Renegade

“He took me to his hotel. He had an enormous suite, luxury fit for a king. When we got inside, he laughed because I was nervous and promised he wouldn’t hurt me, that he just wanted to help me. I was so scared, I spilled a glass of water down the front of my shirt.” She smiled. “I’ll never forget the shock on his face as long as I live. I had short hair and I was never voluptuous, even back then, but the wet shirt…” She looked up at Cash, who was listening intently. “But of course, he wasn’t interested in me in that way…”

Cash’s lips parted on a soft explosion of breath. “Cullen Cannon, the great international lover, was gay?” he asked, astonished.

She nodded. “He was. But he hid it with the help of women friends. He was a sweet and gentle man,” she recalled wistfully. “I offered to leave, and he wouldn’t hear of it. He said that he was lonely. His family had disowned him. He had nobody. So I stayed. He bought me clothes, put me back in school, shielded me from my own past so that my mother wouldn’t be able to find me.”

Her eyes misted as she continued her story. “I loved him,” she whispered. “I would have given him anything. But all he wanted was to take care of me.” She laughed. “Perhaps later, when he’d put me in modeling classes in New York, he liked the image it gave him to have a pretty young woman living with him. I don’t know. But I stayed there until he died.”

“The media said it was a heart attack.”

She shook her head. “He died of AIDS. At the last, his biological children came to see him, and they buried the past. They resented me at first, suspected me of trying to play up to him for money. But I guess they finally realized that I was crazy about him.” She smiled. “They tried to make me take his apartment over, when he died, tried to give me a trust account out of their in heritance. I refused it. You see, I nursed him the last year he lived.”

“That’s why you didn’t model for a year, just before you were offered your first film contract. They said you were in an accident and had to heal,” Cash recalled.

She was flattered that he remembered that much when he’d literally hated her in Jacobsville. “That’s right,” she said. “He didn’t want anybody to know about him. Not even then.”

“Poor guy.”

“He was the best man I ever knew,” she said sadly. “I still put flowers on his grave. He saved me.”

“What about the man who raped you?” he asked bluntly.

She looked at Rory, who was talking to the bagpiper. Her expression was tormented. “My mother said he was Rory’s father,” she managed.

Now his intake of breath was really audible. “And you love Rory.”

She turned to him. “With all my heart,” she agreed. “My mother’s still with Rory’s father, Sam Stanton, on and off. They are both drug addicts. Sam and my mother have fights and he beats her up and she calls the police. He always comes back.”

“How did you end up with Rory?” he asked.

“The police officer who saved me the last night I was at home—when Sam raped me—called me when Rory was just four years old. I was still living with Cullen and he was powerful and rich. Cullen went with me to see Rory in the hospital after he was severely beaten by his father. My mother was quite taken with Cullen,” she recalled coldly. “So after Rory was released she brought him to the hotel where we were staying. Fishing, for money. Cullen offered to buy the child. And she sold him to us,” she added icily. “For fifty thousand dollars.”

“My God,” he bit off. “And I thought I’d seen it all.”

“Rory’s been with me ever since,” she told him. “He’s like my own child.”

“You never got pregnant…?”

She shook her head. “I was a late bloomer. I didn’t even have my first period until I was fifteen. Pretty lucky, huh?” She pushed back wisps of red hair. “Real lucky.”

“But your mother wants Rory back now.”

“The money ran out years ago. She’s having to get her drug money by working in a convenience store, and she doesn’t like it. Sam works when he feels like it, and I don’t think he does anything legal, either. My attorney paid my mother off last year when she threatened to go to the tabloids about the brutal way I was treating her,” she scoffed. “Rich movie star allows poor mother to live in poverty while she rides in stretch limousines.” She smiled cynically. “Get the picture?”

“In Technicolor,” he agreed coldly.

“So now she’s decided she wants Rory back. She sent Rory’s father up to the military school and he tried to get him out. Rory told the commandant what his father had done to him—and to me—and the commandant called the police. The rat ran for his life before they got there.”

“Good for the commandant.”

“But that doesn’t rule out kidnapping. I’d pay any thing to get Rory back, and they know it. I don’t sleep very well these days,” she added. “Rory’s father has a cousin who lives near here, in a really bad part of town. They’re close, and the cousin has his dirty fingers in a lot of illegal pies.”

Cash was doing mental gymnastics. “Does Rory care for his father or his mother?”

“He hates our mother,” she replied. “And he doesn’t know that Sam Stanton is his real father.”

“You haven’t told him?” he probed.

“I haven’t had the heart to,” she explained. “He took a real beating from Sam. The psychologist says he’ll have mental scars for the rest of his life from that or deal.”

“How about you?”

“I’ve lived through enough to make me strong, with occasional lapses. But mostly, I’m tough,” she murmured.

“Not tough enough, just yet,” he commented. “But you will be, if you hang around with me long enough.”

She glanced at him with a teasing smile. “Am I going to?”

He shrugged. “It’s up to you. I have a few quirks.”

“So do I. And a few hang-ups,” she added.

He put his hands in his pockets while he stared down at her, to the music of New York traffic. “I don’t like ties very much. I’m making no promises. I want to see you while I’m here. Period.”

“You don’t pull any punches.”

He nodded.

She searched his dark eyes. “I don’t find you repulsive,” she said bluntly. “That’s new. But I’ve got some terrible scars of my own. I can put on a good act as a vamp when I’m around men. But it’s all a ruse. I haven’t ever had consensual sex.”

He whistled. “That’s a heavy load to put on a man.”

She nodded.

He smiled slowly. “So, it’s back to Dating 101.”

She laughed. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

“We’ll go slow,” he said, noting Rory’s sudden reappearance. “That took a while,” he commented when the boy came back laughing.

“He wanted to know about military school. Guess what? He was a soldier in Vietnam.” Rory grimaced. “Sad, huh, that he’d end up like that.”

Cash’s eyes were haunted as he studied the man, who lifted a hand and waved before he went back to his bagpiping. Cash waved back. “Too many veterans wind up like that,” he commented quietly.

“Not you,” Rory said proudly.

Cash smiled at him and ruffled his hair. “No. Not me. How about going to the Statue of Liberty? It’s closed, so we can’t go up in it, but we can see it. Are you game?”

“Lead me to it!” Rory laughed.