Cottage by the Sea (8 page)

   A curt voice came on the line.

   "Yes…?"

   "Oh, Jesus, Lisa… I'm sorry," Blythe blurted. "I got your message about remaining here in Cornwall through September, and I wanted to know why you thought it necessary."

   "Where are you now?" Lisa asked abruptly. "Is anybody with you?"

   "Well, there's the lord of Barton Manor, of course… in another room somewhere in this drafty pile," Blythe replied in a voice edged with sarcasm. Was she just another bothersome client to Lisa Spector, now that the lawyer had been paid her fat fee?

   "Is it awful?" Lisa asked, sounding as if any problems that Blythe might be having in far-off Cornwall would be an unwelcome addition to whatever else had landed on her desk that day.

   "No… as a matter of fact, it's quite wonderful," Blythe replied tartly, "but four months of pastoral pleasures may be just too much for a recovering cowgirl like me."

   "Blythe…there's a good reason you should stay there," Lisa said in her most lawyerly tones.

   "Four months?" she demanded. Then, attempting to sound utterly in control of her emotions while, at the same time, making a revelation that surprised even her, she added, "Look, Lisa… I've been having these odd bouts of what I guess is depression since the moment I arrived. Nothing to do with the scenery or the natives, really, but the thought of spending four months completely out of touch with everything I—"

   "Your sister and Christopher got married… right after his courthouse appearance," Lisa interrupted.

   Blythe gripped the edge of Luke's desk with her free hand.

   "The white stretch limo," she blurted. "He took her to a church in it?"

   "He took her to the airport in it," her lawyer replied evenly. "Right behind you, apparently. They flew to Mexico. Presto! Mrs. Christopher Barton-Stowe the Second."

   Blythe was sickeningly aware of the generous portions of Cornish clotted cream churning in her stomach.

   "Blythe? Are you there? Surely you can't be too shocked with the bambino on the way and all that. It was inevitable. Your ex has had enough bad publicity without fathering a little bastard with your last name on the birth certificate." The phone remained silent. "Blythe!
Say
something."

   "He married her…" Blythe murmured into Luke's antique receiver, feeling as if she were speaking underwater. "He married her within hours of divorcing me…"

   "Yeah… well, guys like Christopher Stowe do things like that," Lisa snapped as if her client were avoiding the obvious.

   "I'll be alright…" Blythe said faintly, wondering why she felt the need to reassure a lawyer who had offered her client no sympathy whatsoever.

   Fact was, nothing between her sister Ellie and her had been right for years… way before she'd walked in on her husband getting it on with her own flesh and blood on the chic sofa bed in his director's trailer. There were some things in life that simply defied fixing. Unfortunately, as events had shown over the years, Eleanor Barton specialized in making things worse.

   "I just can't stand it that Ellie actually got him to marry her!" Blythe added in a rush. "It wasn't enough that she fucked my husband and knocked herself up with my baby? Now she's even got my name!"

   "With a little help from old Mr. Midlife Crisis himself," Lisa added caustically. "As you can imagine, every tabloid in the universe managed to cover the nuptials. CNN has gone with the story big-time. The bride looked like a blimp, of course, which made their reporting even juicier. The cooing newlyweds left today for Africa.
In Kenya
starts filming there on a closed set next week. That leaves the Fourth Estate in L.A. with no pictures of them, so the TV trucks are back in front of your house, and everyone's calling here, trying to find you and—"

   "Okay, okay, I get the picture…" snapped Blythe.

   She swallowed hard. There was silence on the line as Lisa gave her time to absorb the details of this latest revelation. As reality sank in, Blythe felt as if she were rolling naked in a bed of nettles. The pain was sharp and the exposure complete. "I suppose Cornwall's as good a spot for exile as anyplace else," she added dully. "Thanks, Lisa, for arranging for the extension on the lease. You'd better get on to your deposition."

   Hooking the earpiece onto the vintage black telephone, she gently hung up. She leaned back in Lucas Teague's leather desk chair and stared blankly into space. Not into space, she realized absently, but at the desolate seascape that hung above the mantelpiece, a near twin to the one over the fireplace in her own cottage. The sweep of vacant sand, lacking footprints or even seaweed, for that matter, seemed as empty as she felt inside. Nothing growing, nothing living, a barren landscape of sharp, treeless cliffs where—

   Blythe closed her eyes and then opened them, startled to see a standing figure suddenly etched against the painting's remote, brooding promontory. Tall, and leaning heavily against a stag horn walking stick, the dark-haired man stared disconsolately down at the churning waters of Veryan Bay, his gaze riveted on an overturned dinghy that bobbed forlornly on the sea.

   Blythe didn't hear the knock reverberating lightly on the sitting-room door.

   "Ready for my tour?" Lucas said cheerfully, and then paused at the threshold, gazing at the stricken look on Blythe's face.

   "What's happened?" he asked, shutting the door behind him. "You've had some bad news." It was a statement, not a question. "Something back in the States, is it?"

   "You couldn't possibly understand," she said in a tight voice. To her astonishment the painted seascape was once more devoid of any sign of life. And so was she.

   "Understand loss?" he asked evenly. "Yes, I think I can."

   "Not my kind of loss," she said, startled from her nearcatatonic state by a sharp stab of galvanizing anger. Luke's wife had died. To be sure, it must have been a tragic, poignant finish, but the late Mrs. Teague, whoever she might have been, didn't betray her husband with his—

   "I have some idea what you've been put through," Luke said quietly.

   "No, you don't!" she cried, slamming her fist against Luke's desktop, unable to prevent the angry outburst that had been boiling just beneath the surface.

   "Blythe," Lucas said, crossing quickly to the desk that stood between them. "Did you notice that satellite dish the size of a dinner plate attached to Mrs. Quiller's kitchen window? We may not have adequate cell phone service, but we watch CNN even in this remote part of the world, you know. And then there're those dreadful tabloids whose headlines scream at one in the food shops. So I do have some notion of what you've been subjected to." He perched one hip on his desk and leaned forward toward the chair where Blythe sat utterly still. "Your former husband's films are splendid, of course, but his behavior has been appalling."

   "Well, can you beat that?" she drawled sarcastically, feeling a mild form of hysteria rising in her throat. "A Cornish guy with his boots on the right feet!"

   Looking puzzled, Luke suggested uncertainly, "I suppose he felt compelled to marry so soon because of the child…"

   
The child… the child… my child…

   "So I gather you caught that CNN broadcast about the ever-so-talented Christopher Stowe marrying my sister Ellie Barton, whose talents are mostly limited to those she can perform on her back!" she declared, her eyes drawn with loathing toward another antique TV set in Luke's office that stared blankly back at her from the corner. "You Brits are all so discreet," she added acidly. "All this time you knew who I was and what had happened in my life, but you never mentioned it, of course!" She wondered if humiliation was a disease you could die from.

   "I assumed that what you'd come here for was anonymity—and a long rest," he replied quietly.

   "I came here to escape!" she cried. "To hide out… to try to forget that my husband screwed my sister, up close and personal, on a couch I special-ordered for his director's trailer!" Moisture bathed her cheeks, and her voice sank to a raw whisper. "I came here to mourn my grandmother… and to get as far away from those two monsters as I possibly cou—"

   Her voice cracked and she was finally speechless. She shifted her gaze to the damask walls that seemed to pulse in concert with the pounding in her chest. She could see that Lucas was earnestly speaking to her, but for some reason she couldn't actually hear what he was saying. That was because she couldn't think coherently. Instead she began to weep. Not a ladylike whimpering, but a wounded animal's keening cries that were so shrill, they made her throat sting. Her loud, attenuated wails were not at all the response that a paying guest should be making in front of her well-meaning host.

   Blindly she rose from her chair to make her escape but was halted midway to the sitting-room door. She fought the stranger's arms that were suddenly wrapped tightly around her shoulders, but Lucas Teague's grip was too strong and his determination to comfort her too great.

   "I'm so sorry… I'm so sorry," he kept repeating.

   "He married her… he
married
her!" she shouted, her voice reaching a frenzied pitch as the weight of the double betrayal bore down on her. "The baby
… my
baby—"

   Then she gave herself up to deep, racking sobs and stopped struggling, allowing Lucas Teague to rock her in his arms.

   "You'll sleep here tonight," he announced softly, "in the guest wing."

The following morning—spent from her ordeal, and embarrassed by her unrestrained outburst in front of her well-mannered host—Blythe woke up in a cheerful yellow guest bedroom and promptly began to weep again. Between bouts of sobs and attempts to get a grip on her emotions, she wondered where she would go next.

   By the time Mrs. Quiller bustled in with a breakfast tray, Blythe also faced another problem: she had a raging sore throat. Her bones had begun to ache, and the crisp linen sheets brushing against her body felt as if they might peel off her skin.

   "All right if I be puttin' yer tea on the bedside cabinet?" the housekeeper inquired.

   Blythe could only produce a strangled croaking sound when she attempted to reply, "Fine… thank you."

   "Oh, dearie dear," Mrs. Quiller clucked. She carefully set the tray down and immediately marched over to the windows. With the hand of a professional she flung back the heavy drapes that had shut out the light in Blythe's large, but rather threadbare, guest quarters. "Let's have a look at you."

   Blythe winced as bright sunshine flooded the room. The older woman approached the side of the bed and scrutinized her houseguest's flushed face.

   "We'll be callin' the doctor straightaway," she announced in a firm manner that brooked no dissent and recalled for Blythe Lucinda Barton's fierce, motherly ministrations whenever someone on the ranch was shown to be genuinely ill. However, malingerers at the Double Bar B were another matter, she remembered ruefully.

   "No! Please…" Blythe rasped, and then was consumed by a fit of coughing. Her fervent wish was simply to crawl back to Painter's Cottage and disappear under the goose-down duvet—forever, if possible. However, when she struggled to sit upright, she soon flopped back onto her pillow and cried weakly, "Ooh…" She suspected that during her fitful night's sleep some raging bull had kicked her in the head.

   "You poor dear," Mrs. Quiller sympathized, helping Blythe to find a comfortable position among the piles of feather pillows. "Just you be tryin' to get some rest and I'll ring Dr. Vickery."

Blythe retained no clear memory of the ensuing twenty-four hours, other than recollecting that a stranger with bushy eyebrows in his early fifties who she assumed was a medical doctor injected her in the bottom with some drug. Following that she had a dim recollection that Mrs. Quiller handed her antibiotics every six hours, around the clock.

   By the second day of her massive indisposition, Blythe's fever broke, but her throat still felt like a fìred-up barbecue pit. She found herself, when not giving in to drugged sleep, unable to refrain from weeping for more than twenty minutes at a time.

   
Cowboy up!
some voice whispered in the back of her mind.

   "I can't!" she wailed, and buried her head beneath a pile of pillows so no one could hear her sobs. The Barton family motto had lost its power to conquer the despair that literally held her by the throat.

   The lanky, balding Dr. Simon Vickery, who had come to see her the first day of her illness, reappeared one morning clad in tweeds appropriate for playing a round of golf, as he explained cheerfully. He peered down her gullet and directed Mrs. Quiller to continue her duties as impromptu nurse and carry on with the medical regimen of sleep, soup, and prescription medications.

   Later that evening Blythe heard the sound of the dumbwaiter creaking to a halt down the hall from her bedroom door. She made a lunge for the box of tissues perched on the nightstand beside her bed. She barely had time to wipe her eyes before the housekeeper opened the door to deliver her dinner tray. However, Blythe assumed that the balled-up tissues already littering her bedspread gave some clue to her mental state.

   "Feelin' any bit better, are we?" The housekeeper smiled encouragingly as her charge struggled to sit up so that the wicker bed tray would fit across her knees. This night's bill of fare featured Mrs. Q's interpretation of minestrone, delicately laced with fresh vegetables from the castle's own kitchen garden.