Intimate Betrayal (5 page)

Fletcher watched her walk away from him, her long slender legs, the subtle curve of her ass under her skirt. Annie Jefferson
always dressed in an elegant professional manner, usually wearing tailored suits that displayed her trim body to perfection
without flaunting it. She had great legs. Her breasts—which he’d once caught a glimpse of through a sheer blouse on a hot
day—were to die for. And her face was lovely. Clear blue eyes, looking surprisingly innocent for a woman who had been married
for several years. Something sensual about the mouth. A straight nose with tiny nostrils that flared occasionally, when she
was angry or upset about something, although she was too cool ever to let any negative emotions register for long on her face.

Ever since he’d first met her, he’d wanted to fuck her Just that. He didn’t want a relationship with her. He didn’t
do
relationships. He fucked—and rarely the same woman twice. He didn’t need the hassle of a woman in his life, didn’t want the
inevitable conflict, the jockeying for control, the complaints that he was inattentive or unfaithful or unable to commit.

He also didn’t want any woman poking into his past.

He just wanted to fuck as many females as possible. Preferably the good-looking; submissive ones.

Annie fascinated him. She was cool on the surface, but he
fantasized that underneath that elegant control was a woman who shared his own dark passions.

He had to be careful, though. Fucking female colleagues was not smart. These days you could get hit with a lawsuit for even
seeming
interested
in fucking female colleagues. His real heyday had been years ago in the singles bars, where the women were so eager to get
home for a quick roll that he barely had to do a thing. His looks had been good enough—and they’d loved his well-toned, muscular
body.

But the bar scene wasn’t the same since the advent of HIV. Especially here in the City of Fairies. He had his best luck these
days in the gym where he worked out. Women were into weight training these days. And there in the exercise room in front of
the full-length mirrors that adorned every wall, he could check them out and they could check him out and it could all be
arranged hardly without saying a word.

Trouble was, Fletcher didn’t go for the hard-body type. He liked his women soft. He wanted to run his palms and fingers over
soft juicy breasts, not hard pecs. He didn’t want some bitch who could wrestle and pin him. He wanted one who was fluttery
and helpless in his arms. He wanted a shy, reluctant lady, not a muscle-pumping bull dyke.

Despite the fact that she worked at least part of every day in a hard-hat construction site, Annie Jefferson always looked
like a lady. She dressed like a lady, too, in suits and blouses and shiny shoes with little heels and matching handbags. She
wore pale lipstick, and her perfect little fingernails were always painted soft pink or beige, never harsh and red. She was
sweet and gentle, with a well-modulated voice and a patient smile even when things weren’t going well. She was all woman.
She was everything he’d ever wanted.

He loved to picture it—Annie Jefferson’s slim, elegant body naked under his, straining and thrashing, a lovely sheen of perspiration
rising on her honey-gold skin, her head tipped back, her eyes wide with passion—or, better, with fear—and her soft lips widening
in a scream.…

One night.

It was all he wanted, all he needed.

One night that she would remember forever.

Darcy laid out the tarot deck and pondered the cards.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that around me,” Annie said.

Darcy looked up, blinking. “I thought you didn’t believe in it.”

“I don’t. Well… I don’t think I do,” she added with a smile. “But you always look so serious, and I find myself half expecting
some gloomy death and disaster card to show up.”

“There’ve been a lot of those gloomy death and disaster cards lately, it’s true,” Darcy said cheerfully. “But I’ve also seen
some good cards for you. A strong, exciting man. Passion. Romance.”

“Now that’s the sort of thing I want to hear—good cards, predicting wonderful events and summoning handsome, sensitive, capable-of-commitment
men!”

Darcy giggled. “Hey, they’re my cards—I’ve got dibs on those guys, if they exist.”

She and Darcy had gotten together for supper, as they often did on weeknights after work. Tonight was Annie’s turn to cook,
and she was tossing a salad while Darcy read the tarot.

“So what do you see in store for yourself?” Annie asked as she popped a loaf of San Francisco’s famous sourdough bread into
the oven.

The lower level of the house was open space, without walls separating the living, dining, and kitchen areas. Annie could see
Darcy glaring at the latest spread on the coffee table before scattering it with her hands.

“Trouble,” she said glumly. “Why’d I ever take up this New Agey stuff anyway? It’s depressing as hell. You’d think I’d be
resigned by now to being a dull person leading an uninspired life.”

“Nonsense!” said Annie. “You are by no means a dull person. Everybody adores you, Darcy.”

And it was true, she thought. She wasn’t just complimenting her best friend. Women liked Darcy because she was unpretentious,
lively, and empathetic. Men liked her because she was easygoing, friendly, logical, and quick with her hearty laugh.

“Well, I hate my life,” Darcy said. “I wish I could be more like you. You’re so polite to people, so diplomatic, so ladylike,
so serene.” Darcy idly picked up the remote control and flicked on the TV. “Don’t you ever just feel like boiling over?”

Annie bit her lip and smiled. Did she? Certainly she
used
to feel like boiling over. She’d spent the first half of her life, in fact, doing just that.

Born to a single mother who was sent to prison for armed robbery when Annie was three, Annie was shuffled from one foster
home in the Los Angeles area to another. She had
adored her mother and could not understand why the police had taken her away. She’d hated the police after that.

Anger and grief over losing her mother came out in disruptive behavior, and by the time she was seven, Annie was notorious
in the Department of Social Services for “acting out” and “recalcitrance.” Foster parents couldn’t deal with her. She was
rude, combative, and a major behavior problem in every elementary school she was sent to. Despite placing well above average
in intelligence tests, the various social workers who were assigned to her case reported that she appeared to have little
interest in learning.

There were a few dedicated teachers who worked hard to get through to her. One of them used to take Annie home with her after
school, feed her milk and cookies, and tell her wonderful stories about heroes and villains, gods and goddesses. The teacher
even gave Annie a book of her very own with myths and legends in it. It was too hard for her to read, but she loved to look
at the color plate of Perseus with his mirrored shield and his mighty sword fighting Medusa. And the one of Eros rescuing
Psyche, who was chained to a rock over the sea, waiting for a dread monster to come and devour her.

The foster family she was living with at the time were strict born-again, evangelical, Word-of-the-Lord Christians. When her
foster father found Annie trying to spell out the words in the book of myths one evening before supper, he took the volume
from her, leafed through it, and declared it impious and sacrilegious. He burned her precious book in the fireplace, unmoved
by Annie’s screams of protest and rage, and then he whipped her soundly with his belt.

Annie ran away, swearing that she would kill herself if they
tried to send her back. Instead they sent her to a group home with other difficult-to-place children. By the time she was
ten years old it was clear to Annie that nobody wanted her… and nobody ever would.

She took to thieving the next year. Various social workers and foster parents had drilled it into her head over the years
that she was a thief’s daughter, so she figured she might as well live up to her heritage.

She stole, and she lied about stealing. She did it less out of need than out of rage. Everything that had ever mattered to
her had been stolen from her.

By the time she was thirteen she’d been arrested three times and was well on her way to proving the curse of her genes.

With her blond hair, her pretty, waifish face, and her angelic turquoise eyes, Annie’s best scam was to mimic a scared child
from a good home who had somehow gotten lost in the city. She could spot a bleeding-heart sucker a mile away. She’d squeeze
out a few tears and whimpers, mixed in with an occasional melting smile, and the marks would buy her food and clothing, ice
cream, taxi or bus fare “home.” When she’d taken them for all she could, she’d disappear, usually with their wallets as well.

It worked fine until the day she tried her game on Charlie Jefferson, then a college student, who proved to be not as soft
a touch as he looked. Annie was fourteen by this time but small for her age. She hid her breasts under a baggy shirt and tried
to look ten.

Charlie gave her a five-dollar bill on her first appeal, but she’d caught a glimpse of his wallet, which looked thick. So
she distracted him—or tried to—and went for the wallet, but he was quicker than she was. He got a good grip on her wrist,
and all her squirming, kicking, and yelling Robbery! Rape! and Murder! didn’t unnerve him one bit.

He held her firmly until the cops came, and then, to her utter amazement, he told the officers that she was his kid sister
who’d run away from somewhere in Orange County and he was taking her home. Because the officer in charge didn’t know her,
and probably because both she and Charlie looked so clean-cut, he’d turned them both loose. Charlie, whose grip on her arm
hadn’t for a moment wavered, then dragged her away to his car.

“You’re a child molester!” she cried, resisting every step of the way.

“I’m a college student,” he retorted. “My
parents
are child molesters. They collect incorrigible brats like you.”

It turned out that his parents were educators who ran a progressive school for troubled adolescents. The emphasis was on individual
responsibility rather than discipline, and one of the first courses Annie was offered was in Greek and Roman mythology. Even
so, she continued to be rebellious, and it took the Jeffersons several months to win her heart and convince her that someone,
at last, did want her.

She didn’t see much of Charlie, who was away at school studying architecture, but she never forgot that he was the one who
had rescued her. She was a beautiful young woman of eighteen when he came home to spend an entire summer. The mysterious chemistry
that had initially drawn them together began working once again.

At first the relationship seemed doomed. When she tried to fit in to the Jefferson’s social world, she felt completely outclassed.
Although she had learned to behave herself, she had not learned the finer aspects of etiquette—the right things
to say, the right forms of address, the right silverware to use, the proper way to dress, the correct subjects for polite
conversation, the right way to conduct herself in every situation. “I’ll never be good enough for you,” she told Charlie,
who laughed and reassured her. Anything she needed to learn, he would teach her.

He was a very persuasive young man. Like a hero from one of her myths, he had played Pygmalion to her Galatea, discovering
within her intelligence, ambition, and a true hunger for learning. Annie flung herself into her studies. She vowed never,
ever, to make him sorry for loving her.

With Charlie’s help, she finished high school and enrolled in college. He taught her everything he knew and loved about buildings
and encouraged her artistic side. For a while she had dreamed of following his footsteps into architecture, but eventually
she had chosen interior design, and during the course of graduate school she’d shifted into corporate design.

And she and Charlie had gotten married.

Together, they’d founded Fabrications.

She hadn’t realized how dependent she was on him until he died. Or how hard it was to make her way in a world deprived of
magic and myth.

“Annie?” Darcy’s voice brought her crashing back to the present. “Come here, and take a look at this.” Darcy increased the
volume on the television. “Looks like the jury’s back in the courtroom. And they’re smiling and making eye contact. Shit,
I think that scumbag is going to walk after all.”

Annie hurried into the living room area. She didn’t have to ask “what jury?” The murder trial of Matthew Carlyle was one of
the biggest crime stories to hit the country in recent years.

“You mean they’ve acquitted him?”

“They haven’t announced the verdict yet, but it looks like the judge is about to say something.”

The panel of eight women and four men were shown seated in the jury box, and the judge, a middle-aged woman who had been profiled
by all the local and national TV stations and newspapers, was speaking to the bailiff. It had been a long trial, and every
argument made by both the defense and the prosecution had been analyzed endlessly in the press. The closing arguments had
been presented to the jury several days ago, and since then they had been deliberating.

Annie had had mixed feelings about the trial from the beginning. It was as if two completely separate processes had been inextricably
linked to one another—the building of the cathedral and the trial of Matthew Carlyle. Because Francesca Carlyle had been the
prime mover behind building the cathedral, her violent death and her husband’s subsequent trial had thrown a pall over the
project.

Ironically, as the cathedral had been slowly constructed stone by stone, Matthew Carlyle’s reputation and credibility had
been deconstructed in the same slow manner. There was no doubt about the outcome of Matthew Carlyle’s trial in the press:
In their view, he had already been judged and found guilty.