Million Dollar Road (5 page)

Oh, how Emma had loved him then for his generous heart, how she had loved him ever after. They were married a year later, and as the years passed, except for the shattering grief of the miscarriage and Emma's subsequent inability to have another child, theirs became a happy life, gilt-framed by marriage. Without the possibility of the large family she'd longed for, it was always going to be just the two of them, but Emma Costello had felt safe in that frame. She grew lilies in her garden, looked after her husband, and their life together was so very, very good.

Emma had believed with all her heart that it was forever, that life.

Forever lasted until the afternoon when Con told her their marriage was over. At first she couldn't believe what he was saying to her. Like firebombs, his words hung in the air of their old, painstakingly renovated house in Covington, falling like a rain of napalm in her kitchen.

“What?” Emma faltered.

“I said . . . I . . . want a divorce.”

Emma's head was slammed with a vast ripping sound, as though a world-sized sheet of canvas had been torn in two. She couldn't hear Con's halting explanations, his reasons for what he was going to do to them, going to do to
her,
because that monstrous rupture brought Emma to her knees. Her hands covered her ears as she gasped for breath, lost in the throes of her first full-blown panic attack.

Con went to his knees on the floor beside her. Gently, he pulled her hands away, his tear-filled blue eyes searching her face.

“Please listen to me, Em. Don't blame Lizzie. She's not the first. I-I've never been faithful to you and I can't lie about it anymore. I know I'm a bastard. You deserve better.” A tear ran down Con's cheek. “Please try to see that this is for the best, honey.”

“Is this because of the . . . baby?” Speaking was almost impossible. “If somehow she'd . . . lived?”

“God, no. A baby wouldn't have made any difference. It's not about that.” Con knuckled his streaming eyes, moaning, “Oh, Em—I
hate
this.”

And on her knees, Emma comforted him. God help her, she'd comforted him then even as she'd labored to breathe. But when he was done crying, Con rose to his feet and left, driving away to his girlfriend's apartment to begin his new life. His bag had already been packed.

Now Emma's golden frame was broken, the picture she'd so loved wadded up in a discarded ball. In the days after Con left, she'd known herself only as a wavering outline floating in a solid world, vanishing like a gray fog in the bright light of day.

And soon came the morning when, following another long sleepless night, she'd wandered into the bathroom to wash her tear-swollen face, looked in the mirror, and seen nothing—nothing—no reflection whatsoever. Too breathless even to scream, Emma had hit the limits of what she could take: she checked herself into the hospital that morning. Thus began the nine months of Emma's pregnancy of loss, a term of heavy therapy, the search for the right pills, and the fight for her tenuous sanity. Nine months, and at the end of it, she'd given birth to solitude.

You'll have to reinvent yourself
. It was more of Margot's advice.

So although she was crippled inside, in dogged determination Emma took back her maiden name—Favreaux—and got her own bank account. She changed her address at the post office, signed reams of legal papers, and did all the usual divorce things her lawyer told her to do.

The house went on the market.

She began looking for country property.

It was a halting start to a journey she'd have given the earth not to take, but later Emma learned Con would be working for Hannigan at the alligator farm, only a few miles away from her new property. So close she could feel him, could almost hear his ringing laugh.

But with no other choice, not if she wanted to go on living life as a semi-sane woman, Emma doubled down on the therapy and began the work of renovating the old farmhouse. With a heroic, blind effort, somehow she learned to forget for hours at a time how near he was.

And yet, Emma never forgot for long that she only had to walk out her door, go across the countryside through the fields, and she would see him again.

Just . . . see him. Sometimes it was the only thing on earth she wanted.

Other times, it was the last.

 

And today, as he occasionally did, Con had called, burning through Emma's carefully constructed and vigilantly maintained defenses like a prairie grassfire. As always, there'd been an episode at the mere sight of his number on her cell phone. This panic attack was no worse than the others, but even after all this time, it wasn't getting any easier either.

Ah
God,
this had to stop, Emma thought in despair. It had been years of days since that day.

But she'd listen to his message; she was going to do that now. It was just a voice mail, just a collection of words, and panic attack or not, she wasn't really going to die if she heard it, would she? Her forehead in her hand, her shoulders tensed, Emma pushed the voice mail button and held the phone to her ear.

“Hey, it's me,” Con's voice said. “Call when you get a minute, will you, honey?”

Emma gripped the phone in her hand, staring at its blank screen for minutes. Relieved to discover that her heart remained more or less steady and her breath stayed even, she wondered if she dared return the call. Talking to Con didn't seem to be getting any less painful, but . . . he might need to tell her something important, right? Then, too, her alimony check had been due days ago. So . . . she shouldn't put it off, should she?

It would be pointless to try. With a sense of helplessness, Emma knew from experience she was going to do it because she wasn't going to be able to stop herself.

Be here now
.

Yes. Okay. Her finger trembling, Emma dialed her ex-husband's number from memory.

Con answered on the second ring, his familiar voice warm. “Emma!” He seemed delighted it was her.

Oh, she'd done this to herself
again
. Immediately, Emma imagined her emotional walls, high stone walls keeping her safe.

“Hello, Con.” The walls were up. “What can I do for you?”

Con chuckled. “Nice to talk to you, too, honey. What, I don't even rate small talk with one of my favorite people?” he said.

Against her will, Emma's generous, full-lipped mouth turned up in a half-smile. He was doing that Obi-Wan thing of his. Since seeing
Star Wars
together back in college, Obi-Wan's famous line—
these are not the droids you're looking for
—had been something she'd laughingly repeat when, once again, he'd won someone over, a difficult professor, a cautious client. But
she
was the one being Obi-Wanned now; he was doing it to her instead of some stranger.

Walls. Emma began to pace the wooden floor of the kitchen, the phone cradled to her ear. Remember the walls.

“Sorry.” She traced an aimless design in the lemonade glass's ring of condensed moisture on the table. “What do you want? I'm . . . sort of in the middle of something.” Sure I am, she thought, sneering at her lie. Except I have nothing to do until it's time to feed the damned chickens.

“I was wondering if I could borrow your truck,” Con said, his tone breezy. “Just for a couple of hours this afternoon.”

“My truck?” Emma was startled by this unexpected request. “Um, doesn't the alligator farm have a bunch of trucks you could use instead of mine?”

“Well . . .” Con hesitated.

She could almost see him, his hand at the back of his neck, his long, big-knuckled fingers buried in his red hair. Emma bit her lip, struggling to unsee that image, imagining the walls instead.

“So?” she asked hastily. “Why
my
truck?”

Con sighed. “This is kind of personal. Lizzie wants a damned trampoline, of all things, and there's a sale on at Western Auto. Cash and carry. If I can borrow your truck, I could get it home and set it up in the backyard this afternoon.” At least he had the grace to sound a little embarrassed. “It'd be a big help, Em. What do you say?”

A
trampoline
? For his new
wife
? Brilliant, white-hot pain almost slipped past the walls. Emma drew a shaky breath before she could answer.

“Sorry, I don't think my insurance will cover it if you have an accident,” she said quickly, crossing her fingers against another lie. She couldn't bear to see Con if he came out to get the truck. It had been bad that last time at the attorney's office: she'd had a breakdown in the parking lot and hadn't been able to pull herself together sufficiently to drive home for an hour. Since then she hadn't been near Con in a year. Talking on the phone today had proved to be perilous enough.

High, rough stone walls covered with hanging trumpet vines, the scarlet blooms nodding in the breeze. “Wish I could help,” Emma managed. The stone was cool as she pressed her ear to the wall to hear Con on the other side. “Sorry,” she said again, her voice quiet.

It was Con's turn to be quiet. After a pause, he said, “No, I'm sorry to have bothered you.”

“It's okay. Um, is there a problem with my check this month?” She had a right to ask, of course she did, Emma thought. And talking about money felt safer, as though it was a neutral territory in a country hollowed out with land mines.

“You haven't gotten your check yet? Sorry, I'll get to it on Monday.” Con lowered his voice. “Hey, Em? You doing all right?” He really seemed to want to know. “I missed you at the farmers' market this morning. I was looking for you.”

Emma's already rapid heartbeat shot skyward in an explosion of wild wings. Con and his wife at the market, buying free-range eggs and lingering over organic blueberries, holding hands, laughing. Except for Margot's office and the farm, the market had been the one place where she'd imagined herself safe from running into him. Her throat threatened to slam shut. Emma swallowed with difficulty, her breath running fast to keep up with her heart.

“There wasn't much to bring to town, that's all,” she croaked. “Just okra.”

“Oh, right,” Con said. “Okra. Well, don't work too hard, honey. I bet it's hotter than hell's doorknob out there. You know how I worry about you.”

The concern in his voice sounded so genuine, so intimate, Emma's stone walls were swaying as though they were made of cardboard.

“I'm fine. Sorry . . . I couldn't help.” Her
breath,
scraping in her throat.

“It's okay, Em. Hey, maybe we could get together soon, have lunch? It's been a long time. We could catch up. I'd love to see you.”

“No.”
Emma choked. “'Bye.”

She stabbed the “end” button and placed her phone on the table like it was a stick of dynamite, feeling almost as if she should throw it outside in the yard before it blew up her kitchen.

Oh God, no—what was that? Somewhere in the house, just under the last haunting notes of the
Requiem,
Emma was suddenly sure she heard a murmur, a voice just out of earshot, a low laugh. With a shiver, she turned and hurried out of the kitchen, down the hall, and into the bathroom.

Thighs braced on the edge of the sink, her hand shaking, Emma spilled a handful of Xanax into her palm and swallowed two tablets in a gulp, begging the tranquilizer to hurry, to please,
please
quiet the steel hammer of her heart.

And Emma didn't look in the mirror because she was heavy-limbed with a deadly certainty that if she dared a glance, she'd see nothing.

Nothing at all.

C
on, sartorial as ever in a polo shirt that almost matched his eyes, a pair of pressed jeans, and gleaming alligator loafers, fired up his cigar before he rolled down the window of the Lexus. As always, he was driving too fast on his way down the highway, heading out to the alligator farm to collect one of the pickups from the SGE fleet this Saturday afternoon.

Son-of-a-bitch, he thought irritably. What's
her
problem?

Con hadn't wanted to remind Emma that her precious truck was bought and paid for with the money he'd given her in what anyone would have called a rather generous settlement. That was sure to create conflict and Con hated conflict. He hated conflict so much he was going to take said SGE truck back into town to buy a goddamned trampoline for Lizzie. Then, with any luck, she'd bounce her ass into a better mood. After the scene in the restaurant last night, Con had wanted nothing more than to walk out and let his drunk wife find her own way home, but instead he'd wiped the champagne off his face and eaten his subsequently tasteless dinner in silence.

And yet . . .

This morning they'd woken up, rolled toward each other in the bed, and made love as though the whole embarrassing incident had never happened—a confusing but all-too-frequent pattern these days, especially following an alcohol-fueled disagreement.

Something, Con thought, was going to have to be done about Liz and her drinking. She'd never had a head for it, but lately that fact didn't seem to matter to her worth a damn. It had once been hot, the way a glass of wine or two made her giggle and flirt, but there wasn't any of that happening
now
. Instead of a sweet, sexy giddiness, Liz's recent boozing was turning into a real problem to deal with; hell, it was becoming damned unpleasant. Con wanted Lizzie back, the fun, adoring girl he'd fallen for, not this new, narrow-eyed, faultfinding version.

Where had that girl gone?

And what in the hell was going on with Em? Con's thoughts circled back to that phone conversation with his ex-wife. It had been disturbingly distant in its tone, Emma's noncommittal responses sounding as disengaged as if she were talking to some Republican Party phone banker seeking money for Bush's re-election. So her check was late, okay—he was having a temporary cash-flow issue—but she'd been barely polite. Up until that last call she'd been still, well . . . Emma. Still reachable, still in love with him even though they weren't married anymore.

What, Con mused as he made the turn onto Million Dollar Road, was up with Emma?

He hated to lose more than he hated conflict, and after that phone call he sensed the ground might have shifted. Con didn't like to admit to it, but two years after the divorce he continued to miss Emma's keen, coolly worded observations, her graceful acceptance of him in all his complicated energies. He missed the easy conversation, the intimate understanding—comforting as balm blended with single-malt scotch—waiting for him when he came home. She'd welcomed him like he was a buccaneer, returning ragged and triumphant from the high seas of the courtroom. Sometimes her habitual gravity, her terminal shyness, had been stifling and something of a bore, but certainly life with Emma had been more restful than it was of late with Lizzie.

After two damned years, couldn't he and Emma at least be friends?

Of all the women before, during, and after Emma, there'd never been another one like her, Con thought with nostalgia. He took a deep puff of his cigar. Sometimes he wondered if leaving her had been one of his better ideas, but then he remembered how so often he'd felt, well . . .
constrained,
tired of laboring under the weight of Emma's unrealistically high expectations of him. To keep her good opinion he'd had to pretend to a monogamy he'd never once practiced, a subterfuge that had grown to become a pain in the ass. The fifth boy in a family of eleven children, Con had always needed the comfort of a woman waiting for him at home, someone who'd belong to him and only him. He needed a constant moon, a green and fertile planet to his wandering comet-self.

After his affair with Lizzie began, though, Con had found he wanted all that and more. More sex, more fun, more of this superb girl who seemed to get him, all of him, all the way down to the ground. He'd wanted less seriousness, less introspection, and less of the work involved in taking care of Emma's tender—sometimes too tender—feelings. To be sure, when he really thought about it Con always calculated that he'd made the right move, even though he missed his first wife more often than he'd ever imagined he might.

But his new wife wasn't under any illusions about him. Con puffed his cigar in renewed complacence, smoke billowing out the open window. Liz had known exactly who he was when she'd boarded ship—known about his affairs, his excesses, his pirate nature. She just didn't want to have her nose rubbed in it, that was all.

And even if she suspected that he continued to wander afield (which she almost certainly didn't), Lizzie was sure to get it: his other women didn't threaten her position as his wife in any material way. Hey, she was Mrs. Con Costello now. That champagne-in-the-face business last night was bound to be just a glitch in the system, only one of those rough spots in the road. He'd indulge her like he always did, she'd come around, and life would return to its usual satisfying rhythms once more.

Liz just needed to ease off the sauce. Ease off the sauce and quit bitching.

So preoccupied with his thoughts of his wives, past and present, Con didn't see the girl on the side of the road before he nearly ran over her.

Slewing around the blind curve, he was throwing the soggy butt end of his cigar out of the window into the drainage ditch and then, unexpected as a heart attack, there she was—a half-seen, openmouthed figure scant inches from his front bumper.

“Shit!”

Con's excellent reflexes swerved the Lexus in a screeching
S
across the road. Two wheels went into the ditch before he got the car under control and back onto the asphalt. He slammed it to a stop, leaving twenty feet of burned rubber in his wake.

Shaken, Con looked in the rearview mirror.

She hadn't budged from the spot where he'd almost hit her, a young, dark-haired girl clutching an armload of yellow, plastic Dollar General bags to her chest. Cursing under his breath, Con unsnapped his shoulder belt and got out to see if she was all right.

“You okay?” he called to her as he approached.

When she didn't answer, he commanded his legs, still trembling with the aftershock of his near miss, to walk back down Million Dollar Road toward her. The girl remained motionless, rooted to the spot as though she were planted in the gravel beneath the underwater gloom of the live oak trees.

“Hey, are you okay?” Con asked again, drawing closer.

Her pretty rose-leaf lips parted; her green eyes were huge in her white face . . . her extraordinary, heart-shaped . . .
face
.

Con's eyes raked the perfection of it, noting that her pale, poreless skin was marred only by a small crescent-shaped scar through her right eyebrow.

And Jesus, her
body
. Slim-waisted, slender, lithe as a mermaid clothed in a white tank top and short, frayed cutoffs, Con's breath caught at the wonder of her thighs, the sweet curve of her calf, the remarkable architecture of her ankles, the high-arched feet in red rubber flip-flops.

The girl shifted her stuffed Dollar General bags to one hand, pushing a cascade of blue-black hair behind a seashell ear.

“I'm okay.” Those green eyes narrowed, those lips turned down in a lovely frown. Light and rippling as cool water, her voice trembled ever so slightly as she said, “Like you coulda killed me, you know, driving like your ass was on fire.”

At that, Con's lawyerly instincts woke up at last. “Well, now . . . I think you had a duty to walk farther off the road—legally speaking, of course. And,” he added quickly, “I
was
doing the speed limit.”

The girl shrugged one white shoulder. “Sure you were,” she said. The tremble was absent from her voice now.

Con found himself almost tongue-tied in the face of this girl's self-possession, those amazing eyes appearing to see only a middle-aged guy in a fancy car trying to talk his way out of a potential lawsuit. If she weren't so arrestingly lovely, that self-possession would be a challenge. Most men would pass on a challenge like this one, but not Con.

In self-defense he offered, “Well, I wasn't speeding. Really.”

The girl shrugged again, re-grouping her plastic bags with a sharp rustle in the country quiet. “Whatever, okay? You didn't hit me. I get it.” She turned away from him, ready to resume her walk down Million Dollar Road. “Just slow down, okay?”

It seemed as though the afternoon's sunlight faded. Quick, Con thought. Do something, you idiot. Don't let her go!

“Hey. Uh, listen,” he said loudly.

She paused, that gorgeous, disinterested face turning to look back at him over one shoulder.

“Can I give you a ride at least?” The corners of Con's mouth lifted in his trademark smile. “It's a miserable afternoon for walking, anyway. I could give you a lift, get you out of the sun.” He paused. “And those bags look heavy,” he added. “C'mon. I'm safe.”

The girl seemed to think it over for a moment, as if weighing his offer of a ride against resuming her walk in the stifling heat.

“You sure?” she said cautiously. “Like, I don't know. Maybe.”

Now that's better, Con thought. The girl didn't seem overly anxious at the notion of accepting a ride from a stranger who, five minutes before, had nearly killed her with a Lexus.

She said, “I've got another mile to go from here, just up the road from the alligator farm. I guess . . . I
maybe
could.”

Upon hearing the words
alligator farm,
Con seized the opening.

“SGE? Great! I'm headed there anyway. I'm Con Costello.”

They were walking toward the Lexus now and the girl hadn't said anything more. Con opened the passenger door with a courtly suggestion of a bow and she arched a scarred, disbelieving eyebrow, as though he'd summarily dropped his pants and was hanging around in the middle of the road wearing only his boxers.

“I mean, you can trust me. I'm no ax murderer,” Con volunteered, belatedly regretting the bow.

Saying this only seemed to make matters worse, though: gauging from the look on her face, he was positive she found him even more ridiculous now. “I work in the front office at the farm,” he added.

The girl dropped her Dollar General bags on the floor of the front seat in a yellow heap. “I know who you are,” she said shortly. “No offense—you might still be an ax murderer, but you said it. It's hot.” And she got in, drawing her long, long legs into the car.

At once Con found himself undone by lust, imagining those legs wrapped around him. This wasn't going by the rules. For God's sake, he was teetering on the brink of an embarrassing tumescence, beginning to be hard as a zit-ridden kid holed up in the bathroom with a Victoria's Secret catalog.

Goddammit, Con thought. He shut the passenger door in a hurry. “Get a grip, guy,” Con muttered under his breath as he hurried to the other side of the Lexus. She's just a pretty girl, not some, some
goddess
.

But easing himself into the driver's seat, Con discovered he couldn't take his eyes off the vision sitting next to him, so close he breathed in the sweet mingled scents of girl-sweat and some subtle perfume, fresh as the memory of long-ago rain. He tightened his hands on the wheel, shocked by the overpowering urge to press his lips to the tender skin behind her exquisite knee.

The girl shifted the plastic bags under her flip-flops as the car slowly accelerated in a smooth meshing of gears.

“So, what's
your
name, and uh, how do you know who I am?” Con asked, trying to make conversation.

“Lireinne Hooten.” She adjusted the air-conditioner vent, her profile pure as a marble water nymph's in a Roman fountain. “I work at the alligator farm, too.”

She lifted her long, silky hair off the back of her neck, un-self-consciously fanning the chilled air toward her chest. Con wrenched his gaze away from those beautifully proportioned breasts, a pair of ripe peaches hammocked in the tight-fitting tank top. Trying to feign a coolness he didn't feel for an instant, he forced his eyes to stay on the road.

“Really! You work at SGE?” Con cursed himself for sounding so fatuous, so ham-handed. Where was his goddamned charm when he needed it most? And if she was a farm employee, why hadn't he noticed her before now?

“That's quite a coincidence,” he said. He was struggling to think of where she could be hidden on a four-hundred-acre alligator farm with fewer than twenty employees and coming up with nothing. “Let me guess, you're a . . .”

“Hoser.”

A hoser. Con quit wondering because that explained everything. He had no idea who hosed. He didn't even sign hosers' checks—Jackie handled the casual labor out of petty cash. And of course their paths had never crossed. He rarely went down to the barns. The smell in there was so awful that one minute spent in the stench insured you would reek until you could shower it off. Liz even had to wash the clothes he wore in there by themselves, separated from the rest of the laundry.

“So you're the hoser?” Con said. “Wow.”

Wow?
Oh, that's good, jerk. She might think I'm making fun of her, he thought. Being a hoser was such a crappy gig that the farm gobbled them up like hot wings. He'd been given to understand that nobody lasted in that job for long, especially since the pay was so lousy.