By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs (9 page)

Mavis knew that they were speaking of her
Great-Aunt Maggie, but she herself did not know Great-Aunt Maggie,
and, furthermore, she was worried about her knee after falling down
the boulder.

"Will I walk funny, like Grandmother does?"
she asked the physician in self-absorbed innocence.

Doctor Henry Whitman had frowned at her and
said, "If you are very, very good, you will someday follow in your
grandmother's footsteps."

Which didn't really answer the question for
Mavis. It wasn't until after she had her scrape bandaged and the
ice cream for dessert that she knew she would walk and run the way
she always had. As for following in her grandmother's
footsteps—that, she doubted. No one could. Tess Moran was bigger
than life, a self-made woman who rose above circumstances. Mavis
had inherited wealth and had more luck in marrying well. Her
grandmother had had neither advantage. Tess Moran was a hard act to
follow.

Mavis and the rest of the Armory audience
had exited into a stream of pedestrian traffic that flowed
endlessly up and down Thames Street nowadays. The afternoon sea
breeze had died away, leaving yet another balmy summer evening,
perfect for yet another dinner party aboard yet another yacht.
Tonight Mavis's host would be the vice-president of AER Industries,
a major sponsor of the syndicate that Mavis's husband had been
supporting. The list of corporations throwing their money behind
the various American syndicates was growing daily. The races had
become far too prohibitively expensive for something like Alan
Seton's one-man band. The America's Cup Races had gone commercial,
and major individual contributors like Mavis and her husband were
sharing center stage with cans of coffee and bottles of
shampoo.

If this were an average evening, Mavis might
first stop by the crew house for cocktails and an update on
waterfront scuttlebutt. She would be filled in and fawned on, with
the hope that she'd follow through on her deceased husband's
commitment to the syndicate. But today she was feeling tense and
dissatisfied for more than one reason; it was best to avoid the
crew house altogether in her present foul mood. Still in disguise,
she chose to saunter instead through Bannister's Wharf. Besides
being the site of boutiques, bistros, and an immensely popular
cookie store, the Wharf was the location of the Black Pearl, the
Candy Store, and the Raw Bar, watering holes where hundreds of
yachties, groupies, and tourists gravitated each day to mill inside
and out, sipping sundowners.

The evening was hopelessly fine, which meant
that the Wharf was hopelessly mobbed. Mavis wandered incognito
through the crowds on the pier, taking in the still-bustling harbor
that lay before her. Launches and water taxis were zipping back and
forth, coolly dodging sailboats from eight to eighty feet that were
tacking up or running down the channel. Family powerboats chugged
along while corporate yachts trundled slowly and windsurfers darted
like dragonflies in and out of all of them.

Idly, Mavis tried to estimate the total
worth of the yachts gathered there, but the same image kept
drifting in and out of her thoughts—Alan Seton, with his lopsided,
rueful smile, withdrawing from the America's Cup competition. All
in all, it had been a graceful exit, although there wasn't any
doubt in Mavis's mind that he'd be back to race another year. She
should be happy that he was out of the running; it made it that
much more likely that her own syndicate would be chosen to defend.
Good news, yes ….

With a sigh, Mavis decided, after all, to go
back to Beau Rêve—when a voice, very loud and very drunk, hailed
her.

"Miss Ma-vis ... yooo-hooo ... oh Miss
May-y-vis." Mavis swung around, annoyed by the assault on her
anonymity. She was surprised to see a certain America's Cup
skipper, retired from the competition less than an hour earlier,
more or less hanging out of one of the low, double-hung windows of
the Black Pearl Restaurant. His elbows were propped on the sill,
which undoubtedly was the only thing keeping him from tumbling head
first into the milling crowd on the wharf, and a large tumbler was
hanging empty from one hand. Whether he'd drunk its contents or
spilled them on the ground was anybody's guess, although Mavis
thought she could guess. He crooked his index finger, motioning her
toward the window.

How had he got drunk so fast?
She
walked unwillingly to the low window. He was going to make a fool
of himself.

"Guess what?" he said, looking up at her
with slightly unfocused but remarkably long-lashed eyes.

"You've withdrawn," she answered calmly.

"Huh! Well, okay .... Guess what else?"

She lifted the empty glass from his hand and
balanced it on the sill. "You've drunk a record amount of rum in
record time." The air between them was redolent with it.

"Well ... well, I'll be damned. Fellas, you
hear that?" he demanded, swinging his head around to the table
inside where the
Shadow
crewmen sat, well on the way to the
same sweet oblivion as their leader. Their ex-leader. "This woman
is definitely ...
psychic
," he said in an awed voice. Then
he turned back to Mavis with a look of suspicion. "Saa-a-y, wait a
minute. Who told?" He turned back to the crew. "Which one of you
blammermouths told?" he demanded loudly.

Mavis tugged at his sleeve, afraid that he
might do something really silly. He'd been under an absurd strain
for the past few days. "Alan. I was at the press conference myself.
As for the rum you've knocked back—call it a lucky guess," she
said, and despite the bewildering anger she had been feeling for
him, she smiled.

"I knew it," he said instantly. "They're a
great bunch of guys. They'd never tell. You'd have to cut their
tongues out first."

He gave her the sweet smile of a neophyte
drunk. And yet she'd seen him put away his fair share at a beer
bash the Canadian syndicate had given for all the other crews and
still stay stone sober. So it had to be the strain.

"I've enjoyed our little chat," she said
ironically, "but I have to be getting home. I need to change for
dinner." She felt self-conscious; the crowd, recognizing the
handsome drunk in the window, was edging nearer. Alan was crazy,
she thought, to appear in public now.

"Dinner! That's what
we're
having!"
he said, thunderstruck by the coincidence. "Come inside. Eat with
us."

"Another time, perhaps. I really must be
going."

"Now wait. Now wait," he said, encircling
her upper arm with a surprisingly callused hand. The roughness of
his touch carried with it unmistakable authority, and she paused
and stared coolly at the deeply browned fingers on the lighter,
golden tan of her arm.

"Mavis, don't be that way," he argued,
fuzzily aware that he was being cut. "Will you at least have a
drink before you go? We, hmm, have a lot to talk about."

"Thank you, no."

"Or wait! Better yet, I'll come out," he
answered, swinging one leg over the low window sill.

"Don't you
dare,"
she said,
aghast.

He paused mid-swing. "Mavis, I was a … I
guess the word is, pig, when you offered your help last year.
Right?"

"Definitely that," said Mavis, not about to
throw him a bone of polite disclaimer.

He grimaced melodramatically, and she
thought, there's black Irish in him, and it suits him very well.
Even drunk he was blazingly handsome.

"I called you some awful things," he said
humbly. "Right?"

"I don't really remember." She remembered
every word. After he'd accused her of preying on human flesh and
dealing in white slavery, he'd launched into a tirade about the
corporate piranha mentality and demanded to know if she, Mavis,
branded the rumps of all her cattle or whether she'd be satisfied
with a complete set of his dental X-rays. She had merely smiled and
said, "Either way." After that he'd stormed out of the Sans Souci
and Mavis was left to pay the bill. That was their last real, if
you could call it that, conversation.

"Mavis, I ... these last few days ..." He
sighed deeply, still holding her arm. "A crystal ball ..." he
began, and again he trailed off. Then the rambling intoxication
lifted, just for a moment, and his eyes held hers with a look of
complete, consuming regret.

The look shot through Mavis like a bolt of
fire, short-circuiting her defense systems, leaving her standing
and staring, astonished at the intensity of her response. His hand
burned into her arm; for a wild second she thought they were fusing
together, there on the wharf. Then: the flash of a camera, acting
like an icy gin and tonic in her face. The press had found them.
He, one leg on the window sill of the Black Pearl, wearing a look
of inebriated anguish; she, resplendent in baggy khakis and a
polyester shirt.

"
Damn
you
,"
Mavis said under
her breath, and she yanked her arm from Alan's grip. Shaking with
fury and confused emotion, she murmured, "You maudlin fool! Who do
you think you are?" And she turned and plunged into the crowd,
brushing aside the photographers as though they were hollyhocks in
a country garden.

Four hours and one dinner party later, Mavis
was still smoldering. More than a year earlier, the media had had a
field day with the story of their tête-à-tête at the San Souci. One
tabloid had run the headline: "Skipper balks, then walks, while
heiress talks." Bill, still convalescing from his heart attack,
thought it was screamingly funny. Mavis did not. And now here she
was, grist for the media mill again, only this time with photos.
Wonderful.

****

In the best bedroom of Beau Rêve, her
grandmother's favorite room, Mavis got ready for bed. She removed
her earrings—tonight, simple emerald studs—and stared at herself
dispassionately in the mirror. With her usual ruthless precision
she reminded herself that she had walked, not been dragged, to
Bannister's Wharf, a known mecca for photographers. She had made
herself fair game, just as Alan Seton had. Clearly her subconscious
had a mind of its own. It was one of the unresolved oddities in her
life, that she despised the gossip columns and yet read every word
of every rag every day. In that, she was nothing at all like
Grandmother Tess.

Mavis folded her arms across the hand-rubbed
veneer of her dressing table and rested her head on the back of one
wrist. She was horribly tired. And depressed.

"Is there anything else, Miss Moran?"

Lifting her head, Mavis answered dully,
"Nothing, Lisa, thank you. Don't forget to flip on the alarm when
you leave."

"You don't think he'd come back for
more,
do you? Because if you want me to, I'll stay. I mean
there might be ... well, he must know where you live now ....
Anything could ..."

"Lisa, I'm fine
.
Don't be theatrical.
Besides, you know everything's in the safe deposit box." The
insurance company, appalled at the cavalier way Mavis stored her
jewels, had insisted on it.

"But does the robber know that? Beau Rêve is
so by
itself.
"

"Lisa."

Mavis heard the girl sigh, then hesitate for
a long moment. "If you're really, really sure, then. Good
night."

"Yes."

Mavis was alone at last. The night was very
warm, very still. Crickets chirped in country harmony, drowning out
the soft laps of the next-door ocean. She shed her dinner dress,
unable to will herself out of her lethargy. The muggy night added
to her sense of oppression. Under the thin batik of her dressing
gown, she was obsessively aware of her left breast, convinced she
felt a vague burning. Did breast cancer hurt? Was a burning
sensation one of the seven warning signs? What were the other six,
in any case? Her mother had been plagued by benign cysts; that,
more than anything, allowed Mavis to circle idly around the
questions without panicking at not having answers.

More questions. With Alan out of the
running, which of the Americans would be chosen to defend the Cup?
Dennis Conner, with his machine-like efficiency, or Tom Blackaller,
Conner's flamboyant rival? If it were a popularity contest, John
Kolius, sailing the two-time defender
Courageous,
would
surely be given the nod. Even without Alan, it should still be an
interestingly bitter campaign. Then there were the Australians, who
had all the other foreign challengers running scared. Still more
interesting.

Then why had it suddenly become
anticlimactic to be a part of it all? The most interesting racing
in a hundred and thirty-two years, and Mavis Moran was—bored.

She raised her head, her sea-green eyes
suddenly wide with realization. Oh no. Not because of him! A
blue-eyed, black-haired egotist with no follow-through?
No
.
A penitent, self-righteous drunk with absolutely no regard for
proper form? Dear God, no, she begged. Let her want someone else.
She could have virtually anyone she desired; she didn't want to
want Alan Seton. Not even for sex, which is the only conceivable
reason a woman could be attracted to him. Other than that, he was
totally impossible.

She forced herself to think of other things
as she brushed her teeth and cleansed her face of the little makeup
she wore. She toweled her cheeks until they glowed a dull red,
trying to remove all traces of the day, of the man, of her thoughts
of him. She pounded her pillows with equal ferocity; they became
too fluffy. She threw one on the floor. Too flat. She lay on her
stomach; her back began to hurt. She lay on her back; her breasts
began to throb.

Oh damn!
she whispered over and over.
An hour later the sheet was on the carpet, the blanket was over the
footboard, and Mavis was on her way to a migraine.

"Yoo-o-o hoo-o. Miss Ma-ayy-vis!"