The brief flicker of pleasure on her face at the thought vanished as she remembered the last time she had met a lover there. She’d known exactly what she must say, must do, and it had slipped out of her control, somehow, all her intentions retaining no more force than a trickle of water. All the carefully gathered strands of her life seemed to be falling from her hands, one by one.
The gentle tapping on the cottage door jerked Cassie out of her reverie. Anger rushed through her. She yanked open the door. “I told you never to-”
Duncan Kincaid stood there, with his infuriating cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. “Expecting someone else? I’ll go away again.”
After a moment Cassie pulled the door wide and stepped back, not speaking until she had closed it behind him. “What are you doing here?” She drew the dressing gown more tightly around her body.
Kincaid gazed around the room, hands in his pockets, and Cassie suddenly remembered the clothes discarded on the floor. She bent and picked them up, threw them into the bedroom and shut the door.
“Nice.” Kincaid indicated the cottage. “Do much entertaining here?”
Cassie held herself in check, refusing to be baited. Just what in hell did he know? “Just you.” She smiled at him with a trace of her former poise. “Like a drink?”
Kincaid shook his head. “No, thanks. We’ve just had an object lesson in the evils of alcohol, don’t you think?” His smile invited her to share his amusement at the debacle of the cocktail party, but Cassie wasn’t to be drawn.
“Cassie.” He perched himself on the arm of one of the overstuffed chintz armchairs and regarded her with an open, friendly look that she found even more alarming than the smile. “If you and Graham Frazer were together the night Sebastian died, why didn’t you say so? It’d be so much easier on both of you.”
Turning away from him, she walked around the counter into the kitchen. “Coffee, then?” She filled the coffee pot, the ritual movements buying her time to think. How much did he know? What could she gain by denial?
“Look, Duncan. Don’t give me that sympathetic tone, as if my welfare were tops on your list of priorities. I’m not stupid. And just what makes you think I was with Graham that night?” She kept her voice level, bantering.
“You’ve been having an affair with him for quite some time. It seemed likely.” Kincaid rose from the chair and pulled up a stool across the counter from her, making her feel trapped in the tiny kitchen. The electric kettle sang and she poured the boiling water into the drip pot. Mugs hung on a rack next to the pot. She plunked two on the counter and stared at them, biting her lip. Pansies and roses intertwined gaily around their surfaces. They were cottage property, not her own.
“What makes you think I’ve been having an affair with Graham?” Some coffee missed the mug and splashed onto the counter as Cassie poured.
Kincaid accepted the mug. Cassie pulled her hand back quickly, hoping he hadn’t noticed its slight trembling. “What puzzles me,” he said, ignoring her question, “is why you’ve made such a point to keep it secret. You’re both single, consenting adults. And I don’t think for a minute that Angela would be shocked.”
Cassie wrapped her long fingers around the mug until it grew too hot to bear, as if pain might sharpen her wits. Honest entreaty, she decided, was the way to play it. “It’s Graham. It’s this custody thing. Right now he only has extended visitation. The hearing’s coming up soon and he’s petitioning for complete custody. He feels he won’t be considered a responsible parent. The whole thing’s stupid, really, if you ask me. He’s only doing it to spite Marjorie.” She took a sip of the hot coffee and winced as it scalded her tongue. “I’ll have to own up to your Chief Inspector Nash, of course. I didn’t realize it was going to be so important.” Kincaid sat silently, watching her across the rim of his cup as he sipped, and Cassie heard herself sounding as fatuous as she felt.
“Of course,” Cassie continued, digging herself in deeper by the minute, “I’d rather it not become general knowledge about Graham and me. To tell you the truth, it’s just about finished between us, and it wouldn’t do my professional standing much good if it were to get about. So I thought…”
“So you thought,” Kincaid finished for her when she trailed off, “you’d just conveniently not mention it. I can’t say I blame you. I’m sure it all seemed a great fuss about nothing. What did it matter where anyone was when Sebastian decided to plug himself into the swimming pool? There’s only one little problem. I think Chief Inspector Nash is very shortly going to come to the conclusion that Sebastian had a little unsolicited help getting himself killed. And then it matters very much what everyone was up to on Sunday night.”
Kincaid gave her a brief, encouraging smile, as if he had uttered nothing out of the ordinary, and he spoke as quietly and casually as he had begun. A tremor of fear ran through Cassie’s body. A moment passed before she trusted herself to speak. “I thought… I wasn’t here. We weren’t here. Graham and I.”
Kincaid’s eyes widened. “Surely not with Angela-”
“No. In the empty suite. We always met in the empty suites, when we could. We were together all the time. It was after midnight when I came back here.”
“And you didn’t think, didn’t wonder why Sebastian’s bike was still parked outside?”
“No.” The word hung between them, charged, and Cassie felt she had been judged and found wanting.
“You didn’t see or hear anything else, anything not as it should be?”
“No.” She couldn’t tell him about the note. Quickly scribbled, wedged into her door, it proved someone else had been abroad in the late hours of that Sunday evening. And it had driven all thought of Sebastian, or anything else, from her mind.
“Thanks, Cassie. For the coffee.” Kincaid stood up and Cassie came around the bar and followed him to the door.
As he opened it she touched his arm and he paused. “Will it… Do you think it will all have to come out? About Graham and me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. But I wouldn’t count too much on Nash’s discretion.”
She nodded. “What made you change your mind? About Sebastian committing suicide?”
“I didn’t. I never thought for a moment that he had.” The door clicked softly shut as he left her.
Hannah stood just inside the open French door of her suite, the room unlit in the gathering dusk. The children’s voices came easily to her, but she couldn’t see them without stepping out onto the balcony and she didn’t want to be seen. Her emotions were so raw she felt she might be transparent even from a distance.
The reality of what she had done, what she still contemplated doing, seized her with cold fingers. She’d been living in some fairy-tale never-never land, where all stories had happy endings, and she was the fairy godmother, coming to right a lifetime of wrongs. Dear god, what a fool she had made of herself!
Her oft-played scenario had never included sexual attraction, so when the whirl of feelings caught her up so swiftly she hadn’t realized at first what was happening. The knowledge crept in insidiously, and some feral part of her mind toyed with the idea of riding with it, letting it take her where it would. She could just not tell him the truth, and there was no other way he would ever know.
The sudden vision of herself brought on by the cocktail party conversation had shocked her to her senses, terrified that she could have contemplated such utter folly. She had never, when she built detailed pictures in her mind of what their relationship would be, imagined herself as… old. Never imagined growing older, never imagined being pitied and dependent. Whether she told him the truth or not, she would still have to face the ultimate fact. Or simply walk away, returning to the sterility of her life as if nothing had happened. And what about Duncan? What must he think of her, flitting about from man to man like some middle-aged butterfly. She felt she owed him some explanation, but she couldn’t tell him all of it, not until she had come to some resolution. A sense of urgency clutched her. It would have to be soon.