Chapter 33

It was approaching midnight when Della lifted her head and rubbed her eyes. "Are we there?"

Perry smiled. She had been dozing and waking to ask that same question since falling asleep around nine o'clock. The lake was so close they could almost hear the mournful cry of the loons that nested on it. Estimating that it would be very early morning by the time they finally arrived at their longed-for destination they had nevertheless decided not to stop at a motel and to eat sandwiches as they continued to drive. "Not yet. Another couple of hours."

"Do you want me to drive the rest of the way? You've done most of the driving today and I've had enough sleep to keep me awake." She slid her arm around his shoulders and nuzzled his neck. "We'll get there faster if I drive."

"I'd rather arrive in one piece."

"Here we go again. Should I have hit the dog?"

"I saw no dog. All I know is one minute we were driving on solid pavement and the next we were careening over someone's lawn toward a brick house."

She made a face and pinched his arm. "I swerved into a driveway, the house was stucco, I stopped well short of it, and you didn't see a dog because you were sawing logs at the time it ran out in front of the car." He had been teasing her mercilessly about the 'phantom' dog since the previous evening when they had driven through a residential area in search of an advertised bed and breakfast, ignoring her protests that the dog, a German shepherd, had actually existed.

He batted her hand away as she pinched him again. "Ow! Make a note that four days alone together in a car is our maximum limit."

Her breath was warm and unsettling on his neck as her lips roamed with desirous abandon, at odds with the pain inflicted by her fingers. "I'll back it up to three," she said. "You were perfectly fine until last night."

"I'm perfectly fine now. Ow! Cut it out, will you?" He shrugged away from her.

Della collapsed against the seat laughing after doling out a nip to his neck. "What was it you said to me? Stop spoiling the party?"

"Being pinched and bitten is no party," he grumbled, even though he was smiling. "I don't snore."

"What's that?"

"I said I don't snore. You shouldn't say things that aren't true."

"You most certainly do. It's odd, but you only snore when you fall asleep in a car."

"Now you're being silly on top of prevaricating."

"Pull over," she directed with dictatorial haughtiness. "Someone as grumpy as you doesn't deserve to drive my lovely car."

"Someone as bratty as you doesn't deserve to own this car."

She folded her arms and arched one eyebrow at him. "Now you're being obnoxious on top of grumpy."

Perry drove for several seconds along the deserted, winding road that would eventually lead them to the lake house belonging to Harvey Sayers, the beacon that had virtually kept them sane during the ordeal that had been their stay in the Street mansion. The shoulder widened around one more bend and he suddenly jerked the wheel, tires crunching noisily over gravel as he brought the car to a bouncing stop.

"Now what?" She inquired, perturbed that he'd driven her new car onto the loose gravel.

"Now," he said raggedly, "I apologize." He twisted in the seat, grabbed her upper arms and pulled her to him in an almost savage kiss. After plundering her mouth with his insistent tongue, he drew back and held her at arm's length. "I'm sorry. You can drive if you want."

"No, I rescind my kind offer."

"Will you stay awake and keep me company?"

"As long as we don't talk about anything that took place between the night my mother showed up and the morning we left that horrible town."

"We'll have to talk about it eventually. Why not get it out of the way now?"

"Because I don't want anything to spoil our trip to the lake."

"And once we get to the lake you won't want to spoil our arrival, or the days or the nights or the fishing or our departure…we have to talk, Della." He killed the engine, grabbed the key, and jumped out of the car. Della climbed up onto her knees and peered out the rear window to watch him.

He slammed the trunk and made his way back to the open driver's door. "Here, take this," he said, shoving a lidded wooden keepsake chest into the car.

Della leaned over and carefully pulled the chest toward her, cornering herself against the passenger door. "What is it?"

Perry climbed back in the car and started it. He pulled back onto the winding road before answering. "It's a present from your father. I think it will get the conversation rolling and keep us occupied until we reach the lake. Open it."

"I won't be able to see anything. It's dark," she pointed out, regarding the box with suspicion.

Perry reached up and snapped on the overhead light. "There. Plenty of light. Open it."

Della continued to eye the little chest suspiciously. What on earth could her father have possibly given her? She wasn't sure if she wanted to lift the lid and find out. "Do you know what's inside?"

"Della, open the box. There is nothing inside that will bite you."

"You do know what's inside!"

"Open the box."

Della made no move to open the box. "Why are you so anxious for me to open it?"

"If you would open the damn thing you'd know."

She still made no move to open the box. "I don't know," she said with a little frown, pushing the chest toward him. "Why did he give it to you? Why didn't he give it to me himself?"

"He showed it to me to prove a point. I tried to convince him to give it to you, but he thought you would be more receptive if I gave it to you. Shows you how much he knows."

"Perry, I don't want anything from him." Her voice was small, her eyes huge as she stared at the box.

"Then astonishingly your father was right and it's from me. Baby, open the box. I think you'll like what's inside."

"Do you like what's inside?"

He had never encountered anyone more determined not to do something. He reached over the chest and sought her hand. She grasped it with nervous, clammy hands. "I like it a lot," he told her with a gentle smile. "How about I lift the lid?"

She shook her head. "No, I'll open the box." Her hand hovered over the box another ten seconds before she grasped the latch and lifted the lid.

"What do I do with all that stuff?" Della shifted slightly, pulling his arm around her more securely. Every article had been pulled from the chest, examined, discussed, and returned to chest. Except for one item, which she held tightly in her hand.

"You keep it in a closet or under a bed. I have a very similar box my mother kept for me. Bart has one too."

"But what do you do with it?"

For an hour Perry had watched as Della's childhood revealed itself in the trinkets her grandmother had chosen to preserve, watched as the love of his life rediscovered her life, watched as the woman who had raised her came back to life. Della had been curious, but eerily unemotional, and now the keepsake chest rested on the passenger floorboard, along with the discarded remains of their dinner sandwiches. "Every once in a while, when I can't see the forest for the trees, I open the box to remind myself that someone who didn't smoke loved me enough to show off a misshapen dirt brown and mustard yellow clay ashtray I made when I was six. She kept it on the coffee table until I made her put it away when I was thirteen. She wrapped it in a scarf she knitted for me and put it in my box."

Della took his hand and kissed it softly. "I love to hear stories about your mother. If I had a time machine, I would go back to let her know what a good man you turned out to be and to thank her for being such a good mother."

"What you see in me…" Perry began before clearing his throat and reaching up to caress her face, taking his eyes from the road momentarily to meet hers. "I hope I never do anything to make you think less of me, because I don't believe I could live with myself if I did."

She hadn't cried since the morning they'd made their getaway, but now tears pooled in her eyes once again. "And I hope I never disappoint you ever again as I did last week."

"Della, whatever disappointment I felt in you very quickly disappeared when I began to realize that your family is populated with stick figures pretending to be human beings. If anything, you should be disappointed with me for bullying you onto the plane. Do you want to hear something funny?"

She nodded. "I could use a little funny right now."

"It's not ha-ha funny. It's actually more ironic than funny, but I think you'll get a kick out of it. I may have in large part taken you home because I wanted to fix whatever was wrong between you and your family the way you fixed what was wrong between me and mine."

A laugh bubbled up through her tears. "Mr. Fix-It. That is rather ironic, since the last thing in the world I want is for things to be fixed between me and my family."

"I would have known that if you had talked to me," he told her gently.

"The hissy-fit I threw the day we flew out didn't clue you in?"

"I had no specifics to work with, only general protestations. I had to see for myself before I understood. If you had told me about the Pathetique or the pretty stones or Grandma Bitty kidnapping you, or how Carter is the most pompous ass who ever walked the earth, I might have reacted very differently."

She crawled back into the crook of his arm and laid her head on his shoulder with a sigh. "Twenty-twenty hindsight and armchair quarterbacking will do us no good, especially since it turned out I really did need to be there."

"Good point."

"I was mad at you, madder than I've ever been. I rely on you and you weren't there."

"I was there. Lord knows I was there."

She shook her head, her curls tickling his chin, which made him smile. "No, you disappeared and didn't reappear until we were in the kitchen after you read Grandmother's letter. I felt so alone and you wouldn't listen to me. I didn't know what to do, so I struck out at you whenever I could."

"You only landed glancing blows," he assured her. "I managed to walk most of them off."

"A lot of men would have walked out."

"It's a good thing I'm not a lot of men."

"It certainly is. I kind of like you, but you're a tough sell on most people."

"Well, it's over," he said with philosophical finality, ignoring her barbed remark. "All we have to do is sign whatever documents Jeremy and Hank send us…" he broke off with a slight shudder as he realized the eerie resemblance of his words to those of Della's father. "I'll make sure not to bother you with the boring legal stuff unless it's absolutely necessary."

"I don't mind boring legal stuff. Sometimes it's a welcome respite from all the exciting legal stuff."

"The law can be exciting," he said with mock huffiness.

"The way you practice law it can be."

Perry was silent as he steered the Impala around yet another curve in the road. Trees lined each side of the nearly deserted highway, and if not for the moon's brightness on the clear night they would be in total darkness. "I'm not everything my mother hoped I would be. I have no noble cause or higher purpose for being an attorney. What drives me to put everything on the line for my clients is the excitement I get out of manipulating the law and delving into its complexities, nothing more."

"That's not true," Della protested. "You've taken on plenty of clients because you felt they were overwhelmed by circumstances and deserved someone to fight for them."

"I'm going to let you in on a little secret: it's knowing you that allows me see those types of clients. Because of you I've become more tolerant and less disdainful of how people react to situations, of how clear thinking abandons them and they invariably do the wrong thing at the wrong time. I always defended clients because their plights intrigued me and challenged me to circumnavigate their flaws and get to the truth. But that changed when you started working with me. I began to see people from a different perspective and not be so disdaining of their flaws."

She sat up and away from him, regarding him with raised eyebrows. "So I've turned you into a marshmallow?"

Perry grinned, the arch reaction to what he'd told her exactly what he'd expected from her, but how she'd phrased the question was completely unexpected. That was one of the things he loved about her – how she stood up to him, how she amused him, how she usually made her points in ways that exposed some bit of foolishness in his thought processes. He had accused her of not listening to him while she planned her next clever retort, but he had been wrong – the very cleverness of her words showed that she did indeed listen to him. "I wouldn't go that far. I can tell by your expression when what I say or do in regard to a client displeases you, and I find myself automatically making adjustments to change that expression. And more often than not those adjustments in my behavior lead to far more satisfying conclusions to cases than if I'd charged ahead with my usual belligerence."

"You are a good man," she persisted, her voice low and quiet. "Only a good man could recognize that about himself."

He shook his head, his mouth set in a grim line. "No, I may do good things, but I do them for purely hedonistic reasons. Good men do good things naturally and for no reason."

"You're good to me."

His mouth lifted in a quick smile. "As I said, purely hedonistic reasons."

"This is no joking matter, Perry. Where is all the self-loathing coming from? Is it because I said your mother would be proud of you? She couldn't help but be proud of you. Look at what you've accomplished in your life – and you're still a young man! There isn't a criminal attorney in the country with a record like yours, which is why law schools as far away as Washington D.C. are soliciting you to lecture." She shook his arm for emphasis. "You told me it didn't matter why my grandmother left me everything, the important fact was she did leave me everything. Walk the walk, Mr. Mason, if you're going to talk the talk."

Was it really as simple as she said – as he had said? It didn't matter why he did what he did. It only mattered that he did it. And it didn't matter why his clients did what they did, because a good defense dealt only with who did what, when and where and how. Let the journalists wet themselves over why. "I've never worked harder at anything in my life than I work at being good to you."

Her fingers traced the serious lines of his lips until they relaxed. "I can tell," she whispered. "No man has ever treated me the way you do."

"I didn't always treat women the way I should have," he admitted remorsefully. "I was better than Harvey, and definitely better than Paul, but I still have plenty of regrets. I don't want to regret anything with regard to you, which is why I make you so mad at times."

"As long as we're making confessions, I'll admit that usually when I say I'm mad at you I'm really mad at myself."

He grinned at her, dimples deep and distracting. "I figured that out a long time ago. Have you noticed I never get mad at you?"

"You said I piss you off," she reminded him.

"No, I said what you do pisses me off."

"I refuse to split hairs with you so late at night."

"You mean so early in the morning."

"Stop it."

"Are you mad at me?"

"No. However, your petty distinctions annoy the hell out of me."

His grin widened. "I could do this forever."

"What, annoy the hell out of me?"

His hand slid from the steering wheel to rest on her thigh. "I could talk to you forever and come back for more."

She raised an eyebrow. "You must be getting tired, Mr. Mason. I don't believe I've ever heard anything as sappy as that come out of your mouth."

"I am tired," he admitted. "Are you going to tell me about that scruffy thing in your hand?"

"Not yet."

"Della…"

"Perry," she countered. "When – if I decide to tell you about it, you'll realize why I didn't want to say anything while we were driving sixty miles an hour down a dark highway at one thirty in the morning."

Perry let out an awe-inspiringly long and loud yawn. "Then I'd say it's a good thing we're only about twenty minutes from the lake, because you will tell me about that thing tonight."

"You mean this morning," Della shot back impudently, splitting the ultimate hair.