Catherine Spencer - Passion in Secret

She debated telling him what he could do with his offer, but her frozen feet won out over her pride. “Just as well you’re not inclined to play the gentleman,” she muttered, yanking open the door and climbing in to the blessed warmth of the car. “I might be tempted to knock your cane out from under you!”

“Now that,” he remarked, stepping gently on the gas and pulling smoothly out into the road, “is why some people—people who don’t know you as well as I used to—talk about you the way they do.”

“And how is that, exactly? I’m living in the guest cottage on my parents’ estate, by the way. You turn left on—”

“I remember how to get there, Sally,” he said. “I’ve driven you home often enough, in the past. And to answer your question, unflatteringly. They say you came back to town and brought a bagful of trouble with you. Are they right?”

“Why ask me? You’ll find listening to their version of the facts far more entertaining, I’m sure.”

“As a matter of interest, where have you been for the last several years?”

“At university on the West Coast, and after that, down in the Caribbean.”

He didn’t quite snicker in her face, but he might as well have. “Doing what?” he inquired, his voice shimmering with amusement.

“Well, not weaving sun hats from coconut palm fronds or singing in a mariachi band, if that’s what you’re thinking!”

“You have no idea what I’m thinking, Sally. None at all. And you haven’t answered my question. What kept you in the sunny Caribbean all this time?”

“The same thing that’s keeping me occupied here. Teaching, except the children down there were so under-privileged that working with them was pure pleasure.”

“Very commendable of you, I’m sure. How long did you stay?”

“Two years in Mexico, and two years on the island of St. Lucia after that.”

“Why that part of the world?”

“They needed teachers as badly as I needed to get away from here.”

“What?” His voice quivered with silent laughter. “You never yearned to settle down in picturesque Eastridge Bay? To follow in your sister’s footsteps and marry a fine, upstanding man of good family?”

Once upon a time I did, but you chose to put a wedding ring on Penelope’s finger, instead! “Not all women see marriage as the be-all and end-all of happiness. Some of us find satisfaction in a career.”

“But not everyone runs away to a tropical island to find it.”

“I was trying to escape the winters up here. But this town is my home and I was happy to come back to it—until everything started going wrong.” She shivered inside her coat. The rain, she noticed, had turned to snow and was sliding down the windshield in big, sloppy flakes. She noticed, too, that they’d passed the turnoff for Bayview Heights blocks before, and were speeding instead along the main boulevard leading out of town. “You’re going the wrong way, Jake!”

“So I am,” he said cheerfully.

“Well, turn around and head back! And slow down while you’re at it. I’ve spent enough time stuck in a snow-bank, for one night.”

“No need to get all exercised, Sally. Since I’ve missed the turn anyway, we might as well enjoy a little spin in the country.”

“I don’t want to go for a spin in the country,” she told him emphatically. “I want to go home.”

“And you will, my lovely. All in good time.”

“Right now!” She reached for the door handle. “Stop this car at once, Jake Harrington. And stop calling me that.”

He didn’t bother to reply. The only sound to register above the low hum of the heater was the click of automatic door locks sliding home and the increased hiss of the tires on the slick surface of the road.

Stunned, she turned to stare at him. There were no streetlights this far beyond the town limits, but the gleam of the dashboard lights showed his profile in grim relief. “Are you kidnapping me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Then just what are you doing?”

“Looking for a place where we can get something hot to drink. It’s the least I can do, to make up for keeping you out past your bedtime.”

The words themselves might have been innocuous enough, but there was nothing affable or benign in his tone of voice. The man who’d beguiled her with his smile and tender memories not half an hour ago, who’d offered her a ride home to spare her walking along icy streets, had turned into a stranger as cold and threatening as the night outside.

“You had this planned all along, didn’t you?” she said, struggling to suppress the fear suddenly tapping along the fringes of her mind. She’d accepted a lift from her one-time lover, the local hero come home from doing battle and with the scars to prove it, not from some faceless stranger, for heaven’s sake! To suspect he posed any sort of threat was nothing short of absurd. “This is what you intended, from the minute you showed up in my classroom.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, you didn’t have to go to such extremes. I’d have been happy to stop for coffee at a place in town.”

“Too risky. Think of the gossip, if we’d been seen together. The widower and the wild woman flaunting their association in public! Better to find some out-of-the-way place where the kind of people we know wouldn’t dream of setting foot. A place so seedy, no respectable woman would want to be seen by anyone she knew.”

Seedy? What on earth would prompt him to use such a word?

Numbly she stared ahead, once again in the grip of that eerie unease. By then, the snow had begun to settle, turning the windows opaque except for the half-moons cleared by the windshield wipers. She could see nothing of the landscape flying past, nothing of where they’d been or where they were headed.

Then, off to the side, some hundred yards or so down the road, a band of orange light pierced the gloom; a neon sign at first flashing dimly through the swirling snow, but growing brighter as the car drew nearer, until there was no mistaking its message. Harlan’s Roadhouse it read. Beer— Eats—Billiards.

And her premonition crystalized into outright dismay. She’d seen that sign before. And Jake was well aware of the fact!

He slowed to turn into the rutted parking area, nosed the car to a spot close to the tavern entrance and turned off the engine. Immediately the muffled, relentless throb of country and western music filled the otherwise quiet night, its only competition the equally brutal pounding of Sally’s heart.

He climbed out of the car and, despite his earlier claim that he was too lame to play the gentleman, came around and opened the passenger door. When she made no move to join him, he reached across to unclip her seat belt and grasped her elbow. “This is as far as we go, Sally,” he said blandly. “Hop out and be quick about it.”

“I’d rather not.”

“I’d rather you did. And I’m not taking you back to town until you do.”

Odd how a man’s mood could shift so abruptly from mild to menacing; how smoldering rage could make its presence felt without a voice being raised. And stranger still that a person could find herself responding hypnotically to a command she knew would result in nothing but disaster.

Like a sleepwalker, she stepped out into the snow, yet felt nothing of its stinging cold. Was barely aware of putting one foot in front of another as she walked beside Jake, past the rusted pickup trucks and jalopies, to the entrance of the building.

“After you,” he said, pushing open the scarred wooden door and ushering her unceremoniously into the smoke-filled interior.

At once, the noise blasted out to meet her. The smell of beer and cheap perfume, mingled with sweat and tobacco, assailed her senses.