Do you?”
Sally, pale enough to begin with, blanched alarmingly and pressed her lips together to stop their trembling. Perspiration gleamed on her brow. Her eyes, normally dark as forest-green pools, turned almost black with distress.
“That’s what you’ve done to me, Sally Winslow.” Colette’s voice rose shrilly. “I’ll never know another moment’s peace, and I hope you never do, either! I hope what you’ve done haunts you for the rest of your miserable days!”
Again, Fletcher moved to intervene. “Hush now, Colette, my darling. You’re overwrought.”
She’d also fortified herself with more than one brandy and was three sheets to the wind, Jake belatedly realized. Her breath was enough to knock a man over. But it was Sally who suddenly fell limply against him and, before he could catch her, crumpled to the floor at his feet.
Drowning out the chorus of shocked exclamations, Colette teetered in Fletcher’s hold and shrieked, “I hope she’s dead! It’s what she deserves!”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Jake said, stooping to feel the pulse, strong and steady, below Sally’s jaw. “I’m afraid she’s only fainted.” Then, although he shouldn’t have, he couldn’t help adding, “Probably too much hot air in here. Where can we put her until she comes to?”
“The library,” Fletcher said, handing a sobbing Colette over to one of her hangers-on. “She can lie down in there.”
“I’ll take her, Jake.” His father materialized at his side. “You’ll never make it with that injured leg.”
“I’ll manage somehow,” he muttered, wishing his parents hadn’t had to witness the scene just past. There’d never been much love lost between his family and the Burtons, and he knew they’d be upset by Colette’s attack on him.
“You don’t always have to be the iron hero, you know. It’s okay to lean on someone else once in a while.”
“Can the advice for another time, Dad,” he said, a lot more abruptly than the man deserved. But cripes, his leg was giving him hell, and that alone was enough to leave him a bit short on tact. “It’s my fault Sally’s here at all. The least I can do is finish what I started. If you want to help, get Mom out of here. She looks as if she’s seen and heard enough.”
Clamping down on the pain shooting up this thigh, he scooped Sally into his arms and made his way through the crowd, which parted like the Red Sea before Moses. There might be some there who felt sorry for her, but no one except possibly his relatives dared show it. Colette had cornered the market on any spare sympathy that might be floating around.
The library was a man’s room. Paneled in oak, with big, comfortable leather chairs and a matching sofa flanking the wide fireplace, some very good paintings, a Turkish rug and enough books to keep a person reading well into the next century, it was Fletcher’s haven; the place to which he retreated when things became too histrionic with the women in his household. Jake had joined him there many a time, to escape or to enjoy an after-dinner drink, and knew he kept a private supply of cognac stashed in the bureau bookcase next to the hearth.
Just as well. Sally needed something strong to bring the color back to her face. Come to that, he could use a stiff belt himself.
Depositing her on the couch, he covered her with a mo-hair lap rug draped over one of the chairs. She looked very young in repose; very vulnerable. Much the way she’d looked when they’d started dating during her high school sophomore year. He’d been a senior at the time, and so crazy in love with her that he hadn’t been able to think straight.
Even as he watched, she stirred and, opening her eyes, regarded him with dazed suspicion. “What are you doing?”
“Looking at you,” he said, using the back of the sofa for support and wondering how she’d respond if he told her she had the longest damned eyelashes he’d ever seen, and a mouth so delectable that he knew an indecent urge to lean down and kiss it.
Get a grip, Harrington! You’ve been a widower less than a week, and should be too swamped with memories of your wife to notice the way another woman’s put together—even if the woman in question does happen to have been your first love.
Her glance shied away from him and darted around the room. “How did I wind up in here?”
“I carried you in, after you fainted.”
“I fainted?” She covered her eyes with the back of one hand and groaned in horror. “In front of all those people?”
“It was the best thing you could have done,” he said, limping to the bureau and taking out a three-quarter-full bottle of Courvoisier cognac and two snifters. “You upstaged Colette beautifully. Without you to lambaste, she was left speechless.” He poured them each a healthy shot of the liquor and offered one to her. “This should put you back on your feet.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said doubtfully. “I haven’t eaten a thing today.”
“I wondered what made you pass out.”
“I haven’t had much of an appetite at all since…the accident.”
“Feel up to talking about that night?”
She sat up and pushed her hair away from her face. “I don’t know what else I can say that you haven’t already heard.”
Cautiously lowering himself into the nearest chair, he knocked back half the contents of his glass and, as the warmth of the brandy penetrated the outer limits of his pain, said, “You could try telling me what really happened, Sally.”
The shutters rolled down her face, cloaking her expression. “What makes you so sure there’s more to tell?”
“You and I were once close enough that we learned to read each other’s minds pretty well. I always knew when you were trying to hide something from me, and I haven’t forgotten the signs.”
She swirled her drink but did not, he noticed, taste it. Why was she being so cagey? Could it be that she was afraid the booze might loosen her tongue too much and she’d let something slip? “That was a long time ago, Jake. We were just kids. People grow up and change.”
“No, they don’t,” he said flatly. “They just become better at covering up. But although you might have fooled everyone else, including the police, you’ve never been able to fool me. There’s more to this whole business than anyone else but you knows, and I’m asking you, for old times’ sake, to tell me what it is.”
Just for a moment, she looked him straight in the eye and he thought she was going to come clean. But then the door opened and Fletcher appeared. “I expect you might need this, Jake,” he said, brandishing the cane. “And I wondered if Sally felt well enough for one of the chauffeurs to drive her home, before the cars fill up with other people.”
Masking his annoyance at the interruption, Jake said, “Can’t it wait another five minutes? We’re in the middle of something, Fletcher, if you don’t mind.”
“No, we’re not,” Sally said, throwing off the blanket and swinging her legs to the floor. “If you can spare a car, I’d be very grateful, Mr. Burton. I’m more than ready to leave.”
Frustrated,
