Stranger in Camelot (11 page)

“Wow. Paint-bucket eyes and Marilyn’s body. I could learn to like your brand of flattery.”

“I’m being honest with you.” John leaned over. Her
nostrils flared a little, and her eyes widened. She lay as still as the sand, watching him. “You’re very beautiful. Please don’t think I’m flirting.” He hesitated, his mouth twitching with humor. “It is flirting but it’s sincere.”

She dampened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “I’ve never heard of anybody around here getting in trouble for kissing on a public beach.”

He put a hand on the center of her stomach. The small patch of bare skin, such an innocent part of a woman’s body, was a silky table making him anxious to explore more of it. She trembled under his fingertips.

“We’re very secluded, back here by the dunes,” he agreed, sliding his propped arm next to her head so he could lower his head close to hers. “No one’s paying any attention to us.”

“Would you mind if we didn’t do anything except kiss?” Her eyes flickered with uncertainty, despite her droll expression. “I don’t feel like Marilyn Monroe in this bathing suit, I feel like Doris Day. And Doris never did anything but kiss.”

The hot breeze lifted a strand of red hair across her face. He drew the hair aside, letting the pad of his thumb trace her cheek. “I don’t want to hurt the friendship we have. And there’s no hurry.”

“John Bartholomew.” She said only his name, but put a world of meaning into it, tentative affection and desire, as if she were testing her emotions out loud, to see what would happen. She touched his lips with her fingers, traced his mouth, then slid her hand in one smooth caress along his cheek until finally her fingers speared into his hair.

“Don’t ever change,” she whispered. “You’re the sweetest man I’ve ever met. You really do have an aura of goodness around you.”

Her words tormented him. He wasn’t good, but she was. There was a helluva lot more to her than he’d learned when he’d researched her past. He sensed that,
just like him, she’d been hurt badly by the people in her life. She was desperate to trust somebody, and she wanted to trust him.

And he wanted to deserve that trust.

“You’re thinking too hard,” she teased gently.

“Trying to decide which corner of your mouth to kiss first. You have sexy lips, Agnes. I can’t tell which lip is nicer. I think it’s a tie.”

She grinned. “Kiss me, and I’ll help you decide.”

When he lowered his mouth onto hers she mewled softly and opened her lips, at first playful as she kissed him, then so intense it was all he could do to keep from snatching her into his arms. John shuddered with delight. A sudden and vivid rush of emotion made him feel like a teenager again. Because kissing was the only intimacy he and she could share, restraint heightened every erotic sensation.

He could hardly keep his hand still on her stomach, and underneath it her body flexed like the swells of the ocean. He pictured her giving in to that strong force. He pictured himself riding her currents.

When she moaned into his mouth and he shuddered in response he knew it was time to stop, before he gave in to an urge to seduce her. He already wanted to lead her deep into the sand dunes, where no one could see what they did next.

He couldn’t let himself do that. When they were naked and he was making love to her with wild abandon she might doubt his gentlemanly talk about being patient, to say the least. He wanted her to trust him, not wonder if he were manipulating her.

Quickly John pulled back. Looking down into her half shut eyes and flushed face, with its charged expression of desire, he was amazed at his self-control. Maybe there was a little of Sir Miles’s chilvalry in his blood, after all. “You’ve been alone a long time,” he whispered, “and I don’t want to take advantage of that, Agnes.”

She frowned and raised a shaking hand to her forehead, as if trying to remember where she was. “No, I don’t want to be careless. I know better than to move too fast.” Her lips were damp and dark red from the pressure of his mouth. John stared at them in fascination, aching to kiss her again. “Kissing each other is not such an innocent thing, after all,” he admitted.

“Not the way you do it.” She looked regretful. “I’ve been alone because I wanted it that way. But maybe it’s time I took some risks again.”

John brushed his lips over hers. Her low sigh of pleasure and the flavor of her mouth nearly made him forget his troubled thoughts. “You taste like those orange slices from breakfast.” He caught her lower lip in a quick sucking motion then released it. “What a meal I could make of you, my lady.”

Her tiny moan of delight made him kiss her again, and their tongues met in a slow, devastating dance inside her mouth. But she began patting his shoulder almost frantically. He knew what she meant and forced himself to move back.

Sitting up, he faced the ocean and propped his arms on updrawn knees. He took deep breaths of ocean breeze and concentrated on the squawking white gulls constantly patrolling the beach. She sat up also, hugged her knees, and stared silently toward a distant horizon where tiny ships crossed the line between ocean and sky.

John still felt as if she were kissing him. It wasn’t only the desire crackling between them like tendrils of static; it was knowing they had something special, a closeness hinting at shared dreams and shared problems.

“Agnes, there are a thousand subjects I want to discuss with you,” he said slowly, still looking straight ahead so he wouldn’t break down and kiss her again. “Everything from your favorite flavor of ice cream to your lifelong ambitions and deepest fears. Everything
you want, or love, or hate. But right now there’s one thing I have to ask.”

“I don’t think I’m going to like it,” she warned softly. She ran a hand through her hair wearily, tearing at a snarl in the red strands. “But go ahead.”

He twisted a little so he could watch her expression. “Only a man you cared enough about to marry could turn you into such a loner. What did your husband do to you?”

A shuttered look came over her face, and her eyes filled with doubt as they searched his. John cupped the side of her face and made a soothing sound low in his throat. “I’m not going to judge you by anyone else’s faults. If I were that kind of bastard, I’d have turned away from you when Mrs. Roberts made her stupid little remarks about you. But I’m not a narrow-minded fool.”

Tears rose in her eyes. “I guess you wouldn’t settle for learning my favorite flavor of ice cream? It’s vanilla. Vanilla’s simple, classic, and it doesn’t surprise you. No matter how it’s made, vanilla’s always about the same.”

“Agnes,”
he said sternly.

She sighed and faced the ocean again. “It’s true about him being a drug dealer. Big-time. Upper-management level,” she added bitterly. “Never got his hands or his respectable image dirty.”

“When did you find out?”

“Not long before he was arrested. We’d been married for about three years.”

“He didn’t use drugs himself?”

“At parties, sometimes.” She hesitated, a muscle popping in her jaw, then added, “So did I.”

“Were you addicted?”

“No, nothing that awful. I wanted to fit in. It wasn’t cool to say no. And to be honest, I was so depressed about who I was that I wanted something to make me feel better.”

He put a hand on the back of her neck and massaged
the sinew that made a thick ridge there. “Who were you, then?”

“An ex-child star nobody recognized anymore. A bargain-basement actress who wasn’t trained to be anything else. I’d worked in the business since I was a
baby
, for godsakes. When I couldn’t get jobs anymore, I felt lost and worthless. I tried going to college, but I couldn’t hack the routine.”

“You’re a smart, disciplined person. I can’t believe you dropped out of college simply because it was difficult.”

“But see, I didn’t know how to adjust to classrooms and strict schedules and all those things. I never went to high school!”

“You can’t mean you never got an education.”

“No, I have a high school diploma. But I never had a high school. Tutors were hired to teach me while I worked. On breaks during the day. That was the only time I had for school. By comparison, college was too slow for me. Boring.”

“I can’t picture you failing at college because of laziness.”

“Okay, okay, there were a lot of reasons. But I could have tried harder.”

“What held you back?”

“I spent too much time running after Richard, doing whatever he wanted. He didn’t like me being preoccupied with college. He never saw the point in getting more education when you already have money. He complained so much about my schedule, I quit.”

“Richard, eh? I’m glad to know his name. Now he isn’t an anonymous face in my mind. I can picture him.”

“Oh? What do you think he looks like?”

“He has fangs, pasty skin, and he turns into a bat each night.”

She gave a short laugh. “If nothing else, you described his personality.”

“Tell me more about this vampire.”

“He owned a real-estate company. Sold expensive houses to expensive people. He was about ten years older than I and
very
sophisticated. He wore designer suits, spent money like there was no tomorrow, and made me feel important even though I wasn’t a TV star anymore.”

“I suspect you needed him for the wrong reasons, reasons you didn’t understand until you were older.”

“No, I can’t blame my mistakes on being too young. I was twenty-two when I married him, but the way I grew up, that wasn’t young. I spent my whole childhood working as a professional actor. I was expected to be a pint-sized adult. I grew up too fast.”

“Precisely. You never had a normal life. You were inexperienced, in that sense.”

“ ‘Inexperienced’ sounds better than ‘confused and stupid,’ which was what I was.”

“Sssh. If Richard made it impossible for you to go to college, what did he expect you to be?”

“A lot of fun,” she answered grimly. “His own private party girl.” She roughly brushed sand off her toes. “I was good at it, too.”

“What happened after he was arrested?”

“The government seized everything he owned, which meant everything I owned, since it was all in Richard’s name. He went to prison. He’s still there.”

“And you were left with nothing?”

“Yep. One week I was living in a Malibu beach house and shopping in Beverly Hills, the next I was selling my wedding ring to buy groceries and rent a cheap apartment.”

“That was when you moved here to live with your grandfather?”

She laughed ruefully. “No, I wasn’t gonna go down without a fight. I stayed in California for about another
year. I wanted to prove the tabloid stories were wrong. I wasn’t just another washed-up kiddie star who’d made some stupid mistakes.”

She swiped a finger across her mouth as if there were a bad taste there. “Then I made some more mistakes. Nothing I want to talk about.”

She didn’t have to. John knew what she meant. He’d seen a tape of the TV movie she’d made. Agnes had portrayed a young cocktail waitress who seduced and then blackmailed all the ministers in a small Midwestern town. The plot was no more than an excuse for scene after scene of smirking sexual innuendo.

The movie had been badly written and poorly made. And Agnes, as she’d already admitted to him, was a mediocre actress. Her primary purpose in the film had been to wander around in a breathtaking variety of lingerie.

When he’d watched the tape, John had laughed at her acting ability and made bawdy, admiring comments about her body. Now he felt a deep stab of sympathy for her and an urge to strangle the filmmakers who’d humiliated her in that piece of trash.

John turned his hand palm up along her neck and began drawing his fingers through her thick hair, carefully untangling the curls and smoothing them. “Let’s keep talking about Richard. Do you still love him a little?”

“I never loved Richard,” she retorted so quickly that she almost spat the words. “I had love confused with need. I needed emotional security. I thought having a husband would give me that. Now I know I’m my own security, and the only thing I need a husband for is … nothing. I don’t need a husband at all, come to think of it.”

John frowned at her. “Don’t let Richard turn you off about love and marriage forever. There’s nothing more
wonderful than a loving partnership between a man and a woman.” The moment he finished saying those words, he was astonished. He almost believed them. This was carrying things a little too far.

She grasped one of his shoulders and looked him in the eye with steely dismay. “You’re a doll, and when you leave I’ll miss you. I’m already sure of that. But you come from some kind of fairy-tale world. You wouldn’t recognize real life from a hole in the ground.”

“I haven’t lived in the clouds, Agnes. I know what the real world’s like.”

“Right. A place where rich little boys go to private schools and rich young men go to Oxford, before they inherit the family business and become rich young men who have so much money they can take a month off to hang out in America.”

John told himself to ignore the anger rising in his chest. If she knew the harsh truth about his background she wouldn’t be so smug. “I don’t get the feeling you grew up poor or downtrodden, Agnes. You certainly didn’t marry a poor man, from what you’ve told me.”

She went very still, looking stunned and then furious. “I made my parents rich,” she said slowly, between gritted teeth. “But we lived one step ahead of the creditors. That Ferrari I told you about? It was repossessed, just like every car we ever owned. My parents never held on to a dollar long enough to make the paper warm.”

“Richard must have looked like a security blanket. No wonder you thought you loved him.”

Her face turned white. She got to her knees. “Are you askin’ me if I married him for his money?”

“Did you?”

His candid question apparently shocked her. “Maybe I did!” she blurted out. “Maybe I loved his money as much as I loved him. Don’t look at me that way. Don’t you dare.”

“You’re seeing what your defensiveness expects to see, not what I feel. Don’t overreact.”

“You’re judging me!”