Shadows At Sunset - Anne Stuart [36]
But she’d taken one look into his cool green eyes the night before and felt oddly, faintly repelled. She couldn’t imagine why—there was very little she considered repellent, and if he was as amoral as Dean thought he was, it would be no worse than a number of other people she’d been involved with. At least he didn’t look like the type who hit.
But he made her uncomfortable, and no amount of rationalization could change her mind.
So she’d gone out last night and again tonight, looking for something to divert her. Someone young and strong and healthy, to fuck her to distraction and back again with no responsibilities, no names, leaving nothing but a smile and a memory in the morning.
She’d headed for the Kit-Kat Klub, but for some reason she never made it there. She’d ended up down at the Unitarian church, at another AA meeting, and she’d sat through it, numb, silent, listening to the words wash over her and seething with resentment underneath. She didn’t want to be there. Other people could drink and drug themselves into oblivion and then walk away from it. Why did she have to be trapped by an addiction she couldn’t control?
After the meeting a group of them went out for coffee, and Rachel-Ann went with them, as she always did, silent, sipping the bitter, too sweet coffee sludge and saying nothing. No one forced her to talk. They let her come with them, a silent, sad-eyed ghost as haunted as the house she lived in.
He was there again. She didn’t remember when she’d first noticed him, but he’d been at the last three meetings at the Unitarian church, he’d joined them for coffee and he’d watched her.
He was tall, almost too thin, with hair that needed cutting and clothes that needed pressing. She had no idea what he did for a living, only that he was “Hi, my name is Rico and I’m an alcoholic.” Hispanic, probably Mexican.
She couldn’t bring herself to talk to him. To meet his eyes. He shouldn’t be watching her—he’d know as well as she did that one of the major rules of recovery was not to get involved with anyone for the first year. She was having a hard enough time staying sober—if sleeping with someone managed to distract her from her need for a drink then she’d do it gratefully.
She didn’t want to sleep with a recovering alcoholic, though. He’d probably lecture her, drag her to meetings when she was sick and tired of them. She didn’t know why she still went when she hated them so much. Probably because she didn’t have anything else to do, and the alternative was to stay home alone with the ghosts.
She’d sat next to Rico, squeezed into a booth with a group of people whose lives she knew better than she knew her siblings’. Susan had been a hooker on Sunset Strip, and not the gorgeous Julia Roberts version. She was well over two hundred pounds, almost as tall as Jilly, with a foul mouth and the kindest eyes. Then there was Maggie, a divorced mother of three. She’d lost her children, she’d lost everything, and people kept telling Rachel-Ann that that was the only way you could recover. You had to hit bottom.
It seemed to Rachel-Ann that she’d hit bottom so damned many times she couldn’t get any lower. So why didn’t she have that fucking blissed-out serenity the rest of them had?
It must have been her frustration over Coltrane that had made her react to Rico. She wanted someone, anyone, and he was warm, strong and available. It would have been easy enough to ask him for a ride home, or offer him one. Any excuse not to be alone, not to come home to this shadowed house with the ghosts who watched her.
But in the end she hadn’t said a word, she’d simply watched as he climbed into an ancient Plymouth and driven off into the Hollywood night.
She moved through the house like a ghost herself, half hoping they were sleeping. Ghosts had to sleep sometime, didn’t they? She knew perfectly well who they were—the stories about the murder-suicide were the stuff