me.
Disgusted by the very thought of Peter ever entering their lives again, Sabrina had warned her to stay close to home. But figuring Peter was long gone, Allie hadn’t seen the harm in going out for a little while. The apartment was too quiet without Sabrina in it, talking about how adorable the baby would be and what a great job Allie would do as a mother.
She’d thought her sister was being overprotective about Peter. Because once he’d quit his job at the publishing house where he’d worked with Sabrina—quit because of some big hush-hush scandal her sister wouldn’t tell her about—Peter had supposedly left town. Sabrina figured he’d gone to New York. Allie had hoped he’d gone to a back alley in Tijuana and been jumped by some horny drug traffickers who’d kidnapped him and put him to work in a slave labor camp picking corn and cleaning toilets with his tongue.
Or something like that.
But, no, apparently not. Because he was here, in Philadelphia. So either he’d never really left, or he’d come back with his tail between his legs.
Whatever the case, the cat was out of the bag—or more appropriately, the pregnant belly was out of the maternity smock.
Remembering the initial shock on his face when he’d seen her—all of her—she couldn’t prevent a small stab of righteous pleasure. But because her own heart had tumbled at the sight of him, she hadn’t been able to enjoy his obvious dismay.
Allie wished it hadn’t hurt to see his handsome face and experience that familiar rush of want she’d felt from the minute she’d met him on campus at Tyler College. Back when she’d had no idea the man had, until recently, been her sister’s colleague—and boyfriend—and was carrying a grudge wider than an elephant’s butt.
What an absolute idiot she’d been to fall for his line. Easy pickings. And, oh, had he picked her over. Flirted with her, teased her, made her feel like a beautiful woman instead of an awkward, small-town girl.
Made her fall in love.
Then he’d dropped her flat. Not even sticking around to see just how much of an impression he’d left behind. A seven- or eight-pound one, she suspected.
Not even twenty-one and she had already disgraced her family, lost her scholarship to her Christian college and been forced to quit her job, move out of the dorm and crash with her big sister. No money. No insurance. No future.
All of that was worse than stretch marks. Or even hemorrhoids.
“Here lies Alicia Cavanaugh,” she whispered. “Her grave marked with nothing but a great big L. For Loser.”
Tears welled up again but this time they wouldn’t stop. She wouldn’t have been able to stop them if she tried, not even for chocolate. Not for Hershey’s. Or Dove. Or Godiva. Or even those crunchy See’s toffee candies.
“Mmm…toffee,” she whispered through a hiccupping little sob.
Not having the toffee candies made her cry harder. Not even thoughts of how much she was going to love her baby boy or girl and how good a mother she was going to make helped.
Because Peter was threatening to take that away from her, too. Once he’d recovered from his shock last night, he informed her that there was no way he was paying child support. And that she might end up paying it to him because he could decide to sue for custody, and since she was an immature college dropout barely out of her teens, he would probably get it.
What if he was right?
He didn’t want to raise this baby, she knew it. He was being hateful. That expression of amusement in his eyes, as he’d informed her he had to think about it first and would be in touch, said it all.
He didn’t want to be a father. He just wanted to be cruel, which seemed to be what he did best.
“I have to tell Sabrina. She’ll know what to do.”
This wasn’t something she could share over a cell phone, however. She needed to see her big sister face-to-face. Which might prove tricky, since Sabrina hadn’t told her where she was going.
Fortunately, however, Allie knew a secret about Jane, Sabrina’s secretary at Liberty Books—a secret Peter Pecker had revealed during their last phone call so many months ago. He’d told her about his affair with Jane, hoping she’d tell Sabrina…and hurt her some more. Allie had kept it to herself. Until now.
Allie wasn’t fond of blackmail, but she’d learned a lot of hard lessons at the school of Peter. Jane would know where Sabrina was, and Allie had ammunition against Jane.
Now, it appeared, was a very good time to use it.
“WHAT ON EARTH is that?”
Hearing the shock in Sabrina’s voice as they reached the top of the hill beside his grandfather’s new home, Max steeled himself to explain. His own first closeup view of the house had been much the same.
The three-story mausoleum had been built about a hundred years ago and it wore every one of those years on its face. With missing tile shingles on the roof, shutters that couldn’t be closed dangling outside most of the windows, peeling layers of varying colors of paint, and a sagging porch that had begun to separate from the front door—requiring a little hop to go inside—the place was silently begging for a wrecking ball.
Max was loudly begging for one.
Especially to maim, kill and annihilate the clocks. The former occupant had apparently owned a clock factory and had liked to sample the wares. Blue ones, red ones, open-billed ones…cuckoos with glittering emerald eyes and shiny black ones, with carefully detailed feathers or fake-looking plastic talons. With open wings or military epaulets or garland wreaths dangling from their beaks.
Two dozen of them, at least, though it seemed more like a thousand. The noise was enough to make a man lose his mind.
And the clocks weren’t the beginning and the end of the insanity, oh, no. The inside of the house was, itself, a crazy maze, with oddly shaped rooms, doors that opened to interior brick walls, chimneys rising from no fireplaces. Like it had been built little by little—piece by piece—with no thought given to the finished product.
Grandfather loved it—right down to the last cuckoo and threadbare rug. No big surprise.
Max supposed that with a few million dollars, the cast and crew of Trading Spaces and that wrecking ball, it could be made into something inhabitable.
“I guess you’re wondering about the house.” But as Max followed Sabrina’s stare, he realized she was not looking at the building. She was looking at the enormous structure beside the building. The one he hadn’t noticed until right now, probably because his brain was used to blocking out the more impossible sights a life with Mortimer Potts often provided.
He closed his eyes briefly, but, unfortunately, the mirage hadn’t disappeared when he reopened them.
Rising from the tangled brush, brambles and honeysuckle vines—which had grown from beyond their original perimeter against the falling-down stone fence to encroach all the way to the side patio—was a monstrosity. A gigantic thing, swaying in the light morning breeze.
Standing twenty feet high and covering most of the side yard, it was an enormous mass of colors all swirled together on a billowy fabric. A tent…but not a garden variety camping-in-the-backyard one. This was like something out of an old Arabian Nights film. Emblazoned with brilliant splashes of red, green and gold, the thing stood like an enormous jewel beneath the bright summer sky.
“Damn.”
Mortimer was in one of his Middle East moods again. His grandfather had spent a number of years in Egypt after the Second World War. He liked to claim he’d been granted an honorary sheikhdom from a Bedouin tribe with which he’d spent one winter, cut off from the rest of the world in a secret, sand-battered camp.
As with many of Mortimer’s stories, Max wasn’t certain if this one was true or