The Bewildered Wife

Chapter Three

“That was real close,” Chelsea said in a small voice.

“Real close,” Henry blubbered.

“Just pay attention to the story,” Susan urged. “Then you won’t notice the thunder. Now where was I? Oh, yes, the Continental Congress appointed five men to write a letter to the King explaining why the colonies should not be taxed under the Parliamentary—”

“Can you tell us about Eastman Bears again?” Chelsea asked.

“Sorry, honey, it’s not…not a good idea,” Susan said, thinking of their father’s new restrictions on what they should read. “Besides, I told you the whole story.”

“No, you didn’t,” Henry pointed out.

“Bears,” Baby Edward begged. He didn’t like the blue book about the American Revolution. Not even the pictures of Benjamin Franklin, the Liberty Bell or the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

The nightstand lamp flickered on and off. Susan glanced only briefly at the window, determined to not let the children see that she was worried. The wind was fast and furious—the massive Radcliffe oaks creaked and groaned as their branches were yanked back and forth. Hail and rain slapped against the windowpanes and the sky was a sickly yellow and black. No wonder they called this part of northern Illinois “Tornado Alley.”

“I wish Daddy was home,” Henry said dismally.

“Me, too,” said Chelsea.

“Me, thweeeeh,” Baby Edward added.

Clap!

Chelsea and Henry leapt into Susan’s arms at the crack of blazing light and thunder. Susan hugged all three children and watched the lamp flutter and die, plunging the bedroom into darkness.

The book on the American Revolution slid from her lap to the floor.

“I want my daddy!” Chelsea cried in great, convulsive gulps. “I’m scared!”

Baby Edward howled.

“All right, all right,” Susan soothed. “Now let’s try to be a little braver.”

“I can’t,” Chelsea exclaimed.

“I can’t, either,” Henry said.

Susan looked around the room, blinking to adjust to the darkness. Familiar furniture seemed like ominous prowling monsters and the curtains looked like unearthly ghosts.

And the candles were safely tucked in the dining room hutch, waiting for dinner parties that hadn’t been given since the mistress of the house had died.

She disengaged herself from the children enough to shove her hand into Chelsea’s toy box. Rooting around, she pulled out the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle flashlight. She flicked it on, shooting out a small but comforting speck of light.

“Calm down, all three of you. The Bear family survived a storm much worse than this without a single tear.”

Henry was the first to catch on. He gulped down his sobs and wiped his runny nose with his sleeve.

“They did? Not a single tear?”

“It was a much bigger storm than this one,” Susan said, guilty that she was going against her employer’s wishes but certain he would understand. Just this once.

She hustled them back into the safe bed, opening her arms wide enough to encompass them all. Even Henry, who sometimes considered himself too old for her embraces.

She started another tale, a story she made up as she went along, cuing her words to the reactions of her charges. She had described the storm, the bears, their bravery and was winding things up, when they heard the first anguished yelps.

“It’s Wiley!” Henry shrieked.

“Oh, no!” Susan cried.

The children leapt from the bed to the window, Susan behind them. Illuminated by the lightning, the pitiful, wet, sobbing Wiley stood in the court-yard—pulling at the chain that tied him to the steel shed out in back of the Radcliffe oak trees.

“The landscape service must have forgotten to let him loose after they mowed the lawn,” Susan said.

“Bring him back in!” Chelsea demanded.

“Yeah, get him!” Henry begged.

Susan stared in horror at the poor dog and then at her charges. If she did nothing, Wiley’s pain and terror would be unbearable—for all of them.

But if she went downstairs and left the three children on their own…

“I’ll go down there, but you have to stand right here,” she said. “And don’t move. And take care of Baby Edward. Chelsea, you’re in charge.”

She left them the flashlight and some comforting kisses. In the hall, she felt her way, hand over hand, along the walls of the night-shrouded house. Down the steps, through the cavernous pitch-black dining room. At last she reached the kitchen. She flung open the back door, then fell back as the wind slammed it right back against her. She landed hard.

She scrambled up, grabbed the door handle and shoved with all her might. A sudden vacuum created by the unruly wind sucked the door outward, and she lurched onto the back porch. Downed branches and ripped leaves, slathered to the porch with rain, made it slippery going.

Out past the courtyard, Wiley moaned for her, his eyes pleading for relief.

Woman and dog jumped as the sky cracked in two with a bang and a burst of light.

That was close, Susan thought. Must have hit right near the orchard behind the formal Radcliffe gardens. Swallowing the tight lump of fear, she charged down the steps and across the courtyard.

She looked back once through the sheets of rain to see three ghostly faces pressed against the window of the second-floor back bedroom. Then she reached for Wiley and he lapped her hand as she fumbled with the chain at his neck.

“It’s all right, Wiley, you’re safe now,” Susan comforted. She found the grip, and released him. He raced for the back door, slipping once but recovering as if the very hounds of hell were chasing him.

Susan felt a gentle tap on her shoulder and, still holding the metal chain, she turned around. She looked down at the bracelet Dean Radcliffe had given her—its little charms twinkling in the eerie storm light. She hadn’t wanted to wear it, hadn’t wanted to admit it meant something to her to receive a gift from him. But she wore it now—always, long after they grew up, the children would be in her memories. She hoped she would get over Dean.

A quivering light burst from the shed and slithered up the chain to the twinkling bracelet. She felt fire squeezing her wrists. And then came the roar of thunder, close against her ear.

“Daddy, you gotta come home.” Henry gulped, then choked on a sob. “Daddy, it’s just like the night Mommy…”

Dean Radcliffe picked up the receiver on the speaker phone and with a single silencing glance at the executives around the conference table, leaned back in his chair.

“What’s just like—” He hesitated and took a deep breath. “What’s just like that night?”

“The lightning!” Henry cried.

Dean glanced out his sixty-fourth-floor office window to the black sky. Clouds hung low, so low it seemed he could grab their swollen mounds. There was a crack of lightning in the distance.

It all came back to him—even now the memory was as sickening as it had been two years ago.

Nicole’s body, her car at the bottom of the ravine where the Radcliffe property line met the street, the car radio still playing the heavy-metal music she loved so much, her blond hair thrown forward across her still, frozen face.

“Henry, get Susan on the phone,” he ordered his son, more curtly perhaps as he struggled to squelch his own emotions.

“That’s the problem,” Henry said. “Susan’s outside.”

Unbidden, the scent of sugar and vanilla came to him. He batted it away with a surge of anger. She was clearly negligent, leaving the frightened children to fend for themselves. He’d have to talk to her.

“What’s she doing outside?”

He stood up, his tall frame making the office look as if it had been furnished with treasures from a dollhouse. He raked a callused hand through his hair. Savvy executives knew he was fighting off a headache—they had seen that gesture many times during tense negotiations. And nothing in recent years had been more tension filled than the attempted purchase of the Eastman Bear Company.

Indistinct sobs crackled from the speaker phone.

“Henry!” Dean yelled.

Someone else came on the line.

“Daddy, it’s Chelsea. Please come home.”

“If Susan’s outside, get me…” He thought for a minute, and then remembered the terrible truth. There wasn’t a housekeeper who would stay in the isolated and gloomy Radcliffe house. There wasn’t a maid who had lasted longer than a day. And he had fired the groundskeeper two days after Nicole’s death; as he remembered that man, his jaws clenched in suppressed rage.

The problem was there was no one to care for his children except Susan.

Dependable, responsible, nearly invisible Susan.

If she wasn’t there…

“There’s no one here, Daddy,” Chelsea said quietly. “Susan went outside to save Wiley.”

Dean scribbled a note to Mrs. Whitherspoon and passed it across the table to her. “Call 911, send them to the house,” it said.

“Are you hurt?” he demanded.

“No,” Chelsea said in a very small voice.

“Are Henry and Edward all right?”

“Yes, but we’re very scared.”

Dean took a deep breath, and his emerald eyes skittered across the conference room at the two dozen executives who had been working through profit-loss statements, annual reports, spreadsheets and payroll estimations for the purchase of the Eastman Bear Company.

“Daddy, it’s just like Mommy,” Chelsea said.

He closed his eyes, wishing very much that she wouldn’t say that. He had worked so hard to get on with his life.

“You’re just saying that because it’s a storm, just like on…that night.”

“No, Daddy,” Chelsea said. “I’m saying that because…because she’s dead.”

Dean dropped the phone and leapt across the table, making the receptionist’s desk in the lobby in four seconds.

“Fire department will be out there in ten minutes,” Mrs. Witherspoon cried out to his shadow.

“Not soon enough,” he muttered.

He punched the elevator button with his fist, then decided to take the stairs. He hit the parking lot in less than a minute, leapt into his midnight-colored Porsche and skidded out onto the street.

Chelsea was so right, he thought, as he sped down the rain-soaked streets of Chicago. It was just like that long-ago night of violent tempers and recriminations. He remembered driving home, angered at…Well, those memories were too painful to go over.

He reached the house before the fire trucks—although, to their credit, he could hear the sirens from a distance.

He screeched to a halt at the point where the circular drive met the front colonnade. His three children cowered just inside the door.

“Are you all right?” he demanded, taking the steps three at a time and yanking open the beveled glass door.

“We’re all right.” Chelsea gulped. “It’s…it’s Susan.”

Though he wanted to pick up a howling Edward, to smooth Henry’s trembling lip, to brush away Chelsea’s tears, he knew he’d better go first to the body of his children’s nanny.

Besides, for the past two years, he had found himself totally unable to handle any of his children’s emotions.

“Now this, now this,” he muttered as he swept through the entrance hall, the living room, the library and out onto the breakfast room porch. Rain lashed against the French doors, and gurgling waters from overflowing gutters swept through the cobblestone courtyard.

He opened the back door and then he saw her. The inert body. Susan? He tried to remember any detail of the woman who had cared for his children for the past year.

But to him, she was the only nanny who had lasted, and there had been fourteen others who had left before her—some lasting no more than a day. He was hard on people, he knew that, and regret welled up in him as he realized that if he were only easier to work for, he might have had a full-time housekeeper, or maid—someone else besides the woman who came twice-a-week—to bring the dog in.

He took the steps two at a time and crouched down at her rain-soaked body.

He opened the palm of her hand, and nearly broke down in uncharacteristic tears as he saw she still held the metal clasp of Wiley’s chain.

He looked heavenward, wondering at a world in which there could be such random and senseless horror.

She had given her life for his children’s dog.

He rolled her over carefully, put his hand underneath her head and pulled her up into his arms.

Gently, so very gently. She deserved the deepest respect in death even if she had never, to his knowledge, had much respect accorded to her in life.

Hadn’t the agency said something about her not having had much of a family?

Well, maybe that’s the only thing that would make a nanny willing to put up with him.

He looked at the closed eyes, the pale skin with drops of rain like dewdrops on rose petals. He touched the budlike lips. He stroked away the wet, thick tendrils of golden hair. He knew it wasn’t right, but his eyes drifted to the swell of her breasts revealed by the rain-drenched T-shirt. She had been beautiful, in her own fresh and innocent kind of way.

He had never noticed. Never noticed at all.

He thought of the life that had been taken away from her, of all the opportunities that a sweet, gentle girl like her had lost. The future—the possibility of finding someone, of having children, of having a life.

All for Wiley, a twelve-year-old German shepherd.

All because of his own stupidity and hard-heartedness—there should have been someone else here to worry about the dog, someone else to help out around the house.

Hadn’t she just had a birthday? He searched his memory and realized that he hadn’t even been able to offer her a day off. Hadn’t even managed to get home in time for a shared dinner. Had delegated the purchase of her birthday present to Mrs. Witherspoon. He noticed the twinkling of the three-charm bracelet.

He shook his head sadly.

And then, suddenly, her darkly lashed eyes fluttered open. She looked up at him, smiled at first tentatively and then joyously. Those amber eyes he had never noticed before now seemed to him to be the most beautiful jewels he had ever seen.

Simply because she was alive.

She squeezed her arms around his neck and his first thought was that he would never, ever embarrass her by reminding her that she had acted most unnannylike by hugging him.

It was a shock—to both of them—and perfectly forgivable, Dean reminded himself.

Many people acted foolishly in the face of death.

“Darling,” she said. “Darling, I’m so glad you’re home.”

And she put her mouth on him and kissed him, really kissed him, while hail the size of Ping-Pong balls pelted the yard and the fire truck came to a screeching halt at the front steps of the Radcliffe mansion.

Chapter Four

Three hours later, after a conference call made from the hospital lobby to reschedule the day’s meeting with the owner of Eastman Toys, Dean Radcliffe swept up the hospital staircase with an oversize bouquet of dazzlingly white and pink tea roses that had been dropped off by Mrs. Witherspoon.

He stopped at the fourth-floor’s nurses’ station.

“Susan…uh,” he said, snapping the fingers of his free hand as he struggled to remember the last name of his nanny. “Susan. She was brought in this evening. The emergency room nurse said she’d been transferred up here from the emergency room. It was a lightning accident. She was struck by lightning. Susan…uh…Susan…uh…”

Susan something or other.

He couldn’t remember her last name.

Had he ever known what it was?

When he had called the office, Mrs. Witherspoon hadn’t even known. And Mrs. Witherspoon knew everything, with the cool, unruffled efficiency of a computer.

He had told Mrs. Witherspoon to find someone, anyone from the agency who could take over this crisis. He ordered her to make arrangements to pay for Susan’s hospitalization and recovery. And a generous severance pay to help her if she didn’t want to return to work.

He hoped she’d want to come back.

The alternative would be a disaster because the agency had warned him many times that it was difficult to find anyone who would work for him at the Radcliffe Estate.

He shoved down the sensation that had haunted him for the past hours, a memory he had dodged by concentrating on the changing profit-loss ratios of Eastman Bears and stock option prices.

Still, the memory nagged at him.

She had kissed him.

She had grabbed him by the collar and kissed him in a way that was most un-Susan-like.

In a way that made him think of stars and fire-crackers and roller-coaster rides and trips to the beach. In a way that lingered on his lips like a caress, even now he could remember the feel. And when he had been most thoroughly kissed by her, she had pulled away and looked up at him with frank sensuality and the breezy confidence of a woman his equal. Straight into his eyes without a whisper of the deference he had unconsciously come to expect from the women in his life.

Not like the Susan he knew at all!

As the paramedics poured out onto the courtyard, he had picked her up, shielding her face with his jacket—but it hadn’t been the rain he had feared, it was the notion of strangers seeing her so…so naked and open and womanly and sensual.

When she was brought back to her right senses, she would be appalled.

She had obviously been very traumatized. Would never remember it and be very embarrassed if she were told about it.

Which he didn’t intend on doing.

He found himself staring into the eyes of the fourth-floor station nurse. And remembering Susan’s beautiful amber eyes, eyes that he had never before noticed.

“Susan,” he repeated more slowly, wondering if the feel of her name on his lips would ever be the same. The name didn’t sound quite so efficient and no-nonsense. The name Susan conjured up images of such intensity that he closed his eyes and counted to ten in an effort to get a grip on himself.

“Your wife, Mr. Radcliffe?” the nurse, a big blonde with a horsey jaw, supplied. “She’s resting comfortably. In room 403. Here, there’s some paperwork in her file. You’re supposed to sign two releases for the Cat scan we performed and…”

Dean opened his eyes to an inch-thick sheaf of forms the nurse had flapped down on the counter.

“No, no, no,” he said, the roses trembling in his arms. “She’s not my wife.”

“Not your wife?” the nurse questioned, frowning.

“Not my wife,” Dean confirmed, again reviewing his nanny’s very odd behavior. She had called him darling. She had kissed him. He touched his lips, where he thought he might still feel her kiss.

She must have been in some sort of shock.

Poor, poor Susan.

Now he was the one having problems.

An older man in a white jacket approached the nurses’ station. He leaned close to Dean.

“But, Mr. Radcliffe, your wife is in room 403. Recovering nicely,” he said. “The Cat scan indicated some problem areas, but considering the shock she took, we’re all quite amazed that she’s doing as well as she is.”

“She’s my children’s nanny,” Dean said brusquely, determinedly putting the memory of her kiss aside. “My wife…my wife…my wife is—was actually was a woman named Nicole and she’s…”

“Relax. You look entirely too agitated,” the man soothed. “Please, let me introduce myself. I’m Dr. Sugar. Sam Sugar. I treated your wife this evening in the ER. When she came in, her blood pressure was 80 over 40 and her heartbeat was erratic but essentially strong and we started with a potassium drip—”

“The woman who was brought in this evening is not my wife,” Dean interrupted.

“But it says right here that she’s your wife,” the nurse said, holding up the chart.

Her square-jawed stare made clear that as far as she was concerned, that ended the matter. Hospital forms were never wrong.