She doesn’t answer. Unlike Pepper, she didn’t follow her own advice and wear a cardigan, and her forearms are bare to the November night. She crosses them against her chest, just beneath her breasts. The material falls gently from her body, and Pepper decides she isn’t quite like Audrey Hepburn after all. She’s slender, but she isn’t skinny. There is a soft roundness to her, an inviting fullness about her breasts and hips and bottom, which she carries so gracefully on her light frame that you almost don’t notice, unless you’re looking for it. Unless you’re a man.
She turns to Pepper. “I have an idea. Why don’t you come back with me to Cocoa Beach? We have a little guest cottage in the back. You can stay there until you’re ready to make some decisions. A little more private than the Breakers, don’t you think?”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course. I’d love the company. To tell the truth, it’s a bit lonely, now that my husband’s gone and the children are grown. And you need me.”
Pepper opens her mouth to say that she doesn’t need anyone.
“Yes, you do,” says Mrs. Dommerich, before the words come out.
“You’re just nuts, do you know that?”
“No, you’re nuts. You think—what? That I’m involved in some vast conspiracy to keep all this out of the public notice?” She waves her hand at Pepper’s belly. “That I’m in cahoots with the great man himself?”
“I’d be crazy not to consider it.”
Mrs. Dommerich narrows her eyes to consider Pepper’s point of view. “I suppose that’s fair enough,” she says. “But you’re already here. You’ve trusted me this far.”
“I haven’t trusted you a bit. I’m just trying to figure out your game.”
“Figure it out at my place, then.” Mrs. Dommerich walks around the left fender and opens the door. “It’s a hell of a lot more comfortable, for one thing. What have you got to lose?”
“My luggage. For one thing.”
Mrs. Dommerich swings into her seat and starts the engine. She calls out, over the throaty roar: “We’ll ring up the Breakers in the morning and have it sent over.”
Pepper stands there in the beam of the headlights, arms still crossed, trying to find Mrs. Dommerich’s heart-shaped face in the middle of all that glare. Mrs. Dommerich gives the horn an impatient little toot.
“All right,” Pepper says at last, walking back to her door and climbing inside. The leather seat takes her in like an old friend. “After all, I don’t suppose I have any choice.”
Mrs. Dommerich turns the car around and starts back down the dirt track to the highway, chased by the moon.
“Honey, you always have a choice,” she says. “The trick is making the right one.”
2.
“I suppose you can call me Pepper now,” she says, as they bounce elegantly back down through the parting in the reeds, “since I’m going to be your houseguest, and not a very good one.”
Mrs. Dommerich changes gears and accelerates down the dirt track.
“You’ll be a wonderful houseguest, Pepper. Better than you think. And you can call me Annabelle.”
3.
They are back on the highway, roaring north under the moon. The landscape passes by, dark and anonymous. Pepper yawns in the passenger seat. “Tell me about this lover of yours.”
“I thought you weren’t interested in romance.”
“I’m just being polite. And I don’t like silence.”
Annabelle shakes her head. “Tell me something. What do you believe in, Miss Pepper Schuyler?”
“Me? I believe in independence. I believe in calling the shots and keeping your eyes wide open. Because in the end, you know, he just wants to get into bed with you. That’s what they’re after. They’ll kiss you in the sunset, they’ll carry you upstairs, they’ll gaze into your eyes like you might disappear if they stop. They might even tell you they’re in love. But the point is to seduce you.”
Annabelle taps her thumbs on the steering wheel and considers this. “Do you know, though, I think I was the one who seduced him, in the end.”
“Well, that’s how they do it, the best of them. They make you think it was your idea.”
The draft whistles around them. Pepper checks her watch. It’s half past eleven o’clock, and she’s getting sleepy, except that the baby is pressing on a nerve that tracks all the way down her foot and turns her toes numb. She shifts her weight from one leg to the other.
“Do you know what I think, Miss Schuyler?”
“Call me Pepper, I said.”
“Is that your real name?”
“Pepper will do. But really. Tell me what you think about me, Annabelle. I’m dying to know.”
“I think you really are a romantic. You’re longing for true love with all your tough little heart. It’s just that you’re too beautiful, and it’s made you cynical.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yes, it does. Any unearned gift makes you cynical, unless you’re a psychopath.”
“Beauty hasn’t made you cynical.”
“But I’m not beautiful. I suppose I’m attractive, and I have a few nice features. My eyes and skin. My figure, if you like your women petite. But I was never beautiful, certainly not compared to someone like you.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. Look at those cheekbones of yours.”
“Not like yours. I could hang my hat on yours. No, there were just two men in my life who thought I was beautiful, and I think they thought I was beautiful because they loved me, because they were attracted to something inside me, and not the other way around.”
Pepper laughs. “Trust me, it was the other way around.”
“How can you say that? You don’t know either man.”
“I know men.”
“You think you know men, but you only know cads, because the cads are the only ones brash enough to take you on. You don’t know the first thing about a man capable of a great love.”
“Because there’s no such thing. It’s just the sex instinct, the need for reproduction, and the more attractive the man, the more women he wants to reproduce with.”
“All right, Miss Schuyler. That’s quite enough. You just shut that steely old mouth of yours and hear me out.”
“So you’re feisty, after all!”
“When I have to be. So be quiet and listen up, and you might actually learn something, my so-wise friend with the prize-winning cheekbones and the knocked-up belly.” Annabelle taps her long fingers against the steering wheel. “In fact, I’ll make you a bet.”
A bet. Pepper’s heart does the old flutter.
“I don’t know,” she says, poker-faced. “What’re the stakes?”
“Stakes?”
Pepper shrugs. “It’s got to be interesting, that’s what my mother says. The only true crime is boredom.”
Annabelle laughs. “My, my. The apple doesn’t fall far. Well, then. Let’s see. You’re an unwed mother on the run,