Free Now or Never by Elizabeth Adler Page B

tail and returned to the bone.
    “‘Love me, love my dog,’” Harry repeated, smiling. Glancing at his watch, he decided to call her in the morning. Which was only a couple of hours away by now.

11
    T HE MAN DROVE the gunmetal-gray Volvo carefully around the corner. He was late getting home this evening. He didn’t like that, but it couldn’t be helped. There had been a problem.
    The treelined street was pleasant, with large well-kept houses set back on velvet-green lawns. Expensive automobiles were parked in the driveways, and gardeners toiled for seasonal perfection, replacing dying spring bulbs with fresh early summer flowers.
    His home was at the very end opposite a vacant lot, hidden from its neighbor by a thick bushy screen of leylandia. Leylandia wasn’t as beautiful a shrub as he would have liked, but it had the advantage of being dense and fast-growing, and that had taken precedence over beauty. The rest of his garden, though, was a showplace, his pride and joy.
    He swung the Volvo up the driveway and pulled into the garage. He switched off the engine and pressed the remote, waiting until the garage door was fully closed before he got out of the car. Taking a red box-file from the seat, he slammed the door and locked it.
    The locks on the back door of the house were expensive and complicated. There were two of them: a Chubb deadbolt and a Yale mortise lock. He took out the keys, unlocked each one, stepped inside, then turned andrelocked them. He pushed two enormous bolts into place, one into the floor, the other into the wall.
    As he walked through the tidy white-tiled laundry room into the kitchen, he glanced sharply around, his dark eyes taking in every detail. It was exactly as he had left it.
    He strode into the hall and examined the front door, which had the same arrangement of locks and bolts. They were firmly in place.
    Satisfied with his security arrangements, he went to the wood-paneled study and placed the box-file on the desk. He walked away—then, irritated, turned back and realigned the pile of books waiting for his attention. He straightened the pens in the pewter containers, putting the red ones together, then the blue and then the black. He couldn’t work unless everything was neat and precisely arranged. “Ship-shape,” his father, a navy man, used to call it.
    At least “a navy man” was what he grandiosely told people his father had been, and it was partly the truth. But even as a young lieutenant, his father’s drinking had been a problem. There were “incidents”: barroom brawls, fights in foreign ports, drunkenness on duty. He was warned. Then he had gone too far—he’d beaten up a woman, a prostitute in San Diego, and almost killed her. His father had been dishonorably discharged.
    He was six years old at the time. His mother had told him the sorry story later, though of course she’d never let on to their neighbors. She kept it a family secret. Meanwhile, her husband staggered from job to job as a traveling salesman, eternally on the road and eternally in the saloon.
    It wasn’t the only family secret.
    The boy had been sleeping in his mother’s bed since he was out of diapers. He had always hated it—she was a big woman with large floppy breasts that she still offered tohim to suckle every night, even after he was weaned and no longer wanted her milk. And then shamefully, she kept offering them to him all the time he was growing up.
    “Go on, do it,” she would urge him, thrusting her giant brown nipple into his reluctant mouth. “Relieve me of the burden of all this milk. It’s all your fault anyway—you caused me to swell up like this. And it’s your fault your father no longer wants me.”
    The musky female scent of her would envelop him as he felt her fumbling under her nightdress. She moaned and trembled.
    “What are you doing,” he’d demanded, terrified, taking his mouth from her, but she simply forced his head back again.
    “Do it, just do it,” she