When Night Falls (21 page)

“Well, maybe.”

Mitchell frowned at the doorbell. He was just studying the grass stains on his shirt, the rose fragrance delicate and precious as he remembered Uma arching up to him, her body pale and curved in the moonlight—

One petal clung to the material, pressed and flattened and bruised into the fabric and he smiled fondly at it, remembering. He brought the shirt to his face, nuzzling it and inhaling the scent.

He frowned again when the doorbell rang again and the tom who had clawed at the back screen, ruining the wire mesh to get inside, raced to the front door.

Mitchell didn’t want company; he had other plans—like joining Uma in bed with the breakfast he’d just cooked and a bouquet of freshly picked roses; making love on a bed of rose petals was an experience he intended to repeat. He glanced at the filled plates he’d placed on a scrap of board and the huge bouquet of roses. He’d chosen “Paul Neyron,” a cabbage rose with blooms of six to seven inches wide—more petals to lie on with Uma. Lauren had left excellent notations in her handwritten garden book, “Big and juicy and luscious, but a little overpowering. Quite persuasive when used in the proper setting.”

The shower sounded in his bedroom and he smiled to
himself, picturing Uma wrapped in steam and nothing else. He just had time to scatter the rose petals on the bed—

Mitchell shook his head; he was not thinking like Lauren. He was not influenced by her gentler, feminine romantic notions. Her presence was not in the house…just the showering woman he intended to join. He wanted to persuade Uma—of what? To live with him? That he was a stable, well-rounded, courteous guy capable of intimate feelings and sharing himself?

He jammed on the jeans he’d worn last night and hurried to the front door before the intruder could ring again. On his way, he jerked on the shirt Uma had worn, wanting to keep her close to him.

Maybe he was beginning to understand intimacy, yin and yang. One thing was for certain: he was on a winning roll that he wanted to strengthen this morning—without the intruder.

As a man with deep upward mobility tendencies, Mitchell was dizzingly happy. “I might even make it to the petit four tray-carrying stage, at this rate.”

One jerk of the door opened it to a familiar woman. Through the screen, she was older, harder-looking, and definitely uncertain. There was no mistaking the thick ring of diamonds that glittered on her shaking hand as she raised it to smooth her bleach-damaged hair. “Tessa?”

He sensed rather than saw Uma behind him in the hallway. “I invited her, Mitchell. Please come in, Tessa. We’re just about to have breakfast, weren’t we, Mitchell?”

Caught between the two women, Tessa Greenfield, who years ago had accused him of being her lover and had fueled her husband’s rage, and Uma, the woman who had just taken his hand, the woman whose hair still carried the scent of roses, freshly showered and dressed in one of his shirts, his jeans rolled up at her ankles, Mitchell said bluntly, “Not with her, we’re not.”

Tessa paled more beneath her heavy makeup and Uma’s
dark smoky eyes locked with his. “I invited her, Mitchell, after…yesterday morning. She has something to say, and it will not be said with a screen door between you and on a front porch that everyone in the neighborhood can see.”

“Busy little bee, aren’t you?” he asked, and didn’t spare the sarcasm as he withdrew his hand from hers. “One should not act in the business that does not concern one.”

Uma’s head went back with the verbal blow, and her lips tightened. “Mmm,” she murmured. “Come in, Tessa.”

“Yes, come in,” Mitchell invited tightly. Uma had stepped into the intimate corners of his life, the edges he didn’t want touched and had ripped them wide open. Maybe she needed to see just how ugly they were.

Tessa glanced around the barren, newly repainted home. “I can’t stay…It’s so soft in here. Like love,” she whispered in awe as the old tomcat rubbed against her legs.

“Remember Lauren? This used to be her house,” Uma said softly.

“I remember her. She was sweet, like sunshine.” Tessa hadn’t been a loving person, always out for herself, but she bent to pick up the insistent tom and cuddled him close. He purred and seemed to smirk at Mitchell.

“What do you want?” he thrust at Tessa and arched as Uma pinched his butt, just enough to warn him.

“I’m sorry about Fred—your dad. I didn’t know that my husband—you know Max died of a heart attack right away—I didn’t know that he would even do anything like that. I should have known—I’d seen him with animals, and with men. We had a terrible fight that night—after I’d found out what he’d done. When you came to the house, I was more furious with him and myself and I—I reacted badly to you. Back then, maybe I was terrified of Max, too, of what he would do to me. It was so awful, what happened to Fred.”

Mitchell heard his father’s dying screams echo through
time. “You were just an innocent bystander in all this—right, Tessa?”

Her face seemed to crumble beneath the makeup, aging her instantly. “No, I caused everything, and I’ll have to live with it for the rest of my life.”

“Such sympathy.” He frowned at Uma, who had just pinched him again; he wasn’t used to being prodded or told to mind his manners; Uma would have to get the rules straight. Then he bluntly asked Tessa, “Anything else you have to say?”

“Only that it was Fred that I wanted. I couldn’t believe he still loved your mother. When he turned me down, I decided to—to take something he loved just as much as her. That was you. And you weren’t buying. I was spoiled and young and—and I’m so sorry, Mitchell…so sorry,” she sobbed. “It wasn’t you, it was him. And it was my fault. He never once wanted another woman, only Grace.”

Mitchell couldn’t move, couldn’t think, locked in the nightmare of that night.
You’re all I’ve got left of her. You and Roman. I loved that woman with all my heart
. “Get out.”

Then, because Mitchell was in pain and couldn’t bear to let anyone see so deep inside him, he scowled at Uma, “You, too. Get out.”

He turned and walked down the hallway, into the kitchen where breakfast and the rose blooms waited. He waited for the tom, his only male alliance in the house to follow—the doorway remained empty.

Uma heard the crash and placed her arm around Tessa, who was shivering and holding the old tomcat tightly. “He’ll be all right. Thank you for coming.”

Before he’d closed his expression into that tight dark mask, Mitchell’s pain had seared her. When he had turned and stalked away, his clothing bore stains of roses and grass,
his body taut as if last night’s lovemaking hadn’t happened. Yet that one lush red petal had clung to his shoulder, refusing to be tossed aside.

Uma knew how badly he ached; she wanted to go to him, needed to comfort him—and herself. But all his edges were up and bristling, cutting her out of his life.
Get out
.

She shivered despite the morning’s warmth. Mitchell had just severed what they had without a second look back at her.

“He’s so fierce, just like Fred,” Tessa whispered shakily as they moved out into the morning sunshine. “And honest. You can see the truth in him, and the strength. That unbending strength. That’s what I saw in Fred, why I wanted him so badly. I knew that if he wanted to love me, he could make everything right. I had only my body to bargain with, and still I was no match for Grace. Mitchell is like that. If he ever loves, it will be just one woman to the end, but he’s a hard man to understand.”

There, in the fresh August morning, Uma knew exactly what Fred had said as he was dying. When a man loved a woman that deeply, he’d speak of that to his sons.

And Mitchell had clenched that inside him all these years, withholding it from Roman. Both men were firmly against Grace, and yet they didn’t know how much she had tried, how the failure of her marriage had wounded her.

Through her mother, Uma knew. And she knew that Dani was right in wanting to meet Grace.

Get out
, Mitchell had said, slamming the door shut on her and the past. He was more like his father than he knew, proud and stubborn, and just as skilled at hurting….

Uma brushed away the tears burning her eyes.
Get out
.

Later that morning, Uma put the finishing touches on a new logo for Mrs. Westerfield, a client in Oklahoma City who wanted to market designer bags inspired by vintage styles.

The duct tape over the bullethole in the window reminded Uma that danger circled Madrid.

The ache inside her told her of Mitchell’s pain, the way he could easily close her away from him, even after two nights of lovemaking. She’d opened herself to feeling, to wanting desperately, to sensuality and hope and—

And Mitchell had crushed it in his fist.

Tessa had been shaky, but steady enough to drive; and Uma had almost run for her house and for safety. She felt as if pieces of her were scattered along the sidewalk from Mitchell’s house to hers.

Uma let the tears gather inside her and roll down her cheeks, the sobs growing, choking her, until they burst into the quiet room.

Out of habit, she reached for her fortune cookie jar. Her fingers trembled as she broke one open to extract the small paper that read, “Your actions to help another are justified.”

She crushed the paper in one hand and the cookie in the other. She watched the crumbs fall into her wastepaper basket. Of course she was justified. She was half in love with a man who brooded about a death that wasn’t his fault. She wanted to protect Mitchell, to soothe him, and what did he do?

Get out
. The words rang cold as steel, as if he’d never kissed her like that, and she’d opened her body and her life to him.

Did she regret the giving?

No, it was honest and true, just as Tessa had said of Mitchell.

Uma cried until the anger came, fierce and unrelenting, and needing release. They’d made love perfectly and Mitchell had torn the magic into shreds. Later, she would be reasonable and regret any hasty actions.

Later would be too late; she needed to find Mitchell and nail him. “If truth be held in your emotions today, release them,” she muttered. “Holding darkness within withers the beauty…strike while the iron is hot…waste not, want not.”

Mitchell had reached inside her, taken away her safety, and given her beauty, and now he had to pay for his
Get out
.

Uma ran to her room, where she had shed his clothes, bent to gather them into her arms, and hurried to his house.

Mitchell wasn’t there; his pickup gone. Uma hurried back to her car, tossed his clothes into the passenger seat, and shot back out of her driveway. Her tires squalled as she left Lawrence Street, passed Tabor Street, and bulleted down Main Street onto Maloney, cornering sharply enough to make her tires squeal.

His pickup was parked in front of Roman’s garage. Her brakes screeched as the car slid sideways a bit, nicked Mitchell’s perfect back bumper, and stopped. Fiercely angry, now that Mitchell could dismiss her so easily, she ignored Lonny’s patrol car easing to park in front of the garage.

Uma grabbed Mitchell’s shirt, jeans and belt that she had worn and hurried into the garage.

“Where is he?” she demanded of Roman, who had just hefted a small motor from out of a dishwasher and stood holding it. A long rubber hose was draped around his neck.

Roman, clearly wary of her mood, nodded to the truck, and to the two feet extending from beneath it. Uma didn’t think; she reacted. She walked to the work boots she recognized as Mitchell’s, dropped the clothing, and bent to grab both of them.

When she tugged, he grunted and the bump beneath the truck sounded like he had hit his head. She tugged again and the roller bench he lay upon slid from beneath the truck. Mitchell lay there scowling up at her and rubbing the grease mark on his forehead—it spread across his forehead like war paint.

War, that was what she wanted—war on the man who had made love to her and then had told her to “get out.”

“Here,” she said, bending to pluck up the clothes and dump them on his face. “I forgot these this morning. Thank
you for the use of them. Goodbye. And by the way, Tessa was doing her best this morning, and you were just plain evil. About three years ago, she went off into a ditch—she was tipsy and sobbing and guilty over what she had done. She’d been visiting your father’s grave. We had a chat over tea and she explained everything. I thought you should know. I thanked her for you. And I refuse to be dumped like garbage.”

Mitchell slammed the clothes aside. “You what?”

“I said, I refuse to be dumped like garbage on the morning after. You needed to know the truth. I just didn’t have time last night to prepare you. I was very busy. I contacted Tessa because I cared—I cared, or last night wouldn’t have happened. You think that I am the sort of woman who has flings because—because?”

Uma paused to suck in air and anger, just getting warmed up. “You’ve been feeling guilty all these years because you thought you caused that fire by turning Tessa down. It wasn’t you she really wanted, it was Fred. So you’ll have to stop hiding behind all that self-installed guilt,
because it doesn’t fit anymore
. She served you the absolute truth. If you can’t handle that, then you’re not the man I think you are.” She kicked his boot for emphasis. “And by the way…I’ll pay for whatever damage there is to your pickup. It was in my way. I hit it.”

“You
what?
” he demanded again, this time louder.

“I hit your pickup. It was there and it reminded me of how awful you were this morning, when I was just trying to help—”

“You’ve been crying,” he noted softly, as if seeing her for the first time. “Your eyes are all puffy and red. The braids look nice, though. Your mother used to put ribbons in them…pink. What’s that stuff in your hair? Bread?”

Uma brushed the fortune cookie crumbs from her hair and then her face where they had stuck to her tears. “Mmm. I didn’t notice my eyes were puffy and red. However, thank you for being so observant and noting that I’m not exactly look
ing tip-top this morning, for some reason,” she said and tried to walk out of the garage with as much dignity as she could manage.