The Marriage Contract. Anna Adams

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ didn’t answer. He’d known her most of his life, but since he’d come home, she’d treated him with icy deference. Now he understood why.

      “Are you like your father?” she finally asked.

      “What are you talking about?” He wanted to tear someone apart, not stand around discussing whether he would persecute little girls. Clair Atherton must be in her twenties now. Surely old enough to take care of herself.

      “I’m going to invite Clair back to Fairlove. If she comes and you try to harm her, you’ll face all of us who had to let her go. We were afraid we couldn’t protect her any better than we protected her parents, but you don’t have your father’s political clout.”

      Deep in Selina Franklin’s eyes burned guilt as strong and relentless as Nick’s own. He felt her start of surprise as she also recognized his secret shame. Turning away from her, he started toward the door on legs that felt as stiff as iron pokers.

      He glanced over his shoulder, but didn’t allow himself to meet Selina’s gaze. “Clair Atherton has nothing to fear from me,” he said.

      TWO DAYS BEFORE HALLOWEEN, Clair turned off the interstate at the Fairlove exit. Immediately, the trees seemed more lush. She rolled down her window to breathe in the crisp air of home. A small green sign directed her toward town. Within seconds, she came upon Shilling’s Gas ’n’ Go.

      It looked pretty much as it had the day she’d left. The same sign displayed gas prices in bold black letters. Twelve years ago, she’d stared at that sign through the back window of a social worker’s van.

      She didn’t need a map to find her way from here. She could have driven to Franklin House with her eyes closed. This hour of the day, breakfast cooking in Selina Franklin’s kitchen lured anyone with a sense of smell.

      Clair suffered from even stronger appetites. Mrs. Franklin’s invitation had answered a longing Clair had never satisfied. Her mother’s old friend had said she’d found her through the “white pages” on the Internet, and she’d wondered if Clair ever thought of the old town.

      Clair hardly ever forgot. The house she’d lived in might have fallen into ruin after all these years of neglect. Often, she’d dreamed of Jeff Dylan demolishing it with a big yellow crane and a wrecking ball. But she couldn’t forget the place where she’d known love, unconditional and ever-present, love whose memory made her hungry for the place she’d felt it.

      But she was no longer a naive child, and she had to wonder why Selina Franklin had suddenly remembered her. Her parents’ dearest friends, Mrs. Franklin and her husband, an ambitious attorney whom Clair’s father had nicknamed the Judge, hadn’t been the only ones to look the other way when Social Services had cast around for someone who might take Clair in. None of the people she’d thought were like family had found room for her.

      Which made Mrs. Franklin’s invitation all the more suspect. She’d asked for whatever time Clair could spare. Clair reminded herself to be wary. People rarely made such generous offers without an ulterior motive.

      She slowed her car at the small elementary school, and memories assaulted her, of books and paper, overheated children who played hard outside at recess. Her memories had never left her, had, in fact, grown more important to her, because they formed a lifeline back to Fairlove.

      The bell at Saint Theresa’s began to peal, a call to morning prayers, and Clair turned her car toward the sound. Those deep chimes had punctuated so many moments of her first fourteen years. She was glad she’d broken her trip from Boston in D.C. the night before. She’d wanted to arrive with the morning bells.

      As soon as she rounded the corner into Church Street, she saw him. Nick Dylan. The man whose father had destroyed her family. Tall, lean and prosperous-looking in a dark suit and a long black overcoat, he was carrying what appeared to be shirts from the dry cleaners.

      Clair began to shake as she saw him approach a Jeep and open the door. The long dry-cleaning bags twined around his body. She slowed as he tucked his laundry in his back seat.

      Good. With any luck, he was on his way somewhere else. Since the cleaners was closed on Sunday, he must have brought the shirts from his house. Maybe Fairlove wouldn’t keep him now that his father had died.

      He straightened, and the wind lifted his jet-black hair. She glimpsed his sharply etched, aristocratic Dylan face, dark eyes that met hers and instantly flared. Clair looked away, but she couldn’t help looking back at him. His pale, shocked expression struck her as she passed him.

      Barely three feet separated them, a space poisoned by years of family enmity. Clair clamped her teeth together, to keep from shouting her frustration. How could she have prepared herself for a Dylan mundanely packing his shirts in a car?

      Rattled, her heart pounding, she drove twice around the square. People stared, but no one else recognized her. To push Nick Dylan out of her mind before she saw Mrs. Franklin, she concentrated on the buildings.

      A landscaper had taken over the old ice-cream shop. The local newspaper had bought out Mrs. Clark’s sewing-and-crafts shop and added on to their property.

      Clair fought back unwanted tears. The sheer, comforting familiarity of these streets and buildings brought her past back to her. Her memories hadn’t just been myths she’d created to help her survive in foster care.

      She turned down the town’s outer road toward the high school where she’d been in her first year when her parents had died. Those rooms hadn’t left a strong impression. Nor had the apartment block behind the school, where they’d lived until her father died, a victim of his own sense of failure after he’d lost their house to Senator Dylan. After her father’s death, her mother lost interest in everything. Including her own life. Within months she’d suffered a heart attack and followed her husband to the grave.

      Clair looked up the hill. If her home still existed, thick evergreens hid it from her, but the Dylan home remained as commanding as ever. An image of Nick flashed through her mind, but his stunned expression got all mixed up with his father’s customary contempt.

      She turned away from that house, determined to conquer the pain that still tore at her. She shouldn’t have come this way. She drove straight to Mrs. Franklin’s bed-and-breakfast, determined to live in peace with her memories of the Dylans.

      Her other choice was revenge. A pointless exercise that couldn’t bring back the parents and the home she’d lost.

      Clair parked at the bottom of the steps in front of the bed-and-breakfast and climbed out of the car. She swung her backpack over one shoulder. Caution moistened her hands and dried her mouth.

      She marched up the stairs and then curled her fingers around the cool brass door handle. Counting two quick breaths, she pushed the door open and stepped into a shadowy hall. Overhead, a fan’s blades whiffed in rhythmic puffs of sound. She waited for her eyes to grow accustomed to the subdued light.

      “Clair, you’ve come home.”

      Her heart hammered. Home. She knew this woman’s voice—rich, ragged around the edges. Selina Franklin had been a frequent visitor at Clair’s house. She’d brought homemade oatmeal cookies and sock puppets with black button eyes.

      The shadow in front of Clair slowly formed itself into a woman who seemed too short to be Mrs. Franklin. Clair had last seen her through the back of that Social Services van. Her memory of her mother’s friend was all bound up with a painful СКАЧАТЬ