“Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?” he whispered in her ear.
“I don’t mind you telling me, if you feel like it.”
He felt like it, he felt like it.
Then she got busy straightening the covers around them and they lay there under the quilt, snuggling.
“I’m not liking this,” he confessed. “What we’re doing.”
“I’m not either. But if it feels this good, it can’t be all bad, can it?” She let out a soft laugh. “That sounds just like a Sheryl Crow song.”
“I wouldn’t know. I never pay attention to lyrics.”
“You don’t? But how can you tell what the song is about?”
“What’s to tell? They’re all about the same thing-love that’s starting, love that’s ending. Good love, bad love, love.”
“Okay, if our love was a song, who would sing it?” she asked, immediately feeling stupid. It was a high school date question.
He was silent a long moment. Was he carefully considering his response, or was he just asleep? It was only when they began to talk this way that she began to wonder if they had anything in common at all.
“Okay, I’m thinking Bonnie Raitt,” she rattled on. “Or maybe Sarah McLachlan. How about you?”
“I guess I’m thinking more along the lines of Roy Orbison.”
She cupped his chin in her hand. “Oh, honey, it’s not that bad, is it?”
“This has got to end. I have to leave town.”
“You can’t leave,” she protested, hearing the desperation in her voice.
“It’s too risky.”
“There are people who go through their entire lives without risking anything. We don’t want to be like them, do we?”
“But both of our lives could be totally ruined.”
“So we’ll leave town together. She’ll let us go. She’ll come to her senses. We just have to give her time.”
“And then what?” he asked miserably.
“And then we can start a new life,” she said, not even believing her own words. The utter and complete hopelessness was washing over her now, too. It was only their passion kept it at bay.
So they reignited it, much more slowly and tenderly this time. And there was this and only this. And it was so much better than it had ever been with anyone else. Until they were spent once again, and the despair came creeping right back, like a chronic pain that could only be dulled with stronger and stronger drugs.
They did not sleep a wink, not wishing to lose a single precious one of their stolen moments together.
The kitchen staff generally trickled in at about five-thirty to begin breakfast. Not wishing to encounter anyone, she kissed him good-bye shortly before five and tiptoed back down the stairs and out the kitchen door into the pre- dawn darkness, her clothing disheveled, hair a mess.
The village was still asleep. No dog walkers were out yet. No joggers. No one. It was quiet and calm and cold.
Shivering, she scraped the thin layer of frost from the Porsche’s windshield and jumped in and started it up with an indiscreet roar, wishing it weren’t quite so loud. Quickly, she steered her way back up Frederick Lane toward home, tearing past an enclave of precious antique houses that dated back to the early seventeen hundreds. They were set far back from the road and surrounded by lush green meadows and mossy stone walls. Many of them overlooked the Connecticut River. One by one the adjoining meadows were being transformed into building sites. Giant new prairie palaces with many wings and turrets were springing up alongside the lovely old houses, dwarfing them. Often, as she passed by these new showplaces, she made unkind remarks about them under her breath. But on this morning, as she turned north onto Route 156 and floored it up into the farm country, she was so lost in thought she barely noticed them.
It was no good and she knew it. Because his wife would never let him go. Because it was an illicit, unbelievably tacky small-town romance, and no good ever came of those. Because all three of their lives would be destroyed.
No, she was not tough. But she was stronger than he was. So it was up to her to do the right thing, the adult thing, the smart thing. End it. Right now.
As the dawn light came, the autumn leaves began to emerge from the darkness in their red and orange splendor. This was her favorite time of the season, just before the peak color, when there was still a good deal of lush green foliage remaining on the trees to offset the flaming color. At Winston Farms, a blanket of frost lay over the pastures, sparkling. It was as fragile and serenely beautiful a sight as she had ever seen.
Her turnoff onto Old Ferry Road was just beyond the Winston Farms feed troughs, where the cows were busy enjoying their breakfast. It was a hard left turn, and it required her to come nearly to a complete stop, even in the nimble roadster. As she did so, downshifting, she glanced at the dashboard clock. It was five-twenty. That left her just enough time to shower and change and start breakfast. Sleep? That would have to wait until after work, when she’d be able to close her eyes and take a deep breath and-
She barely saw the flash. It came from somewhere up in the rocks across the road. But this fact barely had a chance to register in her sleep-deprived brain. And she never did hear it because by the time the sound reached her, the car had already exploded and flipped over onto the hay trough, where it and countless bales of hay and several poor, unwitting dairy cows erupted in a fireball that rose over a hundred feet into the dawn sky.
The very last thing on earth she saw was that flash. It was the brightest light she had ever seen. Just like staring right into the sun. And then she was the sun. And she didn’t have to worry about their relationship anymore. Or about anything else.
The very last thing she thought was: This wasn’t supposed to happen.
But it had.
And now there would be hell to pay.
ONE DAY EARLIER
CHAPTER 1
Autumn’s arrival meant the onset of headless mousey season out on Big Sister Island. Or at least it did in Mitch Berger’s little corner of it.
Shortly before dawn, Mitch’s rugged outdoor hunter, Quirt, deposited a fresh head-free corpse on the welcome mat of Mitch’s antique post-and-beam carriage house and meowed to be let in. And meowed. And meowed. Upstairs in his sleeping loft, Mitch reluctantly stirred. Next to him on the bed, Clemmie, his gray-and-white short hair, did not so much as open an eye. Not even a hurricane could rouse Clemmie. In fact, with each passing day, Mitch was becoming more and more convinced that she had been genetically altered into a meat loaf.
Yawning, Mitch padded barefoot down the narrow stairs into the living room and waddled to the front door, flicking on the porch light to find one orange tabby who was immensely proud of himself and one white-footed field mouse who was missing his or her head.
It definitely took some getting used to as a morning wake-up call.
Quirt immediately made straight for the kibble bowl. The mouse stayed outside. Later, Mitch would bury him. Her. It. A small ceremony, nondenominational. Right now, he put the coffee on, watching Quirt chew his way steadily through his breakfast. Quirt had been a feral stray until he was six months old, same as Clemmie, but the two could not have turned out more different. Quirt remained a sinewy outdoorsman who did not linger inside unless it was raining. On those rare occasions when he would consent to sit in Mitch’s lap he’d squirm and wriggle and make this unbelievably strange noise in his throat that sounded more like Gorgo, the monster that rose from the ocean’s depths, than it did a pussy cat. Clemmie, on the other hand, never went outside, never stalked anything more threatening than dust and spent so much time in Mitch’s lap that he sometimes felt she was attached to him by Velcro.
Mitch had not actually chosen to adopt either one of them. The new lady in his life was one of those
