The Last Honest Woman (7 page)

His mouth brushed over hers, and he felt the tremulous movement he knew women used as seduction. "I already have."

"No." She was weakening. The hand that she brought to his chest simply lay there. "Please don't."

Her breath was unsteady, her eyes half-closed. Dylan had little respect for a woman who pretended reluctance so that a man was left with the responsibility. And the blame. Need crawled through him, but he released her. His eyes were flat and cool as he nodded. "Your choice."

She was chilled and churning. There was something biting, something hurting, in his tone, but she couldn't think about that now. Careful of the melting ice, she picked her way back to the house.

After using the boot pull on the back porch, she took the eggs to the sink and began washing up. Dylan came in behind her. "If you'll give me a few minutes, I'll have something hot."

"Take your time." He walked past her and out of the kitchen.

She washed each egg meticulously, waiting for her mind to empty and her system to calm. Serenity was what she relied on, what she'd worked for. She couldn't allow an accidental embrace with a man she barely knew to change that. Hadn't he released her without a second's hesitation? Abby began to put the eggs in one of the empty cartons she kept under the sink. He was safe. She only sighed over that once.

She'd never been terribly sexual in any case, she reminded herself as she pulled a slab of bacon from the refrigerator. Hadn't Chuck pointed that out with complete clarity? She simply wasn't enough to fulfill a man's needs. Abby heated the cast-iron skillet and watched the bacon bubble and shrink. She was a good wife, dependable, responsible, sympathetic, but she wasn't someone a man burned for in the middle of the night.

She didn't need to be. She put on more water for coffee. She was happy being what she was. She intended to go on being what she was. Taking a deep breath, she unclenched her hands. Dylan was coming back.

"I didn't ask you how you wanted your eggs," she began then turned to see him set his tape recorder on the counter. Nerves threatened and were conquered. "You want to work in here?"

"Here's fine. And I'd like the eggs over easy." He found an uncluttered spot at the counter and sat. "Listen, Abby, I don't expect you to cook three meals a day for me."

"The check you sent for expenses was more than adequate." She broke an egg in the pan.

"I thought you'd have a staff."

"A staff of what?" She broke the second egg, then glanced over. Abruptly, nerves gone, she laughed. "A staff? As in maid and cook and so on?" Delighted, she shook her hair back, then gave the eggs her full attention. "Where in the world did you get an idea like that?"

Automatically he turned on the tape recorder. "Rockwell was wealthy, you were his heir. Most women in your position would have a servant or two."

She remained facing the stove so that her face was curtained by her hair. "I don't really care to have people around. I'm here most of the time; it'd be silly to have someone dusting around me."

"Didn't you have a staff before your husband died?"

"Not here. In Chicago." She scooped up his eggs. "That was before and right after Ben was born. We lived in a suite in his mother's house. She had a full staff. Chuck traveled a great deal, and we didn't really have a family yet, so we hadn't decided where to settle."

"His mother. She didn't approve of you."

Abby set the plate in front of him without a tremor. "Where did you hear that?"

"I heard all sorts of bits and pieces. It's part of the job. It couldn't have been easy living in Janice Rockwell's home when she didn't approve of the marriage."

"I don't think it's fair to say she didn't approve." Abby went back for coffee, choosing her words carefully. "She was devoted to Chuck. You probably knew she raised him alone when her husband died. Chuck was only seven then. It isn't easy raising children without a partner."

"You'd know about that."

She sent him an even look. "Yes, I would. In any case, Janice was very protective of Chuck. He was a dynamic, attractive man, the kind who attracted women. On the circuit, there are all manner of groupies hovering around."

"You weren't a fan."

"I never followed racing. We were always traveling around, playing in clubs and so forth. I didn't even know who Chuck was when we first met."

"Hard to believe."

She poured coffee into two cups on the counter. "Janice thought so, too."

"And resented you."

Abby took a calming sip of coffee. "Your job isn't to put words in my mouth, is it?"

She wasn't going to be easy to shake. It seemed to him that she had her answers down pat. Too pat. "No. Go on."

"Janice didn't resent me personally. She would have resented any woman who took Chuck away from her. It's only natural. In any case, I think we got along well enough."

Though he intended to dig a bit deeper there, he let it pass for now. "Why don't you tell me how you met Rockwell?"

That was easy. She could talk about that without hedging. "We were playing—my family and I—in a club in Miami. My parents did this little comedy routine and a couple of songs. Then my sisters and I ran through our bit—show tunes with a sprinkling of popular music. God, the costumes—" She broke off, laughing, then began to set the kitchen to rights as she talked. "Anyway, we did bring some business in. I always thought Chantel was responsible for that. She was stunning, and though she never had Maddy's range, she could sell a song. The race brought the drivers into town, the mechanics, backers, groupies. We always had a pretty good crowd.''

He watched her move around the kitchen with a smile on her face as though she were amused by the memory. "Every night Pop had to ward men off who wanted to ah… see Chantel home. Then one night Chuck walked in with Brad Billinger."

"Billinger's retired now."

"He quit racing after Chuck was killed. They were close. Very close. I haven't seen him in a couple of years now, but he always sends the boys something on their birthdays and for Christmas. As soon as they sat down at a table, there was a lot of noise and confusion, right during the middle of a set. You get used to that kind of thing in clubs and have to know how to handle it. Noise, hecklers, drunks."

"I can imagine."

"Pop had delegated me to deal with that kind of problem when the three of us were on because Chantel tended to lose her temper and Maddy had a habit of walking right offstage until things calmed down again. So I leaned into the mike and made some joke, something about our next number being so dangerous that we needed absolute quiet. They didn't pay a lot of attention, but we kept on. Then we went into 'Somewhere,' from
West Side Story.
Do you know it?"

"I've heard it." Dylan leaned back and lit a cigarette. Eighteen, and handling drunks and hecklers. She couldn't be as soft as she looked.

"I looked over to where most of the noise was still coming from, and Chuck was looking right at me. It was an odd feeling. When you perform, people watch, but they rarely really look at you. At the break Chantel made a comment about Superdriver staring at me. That was the first inkling I had of what Chuck did for a living. Chantel was always reading gossip columns."

"Now she's in them."

"She loves every minute of it."

After searching through the kitchen drawers, Abby came up with the lid of a mason jar for Dylan to use as an ashtray. "Sorry, I don't have anything else."

"Chris has already given me your views on smoking. So it was love at first sight?"

"It was…" How did she explain? She'd been eighteen, and naive in ways the man sitting in her kitchen would never understand. "You could call it that. Chuck stayed until the last set was over, then came back and introduced himself. Maybe part of the attraction for him was that I really didn't know he was someone I should be impressed with. He was very polite and asked me to dinner. It was after midnight and he asked me to dinner."

She smiled again. She'd been so young and, like Chris, so gullible. "Of course, Pop wouldn't hear of it. The next afternoon there were two dozen roses delivered to the motel where we were staying. Pink roses. Nothing that romantic had ever happened to me. And that night he was back again. He kept coming back until he'd charmed my mother, persuaded my father and infatuated me. When he left Miami for the next race, I left with him. And I had his ring on my finger."

She glanced down. Now it was bare. "Life's a funny thing, isn't it?" she murmured. "You never know what trick it's going to pull next."

"How did your family feel about you marrying Chuck?"

She pulled herself back to the business at hand. Give him enough, Abby reminded herself. Just don't give him everything. "You'd have to understand that my family rarely all think the same thing about anything. My mother cried, then altered her wedding dress to fit me even though we were married by a justice of the peace. Pop cried, too. After all, he was marrying me off to a stranger, and his act had just been shot to hell." Picking up an apple, she polished it absently on her sleeve. "Maddy said I was crazy, but that everyone deserved to do something crazy now and then. And Chantel…" She hesitated.

"Chantel what?"

It was time, she felt, for caution again. "Chantel's the oldest of the three of us—two and a half minutes older than me, but that still makes her big sister. She didn't think Chuck, or anyone, was good enough. She had plans to have a great many love affairs, and decided I was blowing my chance to have them, too." With a laugh, she bit into the apple. "If you believe everything you read, Chantel's had so many love affairs she's lucky to be alive. Trace didn't hear about the wedding until, oh, three or four months later. He sent me a crystal bird from Austria."

"Trace… that's your brother. Older brother. I don't have much information on him."

"Who does? I doubt it matters in this case, really. Trace never even met Chuck."

Dylan made a note anyway. "From there, you hit the circuit. Some might call it an odd sort of honeymoon."

In some ways, that entire first year had been a honeymoon. In other ways, there'd been no honeymoon at all, no solitary time for settling in and learning. "I'd traveled before." She shrugged. "I was born traveling, literally. Pop got my mother off a train in Duluth and to a hospital twenty minutes before she gave birth. Ten days later we hit the road again. Until this place, I'd never lived in one spot for more than six months at a time. You follow one circuit or you follow another."

"But the Grand Prix's more exciting."

"In some ways. But like performing, there's a lot of sweat and preparation for a few minutes in the spotlight."

"Why did you marry him?"

She looked back at him. Her eyes were calm enough, but he thought her smile was just a little sad. "He was a knight on a white charger. I'd always believed in fairy tales."

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She wasn't being honest with him. Dylan didn't need a lie detector to know that Abby veered away from the truth every time they talked. When she veered, she did so calmly, looking him straight in the eye. Only the slightest change in her tone, the briefest hesitation, tipped him off to the lie.

Dylan didn't mind lies. In fact, in his work he expected them. Reasons for them varied—self-preservation, embarrassment, a need to gloss over the image. People wanted to paint themselves in the best light, and it was up to him to find the shadows. A lie, or more precisely the reason for the lie, often told him more than a flat truth. His background as a reporter had taught him to base a story on fact, corroborated fact, then leave judgment to the reader. His opinion might leak through, but his feelings rarely did.

His main problem with Abby was that he'd yet to satisfy himself as to her motivation. Why lie, when the truth would undoubtedly sell more books? Sensationalism was more marketable than domestic bliss. She hadn't reached the point where she portrayed her marriage as idyllic, but she certainly had managed to skim over problem areas.

And there'd been plenty of them.

Alone in his room with only the desk lamp to shed light, Dylan took out a stack of tapes. A glance at this watch showed that it was just past midnight. The rest of the house was long since in bed, but then, regular hours had never been a part of his life. Schedules and time frames boxed a man in. Dylan didn't like walls unless he built them himself. He could work through the day if he chose, or he could work through the night, because hours didn't matter. Only the results.

The house was quiet around him, with only a faint wind scraping at the windows. He might have been alone—but he was aware, maybe too aware, that he wasn't. There were three people in the house, and he found them fascinating.

Chris and Ben, Dylan recalled sympathetically, had gone to their rooms after a firm scolding and a few tears. Using their mother's best china to feed the dog hadn't been the smartest move they could have made. She hadn't lifted a hand to them or even so much as shouted, but her lecture and disapproval had had both boys' chins dragging on the ground. A nice trick. Though it amused him, Dylan pushed the whole business aside. He had work to do, and a woman to figure out.