Lady Be Bad (4 page)

The smile she offered Paul was almost a
plea. "The career has been a happy accident. An accident that
you've had more fun with than I have. The traveling goes with the
job along with the money—money that you keep reminding me to spend
but that I keep putting in the bank."

Marlayna resumed her seat on the coffee
table. Her right hand took Sylvia's; her left took Paul's. "You two
are my only real friends. All the others are the usual
supercilious, shallow hangers-on that come and go like a summer
breeze
.
If all this –" her dark head nodded "-- were to
disappear, to end this very second, you two are the ones that I'd
mourn."

It was Sylvia who finally spoke, her tone
quietly sympathetic. "You have been in mourning all these years,
haven't you."

"Deep mourning." Marlayna nodded, squeezing
both their hands before letting go. "If Noah had been killed, the
mourning would have had an end. But a divorce — especially ours
left me with so many questions. Frustrations that have eaten away
at my life."

Her eyes were bleak. "Since I read that
invitation, my life suddenly became balanced. I am anxious to see
him, anxious to have all my questions answered. If it's true, if
our marriage is really supposed to be over, I have to go back to
it, confront the ghosts, solve the mystery. Then, I'll be able to
go forward toward a new life. A life I can really enjoy. And maybe
even find someone to share it with."

Marlayna turned to Paul. "During the past
years, I've forced you to pencil in my future. Now, once I see and
talk to Noah, we can write me in ink. One way or another, Noah
Drake is going to give me back my past. Then I'll be able to live
and enjoy the present and dream about the future."

"Do you think it's wise to put all your eggs
in Noah Drake's basket?" Paul countered. "He cracked them
before."

Sylvia cleared her throat. "I hungered and
chased after my first husband," she confessed, "and ultimately got
George back from another woman." She gave Marlayna's knee a warning
squeeze. "He was an even bigger disappointment the second time
around."

"I've been thinking a lot about that, too."
She sighed, wiping a weary hand over her face. "I wonder just how
accurate my memories are. Have my dreams and longing blown Noah all
out of proportion? Have I bestowed on him god-like qualities he
never deserved?"

"He certainly doesn't deserve you," Paul
said rudely. "I'm sorry, Marlayna, but it seems to me you've
deliberately clung to the past and ignored everything else. I'm not
sure you rate one speck of sympathy."

"She's not asking for sympathy, you clod,"
Sylvia snapped. "She's asking for us to understand." Her brown gaze
shifted to her friend. "I, for one, understand perfectly and I
should think with all the womanly hormones you have been blessed
with, Paulie, you would too."

Marlayna leaned forward and pressed a damp
palm against Paul's cheek. "I'm scared, Paul. Scared and afraid of
what I'm going to hear about myself. Maybe I did fail at being a
wife, maybe I even failed at being a woman a man wants to spend the
rest of his life with. But I'm also mad. Angry that Noah has found
someone else. Was I so easy to replace? He vowed to love, honor and
cherish, and I find it offensive that another woman will hear those
same words.

"I want justice. I want revenge. I want to
shed my guilt. No matter what some judge decreed in five minutes in
a courtroom, I am still Noah Drake's wife!" She tried to control
her trembling. "When you were a child, Paul, did you ever play with
puzzles?" His silver head nodded. "Well, that's exactly the way my
life has been," she told him, "a puzzle that has never been
completed, a puzzle that can't even be appreciated because too many
pieces are missing."

Paul took a deep breath. "All right, kiddo,
if this is what you really want, I'll back you one hundred
percent." His fingers entwined with hers. "I'll even be here to
glue all the shattered pieces back together. When is D-Day?"

Sylvia hunted for the engraved card that had
slid between the sofa cushions. "Next weekend and... oh, look at
this note on the back." She turned the card for Marlayna's
inspection. "King Arthur's scrawling personal message requests that
you spend the entire week at his island castle."

"A week to recapture six years." Marlayna
looked from one to the other. "Seems like a fair trade," she said
then smiled.

Paul shrugged his shoulders in silent
capitulation. "I'll make sure your schedule is free for the next
two weeks." At her raised brow, his mouth twisted grimly. "The
extra week's just in case Sylvia and I have to play paramedic."

"Doesn't he have a charming way with words?"
Came Sylvia's caustic pronouncement. "I say we celebrate Marlayna's
impending prison break and relocate ourselves to Giovanni's for
some antipasto, fettuccine, and an aged Burgundy."

"That's the most brilliant idea you've had
all week, Sylvia," Paul agreed. "Let's go, Marlayna, and I’ll even
let you pig out on the sesame breadsticks."

"You two go and gorge," she instructed "I'd
like to be alone for a while and think." Noticing their matching
worried expressions, she released an easy laugh. "Hey, I just flew
through three time zones! My sneakers are still filled with the
California desert and I could use a long soak in a bubble-filled
tub."

Sylvia and Paul made their good-byes last
another twenty minutes. Once inside the waiting air-conditioned
limousine, Paul continued to voice his objections. "We were fools
to leave. If we stayed perhaps we could have --"

"Changed her mind?" The blonde inquired.
"Paulie, all we would have done was exhaust ourselves and see
absolutely no results. Look at things from Marlayna's perspective.
She really has no alternative but to confront Noah Drake." Sylvia
squeezed Paul's arm. "She knows where she's been for the past six
years, but she needs to know what's happened to him and what
happened to them. If Marlayna doesn't get those answers, her life
will be lived in limbo. Do you want that for her?"

"Of course not! I love that girl. Frankly…"
Blue eyes looked into brown. "… if I were going to love any woman
it would be her. But, damn it, Sylvie, she's so much better now.
She should be on top of the world. Do you want to see her come back
from Noah Drake the way she was the last time?"

"No, but I honestly don't think Marlayna
could ever sink that low again. She's older, stronger, healthier,
sharper and in control. We've both seen how she handles herself. On
the job, she just tunes out the grinding tedium of the model's
routine and virtually ignores all the people that pick and push and
poke at her. She handles the never-ending line of fawning males
with equal aplomb."

"And you think Marlayna can handle Noah
Drake?"

Sylvia nodded. "I think she'll thrive on
handling Noah Drake."

"What if your prediction about anticipation
being ninety-nine percent of the actual event proves to be
true?"

"Then we'll be there to help her."

Paul stared into Sylvia's perfectly made-up
face. "She means a lot to you too."

She nodded. "We both know how shallow and
materialistic I am, but Marlayna disregarded all of that and kept
digging until she found the real human being that is Sylvia
Davies."

He ran a hand through shaggily cut silver
hair. "Marlayna does have the uncanny ability to ignore surface
imperfections and get through to a person's heart."

Sylvia leaned back and let her eyes sweep
over him. "You know, Paul, you're really quite a likable, almost
lovable, person." One perfectly shaped eyebrow arched in silent
appraisal. "I'm very tempted to try and convert you." She lifted
the receiver on the rear intercom and spoke to the driver. "Cancel
Giovanni's, Fred, and bring us back to my place. Then," winking at
Paul, she added, "take the rest of the night off."

***

There was a quietness about the elegant
apartment that Marlayna could feel, a quiet that was neither
calming nor soothing nor safe. She left her sneakers at the foot of
the Victorian hall tree in the foyer and padded barefoot back into
the living room.

Her eyes mapped and catalogued her
surroundings: the valuable fifteenth-century Italian accent table,
a Ming vase here, a signed master's painting there. Brass planters
and crystal lamp-bases caught and reflected the coral-tinted
sunset; the wall bookcase was filled with hand-tooled leather first
editions and a classic eighteenth century French tapestry hung
behind glass in the alcove. "It's like living in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art," Marlayna sighed.

Living?
"Visiting," came her audible
correction. She sat in perfect schoolgirl form on the edge of a
Chippendale side chair one step up in the dining room. She had
occupied this duplex that Paul had sublet for her for the last
three years and still felt like a guest. The only person who took
this place seriously was Pearl the housekeeper!

"Perhaps if I had been 'to the manner
born.'" Marlayna lifted an invisible cup to her lips, her pinky
curving in a refined arc. Her fingers opened, letting the phantom
china shatter into oblivion. "Face it, kiddo, this house and its
furnishings are just not right for you." A melancholy expression
shadowed her face and replaced her grin when she remembered a house
that was just perfect for her.

She and Noah had decided to rent one of the
remodeled brick pre-World War II bungalows that edged the Georgia
Tech campus. They had combined the furniture from their respective
apartments, put a fresh coat of paint and new drapes in the rental
and discovered that the eclectic mix was charmingly attractive.

"Now that was a home!" Marlayna told the
brass unicorn she had lifted from a hand-painted teakwood display
pedestal. "My tweed sofa and glass end tables balanced those two
leather recliners of Noah's that he put in front of the brick
fireplace. His double bed fit the two of us just perfectly and my
single set was put in the extra bedroom."

Her eyes inspected the ornate Oriental-style
furniture, then looked down at her hands. "How well I remember
stripping and staining that oak claw-footed dining table and
sideboard we bought at a garage sale."

For the millionth time Marlayna wondered
what had happened to all their shared treasures. Anger, fear,
confusion and tears had been her only companions when she'd fled
Atlanta, and afterward she had let Sylvia's lawyer handle any
further communications with Noah's legal representative. There had
been a settlement check and the usual signing of documents, but she
had been too sick to be interested and Sylvia convinced her that it
was beneath her, as a woman, to care.

The trouble was, she did care; she had never
stopped caring and wondering and thinking. Always about the past,
never about today, no thoughts of tomorrow. "One minute life was
simple; the next, so complicated." She inhaled deeply. "Maybe it
would have been better if I had taken all of this more seriously."
All of this
included much more than her living quarters.

The fascinating events that changed her life
after her divorce from Noah had been more obstructive than
constructive. Marlayna had chosen New York City as a place in which
to disappear from the face of the earth, but Fate had decided
otherwise.

And yet, hadn't she actually become what
millions of young women dream of becoming? From obscurity to
celebrity—her face and figure were now splashed across fashion
pages and magazine covers. Somehow, somewhere, in some other
dimension of time, there had been a little mix-up and Marlayna was
living someone else's dream.

Her mouth twisted in an impertinent grin. It
was really quite funny.
H
er
dreams had never been
filled with fame and fortune. A little cottage, rimmed by a white
picket fence, a smiling husband, laughing children and a sleepy
schnauzer—that was the stuff
her
dreams had been made of.
Dreams that had come true and turned into a nightmare.

But the beginning had been beautiful, she
reminisced, the perfect fairy-tale story. She had found her Prince
Charming in Noah Drake, or as he had said more correctly, "I've
finally found the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with,
the woman I want to love and care for and raise children with and
grow old with." Marlayna had believed him.

"Why wouldn't I?" She again spoke to the
unicorn. "We wanted the same things. We were two alike."

They both had been the only child of only
children. If either had aunts, uncles or cousins, their relatives
had been well hidden. Her father had suffered a heart attack when
she was sixteen and her mother was felled by the same, leaving
Marlayna totally on her own at twenty. Noah's parents had been
killed in a car accident just after he graduated from high school,
and he had let the Marines play surrogate for two tours of duty. At
twenty-six, he had settled in Atlanta to enter a non-saluting
world.

Noah had been twenty-eight to her twenty-one
when they married, and their life together had been a happy one for
two years. She was head of admissions in the emergency room but was
taking courses at the community college to become a medical lab
technician. At the construction company where Noah worked, he was
promoted to foreman, but at night he was a student accumulating
college credits toward a degree in architecture.

Working and studying had been the main
activities for Mr. and Mrs. Noah Drake. Each seemed to thrive on
the other's achievements; each needed the other to bolster an ego
during a failure; and both reveled in designing their future.

"I'm going to build you the house of your
dreams." Noah's voice rang fresh in her ears.

"The perfect place to live with the man of
my dreams."