Forever... by Jude Deveraux
Cocking his head to one side, he looked down at her. “I have never seen a woman who didn’t love to buy herself clothes. So why didn’t you take your first paycheck and buy yourself a whole new wardrobe?”
“I’m saving for something,” she said as she turned around and started walking down the sidewalk. “Let’s see if there’s a library in town. Maybe we can find out something about the local history. Maybe we should check the local newspapers too and see what we can find out about the four people who’ve disappeared. I’d like to know if they were male or female.”
“Female,” he said, but he didn’t take a step forward. “What are you saving for?”
“Freedom,” she answered as she turned and started walking backward, moving farther away from him.
Adam gave a sigh. Maybe he was a snob, but he couldn’t bear to be seen with someone dressed as poorly and as inadequately as she was. “All right,” he said with a sigh and held up the bills.”It’s yours. I won’t take the money out of your pay.”
At that Darci gave a big smile, walked toward him at a surprisingly quick pace, snatched the money from his fingers, then ran across the street, barely missing being hit by two cars, and entered the clothing shop. Adam stood still, his mouth quirked up at one side. “Didn’t take her long to get over her reluctance, did it?” he mumbled as he went toward a park bench to sit and wait. He really hoped she wouldn’t take too long.
But he had no more than sat down when Darci ran back across the street, dodging the light traffic in a way that made him catch his breath.
She had on what had to be the ugliest sweater he’d ever seen in his life. It was thick and probably warm, true, but it looked as if a child had spilled a dozen tubes of acrylic paint on it. And it was so big on her that the sleeves fell below her hands.
“What is that?” he asked.
“A sweater,” she answered, pulling up the sleeves, then running her hands down her arms. “It’s warm.”
“Please tell me that you didn’t pay three hundred dollars for that thing.”
“No, not at all,” Darci said brightly. “Twenty-nine ninety-nine on third markdown. Plus sales tax, of course. That means that I have $268.21 left to put into my savings account.”
Adam didn’t want to argue with her, but his conscience wouldn’t allow someone in his employ to be inadequately clothed—not to mention that he would have to look at the ugly thing. “Follow me,” he said sternly, then led her to the street corner. When the one and only traffic light in Camwell turned red, he walked across the street, Darci running to keep up with him.
Adam opened the door to the little shop. In the window were beautiful, expensive clothes, shoes, and boots. The saleswoman inside looked up, and the moment she saw Adam, wearing his expensive clothes, she smiled warmly, but when Darci entered behind him, her expression changed to a look of disdain. The way Darci was dressed, combined with the fact that she’d bought such a cheap item only moments before, made the woman look down her nose at Darci.
In all his life, Adam had never had anyone look at him the way this woman was looking at Darci, who, as far as he could tell, was oblivious of the saleswoman’s scornful gaze.
With a voice that barely concealed his anger, he held up a platinum credit card and said, “Run this through the machine.”
“I beg your pardon,” the saleswoman said, her eyes still on Darci, who was looking at a rack full of blouses. The woman looked as if she thought Darci was going to shoplift.
“Run this through with a credit card slip,” Adam growled as he nodded toward a pile of old-fashioned slips stacked behind the counter.
That voice got her full attention, and she jumped to obey him. Puzzled, she handed the imprinted slip to him, then Adam signed it. There was no amount on it, just his signature.
“Now dress her from the skin out, and from the feet up,” he said in a low voice meant only for her ears. “And take that hideous sweater back. If you foist another item like that on her, I’ll buy this damned store and burn it down—and I hope to hell you’re not in it when it goes. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir,” she said meekly.
4
IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE, Adam had never seen anyone as pleased about anything as Darci was about her new clothes. When she walked out of the store carrying three shopping bags in each hand, it was on the tip of his tongue to make a sarcastic remark about how she was obviously good at spending money that wasn’t her own. But the look Adam saw on her face made him withhold his remark. Her eyes were huge and filled with a wonder he’d only seen in toddlers on Christmas morning. Adam had spent a great deal of his life bumming around the world, and he’d seen a lot. “Jaded,” his cousin Elizabeth called him. “Seen it, done it, bored by it” was the family pronouncement about their black-sheep cousin.
But Adam didn’t think he’d ever seen anything like Darci’s face now. She was looking straight ahead, her eyes seeming to see nothing but some inner vision that was making her sublimely happy.
“Want me to carry those?” he asked, unable to keep the amusement out of his voice.
When Darci didn’t answer, he reached down to take one of the bags from her, but her fingers were so tightly clenched about the string handles that he would have had to break her fingers to make her release the bags. “Maybe I should just carry you instead,” he said, but that gibe didn’t get a response from her either. She was still staring into space, her eyes full of wonder.
“Come on,” he said good-naturedly, “let’s go back to the hotel. It’s time for lunch. Hungry?”
When the mention of food didn’t get a reply from her, he waved his hand in front of her face. Darci didn’t blink.
For a moment Adam contemplated throwing Darci over his shoulder and carrying her; the bags probably weighed more than she did. But they were on a public street and he really didn’t want to cause more gossip than need be. Putting his hands on her shoulders, he turned her toward the sidewalk, then gave her a bit of a push to make her legs move; then he steered her toward the street corner.
When the light changed, Adam had to give Darci a harder push to make her start walking again and he had to catch her to keep her from falling as she stepped off the curb. There was one car waiting at the light, and the woman inside put down her window and stuck her head out. “Is she all right?”
“Fine,” Adam said. “New clothes.” He nodded down toward the six shopping bags that Darci was clutching as though they were her life-support system.
“I understand that,” the woman said as she put her head back inside the car, and Adam heard her say, “Why don’t you ever buy me anything new?” to the man beside her.
When they reached the other side of the street, Adam couldn’t get Darci to step up, so he put his hands about her waist and lifted. He was used to women who weighed more than Darci, so when he lifted, she came up about a foot above the curb, her head nearly hitting him in the chin. Once she was on the sidewalk again, he was able to steer her back to the driveway that led to the Grove, then around the main house to their bungalow.
Once inside the door, Darci stood there.
So now what do I do? Adam thought. For all that he’d traveled quite a bit in his life, for all that he’d seen and done many things, domestic situations were not something he was familiar with. What did ...well,what would a husband do in this situation? On the other hand, did normal, ordinary women act this way after they’d been shopping?
Hangers, was his only thought. Maybe he could get her to hang up her new clothes. Maybe that task would bring her out of her trance. With that in mind, Adam went into Darci’s bedroom and opened her closet door. There were hangers in the closet but no clothes. Absolutely none. Where were her clothes?
Curious, Adam went to the chest at the opposite side of the room and opened a drawer. Inside was a pair of often-washed white cotton panties, a pair of socks that were thin at the heel, a pair of neatly folded blue jeans, and a long T-shirt that he assumed was a nightgown. Adam
As Adam walked back into the sitting room, he was cursing under his breath. He’d sent her money, so why hadn’t she bought herself something decent to wear? Why hadn’t she—
She was standing exactly where he’d left her. Shaking his head in disbelief, Adam again gripped her shoulders and turned her toward her bedroom. When she was standing at the foot of the bed, he began pulling items from her bags; he wasn’t about to try to loosen her grip on the handles.
As he took the clothes out of each bag, he thought about the fact that he’d had money all his life, so nice clothing wasn’t unusual to him. He’d never given much thought to new shirts and trousers. But what did these clothes mean to someone who had so little?
As he unpacked her new items, he was glad to see that the clothes were top quality. For a tiny town like Camwell to support such a store, it was obvious that the residents had to have money. Cashmere seemed to be the predominant fiber in the clothes. There were soft sweaters, tweed skirts that were lined and had pockets (one of his cousins said that a skirt wasn’t worth having if it didn’t have a lining and pockets), and there were trousers that looked to Adam to be too small to fit a child. The label inside them said they were size two. There was also a navy blue blazer with silver buttons, two thick pullover sweaters (“hand knit in Maine,” the label read), and a cardigan dense and heavy enough to keep an orchid warm in a snowstorm. Inside a smaller bag was tissue-wrapped jewelry. The jewelry wasn’t real, of course, just gilt and nickel silver, but he could see that it had been chosen to match the clothes. The bag was also full of what looked to be underwear, but he just closed that bag, taking nothing out of it.
Once he’d laid out all the clothes on the bed, he turned to Darci. She was still holding the bag handles in her white-knuckled grip, still staring straight ahead sightlessly. So now what did he do?
Without giving it another thought, he picked her up and tossed her onto the bed on top of all the clothes.
That woke her up! She was off the bed in a second. “You’ll hurt them. You’ll crush them. You’ll. . . .”Her voice faded away as she bent down to touch one of the cashmere sweaters. It was a deep purple, and there was a plaid skirt whose pattern contained the same color.
As Adam watched her touch the clothes with a reverence that he’d only seen people use with holy objects, he found that he was a bit annoyed. Well, maybe it wasn’t annoyance he was feeling but, well, just maybe it was a tiny bit of jealousy. After all, he was the one who had bought the clothes for her, shouldn’t she be....
“You ready to go to lunch?” he said, then further annoyed himself because his voice sounded harsh and almost angry.
“Oh, yes,” Darci breathed. “Yes, yes, yes. I’ll be ready in a minute.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” he said as he left the bedroom to wait for her in the living room. Ten minutes later she emerged, and once again she was clutching her six shopping bags. It was obvious she had put her new clothes back into the bags. “You aren’t returning them, are you?” he asked, aghast.
“Of course not,” she said, smiling. “I’m just going to show everyone in the hotel my new clothes, that’s all.”
“You’re going to show . . . ?” he began, then had to shake his head to clear it. “You don’t even know these people. What do they care whether you, a stranger, got new clothes or not?”
For a moment Darci blinked at him in disbelief. “What an odd person you are,” she said; then she slipped past him and out the front door, using just her fingertips to turn the doorknob, never loosening her hold on her six bags.
For a few minutes, Adam stood still, debating whether or not he should follow her. She was a child, he thought, as his whole face drew down into a deep frown. What she didn’t know about people would fill a library.
But a few minutes later, when Adam reached the dining room of the main house, he stood to one side of the doorway for a few moments and listened.
“And this sweater can go with that skirt too,” he heard a woman say.
“I hadn’t realized that,” Darci said. “And aren’t you clever for seeing it?”
“For me, I like this necklace with this blouse,” said another woman.
“And, oh, that skirt is my favorite color,” said the first woman.
“That’s because your eyes are exactly that shade of blue,” said a man’s voice.
“Oh, Harry, get on with you,” the woman said in a flirty way. She’s making everyone feel good, complimenting everyone, Adam thought as he stepped through the doorway.
“And here’s the man who did it!” a tall, dark-haired woman said when she saw him.”What a great boss you are. Look at that! He’s blushing.”
Adam wanted to snap at them, at what looked to be the entire population of the hotel, staff included, that he had never in his life blushed. He wanted to inform them that he was a man with a mission, a mission of great secrecy, and that he was not a man to blush over a passel of new clothes.
But Adam didn’t say any of that. Instead, he grabbed Darci’s elbow and pulled her toward the doorway. “We’re going out to lunch,” he mumbled.
But Darci leaned back on her heels in such a way that if Adam was going to get her out of the room, he was going to have to drag her or carry her. At first he thought she didn’t want to leave the other guests, but then he realized that it was her new clothes that were keeping her there.
Laughing, one of the women patted Darci’s shoulder. “You go on, honey. I’ll see that all your clothes are put away in your room.” It was only when Darci heard that that she began walking again and followed Adam into the entrance hallway.
Just as they were leaving, two women came in and stopped in front of Darci. They were both dressed like men, in heavy work boots, jeans, and Barbour coats. “Have we missed the fashion show?” one of the women asked, and Adam wondered how they could have heard of it if they were outside.
“Hello, Lucy and Annette,” Darci said as though the women were old friends. “No, my new clothes are still in there.” There couldn’t have been more longing in Darci’s voice if she’d been a nursing mother leaving her newborn baby.
“Oh, good,” the shorter woman said. “We raced back to see them. By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you. What does the T in your name stand for?”
“Tennessee,” Darci said instantly. “For Tennessee Claflin, the suffragette.”
“And proponent of free love,” the taller woman said. “Good for you, girl!”
Laughing, both women went into the hotel, and Darci started walking again. “Where do you want to go for lunch?” she asked, then stopped when she saw that Adam wasn’t beside her. He was still standing by the doorway.
“So what does the T stand for? Theda or Tennessee?” His eyes were narrowed at her, but when Darci opened her mouth to reply, he put up his hand. “No, I don’t want to hear. I’d probably get a third answer.”
Turning away, Darci smiled. “Want to go to the diner?” she asked.
“Sure. Why not? I don’t think there’s much choice in Camwell.”
“We could have stayed at the Grove.”
“And be ogled at by everyone? No, thanks,” he said.
When he opened the diner’s glass door for her to enter ahead of him, the waitress said, “Back already?”
“We couldn’t stay away, Sally,” Darci said as she went to the same booth they’d had the night before.
“And how do you know her name?” Adam snapped as he slid onto the seat on the opposite side of the table and picked up the menu.
“It’s on a badge on her chest,” Darci said. “I read it.”
Adam had to laugh at the way she’d answered him. “All right, point tak
“All of it,” Darci answered truthfully. “But I guess I’ll just have the special.”
“Okay, so what’ll it be?” the waitress asked as she put glasses of water before them, then took her pad and pencil out of her apron pocket.
Adam knew that the special was the cheapest thing on the menu, and it was his experience that “special” meant that the cook wanted to get rid of it. “You have any steaks? Filet mignons, maybe?”
Sally was chewing gum, and her black hair looked as if it hadn’t been washed recently. Also, the black was in stark contrast with the extreme whiteness of her skin. She didn’t look like the type for outdoor sports. “No steaks in here, but there’s a grocery next door. You want somebody to run over there?”
Adam looked at Darci.”Steak for lunch too heavy for you?”
Mutely, Darci shook her head no.
“Two of the best,” Adam said. “With everything that goes with it. Can you microwave a couple of potatoes?”
“Microwave?” Sally said, chewing on one side of her mouth and looking bored. “Naw, we don’t need microwaves in Camwell. The cook’s a warlock, and he uses his magic wand to—” Adam’s look made her cut off her sentence, but she went away laughing.
“So, do we go to work this afternoon?” Darci asked as soon as they were alone.
“Actually,” Adam said as he picked up the menu again and began to read it with all-consuming interest, “I have to do something personal this afternoon, so you can start your job tomorrow.”
When Darci didn’t say anything, he looked up at her. “Personal?” she asked quietly, her eyes boring into his. “What you mean is that you’re going out snooping again, so you want me to sit and wait in the hotel room.”
“No,” Adam said slowly. “I meant that I have some personal business to take care of, so you have the afternoon off. You can spend time with all the friends you’ve made here. I know! Why don’t you go to the local library and research those women who disappeared. Or maybe you can find 212 words to tell people that the T in your name stands for?”