Hot Touch (15 page)

Caroline couldn’t drag a response from her throat without crying, so she simply nodded.

“I think you’re teaching Wolf things that can only get him in trouble. He’s working fine now. You can go back to California. Tomorrow.”

“Paul, now, wait a minute,” Frank interjected somberly.

Caroline swallowed hard and knew that Paul watched
every second of her effort. This last blow had destroyed her defenses. “I never had … a client like … Wolf before,” she managed to say in a choked, quivering voice that gave away all her desperation. “At least don’t take him away from me … please.”

The anger wavered in his eyes, and they filled with a sheen of frustration and anguish. He looked down quickly, a muscle flexing in his jaw as he struggled to get his emotions under control.

“All right,” he said between clenched teeth. “Just get your stuff out of my house. And keep away from Angie and Mark.”

“That isn’t necessary,” Angelique said.

Caroline trembled with mortification. Nothing was worse than being defended by June Cleaver.

“I like Caroline,” Mark interceded in a tearful voice. “She wouldn’t hurt anybody. She’s
not
mean. She even lets a granddaddy longlegs live in her room.”

Caroline blinked rapidly and dug her fingernails into her palms.
Oh, Mark, you sweetheart
. If she stayed here another second she’d gush more water than a fire hydrant.

“I’ll get Wolf.”

“I want him chained up in one of the barns tonight,” Paul told her, his voice still soft with strain. “That way he’ll stay out of trouble until Angie and Mark leave tomorrow. Take him to Ed and tell him I said so.”

“Have a heart, Paul,” Frank urged.

“Stay out of this,
ami
. Run your movie and let me run my plantation.”

“Please don’t chain Wolf up,” Caroline begged. She grasped Paul’s arm. “You’ll hurt him more than you’ll ever hurt me by doing that.”

“How do you know?” he demanded hoarsely. “Eh? Just how do you know?”

“She talks to the animals,” Mark said fervently. “Inside their heads.”

“Mark, stop pretending!” Angelique ordered.

Paul swiveled toward the child. “What do you mean,
petit
?”

“Don’t chain Wolf up,” Caroline asked again. “I’ll keep him with me. What he did wasn’t his fault.”

Distracted by her plea, Paul forgot his question to Angelique’s son. “Wolf knows better.” He slashed the air with one hand. “This crazy discussion is closed.”

“Why don’t you chain me up instead? I’m the one you’re so eager to punish.”

His eyes were guarded and fathomless. “Wolf can learn different. You’re hopeless.”

“Please, don’t.”

He looked past her. “Wolf! Venez!”

Wolf trotted out of the woods, his nose covered in dirt from burying the offending camera. Caroline watched him come straight for Paul without any sign of shrinking.

Wolf. He thinks we’re very bad. Go away while I explain
.

Wolf won’t disobey Master again
.

He sat down in front of Paul and looked up solemnly. Paul gestured from him to Caroline. “Go.” He turned toward her and ordered, “Take him to Ed.”

Caroline shook her head and said in a broken tone, “I can’t do it.”

“Then I will.”

Chain!
Wolf communicated in alarm as he caught the drift of her thoughts. His ears drooped and he whined.

Paul winced at that heartrending reaction, but he snapped his fingers and strode toward the barns. Wolf crept alongside him but glanced back at Caroline repeatedly.

How were we very bad?

Wolf. I’m sorry. I was bad. Not you. Master is angry with me
.

Puzzlement.
Lick his nose. He’ll know you like him
.

It’s not that easy with people
.

What is that under your eyes?

That’s sadness
.

There was a potent pause as Wolf turned his gaze up to Paul’s face.
Master has it under his eyes too
.

Paul sat in a big rocking chair on the front veranda, surrounded by a private darkness that suited his mood, and watched a new moon over the edge of the trees. His senses dull with unhappiness, he wasn’t certain how long he had been there when he heard the soft crunch of feet on gravel.

He looked to his left and saw a tall, loose-limbed shadow ambling up the walkway that ran past the house toward the outbuildings.

“
Bonjour
, doc,” Frank called jovially. Frank breezed onto the veranda, gave a totally uncharacteristic hoot of laughter, and slumped down in a rocker beside Paul’s.

“I had hoped to find you awake, my man, so that I might chat with you in private.” Frank enunciated his words as if every consonant mattered.

“Frank, my man, you’re soused.”

“I have had a drop more than my Saturday night cocktail, ’tis true. Sir Frederick and I were playing cards and drinking bourbon with your college interns. A mighty challenge, those youngsters.”

Paul leaned back in his rocker and shut his eyes. “This isn’t like you, Frank.”

“I’m rather perturbed, I admit it. I’ve been wrestling with my personal creed. The one about not meddling in other people’s personal creeds.”

Paul looked at him wearily. “Frank, I’ll fix you a cup of strong coffee, yes?”

“No.” Frank shook his head and rocked with vigor.

“Slow down, Captain Kirk, you’re about to reach warp speed.”

“Oh.” Frank brought the chair to a halt. “As the Walrus said to the something-or-other, ‘I have come to talk of many things, of cabbages and sailing ships, of Caroline and …’ Whoops. Did I say Caroline?”

Paul got up and leaned against one of the veranda’s columns. “Where is she?”

“She is in the barn, in the stall where Wolf is chained, sitting in the hay with his head in her lap. She is reading an Agatha Christie novel to him, and he seems to be enjoying it.”

“Are my cats there too?”

“Yes, indeed. I think they’re bored by Christie. They’re all asleep.” Frank cleared his throat. “You hurt Carrie today, my man. More than you can ever imagine.”

Inside his pockets Paul’s hands clenched into fists. “Tell me everything you know about her. Help me understand her.”

“Ah.” Frank slapped the arms of his chair. “Here’s where I fought my personal creed to a standstill. What do you want to know?”

“Did she really love your brother?”

“Ah. Tom and Caroline. Let me tell you a little story, my friend. Tom introduced me to Caroline five years ago. Here was this young woman, twenty-one years old at the time, I think, a hard-nosed runaway from Connecticut who’d spent the last four years living in San Francisco with a Chinese family. They’d given her a job in their restaurant, then a place in their home, and she’d practically become a member of their family.”

Paul frowned in the darkness. “When she told me that she left home at seventeen I thought she meant she’d gone to live with some friends.”

“No. She had nothing and no one. Does that help you understand why she learned to be so tough? Anyhow, she was the new kennel attendant at a ritzy place
where Tom boarded his goofy Airedale. Damned dog hated everyone but Tom. The dog fell over and licked Caroline’s feet, Caroline hugged the dog, and then she says to Tom, ‘He’s just lonely. If you buy him a puppy to keep him company, he’ll be perfectly fine.’ ”

Frank chortled. “And she was right. By then Tom was just as smitten with her as his dog was. Anyhow, he brought her over to meet me because he thought she could help me with an ornery skunk I’d hired for a TV show. Skunk was mean as hell, but we had to have him. She goes off with the skunk for ten minutes, comes back and says, ‘Spray him with Chanel No. 5.’ We did. Skunk’s in ecstasy. A joy to deal with from then on.”

“And about Tom?” Paul asked in exasperation.

“So people in the industry heard about the skunk, and she started to get other jobs. Pretty soon she had her own animal consulting business. The rest is history.”

“And Tom?”

“Oh. When I first met her I thought, ‘What does this tough-talking, arrogant kid want with a shy, strait-laced accountant who has severe diabetes?’ And you know what she wanted?”

“What?” Paul held his breath.

“To take care of him.”

“
What?
”

“She’d never had anybody to take care of. And nobody to take care of her. And, by God, she treated him like a king. She made him sublimely happy, and he returned the favor. She was hell on the rest of the world until Tom softened her up and we finally realized that she was just scared to death of us. You may not believe this right now, but to know Caroline is to love Caroline.”

Paul puzzled over her past. “She was faithful to Tom?”

“Without a doubt.”

“But after he died, she was lonely, yes?”

“Sure. She lived with Gretchen and me for a while until she got over his death.”

“No, I mean, then she started dating again. Okay, who does she have now? What’s his name? What are
their
names? Tell me the truth, Frank.”

After a silent moment Frank said softly, “This is where my personal creed against meddling takes a real nosedive.” He stood up proudly, as if surrendering in good conscience after fighting a noble battle.

“There isn’t anyone and hasn’t been anyone in the two years since Tom died.”

Paul stared at him in the darkness. “No one? She didn’t go back to California to see somebody?”

Frank sighed grandly. “My friend, you are dealing with a rarity: a one-man woman who’s been waiting for that one man. And you’re him.”

Caroline woke up to the sound of rustling straw, the hot puff of Wolfs breath against her arm, and the sharp tugging of his teeth in the sleeve of her pink T-shirt.

“Hmmm?” She rubbed eyes swollen from intermittent crying, shifted her aching shoulders against the stall’s coarse partition, then checked her wristwatch and saw that midnight had just passed. “I’m sorry. I always fall asleep when I read in bed.”

She-friend is back. Help me go. Help me
.

Caroline tossed the Agatha Christie book out of her lap and grasped Wolf’s ruff. His gaze burned into her and he poked her leg with one huge gray paw.
How do you know?
she asked.

I feel it
.

Where is she-friend?

A long way. But I can get there
.

Oh, Wolf. Wait until morning. Then I’ll ask Master if you can go
.

He jumped over her outstretched legs and lunged frantically against the thick chain that ran from his leather collar to an iron ring in the wall. Caroline scrambled
to her feet and tried to stroke his head. The cats, curled in the straw around him, jumped up amid the commotion and ran.

Help me, help me
, Wolf begged.
She needs me
.

His desperation overwhelmed Caroline, and she quickly unbelted his collar. Wolf bolted out the open stall door.

“Wait! I’ll go with you!” Caroline called, but he was already racing past the curious heads of Paul’s quarter horse brood mares. He shoved through the unlatched door at the end of the barn’s wide corridor and disappeared into the night.

Don’t put sadness under your eyes. I’ll come back
.

Caroline ran to the end of the corridor and stood for several minutes, gazing after Wolf in open-mouthed dismay. Paul would never forgive her for turning Wolf loose, and she certainly couldn’t tell him why she’d done it.

You see, doc, I talked with him and he said he had to go help his girlfriend. That was the reason he’s been depressed
.

Her shoulders slumped. It was better to suffer anger than disbelief, she thought wearily. She’d learned that lesson long ago.

Caroline walked numbly back into the stall and sank down on her sleeping bag. While preparing for a night of keeping Wolf company she’d exchanged her sundress for loose green chinos, the pink T-shirt, and her jogging shoes. Caroline drew her knees up, hooked her hands around them, and gazed blankly at the wall across from her.

When Paul learned that she’d set Wolf free against his wishes, he’d send her away from Grande Rivage for good, and neither Frank nor anyone else would be able to change his mind. An emptiness like nothing she’d known before grew inside her as she thought about leaving him and his wonderful home.

A few minutes later she heard the barn door swing open. Caroline stiffened with dread; she absorbed the horses’ affectionate, welcoming attitude and knew who’d just entered the building.

She shut her eyes and groaned silently. Paul had come to check on Wolf.

Caroline gazed at the empty collar lying in the straw and strained to pick up his footsteps on the hallway’s sawdust floor. Finally he reached the stall door and stopped. She looked up wretchedly and found a stunned expression on his face.

“What have you done now?” he asked, but with less anger than she’d expected.

“I turned him loose. He’ll be back.”

Paul stepped inside the stall and dropped to his heels by the collar. He fingered it thoughtfully, frowning. Caroline gazed at him with bittersweet sorrow, part of her mind focused only on her problem and part focused solely on the heart-stirring sight he presented in old jeans and a soft white pullover, his thick black hair feathering over the ribbed neckline in back.

In Angelique’s honor he’d traded his lace-up work boots for loafers all weekend. A significant sacrifice, Caroline thought enviously. He really cared about that woman and her son—and why shouldn’t he? They were terrific.

He raised his head and studied her intensely. “Why did you disobey my orders about Wolf?”

Her heart racing, Caroline pretended to study a seam on her pants. “He was miserable. And since you couldn’t be any more disgusted with me than you already are, what difference does it make?”

“I’m not disgusted with you.” He met her shocked gaze and held it. “
Chère
, I need answers.”

Caroline inhaled raggedly. He hadn’t called her by that endearment in some time, and never in such a loving voice before. A hunger for more flashed through
her veins. “Answers?” she echoed in a high, innocent tone.