Room Service
CHAPTER ONE
One Week Earlier
I'M an orphan.
Katya Morgan felt the telephone receiver start to slip out of her hand and clenched it tighter. Her fingernails dug into her palm, but she didn't relax her grip as she sat staring out at the sparkling waters of the Caribbean.
Her stepmother's calm voice on the other end of the line sounded soothing, belying her words as she said, "I know this is a shock to you, Katya. Your father did his best to hide the seriousness of his cancer, even from me. I didn't know how sick he was until it was too late."
Katya reached for the pack of Nat Sherman Black & Golds lying on the poolside table next to her. Tapping one slim cigarette out of the pack, she brought the sweet-smelling tobacco to her lips and searched blindly for her lighter, then leaned back in her chaise lounge on the patio of the villa she'd rented for the summer on the island of Saint Martin. Holding the flame to her cigarette, she pulled in a breath of expensive nicotine.
Daddy couldn't be ... gone. She knew he'd been unwell, but he was going to get better. He'd said so himself.
Pushing her favorite gold-rimmed, purple-tinted Armani sunglasses farther up the bridge of her nose, Katya blinked back tears. "How did he ..." She paused, swallowing a deep breath of island air, and started again. "Was it bad at the end?"
"No. The morphine helped a lot with the pain. He simply slipped peacefully away in his sleep," Jillian answered in that same soothing tone, the one Katya always thought of as her stepmother's kindergarten-teacher voice.
Katya closed her eyes, trying not to imagine her tough, judgmental, larger-than-life father lying small and withered in his massive mahogany bed. The Caribbean sun beat down on her mercilessly, her island paradise now turned into an unrelenting inferno.
Opening her eyes again, Katya tapped the dead ash off the end of her cigarette with a shapely red fingernail and gazed out at the stunningly glorious day. White sailboats studded water so blue, it nearly screamed to be painted. Lush green islands were dotted about, their brightly colored flowers invisible until you ventured closer, then exploding in bright pinks, golden yellows, and luminescent corals. It was all too perfect, and she couldn't bear to continue looking at it, but couldn't close her eyes again, either, and risk seeing that haunting vision of her father.
As usual, she seemed unable to make the right choice.
Eyes open, eyes closed. What did it matter? Her father was dead, and, at thirty-one, she was an orphan. Without her father, she had no one.
Katya drew in a ragged breath and sat up straighter in her chair. Who was she kidding? Even with her father, she'd had no one.
"I know you and your father didn't always see eye to eye, but he really did love you," Jillian said, as if reading her stepdaughter's thoughts. "It was just so difficult for him. You look so much like your mother, and he loved her so. He took her death very hard."
Katya remained silent as her stepmother continuedon in her same even tone, "The funeral is scheduled for Saturday morning, and the will is to be read later that day."
"I'll be there," Katya mumbled before dropping the receiver onto the table beside her. Her hand shook as she reached out and picked up the fruity cocktail the butler had brought earlier. The ice had melted, causing cool beads of sweat to drip onto her lightly tanned stomach as she lifted the glass to her lips and drained the entire drink in one long swallow.
A wave of grief tinged with anger around the edges washed over her. Why hadn't Daddy told her that he was so ill? Why had their last conversation been identical to every other one for the past fifteen years? If he'd told her he was so sick, she could have ...
Katya drew in a deep breath and put the now-empty glass back on the patio table.
She could have what? Altered the way she looked so he wouldn't feel as if he were looking back in time every time he saw her? Changed her wild and wicked ways? Become the serious-minded, studious daughter he wanted her to be?
Katya gritted her teeth and pushed a lock of silky dark hair behind her ear. No. She wouldn't have done any of those things, even if she had known how sick her father was.
"I shouldn't have had to change to make him love me," she muttered under her breath, taking a final drag on her cigarette before crushing it out viciously in the Baccarat crystal ashtray.
"Katya, honey, you want to ring for a Bloody Mary?"
Startled, Katya looked up to see the perfectly muscled, perfectly tanned, perfectly nude body of her latest flavor-of-the-season as he pulled himself out of theswimming pool. She had completely forgotten about Antoine, whose real friends, she suspected, called him Tony.
When they had woken up at just past noon, they'd talked about their plans to lounge for a while in the pool, maybe go to lunch at Le Tastevin on the French side of the island or perhaps L'Escargot on the Dutch, then head down to their private beach. Tonight there would be gambling in Philipsburg; they'd hit a party or two and maybe go dancing.
That had been before her stepmother had called to tell her that her father had died.
Katya considered her companion through her lashes. The problem with Antoine was that he was clingy, always dropping endearments into the conversation or making some excuse to touch her. And the last thing she wanted right now was someone trying to console her. What she really wanted was to be alone.
"Actually, Antoine, I've just developed some, ah, female troubles. I think it would be best if we canceled our plans for the day."
In her experience, even remotely hinting at problems with the female reproductive system had the immediate effect of clearing the area within a five-mile radius of heterosexual men. Antoine didn't even stop to pout, as he normally would if she changed their plans at the last minute. Instead, he gave her the predictable "Oh, God, please don't start talking to me about your period" look before scurrying off to the cabana to pull on his linen shorts and silk shirt before making a mad dash out to his rented convertible.
Katya threw her legs over the side of the chaise lounge. The smooth stones of the patio felt warm beneath her bare feet as she headed for the pool overlooking the Baie de l'Embouchure to the north and theisland of Saint Bart's to the east. She dropped her sunglasses onto the stone patio before diving into the refreshing water.
Pushing her straight black hair out of her eyes as she surfaced, she paddled over to the edge of the pool that had been constructed to look as if it were an extension of the ocean beyond. She tried focusing her attention on a brilliant white sailboat with its red-and-white-striped spinnaker fluttering in the wind but was unable to stop the tears from welling up in her eyes. She swiped at them with her hand, drying their salty wetness before they could roll down her face.
Crying was not to be tolerated. Her father had taught her that lesson himself. She could still remember the sting of his words, the week after her mother had died. His voice, raised in anger, as he yanked the sterling silver picture frame out of her hands. "Crying won't bring your mother back, so you might as well stop that bawling right now. Do you hear me?" he'd yelled.
And of course she could hear him, he was standing right there in front of her, but she couldn't say anything, couldn't seem to do anything but sit in her mother's favorite chair and stare at her mother's laughing face in the picture and cry. Her father continued his tirade, telling her that crying wasn't going to bring her mother back. But, still, she couldn't stop the tears from coming.
The next day her father had the servants box up all of her mother's belongings and take them away. Then he told her he was sending her away, too. And even at ten, she was smart enough to know she was being punished for not being able to keep her grief to herself.
Closing her eyes against the pressure behind them, Katya laid her head down on the arms she'd crossed over the edge of the pool and made lazy circles in the water with her legs. She had only cried once since that dayover twenty years ago, and she wasn't going to do so now.
After all, Daddy had been right. Crying hadn't brought her mother back, and it wasn't going to bring him back, either.
Copyright © 2003 by Beverly Brandt.
