In a Heartbeat - Elizabeth Adler [57]
“That’s okay. Good night, baby, sleep well.” Again she dropped a light kiss on his cheek, but there was no smile tonight. Camelia sighed. He had smashed her dreams.
And this scenario was so far from his own dreams of starlit nights and warm tumbled beds that he grinned. He was in a one-horse pseudo-tourist town; it was pitch-dark and raining like hell; and the woman he was enamored of had gone off, sniffling and clutching a box of Kleenex, with a room-service order for one.
Chicken soup and grits. Camelia wished that were all it would take to make him feel better.
34
They were on the flight to Charleston. The leg-room was almost nonexistent and Mel sat with her knees practically under her chin, her eyes tight shut, her face pink with fever. The few times she spoke, in response to Camelia’s questions about how she felt, her voice was a hoarse whisper.
So much for romance, Camelia told himself with a grin. You might say it was God’s punishment to a would-be errant husband. Only it seemed to him that she was the one suffering.
He asked the attendant for some hot tea and insisted that she drink it, and also that she take the Tylenol Flu tablets he had bought at the airport.
“Thanks,” she whispered throatily.
“A magical sound,” he replied dryly.
“What is?”
“Your voice. Kinda like sandpaper on rusty iron.”
She giggled, then took a sip of the tea. It was almost hot, airline-style. “I was just beginning to hate you, y’know that?”
He caught her sideways, glossy brown-eyed glance. “For what?” he asked innocently. “For taking you to Stepfordville, treating you to the best they had to offer? Buying you as many cosmopolitans as you liked? Treating you like a lady?”
“Thank you for that,” she whispered in that hoarse voice that only made her seem sexier, in that oddball kind of way that appealed to men like him and Ed Vincent.
“For which one?”
“The lady part.”
Her eyes met his again, then he looked away uncomfortably. “You’re welcome,” he said, but he guessed she knew how he had been feeling. He crossed his fingers and thought of Claudia, the love of his life, the mother of his children, the woman who meant everything in the world to him. What was he doing, thirty thousand feet up in a plane with another woman? What was he thinking? He had never understood infidelity, particularly the casual sort. Never believed that the momentary physical pleasure it brought could ever equal the terrible pain it might bring to the one who had loved and trusted him. He still didn’t understand. All he knew was what he felt.
The sun was shining when they got to Charleston. There was a tang of the sea in the air, a blueness to the sky, and a softness to the breeze that lifted both their spirits, and Camelia went completely mad and rented a Chrysler Sebring convertible. Then, top down, hair whipping in the wind, and feeling like a couple of teenagers, they drove through the outskirts of the city.
The Fairland Nursing Home was a residential unit for the elderly and infirm, expensive and a class act. It sat regally atop a hill, a pleasant stone-faced building with magnificent views over the countryside and a gravel driveway that swept in a circle to an imposing portico. The tall double doors stood open to the sunshine, revealing a polished hallway flooded with light from the long windows on either side.
Camelia sat for a moment, contemplating it. “You don’t get this on Medicare,” he observed. “This costs. Our Mamzelle Dorothea must be rolling in it.”
They went inside, walked to the end of the hall, and tapped on a glossy blue door marked OFFICE.
“Come on in,” a pleasant southern voice sang out.
The pleasant voice belonged to a pleasant-looking middle-aged woman, with a cloud of gray hair held back by a blue velvet headband. She was small and comfortably stout, wore no makeup, had pink apple cheeks and smiling greenish eyes behind little wire glasses.
“Definitely not a Stepford wife,” Mel whispered.
“That’s because you’re in Realville, not Hainsville,” he whispered back. “Hi, how are ya,