Whispers (18 page)

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Authors: Lisa Jackson

BOOK: Whispers
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Miranda checked her watch. Nearly ten o'clock and Ruby Songbird still hadn't shown up. Miranda couldn't remember a day when Ruby hadn't been in the house before eight, washing windows, scrubbing floors, baking bread, and stoically giving orders that she expected to be unquestioned and obeyed. Miranda disregarded any thought that something might be wrong and focused her attention on her youngest sister. Tessa had a way of getting into trouble. Big life-altering trouble. “Look, I don't know what you're thinking, Tess, but getting involved with Weston is all wrong, believe me.”
“Just like Harley and Claire are all wrong?” Tessa asked, her gaze skating to the doorway as Claire walked in, taking in the tail end of the conversation.
“It's different.” Miranda felt trapped, cornered by her cunning fox of a sister.
“How?” Tessa demanded.
Miranda silently counted to ten and gazed directly at Claire. “Harley and Claire think they're in love. They've dated a while, seem committed to each other and—”
“What about Kendall Forsythe?”
Claire turned as pale as winter sunlight, and her fingers coiled tightly. “What?”
“Harley can't seem to really break it off with her.” Tessa scraped back her chair and if she was conscious of the pain in Claire's eyes, she didn't show it.
“That's a lie,” Claire said firmly. “He and Kendall are history.”
“I don't think so.” Tessa swung open the refrigerator door and rummaged inside until she came up with a jar of Ruby's homemade raspberry jam and a pitcher of orange juice.
Ruby? Where in the world was she? Miranda walked to the windows and stared at the path to the driveway, the one that curved around the back of the garage and cut between the lake and swimming pool, the one Ruby used each morning.
“You shouldn't believe anything Weston tells you.” Claire, finding some steel for her spine, strode across the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee even though the pot wasn't finished filling. Hot drops sizzled on the warming plate before she placed the glass pot back in its spot. To her credit, her hands barely shook.
Tessa was unconcerned. “Why not?” She grabbed a teaspoon from the drawer and plunged it into the jam.
“He's . . . he's not trustworthy.”
“And Harley is?” Tessa arched a disbelieving brow as she dipped a spoon into the jam and leaned a hip against the cupboards.
“Yes!”
“Look, Tess, there's no reason to argue, just be careful, okay?” Miranda suggested.
“Like you are?” Tessa's smile, like that of a cat who'd swallowed the pet canary, didn't falter as she licked the spoon clean. “You know, when you're with Hunter.”
“Hunter? Hunter Riley?” Claire asked, a crease forming between her eyebrows as she turned to her older sister.
“According to Weston, Randa's been seeing Hunter on the sly.”
“We're friends,” Miranda said. That much wasn't a lie.
“And so much more.”
“Really?” Claire, always the romantic, seemed intrigued.
Damn Weston Taggert and his big mouth.
“What's it they say about people who live in glass houses?” Tessa asked as she plopped down in her chair again and spread a thick layer of jam onto her toast. “Something about not throwing stones?”
“You and Hunt?” Claire was still digesting the information and Miranda was certain her face, suddenly hot, had betrayed her. “For real?”
“It's not that big of a deal.”
Tessa rolled her eyes.
“You
are
seeing him!” Claire's lips twitched into a small smile. “I don't believe it.”
“Don't. It's nothing.” Now,
that
was a lie. Her feelings for Hunter were important, a very big deal, the single most meaningful relationship in her life.
Tessa made a disparaging sound in the back of her throat. “What would Daddy say, hmm? His oldest daughter, the serious,
good
girl, the one who plans on going to—where is it?—oh, yeah, either Radcliffe or Yale or Stanford, right?”
“Willamette.”
Tessa rolled her eyes. “Such lofty ideals, when really she's out doing God only knows what with the caretaker's son.” Clucking her tongue, Tessa wagged her head dramatically from side to side. “And Mama, oh, Randa, think what she'd say about dating someone beneath your station.”
“He's not beneath—” Miranda snapped her mouth shut. “I can't believe we're having this conversation.”
“You started it.”
“And I'm ending it right now!” She glanced at her watch again. “Where is Ruby? She's never late.”
“Cut her a break, will ya? Mom and Dad are in Portland. She's probably just sleeping in. You know what they say. When the cat's away . . .” Tessa licked the corner of her lip.
“You're just full of old-time sayings, aren't you?”
“If the shoe fits—”
“Oh, stop it!” Claire took a long swallow of her coffee. “I think you two should be the first to know.”
“Know what?” Miranda felt a niggle of fear climb up her spine.
“Uh-oh.” Tessa's grin faded.
“I've made a big decision.” Claire took a deep breath.
“About?” Miranda prodded.
Tessa shook her head as if she'd already guessed.
Claire set down her cup, managed a rather weak-looking smile, and held out her left hand. On her ring finger a diamond winked proudly in the morning light. “It's official,” she said, her voice trembling a bit, uncertainty written all over her even features. “We don't care what anyone else thinks. Harley and I are getting married.”
Thirteen
Kendall's tears were real and bitter. They rained from her porcelain blue eyes and drizzled down her chin. “You can't,” she whispered, her fists balling in his shirt, her body limp with grief. “You can't marry her.”
She was standing on the deck of her parents' beach house, the winds off the Pacific fierce, sand blowing through the dunes and onto the floor. The morning sun was weak, and Harley felt cold as death. He'd come to tell Kendall because he thought she should be the first to know. Now he realized what a mistake he'd made.
Through sheer curtains, he saw Kendall's mother seated in a leather recliner, smoking a cigarette and sipping coffee as she read the morning paper. If she had the least bit of interest in what was going on between her daughter and the boy who had dated her for nearly a year, she didn't show it.
Thank God.
Harley wanted to comfort Kendall, to tell her she'd get over him, to help her through this pain, but how could he when he'd been the cause of it? Her breath, wet from the wash of tears, was hot against his neck and he felt like a heel. Whereas Weston triumphed in breaking girls' hearts, Harley hated it. “Look, I didn't want you to hear it from someone else.”
“But what—what if I'm pregnant?” she choked out and fear, real and dark, clawed at his sense of decency.
“You're not.”
“I—I don't know.” She sniffed, tried to pull herself together, but, giving up, flung herself against him. His arms, of their own volition, surrounded her. He moved slightly so that the umbrella of the deck table, flapping in the stiff breeze, partially hid them from the bank of windows, just in case Kendall's mother looked their way.
“We'll take care of it. I told you—”
“And I told you I'd never have an abortion,” she vowed with so much passion it scared him. “My father will kill me.” She sagged against him and he smelled her skin and the scent of the elusive perfume she wore, some fragrance that her aunt sent her from Paris each Christmas.
“Things will work out.”
“How?”
“I—I don't know,” he admitted, feeling too young to deal with all this. He didn't really believe that Kendall was pregnant. It was too convenient, suited her purposes too well and yet how would he know? “I'll go to the doctor with you,” he offered.
“Would you?”
Damn! She sounded hopeful when he'd intended to call her bluff. Could it really be true? Was he going to be a father? Oh, shit. “Of course.”
“The appointment's in three weeks.”
“Three weeks?”
“It's the first I could get with Dr. Spanner in Vancouver. I tried one of those in-home pregnancy tests and . . . and it looks like . . . like I'm pregnant, but I want to check with a doctor.”
“Oh, God.” So it was true. Harley felt a noose tightening around his throat. She smiled up at him. “Please, until we go check this out, don't make any rash announcements about getting married to Claire.” She nestled her head against his chest and he knew in his heart he couldn't say no. Just as he never had. Christ, why was he such a baby?
“Harley?” she said, and her voice was so small he could barely hear it over the roar of the surf. Salty air clung to his skin.
“Yeah.” Harley had never been so scared in his life.
“I love you.” She sighed against his shirt. “No matter what, I'll always love you.”
“Don't. Please, Kendall—”
“I'd do anything not to lose you.”
“This is crazy talk.”
“Maybe.” She looked up, her face innocent, her lips, long bleached of any lipstick, beckoning. “I'm serious. Whatever it takes, I'll make sure that you love me again.”
And she meant it.
 
 
Weston lit a cigarette, then let it burn in the ashtray by his bathroom sink as he soaked his beard and smoothed on shaving cream. He felt the edge of a hangover burning his eyes and pounding in his brain. His mouth tasted like shit and his muscles ached a little, but he was one who believed in the old adage that if you soared with the eagles at night, you had to rise with the sparrows in the morning.
With practiced hands he shaved off a day's worth of stubble and saw the dark spots on his neck—hickeys of all things—where Tessa Holland had pressed her hot little lips against his skin and sucked like no one he'd ever been with. Hell, he got hard just thinking of her.
Who would have thought she was a virgin, the way she'd been strutting her stuff around town for the past couple of years? She'd been hot and willing when he'd driven her to the cabin he kept for just such times; she hadn't shown any fear. She'd kissed and touched like a woman of the world instead of a naive schoolgirl. Instead of jailbait.
He nicked himself, swore, dabbed at the wound, and rammed his Marlboro into the corner of his mouth as he continued scraping his beard away. He should have been more careful, at least used a damned rubber, but he'd been swept off his feet by the thought that he was actually scoring on one of Dutch Holland's daughters.
Tessa wouldn't have been his first choice, of course. That particular obsession belonged to Miranda, but he hadn't been too choosy last night. Tessa had sighed when he'd kissed her, mewed when he'd stroked her breasts, cried out as he'd nipped at those glorious globes with his teeth and teased her with his tongue. She'd gone down on him as if she'd done it regularly, so it was a shock to him when he'd spread her willing legs, thrust into her wet cunt, and felt resistance.
Not that he'd stopped. She'd wanted it, begged for it—or had she?—seemed as determined as he about making it. At first she'd cried out, shifted away from him on the bed where he'd scored so often, but then she'd given into the hot-blooded animal she was.
Shooting a stream of smoke, he crushed his cigarette and rinsed his face. At times he wondered why his damned sex drive was always in fifth gear. He couldn't look at a woman without fantasizing about bedding her and when it came to the Holland girls, it was worse. He didn't want to think it was because of some twisted condition because he'd seen his mother's treachery . . . No, that couldn't be it. Nor was it because of the feud between the families, not really. It was the challenge of it all. Miranda, Claire, and Tessa were so damned arrogant and their better-than-thou attitude coupled with their beauty got to him. Big-time. So he'd scored with Tessa . . . one little virgin down, two to go, though he doubted the other two were innocents. Claire was doing it with Harley, Weston was sure of it, and Miranda, ice princess that she appeared, was surely all fire below the surface.
He wanted to bed all three Holland girls in the worst way. But those thoughts were normal, the quirk he dealt with was that he was forever acting on his impulses, even when he instinctively knew he should be more selective, probably because of all his mother's sermons. As if she knew anything about virtue.
His jaw tightened, and as he frowned at his reflection the years rolled back and he was a boy again, no more than ten or eleven. He'd climbed his favorite oak tree and was on the lookout for squirrels, his slingshot ready while he wished that he had a BB gun like some of his friends. Settled onto his favorite branch, eyes trained on a hawthorn tree where a family of squirrels usually nested, he heard music coming from the second-story window of the guest house.
Mick Jagger—his mother's favorite in recent years, she'd seen him in person, even gotten his autograph—was singing about brown sugar again. Jeez, Weston was sick of that song. He'd heard it for years, watched in stunned awe as his usually conservative mother would close her eyes, wag her head, and swing her hips to the music. He just didn't get it. And he didn't like the noise now. It was bound to drive the squirrels away.
He was about to shimmy down the tree when he heard laughter—his mother's tinkling, and rare laughter—coming from the open window. Another voice, deeper and male, said something indiscernible, and Mikki Taggert giggled like a schoolgirl again. A sense that something was wrong settled over Weston, and though he knew he shouldn't, he inched farther onto the branch that brushed against the guest house.
“I can't believe you're here,” Mikki said, whispering in delight again as the song ended.
“Couldn't stay away.”
“I'm glad.” Her voice had lowered an octave and Weston, his hands sweaty as he looked down toward the ground that looked so far away, closed in on the open window.
“Looks like you were ready for me.”
“No, silly, I was going to work on my tan.”
A rumble of laughter. “In September?”
“Why not?”
“I think we can work on something else.”
“You're evil,” Mikki insisted, though she didn't sound scared. Her voice was breathy and low; the tone made Weston's skin crawl—like the sound of fingernails scraping against a chalkboard. Something in the back of his mind cautioned him to scramble back down the tree, to run as fast and as far away as his legs would carry him, but it was as if he were drawn by a magnet, pulled closer to that open window by an irresistible and probably malignant force.
“Evil?” the man repeated, and Weston thought he heard the sound of ice cubes tinkling in a glass. “I don't think so.”
“What would Neal say?”
Yeah! What would Dad say?
Laughter. Deep and dark and dangerous. “Now that's an interesting question, but let's not think about him right now.”
“Shouldn't we?” Mikki Taggert's question hung in the late summer air. “I thought this was all about him, that he was the one really getting screwed, so to speak.”
The window and edge of the curtains were near. Weston craned his neck and squinted. As his eyes adjusted to the dark interior his stomach, already churning, turned over. His mother was standing on her tiptoes, her arms thrown around the thick neck of a big man, his fingers moving against her bare back, untying the string to the top of her bikini. Oil gleamed on her already-tanned skin.
The man kissed her, and with a quick movement, pulled the red bra down. Weston swallowed as he saw his mother's breasts, white where the sun hadn't touched them, dark huge disks for nipples, stretch marks marring their beauty. He squeezed his eyes shut and nearly fell off his perch. His brain thundered. What was his mother doing with this guy—this stranger with the thick neck and brown hair just starting to gray?
His stomach convulsed and it was all he could do not to retch and throw up. Sweat slid down his nose and he wished to God he'd never climbed the tree, never crawled near this damned window, but still he stared, unable to drag his gaze away, watching in morbid fascination as his mother, the woman he'd looked up to all his life tipped her head back and let the guy kiss her, his hands finding those big pillowy breasts as they tumbled onto the antique quilt Grandma had stitched. Mikki made deep, ugly sounds in the back of her throat and arched up against the man—rubbing his crotch.
Bile tickled Weston's throat as the man stripped himself of his shirt. The slingshot in Weston's back pocket pressed against his butt and he thought of aiming through the window and shooting a rock right at the guy's head. Why not? The bastard deserved it. He reached for his weapon as his mother let out a long, low, “Ooooh, that's it baby.”
Weston's heart shriveled. How many lectures had his mother given him and his little brother about being good, playing fair, never cheating, always being loyal? He couldn't count the times that Mikki had smoothed his cowlick with loving fingers, straightened his tie, and driven Harley, Baby Paige, and him into town to the Second Christian Church where from high in the pulpit Reverend Jones, the most boring minister in the world, went on and on about the wrath and power of God.
Mama had always told him to be true to himself, to his family, to God and Jesus. She'd told him over and over again that the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule were never to be broken, and yet there she was, stripping some guy of his clothes,
humping
him for God's sake.
Still it was too dark to see the man's face, but Weston had the sickening feeling that he should know him as he stared at his freckled hairy back. There was a mirror across the room, facing the bed, but the guy never looked up, and all Weston viewed was the top of his head as he straddled Mama, his back to the window. Weston heard the distinctive metallic hiss of a zipper being lowered. “You want me, baby?”
That voice!
Weston had heard it before.
“Yes.”
“How much, baby? Show Daddy how much.”
He couldn't stand it another minute. Yanking the slingshot and a sharp-edged rock from his back pocket, he took aim. Through the open window, right at that white, freckled back he sighted his slingshot, drew back on the thick rubber band, and with a thwang, let his sharp little missile fly.

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