Lisa Jackson - Confessions

Backing the Jeep out of its parking place, he maneuvered through the garage and into the drizzly light of a wintry San Francisco afternoon. The wet streets were crowded with bustling cars and pedestrians. Holiday lights blinked red and green in the windows of major department stores and bell-ringers stood near the doorways, asking for donations for the needy this holiday season. Slowly traffic inched out of the city. “Whitefire Lake,” Hayden said, catching Leo’s reflection in the rearview mirror. “Believe me, you’re gonna love it there.” As if the dog could understand him! God, he was losing it.

Frowning at the reminder of the small town, he flipped on the radio. He’s spent most of his summers at the lake hanging out with his cousins, Roy, Brian and Toni Fitzpatrick. Roy was dead now and Brian’s wife had finally proved to be Roy’s killer. Hayden scowled. Nope—not many fond memories in Gold Creek.

There had been a girl once. Nadine Powell. She’d been different—or so he’d thought. She’d turned his thinking all around until, like the others, she’d shown her true colors and when offered money to stay away from Garreth’s son, she’d eagerly reached out her greedy little fingers.

He grimaced at the thought of her hands and the way they had touched his body. Good God, he’d almost seduced her a couple of times. No doubt that had been what she’d been hoping for. When he thought of the way she could turn him on...

“Hell!” He ground the gears and the Jeep slid a little. The familiar notes of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” filled the vehicle’s interior. Hayden turned the radio dial to an all-news station. He didn’t want any reminders of the holiday season as his memories of Christmas were tangled up in emotions he didn’t want to dissect.

Though Garreth had proclaimed Christmas as the one time the family was to spend together, he had, often as not, shown up hours late to a goose that was cold and to barely flickering candles that had burned down to stubs of dripped wax.

Even as the spoiled son of Garreth Monroe, Hayden hadn’t wanted to become a man like his father. Though his name promised the same wealth and financial wizardry as that of his predecessors, Hayden had no interest in making money. Hell, he’d already done that with the lousy mill in Oregon.

Maybe, he thought, his mouth thinning in repressed anger, he should change his name. Wouldn’t that tick the old man off?

Except it didn’t matter now. Hayden alone was the sole survivor of the Monroe line—no brothers to carry on the tainted Monroe name. The H. G. Monroe lineage was destined to die with him because he’d sworn to himself over and over again, he’d never become another Monroe mogul.

He wouldn’t marry and he’d never father children. No one really gave a damn, anyway. He knew that he’d been conceived for the express purpose of carrying on the Monroe line and, had he been born a girl, his mother would have been pressed to produce a male child—an heir.

Female after female would have been born until a boy had finally come along. Fortunately for Sylvia Fitzpatrick Monroe, who really wasn’t all that interested in motherhood, she’d come through with a male. Saints be praised, the line would continue! Hayden could imagine the magnums of Dom Pérignon that had been uncorked when his father’s manhood had been proved and his son had been delivered into the world to preserve the family name.

What a joke, he thought, as the Jeep bucked up the steep hills of the city before merging onto the freeway heading north. He laid on the horn when an old white sedan tried to swerve into his lane ahead of him. “Idiot,” he muttered, and Leo snorted in agreement.

The windshield wipers slapped away the rain and the engine thrummed as Hayden shifted down. Cold air seeped in through the windows that didn’t quite close, and rain drizzled down the inside of the glass. Hayden barely noticed. He wasn’t about to return to his father’s house and take the damned Ferrari.

“Damn you, Garreth,” he growled, as if his father could hear him. “Leave me alone.” The way you did when I was a kid.

If having a son were such a big deal, why hadn’t the old man taken any interest in him until he could read the market quotes in the Wall Street Journal?

“Bastard.” Hayden had grown up all alone, and that’s the way he planned to live the rest of his life. Alone.

He could think of worse company.

* * *

HANDS ON HER jean-clad hips, Nadine stood near her idling Chevy and stared at the fortress that protected the Monroe summer home. In all her thirty years—even in the few weeks when she’d been secretly seeing Hayden—she’d never walked through the sturdy wrought-iron gates that led to what was rumored to once have been the fanciest house on the lake, built by a movie star in the late twenties and purchased—or, more likely, stolen—by the thieving Monroe family in the fifties.

Her lips turned down at the corners as she eyed the rock wall that stretched around all fifteen acres of prime lakefront property. Only the uppermost branches of the tallest pines were visible over the eight feet of stacked basalt and mortar.

And now, she was allowed—as a servant, she reminded herself—access to the fabled estate. The code she’d been given by the hotshot attorney in San Francisco worked. She punched out the numbers on a keypad and electronically, with a loud clang and groan, the gates swung inward.

Ironic, she thought, that she should be here, called upon to clean up the old manor, get it ready for its new inhabitant. It seemed that the attorney who had hired her didn’t know about her connection to the Monroes. All the better.

She slid behind the wheel of her Nova and disengaged the emergency brake. The little car sprang forward, as if as eager as she to view the mansion owned by the man who had nearly single-handedly ruined her family.

The drive was overgrown with weeds, but still seemed inviting as it curved through a forest of sequoia, oak and pine. Pale winter sun streamed through the leafless branches and spattered the ground with pools of shimmering light.

As she glanced in her rearview mirror, she noticed the huge gate swing closed again, cutting her off from the stretch of road that wound through the hills surrounding Whitefire Lake.

She’d thought often of leaving Gold Creek, but after her shattering experience with Hayden, and what had happened to her as a direct result of her short-lived romance with him, she’d never left again. Her family, or what was left of it, still resided in the town, and she wasn’t the kind of woman who would fit into the suburban sprawl or the hectic pace of the city. She’d learned that lesson the hard way. So, after being shipped off to a boarding school her parents could barely afford, she’d returned to Gold Creek and her battered family. Through her parents’ divorce, through her eldest brother’s death and through a bad marriage, she’d stayed.

She’d even, for a brief period, fancied herself in love with Turner Brooks, a rough-and-tumble cowboy whose house she cleaned on a weekly basis.

Nadine squelched that particular thought. She hadn’t let herself think of Turner for several months. He was happily married now, reunited with Heather Tremont, the girl of his dreams. He’d never even known that Nadine had cared about him.

Why was it that she always chose the wrong men?

“Masochist,” she reprimanded herself, as the lane curved and suddenly the lake, smooth as glass, stretched for half a mile to the opposite shore. Mountains rose above the calm water, their jagged snowcapped peaks reflected in the mirror that was Whitefire Lake.

Nadine parked and climbed out of her old car. She shoved her hands into her pockets and shivered as a cold breeze rushed across the water and caught in her hair. Rubbing her arms, she stared past the gazebo, private dock and boathouse and tried to see her own little house, situated on the far banks of the lake, but was only able to recognize the public boat landing and bait-and-tackle shop on the opposite shore.