A Novel Seduction (35 page)

“She vuz on a call when I left the house. Still vurking things out, I think.”

Axel chewed his lip. If she was talking to Jill, he didn’t want to interrupt.

“Go to her,” Dr. Albrecht said. “You might be able to help.”

He looked at his watch. “I’ll give her a few more minutes.”

“Oh, dear!” Dr. Albrecht said, throwing her hands up suddenly. “We’ve forgotten the bar. Axel, can you open it back up?”

He turned to Duncan. “Would you be able to catch the first fifteen minutes or so? I want to grab a few shots of the moon. Do you mind?”

Duncan didn’t, and Axel returned to the tripod out in the yard.

The clouds had passed, and the moon was high enough to spill its silver light over the treetops and cast a layer of cool incandescence over the lawn and fields beyond. He thought of the assignment he was supposed to be on and felt a twinge of guilt. He wished he hadn’t promised Black he’d try to persuade Ellery, not because it hadn’t worked, but because it hadn’t been exactly honorable to be maneuvering behind her back. He should have remembered that, with Ellery, it was much more
fun to be maneuvering face-to-face, all cards on the table.

In the middle of reattaching the camera to the tripod, something in the distance caught his eye. It was Cairn-papple, aglow in the moonlight. His fingers slowed. He wondered what the countryside looked like from up there, with the gilded blanket of Scotland, spangled with lights, stretching out below him. God, what a shot that would be. He bet he could see for twenty miles in every direction on a night like this. He glanced at his watch. The mound was no more than a quarter mile away. If he hurried…

He unscrewed the camera, grabbed the tripod and walked quickly toward the mound.

While he navigated the shadowed path, his mind was sorting through the photographic prospects he might have at the top of the hill and considering the ideal aperture and shutter speed.

For an instant the world seemed to weave, and he nearly stumbled.

Odd, he thought, feeling suddenly dry-mouthed. The jet lag was finally catching up to him.

He ran up the long path leading from the visitors’ hut to the level ground that surrounded the much higher rise in the mound’s center. He could feel his blood begin to prickle, amazed at the vista across the Lowlands.

He climbed the steps to the top of the second mound two at a time and swung in a circle, taking in the sparkling lights that streaked across the undulating hills. He wished Ellery were there to see it, then remembered how oddly she’d acted when they’d come here earlier. The view
of fields in the afternoon light had been interesting, but low-lying clouds had obscured the prospect. Now the sky was as clear as glass, and the stars twinkled like fairy lights on an ink-black canvas.

There was a thickness in his chest when he thought of Ellery and Jill. Running into Jill again—and being able to partner with Ellery to help her—had made him remember what it was like to be a part of a family he had helped create.

He leaned down to set up the legs of the tripod and again felt another wave of dizziness. He reached for one of the legs to steady himself, but the effort seemed overwhelming. An instant later he was on his back, staring at the sky. The constellations morphed into pulsing neon creatures darting about like the view inside a kaleidoscope. He groaned, confused, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again he realized time had passed because he had kicked the tripod over, which struck him as oddly funny. He had a blurry, shifting idea in the back of his mind that this had something to do with his insulin shot and that he was in trouble.

Axel struggled to move, and the next thing he knew he could feel the cool earth under his knees and the view had changed from the sky to grass; but whatever it was he’d been trying to do, the effort was too much. He fell back to the ground and darkness overtook him.

Ellery’s fingers flew to the end of the sentence and clicked the period key decisively.

Beautiful.

The best times in a writer’s life were when passion combined with craft. That had just happened with Ellery. It was only a draft, not even a whole one, but she still felt the addictive rush of creation.

The best twenty minutes I’ve ever spent.

Then she remembered yesterday afternoon in the hotel room with Axel.

Okay, maybe the second best.
She reread the title: “Who’s on Top? Romance Readers Teach the Literary World a Lesson.”

Ha! She’d nailed it.

She clicked
SAVE
, and launched herself from the chair. She wanted to find Axel and tell him everything: about Jill, Black, Purdy and this. Oh, how he’d laugh.

The phone rang. This time it was hers. She didn’t recognize the number. “Hello?”

“I don’t appreciate you telling Purdy I’m a blowhard.”

Barry Steinberg. And he sounded like he’d been drinking. Jesus.

“Oh, really?” she said. “Well, I don’t appreciate you telling him I’d embarrass Lark & Ives.”

“I didn’t tell him that.”

“And I didn’t tell him you were a blowhard. Sometimes people can’t help the conclusions they draw.”

Barry snorted. “Nice little pick Axel threw for you back at the Rosemary, the prick.”

It had been, she thought. Even if she’d nearly rung his neck over it. She was so overcome with the memory of Axel’s Jemmie-like heroics, she didn’t quite catch what Steinberg said next.

“… hard-core for you.”

“What?”

“I
said,
you should know Axel Mackenzie’s probably a little hard-core for you. Certainly if you end up at Lark & Ives. They wouldn’t want their lily-white reputation besmirched by a publisher who’s screwing a smack freak.”

She felt like she’d been slapped. Even in his down-and-dirty days, Axel’s drugs of choice had been alcohol and pills. “Axel is not a smack freak. Jesus, Barry, do your research.”

He hooted. “So you don’t even know? Lemme tell you what: I walked into the men’s room last night and saw him sticking the needle in.”

“Barry, you’re an asshole. And adding alcohol only makes you a drunken one.”

She hung up, trembling. She carefully separated her fury at Steinberg from her uncertainty about Axel. What
he’d said had been stupid, just stupid. There was no way Axel could hide something like that from her. They’d been together almost nonstop for the last four days. She scanned her memory for anything suspicious. Yes, there were the regular trips to the men’s room, but for God’s sake, even she knew that wasn’t really evidence.

She took a hesitant step. It was as if she had lost the power to move forward or back. Without an answer, she was stuck.

She wondered how much she’d hate herself for what she was thinking of doing.

The phone rang again. She wished the damned thing would go dead. It was Kate.

“Sorry I had to rush off.”

“Yeah, no problem.” Ellery grabbed Axel’s duffel and swung it onto the bed.

“What happened? Did you talk to Black?”

“Oh, yeah. Fired.” The zipper made a quiet
whrrr
as she drew it along the length of the nylon.

“Oh,
El
!”

His jeans, shorts and T-shirt were rolled in a ball. She scooped out the mass of fabric and dropped it on the spread. “It’s all right. I can make a living without
Vanity Place
.”

“Lark & Ives?”

“Mmm, maybe. If Carlton Purdy surprises me by liking the article I’m about to send him.” The brown leather of the Dopp kit was smooth with age. It had been his father’s. She unzipped it, fingers shaking.

“What’s it on?” Kate asked.

She didn’t even need to look. There it was, on the top
of everything, a used syringe. She felt something large and dry in her throat, as if she’d swallowed a rock.

“Listen, I’m sorry, but I have to hang up.”

And she did, right in the middle of Kate’s response.

She sunk slowly onto the bed, the Dopp kit in her hands. She didn’t know what to say or think. There was a roaring maelstrom in the room, sweeping around the tight, still space that contained only her, the Dopp kit and the syringe.

She couldn’t touch it. Her hand wouldn’t move. All she could see were the glistening drops that remained from whatever had been loaded into the barrel, and she stared at it, confused, as if the picture didn’t match the words in her head.

She could sense a presence at the door, but couldn’t lift her head.

“Ellery,” Dr. Albrecht said, “are you all right?”

“Yep. What’s up?”

“My friend with the car service is here. I think he vuz confused. He can still take you to the airport if you need to go.”

Ellery stared at the syringe. Which Axel was he? The man who ran to her aid or the one who disappeared on her?

“Ellery? Should I tell him to go?”

She zipped the Dopp kit closed and folded her hands on top of it. “Give me a minute.”

Ellery hurried down the porch stairs and toward the car.

The driver smiled when he saw her and rolled down the window. “Do ye not have a bag, lass?”

“I’m sorry for the confusion,” she said, bending to talk. “I’m not going. Please let me give you this for your time.” She pulled a ten-pound note from her purse and handed it to him.

“Och, keep your money. I live a quarter mile from here. Tell Gertrude we’ll see her at the Historical Society meeting on Monday.”

“Will do.”

Ellery tucked her purse under her arm. She and Axel were going to settle this once and for all. And, dammit, if she found out he was using, she was going to kick his ass from here to New York.

She hurried to the barn and scanned the heads of the crowd for Axel’s, always half a foot above everyone else’s. She spotted the older man with the blue kilt
who’d spoken to her earlier. But before she could make her own inquiry, he said, “Have you found Axel?”

“No. Is he here?”

“No.” The man frowned. “Duncan’s looking for him.”

“Duncan?”

“The lad at the bar. He was spelling Axel for a bit while Axel shot the moon. But it was only supposed to be fifteen minutes, and it’s well nigh on forty.”

Shooting the moon. That’s our Axel.
“Don’t worry. I’m sure he got lost in what he was doing. I’ll find him.”

She doubled back toward the house and found his camera bag sitting unattended in the middle of the yard. The hairs on her arm rose. Axel was not known for abandoning his über-expensive equipment. She looked around for his shooting spot. The open fields were unlikely because, as she’d heard him say many times, without a foreground, the sky has no impact. She ran a few paces to see if the rental car was still in the little lot beside the house. It was, which meant he hadn’t left.

She reached in her purse for her phone to call him, then realized she had both phones. And he hadn’t been in the house. The place had been completely empty except for her and Dr. Albrecht.

Maybe he’s looking for me in the woods?

She hurried down the path they’d followed earlier that evening, swinging into the barn one more time to look for him, to no avail. The moonlight had turned the forest into a canvas of glimmering blacks and browns, and she moved as quickly as the uneven ground would allow.

In the distance she heard voices, and when she looked
she saw a light on in the distillery and two people talking outside the entrance.

If he’s over there, I’m going to kill him.

But the light clicked off, and the people got into a truck and drove away.

Dammit, Axel, where are you?

She turned in a slow circle, trying to think like him. Then she saw Cairnpapple, a silvery hump against the purple sky. That was where he was. It had to be. She could almost feel the pull.

She began toward the cairn, breaking into a jog wherever the ground was clear enough for it.

When she reached the open field, she called, “Axel! Axel!” and though she received only the echo of her voice in reply, the pull she felt grew exponentially.

She couldn’t explain why his disappearance worried her. Lord knew, he’d disappeared enough in their time together for it to seem as natural as rain. But tonight for some reason it didn’t seem right.