by Nora Roberts
“Champagne cocktails,” Bess ordered when they slipped into a booth in the lounge. “I’m buying.” She pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “Don’t tell Pierce,” she added with a wink. “He frowns on the use of tobacco. He’s a fanatic about body care.”
“Link told me he runs five miles every day.”
“An old habit. Pierce rarely breaks old habits.” Bess drew in smoke with a sigh. “He’s always been really determined, you know? You could see it, even when he was a kid.”
“You knew Pierce when he was a boy?”
“We grew up together—Pierce, Link and me.” Bess glanced up at the waitress when their cocktails were served. “Run a tab,” she directed and looked back at Ryan. “Pierce doesn’t talk about back then, not even to Link or me. He’s shut it off—or tried to.”
“I thought he was trying to promote an image,” Ryan murmured.
“He doesn’t need to.”
“No.” Ryan met her eyes again. “I suppose he doesn’t. Did he have a difficult childhood?”
“Oh, boy.” Bess took a long drink. “And then some. He was a real puny kid.”
“Pierce?” Ryan thought of the hard, muscled body and stared.
“Yeah.” Bess gave a muffled version of her full-throated laugh. “Hard to believe, but true. He was small for his age, skinny as a rail. The bigger kids tormented him. They needed someone to pick on, I guess. Nobody likes growing up in an orphanage.”
“Orphanage?” Ryan pounced on the last word. Studying Bess’s open, friendly face, she felt a flood of sympathy. “All of you?”
“Oh, hell.” Bess shrugged. Ryan’s eyes were full of eloquent distress. “It wasn’t so bad, really. Food, a roof over your head, plenty of company. It’s not like you read about in that book, that Oliver Twist.”
“Did you lose your parents, Bess?” Ryan asked with interest rather than the sympathy she saw was unwanted.
“When I was eight. There wasn’t anybody else to take me. It was the same with Link.” She continued with no trace of self-pity or regret. “People want to adopt babies, mostly. Older kids aren’t placed so easily.”
Lifting her drink, Ryan sipped thoughtfully. It would have been twenty years ago, before the current surge of interest in adoptable children. “What about Pierce?”
“Things were different with him. He had parents. They wouldn’t sign, so he was unadoptable.”
Ryan’s brows creased with confusion. “But if he had parents, what was he doing in an orphanage?”
“Courts took him away from them. His father . . .” Bess let out a long stream of smoke. She was taking a chance, talking like this. Pierce wasn’t going to like it if he found out. She could only hope it paid off. “His father used to beat his mother.”
“Oh, my God!” Ryan’s horrified eyes clung to Bess’s. “And—and Pierce?”
“Now and again,” Bess answered calmly. “But mostly his mother. First he’d hit the booze, then he’d hit his wife.”
A surge of raw pain spread in the pit of her stomach. Ryan lifted her drink again. Of course she knew such things happened, but her world had always been so shielded. Her own parents might have ignored her a great deal of her life, but neither had ever lifted a hand to her. True, her father’s shouting had been frightening at times, but it had never gone beyond a raised voice and impatient words. She had never dealt with physical violence of any sort firsthand. Though she tried to conceive the kind of ugliness Bess was calmly relating, it was too distant.
“Tell me,” she asked finally. “I want to understand him.”
It was what Bess wanted to hear. She gave Ryan a silent vote of approval and continued. “Pierce was five. This time his father beat his mother badly enough to put her in the hospital. Usually, he locked Pierce in a closet before he started on one of his rages, but this time he knocked him around a little first.”
Ryan controlled the need to protest what she was hearing but kept silent. Bess watched her steadily as she spoke. “That’s when the social workers took over. After the usual paperwork and court hearings, his parents were judged unfit, and he was placed in the orphanage.”
“Bess, his mother.” Ryan shook her head, trying to think it through. “Why didn’t she leave his father and take Pierce with her? What kind of woman would—”
“I’m not a psychiatrist,” Bess interrupted. “As far as Pierce ever knew, she stayed with his father.”
“And gave up her child,” Ryan murmured. “He must have felt so completely rejected, so frightened and alone.”
What sort of damage does that do to a small mind? she wondered. What sort of compensations does a child like that make? Did he escape from chains and trunks and safes because he had once been a small boy locked in a dark closet? Did he continually seek to do the impossible because he had once been so helpless?
“He was a loner,” Bess continued as she ordered another round. “Maybe that’s one of the reasons the other kids tormented him. At least until Link came.” Bess grinned, enjoying this part of her memories. “Nobody ever touched Pierce when Link was in sight. He’s always been twice as big as anyone else. And that face!”
She laughed again, but there was nothing callous in the sound. “When Link first came, none of the other kids would go near him. Except Pierce. They were both outcasts. So was I. Link’s been attached to Pierce ever since. I really don’t know what might have happened to him without Pierce. Or to me.”
“You really love him, don’t you?” Ryan asked, drawn close in spirit to the large, exuberant redhead.
“He’s my best friend,” Bess answered simply. “They let me into their little club when I was ten.” She smiled over the rim of her glass. “I saw Link coming and climbed up a tree. He scared me to death. We called him the Missing Link.”
“Children can be cruel.”
“You betcha. Anyway, just as he was passing underneath, the branch broke and I fell out. He caught me.” She leaned forward, cupping her chin on her hands. “I’ll never forget that. One minute I’m falling a mile a minute, and the next he’s holding me. I looked up at that face and got ready to scream blue blazes. Then he laughed. I fell in love on the spot.”
Ryan swallowed champagne quickly. There was no mistaking the dreamy look in Bess’s eyes. “You—you and Link?”
“Well, me, anyway,” Bess said ruefully. “I’ve been nuts about the big lug for twenty years. He still thinks I’m Little Bess. All six feet of me.” She grinned and winked. “But I’m working on him.”
“I thought you and Pierce . . .” Ryan began, then trailed off.
“Me and Pierce?” Bess let loose with one of her lusty laughs, causing heads to turn. “Are you kidding? You know enough about show business to cast better than that, sweetie. Do I look like Pierce’s type?”
“Well, I . . .” Embarrassed by Bess’s outspoken humor, Ryan shrugged. “I wouldn’t have any idea what his type would be.”
Bess laughed into her fresh drink. “You look smarter than that,” she commented. “Anyway, he was always a quiet kid, always—what’s the word?” Her forehead furrowed in thought. “Intense, you know? He had a temper.” Grinning again, she rolled her eyes. “He gave a black eye for every one he got in the early days. But as he got older, he’d hold back. It was pretty clear he’d made up his mind not to follow in his old man’s footsteps. When Pierce makes up his mind, that’s it.”
Ryan remembered the cold fury, the iced-over violence, and began to understand.
“When he was about nine, I guess, he had this accident.” Bess drank, then scowled. “At least that’s what he called it. He went head first down a flight of stairs. Everybody knew he’d been pushed, but he’d never say who. I think he didn’t want Link to do something he could have gotten in trouble for. The fall hurt his back. They didn’t think he’d walk again.”
“Oh, no!”
“Yeah.” Bess took another long drink. “But Pierce said he was going to walk. He was going to run five miles every day of his life.”
>
“Five miles,” Ryan murmured.
“He was determined. He worked at therapy like his life depended on it. Maybe it did,” she added thoughtfully. “Maybe it did. He spent six months in the hospital.”
“I see.” She was seeing Pierce in the pediatric ward, giving himself to children, talking to them, making them laugh. Bringing them magic.
“While he was in, one of the nurses gave him a magic set. That was it.” Bess toasted with her glass. “A five-dollar magic set. It was like he’d been waiting for it, or it was waiting for him. By the time he got out, he could do things a lot of guys in the club field have trouble with.” Love and pride mingled in her voice. “He was a natural.”
Ryan could see him, a dark, intense boy in a white hospital bed, perfecting, practicing, discovering.
“Listen,” Bess laughed again and leaned forward. Ryan’s eyes were speaking volumes. “Once when I visited him in the hospital, he set the sheet on fire.” She paused as Ryan’s expression became one of horror. “I swear, I saw it burning. Then he patted it with his hand.” She demonstrated with her palm on the table. “Smoothed it out, and there was nothing. No burn, no hole, not even a singe. The little creep scared me to death.”
Ryan found herself laughing despite the ordeal he must have experienced. He’d beaten it. He’d won. “To Pierce,” she said and lifted her glass.
“Damn right.” Bess touched rims before she tossed off the champagne. “He took off when he was sixteen. I missed him like crazy. I never thought I’d see him or Link again. I guess it was the loneliest two years of my life. Then, one day I was working in this diner in Denver, and he walks in. I don’t know how he found me, he never said, but he walks in and tells me to quit. I was going to go work for him.”
“Just like that?” Ryan demanded.
“Just like that.”
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything. It was Pierce.” With a smile, Bess signaled the waitress again. “I quit. We went on the road. Drink up, sweetie, you’re one behind.”
Ryan studied her a moment, then obliged by finishing off her drink. It wasn’t every man who could command that sort of unquestioning loyalty from a strong woman. “I usually stop at two,” Ryan told her, indicating the cocktail.
“Not tonight,” Bess announced. “I always drink champagne when I get sentimental. You wouldn’t believe some of the places we played those first years,” she went on. “Kids’ parties, stag parties, the works. Nobody handles a rowdy crowd like Pierce. When he looks at a guy, then whips a fireball out of his pocket, the guy quiets down.”
“I imagine so,” Ryan agreed and laughed at the image. “I’m not even sure he’d need the fireball.”
“You got it,” Bess said, pleased. “Anyway, he always knew he was going to make it, and he took Link and me along. He didn’t have to. That’s just the kind of man he is. He doesn’t let many people in close, but the ones he does, it’s forever.” She stirred the champagne quietly a moment. “I know Link and me could never keep up with him up here, you know?” Bess tapped her temple. “But it doesn’t matter to Pierce. We’re his friends.”
“I think,” Ryan said slowly, “he chooses his friends very well.”
Bess sent her a brilliant smile. “You’re a nice lady, Ryan. A real lady, too. Pierce is the kind of man who needs a lady.”
Ryan became very interested in the color of her drink. “Why do you say that?”
“Because he has class, always has. He needs a classy woman and one who’s warm like he is.”
“Is he warm, Bess?” Ryan’s eyes came back up, searching. “Sometimes he seems so . . . distant.”
“You know where he got that stupid cat?” Ryan shook her head at the question. “Somebody’d hit it and left it on the side of the road. Pierce was driving back after a week’s run in San Francisco. He stopped and took it to the vet. Two o’clock in the morning, and he’s waking up the vet and making him operate on some stray cat. Cost him three hundred dollars. Link told me.” She pulled out another cigarette. “How many people you know who’d do that?”
Ryan looked at her steadily. “Pierce wouldn’t like it if he knew you’d told me all this, would he?”
“No.”
“Why have you?”
Bess flashed her a smile again. “It’s a trick I learned from him over the years. You look dead in somebody’s eyes and you know if you can trust them.”
Ryan met the look and spoke seriously. “Thank you.”
“And,” Bess added casually as she downed more champagne, “you’re in love with him.”
The words Ryan had begun to say jammed in her throat. She began coughing fitfully.
“Drink up, sweetie. Nothing like love to make you choke. Here’s to it.” She clinked her glass against Ryan’s. “And good luck to both of us.”
“Luck?” Ryan said weakly.
“With men like those two, we need it.”
This time Ryan signaled for another round.
Chapter 8
When Ryan walked through the casino with Bess, she was laughing. The wine had lifted her mood, but more, Bess’s company had cheered her. Since she had returned from school, Ryan had given herself little time to develop friendships. Finding one so quickly took her higher than the champagne.
“Celebrating?”
Both of them looked up and spotted Pierce. In unison, their faces registered the abashed guilt of children caught with one hand in the cookie jar. Pierce’s brow lifted. With a laugh, Bess leaned over and kissed him enthusiastically.
“Just a little girl talk, sweetie. Ryan and I found out we have a lot in common.”
“Is that so?” He watched as Ryan pressed her fingers to her mouth to stifle a giggle. It was apparent they’d had more than talk.
“Isn’t he terrific when he’s all serious and dry?” Bess asked Ryan. “Nobody does it better than Pierce.” She kissed him again. “I didn’t get your lady drunk, just maybe a little looser than she’s used to. Besides, she’s a big girl.” Still resting her hand on his shoulder, Bess looked around. “Where’s Link?”
“Watching the keno board.”
“See you later.” She gave Ryan a wink and was off.
“She’s crazy about him, you know,” Ryan said confidentially.
“Yes, I know.”
She took a step closer. “Is there anything you don’t know, Mr. Atkins?” She watched his lips curve at her emphasis on his surname. “I wondered if you’d ever do that for me again.”
“Do what?”
“Smile. You haven’t smiled at me in days.”
“Haven’t I?” He couldn’t stop the surge of tenderness but contented himself with brushing the hair back from her face.
“No. Not once. Are you sorry?”
“Yes.” Pierce steadied her with a hand on her shoulder and wished she wouldn’t look at him in quite that way. He had managed to back down on needs while sharing the same set of rooms with her. Now, surrounded by noise and people and lights, he felt the force of desire building. He removed his hand. “Would you like me to take you upstairs?”
“I’m going to play blackjack,” she informed him grandly. “I’ve wanted to for days, but I kept remembering gambling was foolish. I’ve just forgotten that.”
Pierce held her arm as she started to walk to the table. “How much money do you have on you?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Ryan rummaged in her purse. “About seventy-five dollars.”
“All right.” If she lost, Pierce decided, seventy-five would put no great hole in her bank account. He went with her.
“I’ve been watching this for days,” she whispered as she took a seat at a ten-dollar table. “I’ve got it all figured out.”
“Doesn’t everyone?” he muttered and stood beside her. “Give the lady twenty dollars worth of chips,” he told the dealer.
“Fifty,” Ryan corrected, counting out bills.
With a nod from Pierce, the dealer exchanged the bills for co
lored chips.
“Are you going to play?” Ryan asked him.
“I don’t gamble.”
She lifted her brows. “What do you call being nailed inside a packing crate?”
He gave her one of his slow smiles. “My profession.”
She laughed and sent him a teasing grin. “Do you disapprove of gambling and other vices, Mr. Atkins?”
“No.” He felt another leap of desire and controlled it. “But I like to figure my own odds.” He nodded as the cards were dealt. “It’s never easy to beat the house at its own game.”
“I feel lucky tonight,” she told him.
