"Hey," he said, coming up the aisle on one side of their table and sliding onto the banquette next to Kim, while Jared crowded in next to Sandy on the other side of the table.
"What's going on?" Jared grinned at his sister. "How come you guys didn't invite us along when you snuck out?"
Kim saw Sandy's eyes fix coldly on Luke Roberts, and realized, to her horror, that she was staring at her brother exactly the same way. She looked at him carefully, studying his face. His features—everything about him—looked exactly the same as ever. But it just didn't feel the same. All her life she'd felt the Twin Thing—that deep link with her brother—which had always let her know that no matter what else happened, he was always there.
Now he wasn't.
She just didn't feel him anymore. Kim sighed inwardly. Maybe it was just something she had to forget about. Maybe it was just that they were both growing up.
She was jerked out of her reverie by ... what?
Something had touched her leg! Then she felt Luke Roberts's thigh pressing against hers. She turned and glared at him. "Could you just move over?"
Luke rolled his eyes scornfully, but he pulled away.
"And keep your hands on the table," Kim told him.
"Jeez," Luke groaned. "What is with you?"
Kim gave him a cold smile. "Not you!" she said.
Across from Kim, Sandy Engstrom was acutely aware of Jared Conway's presence next to her. She'd seen him when he first came in, and when their eyes met, the strangest feeling had come over her.
As if he'd looked right inside her.
But not just looked in. It seemed he'd reached into her, actually touched her. She'd felt a rush of heat and her skin broke out in goose bumps. And right away—even before he'd started toward her—she'd known he would sit next to her.
Now, with his body pressed against hers, the goose bumps were back, and she could once again feel that delicious heat.
What if Jared asked her out?
Should she go?
Sandy shivered with excitement as she began to think about the possibilities.
I don't believe it! Kim thought as once again Luke Roberts's fingers touched the skin on her leg. Giving Luke a hard enough shove that he almost fell off the banquette onto the floor, she slid out of the booth. "Let's get out of here," she told Sandy. "We've only got ten more minutes, and I have to stop at my locker."
"What's the big hurry?" Luke protested. "Come on—we just got here!"
"Maybe you don't care if we get caught, but I do," Kim snapped. "This was a stupid thing to do in the first place!" She headed toward the door, refusing even to glance back.
Sandy followed her, but at the door, turned to look back at Jared. His eyes locked on hers, and once more she had the strange feeling that he was reaching right inside her, sending a warmth through her that made her almost tremble with pleasure.
Like he's making love to me, she thought. It feels like he's making love to me. Doing her best to control her emotions—and praying no one would notice her deep blush—Sandy hurried after her friend.
Suddenly, she could hardly wait for the sleep-over at Kim's house.
The pizza parlor had emptied out twenty minutes ago, but so far Jared showed no sign of being ready to leave. Luke Roberts was starting to get nervous. Very nervous. For ten years—ever since he'd started at St. Ignatius, when he was five years old—he'd lived in fear of the wrath of the sisters. He'd first learned to fear their swift brand of retribution when Sister Katherine rapped his knuckles with a ruler for passing a piece of chewing gum back to one of his friends, sitting behind him. His hand had bled for the rest of the day, but Sister Katherine wouldn't even let him go put a Band-Aid on it. "If Jesus didn't ask for Band-Aids on the Cross, I think you can stand a little cut on your knuckles, Luke," she'd told him. The rest of the class giggled at the way she talked about Jesus on the Cross, but a single look from the nun silenced them, and Luke burned with shame when the pain in his knuckles made him cry. If Jesus hadn't asked for Band-Aids, he sure couldn't have cried, either. But he'd learned his lesson, and never tried to pass another piece of gum.
He'd also learned not to talk during class, and to stand up next to his desk when he answered a question.
And he'd learned not to be late.
He made that mistake in sixth grade, when Sister Michael was his teacher. Sister Mike—the only nun who let the kids shorten her name—had made him stay after school and write on the blackboard.
I waste my time when I'm late.
I waste the class's time when I'm late.
I waste Sister Michael's time when I'm late.
He'd written the three sentences a hundred times, and when he was done, he vowed never to be late to class again.
And he hadn't, until today. Now he glanced at the clock, trying not to let Jared Conway see him doing it. But Jared seemed almost as good as the sisters at knowing what he was doing.
"What's the matter?" he asked now. "Afraid Sister Clarence is going to make you stay after school?"
"No," Luke replied, knowing he'd spoken a little too fast.
Jared's eyes clamped mockingly onto his own. "'I waste my time when I'm late. I waste the class's time when I'm late. I waste Sister Michael's time when I'm late,'" he parroted, as if reading the words off the blackboard.
Or out of his own mind, Luke thought.
How? How'd he know? He thought back over the last few weeks, when he'd been spending almost all his time with Jared Conway. Had he told Jared about that afternoon when he was in Sister Mike's class?
He must have.
But he hadn't—he was almost sure of it!
How had Jared known?
"I can read your mind," he told Luke the day after they'd smoked the joints in Jared's basement room, when Luke had the weird hallucinations.
Hallucinations that were still so vivid, even weeks later, that he could hardly believe they'd been hallucinations at all. Just last night, before he went to sleep, he'd even imagined he felt the touch of the woman who appeared that night, stroking his cheek and letting her fingers trail down over his neck and chest, caressing his stomach, then reaching lower and lower until—
"Maybe you better go into the men's room," Jared drawled, slouching back in the booth and leering suggestively at Luke.
Luke felt his face burn, and shoved the memory out of his mind. Then he looked at the clock again. Sister Clarence is gonna kill us, he thought. This time she's really gonna kill us.
Jared grinned at him, and winked. "Well, we wouldn't want Sister to kill us, would we?" he said. Laughing, he slipped out of the booth and headed for the door.
As Luke followed, he found himself wondering again if it was really possible that Jared could somehow read his mind.
Sister Clarence stopped speaking as the door to her classroom opened and the two boys walked in, led by Jared Conway. A cold knot of anger formed inside her as she gazed at her newest student, and—not for the first time—immediately begged her savior for forgiveness for her failings. I know I should love all the children, she silently prayed, but I cannot love Jared Conway.
She'd thought about it many times over the past six weeks. Late at night, when she was alone in her tiny cell on the third floor of the convent next door, she occasionally blamed herself for the change in the boy. Perhaps she'd been too hard on him that first day, when he passed the note to his sister, but she'd learned years ago that when children arrived at St. Ignatius from public school, it was never too early to begin challenging the laxity of their habits. That nothing was demanded of the children was the worst failure of the public schools. Not that their parents were much better than the teachers, for the most part. But at St. Ignatius, lack of discipline—mental, physical, or moral—was simply not tolerated, so when she'd caught the Conway twins misbehaving on their very first morning, she hadn't hesitated to discipline them. And Kimberley had certainly responded well. The girl settled right into the routine of the school, and immediately made friends wi
th exactly the right sort of girl—Sandy Engstrom was one of Sister Clarence's favorites.
But the boy was another story entirely. On the surface, Jared seemed unchanged. He was still the handsome boy who had walked into her classroom with his sister, a friendly smile on his lips, a strand of his dark curly hair falling over his forehead.
But something about him had certainly changed. It wasn't something Sister Clarence could quite put her finger on—and her inability to identify the difference troubled her. She found herself dreading his arrival in her classroom, and upbraided herself for it, but despite her efforts to exorcise the demon of anger, it still resided within her. In fact, it was growing stronger every day, and as she saw the effect that Jared was starting to have on Luke Roberts, the demon's strength increased. Now, as her class fell silent waiting to see how she would deal with Jared Conway, she struggled with the demon.
She wished to be fair.
She wished to be just.
He knows what I'm thinking. He knows, and even though it doesn't show in his face, he's laughing at me! The demon anger raged inside her, but she held it firmly in control. "Don't bother to sit, Jared," she said as he moved toward his seat. He stopped as her words struck him, but showed no sign of feeling the sting she'd injected into them. "Or you, either," she added as Luke Roberts slouched toward his desk. Though her words were directed at both the boys, her eyes remained on Jared Conway, held by his gaze like—
Like a mouse staring into the eyes of a coiled cobra.
For the first time in all her years of teaching, Sister Clarence had to struggle to keep her voice steady. "Both of you will report to Father Bernard's office at once." She waited, and for one terrible moment had the feeling that Jared Conway was somehow taking her measure. That he was thinking of defying her. Then he turned away and led his friend out of her classroom. But before he released her from the grip of his gaze, Sister Clarence saw the tiniest hint of a smile playing around the corners of his mouth.
The cold knot of anger within her congealed into hatred.
Hatred, and something else.
Something she'd never felt before, at least not in the presence of one of her students.
She felt fear.
For some reason she couldn't quite fathom, Sister Clarence realized she was dreadfully afraid of Jared Conway.
CHAPTER 21
Janet climbed down off the ladder and stepped back to survey her work. When it was finished, the mural would cover most of one wall of the dining room. When she first told Ted her idea of doing the trompe l'oeil, making the long dining room wall opposite the French doors appear to open out onto another, far more formal garden from a time long past, she confessed that she'd almost given up on it before she even started. And it hadn't been simply the vastness of the wall that deterred her. "It's a whole different technique," she'd explained. "You have to know everything about perspective, and lighting, and—"
"And mostly, you have to have the ability to put what you see on the canvas," Ted had interrupted. They'd been in her studio, where she'd shown him the first sketch she made of the imaginary garden from the past. "I might not know much about art," he'd gone on, "but even just in black and white I feel as if I could walk right into that garden."
She eyed the image on the canvas as objectively as she could, and knew he was right—it was good. But still, the task of expanding it to fill the dining room wall seemed all but impossible. What if she couldn't do it?
"The worst that can happen is that you make a mess, and we paint it over. What have you got to lose?"
"Time," she'd reminded him. Just that morning, she'd tried to make a list of everything that needed to be done in the house, but gave up when the job began to look so staggeringly huge that she didn't see how they could ever succeed. But Ted had had an answer for that, too.
"Time is the one thing we're not lacking. Don't forget—there isn't any deadline for opening the hotel. I'd love to be ready by spring, but if it doesn't happen, it's not going to kill us. All the trust says is that I have to be living here. It's my idea to turn it into a business. And there's plenty of money in the accounts to hire people if I need to. So why not give the mural a try?"
He'd taken her hand—something he hadn't done in years—and led her through the house to the cavernous dining room. He had stripped the walls of their peeling wallpaper only the day before. "Maybe it's just the way you did the drawing, but I keep seeing a night scene." His eyes left the wall and scanned the vast, empty room. "And I keep seeing this room done in white—with fresh flowers everywhere—on the tables, on the sideboards, everywhere. I want to make it really romantic, with lots of candles, and tables for two—maybe a few for four, but mostly deuces." His eyes shifted back to the huge blank wall. "And when people look at that wall, they'll see what it must have been like here a century ago, with all those perfect formal gardens no one can afford to keep up anymore. Maybe with a reflecting pool, and moonlight..." He stopped, and looked worried. "Am I biting off more than you can chew?"
Janet shook her head. "If I could do it right, and it were lit right, it could be gorgeous at night. But what about breakfast and lunch?"
"We build a breakfast room," Ted had told her, and for the next hour he led her from room to room, describing the visions in his head. As she listened, Janet, too, began to see the elegant little hotel he wanted to build.
"I don't know if I can do it," he admitted when they were back in the dining room. "But I figure I'll take it one step at a time, and when I come to something I can't do, I'll find someone to help me out. So how about it? What's wrong with you trying to do something wonderful with that wall?"
She started the next day, elaborating on that first sketch she'd made. She worked through the morning, and Ted stopped by now and then to look over her shoulder at the drawings. But he never said anything unless she asked him what he thought. By the end of the morning, she'd finished a drawing that he assured her was a perfect depiction of exactly what he'd had in mind.
And Janet, after studying the drawing as objectively as she possibly could, decided that whether or not Ted was simply humoring her, the drawing was good. Right after lunch, she set to work expanding it onto the huge expanse of the dining room wall.
Within a couple of days—after she'd transformed the wainscoting into a faux-marble balustrade—she realized that Ted was right. She could do it. Slowly, the image took form, and as she worked, new ideas came to her. The painting seemed to take on a life of its own.
Now, even though the mural was still far from complete, the illusion was starting to emerge. She moved from the base of the ladder to the double doors opening from the entry hall, and was trying to gauge the mural's overall effect when she heard Ted come up from the basement, where he'd been working most of the day on the plumbing. For a moment she felt all the automatic responses that had become almost instinctual in her over the years:
The flush of apprehension as she waited to see how much he'd had to drink.
The reflexive shrinking away from the alcohol on his breath, and the roughness of his touch.
The measuring of the anger he always carried with him, which increased in proportion to the number of drinks he'd consumed.
But since that morning six weeks ago when he rid the house of the alcohol he'd bought only the day before, all of that had changed. Slowly, Janet had lowered her guard. Now, as she felt him behind her, she found herself looking forward to his touch rather than dreading it. She snuggled back against his chest, her fingers stroking the thick curly hair on his forearms as he slipped his arms around her and nuzzled her neck with his lips.
"I must smell like a pig," he growled into her ear.
"You smell wonderful," Janet murmured, her whole body responding to the musky odor emanating from his skin.
"Where's Molly?"
"Sound asleep," Janet replied. "I put her down half an hour ago."
Ted's fingers gently caressed her breasts. "How long will she sleep?"
"May
be an hour." Janet twisted in his arms, and put her own around his neck. "Think that'll be long enough?"
"Not by half," Ted whispered. His lips moved from her neck and ear to her mouth, and his arms tightened around her. "Want to go upstairs?" he asked when their lips parted again.
Janet thought of the paintbrushes she'd left on the tray at the top of the ladder.
She thought of the mess in the kitchen that she hadn't cleaned up since lunch.
She thought of the hundred other things that needed to be done.
"I can't think of anything I'd rather do," she said.
He swept her up in his arms and started across the foyer toward the stairs.
"What are you doing?" Janet cried. "Ted, for God's sake, put me down! You'll cripple yourself!"
"Quiet, woman!" he commanded. He started up the stairs, and Janet's struggles gave way to giggles.
"If you drop me, so help me I'll—"
The front door opened then, and they heard Kirn's voice. "Mom? Dad? What's wrong? How come you're carrying Mom?"
"Damn," Ted swore. Janet froze, waiting for the explosion. But when he spoke again, his voice was low enough that only she could hear him. "There goes a perfectly good ravaging. But just wait until later, when the children are locked in their rooms...." His voice trailed off seductively, then he kissed her and lowered her to the stairs. "Nothing's wrong," he told Kim, starting back down to the first floor. "How was school?"
Kim's face clouded. "Okay, I guess," she said, her voice giving the lie to her words.
"What happened?" Janet asked, also back in the foyer now.
Kim's eyes flicked from her mother to her father, then back to Janet. "Just Jared and Luke. They were acting like jerks."
"Anything special, or were they just being adolescent boys?" Ted asked.