Her clothes fluttered outwards then settled quickly back into place as she pulled the door squarely behind her. She jiggled the handle righteously to ensure privacy then frowned. The closet was shallow, the brainchild of a long-forgotten tenant in the 1920s who stayed just long enough to add a few modern amenities. Carolyn swept her suits to the side with one hand and her dresses to the right with the other. Evidently no one owned more than a few items of clothing even in the decade before her own birth. Moving into the small, empty hollow she'd created, the arch of her foot slid painfully over an upside down high heel. Blast! She gasped in pain. The nightgown slipped through her fingers and as she bent, blindly groping for its cool satin texture, she detected the shadow of two feet – or was it the feet themselves? – just outside the door, in her bedroom.
"Oh, Captain," she sighed as the pain receded, flattered yet still confused by his response to Blair's wedding proposal. "If only you'd had the chance to pursue me and I, you. With more than words, anyway." Her eyes closed as she leant against the sturdy door, forehead on the cool, solid wood. She searched the closet's rough-hewn panel with her fingers, wondering if he were doing the same, on the other side.
Blair was right – she'd left Philadelphia on a whim, with nary a word to anyone but her parents, and Bobby's. Neither set of interlopers approved, of course, but she knew with certitude nobody would follow permanently to Maine and down eastern winters. Too déclassé after the summer season for their crowd, her former milieu. Her disappearance so far had exceeded even her expectations. Only one of her rich, former playboy friends found her, if only because of his more-than-considerable resources.
Ruefully, she smiled. Her dress fell to the floor, followed quickly by silk undergarments that were her only extravagance. Why had she made such a point of his not seeing them? After all, the tease begun with the locket could easily have ended under far more alluring circumstances. Why, after 34 years, was she hiding in a closet from the only man she'd ever physically desired?
Admit it to yourself, she thought crossly as she settled back onto the pillows as his final good night faded. The faint groan of his nightly footsteps began on the Widow's Walk above. You do. You need Daniel Gregg, as much for companionship and love as for the growing realization between your legs that not everything was left behind in Philadelphia.
Like a willful teenager, she scampered almost too quickly down the stairs, looking for the other bottle of Blair's Chateau Marmont. Grabbing a towel and two glasses, she steeled herself for the final, scary crawl up the attic ladder and onto the Widow's Walk, where she fervently hoped a very steady hand would pull her up, away from her fear of heights and into the heady night air of a spirited world.
She reached into the dark for the first rung of her new life.