “annoyed socialite” version of Lynne wasn’t actually a disguise at all: the two parts of her identity fit together seamlessly.
Jane couldn’t help but be the tiniest bit envious despite herself. She’d felt split in two from the moment she had put Gran’s ring on her finger and couldn’t imagine ever feeling whole again.
“. . . just swimming in this tacky perfume like some kind of barmaid—can you imagine?”
Jane had lost the thread and settled for a combined head-shake and eye-roll, which worked for an impressive number of Lynne’s tirades.
“Naturally Marie-Annick will find someone to replace her, but I simply cannot believe the level of unprofessionalism from a company that’s supposed to be so highly . . .”
Marie-Annick . . . Marie-Annick . . .
It came to her in a flash: Marie-Annick was the music director for the Brick Presbyterian Church, where they’d be holding the ceremony. And just like that, the detached fog lifted from Jane’s mind and her fingers clenched into fists. The morning after steering a two-ton taxi into a one-hundred-pound girl, Lynne was sipping ginger tea and bitching about one of the ceremony musicians’ perfume.
Jane wanted to dump the scalding contents of the rattling kettle on Lynne, but considering the fact that the older woman could literally kill her with the blink of an eye, she forced a submissive smile onto her face. To keep her hands occupied, she reached for a bagel half.
“Jane Boyle, what do you think you’re doing?” Lynne’s tirade ended in a shout, and she knocked the bagel out of Jane’s hands.
Jane’s heart started pounding and she nearly jumped out of her chair in shock.
This is it,
she thought wildly, looking for something, anything, she might be able to use to defend herself. Her eyes landed on a butter knife and she gripped it rigidly in her left hand.
But Lynne was oblivious to Jane’s sudden battle-readiness, busily digging into the bagel half with a teaspoon. When there was nothing left but an empty crust, she handed it back to Jane with a bright smile. “It’s a neat little trick, if you have trouble controlling what you eat,” she said, her strange, dark eyes examining Jane’s waist. “Our last dress fitting is less than a month away, dear!”
Officially the worst prospective mother-in-law ever,
Jane decided, using her would-be weapon to spread fat-free cream cheese on her bagel shell. “Thanks,” she mumbled, trying to not glare too obviously at the unappetizing result.
“You weren’t raised in New York,” Lynne declared, her voice back to its snake-charmer purr, “so I know it’s hard for you to understand. But this wedding is extremely important, right down to the commas in the invitation. We have a position in this city and every move we make is scrutinized and judged and dragged through the press in case anyone important missed the live version. Our every move must be calculated, precise. We cannot afford the slightest mistake.”
Jane shuddered in spite of herself. This woman was unbelievable: she was willing to commit murder in order to procure a magical heir, yet she was worried about the pomp and circumstance that went along with being one of the city’s preeminent families. The amazing thing was, Lynne could have instructed Malcolm to elope with Jane in France and get her pregnant without ever raising her suspicions. But her desire to throw the wedding of the century and to show everyone in Manhattan that her son was respectably married before impregnating his wife had led to the very thing Lynne had wanted so desperately to avoid: Jane catching wind of her plan.
“You seem distracted,” Lynne observed as she sliced her egg whites into perfectly even rectangles. “I hope you’re not too upset about Malcolm leaving again. I can’t imagine what could possibly be considered ‘urgent’ in the art-dealing world.”
Phrasing aside, it was clearly a question—and perhaps even a test. Malcolm had sent an e-mail to the entire family from the airport, claiming that urgent business had called him away but assuring them that he’d be back in time for the wedding.
Chewing her bagel slowly, Jane thought through every angle before she answered. In Lynne’s perfect world, Malcolm would be uninterested in Jane, but Jane would be blindingly, head-over-heels in love with Malcolm. So smitten and clueless, in fact, that she wouldn’t bat an eye at his sudden departure just one month before their happy day. Her toes curled at how well she’d unwittingly conformed to that insipid role for the past month.
“I’m not worried at all,” she answered, forcing a bright note into her voice. “I love that he takes his work so seriously.” To her own ears, she sounded positively moronic, but Lynne beamed approvingly.
Then her peach mouth rearranged itself into a stern expression, and she leaned forward a little. Jane’s impulse was to lean away, but she swallowed her revulsion and stayed put. “Did he happen to mention to you where he was going?”
Jane shivered in spite of herself. She felt like a mouse facing a snake at feeding time, but Malcolm had assured her that her mind was like a locked vault to Lynne, so she met Lynne’s eyes and plastered on her most vapid smile. “Um, Spain I think?” she lied.
“Ugh. I hate Spain.” Lynne sniffed. “It’s so hot in the summer, and that rioja stuff could strip paint.”
Jane, who loved rioja second only to French wines, resisted the urge to point out that it was still January. Instead, she took an aggressive bite of her unsatisfying bagel shell while Lynne sipped her tea. The older woman’s glance fell on a glossy, gold-embossed folder in the wedding-planning stack and she fluidly snapped back into gear. “Our head-count has gone up again, so I’ll have to fax the caterer. But the bakery didn’t have a fax, as I recall”—she flipped through the folder in frustration—“so perhaps you could call.”
The bakery. A pair of wide-set amber eyes swam in front of Jane.
Diana. Dee, who thought magic was genetic.
Not as certain a source of help as Harris would have been, but a much, much safer one, given that Lynne had no clue who Dee was. “I was planning on shopping in SoHo anyway,” she improvised. “I’ll just stop by.”
Sofia bustled into the kitchen to check on the boiling water, then quietly left again.
“Fine.” Lynne passed Jane the folder and cleared her throat significantly. “Now, are you sure we need to invite that redheaded friend of yours to the wedding? If she gets drunk enough to lunge into traffic on a regular weeknight, just imagine the scene she would make at the wedding!”
The words slammed into Jane with the force of that speeding taxi. She crushed the remnants of her bagel crust in her fist. “She wasn’t drunk,” Jane hissed, seething.
“I’m sorry, dear, but I saw the whole thing,” Lynne replied mildly. “Now I’m not saying what happened wasn’t horrible, but really. New York is a dangerous place—she should be more careful.”
Rage and electricity spiked hotly through Jane’s limbs and the kettle let out a low whine that rose quickly toward a shriek. For a delicious moment, Jane fantasized about having enough power to lift the copper vessel from the stove and bash it into Lynne’s smug smile. This bitch so needed to be taken down. But then Sofia rushed in, and Jane was brought back to her senses.
Someday Lynne will get hers, but right now I have to keep my head.
“You know what? You’re right. Disinvite her—and the brother,” Jane said briskly, making a snap decision. “We need to make sure that everything goes smoothly.”
Lynne beamed, and Jane tried hard not to grind her teeth together. She hated to even pretend to be disloyal, but the only way to keep the Montagues safe was to make Lynne think they weren’t a threat.
The decision made, she shoved her chair back and grabbed the folder, exiting the kitchen to the impossibly domestic noise of Sofia pouring another cup of tea for Lynne.
