Jasmine Cresswell - Payback

Perhaps he should call Kate and warn her that her mother…He cut off that insidious thought before it could carry him down any of the dangerous paths that led to Kate. He’d taken that walk too many times already, and he sure as hell didn’t plan to take it again. He’d told Avery what he’d seen and his responsibilities in regard to Ron Raven’s resurrection were now ended.

It was time to move on, leaving Kate locked safely in the past, where she belonged.

Later the same day

Kate Fairfax—formerly Kate Raven—not only loved her mother, she’d always admired her. Her respect had been heartfelt, even during her teenage years when she’d been intimidated by her mother’s unfailing elegance and exquisite taste. In self-defense, Kate had indulged in a few years of grunge dressing just to prove that she didn’t give a flying flip about clothes or makeup. On her eighteenth birthday she’d reinforced her rebellion by getting a tattoo of a dragon on her butt, a gold ring threaded through her left nostril and multiple piercings in both ears.

Her efforts provoked a satisfactory bellow of outrage from her father, but unfortunately nothing much from her mother. After complimenting Kate’s choice of earrings, Avery offered a mild comment to the effect that she’d always wanted to have a tattoo but was too much of a coward to endure the pain.

Since her mother didn’t seem to care in the slightest about the nose ring, and it was a major pain to keep the hole disinfected, Kate had given up on it within three months. By the end of her first semester in culinary school, she’d allowed half of the ear piercings to close, and by the time she graduated, she had acquired a fair-size wardrobe of clothes that weren’t black, weren’t denim and had no rips anywhere.

The tattoo, however, she’d never for a single moment regretted. Luke had christened the dragon Puff, and had woven several highly erotic fantasies that supposedly revealed the secret story of how Puff came to end up living on her butt. It was only after they broke up that she happened to hear the old Peter, Paul and Mary song and understand why he’d picked that name. It annoyed her every time she glimpsed the dragon in her bathroom mirror and realized that she was still mentally calling him Puff. There was also the problem of the tiny jeweled egg that she kept buried in a shoe box in her closet. This, according to Luke when he gave it to her, was the egg from which Puff had hatched several centuries earlier. The fact that she had neither given the egg away nor found the courage to display it on a shelf suggested an unhealthy level of neurosis about the ending of their relationship.

Her memories of Luke sometimes seemed impossible to shake, and Kate was frustrated by her inability to banish him to the trash can of past mistakes. She was twenty-seven, for heaven’s sake, which ought to be old enough to recognize when a relationship had been doomed from the start. She constantly repeated the reasons why they had made a lousy couple and her brain was finally convinced by the mantra. Unfortunately, the rest of her was having a hard time getting with the program. A succession of dates in the past couple of months had merely reinforced the forbidden judgment that Luke Savarini was the world’s most superlative kisser, bar none. Why couldn’t he have been an arrogant, uncaring lover to match the rest of his arrogant, uncaring personality? That was one of life’s more annoying puzzles.

Kate switched her thoughts back to her mother, which was a lot more agreeable than thinking about Luke. In the six months since her father had died, her lifelong admiration for her mother had blossomed into full-blown hero worship. She had learned how much more there was to Avery than a kind heart, a pretty face and a knack for selecting attractive clothes. She watched the bravery with which her mother set about rebuilding a life that had been shattered not only emotionally and socially but also financially, and she was torn between pride and an odd sense of role-reversal protectiveness.

Today, as she looked around the little house that her mother had just begun to restore, Kate’s admiration was tinged by a dose of worry. The house was structurally sound, but it had been owned by an elderly couple for fifty years, and routine upkeep had clearly defeated them over the past decade. Avery had acquired the house for a rock-bottom price, despite the excellent location. Still, ten days of hard work had barely made a dent in what needed to be done.

The kitchen had the very latest in modern conveniences, circa 1973. The shag carpet looked as if it might date from approximately the same era, and the drapes seemed to be held together by twenty years of solidified grime. Last weekend they’d managed to clean the master bedroom and bathroom and get both rooms painted. On Monday, a new bed had been delivered, so Avery now had somewhere other than Kate’s small row house where she could take showers and sleep. The rest of the place, however, was still a complete disaster.

Carrying a pail of steaming water, her mother returned from the kitchen just as Kate poked gingerly at an unidentified gray object on the decrepit living room sofa. “I think it was a cushion,” Avery said.

“I’ll take your word for it.” Katie shoved the putative pillow into a giant plastic garbage bag, already half full of similar unidentified objects. The house should have been cleared out by the sellers, but pursuing them out of state to their retirement villa was more hassle than doing the cleanup themselves. “How much money have you set aside for hauling trash, Mom?”

“Sorry? What was that?” Avery set the pail by the fireplace and pulled on rubber gloves.

“I wondered if you’d budgeted enough money for hauling trash,” Kate repeated.

“Oh, yes, I’m sure I have. I got several quotes, you know. It’s less expensive than you’d expect. Or less expensive than I expected, anyway.” Avery looked vaguely around the room, as if waiting for hard copy of the quotes to leap into her hand. “The men I contracted with are scheduled to come on Friday, and they’ve agreed to rip up the carpet, too.”

“Good.” Kate reviewed her mental checklist. “The hardwood gets refinished next week, right?”

“Hardwood?” Avery looked vague again. “Oh, yes, the floors. That’s right. They’ll take a day to sand everything down and then another day to apply the coating. They promised to be done by the middle of next week, so I decided to hold off on getting any more of my new furniture delivered until then. Thank goodness, everything I ordered seems to have arrived from the manufacturers.”

“Sounds like you have a plan. You seem preoccupied today, Mom. What’s up?” Kate gingerly pulled out the sofa, afraid of what she might discover between the furniture and the wall. Dust bunnies frolicked in abundance, but there were no live critters, thank God.

“I am a little distracted, I suppose. I’ve…had some surprising news.” The tension in her mother’s voice was palpable. Belatedly, Kate realized that Avery had been on edge the entire afternoon. She would have noticed earlier if they hadn’t mostly been working in separate rooms.

“Surprising good news?” she asked, straightening. Searching her mother’s face, she shook her head. “No, it’s bad news, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure.” Avery’s laugh was harsh, an astonishing fact in and of itself. Kate was even more astonished when her mother covered her face with her grimy hands and burst into tears. “Oh, God, how can I possibly say I’m not sure? I loved him! I did. Once upon a time I loved him. So what’s the matter with me?”

Loved who? Kate put her arm around her mother’s slender shoulders. “I could answer that better if you’d give me some clue as to what we’re talking about.”