My Little Runaway (Destiny Bay) (16 page)

“Who’s going to tell Eddie,” Reid returned, his voice deceptively lazy, “that this dinosaur doesn’t give a damn what ‘everybody’ does? He can think for himself.” With arrogant deliberation, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and tapped it on the table. He glanced around at all the staring eyes. “You jump out of airplanes ... I smoke. We each tempt the devil in our own way.”

Everyone laughed, but there was an underlying sense of tension that no one could ignore.
 

It’s as though we’re both struggling for Jennifer’s soul
, Reid thought to himself, watching Eddie.
I’m not at all sure I’m going to win
.

But he had an opportunity to meet more of Jennifer’s friends. There was Suzy, dressed like a bag lady understudy, who taught horticulture at a local college, and Davy, who played in a rock band.

“It’s so unusual to get Davy to come along anymore,” Martha said happily. “He’s in a rock band. They’re real popular. We were lucky we caught him on a night when they didn’t have a gig.”

“What instrument do you play?” Reid asked the tall, skinny young man.

“It’s not an instrument, exactly,” Davy said. “I kinda make a special noise.”

“Oh?” Reid looked suddenly reluctant to pursue this subject. “What kind of special noise?”

“Like this.” He began to demonstrate, opening his mouth and pulling one lip to the side, making a funny, plopping sound. Reid looked to Jennifer for help.

“It’s great, man,” Davy enthused. “Blows them away.”

“Not now, Davy,” Jennifer said quickly. “The singer is still on. She doesn’t need competition.”

Others were introduced to Reid one by one. There was an aspiring actress and a cartoonist and an older man who was working on his doctoral thesis in sociology.
 

“It’s been fifteen years since I began,” he confided to Reid sadly. “The flux, you know, the constant movement, the ebb and flow of the human condition— it becomes impossible to end the darn thing. Every time I think I’ve come to a firm conclusion, someone does something to knock it out of contention.”

Reid made sympathetic noises, but he found his gaze slipping more and more often to see what Jennifer was doing. He felt her beside him even when they weren’t touching. And he wished the others would get up and go away.

“Reid, I want you to meet Jarvey,” she said, intercepting his look and gesturing toward the last of the group, a slight, blinking man in huge, horn-rimmed glasses. “He’s a bird trainer.”

“How nice.” Reid barely gave the poor man a nod before dismissing him, pulling Jennifer into the crook of his arm, and nestling close to her ear. “Can we get out of here?”

“No,” she whispered back, enjoying the warmth of his breath on her cheek. “And you should be nicer to Jarvey. He’s an interesting man.”

“I’m sure he is,” Reid murmured, breathing in her fresh scent. “But right now I’m more interested in a woman.”

“Really,” she giggled, snuggling closer to him. “Talk to him. He trains birds to sing like Bing Crosby.”

Reid stopped short, frowning. He cast a quick glance around her to where Jarvey was still smiling hopefully. He gave him another nod, then came back close to Jennifer. “You mean—the blue of the night and the gold of the day and all that?”

She laughed. “He’s a genius. Close your eyes and you’d swear those birds were little Bings.”

Reid groaned and pressed his face to hers. “I’ve got to get you out of here before we both go crazy.”

They got out, but the others came with them. From there they went to another dance club called La Difference. Smoky and crowded, it offered barely dressed waitresses and waiters in tiny loincloths.

“This is a strip joint,” Reid announced to Jennifer with a frown.

She hesitated. “Kind of. But classy.”

Reid looked around. “Paint a whore gold, she’s still a whore,” he muttered.

“Don’t be sexist,” Jennifer said, grinning at him. “This place isn’t.”

He realized what she meant when he saw who was doing the stripping.

He turned to her slowly. “Do you really expect me to sit here and watch a man take his clothes off?”

“No,” she teased. “You can sit here and watch me watch a man take his clothes off.”

So he did. Not an emotion appeared on his face. But Jennifer began to get very nervous. She knew he didn’t like the places they’d visited tonight; and to tell the truth, seeing it all through his eyes, she was beginning to have doubts herself.

The male stripper left the stage to the uproarious applause and whoops of the audience, and then a couple came on, doing a dance that left as little to the imagination as their skimpy costumes did. Swaying back and forth, with accelerating moans and groans, they looked authentic. Too authentic.

“Wow,” enthused Eddie. “You’d need a microscope to see if they’re dancing or ...” He laughed, then looked at Reid antagonistically. “Really good stuff, huh, Carrington?”

Reid’s face was oddly cold as he looked back at Eddie. It was evident that he’d had about enough. “If you like this sort of thing. I’ve never considered sex much of a spectator sport myself.”

Eddie’s eyes gleamed. He was preparing a reply guaranteed to point out Reid’s supposed prudery when Reid beat him to the punch, turning to Jennifer and speaking in a voice that carried to the entire table.

“Why are we sitting here watching dancers pretend to do what we could do for real all by ourselves?” He raised an eyebrow, holding Jennifer’s gaze with his electric stare. “That’s an invitation, Jenny. Are you coming with me?”

He knew he was taking a gamble. He was asking her to choose, right now, in front of them all. But he had to know what her answer would be.

Jennifer stared at him—shocked yet somehow uplifted. Suddenly she began to see the superfluous nature of her “fun.” What was she doing hanging around with this desperate crowd—these players-at-life— when she could have a real man of her own, when she could really live? It didn’t make sense.

Slowly, with everyone at the table watching, she stretched up and kissed him on the mouth. “I’ll go anywhere with you,” she said, her voice crystal-clear.

For the first time that evening, Reid relaxed.

“So it really wasn’t a dream.”

Jennifer lay back on her pink sheets, her body naked and open to the man she loved.

“What wasn’t?” Reid propped up on one elbow and looked at her. His hair was mussed, and his blue eyes were serene in the aftermath of their fulfillment.

“That night we spent together. We really
are
as good together as I thought we were.” She smiled and curled closer to him, inviting a hand on her breast.

They’d come together beautifully, each instinctively knowing how to please the other. It had flowed like a symphony, the melodic sections a prelude to the shattering climax. The extraordinary beauty of the moment had brought a lump to her throat.

“Kiss me again,” she murmured, pulling him down on top of her, “and tell me how happy we’re going to be together.”

He kissed her, his tongue tracing the outline of her lips and then burrowing into her eager mouth. Her legs wrapped around him as though of their own volition, and she arched up, meeting his heat with her own.

He groaned, his breath mingling with hers, then laughed softly. “Does that give you some idea?” he whispered near her ear.

Smiling, she dropped back down and closed her eyes. “I’m reassured,” she said softly.

With her eyes closed and her body touching his, she felt his change in mood. Funny, she thought languidly, how well she could read him just by touch, by a sense of something in the air. She knew he was gearing up to say something. Perhaps she should open her eyes and ...

“Jennifer . . .” Her eyes flew open. Now she could hear the seriousness in his voice. “Jennifer, I want to get one thing out of the way. You know how I feel about you, and that I want you to come live with me. That’s paramount. No matter what.”

“But . . . ?” she encouraged, her voice brittle.

“It’s not a ‘but,’exactly. But . . .” His grin met her mocking smirk. “Okay, it’s a ‘but’ after all. I’m still determined to get you together with your mother. You will see her, won’t you?”

She stared at him for a long moment, then deliberately shook her head. “No,” she said firmly.

His fingers hardened on her shoulders. “Why not?”
he said in a voice he was obviously working hard to
control.

Jennifer closed her eyes again. She was going to do it. She was going to tell him the secret she’d kept all these years—the reason why she’d never tried going back before. Once he knew, maybe he would give up on her. Maybe he would decide he’d never get her to reconcile with her parents, then realize he didn’t love her after all.

She knew the chance she was taking, but she didn’t have much choice any longer.

“There’s something I’ve never told you,” she said evenly. “A reason why it would be very hard to go back and try to iron things out with my parents.”

Reid was silent, almost as if he’d expected this.

“You see, something happened that last day I lived at home. It was the real reason I left the way I did— the reason I could never go back. Because it was something I—I just couldn’t explain to my parents.”

She was staring at the ceiling. She could hardly feel Reid beside her any longer—almost as though he were holding his breath.

“You know Tony and I were always close. Even though we were a few years apart in age, I always looked up to him and told him all my problems. And I was so proud when he would seem to enjoy being with me as much as—or even more, sometimes, than—being with his friends. We hardly ever fought the way other brothers and sisters did. We seemed so attuned. I used to pretend he’d been adopted along with me, that we both really did have the same bloodlines and everything. We seemed so perfect together.”

She turned her face toward the wall, away from Reid. “Tony loved me just as much as I loved him. Only ... for some reason, all of a sudden he got that love twisted up. He began to—to imagine that he was
in
love with me.”
 

She swallowed, closing her eyes. She’d never told this to another soul. She’d hoped she never would have to.
 

“He began to tell me how he felt. At first I thought he was kidding, and I tried to laugh it off. But--but he became more insistent. He—he wanted”—she shook her head—“he kept saying we weren’t really brother and sister, that it was only a legal technicality keeping us apart, that all we had to do was run away together to another state . . .”

She swung around to stare into Reid’s infinite gaze. “But we
were
brother and sister. Don’t you see? I felt like a sister to him. I’d been raised as a sister. I knew it was wrong ... so wrong . . .” Her voice choked with emotion, and Reid cupped her cold cheek with his warm hand.

“Finish,” he said quietly, his voice filled with understanding and concern. “Tell me the rest of it.”

She took a shuddering breath. “I told Tony how I felt. I—maybe I was too strong in condemning his feelings. He started to talk wildly, about suicide and things like that. He was going to go to Mother and tell her.” She bit her lip. “You know my parents. You know how firm their morals are, how important certain conventions are to them. It would have destroyed them to think that their beloved Tony could have these feelings—these desires. They would have been torn apart.”

When she didn’t go on, Reid added, “So you left in order to spare them that pain.”

She nodded. “We’d had so many fights around that time that it was easy to pretend I despised their upper-middle-class ways, that I needed to be free. There was some truth in it, and I just embroidered around facts, making the whole thing more dramatic than it needed to be. My intention had been to get away for a time and give Tony the opportunity to think things through before coming back. But ... I don’t know, things got out of hand. Things were said that couldn’t be taken back. When I left, I knew I was leaving for good.”

He sighed. “You never had the urge to come back and explain—“

“Explain what?” she broke in emotionally. “That I’d left because their beloved Tony had thought he was in love with me? Even now, don’t you see how that would sully their memories? If they even believed me.”

There was a moment of silence. “You really love them, don’t you?” Reid said at last. “Despite everything.”

“Yes,” she whispered miserably. “They’re the only parents I’ve got.”

“You never had an urge to look for your natural mother?”

“I did look for her and I found her, too.”

He rose above her and stared into her eyes. “What happened?”

She shrugged. “We were strangers. She was a bit embarrassed. She had a new family and lived in a modest suburb of San Francisco. I was a bad memory to her. I never went back.”

He took her hand in his and laced his fingers with hers. “I’m sorry, Jenny,” he said softly. “You’ve had enough pain in your young life. You need some happiness.”

She looked at his beautiful tan face and his dark hair, and she managed a wavering smile. “That’s me, the happiness kid,” she reminded him. Then her gaze sharpened, and she began to realize something about his response to all this.

“You knew, didn’t you?” she accused, incredulous. “About Tony, I mean.”

His blue eyes looked candidly into hers. “I didn’t know all the details, but from things Tony said, I had a feeling it was something like what you described. We talked a lot during that last year when we knew how ill he was, and you were always his favorite subject. His fantasy was to find you and bring you home, but he never actually went out looking. From the first, that seemed strange to me.”

She sighed. “I hope he was a bit more rational by . . . later,” she muttered. Then she looked up. “You don’t think ... he never told our parents, did he?”

Reid shook his head. “I doubt it.”

“Good. I’d hate for them to have that to cloud their feelings toward him.”

“Yes. I think you’re right. They don’t need to know.”

She nodded. “So you see why I can’t go back.”

“No, I don’t see that at all.”

She rolled toward him. “What are you saying?”