Father Fever

She pushed up against his shoulders. “What?” she asked in concern.

He ran a hand over his face. “Allergy…medication,” he said, shaking his head as though trying to clear it. “Champagne. Bad.” He expelled a sigh as he held on to her with one hand, trying to sit up.

She tried to help by pulling on his arm but didn’t have sufficient leverage. He caught a fistful of her slip, exposed by her awkward position, and tried to draw himself up with it, but the combination of medication and alcohol was too strong and he fell backward, ripping off a large piece of silk.

Athena punched his shoulder once. “Wake up!” she demanded. “I want to talk to you!”

His eyes opened languidly and he caught her fist and kissed it. Then he was out like a light.

She could have wept with frustration.

She reached for his mask, wanting at least to know what he looked like, sure that would help her somehow. But she heard voices on the other side of the door. And it wasn’t locked.

She looked at the state of her costume, her host and the fact that she wasn’t even invited to this party, and decided that retreat was the wisest course of action.

At a knock on the door and a questioning “Hello?” she bolted, heading for the French doors that she knew led out to a veranda with stairs down to the backyard. Thanks to the rainy February night, the party would not have spilled outside.

She heard the sitting room door open when she was halfway down the stairs and ran through the darkness without looking back. She knew the way. She’d run down this road where she’d left the car a hundred times as a child.

But never with a man’s kisses stinging her lips, and a piece of her slip still caught in his hand.

Chapter Three

September

Where did he go from here?

David reread the three paragraphs on his monitor for the sixth time.

Jake stared moodily out the back window of the cab as it made the turn to Janie’s bungalow. He hadn’t had a letter in months, but then he hadn’t written her, either. Life had been too hard, too dark to chronicle it for her.

The cab pulled up in front of 722 Bramble Lane. Jake paid the driver and stepped out.

Janie was sitting on the front steps with a cup of coffee and a book. She looked up at the slam of the car door, froze for a moment, then dropped the book and the coffee.

The cursor blinked at the indent on the next paragraph as he waited for inspiration.

She ran into his arms?

He ran into hers?

She walked inside and slammed the door?

Jake pounded on the door?

David hadn’t a clue. He was writing the last chapter of his novel, trying to make his hero’s personal dreams come true after the hell he’d put him through in the previous three hundred pages.

But David couldn’t guess how Janie would react after she’d been skillfully wooed, willingly seduced, then left to fend for herself while Jake answered the CIA’s call after assuring her he was through with the work.

As he’d done at least once a day for months, he thought back to the costume party last February, and the woman who’d appeared in his living room like the realization of a dream.

He remembered her smile, the shape of her chin, snippets of their conversation. There were gaps in his memories. The champagne, the antihistamine and only four hours of sleep the night before had combined to knock him on his butt, but he recalled one crystal clear glimpse of her.

A heart-shaped face. Eyes the color of his favorite chambray shirt. A smile that tripped his pulse. And breasts that spilled out of her Empress Josephine dress like exotic blooms.

He could close his eyes now and catch the rose-and-spice scent of her that had clung to him when he’d awakened in the sitting room. He’d been alone on the futon with part of her slip caught in his fist and the taste of her on his lips.

He couldn’t remember what had happened, but he could imagine. The first few minutes of their meeting were clear in his memory—and he’d been plotting her seduction since then.

He remembered taking her upstairs, pouring more champagne, taking her in his arms and…had he told her about his lonely childhood, or had he just dreamed that? He couldn’t be sure.

But he wished he could be sure he hadn’t hurt her, offended her, upset her.

He’d tried to find her, but without a name or any idea what she did or who the friends were she was visiting, it had been impossible.

Even Mrs. Beasley hadn’t known who she was, though she remembered the dress. She’d arrived with friends, she said, and that was all she knew.

David got up from the computer and went downstairs to the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee and read the editorial page and his horoscope. He forced himself to write three pages every morning before allowing himself that luxury. Otherwise, he’d find a dozen excuses to keep him from the computer.

He’d submitted a full synopsis and three chapters of the novel to an agent in New York, primarily as a way to make himself finish it.

Writing columns, though putting him under the stress of three weekly deadlines, had been easy compared to writing fiction. And in a way, his work as a government agent had been the same. He’d had a clear subject, his own observations and feelings to draw from, input from other people.

In writing fiction, he sat there all alone, except for the demanding blink of the cursor. There were no source materials. Everything came out of his heart or his head and usually lived there behind closed doors, resisting his every effort to force them open.

When the doors did open, the material came at him haphazardly. It made him hurt, made him laugh, made him angry, made him wish he’d chosen to do anything but be a writer.

Until he put just the right words together and made a nebulous thought clear in a beautiful way. And then it was all right. He was all right.

But every morning was a fresh struggle. Every day he had to figure out just how he’d done it the day before.

He poured some Colombian roast into a plain brown mug and carried it to the living room coffee table where he’d left the paper.

He turned on the television for the noise. Dotty, his housekeeper, was away for a few days, Trevyn was somewhere in a remote spot of the Canadian mountains, taking pictures for a calendar, a commission he earned every year. With Bram in Mexico on a case for his already thriving detective agency, Cliffside was quiet as a tomb.

He folded back the editorial page as the weather report promised another week of Indian summer for the Oregon coast. Then the newscaster’s voice said, “We’ll show this item one more time for those of you who are joining us late or missed last night’s report. This woman was found in the Columbia River off Astoria by a pilot boat. She’s in fair condition at Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria, but cannot remember her name, where she lives, or how she ended up in the water. The Coast Guard reported no capsized boats or distress calls.”

David looked up from the paper, his attention snagged by the story—and felt his heart stall in his chest. He got up, knocked over his coffee in the process and stood stock-still in shock.

The grainy photo of the woman remained on the screen while the newscaster pleaded for anyone who knew this woman to contact the Astoria police.

The photo showed a woman on a stretcher, long red hair wet and lank against the pillow, her eyes closed. Her features were difficult to distinguish, but he knew the shape of that face, the delicate point of the chin. It was Constance! And her stomach mounded up under the blanket covering her, clearly in a very advanced state of pregnancy.

His heart hammered its way into his throat. Oh, God.

In his fuzzy memories of that February night, he saw her lying atop him, her hair free of the confining headpiece. He’d been filled with lust for her and she’d been so warm and responsive.

Though he struggled to remember, he still couldn’t recall what had happened after that.