Лорен Кейт: The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove

“Jesus,” I gasped. “I thought you were—”

“My mother, coming in to soap your back?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Get in here.” I grabbed his arm to pull him in. Finally, things were getting back to the way they belonged: steamy.

But Mike looked around, as if his family could see us alone in the bathroom.

“I can’t,” he said. “I have to help my parents unload the car. Mom was hoping we could all have dinner.”

“Dinner?” I said. Dinner chez Diana’s was so not part of the plan. I needed alone time with Mike to gear up for our big week. “What about the lake?”

Mike took the loofah out of my hand, turned my body around with one deft movement of his wrist, and started lathering my shoulder.

“Don’t change the subject,” I moaned.

“We can’t exactly get out of it,” Mike said. “I’ll take you out in the boat after dinner.”

I whipped my head around. “Just the two of us?”

“On a school night,” he winked.

“Ooh,” I smiled. “What will Mother think?”

Clean enough and appropriately attired in the tennis dress Mike had even laid out for me on the bed — what, did he think I was going to wear the teddy to dinner? — I tromped down the hardwood stairs.

Through the French windows, I could see Mr. and Mrs. King relaxing on the terrace facing the glittering water at the west end of the Cove. Diana was cross-legged in her navy-blue skirt suit, reading the paper and sipping her token glass of Viognier. Her frosted hair was gathered in a low bun at her neck and, as ever, her foundation was flawless. Mike’s father, Phillip, who carried visible stress in every part of his body — and who Mike took after in looks alone — had his brow furrowed and was shouting into his cell phone. The toe of his polished leather dress shoe was making rushed circles in the air.

Nothing indicated the imminent parental dinner party. But when I heard the telltale clamoring of pots behind the closed doors of the kitchen, I got it. Just because no King had set foot in that kitchen since they approved the architect’s floor plan, it didn’t mean someone else wasn’t whipping up a feast in their honor. Of course, they couldn’t travel the thirty miles to the shore without “help.” Of course, they would have brought their housekeeper Binky in tow.

Binky and I had a complicated relationship — there were times, like right now, when I almost related more to her than to the rest of Mike’s family. I knew that when she wasn’t boarding with the Kings, she lived in my old neck of the woods, in Cawdor across the bridge. In fact, the first time I met Binky, we bonded over a shared love for the huevos rancheros at Dos Hermanos, a hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint near her house. It wasn’t until Mrs. King cocked her head at me and asked when on earth I would ever have been on that side of town that I remembered my new position over here. I had to resort to stammering something I’m not proud of about getting really lost one time during my driver’s ed test. After that, I learned to be cautious about what I let slip in front of Binky. By now, I knew this was easier to do if I just didn’t blur the line between servant and the served.

“There you are,” Mike said, coming in from the library. He kissed my forehead, all PG and appropriate. “I hope you don’t mind, when Mom saw your dress, she asked Binky to iron it.”

“Your mother went through my things?” I asked. So Diana, not Mike, had laid out my dress. I didn’t think I had anything suspicious in my bag, but giving Diana free rein over my things was definitely not a precedent I wanted to set.

“We were just trying to help you do a quick costume change,” Mike said, always the mitigator. “Speaking of costumes, are you going to give me a late-night preview of your costume for tomorrow?”

The Mardi Gras party. I’d finally settled on a costume, and after a tiny battle with Mike — why did guys always want to wear makeup and stockings? — I’d convinced him that this year, we were going to shock everyone by taking the classy route. It was a given that every one of my friends would still be rocking that tired brothel-employee look, and I loved the idea of being the only lady in the house. Mike’s debonair get up this year was of equal importance. He was really going to stand out — especially next to Justin Balmer in a minidress.

“Our costumes for tomorrow are still a surprise, right?” I said to Mike. “You haven’t told J.B. or anyone? This is our moment to outshine them — show we’re really royalty material.”

“Trust me,” Mike said, taking my hand to go greet his royal family outside. “We’ll blow the whole party away.”

“Hello, Natalie.” Mr. King stood up to give me a very charged squeeze on the shoulder. “Aren’t you tan?” he asked, taking me in head to toe.

“Goodness,” Diana said, peering at me over her paper. “She certainly is brown, isn’t she?”

“Golf lessons,” I piped up, lest either of them assume I’d been working in the field. “At the club.”

Diana looked down at her own arms. “I’m so pale, like Scarlett O’Hara. You know that used to be the fashion.” She looked around and gave us all a tight-lipped smile. “Who wants to take dinner on the terrace tonight?”

With a shrug, Mike deferred to me.

“Of course,” I said, taking a seat on the patio between his parents. Like Mom always said: It doesn’t matter where you are; if you act at home, you will be. Then again, I wasn’t sure Mom’s limited Emily Post library book repertoire would have gotten her far with this crowd.

Especially with someone like Diana, who picked up a silver bell from the glass tabletop and jangled her thin, Scarlett O’Hara-pale wrist. The high, tinny sound rang out across the yard, and I thought about what this unspoken summons might sound like to anyone out on the bay. Then again, the houses in the Cove (a.k.a. the Coveted) were so spread out, the Kings and I might be the only ones around for miles.

Seconds later, Binky arrived to answer her summons. She wore a starched black uniform that smelled of lavender, and the laces on her sensible black shoes were double-knotted. Her short dark hair had the telltale bluish tint of drugstore dye. Her smile looked slack when she stood expectantly before the Kings.

“Our guest would like to dine outside,” Diana said. “I hope that’s not too much trouble for you.”

“Of course not,” Binky nodded. She looked at me. “Hello, Miss Natalie.”

I smiled and nodded back at Binky but decided to keep my mouth shut. It was only the hundredth time I’d had dinner with Mike’s parents, but I was still forever designated as the “guest.”

It was getting to be that time of year in Charleston when it was still warm enough to swim, and the advancing sunsets always came as a surprise. The canopy of pine trees above us cast an acid-green tint on the Kings and me as each of us waited for someone else to pick up the conversation. Cicadas buzzed in the dusk. A pinecone thumped to the ground.

At the sound of voices near the dock, Diana beamed and rose from her chair. She gave her staid, ex-beauty-queen wrist twist to Mike’s brother Phillip Jr. and his new fiancée, Isabelle, as they came up the path.

I noticed a sailboat docked in the King marina, but from the freshly pressed look of Phillip and Isabelle’s matching white dinner clothes, I was guessing that they, too, had a couple of hired hands on deck.

“You made it,” Diana called.

Isabelle doled out a slew of squeaky air kisses while Phillip Jr. moved in at the bar. “We heard your little dinner bell and just came running,” he said dryly, dropping bitters into a bourbon.

Despite his namesake, Phillip Jr. had opted out of the family radiology business when he graduated from med school last year. Instead, he’d started his own practice and had since become one of Charleston’s hottest young plastic surgeons. It was all very hush-hush — plastics being borderline unacceptable in a family of “real” doctors — but from the seamless skin around Diana’s eyes when she smiled at her future daughter-in-law, it was obvious that someone had discovered the perks of having a son with an endless supply of botox.