Wild Child Page 7

  He didn’t like to think of what that might mean.

  But then, as if his fingers under the edge of her shirt, right at her spine, had unlocked her, she melted against him. Arched to meet him. It had been sweet and hot and about the most perfect moment in his life in as long as he could remember.

  Whatever “show” she was talking about, he didn’t know if that was it. All he knew was that she was viciously, sublimely exciting.

  But she was staring at him, her eyes deep and dark, and he realized that whatever her reasons were, the kiss was a mistake for her, too.

  Ironic that it stung.

  “I’ll walk you home,” he said.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Yeah … I do.”

  The night had taken some strange turns, but when he turned and walked down the road with Monica close enough that her shirt touched his, he was electrified all along the side of his body.

  The dog pranced ahead.

  Before he realized it, he smiled. A real smile, not his mayor smile. And he knew in a heartbeat that if Monica had come back to town just two months from now, after the contest was all over, things would be different between them.

  But then, he wasn’t going to be here in two months. It was now or never for them, and it absolutely couldn’t be now.

  Which left them with never.

  Jackson held open the front door to the Peabody and Monica slipped in.

  “Good night.” His voice curled over her shoulder and when she glanced back at him, his face was half-shadowed. His lips dark, his eyes bright. Oh. Those eyes … in those eyes she saw the echo of the loneliness that lived in her heart.

  “Monica—” This was the start of a conversation she didn’t want to have. “Stop, Jackson—it was a mistake for me too.”

  There was nothing else to say, and he nodded in maybe grim, maybe sad concession. Hard to tell.

  “Good night.” Reba at her feet barked and she saw the upward curve of Jackson’s half-smile. “’Night, Rambo.”

  And then he was gone and she was walking through the Peabody with its golden lamplight beating back the worst of the Arkansas night. Behind the desk was Jay, who waved with one hand and seemed nervous, probably because of that photo thing yesterday. She gave him the warmest smile she was capable of at the moment and climbed the steps to her room.

  Through the door, she heard the sharp ring of the telephone. Weird. Who would call her at the hotel? She thought of Jackson and despite it all, despite everything she knew in her head, she got a thrill in her belly.

  The instant the door was open, Reba raced past her for the prime spot on the bed.

  She crossed the room and grabbed the phone on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Monica?”

  That voice, low and feminine. Southern at the edges, steel at its core, it unlocked something in her head, a dark room that she loathed. A dark room full of dark stories and memories and snakes and every monster under the bed.

  No. No. Not this. Not now.

  Monica pulled the receiver away from her ear.

  “Don’t hang up!” the voice shot out of the dark she was flooded with fight-or-flight instincts. Reba watched her and as if sensing her dismay, growled low in her throat. “Honey, please don’t hang up.”

  The endearment moved her and standing in the dark, the monsters breathing down her neck, she sighed.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  Chapter 6

  Monica used to love her mom. Not just in the generic way all children love their moms, but after the murder, after Simone had been acquitted, and she and Monica fled the United States and the press and the memories, Monica cherished her mother. Cared for her, as if Monica had become the parent and Simone the child.

  Simone drank too much in London, started doing drugs with the rail-thin English models they were staying with.

  So Monica dumped out the booze. Hid the drugs.

  With their lips curled and their hands in bony white fists, Simone’s friends called her—unkindly—the little mother. And they weren’t wrong.

  After it got cold in London they went to Greece.

  They lived in a small room behind a house. Monica remembered that the room was blue, and the curtains had red roosters on them. Simone spent days in the bed, staring out that window. Monica read books on the floor beside the bed, unwilling to leave her mom’s side. She made her mother soup and stood over her to make sure she ate it.

  Monica was seven by then. Her birthday was spent begging her mother to get out of bed.

  After Greece it was Paris, and Simone started to come back to life, only with harder edges, longer silences. But Monica remembered being happy because they used to get chocolate croissants and take naps along the Seine. They spent the days together, out in the city, walking hand in hand along the cobblestone streets. Now, of course, she realized that Simone had to keep them out of the apartment during the day—the price of being able to sleep there at night.

  But sometimes, even now, she dreamt of cobblestone streets and chocolate croissants and she woke up crying.

  “How did you find me?” Monica asked, swamped by the memories brought in by the sound of her mother’s voice. So powerful, she imagined the scent of Shalimar. As if Simone were there. In the room.

  She imagined her in pieces, never able to fully see her mother as a whole. The famous cheekbones, the flawless skin, the cold smile, the calculation behind those famous purple eyes.

  “I read the Rolling Stone article.”

  Monica’s shock cleared the memories away, making room for the anger that would no doubt follow.

  “Why are you calling?”

  “I would think that was obvious?”

  Monica bit down hard on her back teeth. “Illuminate me.”

  “I want to stop you from writing that book.”

  “Now that is surprising.” With her suddenly thick and clumsy fingers, it took a few tries for Monica to unclip Reba’s leash. “I would think that you’d love me writing a book about you.”

  “You want to write a book about me? About that reality show I made you do when you were a kid? Fine. Do it. Tell the world how I screwed you up. But don’t write a book about that night.”

  “That night. Listen to you, you can’t even own up to it—”

  “The night your father tried to kidnap you and strangle me, and I stopped him by putting a bullet in his chest.”

  The silence buzzed, like a sound system turned up too loud without music. Monica swallowed. She took her time hanging the leash over the bathroom doorknob, making sure the weight was distributed just right so it didn’t slide to the floor. Something about all those words put together like that made her small again. A girl.

  “Have I owned up to it enough for you?”

  “Why do you care?” Monica murmured, wishing her voice were stronger. Wishing she hadn’t put all that hate from her teenage years behind her. She could use some hate; she could use something to keep herself grounded. Because she felt about as substantial as fluff.

  “I have always cared.”

  Monica’s laugh was full of poison, but Simone was silent.

  “I’m not sure when I started giving you the impression that I didn’t care, but I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  “This is very old ground, Mom. Tell me why you’ve tracked me down to try—far too late, I might add—to tell me what to do.”

  Simone took a deep breath, as if pulling herself together, bracing herself for impact, and it was so surprising, Monica stood still in the middle of her room, wondering what could make Simone unsure of herself. Everything Simone did was planned, staged. She knew the angles, the lighting, her best side. Nothing was unscripted; there was no room for chance in her life.

  “Because if you write this book you can’t go back. You’ll let the whole world into the darkest corner of your life—”

  “You’re one to talk, Mom! You air your laundry every week on national television. And a fa
ir amount of mine, I might add.”

  “But I have never talked about JJ. Ever.”

  Monica blinked, stunned to realize it was the truth. Simone might have spent two seasons auditioning young men to be her lover, but she’d never publically talked about JJ. Dad.

  “It’s a choice,” Simone said, taking advantage of Monica’s silence. “What I do is a choice. I choose what to show the world and I have made the choice to never show them that.”

  It was on the tip of Monica’s tongue to ask why, but she shook her head. She didn’t really care. “You’re worried about your reputation,” she said, assuming the worst.

  “No.” Simone’s denial was said with such power, with such precision, that Monica had to fiddle with the leash again, as if it were the most important thing in the world. “I’m worried about you. About what it will mean for you if you keep giving away yourself like this. Handing out your secrets and your pain and your mistakes as if they mean nothing. As if by putting it all down on paper it loses its power to hurt you.”

  “It doesn’t hurt me!” she barked. “I barely remember that night. And it’s too late. The contracts are signed. The deadlines are set.”

  “Send back the money. Get out of it.”

  Monica almost told her mother she was broke. Almost. But she stopped herself just in time.

  “If you need the money …” Simone said, apparently with the sixth sense that comes with motherhood despite being shitty at it.

  “It’s an important cultural event.” Her editor’s words gave her a little bravado, and she lifted her chin. “And I have a personal attachment to it.”

  “It’s scandal and gossip.”

  “Once again, Mom, you are one to talk.”

  “You are trying so hard to pretend that you’re better than me because you write books with the word ‘nonfiction’ on the spine. But you’re just like me, digging through your life for little shiny bits and scary bits and terrifying bits to show the world so they have something to talk about at work, so they can feel better about their own lives because ours are such a mess.”

  Monica shook her head, denying it. Denying her. Wishing all over again that there was nothing between them. No connection, not even blood. Wishing somehow that she could sever all of it. Monica wasn’t blind enough to pretend innocence in the great rift between herself and her mother. She’d done her fair share of damage, but those years—those lost years when she’d felt unprotected and vulnerable, when the questions about what had happened with her father, to their family, had been brushed aside—those years were her mother’s fault.

  “I am nothing like you, Mom. Nothing.”

  “I know you want to believe that.”

  “There’s nothing you can do to stop me from writing this book.”

  Even if she didn’t need the money, even if she was squeamish about going back into those dark days, she’d still write the damn book just to piss her mother off.

  Not healthy, not at all, but the truth. The truth dug up from the place where she kept it buried.

  I guess I do still hate her.

  There were silver sparkles at the edge of her vision—a headache approached.

  “We’re done, Mom. We were done fourteen years ago. Don’t contact me again.”

  Monica hung up. Which she should have done the second she heard her mother’s voice, the second she imagined the ghostly scent of her mother’s favorite perfume.

  Monica collapsed on the bed and Reba climbed up on her chest, licking her chin. It was strange comfort, but Monica couldn’t afford to be picky.

  “What a night, dog,” she whispered.

  She closed her eyes, feeling young. Unsafe.

  Chapter 7

  It was getting harder and harder to breathe.

  Shelby Monroe unrolled the window, despite having the air-conditioning on. Despite the red Arkansas dust that swirled in through the window. She couldn’t breathe.

  Every mile that brought her closer to home, closer to her life, suffocated her.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said out loud in an effort to calm herself down. Every time she came home from the annual Teachers of Fine and Industrial Arts Convention held in Memphis, she felt this way. Like she was burning through the atmosphere as she reentered her world.

  This year was worse. And it was all because of the thong.

  How do women wear these? she wondered, shifting uncomfortably in the driver’s seat of her Taurus.

  For two years she’d been flirting with Eric,Long sitting with him at the bar, nursing a white wine spritzer while everyone else went to bed. For two years she’d thought, breathlessly, that he was going to ask her up to his hotel room. And she’d waited. And waited. Two years.

  Which was why she’d decided that this year, if he didn’t ask, she would ask him.

  That had been her plan. To drink three white wine spritzers and ask Eric, a balding high school Agriculture teacher with sweaty hands, up to her hotel room. For sex. Yep. Sex.

  But Eric had shown up this year wearing a wedding ring. And showing everyone pictures of a honeymoon with a tiny brunette in the Ozarks. And Shelby had thought for one long, horrifying moment that she might actually burn to dust in embarrassment. As if everyone could see what she’d been planning. As if everyone could see that under her Land’s End denim skirt, she was wearing a pink thong. Just one of a bunch of thongs she’d had to mail-order because she was too embarrassed to go to the mall and buy it in person.

  All of her friends at the conference, not just Eric, were showing off pictures of babies and diamond rings and telling stories about honeymoon cruises.

  And she was still living with her mother.

  “Oh God,” she moaned, hating her life.

  It wasn’t as if she expected some grand love affair to come her way. She wasn’t the kind of woman who got swept off her feet; she fully realized that. Her feet were so rooted to the ground where she was raised, it was amazing she wasn’t covered in kudzu.

  Practicality had its own list of benefits, but romance was never included.

  She topped the hill under the willows and in front of her, on the long stretch of red dusty road, she saw Mrs. O’Hara’s burgundy 1977 Cadillac El Dorado on the shoulder, steam rolling out from under the hood.

  For crying out loud, how many times did that woman need to get hauled off the side of the road before she’d get rid of that piece of garbage? Shelby slowed down and eased in behind the El Dorado, so covered in dust that the license plates were obscured and the back window had practically no visibility.

  Eighty-year-old Mrs. O’Hara was a menace in this car. Any car, actually, but this one in particular. The blind spots were epic, the radiator problematic, and she had no sense of how damn big the car was despite having driven it off the lot a million years ago!

  Shelby slipped on the mint-green ballet slippers she’d taken off to drive, tucked her cell phone in her pocket in case this was more than just the radiator hose, and popped open the door to her car. Immediately the hot wind swept up around her, and her pink skirt swirled around her knees.

  “Mrs. O’Hara!” she cried, rounding the back of the car, slapping her skirt back down. Mrs. Hara didn’t need to get a glimpse of her naughty underwear. “You all right?”

  From the front passenger seat a person emerged. But it wasn’t Mrs. O’Hara.

  It was a tall, very tall, powerfully built man, wearing khakis and a white tee shirt that were rumpled and smeared with grease.

  Shelby stopped and took a step back. She held up the mace on her key ring.

  “Stop … I mean …” He held up his hands, his voice low and soft. His blond hair was long, and he swept it out of his eye and then put the hand back up. “I’m sorry. I won’t … I won’t hurt you.”

  “Where’s Mrs. O’Hara?” she asked, stepping back again. No one ever came down this road. Except for Gary sometimes on his tractor, but it was the wrong season for that. This man could rape her, kill her, and bury her body and no one w
ould ever know.

  “Who?”

  “This is Mrs. O’Hara’s car.”

  “No. It’s the crap car I bought from a crook outside Little Rock. Doesn’t go twenty miles without overheating.”

  She hesitated before taking another step, but then he shuffled forward and she leapt back, her butt hitting the hood of her car. Her cell phone was in her pocket. She fumbled through her skirt until she pulled it out. Brandishing it like a gun.

  He stopped, those hands going back up. His features were sharp, his eyes a startling blue. “I’m sorry. I am. I have no … well, no intention of hurting you. And I have no idea how to fix this car. I was calling someone for help, but I don’t get service out here. Do you?”

  She noticed, belatedly, through the adrenaline haze of panic that his accent wasn’t local.

  “You’re not from here?”

  “I just … I just arrived from New York.”

  Oh, that was worse, wasn’t it? Being from New York made him seem decidedly more dangerous.

  “Why … why did you buy this car?”

  “The rental place was out of cars, if you can believe it. And this car … well, it seemed sort of cool in the lot.” He gazed at the car as though it was a friend who’d had betrayed him. “Look, if you get service out here, can I use your cell phone? Call a mechanic or something?”

  It was his smile, abashed and charming, that convinced her. He was embarrassed out here with his broken-down car, relying on the kindness of strangers.

  “I can look at your car, if you like. But I warn you,” she said as she typed in 911 on her cell and showed him the display, “I do get service, and any funny business and all I have to do is hit send—” Hit send and if she was lucky, maybe in twenty minutes Darryl down at the station would find his way out here. But this man didn’t know that.

  “Understood,” he said solemnly. “But …” Sunlight hit his blue eyes and she realized they weren’t all blue, they were also gray and green, a beautiful color, and in the sunlight they glowed.