The hellion Page 5

  She couldn't help smiling for a moment, but she knew all the other things they said about him, too.

  "Do you enjoy being… unconventional?"

  "Unconventional?" He glanced up with a crooked, sad smile. "Why, I'm as conventional as the next one. What you're meaning to ask is if I enjoy being the hell-raiser they say I am, isn't it, Rachel?"

  "You said it, Tommy Lee. I didn't."

  He seemed to consider the question a long time, all the while studying her closely. When he answered, he sounded resigned. "No, I don't enjoy it much. But it kills time."

  Rachel bristled. "Is that what you consider three marriages and three divorces-killing time?"

  He flicked his ashes into the crystal ashtray and answered as if to himself, "Well, it was killing anyway. But then we all can't be lucky like you and end up with a marriage made in heaven, now, can we?"

  "You've grown cynical over the years."

  "Hell, yes. Wouldn't you if you tried three times and failed?" She glanced aside as if appalled by his admission. "Does it bother you, Rachel, the fact that I've been married all those times? Is that why you're so tense?"

  Her eyes snapped angrily. "I'm tense because I've just been through two grueling years watching my husband die of cancer. It would make anybody tense." She jumped to her feet and he followed, catching her elbow above the marble-topped table.

  "Rachel honey, I'm sorry."

  She carefully withdrew her arm. "I'm not your Rachel-honey anymore, and I begin to see what it is people object to about you, Tommy Lee. You had no business coming here like this so soon after Owen's death, and especially after I asked you not to."

  Their eyes clashed for long seconds. Then she turned her back and walked to one of the arched windows, where she stood staring out at the fading twilight. He leaned down, studying her back while he stubbed out his cigarette. Then he crossed to stand behind her. He caught her scent again, the Rachel-scent, the lingering of fine, costly powder caught in her clothing and on her skin, and it created a maelstrom in his senses.

  "I didn't come here to upset you, Rachel. Not at all. But my life is in a hell of a mess and I don't think it's going to get straightened out until I can talk to you about what happened." He touched her shoulder, making sure he didn't touch too hard. "Rachel, turn around. I've been thinking of this day for… for years. And now you turn away. Please, Rachel."

  She dropped her chin, sighed, then turned very slowly, allowing him to look at her at close range while similarly studying him. They were strangers, yet they knew each other well. Their past was best forgotten, yet it never would be. Time should have kindly seen to it that they no longer appealed to each other, yet they did.

  "Jesus, you're more beautiful than ever. Did you know that?"

  One of them had to be sensible. She carefully hid the pleasure brought about by his words and replied, "I'm forty-one years old, and I'm told constantly that I'm too thin. And the last two years, the last six months in particular, have put road maps on my face. It's not Rachel Hollis you think is beautiful, but Rachel Talmadge, the girl I stopped being twenty-four years ago. She's the one you came here to find."

  "No. I didn't come here looking for her, only to talk about her and find out where she went and why. And why I never heard from her afterward."

  Her eyes closed and he saw the flawless violet makeup tremble on her lids while he battled the urge to draw her into his arms, hold her close, and comfort her. And himself. But if he touched her, he knew she'd flee. Her deep brown eyes opened again and she asked quaveringly, "Why, Tommy Lee? Why now?"

  "Because I couldn't wait another year. I've wasted too many already."

  "But Owen-was

  "Owen is gone. That's why I came."

  She made a move as if to turn away, but he blocked her with his shoulder. "Rachel, I'm sorry if my timing is bad. I'm sorry if I haven't given you the proper time to mourn him, but I've put this off until I can't anymore. I'm forty-one, too, Rachel. Please understand."

  She was afraid she was beginning to understand all too well. What he seemed to be saying was too shattering to contemplate this soon after Owen's death. He shouldn't even be here in her house, with his distinctive car parked out front where anyone and everyone could see it. Nor should he be broaching the subject that had been carefully avoided since they were seventeen years old.

  "I want to know what happened to you, Rachel."

  She met his eyes squarely and challenged, "Ask your parents, Tommy Lee. They were in it with Daddy and Mama."

  "I asked them years ago, but they would never tell me anything. Then after just so long, I stopped asking altogether. It's been years since I've talked to them."

  "I know that, too." Impulsively she reached out to touch his arm, understanding fully what the estrangement must have cost all of them. "When will you decide you've made them suffer enough?"

  "Never!" he spit out, and spun away, for her nearness brought too intense an ache. "Just as they've made me suffer all these years. I guess I'm not as… as magnanimous as you are, Rachel. I can't forgive them and be their loving son again, like you forgave your parents."

  The bitter feelings she'd had the day of the funeral, while gazing out the bedroom window, came back again, rife and fresh. It was rare that she let them take precedence, but they did now, and when they'd lodged like a thorn in her heart, she asked, "Don't you think there are times when I feel bitter? When I still blame them? There are times when I have to guard myself against… against hating them for what they did to us." Once the truth was spoken, Rachel realized how heavy its burden had been all these years. She'd never said it aloud before, but then, there was nobody but Tommy Lee to whom she could have.

  He turned, and as their eyes met and held, it struck them both that they'd suffered many of the same things over the years, in spite of the different roads their lives had taken.

  "You, Rachel?" he asked, as if unable to believe it of her. She nodded, dropping her eyes to the fingers laced over her stomach. "But you and your daddy have always stood by each other. You seem so close."

  "On the surface. But there are undercurrents."

  Once again Tommy Lee felt a compelling urge to touch her. Instead, he backed away a step. "This room makes me uncomfortable, Rachel. Could we sit at your kitchen table or somewhere else?"

  She hadn't expected him to stay that long. Still, looking up at him now, wondering many things about the man whose eyes she could only half make out behind the glasses, she realized that talking about everything-at last-was something they owed each other.

  CHAPTER THREE

  She led the way through a pair of white louvred cafй doors into a shining kitchen decorated in white with splashes of geranium red. The room constituted one arm of the house and had a wall of sliding glass doors that overlooked the pool. Unlike Tommy Lee's kitchen, this one hadn't a thing out of place. The white countertops and appliances gleamed. The polished vinyl floor shone. The walls were cheerfully splattered with that same geranium color, which was repeated in a set of pots hanging on a wall beside the stove and a teakettle sitting on one burner.

  Rachel touched a wall switch and a tulip-shaped lamp of white wicker came alight above a small white pedestal table flanked by a pair of bentwood ice-cream chairs situated smack in front of the windows.

  "Sit down, Tommy Lee. Can I get you something to drink?"

  "Yes, whatever you're having."

  She moved to the refrigerator, and he to stand before the wide expanse of glass. In the shadows he could make out the brick-walled backyard, the stretch of pool reflecting a newly risen moon, and an assortment of tables and chaise lounges. The house curled around to his right, hugging the pool between the glass wall of what he guessed to be a family room, leading at a right angle off the kitchen, and the bedroom wing, straight across the water. The entire view was nothing short of sumptuous.

  "You really meant it when you said he'd been good to you. This is even nicer than I always imagined it to be."

&nbs
p; The butcher knife paused over the lime Rachel was slicing. "Than you imagined?"

  He glanced over his shoulder. "I used to own this land, you know. I was the original developer who subdivided it, had the improvements put in, then sold the lots. Cauley built this house, didn't he?"

  "Yes, he did."

  "And I saw your application for a pool permit when I was up at City Hall that spring you put it in. I always wondered what it looked like back here behind that hedge."

  Rachel felt disquieted to realize Tommy Lee had kept such close track of the personal plateaus in her life with Owen.

  "You've driven past often?"

  She felt his eyes measuring her, though she couldn't see beyond the top half of the brown lenses. His voice was subdued as he answered, "You've never been far from my mind, Rachel." They stared at each other for a pulsating moment, then he added, "Not even when I was married."

  Flustered, she turned to reach into an upper cabinet for two thick amber glasses. From an ice dispenser on the refrigerator door came the clunk and chink of cubes falling into the tumblers. His eyes followed each movement of her slim back, the shift of her silk blouse and the pull of the lavender trousers across her spine as she reached, bent, opened a chilled bottle of carbonated water, dropped lime wedges into the glasses and filled them.

  She turned with the sparkling drinks in her hands and said composedly, "Let's sit down."

  Despite her outward calm, Rachel knew a sudden reluctance to approach him. A dangerous flutter of physical awareness now hummed in her stomach. How silly. They were not at all the same people. She was thin and gaunt, and he was graying and too heavy, and beneath the unkind light she saw again the lines of dissipation that reiterated the truth about his life-style.

  He took the iced drink from her hand, and without removing his eyes from her, pulled out her chair, waited for her to sit, then took the chair across from her. She felt his eyes intensely lingering and dropped her own to the white Formica tabletop, where a poppy-red mat held a thriving green sprengeri plant in a toadstool planter. But even without looking she knew he studied her unwaveringly, and it set her midsection trembling. Between them the old compelling magnetism tugged and seemed to draw her to him against her will.

  After a full minute's silence he asked, very quietly, "So… where did you go, Rachel?"

  Her eyes, dark and wide, lifted to his, but they focused on her own reflection in his glasses.

  "They sent me to a private school in Michigan."

  "In Michigan?"

  "Yes."

  "They were going to make damn sure I couldn't find you, weren't they?" He took a perfunctory sip from his glass, grimaced, and set it aside.

  "They talked it over, all four of them, and decided to tell everyone here the truth-that I'd gone off to finish high school in an exclusive high-priced private school up north. No excuses. No questions. Given my daddy's bank account, nobody thought a thing of it."

  "Michigan," he ruminated, staring at his glass. "How often I wondered." The room was utterly silent. Rachel waited, suspended in dread anticipation for the question she knew would come next. He lifted his eyes to hers, and his voice held an audible tremor as he asked softly, "And did you have the baby there?"

  She wanted to tear her eyes away from his, but could not. How many years had she forced herself never to imagine this moment happening? Now it was here, and her emotions exploded with a force for which she wasn't prepared.

  "Yes," she whispered.

  He swallowed. His lips opened, but no sound came out. After several seconds he finally managed, in a strangled voice, the question that had haunted him through three marriages and the driven time since, "What was it?"

  "A girl," came the nearly inaudible answer.

  He jerked his glasses off, and they hung over the table edge from his lifeless fingers while he rubbed his eyes as if to stroke away the pain. He sucked in a great gulp of air. His shoulders heaved once, then sagged again. The room was as silent as they had been to each other over the intervening years.

  The old hurt rushed back, sharpened by nostalgia.

  He opened his eyes, stared at her delicate hand resting on the tabletop. His heavy hand moved the few inches to hers and enclosed it loosely while he watched his thumb rubbing across her knuckles. It was not at all the way he'd imagined touching her again, if he ever got the chance.

  Rachel's fingers tightened. "Oh, Tommy Lee, they said you'd be told. They shouldn't have kept it from you."

  He continued staring at their hands. She still wore her wedding ring on her left hand, while his held a gold florentine band with a cluster of seven large diamonds. With his thumb he drew circles around her engagement diamond, and went on tiredly. "They did. My daddy called me into his office at the lumberyard one day that spring and said you'd had the baby and that it was a girl. But somehow I always wanted to hear it from you."

  Rachel's heart softened, as did her voice. "She was born April nineteenth."

  Their eyes met and held. Their child's birthday would fall very shortly. Neither Rachel nor Tommy Lee could help wondering what that day would be like if they were husband and wife and she their acknowledged daughter.

  "You never wrote," he mourned.

  "Yes, I did. Many times. A couple I sent, but most I just threw away. I knew they wouldn't let you find out where I was. They were very powerful, you know. Once they got us to agree that adoption was the only solution, they simply"-she shrugged sadly-"took over."

  "I've asked myself a thousand times why we went along with it."

  "We were weaned knowing that college was meant to be part of our lives. Given their age and experience, it was easy for them to make us see the sense in what they said. We were so… immature, malleable. What could we do against all that superior reasoning they gave us?"

  "And so they sent you to Michigan."

  "Yes."

  "I've never been there. What's it like?"

  What is hell like? she thought, gazing at him. To a seventeen-year-old, torn away from the boy she loved, hell could be Michigan. But of course she dared not answer that way.

  "It's cold," she replied quietly, "and very lonely."

  The skin about his eyes seemed drawn and pale. "I was lonely, too. I used to dream that I'd be walking down the street someday and there you'd be just like always."

  They were still holding hands, and she couldn't find the inner resources to pull away.

  "They kept me there until you were safely tucked away at Auburn. I got my high school diploma in Michigan that July, then entered the University of Alabama."

  "You went to Alabama, I went to Auburn, just as they'd always planned for us." His sad smile was aimed at the ring with which he continued to toy. She dropped her eyes to it and laughed once, a sad little sound.

  "Their alma maters."

  His pained eyes moved to hers. "While the baby went on to new parents."

  She lifted her eyes and nodded silently.

  "Do you know who got her? What kind of people they are?"

  Oh, God, she thought, can I go through all this again? Must we dredge up old regrets and form new recriminations for what can never be changed? But he waited, and he deserved to know the little she'd been told.

  "They're both Baptist, and college graduates. They had one other adopted daughter three years older, and they live somewhere in the Flint area."

  "That's all? That's all you know?"

  "Yes. They didn't tell you much in those days."

  "Not even her name?"

  For the first time self-consciousness struck Rachel. She withdrew her hand and picked up her glass, lifting it to her lips. "Oh, Tommy Lee, what does it matter now?"

  With one finger he pushed down on the rim of her glass, preventing her from taking a drink. "It matters, Rachel. It matters."

  She didn't want to tell him. She didn't want him to impose new meanings on a decision made years ago by a mixed-up girl scarcely past adolescence. But, again, he had a right to know.

>   She lowered her glass, drew a deep breath, and admitted, "They let me name her."

  "And?"

  Even before she answered, she felt a full-body flush, but there was no escaping the truth. "I named her Beth."

  His shoulders recoiled against the back of the chair as if he'd taken a load of buckshot, and his shocked face blanched. "Oh, Jesus," he whispered, and jerked from his seat to stand with both palms flat against the glass door as if doing vertical push-ups. "Rachel, I need something a little stronger right now than lime water. Have you got anything else in the house?"

  The proof of his habits came as a disappointment, but she supposed this catharsis was adequate reason for needing a drink. She rose from her chair and found her knees shaky as she moved into the family room.

  "We never kept much around the house, but Owen had a couple of bottles somewhere in here."

  As her voice trailed away, Tommy Lee pressed against the glass, then, realizing what he was doing, snapped back and stared at his own palm prints on the spotless surface. He turned to follow Rachel, scarcely noticing the plush sofas and built-in shelves of the room she had entered. He was trying to blot out the picture of her on a delivery table, giving birth to their daughter, then naming her Beth.

  Rachel was squatting before a low set of doors on the far wall. She reached into the cupboard, withdrew a bottle, read its label, and reiterated, "I'm afraid we don't have much of a selection."

  His voice sounded just behind her shoulder.

  "Anything you've got. That's fine."

  "It's scotch."

  "It'll do, Rachel. I'm not fussy."

  "I don't know anything about mixing drinks." From over her shoulder the bottle was taken out of her hands.

  "I do." She swung around and stood watching as he returned to the kitchen, obviously in a hurry. When she reentered the room he was pouring the lime water down the drain. Then he replaced it with straight scotch, added no more than a splash of tap water, stirred it with his finger, and swung to face her, leaning his hips against the edge of the sink while taking a long drink. Lowering the glass, he noted, "You disapprove."