Haunting Olivia (13 page)

“For Kayla to have her mother too. How could I not want that for her?”

She had smiled and glanced back at Kayla, who had snaked an arm around her Winnie the Pooh.

“I know tomorrow may bring a lot of questions, and I’m prepared for that.”

“Your talk with her went very well,” Zach had 118

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said. “It was a great start. She reacted so much better than I thought she might.”

It still felt surreal to Olivia. She’d been talking to her own daughter.
Her
daughter. They would both need time to get to know each other, become familiar to each other. When Olivia had first come to the door tonight, she and Kayla had just stared at each other for a full minute, taking in each other’s faces, bodies, expressions, mannerisms. There was so much to see, let alone know.

Olivia reluctantly stood, and she and Zach stepped out of the room. As they headed downstairs, she said, “Zach, there was another incident today.”

“I had a bad feeling when I saw you pull up in a different car,” he said. “I meant to ask you about it, but with all that was going on with Kayla, it went out of my head. What happened?”

“Someone slashed my tires and defaced my car window with another nasty note. This time it said,

‘Rich Bitch.’”

Zach shook his head. “This is ridiculous. Who’s pulling these kinds of immature stunts?”

“Maybe it’s Johanna. She told me she and my father were engaged, but according to Pearl, who seems quite the gossip, my father dated a different woman every time he came to Blueberry.”

“Well, that wasn’t often,” Zach said. “I certainly never saw him around town. And I had to pass the house a few times. There were never signs of life.”

“So is Johanna living in a fantasy world?” Olivia asked.

Zach shrugged. “I don’t know her at all.”

“There’s another person I’ve been wondering HAUNTING OLIV IA

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about,” Olivia said, hesitant about saying something at all. “Look, Zach, I feel really uncomfortable about even bringing this up, but Marnie does seem to have a problem with me.”

Zach nodded. “Yes, I’d say she does. I don’t know if she’s capable of trashing your entryway and car, though. Doesn’t sound like her. I’ve seen her angry and frustrated and she’s never resorted to backhanded retaliation or subterfuge.”

She’s probably never felt her relationship with you
threatened before,
Olivia wanted to say, but Zach headed into the kitchen to make coffee, and the subject of Marnie was most likely better left alone.

In a few minutes, Zach returned with two mugs of coffee. He set them on the coffee table, then sat down next to her on the sofa. He was so close that their thighs could almost touch if she leaned over just a little. Which she wouldn’t, of course.

But she wanted to.

He glanced at her for a moment, and Olivia almost thought he might just reach over and kiss her, but he didn’t. He picked up his mug and sipped his coffee.

I do want him to kiss me. More than anything,
she realized. This was the first guy she’d ever loved.

And what had torn them apart hadn’t been either of their faults.

They were silent for a moment. She wondered if he was thinking the same thing.

“I really want to get to the bottom of who’s leaving you these nasty notes,” he said. So much for him thinking the same thing. But she was touched that he cared. “I’ll stop by the police station and see what I can find out.”

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“Thanks, Zach,” she said. “I also had a strange run-in at the General Store today. A woman I’ve never seen before stared at me with total disdain, then just turned and left when I said hello. Ten minutes later, my car was trashed.” Olivia described the woman as best as she could remember.

“Sounds like Jacqueline McCord,” Zach said. “We grew up next door to each other. Her family barely had it together better than mine. I remember being eleven, twelve, and watching guys crawling in and out of her bedroom window. She got pregnant at sixteen and dropped out of high school, and I never saw another guy around her house after that. When I was sixteen, she showed up in my bedroom when no one was home and told me I could do anything I wanted to her. She’s four years older, so I have no idea why she’d be interested in a high school kid. I lied and told her I had a girlfriend, and she got enraged.” He shook his head.

“What happened?”

“She said a high school girl could never satisfy me the way she could, a woman. She lifted up her sweater and showed me her breasts, as though I wouldn’t be able to resist. So I told her I would never cheat on my girlfriend, and she told me I was a loser and left. She replayed that scenario at least ten times until I left Blueberr y. And then when I came back five years later with Kayla, she tried ever ything to get closer to me—volunteering to baby-sit, be Kayla’s nanny, always bringing over dinners in Tupperware. Once she even came over in nothing but a raincoat and said, “This is all I have left to entice you,” and held open her raincoat. She was buck naked.”

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Olivia recalled how attractive Jacqueline was, even with a murderous expression. “What did you do?”

“I pulled her coat closed and told her that I thought she was a beautiful woman, but that I couldn’t possibly get involved, what with having a five-year-old and starting up my career, and that I thought too highly of her to take advantage of her.”

“That sounds nice,” Olivia said.

“I thought so, but she told me that she wanted me to take advantage of her. That’s when things turned ugly. She started screaming that I thought I was better than she was since I’d left Blueberry and come back with a college degree. It took a while for me to calm her down.”

“Have you spoken since?” Olivia asked.

“I’m always polite to her when I see her in town, but she glares at me and huffs away.”

Olivia took a sip of her coffee. “Well, if she gave me the evil eye because she’s seen us together, she must really stare down Marnie.”

Zach smiled. “She does. But there’s little Marnie’s afraid of. She marched up to Jacqueline the first time Jacqueline stared her up and down and told her off.”

“So Marnie does have a hot temper?”

Zach leaned back against the couch. “It’s hard for me to say. I guess I don’t really know. Marnie and I are dating, Olivia. So we see each other at night for dinner or movies; there’s little to rile her up.” He paused for a moment. “Look, Olivia, I think I’d better tell you that Marnie and I are a couple. We’ve never had any talks about exclusivity, but we see each other a few times a week. We saw 122

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each other last night, as a matter of fact, after I left your house.”

“I know,” Olivia said, offering a hint of a smile.

“In fact, Marnie can still—and I quote—‘feel the impression of the steering wheel against my back.’”

Zach looked shocked. “She told you that?”

“I ran into her this morning.”

Zach shook his head. “How does our sex life possibly work its way into conversation with someone she just met the evening before?”

“I think she’s just trying to tell me that you’re hers.”

He let out a deep breath. “I don’t know if I’m hers. I don’t know anything right now.”

“I can understand that,” she said. “I gave you quite a shock.”

He glanced at her. “You did at that, Olivia.”

For a moment they were silent.

“Zach, if it’s all right with you, I’d like to spend some time with Kayla tomorrow. Maybe I can take her out to breakfast and tell her I’ll be coordinating the pageant.” She froze. “Oh, no. The pageant.

I’ll need to tell Pearl that I’m Kayla’s mother. I don’t know if she’ll allow me to coordinate under that circumstance.”

“Well, let’s see what she says. It’s not as though you’re
judging
the pageant. And taking Kayla out to breakfast sounds great. You don’t even have to be too early. She’s suspended from school for a few days.”

“You mentioned that at Barker’s,” she said. “What did she do?”

“She was caught smoking—for the second time.”

“Smoking!” Olivia couldn’t believe it. Smoking at thirteen?

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Zach sighed. “We had a long talk. She’s grounded—

her third or fourth grounding this month alone. “The Inner-Beauty Pageant couldn’t have come up at a better time. I think it’ll do a lot of my work for me.”

Olivia nodded and sipped her coffee. “I can only imagine how tough it must be to raise an adoles-cent girl. I agree that the pageant will do so much good for Kayla. It asks girls to really focus on who they are inside. And for young girls just forming their identities, like Kayla, you’re right that it couldn’t have come into her life at a better time.”

They each ruminated on that for a moment, and then Zach got up to refill their mugs. She couldn’t possibly ask for a third cup, but she’d take any excuse not to leave. Being in this room, in this house, with Zach, with her daughter—
her daughter!
—

sleeping upstairs—it was like a dream from which she never wanted to awaken.

“You’re welcome to the spare bedroom if you don’t want to go home,” Zach said, reading her mind. “Two incidents at the cottage in as many days—I’m not too comfortable with you there overnight alone.”

She was so surprised that he
did
care about her that she almost dropped her cup. In a moment, he was beside her on the couch, steadying her hand.

His hand felt so good on hers. She closed her eyes to savor it, and then she felt his lips on hers. She opened her eyes, amazed to discover she wasn’t imagining it. Or dreaming. He held her gaze, giving her the opportunity to say no.

“I must be crazy,” he said. “Because things are crazy enough right now. But I’ve been wanting to do that for two hours.”

“Me too,” she whispered.

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“I remember our first kiss,” he said. “On the beach, at night. The warm July wind blowing your hair all around. I thought you were the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.”

She smiled, the image of Zach at seventeen filling her mind. “I thought the same about you.”

“I couldn’t believe you were really interested in me.

But it wasn’t like I had anything but myself to offer you, so I figured you must actually like me for me.”

She laughed. “I did.”

And then she kissed him, tentatively, questioningly. Giving him the out, time to change his mind, tell her it
was
crazy to do this with everything else that was going on.

But he slid his arms around her, pulling her closer, his chest crushing against hers. He kissed her the way he used to, with all the passion inside him, kisses that always led to their making love.

He pulled away and looked at her, and for a moment, she was looking at the Zach she’d loved so much. He took her hand and led her to the room off the living room. It was a spare bedroom, with French doors, which he closed behind them, then locked.

He pressed her against the doors in another kiss, his hands unbuttoning her blouse and then making quick work of her bra. He groaned at the sight of her breasts and cupped them, teasing her nipples until her legs almost buckled. He undid the snap of her pants and slid them down her hips and thighs, then used a finger to ease off her panties.

She stood naked before him and he stepped back to take her in, groaning again. In moments his clothes had joined hers on the floor and he pressed her down with his body onto the fluffy white rug by HAUNTING OLIV IA

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the bed, his hands and mouth roaming every inch of her until she almost screamed.

“Now, Zach,” she breathed, unable to wait a moment more.

He reached for his pants and removed a condom from his wallet. She didn’t care that last night he might very well have been making love to Marnie on this very rug. She only wanted him inside her.

And then he was. Her nails dug into his back as he entered her, and he groaned against her hair.

He then lifted her hips and shifted them to a sitting position against the bed so that she was on top of him. He lifted her up and down against the hard length of him until the waves overcame her and she exploded in pleasure. And then he laid her down on the rug again and rode her hard and fast until he too was spent.

They lay there, catching their breath, until Zach suddenly bolted up.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I thought I heard noises outside the window,” he said, glancing up at the window in front of the bed.

The curtains were drawn, but there was a slight gap between them. And the low lamp from the bedside table could have illuminated them enough for someone to have seen them. “It was like the sound of a foot breaking a branch.”

“Maybe it was a raccoon,” Olivia said.
Or Marnie,
she thought.

“Maybe,” he said.

He looked at her, then down the length of her naked body. “You’re exquisite, Olivia.”

She felt herself blush. “You are too.”

“I’d like you to stay the night.”

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“I wish I could,” Olivia said, “but rules of my father’s will stipulate that I spend every night of a month at the cottage.”

He rolled his eyes. “Your father’s rules never made any sense.”

She smiled. “I know.”

“Keep a phone beside you at all times,” he said.

“And I want you to call me when you get home.”

Pleased, she reached over to kiss him, but he’d already moved away. She suddenly felt very naked.

Exposed. And like a fool for moving so fast. What had she been thinking? She
hadn’t
been thinking.

The man had just told her himself that he’d been with another woman last night. No, not just another woman. His girlfriend. And yet she let herself get caught up and carried away, let him make love to her.

No again. Let him have
sex
with her. Sex, that was what it had been. Hot, fast, lusty, unemotional sex.

Always good during the doing. Not so good during the aftermath, when you lie there feeling . . . alone.