As usual, Matt's excitement got out of control. The harder Thad and his mother laughed, the more animated he became until on one unbalanced pivot, he crashed into the china cabinet. All the dishes rattled. A wooden bowl of fruit was overturned. Apples and oranges rolled in every direction. A tomato splattered onto the tile floor. Several sheets of notebook paper went flying about like chicken feathers before drifting down one by one.
Matt froze and glanced up at his mother apprehensively. "I didn't mean to."
"You're such a dork," Megan said, now acting much older and much more superior.
Matt dropped to his knees. He avoided the globs of tomato, but collected the scattered sheets of paper and carried them like a peace offering to Elizabeth. "Here, Mom. Your papers didn't get dirty. We didn't get pizza juice on them either. Thad moved them off the table and put them on the cabinet so they wouldn't get messed up. He said they might be important."
Elizabeth accepted the handwritten sheets from her son, who began crawling around on the floor, picking up the pieces of fruit.
"Just leave them, Matt." Elizabeth's voice was as thin and tight as a rubber band that had been stretched to its limit. "I'll clean up later. You and Megan please go upstairs and make your beds."
With the keen perception of children, they sensed that the mood in the room had drastically shifted and it wasn't because of Matt's accident. Something beyond their understanding had happened; it had made their mother's face go from rosy and smiling to pale and haggard. Her laughing lips were now drawn into a narrow line that barely moved when she spoke. Together, they left by way of the swinging door, making as little commotion as possible. They feared that something hung precariously in the balance and they didn't want to be the ones to upset it.
Elizabeth meticulously straightened and put the sheets of paper in numerical order before blinking the written words into focus. She knew what they were, of course. She'd written them while soaking in a bubble bath. Every phrase was familiar.
There was her pirate, tall and dangerous. There was his captive, shivering before him, wearing nothing but a thin nightgown. She rifled through the pages. Yes, there was the part where he ripped her nightgown and kissed her breast. And there, in that paragraph, the captive, overpowered by his masculine charm, began to submit and respond.
She tossed the pages onto the kitchen table and turned her back quickly. Folding her arms over her middle, she rubbed her forearms, though the kitchen was sufficiently warm for an autumn morning.
"You read it, didn't you?"
"Listen, Elizabeth, I — "
She spun around. "Didn't you?"
Thad's chest rose and fell with a heavy sigh. "Yes."
Tears filled her eyes. One instant the hot, salty products of humiliation weren't there, the next instant, her vision was blurred with them. She covered her chalky lips with a cold, trembling hand and turned away from him again. She couldn't bear to look him in the face, because of her embarrassment because of his deceit. She didn't know which caused her the most pain.
In a quiet, soothing voice, the kind doctors use to break the bad news to the family, he said, "I didn't realize what it was at first; I thought you had left an unfinished letter lying around. But then a few words just leaped off the pages at me."
She faced him, her expression scornful. "'Leaped off the pages'? Can't you do any better than that?"
He had the grace to look chagrined. "Haven't you ever thumbed through a novel in a bookstore, and when a certain word catches your eye, you stop and read a few paragraphs. And if it's a sensual passage, you keep on reading. Before you know it, you've devoured five or six pages standing there in the aisle. If that's never happened to you, you aren't normal."
"We're not talking about me. We're talking about an underhanded manipulator who used me in the lowest, meanest, most disgusting way possible. How could you?"
"I didn't do anything you didn't want me to."
She clenched her fists and squeezed her eyes shut. "I knew something dreadful would come of this. I never should have listened to Lilah, never let her talk me into this."
He looked confused. "Lilah talked you into dreaming up the story?"
"Into writing it down. She's submitting my fantasies to a publisher."
"Then why are you so ashamed of it? I read it and thought it was damn good."
She opened her eyes and glared at him. Anger had deepened the color of her eyes almost to the piercing hue of his. "Yes, you read it and turned it to your advantage. Why didn't I realize what was going on when you tore my nightgown? It was so out of character for you. You're not like that."
"How do you know?" he challenged. "We'd never made love before. And I was jealous enough and mad enough and drunk enough to get a little rough." He stepped forward and lowered his voice to a sexy growl. "And you liked it."
She backed away from him in revulsion. "Last night you told me that you thought I deserved better than just — " She couldn't bring herself to say the words.
"Apparently after reading my fantasy you changed your mind. I became fair game. After reading that," she said, gesturing down at the manuscript, "you must have thought I was pining for a flesh-and-blood lover. Or did you imagine that I must have a lot of them? Didn't the fantasy convert you from Good Neighbor Sam to Jean Lafitte because you thought that's what I wanted?"
"No. That's not what happened at all. Everybody has an alter ego, Elizabeth. Probably several of them. Yours surfaces in your fantasies. Mine surfaced last night. I wasn't even thinking about the damn fantasy when I came into your bedroom."
"Oh, please." She groaned with sarcastic disbelief. "You acted it out word for word!"
"Subconsciously maybe. I was an angry, jealous man responding to the woman I wanted like hell to take to bed. Reading your fantasy turned me on, yes. But it also made me crazy. I saw Cavanaugh in the pirate's role. Everything you described in such arousing detail, I imagined you doing with him."
"Well, I didn't. Because he's not a sneak and a liar and — " Another horrible thought occurred to her. "Is this the only one you've read?" He looked at her with a bewilderment too profound not to be phony. "It isn't, is it? You read the one about the pilot and the fain girl, didn't you? That's why when I came in and found you sick — "
She clapped her hands to her burning cheeks, just now fully realizing the implications. His interest in her coincided with when she first started writing down her fantasies. She always discarded her first drafts. "What have you been doing, scavenging the trash can every morning like an alley cat, looking for fresh material?"
How many handwritten drafts had she thrown away? How many had he enjoyed, snickering as he read each sensuous paragraph? "I'm amazed that you came up with the idea of the hammock on your own. I hadn't written a fantasy about that yet."
He propped his hands on his hips and assumed that arrogant, aggravated male stance. Elizabeth despised it because it strongly suggested that she was being incredibly stupid and unreasonable.
"I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about," he said. "What's that about a pilot? And my being sick? Do you think I faked a fever of one hundred point four?"
"I wouldn't put anything past you." She summoned all the animosity she felt for him and placed it behind her next words. "Leave my house."
He shook his head no. "I'm not leaving while you're angry. Not until we get this settled."
"It's settled. I don't want to see you, ever again. I'm not sure I can even tolerate your living in the house behind me."