Always You (20 page)

John matched the motion of his hips to that of his thumb. First slow and deep, then shallow and quick until Chiara was biting the heel of one hand to stifle her cries. When John once again brought his mouth to her breasts, her release came quick and hard. Her body responded so powerfully, she nearly forced him out. They embraced and rode out the crest of her climax, their bodies still sealed.

In their all-too-brief moment of pure oneness, Chiara knew that she and John were exactly where they belonged, in that place neither of their families, friends—and now enemies—had the power to reach. It was the place where John found relief from every blow he’d ever taken, every drop of blood he’d shed. They floated back down and became once again aware of the time and space around them. John dragged his coat over them, shielding them from the cold that now felt more refreshing than brutal. John held Chiara tightly, his limbs wrapped around hers, all the while thinking that the woman molded to him was more than a part of his life.

Throughout high school and college, John’s friends had taunted him about being sprung because of his refusal to ever flirt with other women. John knew their teasing came from a place of envy, because they were never more obnoxious than when he saw them watching Chiara with longing and hunger in their greedy eyes.

John used to wonder if he were indeed some sort of freak—was it normal to want one woman as much as he wanted Chiara?

Normal or not, he wasn’t unique. All of Chiara’s brothers-in-law looked at their wives with the same adoring possessiveness he felt toward Chiara. He loved her more than his own life. She was his life.

And Carlton Puel would pay for turning it upside down.

* * *

“George said you could have killed that man.”

Chiara’s soft voice issued from the warm cocoon she and John had formed inside his coat. As she tipped her head up on his crooked arm to look at his face, the movement of the satin lining and Chiara’s silken skin against him kindled the embers that never fully died between them. “Does that scare you?” John stared past her, fixing his eyes on the stubby legs of the cherry wood armoire to avoid seeing any disappointment in Chiara’s face.

She used a finger to drop his chin and guide his gaze to hers. “No,” she assured him. “It makes me feel safe.”

“Just as much as I wanted to kill him for going after you, I wanted to hurt him for trying to hurt me,” John said, a trace of the injured boy he’d once been creeping into his man’s voice. “I’ve taken enough beatings to last me the rest of my life. I wasn’t about to take another one.”

“My mother thinks it’s my fault that Almadine whipped you so much,” Chiara said.

“No,” John uttered in disbelief. “That doesn’t sound like Abby. It doesn’t matter what she thinks, anyway.”

“But she’s right,” Chiara admitted softly. “Even after I knew what Almadine was doing to you, I kept hoping you’d come to the park, just to spite her. If I’d just gone to church like I was supposed to—”

“I’d have still gone to the park,” John said. “I hated church. I wish I’d thought of sneaking off on my own sooner.”

“Wherever the blame falls, I’m not sorry.” Chiara nuzzled his nose with hers. “Those Sundays in the park with you were heaven.”

John held her even closer. “No, this is heaven. Right now. And I think things are going to change for the better fairly quickly.”

“How so?”

“He gave me a name.”

Chiara’s mouth dropped open. “John Doe told you who he was?”

“I made him tell me who sent him after us.”

Chiara didn’t want to know what John had done to convince John Doe to reveal the name of the person who’d hired him. All she wanted was the name.

“Carlton Puel,” John said. “He’s the founder of Vulcan Semiconducter in Phoenix. He’s one of USITI’s manufacturers.”

Chiara sat up, dragging the coat with her. John gave in to an involuntary shiver. Wearing only his socks, he scurried to the windows and closed them. He grabbed one of Chiara’s ponytail holders to loop the crank handles together to keep the windows from flying open again, since he’d broken the lock and support beam.

Chiara stood up, holding the coat tight around her. “Zhou and I met him in Kuala Lumpur in September, at the ACM Expo & Forum. It’s the biggest convention and trade fair in our industry. Grayson sent all of his overseas technical sales reps to it, and Carlton Puel arranged a sightseeing day for us. He took us all out to dinner that night, too.”

John, shivering from the cold still permeating the room, climbed into the bed and pulled the covers up to his chest. “And you haven’t seen Puel since?”

Chiara slowly lowered her weight to the edge of the bed, her forehead wrinkled in thought. “I haven’t. But Zhou might have.” She turned to face John. “When we arrived in Tokyo last month, for that sales trip to Siyuri Robotics, he checked his e-mail on the plane. I didn’t see the message, but he deleted one of them and said it was from ‘that pesky chip man.’ ”

“Puel’s company makes microchips,” John said.

“And he’s a real noodge, too. When we were at dinner in Malaysia, he couldn’t take no for an answer.”

John abruptly sat up. “He hit on you?”

“He followed me around, buying drinks for me, talking about how he wanted to expand his company into programming and design, and how he was looking for experienced sales reps to add to his team. It was the usual song and dance we got from a lot of the companies there. USITI has a solid reputation, and most industry people know that Zhou and I are the best at what we do.
Were
the best,” she corrected. “Zhou was fine until our last day in Tokyo, John. The only time we weren’t together was right after we made our pitch to Siyuri. I went shopping and Zhou went back to the hotel. Or so he said. That’s the only time he could have met with Puel, or anyone else, without my knowledge.”

“You think Puel is the one who sent Zhou over the edge?”

“Him or someone working for him,” Chiara said. She chewed the already ragged edge of her thumbnail. “He and Grayson have been business associates since Grayson founded USITI. If Puel found out how the R-GS system works—”

“And how lucrative it can be,” John said.

“He might have gotten in touch with Zhou. To get a master chip of his own.”

“Do you think he’s the one who killed Zhou?”

“Unless a likelier candidate comes along, yes,” Chiara said. “It’s Puel or someone he sent after Zhou when he didn’t get the master chip.”

“He just makes microchips,” John said. “He had no control over what USITI puts on them. How would he even know what the master chips do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Grayson told him. There’s so much we still don’t know.”

“Not for long,” John said confidently.

“Why?”

“We’ve got our own techno ferret on Carlton Puel’s case right now. I gave George the name when I took him home from the police station tonight.”

“Do you think George knows what he’s doing?” Chiara felt a fresh surge of guilt regarding George’s involvement. “He won’t get caught?”

Loud banging on the trapdoor startled them and cut off John’s response.

“She can’t have heard us,” Chiara whispered. “The floors and ceilings are really thick.” Drowning in John’s coat, she shuffled over to speak through the closed trapdoor. “What is it, Mama?”

“I need to talk to you.”

Chiara turned a baffled eye on John. She’d never heard her mother sound so severe. “Can it wait?”

“No.”

“Well, what’s it about?”

The unlocked trapdoor flew open, brushing Chiara onto her bottom to avoid being smacked in the head. A small brown cylinder with a white cap, a prescription pill bottle, arced into the door space and landed on the carpet. It rolled a few times, finally coming to a stop near the leg of a squatty, cushioned armchair. Chiara picked up the bottle and read the label as her mother’s footsteps on the staircase faded.

“What’s the matter?” John whispered.

Chiara displayed the bottle for him. “Mama found my prenatal vitamins.”

Abby sat at the dining room table, absently smoothing her hands over the crisply ironed linen tablecloth. Chiara, hastily dressed in a pair of old jeans and a loose-fitting pashmina sweater, took a seat opposite her mother and watched the hypnotic movement of Abby’s hands over the pristine white cloth.

Abby wore a plain white shirt that buttoned in the front, a short strand of seed pearls and navy blue corduroy pants. This, minus her ever-present cooking apron, was her typical post-retirement uniform. The rigidity of Abby’s face made Chiara uncomfortable. She wasn’t used to seeing her mother’s gentle features hardened into an unreadable mask.

Chiara opened her mouth to speak just as Abby’s hands ceased their rhythmic motion over the table. “I wasn’t going through your things,” Abby began with forced calm, her gaze fixed downward. “I was cleaning your bathroom and I accidentally knocked over the toiletry bag you had sitting on the edge of the sink. That pill bottle rolled out with everything else.” Abby finally looked up and turned the full measure of her confusion and dismay on Chiara. “Why, Chiara? Just tell me why?”

“Why what?” Chiara leaned her right elbow on the table and cupped her hand under her chin. She had to sit on her left hand and tightly cross her ankles to keep from squirming in her chair.

Propping her elbows on the table, Abby covered her face with her hands. “Why would you want to go and…and…
humiliate
me like this?” she said through her hands.

“It’s not like you found a controlled substance, Mama,” Chiara said. “They’re vitamins.”

“
Baby
vitamins!” Abby hissed through her hands.

“Actually, they’re for adults,” Chiara pointed out flippantly.

Abby’s hands came slamming down on the table. “Oh, you think you’re such an adult now, do you?”

Chiara forced her voice to remain light. “I don’t see what the big deal is, Mama.”

Abby launched herself onto her feet, sending her chair crashing into her beloved black Victorian pine buffet. “Wh-What’s the…Like you don’t…Are you tryin’ to mess with…
YOU KNOW DAMN WELL WHAT THE BIG DEAL IS, GIRLIE!
” Abby fired off, the cords in her delicate neck standing out like telephone cables.

Chiara, blown back by the force of her mother’s voice, held onto the table with both hands. The fine hairs on her arms and at the back of her neck stood on end, and sudden terror like none she’d known so far flooded her chest cavity. Abby’s scorching words washed over her like a heat wave, and Chiara heard nothing familiar in her mother’s words or voice. “I’m your
mother
, and you’ve got the high nerve to come into
my
house and
not
tell me that you’re pregnant?” Abby raged, as if possessed by whatever god ruled offended mothers. “Is this how I raised you? Is this—”

“Reared.”

Caught mid-word, Abby’s mouth hung open but no sound came out. “What?”

“Animals are raised,” Chiara said. “People are reared. You corrected that on a paper I wrote in ninth grade, where I said that I was raised by a single mother and my grandpar—”

“Are you trying to make me go off on you?” Abby threatened loudly.

“I’m having a hard time appreciating your feelings, Mother,” Chiara started boldly, “because quite frankly, I’m the one who should have her back up. You had no right to go through my private things.”

“I didn’t exactly ‘go through’ anything!” Abby shouted. “Don’t leave your ‘private things’ lying around in
my
bathroom if you don’t want me to see them.”

“Why do you keep yelling at me?” Chiara asked.

“I don’t know what else to do!” Abby shouted.

Chiara had a suggestion. “You could calm down, and we could talk about this like grown women.”

Chiara’s advice seemed to further inflame Abby. “Calm down, calm down,” she repeated, more to herself than to Chiara. “I find out that despite my best efforts to raise my baby girl, all I raised is a baby mama!”

At those words, John made his presence known. “Mrs. Winters,” he said, stepping into the dining room from the foyer, that’s not exactly fair to—”

Abby stopped him with an angrily wielded finger and another booming explosion. “Where did you come from?” Before giving John a chance to work out an answer, a more pressing inquiry came to mind. “Are you the daddy?
YOU BETTER BE THE DADDY!
”

John had come down hoping to diffuse the fiery emotion of the situation between mother and daughter, not add his own butt to the burner. He took a seat on Chiara’s side of the table, a symbolic move as well as a sensible one—the table was too wide for Abby to easily go for his throat. “The baby is mine, Mrs. Winters,” he said. “Chiara and I planned to tell everyone, but we wanted to wait until the time was right.”

Abby tossed her hands in the air and John and Chiara flinched. She shook her head and patted the top of it with one hand in one of her more characteristic signs of agitation. “And when would that be? When you send us a postcard inviting us to your baby’s fifth birthday party?”

“I wanted to wait until at least twelve weeks,” Chiara said. “Anything could happen, Mama. This is my first baby, and I’ve needed some time to get used to the idea myself.” She cast a covert glance at John, and squeezed his knee under the table. “We didn’t plan this.”

Abby stubbornly propped her fists on her hips. “So what you’re trying to tell me is that you and John just happened to find yourselves buck-ass naked—”

“Mama, please.” Chiara cringed, flames of mortification igniting in her face.

“—and things just happened to stumble into the perfect position to make a…” Abby gasped sharply and her hands went to her mouth. “Baby!” Tears flooded away her wrath and she rounded the table to throw her arms around Chiara. “My baby’s having a baby!”

Chiara allowed her mother to sob on her shoulder for as long as she could with Abby’s weight bowing her back in the chair. Chiara silently pleaded with John for help, and he took Abby by the shoulders and guided her into his freshly unoccupied chair.

“I wanted to tell you as soon as we knew,” John said.

Chiara’s mouth flew open in indignation. Even though it was true, he didn’t have to tell Abby.

“This is Chiara’s first baby, and she wanted to keep it to herself for a while before she told everyone,” John went on. “So many things are happening all at once. My transfer to St. Louis, Chen Zhou’s death, Chiara’s resignation from USITI…” He took a short step toward the side table near the archway and grabbed a wooden tissue box. He set it before Abby after plucking out a few tissues, which she gratefully accepted. “Chiara didn’t want to add to the chaos the news of the baby.”

Abby turned red, offended eyes on John. “You’re confusing chaos with joy, John Mahoney. I’ve seen all my girls through the births of my grandchildren, and it hasn’t been the least bit chaotic.” Abby touched the seat of her chair and then John’s shirt. “Why are you all wet?”

“There were thirty-six people in the waiting room when Cady’s twins were born,” Chiara reminded her mother, and in so doing, effectively brought her mother’s attention back to the matter at hand. “Cady’s delivery was more like a block party than a delivery.”

“It
was
a party!” Abby declared. “We were happy for Cady and Keren, same as your family deserves the chance to be happy for you.”

“I don’t want a million people breathing down my neck every step of this pregnancy,” Chiara said. “I’m not like Cady. I don’t crave attention.”

As Chiara expected, Abby rushed to her third child’s defense. “Cady doesn’t crave attention, it just naturally comes to her.”

“Kyla’s worse,” Chiara said.

“That’s not fair, and you know it.” Abby caught a sniffle in her handful of crumpled tissue. “She’s an actress. People are interested in her. The attention is part of her job, and when she was pregnant—”

“She was offered twenty-thousand dollars to have her labor and delivery broadcast on the Internet,” Chiara interrupted.

“But she didn’t accept it, did she?” Abby pointed out. “Kyla knew that her baby was something to share with her family, not the World Wide Web.”

“Look, Ma—”

“Here we go with the ‘Ma.’ ”

Chiara held her face in her hands. “Look,
Mother
, this is my pregnancy and I’m delivering the news on a need-to-know basis. When I have the baby, it’ll be the same way. I want to do this
my
way, from beginning to end. Everybody always thinks they know what’s best for me, when they don’t even really know me. When I told Mr. Grayson—”

Chiara realized her mistake three seconds after Abby whirled on her, her face crumpled against a fresh flood of tears.

“You told your boss and you didn’t tell me?” Abby sobbed. “Oh, Chi!” She pressed her tissues to her eyes with both hands. John hugged her as her shoulders shook with the force of her tears.

“We didn’t tell him because we wanted to,” John said over Abby’s mournful wailing.

“I had to tell him, Ma,” Chiara said. “This baby saved our lives,” she added without thinking.

Fortunately, Abby had ears only for her own misery. “Who else knows? Your dry cleaner? Your parking garage attendant?”

“Cady knows,” Chiara started, “but…she…uh…” Her words withered in the heat of Abby’s treacherous stare.

“We didn’t tell her!” Chiara held up her hands as if to ward off her mother. “She figured it out on her own. You know how she is, Mama. Cady can look at you for two minutes and then tell you the one secret you’ve been hiding.”

Abby stood and started for the kitchen. “Cady’s on my list now, too, because she could have told me.”

Abby’s hand thumped loudly on the swinging door as she opened it and blew into the kitchen. A short moment later, Chiara and John heard her say, “Why didn’t you tell me that Chiara was pregnant?”

They raced into the kitchen to find Abby standing over the little telephone table between the back and basement doors. Her hands on her hips, she loomed over the phone to aim her words directly at the speaker. “After all these years and everything I’ve done for you girls, you pay me back in secrets and subterfuge! What else are you girls hiding from me?”

“I’m not hiding anything,” came Cady’s voice through the speaker.

Chiara could have choked her for the extra emphasis she placed on her first word because it made Abby slowly turn and again fix her suspicious scowl on her and John.

“Well?” shot from Abby’s lips with the force of a sniper’s bullet.

Chiara couldn’t bring herself to lie to her mother’s face, but she didn’t dare tell her about the master chip. John, as usual, came to her rescue.

“We haven’t told Almadine yet,” he said.

Muscle by muscle, nerve by nerve, Abby’s face relaxed until it almost totally slackened. It reshaped itself into a slowly blooming smile that filled the kitchen with its usual warm, merry glow. The news of Almadine’s ignorance had a narcotic effect on Abby, calming her to the point where she cheerfully bid Cady goodnight and retrieved a fresh apple cobbler from the pie keeper at the end of the sink counter.

“Almadine honestly doesn’t know, John?” Abby sniffed delicately as she took three dessert plates from a cabinet over the counter.

“She honestly doesn’t know.” John opened the cutlery drawer in the prep island and collected three forks and a pie cutter.

Abby almost skipped into the dining room with the pie and plates, and John and Chiara followed her. “When do you plan to tell her?” Abby asked. She sat the pie on the table and spooned three fat servings from it, carefully setting each one on a plate.

“I don’t know.” John took a plate of the cinnamon-scented dessert and resumed his damp chair. “I’m leaving it up to Chiara.”

Abby slid a plate to Chiara. “Well, when are you going to tell her, Chi?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Do we really have to tell her at all?”

“How about two days after the baby is born?” Abby laughed.

“Mrs. Winters,” John gently chastised.

“All right, all right,” Abby said, her laughter easing up. “You really ought to tell her soon though, or else she’ll act out a storm about the wedding.”

Chiara slowly stopped chewing. John turned and looked at her, his expression unreadable. “What wedding?” Chiara said.

Abby chuckled. “Yours and John’s, of course. Whose do you think? The sooner we get to it, the better, while you’re still small enough to fit into a pretty dress. Rev. Kurl could perform the ceremony, and you could have the reception at Kyla and Zweli’s. Their backyard is beautiful, and can accommodate at least two hundred guests. And the lake in the background would be so lovely for your pictures.” Abby stopped to take a breath, but Chiara still couldn’t get a word in. “I’m sure Cady knows a good caterer. She’s always planning events for Keren’s department, and the food is always delicious. Ciel could point you to a good florist, and you know she’s the one to take with you when you’re negotiating all your service contracts. It’s a good thing you’re leaving USITI, Chiara. You’ve got your work cut out for you.”

“I can’t waste time on a wedding right now,” Chiara said in a rush before Abby could start in on other possible contributors to her most precious day. “It’s not a good time.”

“Good or not, time is something you don’t have,” Abby told her. “That baby will be here before you know it, and it’s going to need a daddy.”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Winters,” John rested his fork on the edge of his empty plate, “but my child has a father. I was there when he was conceived and I’ll be there to greet him when he comes into this world.”

“That’s what they all say,” Abby scoffed. “It’s easier to leave when you don’t have a ring to remind you of where you belong.”

John’s jaw tightened. “I don’t need a ring to know that I belong with Chiara.”

“Have you met John Mahoney?” Chiara asked sardonically. “This man has been a part of my life, a part of our family, for more than twenty years. You think the responsibilities of fatherhood will drive him away?”

Abby refused to meet their eyes directly as she said, “You never know what a man will do after a child arrives.”

“If anything drives him away, it’ll be a bossy, dictatorial mother-in-law,” Chiara said.