The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove Read Online Free PDF Page A

perfume as she stood in the doorway. And from the hurried rummaging in the next room, it sounded like Mike was still scrambling into his shirt. Perfect. As if Diana needed more ammunition to play Ice Queen with me.
    “I didn’t realize you were coming out today,” Mike said smoothly, probably standing to give her the double-cheeked kiss she always insisted on. “What’s the occasion?”
    “Tsk tsk,” I heard Diana say, recalling my own mother’s favorite zinger about that annoying blue-blood habit of speaking in onomatopoeias: like they’re not rich enough to buy a vowel?
    “Darling, don’t act so surprised,” Mike’s mother was saying. “You can’t think Natalie’s the only one who likes to make use of our villa. She’s here with you, no doubt?”
    Sniff sniff. I envisioned her rhinoplastied—excuse me—deviated-septum-altered nostrils flaring with thinly veiled suspicion.
    “She’s, uh, in the shower,” Mike covered for me, and I promptly turned on the faucet. I hadn’t been planning on showering until after we finished what we’d started in the bedroom and squeezed in a couple hours of sunset tubing on the boat. But then again, whenever Mike’s mother made a cameo, it wasn’t unusual for our plans to go to hell in one of her designer handbags.
    Huffily, I resigned myself to shampooing my hair. Minutes later, when I felt the waft of cold air from the shower curtain being pulled back, I jumped.
    “Jesus,” I gasped. “I thought you were—”
    “My mother, coming in to soap your back?” He raised an eyebrow.
    “Get in here.” I grabbed his arm to pull him in. Finally, things were getting back to the way they belonged: steamy.
    But Mike looked around, as if his family could see us alone in the bathroom.
    “I can’t,” he said. “I have to help my parents unload the car. Mom was hoping we could all have dinner.”
    “Dinner?” I said. Dinner chez Diana’s was so not part of the plan. I needed alone time with Mike to gear up for our big week. “What about the lake?”
    Mike took the loofah out of my hand, turned my body around with one deft movement of his wrist, and started lathering my shoulder.
    “Don’t change the subject,” I moaned.
    “We can’t exactly get out of it,” Mike said. “I’ll take you out in the boat after dinner.”
    I whipped my head around. “Just the two of us?”
    “On a school night,” he winked.
    “Ooh,” I smiled. “What will Mother think?”
     
    Clean enough and appropriately attired in the tennis dress Mike had even laid out for me on the bed—what, did he think I was going to wear the teddy to dinner?—I tromped down the hardwood stairs.
    Through the French windows, I could see Mr. and Mrs. King relaxing on the terrace facing the glittering water at the west end of the Cove. Diana was cross-legged in her navy-blue skirt suit, reading the paper and sipping her token glass of Viognier. Her frosted hair was gathered in a low bun at her neck and, as ever, her foundation was flawless. Mike’s father, Phillip, who carried visible stress in every part of his body—and who Mike took after in looks alone—had his brow furrowed and was shouting into his cell phone. The toe of his polished leather dress shoe was making rushed circles in the air.
    Nothing indicated the imminent parental dinner party. But when I heard the telltale clamoring of pots behind the closed doors of the kitchen, I got it. Just because no King had set foot in that kitchen since they approved the architect’s floor plan, it didn’t mean someone else wasn’t whipping up a feast in their honor. Of course, they couldn’t travel the thirty miles to the shore without “help.” Of course, they would have brought their housekeeper Binky in tow.
    Binky and I had a complicated relationship—there were times, like right now, when I almost related more to her than to the rest of Mike’s family. I knew that when she wasn’t boarding with the Kings, she lived in my old neck of the