Dance of the Crystal (24 page)

But he didn’t.

Soren sat in the cab of his truck a long time, staring at the back end of Thor’s Hammer from the edge of the parking lot. He wanted to go upstairs to his cave and hibernate, maybe drink himself into oblivion, but couldn’t bring himself to walk through the employee entrance and face whichever busybodies were in the kitchen.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow he’d apply for a building permit to build an outside entrance to the second floor so he wouldn’t feel like he had to run a gantlet just to get home.

Hell. Why did he want to go back, anyway? He’d left the apartment earlier today because it reminded him of her. If he went back now, the same thing would happen. Maybe he should go to Magnus’ studio and crash on his sofa. Maybe Mags would be spending the night at Kat’s, where he belonged, and he, Soren, could wallow in his self-pity totally alone.

Or maybe he could be a man and face the music. What’s a little ribbing among friends? Why get all bent out of shape from comments by well-meaning employees who were like family?

Because he was accustomed to keeping his emotions buried. Of being the aloof one, the uncaring one.

But she’d made him care. Made him feel something for her, made him hope there might be a “them”.

And then she’d made that ridiculous, woo-woo claim. The lesson he’d learned at age nine still held true—love hurt.

Is that why he felt like shit? Was this what love felt like? If so, Mags could have it.

Love sucked.

Still, the look in Crystal’s eyes haunted him. He’d hurt
her
, not the other way around. She’d given him the kind of sex a man only dreamed of, from a body that Penthouse would pay double to photograph, and he’d walked out on her.

Soren slouched down in the cab, rested his head on the headrest and closed his eyes. He could still hear Crystal’s laugh, feel her vitality, her very joy of being alive. Could see her lying on the living room rug, her hips tilted upward atop his folded shirt, her melted-chocolate eyes slumberous, her smile dreamy as she watched him smooth the washcloth over her wet pussy. His cock twitched just thinking about how good they were together.

Damn, he was one stupid son of a bitch if he let her slip away from him over a few poorly chosen words.

Did it matter
why
she chose him? He should be grateful that she had.

Coming to a decision, he fired up the ignition and roared out of the parking lot. Burning up the road, he soon pulled up to her tidy Cape Cod home and killed the engine. The light near the front door illuminated the porch. The rest of the house was dark. Soren frowned. Had she gone to her grandmother’s looking for some sympathy? He got out of the truck and looked through the garage window. Empty.

Damn. Okay, so he had two choices. He could sit there and wait for her to come back, or he could drive the few miles to Grandma’s house.

A no-brainer. In minutes he was cursing the traffic lights on Lancaster Avenue as he passed through the business districts of suburban Main Line towns on his way to Devon. With a rueful smile, he remembered his first trip through the fancy gates and up the long driveway in the back seat of Kat’s BMW, with Mags behind the wheel keeping their destination a secret in order to get him into Rowena D’Angelo’s home for a birthday bash. God, that seemed so long ago.

Now he drove slowly past the darkened house and garage looking for Crystal’s Beetle or, for that matter, Grandma’s car. Neither was in evidence. Were they together? Had they gone for a nightcap? He glanced at his watch. Nah, it was after one in the morning and the place looked closed up tight. If Grandma was out, she’d also have left a porch light on.

Soren puffed his cheeks and blew out a long breath. Well, it was a half-assed idea anyway. He’d go home, catch some Zs and call her in the morning. Then they could have a good laugh at how he’d reacted when he’d finally come to his senses.

This time when he parked in the lot at Thor’s Hammer, he squared his shoulders and strode in through the employee entrance as though he expected no flak.

And he got none, just a couple of nods of acknowledgement in the kitchen. Squelching his impulse to check the bar area, he went directly upstairs, entered the key code for his front door and walked straight through to the bedroom. He could still smell wisps of her perfume, but now it was more comforting than jarring.

He shucked off his clothes, took a quick shower and dried himself off. Damn, he was edgy, didn’t want to crawl into bed yet. Slipping on an old pair of running shorts, he decided to numb his mind by watching the boob tube for a while. As he walked through the bedroom, he noticed the blinking light on the answering machine. His pulse quickened. Had she called him?

Hell, why would she? He was the one at fault. He had to make the first move. It was probably one of his brothers. Or a pub employee. No way was he in a mood to handle any more problems tonight.

Dismissing the blinking light, he strode to the living room and began randomly pushing buttons on the TV

remote. A few minutes later he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. With a silent curse, Soren muted the TV. If it was Trang or Milton hoping to discuss a problem with him, he’d pretend he’d been asleep and didn’t hear them. If no one had jumped him when he’d passed through the kitchen twenty minutes ago, it could wait until tomorrow. Er, morning. Still, he flinched at the hard knock.

“Soren? You alive in there?”

Magnus. What the hell was he doing here at two-fifteen in the morning?

Go away.Images flickering on the screen, he sat in the silent room, willing his brother to go back to his fiancée and leave him alone to brood.

But Magnus was as stubborn as his siblings. Scant seconds later, Soren heard the buttons being pushed on the keyless entry and the door to the apartment opened, spilling a rhomboid of light from the office into the living room.

“What the…how come you’re watching TV in the dark?”

Seconds after Magnus asked the question, he flicked a switch and the floor lamp—the room’s only lighting fixture—illuminated them both.

With a sigh, Soren said, “Come in, why don’t you?”

“Here. Trang sends this with her compliments.” Magnus handed him a large Styrofoam container.

“Brewed it fresh just for you.”

Soren raised an eyebrow but accepted the coffee. “Why would she be so solicitous? More to the point, why are you the delivery boy?”

“Trang called me to say you were taking a vacation day and asked could I fill in tonight at the bar. Kat told me you planned to spend the time with Crystal. Since you came back earlier than anyone expected—Milton saw you in the parking lot a few hours ago, then you left and came back—I put three and three together.”

“And got what? Five?” Soren scowled at the flickering image on the TV. Someone was silently demonstrating the latest innovation in cleaning bathroom grout.

“The thought occurred to me that maybe you’d be doing what I did a few months ago. Trying to drink myself into oblivion.” Mags lifted Soren’s feet off the oversize sofa where he’d been stretched his full length—it was the only seating in the spacious room—and sat on the opposite end.

Sprawled with his feet on the floor, Soren gave him a gimlet stare.

“Thorvalds are thickheaded,” Magnus continued, working the top off his coffee cup. “Sometimes we jump to conclusions without hearing all the facts.”

Soren ripped the tab from the cup’s top and took a cautious sip of the hot liquid. Strong, black, and perfectly brewed.

“You remember how furious I was to discover that Kat auctioned herself off for a weekend at her Mexican time-share. I didn’t listen when she tried to tell me she’d forgotten all about it, that she had repaid the bid to the charity to get the top bidder off the hook.”

Soren slid his tongue around his teeth. He remembered, all right. Magnus, whom he’d never seen drink more than two shots in an evening, had been halfway through the bottle by the time Kat found him on a barstool in Thor’s Hammer.

Magnus settled his muscular frame back into the sofa cushions as though he planned to stay a while. “So.

You guys have a fight or what?”

Hell. How could he come out and say it without sounding stupid?
Crystal said her magic crystal chose
me
. He took a long swallow of coffee and traced a whorling pattern on the tabletop with his eyes. “Do you believe in love at first sight?”

“No shit! You and Crystal?”

“Not me,” Soren said, irritated that he’d just blurted it out. “Can a woman instantly ‘know’,” he used his fingers to put quotation marks around the word, “that she’d met her one and only?”

“I believe,” Magnus solemnly drew out the words, “that love is…unpredictable. Inconvenient. Blind to all obstacles. So, yeah, why not at first sight?”

Soren cursed under his breath.

“So what’s the problem? She fell in love with you, went to bed with you, and now you’re having second thoughts? If she doesn’t meet your standards in the sack, you can always teach—”

“It’s not that. She…” Soren ran a large hand down his face. “She’s terrific. In and out of—shit. A gentleman doesn’t talk about it.”

To his credit, Magnus didn’t remind him that Soren had never been a gentleman. “Are you…afraid to love her?”

Soren turned his head slowly, surprised by his brother’s insight. Surprised at the thought itself. “Yeah. I guess I am. I don’t want history to repeat itself.”

“You’re thinking about Mom.”

“Yeah.”

They both fell silent for a time. Soren aimed the remote and the screen went blank. “I heard them the day before she left, you know. I had come into the kitchen to get a glass of milk and they were yelling at each other in the dining room. He called her a whore. She laughed in his face. He slammed her against the wall and asked her how long she—” Soren cleared his throat. “That was the first time I heard Dad use the word. He asked her how long she’d been fucking this guy.”

“Ouch.”

“Apparently Dad opened a love letter addressed to Mom and realized she’d been cheating on him. He slapped her around a bit. She asked for a divorce. He said over his dead body. And then, just like that, she was gone.”

Magnus turned to face him. Soren noticed his brother’s eyes were shiny and wondered if his looked the same. They felt pinched and wet.

“So you’re afraid Crystal will eventually cheat on you.”

Soren said nothing.

“Or you’re afraid you’ll wind up like Dad, slapping her around for real or imagined infractions.”

“Imagined…? No. If the letter was what he said it was, I guess I could understand why he hit her. I hope I’d never lose control like that, but maybe he was justified.”

Magnus set down his coffee cup. “I saw him hit her once.” His voice was low, harsh. “She’d burned the hamburgers and he gave her a fist to the stomach. Where it wouldn’t be visible to anyone else.”

“You’re kidding.”

Magnus let out a big sigh. “Maybe she had reason to leave him.”

Soren considered this. “That possibility never occurred to me. At nine years old, all I saw was that a woman did something with another man that enraged her husband and then she left him and abandoned their three children. I swore never to be so much in love that someone could have that kind of power over me.”

“Does she?”

“What?”

“Does Crystal have that kind of power over you?”

Soren barked out a short laugh. “Yeah. I want her for real, Mags. I want to wake up with her beside me for the rest of my life.”

“Scary, isn’t it. I feel that way about Kat. And I’d sworn off women after the experience with my ex-wife.” Magnus clapped a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Like I said, love can be damn inconvenient.

But sometimes, it’s just too big, too strong to ignore.”

“Yeah. It’s like an eight-hundred-pound elephant sitting on my chest.”

Magnus chuckled. “I’d say that’s love.”

“But still—”

“Trying to weasel out of it? Lots of luck, bro.”

“No, it’s not that. She—hell. Don’t laugh at this. That thing Crystal always wears on a chain around her neck? She told me her grandmother gave it to her on her thirteenth birthday. It’s apparently some kind of voodoo charm that was supposed to tell her when she’d met ‘The One’.” He used his fingers again to make quotation marks around the words. “That’s what Crystal called me. ‘The One’. She said that when she saw me on stage at the Bachelor Dinner Auction, the crystal damn near burned her chest, so she knew I was the man she was supposed to—” he cleared his throat and rushed the rest of the words so he’d be sure to get them out, “to give her virginity to.”

“Well. A woman who waits thirty years to, uh, have her first intimate experience with a man probably wouldn’t want to look for excitement outside of marriage.” Magnus paused before adding, “And a man who has a woman who gives that kind of commitment to a relationship isn’t likely to chase her away by knocking her around.”

Soren grabbed the TV remote off the table and flipped it round and round in his hands. “I guess they were both at fault. Mom and Dad, I mean. It looks a little different from the vantage point of thirty-four as opposed to when I was nine years old. I never forgave her for abandoning us. But now…”

“Yeah. Two sides to every story.” After another stretch of silence, Magnus pushed himself off the sofa.

“Well, it’s late. I’ll leave you to your pondering.”

Soren stood with him. “Thanks. For everything.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Maybe you should try to get in touch with Mom. Like you said, two sides. I’d hate to think I carried a grudge all these years and it wasn’t all her fault.”

“I’ll do that. Get some sleep, man.”

“You too.” He touched Magnus on the shoulder. “Give Kat a hug for me.”

“It’ll be my pleasure.”

* * * * *

Crystal opened her eyes to slits. She had squinched them shut to keep the pain at bay and the tears unshed. After uncounted minutes of scouring her skin from neck to ankles, Jack had untied her upraised leg, thankfully giving her back her balance, then went to fill the tub. Her skin felt like raw hamburger that had just been run through a meat grinder.