Free Heroes are My Weakness by Susan Elizabeth Phillips Page A

weren’t bigger, and she’d tried to cover them with her hands. He moved her hands away and stroked each nipple with his fingers.
    She was in ecstasy.
    Soon they were touching each other everywhere. He unzipped her shorts and pushed his hand in her underpants. No boy had ever touched her there. His finger went inside her. She was bursting with hormones. Instantly orgasmic.
    She touched him, too, and the first time she felt the wetness on her hand, she thought she’d hurt him. She was in love.
    But then things changed. For no reason, he began to avoid her. He started putting her down in front of his sister and Jaycie. “Annie, don’t be such a dork. You act like a kid.”
    Annie tried to talk to him alone, find out why he was being like this, but he avoided her. She found half a dozen of her precious paperback gothic novels on the bottom of the swimming pool.
    One sunny July afternoon, they’d been crossing the marsh footbridge, with Annie slightly ahead of the twins and Jaycie trailing. Annie had been trying to impress Theo with how sophisticated she was by talking about her life in Manhattan. “I’ve been using the subway since I was ten, and—”
    “Stop bragging,” Theo had said. And then his hand had slammed into her back.
    She’d flown off the footbridge and hit the murky water facedown, her hands and forearms sinking into the muck, ooze sucking at her legs. As she tried to pull herself out, rotting strands of eel-like cordgrass and clots of blue-green algae clung to her hair, her clothes. She spat out the mud, tried to rub her eyes but couldn’t, and started to cry.
    Regan and Jaycie were as horrified as Annie, and in the end, it had taken both of them to pull her from the marsh. Annie had badly skinned one knee and lost the leather sandals she’d bought with her own money. Tears slid through the muck on her cheeks as she stood on the bridge like a creature from a horror movie. “Why did you do that?”
    Theo had regarded her stonily. “I don’t like braggers.”
    Regan’s eyes had filled with tears. “Don’t tell, Annie! Please don’t tell. Theo will get in so much trouble. He won’t ever do anything like that again. Promise her, Theo.”
    Theo had stalked away, not promising anything.
    Annie hadn’t told. Not then. Not until much later.
    T HE NEXT MORNING, SHE WANDERED through the cottage trying to wake herself up after a fitful night’s sleep before she made the dreaded trek to Harp House. She ended up in the studio, safely out of range of Theo’s telescope. Mariah had expanded the back of the cottage to make this a spacious, well-lit workspace. The paint spatters on the bare wooden floor testified to the parade of artists who’d worked here over the years. A bright red bedspread peeked out from beneath half a dozen cardboard boxes stacked on the bed shoved into the corner. Next to the bed was a pair of cane-seated wooden chairs painted yellow.
    The room’s light blue walls, red bedspread, and yellow chairs were supposed to evoke van Gogh’s painting Bedroom in Arles, while the life-size trompe l’oeil mural on the longest wall depicted the front end of a taxi crashing through a storefront window. She hoped to God that mural wasn’t the legacy because she couldn’t imagine how she’d get away with selling an entire wall.
    She imagined her mother in this room, feeding the artists’ egos in ways she never did her own daughter’s. Mariah believed artists needed nurturing, but she’d refused to encourage her daughter to draw or act, even though Annie had loved doing both.
    “The art world is a vipers’ pit. Even if you’re enormously talented — which you aren’t — it eats people alive. I don’t want that for you.”
    Mariah would have done so much better with one of those naturally feisty little girls who didn’t care about others’ opinions. Instead she’d given birth to a shy child who lived on daydreams. Yet, in the end, Annie had been the strong one, supporting a mother