Forever... by Jude Deveraux
“It’s—” she began.
“I know what it is,” he said impatiently.”I can see what it is. I just meant. . . .” He didn’t say anything else, but scooped up everything she had in the cart and shoved it onto a shelf in front of the canned peas.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Darci said, frowning. “I’ll put everything back in its right place.”
“And let everyone in this town see your hair? I’d tell you to go back to the guest house and wait for me there, but I don’t think you’d obey. Go find some of those tie things that girls use and pull your hair back so it covers that missing piece. I’ll do the shopping.”
“You’ll—?” Darci said, eyes wide, as though that were the most extraordinary thing she’d ever heard in her life.
“Let me guess,” Adam said under his breath. “Underground tunnels don’t surprise you, but the idea of a man buying groceries does?”
Darci could only nod in silence.
“Go,” he said. “And don’t let anyone see the back of your head. I’ll meet you outside. Stand somewhere where people can’t see you, and don’t talk to anyone. Understand?”
Darci didn’t move. “I’d have to pay for the hair ties.”
Adam started to say something sarcastic about how little they would cost but then he gave a sigh and handed her a ten-dollar bill.
Holding the bill, Darci just looked up at him, not moving. “How will I get your change back to you?”
“I’ll trust you until we get back to the room.”
Darci still didn’t move.
“Keep the bloody change!” he said much louder than he meant to; then Darci ran down the aisle so fast that he thought of Road Runner cartoons, with the bird leaving a cloud of dust behind him.
“I have never seen anyone so in love with money as she is,” Adam muttered as he pushed the cart to the deli section of the grocery and began filling it, starting with Brie cheese and a carton of hummus. “What’s she saving her money for?” he muttered. “A wedding gift for her big, strong, young Putnam?”
“Sorry. I couldn’t hear what you said,” the man behind the counter said, and Adam was embarrassed to have been caught talking to himself. He ordered three fresh salads and a quarter pound each of four different kinds of meat. “On second thought, better make that a half pound each,” he added.
In the end, he bought twice as much food as he should have. But then he found himself thinking, I wonder if Darci has ever eaten a pomegranate? As he went up and down the aisles of the small grocery, he kept tossing things into the cart, all the while thinking hard. I must send her away. She doesn’t understand how dangerous this could be. Oh! Wonder if she’d like smoked oysters? She treats all of this like a joke. We can drive to Hartford tomorrow and find a good hairdresser there. I’ve got to send her away until I need her. Maybe if she had some really good chocolate, she’d give up those dreadful candy bars. This last thought came to him as he dropped a twenty-five-dollar box of Godiva chocolate into the basket. Then he found himself grabbing six bouquets of autumn-colored flowers from the selection along the wall as he wheeled the cart to the checkout stand. Maybe if they went to Hartford, they’d have time to see Mark Twain’s house. Darci would probably like that.
“Credit or cash?” the woman at the register asked, and Adam had to bring himself back to reality.
“Is there a liquor store near here?” he asked. “Somewhere I can get a bottle of wine?” He smiled when he was told that a liquor store was two doors down.
When they got back to the guest house, Darci disappeared for a few moments to remove the squashed candy bars from inside her cat suit, and Adam was hoping she’d put on something less revealing. Instead, when she reappeared, she still had on the clinging leotard. Her only concession to modesty was to take a sweatshirt of his out of the closet and pull it on over the suit, but her Lycra-covered legs were still exposed beneath it.
“You couldn’t find anything of your own to wear?” he asked, sounding more snappish than he meant to.
“Don’t want to wrinkle anything,” she said as she picked up the bags of groceries and carried them to the little kitchen.
Adam had planned to make sandwiches with as little fuss as possible, but Darci shooed him away and she took over. She didn’t set the food on the little table in the corner of the room, but instead, cleared the coffee table of its fabric flowers in a pot and set out plates, knives and forks, and glasses from the kitchen cabinets. In the kitchen, she began unloading the food from the plastic bags. She rummaged inside the cabinets until she found a vase and he watched in surprise as she took a pair of scissors from a drawer and expertly snipped the stems of the flowers. Within seconds, she had arranged them, making the flowers form a perfect oval above the vase.
“Where’d you learn that?” he asked.
“Putnam Flowers. I worked there for a few months.”
“Handy thing to know,” he said. “My cousin Sarah would like to be able to do that. She has thousands of flowers in her garden but not a clue as to how to arrange them.”
“‘Thousands,’” Darci said as she took the flowers into the living room.
“Yeah, well, it’s a big house,” Adam said, feeling embarrassed. He didn’t like to reveal things about himself, and he was grateful when Darci didn’t ask him any questions. Instead, he stood back and watched as she pulled long loaves of French bread from the bags, then opened the containers of food and carefully put them into dishes that she carried from the kitchen. For his part, he would have eaten from the cartons but Darci seemed to want to make as elegant a table as possible.
When she was finished, she motioned for him to take his seat on a couch cushion on the opposite side of the coffee table, and immediately, Darci began asking questions about each item he’d bought. When he didn’t have a sharp knife to cut open the pomegranate, she jumped up and got him one; then she watched intently as he cut it open and began to extract the seeds. Without hesitation, she dropped a handful of the seeds into her mouth and declared them delicious.
She tasted everything, exclaimed with delight over every item, and Adam found himself talking more and more about the food. She wanted to know where each cheese had been made, how oysters were smoked, and why the water crackers were called that. Adam tried to answer her every question and when he didn’t know the answer, he handed her the food container and she read what was printed on it to him. And there was a lot of discussion about vineyards and how wine was made.
In the end, the meal took over two hours, and afterward Adam realized he’d enjoyed himself a great deal. And to his disbelief, the two of them had eaten everything. But still, he found that he somehow had room for the Godiva chocolates, and for a moment, he watched Darci close her eyes and let the rich chocolate melt down her throat.
Adam knew that he’d better say something or he’d find himself reaching for her. “Why don’t you get fat?” he asked.
Darci opened her eyes. “No fat cells. I never developed any as a kid, and my metabolism is very fast. My mother says I must get it from my father, because she says that if she eats a piece of lettuce, she gains weight.”
“What does your father do for a living?”
Darci looked into the big box of chocolate and made no answer.
“I was just curious,” Adam said. “You often mention your mother but never your father. Does he live in Putnam, too?”
“I don’t know,” Darci said quietly. “Sometimes you can keep secrets in a small town because I don’t know who my father is.” Her head came up and she smiled at him. “What about yours?”
“My father? Dead. Both my parents are dead. They died when I was three so I never really knew them.”
“How did they die?” she asked, but as soon as she asked the question, she saw that closed-down look come over Adam’s face. She was already learning that when she got too near a spot that he didn’t allow people into, he turned as mute as a rock.
So now, if she didn’t want him to get up and lea
“Me neither,” Darci said. “Know my mother much, that is. She was always at work or ...well, she was busy.”
“So who raised you?”
“Everybody in town, is what Uncle Vern says. They passed me around from one to another. Mostly I heard, ‘Could you watch Darci this afternoon and give me a break?’”
She was looking at him as though she expected him to smile at her joke, but Adam didn’t see any humor in what she was saying.
“Don’t look at me with pity in your eyes,” she said, still smiling. “I was a conniving little demon. By the time I reached eight, I knew every secret of every person in town. Whenever I wanted to see a movie, all I had to say was,’You want me to wait outside while you and Mr. Nearly spend the afternoon . . . talking?’ And bam! Movie money was shoved into my hand. Or clothes or slices of pie. Whatever I needed was given to me.”
Adam didn’t smile at this attempt at humor either. She was trying to make light of it, but he saw the loneliness of her childhood. She’d learned to blackmail people into giving her food, clothing, and shelter by the time she was eight years old. But he didn’t say anything. As she’d just said, she didn’t want to see pity in his eyes.
“So what made you decide to spend your life fighting evil?” she asked.
At that, Adam did smile. “Does Superman have a reason for what he does?” he asked, an eyebrow raised.
“Sure. He wants to run around in leotards and a cape,” she said quickly, making Adam laugh.
She was on her third piece of chocolate. “So when are you going to show me the knife?”
“The what?” he asked, stalling for time.
“You know, the knife you stole from behind that iron fence down in the tunnels. The one you used to cut my hair. And by the way, what happened to the big piece of my hair? Those two men said they found strands, not a piece the size you cut off.”
“That was clever of them to see that the hair was from a natural blonde, wasn’t it?” Adam said quietly. “I was thinking that tomorrow we’d drive into Hartford and get your hair cut properly, something that would cover up the hole at the back. Maybe we should have it dyed too. Maybe you should become a redhead.”
Darci didn’t so much as smile at him. Instead, she looked into his eyes hard, letting him know that his changing the subject wasn’t going to work.
“In my coat pocket,” he said with a grimace. Why couldn’t she have forgotten about that knife?
Darci was on her feet in seconds and nearly ran to the coat closet. When she returned to the table, she was holding the dagger in her outstretched hands. Adam had to work to keep from grabbing it from her because he was dying to have a good look at it. But his plan had been to look at it alone in his bedroom, after Darci was asleep.
As if she knew what he was thinking, she handed the knife to him, then began to clean up the remains of the meal. She was giving Adam time to examine the dagger by himself. Moving from the floor to the couch, he held the knife under the lamp on the end table. The dagger wasn’t very big, only about seven or eight inches, with a steel blade with several pits of rust on it. The handle was gold and black, and as he turned it about in the light, he realized that the raised gold part was writing. The writing had been cleverly twisted around the handle so that it looked more like a design than writing, but Adam felt sure that it was a language of some sort.
Too quickly, Darci was sitting beside him. Actually, she was sitting so close to him that she might as well have been sitting on his lap, and the sweatshirt she’d purloined exposed much too much of her.
“Don’t you ever wear any of your own clothes?” he snapped. “You couldn’t have cleaned up that fast, and why don’t you sit on that side of the couch?”
“I told you that I don’t want to mess up my new clothes. Dishwasher. The light’s better on this side,” she said, smiling at him; then, after a moment, she held out her hand, palm up.
With a sigh, Adam gave her the dagger. He would have moved away from her, but his right side was squashed against the arm of the couch and there was no room to move. You’re acting like a high school boy, Montgomery! he scolded himself, then forced himself to relax.
“You studied witchcraft. Do you recognize any of the symbols from your studies?” he asked.
For a moment Darci held the dagger up to the light, turning it around in her hands. “Evil. Great evil.”
“I hope you didn’t pay too much for that education of yours,” Adam said.
“Not a penny.”
“You went on a scholarship?”
“No. Actually, Putnam paid for my education,” Darci answered, smiling, then she yawned. “You know, as fascinating as this thing is, I think I’m going to have to go to bed.”
For a moment Adam was annoyed. Part of him wanted to discuss this knife with her. Tonight when they’d talked about food and wine, he’d found that he enjoyed talking to her. She always had a quick answer for every question.
“So where do you want me to sleep tonight?” Darci asked, then yawned so wide that he heard her jaw pop.
“‘Where?’” Adam said. But then he laughed, all his bad humor gone. “In your own bed. Go on, get out of here. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Darci paused at the doorway to her bedroom. “Mr. Montgomery, I had a good time today,” she said softly.
He started to say that he would have had a better time if she’d stayed behind and not talked all the way down the tunnel, then faked a faint, then nearly got her arm broken trying to pull candy bars out of a machine, then disobeyed him again and set off an alarm. But he couldn’t say that because it wasn’t true. Instead, he smiled and said, “It’s Adam. Good night, Miss Mansfield.”
Darci hiked up the sweatshirt to her waist and stuck out her hip in the pose of a 1950s bombshell. “Good night, Adam,” she said in a breathless way that was an astonishingly good imitation of Marilyn Monroe.
Again, Adam laughed, then he waved his hand in dismissal, and she went into her bedroom and closed the door.
When he was alone in the living room, he saw that she had set out a little tray of cheese and crackers for him, with a full glass of red wine. Smiling, he took the wine and sipped it as he pulled paper and pencil out of his briefcase and began to make a rubbing of the raised characters on the knife blade. When he’d finished, he went to his bedroom and faxed the paper to a friend of his in Washington, D.C., with a cover sheet that said, “See what you can find out about this, will you? If it’s writing, what kind and what does it say?” and was signed, “A. Montgomery.”
After he’d showered and put on a pair of pajamas, he was tempted to open Darci’s door to check and see if she was all right. But he thought he’d better not do that. Instead, he went to bed, and, like the night before, he was asleep instantly.
7
“WELL, WHAT DO YOU THINK?” Darci asked as she looked up at Adam, her hand on her newly cut and colored hair. “Like it?”
But Adam’s astonished look said it all. She was wearing some of her new clothes for the first time: a dark green wool skirt, a burgundy cashmere sweater, and a jacket in a plaid of the two colors. The dark brown boots she had on were lined with sheepskin and were wonderfully warm and comfortable.
When Adam got up this morning, Darci had already been dressed and waiting for him, eager to drive to Hartford and visit a hairdresser. While he dressed, she ran to the main house and returned with croissants, coffee, and fruit, which she fed him in the car on the way. “You’re going to make me fat,” he said, with his mouth full.
“To whom did you send the fax last night?” she asked as he held the coffee cup to his lips.
At that, Adam spilled coffee down the front of his sweater, and while he was mopping it up with the napkins that Darci handed him, she took the steering wheel of the rental car.
“Do you snoop into everything?” he asked.
“I
“My girlfriend,” he said, still brushing at droplets as he took the steering wheel back from her.
That statement silenced Darci so effectively that he almost regretted it. “All right,” he said after several minutes of silence. “I made a rubbing of the markings on the dagger and I faxed them to a friend of mine in D.C. She knows a lot about languages so maybe she’ll know, or can find out, what’s written on that knife. If it is writing, that is. I’m not even sure that it is.”
“Maybe it’s a magic knife and it’ll give the holder three wishes.” Darci said that nonsensical sentence to cover the annoyance she’d felt when he’d said “she.” But Adam’s silence made her look at him closely. “Hmmm,” she said.
“What does that mean?” he snapped.
“I see that Mr. Bad Mood is back.”
Adam sighed. “All right, out with it. What’s in that little Kentucky mind of yours?”
“Nothing really,” she said slowly. “But every time I mention certain words, you go bananas.”
“I do not go ‘bananas,’ as you so inelegantly put it. In fact, I can assure you that I have never in my life gone ‘bananas.’”
“Of course not. But you do react rather, well ...strongly when I say words like sacrifice and magic.”
“Of course I do. Yesterday we went inside the underground tunnels of a witches’ coven. Did you forget that? There are certain words associated with witches, and it’s to be expected that—”
“Broomstick!” Darci said loudly. “Cauldron! Black cat! No, no, I can see that those words have no effect on you. But the idea of a magic knife and a sacrifice, specifically a sacrifice of me, nearly sends you over the edge.” She was looking at him intently, obviously waiting for his answer.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you why you have very little southern accent. In fact, you almost sound as though you came from this part of the U.S.”