Passion (18 page)

But he was pretty sure that finding out he was carrying over a hundred grand in his battered suitcase would have exactly the
opposite effect of reassurance on her. She would probably think that he had held up a bank or embezzled it from his employer
or some other nonsense. She would probably see it as one more reason why she should be afraid of him.

She
wouldn’t
think it just might be a reason to believe in him.

In an effort to ease her wariness, he turned the conversation away from the issue of money and back more directly to her parents.
“The decision to take in a bunch of special needs kids can’t be an easy one. What made your folks decide to do it?”

She didn’t relax right away; there was still doubt and distrust in her movements, jerky and graceless, as she broke her
biscuit in half and took a bite from the top half, the crusty, buttery half. But slowly, degree by visible degree, calm replaced
nervousness. The guarded air about her gave way to a more natural openness. “They wanted a large family, but after I was born,
something happened. They couldn’t have any more kids of their own, so they decided to open their home to kids who needed one—to
kids who needed
them
.”

“Didn’t you resent the other kids?”

Looking truly puzzled, she stopped eating to stare at him. “Why would I resent them?”

“They were
your
parents,” he said with a shrug, “but you had to share them with all these strangers who had no claim on them, strangers who
needed extra time, extra attention, extra affection. They must have had to spread themselves pretty thin to take care of everyone.
Surely you must have felt slighted at some time.”

“I never did.” Her tone was emphatic, her manner insulted. “These
strangers
were kids, for heaven’s sake—sad little kids who’d been through more pain and sorrow in a few years than most adults experience
in a lifetime.” Then she softened. “My parents had an awful lot of time and attention and love to give. No one got left out.
No one felt slighted.” She pulled the last piece of crust from the biscuit, then tossed the tender insides onto the napkin
with the bones. Before she ate that piece, though, she asked a hesitant question. “Did you resent Tom?”

The unexpected mention of his brother made him stiffen. He had talked more about Tom today than he had in the last seventeen
years combined. In the past the things he’d had to say had been too personal, too painful, and the guilt had been too raw.
There had never been anyone to listen, anyone to understand or sympathize, anyone to offer something other than damnation
for his deeds. There had never been anyone he could trust with his brother’s name, with his brother’s memory.

But he instinctively trusted Teryl, and because he did, he forced himself to ignore the ever-present pain, the guilt, the
damnation. He forced himself to answer, and to answer honestly. “Yes, I did.”

“Because he was so perfect?”

Using one of the wet towelettes that had come with dinner, he wiped his hands, then stretched out on the bed, propped a pillow
beneath his head, and gazed up at the ceiling. There were water spots there, seeping in from above the window and spreading
outward in a yellow-hued stain. “My parents wanted a perfect son and a perfect daughter, and they got them. Unfortunately,
they got
me
in between,” he said, then sighed. “I didn’t resent Tom. I resented that he came first. I resented that he found it so easy
to live up to our parents’ expectations. I resented that, compared to him, I looked even more incompetent and inept than I
actually was—and, believe me, our parents were
always
comparing me to him. I resented that he did everything right and I did everything wrong. But I never resented
him
.”

“Any parent can love a perfect child. It takes someone special to love the rest of us.” There was a faint smile in her voice
when she went on. “Words of wisdom from Debra Jane Howell.”

Still staring at the ceiling, he smiled just a little bit, too. “I figured D.J. stood for something like Dorothy Josephine
or Dorcas June. Debra Jane’s not a bad name. Why does she go by D.J.? Was she a tomboy growing up?”

That earned what was surely almost a laugh from her. He liked the sound of it. He would like to hear her really laugh, would
like to see her really smile. He would like to see her smile at
him.

He’d had so few normal relationships in his life, especially with women. Of course, he’d had girlfriends, back when he was
a teenager. He’d gone steady with one girl all through high school, a typical California girl—nearly six feet tall, blond,
leggy, athletic. They’d known each other from first grade on. They’d shared friends, hot summer days at the beach, and sex
as good as it ever got for most teenagers.

He had liked her a lot, but they had broken up after high school. Chrissy—as smart as Tom, as popular as Janie—had gone to
college back East on a scholarship, and he had begun seeing other girls, girls who didn’t care about much of anything but
sex, which was fair because that was about all he’d
been interested in. By the time he’d gotten old enough to appreciate the distinction between girls and women, he’d been out
of the market for relationships of any sort. There had been the occasional encounter of a sexual nature, but, except for his
arrangement with Marcia, never more than that.

He hadn’t realized until he’d met Teryl exactly how much he missed having more.

Across the room, she was answering his last question. “Not in this lifetime. D.J.’s always been a perfect little…”

While she decided how to complete the description, he considered a few possibilities. A perfect little lady? A perfect little
angel?

But he was way off the mark, he realized, when she finally finished. “A perfect little vamp. Her family had called her Debra
Jane, so when she moved in with us, she chose to go by her initials. It was her way of starting over, I guess. A new home,
a new family, a new chance, and a new name.”

Vamp.
It was an odd word, and it seemed even odder coming from Teryl, describing her best friend. It was a word he might use in
a book—
a perfect little vamp, a perfect little tramp
—but not in conversation, not to describe anyone he knew. Its connotations were too distinctly negative.

Maybe Teryl wasn’t aware of that. Maybe the word, for her, meant nothing more than seductive, feminine, charming.

Or maybe she knew those negative connotations all too well.

He knew from research for one of his early books that there were a thousand different ways for kids to respond to abuse, neglect,
and abandonment. Hell, he knew it to some extent from experience. As far as his parents were concerned, they had fulfilled
their obligations to him: they had given him food, a place to live, and clothes to wear. They had even helped pay for his
two years in college. But if they had ever loved him—truly, unconditionally, the way parents were supposed to—he couldn’t
remember it. The soothing, the loving, the affection in his life had come from Tom and, later, Janie. He had a memory or two
of being cuddled by his mother, but only when he was very young. The older he had gotten and the more obvious it had become
that he wasn’t
another Tom, the rarer those moments had become. Neither his mother nor his father had had any patience with a clumsy, awkward,
slow-to-learn kid who reminded them with his mere presence that, yes, they were capable of producing a brilliant child like
Tom, but they were also capable of producing an unremarkable, less-than-average kid like him.

It was a reminder they hadn’t appreciated.

But his parents hadn’t physically abused or neglected him. Oh, there had been that time in the backyard when his father had
just finished working out with Tom, pitcher of his Little League team, and had ordered John out into the grass for a little
game of catch. The problem was John, five, maybe six years old, was uncoordinated as hell and, worse, he’d had no interest
in baseball or any other sport. His father had been unusually patient for the first ten or fifteen pitches, even though John
had dropped, missed, or—worst of all—avoided the majority of them.

But then he had lost his patience… and his temper. After berating him and calling him a coward, among other names, for dodging
some of the balls, his father had fired off a fast one. There was no way John ever could have caught it—no way even Tom, watching
from the patio, could have. But then, his father hadn’t meant for him to catch it. He had been throwing at a target with the
intention of hitting it, and he had succeeded.

John had walked with a limp for weeks afterward.

He could have accepted his father’s challenge. He could have practiced, could have worked out with Tom, could have done his
damnedest to turn himself into the best jock the Smith family had ever seen. By junior high, he’d had the size for any sport
that might interest him; he’d been quick on his feet, and, from his experience as Janie’s occasional running partner, he’d
known he had strength and endurance.

But he had chosen instead to avoid sports altogether. Going one step farther, he had chosen as his sole physical activity
an activity sure to anger his father—surfing—and he had excelled at it. It was a worthless talent in the old man’s
eyes and just further proof that John was neither the son he wanted nor the son he deserved.

What had D.J.’s choices been? he wondered. What had happened to her to lead her best friend to describe her the way Teryl
had? If she had been sexually abused as a child, it wouldn’t be uncommon for her to remain sexually active as a teenager and
as an adult. After all, Teryl had said that her friend had
always
been a perfect little vamp. Inappropriately seductive behavior in young children was a prime indication of sexual abuse.

On the other hand, a repressive, unloving, unaffectionate upbringing could bring about the same behavior. Maybe her parents
had cared no more for her than his parents had for him, but maybe she hadn’t had anyone like Tom and Janie to love her in
their stead. Maybe after nine years in such an emotionally sterile environment, she had learned to seek affection wherever
she could find it—and the easiest place for a young girl to find such affection always had been and likely always would be
in sexual relationships with hormonally driven young boys.

The rattle of paper and plastic signaled that Teryl was finished with dinner and gathering the wrappers together. He listened
to the creak of the bedsprings as she bent to get her shoes; then she rose from the bed and carried the paper bag to the wastebasket
near the door. For a moment, she simply stood there, her summery dress a splash of color in an otherwise drab room. It was
the same dress she’d worn to say good-bye to the man claiming to be Tremont—simple in style, bright in color. It left her
arms bare, along with a bit of her back, revealing a little creamy golden skin, but concealing more. With its wide straps,
rounded neck, and damned near ankle-length hem, it was as modest as a piece of clothing could be. It flattered her. It concealed
her body so thoroughly that it made her look sweet. Innocent.

It made him remember her naked.

And under the circumstances, he thought grimly, Teryl naked was a memory he definitely didn’t need.

* * *

Returning to the bed, Teryl propped the pillows against the headboard, kicked off her shoes again, and leaned back. It was
warm—the air conditioner had clearly met its match in the muggy heat—the room was dimly lit, and she was full and tired. It
wouldn’t take much at all for her to drift off into dreamland—a few more minutes without conversation. A few more minutes
of listening to the rushing sound from the air conditioner’s ineffective fan. A few more minutes of fighting fatigue.

All in all, she thought, letting her eyes flutter shut, considering the circumstances, it hadn’t been such a bad day. They’d
had breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They had talked. John seemed more like the interesting, friendly man she had met Tuesday
than the volatile, threatening stranger who had kidnapped her Wednesday. She had behaved, and he hadn’t done or said anything
to cause her alarm.

Not that she was coming to accept the situation. Given a choice, she would rather be anywhere in the world with anyone else
in the world—well,
almost
anyone else, she amended as Simon Tremont immediately came to mind—than here with John. She would much rather be home, living
her boring little life, going about her dull routine, doing the drudge work—typing, filing, running errands—that filled her
days, and watching TV at home alone, as she did most evenings. She didn’t need excitement or thrills or danger in her life,
and when they reached Richmond, she intended to do whatever was in her power to remove them—and him—from her life.

Still, she wasn’t as afraid of John now as she’d been yesterday. She wasn’t so convinced that he was going to hurt her. She
was pretty much convinced that he
wasn’t
going to kill her. She thought he was probably a decent guy—probably, at some time in his life, about as normal as any man
who had been raised the way he had could be.

But she still thought he was crazy.

It was obvious he blamed himself for his brother’s death and for whatever injuries their sister had suffered in the accident.
Guilt was a powerful force. It could drive a man over
the edge. It could rob him of his ability to reason. If a man felt guilty enough—and she suspected that the guilt John carried
was as intense, as strong and poisonous, as it could get—it could affect his mind. It could make him hate himself so much
for what he’d done that he would choose to become someone else in order to deal with it.

And if you were going to take on a different identity, why not reach for the stars? Why not become a man who was universally
known, universally admired? Why not choose an identity that would make people adore you rather than criticize and belittle
you? When you’d lived so many years in other people’s shadows, why not choose the name that cast the biggest shadow of all?