Light of Day (3 page)

She paused, her hand on the doorjamb, and flashed him her dazzling, daring grin. “I’m stronger than a stray dog,” she said, and left.

That was no doubt true, he thought with a grin. Nonetheless… He took his car keys from a hook by the door and donned a light jacket, overtaking Lila as she gathered her wet clothes. “I insist,” he said, smoothly taking her elbow with a smile. “You admired my car, and now you may ride in it.” To forestall any protests, he added, “I need you to be in good health this next week.”

T
he car rumbled through the wet night like a sleek, big animal. Inside, in the lap of a comfortable seat, seduced by a Vivaldi violin concerto Samuel played on the stereo, Lila breathed a sigh of relief. She’d not anticipated the ride home on her bike with any joy—it would have meant hours in the bathtub and doing exercises before she could sleep. And Samuel had gracefully given her a way to accept his offer without wounding her pride.

“My father restores old cars,” she offered. “His specialty is trucks, but I know he’d admire this.”

“Thank you.” He adjusted the tone on the stereo. “I’ve spent nearly two years on this. It was falling apart when I bought it.”

“Have you done the work yourself?”

“You sound surprised, I think.”

Lila smiled. “I am.”

“It’s a very satisfying hobby.”

“Will you keep it?”

He glanced at her with a quizzical movement of his eyebrows. “Of course.”

Lila nodded and turned her head to watch the scenery through the rain-streaked window. Samuel’s cologne enveloped her, a musky, spicy scent that made her think of the caressing note his voice could take. “Turn left at the next intersection,” she said.

The car, too, was sexy, inviting Lila to run her hands over its hard, polished lines. If cars reflected their drivers, what did this one say about its owner?

He liked luxury, but an old-world sort, nothing common. It was an assumption backed by the clothes that he wore—a hand-tailored shirt, quietly expensive, well-cut slacks, no jewelry. Only his hair, worn a bit long and brushed back from his forehead, broke his conservative appearance. Like the car, which was elegant and perfect but antique, there was a hint of the unusual about him. Lila couldn’t quite get over her first impression of him as dangerous.

She studied him from the corner of her eye. With the night throwing dark shadows over the planes of his face, he seemed even more so. Maybe, she thought with an inner smile, it was just a stereotype her mind had filed away after dozens of newscasts of downed planes in faraway countries. Foolish, at best.

“I’m the next house on the right,” she said, unzipping her bag to withdraw her keys.

It was a small house on the crest of a hill. He pulled the car in front of it, leaving the engine running.

“Thank you, Mr. Bashir,” she said, her hand on the door.

“You may call me Samuel if you like,” he said. His arm stretched along the back of the seat.

“All right. Samuel,” she said, trying the word on her tongue. She looked at him, and for one quiet moment, a moment framed with violins and the patter of rain and the rumble of the big engine, Lila allowed herself a small wish—that a man like this might one day see her as a woman. For an instant it seemed he returned that wish, for he steadily returned her gaze without speaking. There was warmth in his face.

Abruptly he shifted, glancing toward the small house, and Lila saw the tiny points of her porch light reflected on the black surface of his irises.

“Good night,” she said, and opened the door.

He waited until she was safely inside her house before turning the car around and heading back to his own place, a cold apartment with few personal touches. It was no different from any of the dozens he’d rented the past several years, none for more than a few months. Since he’d left his doctoral thesis unfinished five years before, his life had been filled with restlessness and wandering, a state of mind that was well suited to his position with Gold and Son.

Ordinarily his travels didn’t disturb him. Tonight, though, he felt unsettled as he opened the long drapes hiding his view of Seattle.

He lit a cigarette, flipping his old-fashioned lighter closed as he inhaled deeply. A woman, he thought with a wry twist of his lips. No one who knew Samuel Bashir would believe a woman of any caliber could affect him over the course of a year, much less the course of a day.

And yet this one had. He couldn’t even have said why, but a lingering sensation of excitement clung to the edges of his lungs, an excitement enlivened with curiosity and anticipation. Both had become rare in his life. Intuitively he knew neither was as rare as the woman. There was, beneath the gypsy, a woman of substance.

And that was rare, indeed.

* * *

The weather was no better the next morning as Lila loaded desserts into the car she borrowed from her friend Allen every Saturday and Wednesday. A heavy fog clung to the firs alongside her house and made circles of dewdrops in the curls of her hair. Very quickly those tresses became hopelessly frizzy in the wet air, and she yanked the mass into a ponytail. Cloaked in a heavy raincoat, she set off to make her deliveries.

As she had promised, she drove first to The Shell and Fin. The hour was early, and only Gerald was about in the kitchen. “Hello, sweetness,” he called, shaking croutons onto trays before sliding them into the oven. “What’s up?”

“Not much,” she said, leaning against the stainless-steel counter. “I heard business was good last night.”

Gerald poked out a fat lower lip. “Pretty good,” he agreed. “Heard it was better afterhours.”

“What?” Lila frowned. “I think you’d better clarify.”

“I think you—” he tipped her nose with one finger “—oughta lighten up.” He grinned. “You gotta fall in love someday, sweetness. He don’t seem like such a bad guy.”

Lila rolled her eyes and straightened. “Oh, please! You and Charlene are determined to marry me off to some rich fellow with a fancy car. I keep telling you I like cowboys.”

Gerald winked and shrugged a little. “Well, anyway, he said to send you into the bar when you came. He’s in there now.”

“Thanks.” Still shaking her head, she headed through the cavernous kitchen, through a swinging door that led into the lounge. She expected to find Samuel drinking coffee at the teak-and-brass bar, reading the paper or planning schedules. It was what she would have been doing at this hour.

Instead, she found him behind the bar, his sleeves rolled up, his hair untidy over his brow, rearranging bottles in a cooler. As she came through the door, he cursed and sent a half-empty bottle flying into the trash.

Spying Lila, he straightened and said conversationally, “The bartender was the first one I fired. He served me the worst glass of wine I’ve ever had, right out of this cooler.”

His accent struck her again. “Where are you from, Samuel?”

“Good morning to you, too,” he answered. But his face folded into a semblance of a smile as he carelessly tossed hair from his forehead. “Where do you think?”

What she thought was that it was ridiculous to get worked up over the way he said his words, as if she were some silly schoolgirl falling in love with a foreign film star. But she said, “I can’t decide. I thought it was France at first, but there’s more to it than that.”

“Good ear.” He wiped his hands on a clean bar towel. “The desserts? You have them?”

She looked at him for a moment, then folded her arms. “Yes,” she said, turning to lead the way outside.

Samuel chose a peach tart, a plain cheesecake and a filled torte. As the array of sweets was lined up on racks inside the cooler, he smiled at Lila. “Beautiful work you do. Beautiful.”

“Thank you,” she replied, warmed.

“Perhaps I’ll have a chance to sample one of them this evening.” He eyed the torte. “Is that hazelnut?”

“Yes. One of my best recipes, if I do say so myself.”

“I shall make a point of it, then.”

She followed him once again to his small, windowed office. Standing by the door while he wrote a check for the desserts, Lila looked at the continuing gray beyond the glass, a fog so thick it was impossible to see more than ten feet. “Lunch will be slow,” she commented, walking over to the window for a wider view.

“Yes,” he replied, distracted.

It was cold next to the window. Crossing her arms, she turned restlessly away. On the wall was a picture of Einstein, a black-and-white likeness showing the famous scientist hard at work over a desk. Lila cocked her head. “Intriguing photo,” she commented.

Samuel tore her check from the book and flipped it closed, his eyes flickering up to the picture. “Yes.”

“Odd choice for an office wall, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” He stood up. Again Lila noted he was not particularly tall, but his carriage gave his average height several inches in the imagination. And again, she thought, he’d sidestepped her question.

“Yes, it is,” she replied. “I’ll call you later this week about the reception.”

He inclined his head in a half nod. “Fine.”

Lila shouldered her bag. “Thank you,” she said, her voice matching his cool tones.

“Drive carefully,” he replied.

As she closed the door behind her, he was already engrossed in paperwork. She tried not to mind, but as she traveled through her day, she found her mind tripping over him now and then.

When her deliveries had been completed, Lila returned the car to Allen and took the bus to the used-car lot he had recommended. In the lot she circled several models that fell into her general needs—something fairly small, fairly new and fairly economical.

A salesman in a raincoat materialized almost immediately. “What can I help you with today?”

“I’m here to buy a car,” she said, crouching to look in the windows of a station wagon. Clean, she noted, and not the kind of hasty clean that was given cars when they came on the lot. The grooves in the vinyl showed no build-up of grime, and the acrylic cover of the speedometer was sparkling. “Tell me about this one,” she invited.

As the salesman outlined the special points, Lila continued to circle the car, running hands over door panels, bending to examine wheel rims. Finally she lifted the hood and began poking around the engine. She cut the salesman off in midsentence. “I want to drive it,” she said.

“What? Oh, great. Climb right in. I’ll get the key.” He hurried off toward the office.

Behind the wheel Lila settled in the driver seat, checking the angle of her back in the seat, the way her hands fit on the steering wheel. When the car managed as well as it looked and made none of the telltale sounds she’d been taught to recognize, she smiled in satisfaction. “I’ll take it,” she said, pulling back into the car lot.

Nonplussed, he hurried inside to comply, and within a few hours, Lila was one car richer.

It was odd to drive the car into her driveway. Allen drove up behind her and unfolded himself from the car, a big, redheaded man with sharp blue eyes and the chest of a bear.

“Guess this means I lose out on my special dinners, huh?” he said, though obviously delighted at Lila’s choice.

“Well, considering your engagement, I thought it was time to quit, anyway. Dana will feed you.”

“True. But she can’t make black forest cake like you can.”

“I’ll give her my recipe.” Lila thought of her motorcycle, still stranded at the restaurant. “It feels weird, Allen. I’m getting more and more normal all the time.”

He laughed, giving her arm a squeeze. “There’s no such thing as normal, Lila. I thought you would have learned that by now.”

“There
is
normal—white picket fences and two children and a husband who works in the day and comes home at night.”

“Those are externals.” His eyes sobered. “They don’t mean anything at all, really. I’m going to be that man pretty soon, and I love Dana’s baby. But I’m no more normal or average than—” He broke off. “Than anyone else.”

Lila unlocked the front door and waved Allen in ahead. “You aren’t normal because you’re an artist,” she insisted.

“I’m not normal because there’s no such thing.”

“My brothers are normal to the point of nauseating,” Lila said, tossing her purse on a small table just inside the door. “They all live just like they think they’re supposed to. They go to church on Sundays and PTA on Wednesdays and grocery stores on Monday mornings.”

Allen grinned, sinking down on the pillows near her small wood stove. “You still don’t get it. You would be Lila Waters even if you lived in the most perfect little house in the suburbs with two children and a couple of dogs and clothes drying on the line in the backyard.” He paused. “You’d be even more of yourself, because you wouldn’t have to keep up all these pretenses of how unusual you are, how you’ve broken the mold of your family to be somebody else.”

“No way.” She shuddered for effect and bustled into the kitchen to get dinner. “You’re just hoodwinked because you’re in love,” she called through the archway between living room and kitchen. “You used to agree with me one hundred percent.”

Allen stretched his long, skinny legs out in front of him and propped his head on hands folded behind him. “Rebellion is a blast at eighteen,” he said. “We had a good time being bohemians in college, but really, Lila, that’s all past.”

She laughed. “You’re right. It’s painful to have to grow up though, isn’t it?” She paused in the act of tearing spinach leaves. “I’ve been agonizing about buying a car for two months, so afraid it was going to change the way I looked at things.” She shook her head. “All I feel today is relief.”

“Good for you.” He stood up. “Maybe next you’ll think about buying some real furniture instead of these damned pillows.”

She shrugged. “Don’t count on it.” But as she scrubbed mushrooms for the salad, she thought of Samuel. If the truth were known, she’d be embarrassed to bring him into her living room, with its flamboyant fabrics and colors and defiant air. When she looked over her shoulder into the room, she thought it looked like the expression of the twenty-year-old she once had been. She didn’t know how the woman she’d become would change it.