Fences: Smith Mountain Lake Series - Book Three Read online

  But then I see the sweet faces of my two daughters, as I had left them sleeping. Guilt slices through me. I put my foot on the brake, slow the car to the speed limit. The needle has just leveled off at fifty-five when headlights suddenly flash in the rearview mirror.

  The car comes out of nowhere, racing up behind me, its front end almost touching the Mercedes’ bumper. I touch the brake again, and the car falls back a short distance, then shoots around me in a black flash, even though the double yellow lines indicate a no-passing zone.

  Thirty yards ahead, the car slams to a stop in the middle of the road and swings around at a ninety-degree turn, tires squalling.

  I fumble for the door lock, fear a sudden, choking knot in my chest.

  I’m in the middle of nowhere, not a house in sight. A black Porsche 911 with New York plates now blocks both lanes in front of me. It’s hardly the kind of car someone who needs to steal a vehicle would be driving.

  I grip the wheel until my knuckles lose their color. I’ll go around it. The shoulder is steep, but it beats waiting to see what this lunatic has in mind. A few moments ago, I’d foolishly wondered what it would be like to leave it all behind. Now, adrenaline fuels an undeniable rush of survival instinct.

  I stomp on the accelerator, but just then the car door opens, and a man climbs out. The headlights catch his profile. I slam on the brakes again, feeling the blood leave my face.

  The front bumper of the Mercedes stops just short of his knees. I sit, frozen to the seat, my hands glued to the steering wheel.

  Disbelief weighs like a rock on my chest.

  How many times have I wondered what it would be like to see him again? Imagined what I would say to him?

  In what feels like slow motion, I unlock the door and get out, barely aware of my feet touching the ground.

  “Are you trying to kill yourself?” he asks, walking toward me.

  The voice is a surprise. Deep and even, it is the voice of a man, not the boy I remember.

  “Apparently so,” he says, when I don’t answer. He slides inside my car and pulls it over to the shoulder of the road. He gets back out again, my keys in his hand.

  His highhandedness strikes a nerve. “Give me back my keys,” I say.

  Again, he ignores me, tossing them up and catching them in his palm, before turning and making his way back to his own car.

  I stand there for a moment, feeling as if some ridiculous gauntlet has been thrown.

  The taillights from the car cast him in silhouette. He is as tall as I remember, but his shoulders are wider than they had once been. His slightly wavy hair touches the collar of his light-blue shirt. He opens the car door and slides inside. “Get in, Jillie,” he says without looking at me.

  “We need to talk.”

  “There’s nothing for us to talk about,” I say.

  “That the best you can do after all these years?”

  We stare at each other for what feels like a long time, neither of us willing to back down.

  Finally, I take a deep breath and count to five before going around to the passenger side and opening the door.

  I’ll stay long enough to get my keys back and let him have his say.

  No sooner have I gotten in than he reaches across me and pulls the door closed. He slaps the lock button behind the gear shift, securing the doors with a solid-sounding wachunk. He snaps my seat belt into place.

  “Tate, stop,” I say in the most reasonable voice I can manage. “This is crazy. Let me out of the car.”

  But he turns the key and shoves the gearshift into first, slamming the accelerator to the floor. The car shoots down the narrow road with a deafening roar.

  He pushes another button, and the top slides back. The star-clustered sky hangs above us like a beaded canopy.

  The wind catches my hair, the car taking the curves effortlessly, hugging the road like a fine leather glove on a woman’s hand. I glance at the speedometer. The needle hits ninety, inching higher.

  I grip the door handle. Ninety-five. One hundred.

  We are flying now, the trees a blur by the side of the road, the yellow line dividing the pavement in front of us nearly invisible. I say nothing, feeling his gaze on me, but staring straight ahead and refusing to look at him.

  Another minute or two passes before he stands on the brake and swings the car onto a dirt road barely visible amidst the overbrush on each side of it.

  I remember this road.

  It leads to a dead end where it meets the lake. Tate had taken me parking here one night during our senior year in high school. I haven’t been here since, but the same pasture stretches out to our right, moonlight glancing off the grass. Several large black and white cows turn to let out questioning moos.

  Tate cuts the engine and the headlights at the same time. “Nerves of steel. You always had them, didn’t you, Jillie?” he asks softly, a grudging note of respect in his voice. “There was never a jump too high for you.”

  “You don’t scare me, Tate. As much as you might want to.”

  “And me an attempted rapist.” The words were quietly issued, but there was no mistaking their razor edge.

  “I know you didn’t do it,” I say, the words barely audible.

  He laughs, a bitter laugh I don’t recognize at all.

  I remember other times when we had laughed together, over silly things, like using a fallen tree as a balance beam and ending up in the creek together, both of us going in head first only to emerge with our clothes stuck to us in places that had us staring first in healthy curiosity and then in lustful longing.

  “What makes you so sure now?” he asks, his voice at once belligerent and yet hoarse around the edges.

  “I know you would never have done that.”

  “You didn’t know that then. You see, Jillie, I have a good memory. And I remember the look in your eyes the day you came to see me in jail. You believed it.”

  Pain, long thought resolved, stabs through me. “Tate—”

  “How much did they pay you for the photo?” he asks in a voice casual enough to be inquiring about the weather.

  “If you’re talking about the magazine that just came out, I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Was it for the money?” he goes on, as if I haven’t denied it. “I should think you have plenty of that now.”

  “The picture was in my—” I stop there, start again. Too much information. “I didn’t send it to them.”

  “Then who did?”

  I realize that it won’t matter what I say. He won’t believe me. “I don’t know.”

  He stares at me for several long seconds before getting out of the car.

  I wait a minute or two, then open my door. I walk to the front where he is leaning against the hood. The night air is cool on my arms. “If this is causing problems with your career, I’m sorry, but—”

  His gaze locks with mine. “My career. You think that’s all this is about?”

  The question sends an arrow straight through me. All these years since we’ve seen each other, and I still know him. With other people, he always managed a good front to his feelings. But from day one, it had never worked with me. Shocking to realize it still doesn’t. “I don’t know what to say.”

  His gaze holds mine for several long seconds. “I’ve been asked to make sure you don’t have any more cards up your sleeve. So here goes. Do you?”

  Bitterness saturates the words. He means for them to hurt. And they do.

  “I told you. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “So who did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not exactly the answer I’m looking for.” He shoves away from the car then, swinging around to stand in front of me.

  A warning bell goes off inside me. Close. Too close.

  For long, drawn-out seconds, he says nothing. He just stands there, looking down at me. His gaze lingers on my face, then drops lower in deliberate appraisal. I force myself not to move, when all innate survival instinct
demands I run.

  I lift my chin an inch or two higher and stand my ground.

  He looks his fill, then meets my gaze, and says, “Jillie Andrews. All grown up.”

  It isn’t a compliment. I don’t take it as one. Instead, I return the perusal, my gaze dropping from his face to his chest, subtly defined beneath the blue shirt. I glance away, unable to continue holding up my flagging confidence.

  “Or maybe not so grown up, after all,” he says.

  I push away from the car, forcing him to move. “Take me back. I can assure you there won’t be any more photos of the two of us floating around,” I say, emphasizing the last. “As soon as I get home, I’m going to burn every last one of them.”

  He catches my arm, studying my face. “So why didn’t you before?”

  The directness of his gaze robs me of a response. “I realize now I should have,” I finally manage.

  “You sent them that picture.” A statement, not a question.

  “Believe what you want, Tate,” I say, stepping away and heading for the car door.

  But he reaches for me again, this time pinning me to the hood in a lightning-quick movement, his legs pressing into mine. With one hand, he holds my wrists above my head. “Isn’t this what you would expect of me, Jillie? Rough and tumble? Is this what you imagined me doing with Angela? Not as nice and innocent as what we did?”

  I keep my gaze locked with his, refusing to look away, as if in doing so, I might lose something I’d never be able to get back again.

  “Well, is it?” he asks when I don’t answer, his voice noticeably hoarser than before. “Are you afraid of me? Afraid the way Angela said she was of that barbaric Callahan boy?”

  Given the look on his face, maybe I’m a fool, but of all the emotions descending over me, fear is not one of them.

  The hood of the car is cool beneath my shirt, its unforgiving surface making me all the more aware of the muscled lines of the man above me. Memories of a warm spring afternoon when I had all but thrown myself at him come taunting.

  Somewhere behind us, an owl hoots, and a breeze lifts the limbs of the white pines to the side of the car. I look into the blue of his eyes and catch a glimpse of the boy I had once known. Uncertainty flickers there. Along with a hint of something else I once thought I’d seen in his eyes when he looked at me.

  His gaze drops to my lips. Seconds tick by while we remain still, suspended in indecision. My mouth goes suddenly dry. Tate releases my wrists, and I can see the battle of emotion playing across his face.

  He wants to kiss me. I know it without question. I also know how much he hates himself for it.

  And yet I want him to.

  He lowers his head then, blocking out the Moon behind us. His mouth takes mine, sudden, forceful. Any initial resistance slides away, and I don’t want to think. For now, I just want to forget about the awful guilt eating a hole inside me and the mess I’ve made of my life.

  And somewhere near the base of my soul, I want to see if his kiss is as sweet as I remember it.

  It is.

  And then some.

  His mouth all but devours mine, filling me up and draining me at once. With a single kiss, he has already reached more of me than I ever allowed my own husband to reach throughout the duration of our marriage.

  With Jeffrey, I’d always held a piece of myself in reserve. A part of me that he could never touch. Maybe I hadn’t realized that until now. It seems hateful and beneath me. And I feel ashamed of the kind of wife I’d ended up being.

  The realization douses me with the cold shock of ice water.

  What am I doing? Tate and I are no longer two teenagers controlled by impulse. We are grown adults with a history, a painful one at that.

  I push him away, then slide off the hood and put a few feet of distance between us, my breathing coming in short, ragged gasps.

  He stares at me, like someone awakened from a daze, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, as if he could just as easily wipe away any trace of me. He backs up until a larger chunk of space separates us.

  “Why don’t you take that home to Jeffrey? I’m sure he’ll be waiting to finish what I started.”

  I flinch, the cool air suddenly chilling my heated skin.

  He doesn’t know. Stunned, I start to tell him, but something stops me. I don’t want to see pity on his face. The last thing in the world I want from Tate Callahan is pity.

  7

  Tate

  I LET THE CAR ROLL to a stop beside the Mercedes, keeping my gaze trained straight ahead, silent.

  Without a word, Jillie gets out and slides into her own vehicle before driving away, taillights disappearing into the night. Going back to her husband with my kiss still warm on her mouth.

  I slam my palm against the steering wheel, muttering a few choice words when pain explodes through my wrist.

  I shove the gearshift into first and swing the car around in the road, heading back toward town. I leave the top down, the wind narrowing my eyes, the painful sting welcome.

  What the hell was I thinking to come here, anyway? Leaving New York this morning like a madman on a mission and driving straight through to Virginia had been a crazy, stupid thing to do.

  Okay, so I can admit that now. I’ll be out of here with the light of day. If Jillie wants to sell the tabloids more stories, it’s fine by me. She can tell them whatever she wants to tell them. I’m not going to hang around long enough to dredge up a past I only want to forget.

  In the Beginning

  WE WERE UNLIKELY friends, she a born optimist, me beaten down by a childhood that unfolded from one foster home chapter to another.

  Jillie was sure the world was on the right track, and, like the return of spring after winter, everything always worked out as it was supposed to.

  I had lived a decidedly different experience. When we’d first started hanging around together, she felt sorry for me. I knew it. Not because I was the new kid in school, but because as far as she was concerned, it was an awful thing to see the world in shades of gray.

  But by the age of seven, I had mastered the art of moving. To me, another school was just another school. There would be the requisite bully, the class princess, and the girl who felt sorry for the new guy and wanted to make it all better.

  The bully was Todd Bendermeier, responsible for the most recent bruise beneath my eye. The princess was Angela Taylor, heir apparent to the textile factory where half the town worked and whose honor Todd had apparently been defending. The girl was Jillie Andrews, now hovering around me like a bee to a spring flower, aiming a wet brown paper towel at my throbbing eye.

  “I tried to get some ice from the cafeteria,” she said, “but the door was locked. This might help.”

  I took the towel, not because I wanted it, but because she looked so intent on helping that I didn’t have the heart to ask her to leave me alone, which was all I really wanted. That and to save enough money to finally strike out on my own. Find some place where I might actually be wanted and never leave. “Thanks,” I said, not looking at her.

  We sat at the edge of the playground, backs against a set of monkey bars.

  “Todd’s just jealous,” she said. “And he looks worse than you do, if that makes you feel better.”

  I made a sound of disbelief.

  “Well, he does. Everybody knows he’s been after her since first grade.”

  “He won’t get any arguments from me.”

  “Yeah, but Angela gets all googly-eyed every time she looks at you.”

  “Googly-eyed?”

  “You know. Weak at the knees. Heart palpitations.”

  I choked back a laugh and couldn’t stop myself from looking at her. Really looking at her. She had a nice smile: straight, white teeth, lips that looked like she’d just eaten a bowl full of strawberries. Blue eyes with dark lashes made a noticeable contrast to her light-blonde hair. She wore a white, sleeveless blouse with faded jeans and a pair of worn brown boots.

  �
��Why are you so interested in it?”

  She lifted a shoulder, traced a finger through the red clay dirt between them.

  “Boredom, I guess.”

  The answer surprised me. She was supposed to say she felt sorry for him. Or it wasn’t fair that the new guy always got picked on. A future warrior for the underprivileged. “Glad I could liven up your day,” I said.

  “Me, too.” She smiled again, and I wondered if my take on Jillie Andrews was all wrong. At first glance, she was more plain than pretty; her hair pulled back in a ponytail, her nose dotted with freckles. Unlike Angela whose shiny, dark hair hung to her waist. Angela, who looked as if she’d never been allowed to play in the sun without a hat on. “So how long are you here for?” Jillie asked.

  I shot her another look of surprise. “What makes you think it’s not forever?”

  “Because you look like somebody who can’t wait to be sprung.”

  “No longer than I have to be,” I admitted.

  She considered my answer. “Where do fourteen year olds go when they’re making their own choices?”

  Tate pressed a finger against his eye. “Anywhere other than here.”

  “It’s not so bad,” she said, sounding offended.

  “Been here all your life?” I asked.

  “Yep,” she said, obviously proud of the fact.

  “That’s a good thing?”

  “What’s wrong with roots?”

  “I guess nothing, if they’re in the right place.”

  “To me, this is the right place.” She waved a hand at the Virginia mountains in the distance, the late September trees starting to turn a series of molten golds and reds.

  It was pretty. I could give her that.

  I’d spent the early years of my childhood in a forest of concrete, government-built skyscrapers with playgrounds that measured in square feet, rusted sliding boards and rotting seesaws. When I came to live with my current foster family, my first glimpse of the Blue Ridge Mountains made me think the whole thing had to be some kind of cruel joke. That I couldn’t actually live in a place this beautiful, that with a single blink it would all disappear, as anything good always had.