Rule Breaker

by Barbara Boswell

  Saran folded her arms in front of her chest and glared from Jamie to Rand. “Come on, Rand. Are you just going to let her go? She’s dumping you, in case you don’t know it. Don’t let her do it. Pick her up and carry her into the house, and I’ll be glad to take the car for the rest of the weekend.” “Forcible seduction isn’t my style, Saran,” Rand growled. “If Jamie wants me—”

  “I don’t!” Jamie interrupted hotly. “Now get into the car immediately, Saran. I’m going home, and I’m not about to leave an underage woman alone with the creator of Assignment: Jailbait.”

  Rand’s golden eyes glittered and his mouth twisted into a grim line, but he said nothing.

  Jamie glared at him, then opened the car door. He was standing where the stone path to the front door met the driveway, and he made no attempts to stop her from leaving. She told herself she was glad.

  “I never want to see you again,” she added, flinging the words at him. “Don’t even try to call me because I won’t talk to you.”

  Still Rand remained where he was, his face a tightly controlled mask. A mask that was concealing what? she wondered miserably. She felt lost, confused and utterly without direction. “Of course, I won’t be going to Virginia with you for the anniversary party,” she added, watching him. “I won’t go anywhere with you, ever again!”

  His only response was silence, a silence that spoke volumes to Jamie. She remembered how persistent he’d been in the beginning of their relationship, never taking no for an answer from her, pursuing her despite her reluctance and withdrawal. It was in marked contrast to his passive acceptance of her leave-taking now.

  Was it because he’d finally achieved his goal and taken her to bed? She thought about the bet he had denied making with that odious Daniel Wilcox. Maybe he hadn’t actually made a bet, but was it possible that her main appeal to him had been her sexual unavailability? Which had ended last night in his bed. Oh, she’d been available last night, all right! Every time he had reached for her, she’d been ready and willing. And at dawn, she had awakened, her body throbbing and sensitized and aching for him, and with the newfound sexual confidence he had inspired, she had begun to caress him...

  She thought she had pleased him; he had certainly pleasured and satisfied her beyond her wildest dreams. But then she’d had the added impetus of love, which had heightened their union into something far beyond mere sex for her. Thinking back, she realized that Rand hadn’t mentioned the word love, not once, not even in the enthralling climax of their passion.

  What if it had been just sex to him? Nothing particularly significant, certainly nothing profound, but just a physical urge being satisfied, like an itch being scratched? She felt queasy.

  It was painfully paradoxical that since they’d made love she felt less sure of him than she had before. She had taken him inside her, shared intimacies with him she’d known with no one else, but in ceding a part of herself to him, she’d become vulnerable in a way she had never before experienced. The power he wielded over her was frightening to accept. She’d always been so self-assured, so calm and controlled, the mistress of her fate. But now Rand Marshall could determine her happiness or misery.

  “I—I hate you, Rand Marshall!” she tried desperately. At that moment, she thought she really did. But she could be persuaded otherwise.

  Wordlessly, Rand turned and went inside.

  “Oh, smart move, Jamie,” Saran said sarcastically. “I know you wanted him to come and grab you so that’s why you were yelling nasty things at him, but he thought you meant them. Now what are you going to do?”

  “Exactly what I said I was going to do, Saran.” Jamie climbed behind the wheel and steered the car carefully from the drive. What choice did she have? her anguished heart cried. He’d made it quite plain that last night had been enough for him; she wasn’t worth expending any further effort on. “I’m not going to see him or talk to him again. I intend to—to get on with my life. I’m not the first woman who’s ever broken up with a man.”

  Saran made a sound of disgust and switched on the radio, turning to a rock station and putting the volume so high Jamie felt as if the heavy metal band were playing inside her head. She drove home, greeted the rest of the family, told them in matter-of-fact tones that she’d broken up with Rand, then went upstairs to her room, locked the door and burst into tears.

  * * *

  Strictly by rote, Rand showered and threw on a pair of black jeans and a black cotton shirt. The clothes fit his mood perfectly, and when the skies turned gray and rain began to fall, it seemed as if even the weather was commiserating with his state of gloom. For the first time in his life, Rand, the cheerful loner by choice who’d always managed to keep his emotions suppressed beyond his level of consciousness, felt the terrible force of loneliness, the desolation of the emptiness that was his life.

  He had no one he could really talk to. Jamie had been his first and only true confidant. His friendships were superficial and tinged with competition; he envisioned the astonishment and awkwardness that would transpire if he tried to call one of his friends for consolation. They would uneasily suggest that he call a woman—any woman, hey, they were pretty fungible, weren’t they?—and anesthetize his pain with some hot, fast sex. It was the very advice he would have given a few months prior—prior to meeting Jamie and courting her and falling in love with her.

  He didn’t even think about calling his family. There had never been any encouragement, advice or sympathy from any of them. No, there was no one with whom to share his grief and his confusion. The only person who’d ever cared about him, about how he felt and what he thought and did, was Jamie, and he’d lost her by losing her trust. She thought he had deceived her and she couldn’t love him.

  He really wasn’t surprised that she couldn’t. On a gut level, he’d always suspected he was unlovable; his parents and brother, his own flesh and blood, certainly found him so. And he’d been careful never to put his lovability quotient to the test with anyone else. No one but Jamie had ever gotten close enough to really know him—and as the old song went, to know him was to love him, or in his case, to know him was to not love him after all.

  When her mother knocked on her bedroom door, Jamie didn’t open it. She said, as calmly and politely as possible, that she wasn’t feeling well and wanted to stay in her room and try to sleep. She told her father, Grandma, Cassie, Saran, Brandon and Timmy the same thing when each of them knocked. She’d had approximately two hours of solitude and misery when her brother Steve arrived. He’d come home to pick up the shirts that Grandma had laundered and ironed for him—he’d never found a dry cleaner to do his shirts as well as Grandma—and he regularly treated her to the pleasure.

  Jamie gave Steve the same controlled little speech she’d given the others, but he was undeterred. Perhaps it was the specter of the locked door that challenged him; no one denied Steve Saraceni anything, even entry to his sister’s room. “If you don’t open the door this minute, I’m going to break it down,” he threatened. “And I’m not kidding.”

  Jamie knew he wasn’t. If she didn’t comply, her father would be faced with repairing the door, and Brandon and Timmy would probably attempt to imitate Uncle Steve’s door-busting feat every chance they got. Sighing, wiping her tear-filled eyes, Jamie opened the door.

  Steve strode into the room, with Cassie and their parents, Grandma and Saran at his heels.

  “Saran told us everything, Jamie,” her mother said quickly. “And we’re so sorry you’re upset and we want you to know that we love you.”

  “Even though we think you’re crazy,” added Saran. “Breaking up with a hunk like Rand who’s cool and smart and rich and—”

  “Sweetheart, we respect your right to make your own decisions, of course,” Al cut in, “but don’t you think you’re overreacting a little? I don’t see what he did that’s so awful.”

  “Daddy, he lied to me!” cried Jamie, fighting back another surge of tears. Of course it wasn’t only that. Although
she hadn’t told her family so. She’d initially been furious that Rand hadn’t told her about his secret life as Brick Lawson, but she didn’t consider it an unforgivable sin.

  That was a smoke screen; the real issue was that Rand didn’t love her. He’d satisfied his curiosity in bed last night and was willing to let her end it between them, choosing any reason she pleased.

  “All this fuss because he writes books you don’t like?” Grandma seemed incredulous. And quite disapproving. “So you judge and condemn a man because his writing doesn’t meet your approval? Sounds like some lunatic ayatollah, not my granddaughter, a librarian in America.”

  “Grandma, I’m sure there is more to it than that,” Cas-sie interjected quietly. “Jamie loves Rand.” She gave her younger sister a sympathetic squeeze. “She has her reasons for doing what she’s done. Maybe she had no other choice.” “That’s right,” Steve chimed in. “I know a prearranged dump when I see one. And that’s exactly what’s happened here. Marshall is letting Jamie end it between them. Any reason will do, but the bottom line is that he’s decided it’s over. Here’s the scene: there’s a fight—it can be over anything, even something as simple as how to boil water—the woman is pushed into saying they’re through and the man takes her word for it. Gladly. With incredible relief. Because he wants to. Because she was set up to say it. Later, she can change her mind and beg him to take her back but he’ll say, ‘Sorry, babe. We’ve reached the point of no return.’ ” A ghastly silence descended, then Jamie began to cry again. Having her brother confirm her worst fears dissolved her veneer of self-control. Her heart felt as if it was shattering into a million pieces as pain, the force of which she had never experienced, slashed through her.

  Her parents and Cassie crowded around her, hugging her, stroking her, trying to comfort her, near tears themselves. Steve paced back and forth muttering threats, promising vengeance, asking if anyone knew if Rand Marshall had a sister.

  “Saran, I need some olive oil to make the rigatoni tonight,” said Grandma. “Take me to the store.”

  “Now?” protested Saran. “Grandma, how can you even think of making dinner when Jamie—”

  “So you think we should all starve to death? When six o’clock comes, everybody will want to eat, and we won’t if I don’t get to the store.” The old woman fastened her hand around the girl’s arm. “Get Steve’s keys, we’ll take his car. You drive me right now.”

  Twelve

  Rand stared at the computer screen until his eyes burned. He couldn’t write a word. Revising and rewriting was impossible, as well, because he couldn’t comprehend what he’d written during previous days. He had decided that writing would be an ideal way to distract himself from the pain, to block it out. Long ago, he’d learned how to put a psychic wall between himself and whatever hurt he was feeling.

  He either seemed to have lost that ability or the pain of losing Jamie was too powerful to be banished by a mere act of will. He wandered through the house, sinking deeper and deeper into the terrifying abyss of sorrow and desolation. The telephone rang and he raced to answer it, thinking, hoping, praying that it might be Jamie telling him that it had all been a terrible misunderstanding, that she loved him, that— It wasn’t Jamie on the line. It was his mother asking if he’d received the invitation to Dix and Taylor Ann’s anniversary party and assuring him that they all understood if he couldn’t make it. It was a long drive, he was very busy. Really, the family didn’t mind at all if he chose to remain in New Jersey.

  Rand gave her the reassurance that she was seeking. No, he wouldn’t be coming to Virginia. Yes, it was a long drive and he was very busy with a deadline facing him. His mother ignored the reference to his writing, but the relief in her tone at the promise of his absence was impossible to misinterpret.

  Aimless and miserable, he wondered how he was going to get through the next hour. It stretched painfully and endlessly in front of him, and when he thought of all the hours after that, of the interminable nights and days ahead of him, he was deluged by torrents of rage and sorrow, so inextricably mixed that he couldn’t begin to separate one from the other. It was as if all the emotions he’d kept pent up for so long had been unleashed, and the force and the strength of them disturbed him.

  He tried to fight them, to push his thoughts away, but that old defense didn’t work anymore. So he decided to try something else. To blot out his thoughts and exchange his pain for oblivion. He reached for the bottle of A1 Sara-ceni’s sour cherry wine, which Jamie’s dad had given him on St. Patrick’s Day, all those weeks ago.

  The first few sips went down like pure fire, with a tinge of tart cherry. Determinedly, he drank some more.

  Then the doorbell rang. He had no hopes that it would be Jamie and decided to ignore the bell. Which refused to be ignored. Somebody, one of those demonic little neighborhood salesmen, no doubt, was leaning on the bell. Feeling decidedly hostile, clutching the wine bottle in his hand, he threw open the door. “What?” he roared, determined to scare the intrusive little harasser away forever.

  He got the shock of his life. For standing on his doorstep, her thumb firmly on the doorbell, was Jamie’s grandmother with Saran close behind her. Rand was aghast. Not only had he snarled at her—Jamie’s grandmother!—he was unshaven, his hair was uncombed and he was clutching the wine bottle like a drunken sailor.

  “Just answer me one question,” Grandma said, her dark eyes snapping and fierce. “Was it a prearranged dump?”

  Jamie knew that Cassie and her parents were trying to cheer her up, but a trip to the multiscreen cinema at the mall with Timmy and Brandon to see the latest Disney cartoon release was not going to work. And the thought of watching cartoon characters cavort across the screen was fairly mind-boggling. So she declined, but urged them to go ahead without her, and was surprised when Grandma and Saran decided to go along, too. She couldn’t remember Grandma ever going to a movie, although she’d once heard her grandmother mention seeing Gone With the Wind...during its first release in 1939.

  But Jamie didn’t question them; she even suspected that they were all eager for an excuse to escape from the house after having to endure her moping and weeping all day. She didn’t really want to be alone, though, and almost asked Steve if he would stay and keep her company. She decided against it when he received phone calls from the three young women with whom he’d made dates for that night. He planned to split the evening among them, staging strategic quarrels to end each date early. Whoever he decided to favor with his presence for the entire night would then be the lucky recipient of his makeup call.

  After hearing that, Jamie was too incensed on the women’s behalf to want her brother in the same town with her, let alone the same house. So she sat alone in the family room, if one can be alone with seven cats sharing the same sofa, and tried to read. For the first time, she had trouble selecting a book. Romances made her cry, mysteries involved too much concentration from her aching mind, so she settled for one of Grandma’s true crime books, about a bloodthirsty clan who kept trying to kill each other off for insurance money.

  The sound of the doorbell was a welcome relief. She put down her book and hurried to answer the door. Rand was standing on the other side of it.

  His hand snaked out to encircle her wrist. “You’re coming with me,” he said in a bold tone that brooked no argument.

  Jamie brooked it anyway. “I am not! You can’t come here and—”

  “I was invited here.”

  “Not by me!” Her heart was pounding, her stomach had begun to somersault, and her voice was embarrassingly squeaky. Breathless at the sight of him, she was unable to summon the irate fury his arrogant assertion demanded.

  “By your grandmother and Saran. They came to visit me this afternoon.”

  “Oh, no!” Jamie groaned. “They had no right to interfere.”

  “Grandma said a family has every right to interfere when one member is making another one miserable.” He smiled wryly. “She said she considered me fami
ly. And the feeling is mutual. For the first time in my life I feel like I know what it’s like to belong to a family.”

  Jamie scowled at him. “All the interference and inconvenience—”

  “Yeah, there’s that. But there’s involvement and support and fun, too.” He gave her wrist a tug. “Let’s go, Jamie. We have a lot to talk about.”

  Her eyes filled with sudden tears, which she tried to blink away. “I don’t know what my grandmother said to you.” “She said you were crying your eyes out in your room because you loved me and thought that I didn’t love you,” he said bluntly.

  Jamie winced. What was the use in denying it? But her fighting spirit, though severely dashed, was still viable. “So you came over to offer your condolences?” She managed a very credible glare. “Or to gloat?”

  Rand grinned. “I knew I could count on you not to give in without a struggle.” Swiftly, smoothly, he scooped her up in his arms, turning slightly to pull the front door closed behind them.

  “Oh!” Jamie gasped. Reflexively, her arms encircled his neck. She felt disoriented by her unexpected loss of equilibrium. It was strange, being carried, she thought dazedly. The dependence, the complete loss of control... “Put me down!” she demanded, though her voice was not as forceful as she had intended.

  “Your wish is my command.” He slowly lowered her to her feet beside the passenger door of the Ferrari, letting her slide against the length of his body, turning the release into a sensuous caress. Before she could move away from him, he locked his arms around her and held her tight. “But I’m taking you home with me tonight, baby. We’re going to make up and make love and—”

  “I won’t go to bed with you!”

  “You already have. And you loved every minute of it.” He touched his lips to the sensitive curve of her neck, then nipped lightly with his teeth. His big hand moved up and down her back before sliding slowly to her bottom, where he sensuously kneaded the rounded softness. “And so did I, my love. Ah, Jamie, you evoke feelings in me that I never dreamed I possessed, that I didn’t think I was capable of experiencing. I tried to tell you so last night. I thought I had, but—” he lifted his lips and stared into her deep blue eyes “—obviously, I failed to let you know how much you mean to me, how much I care.”