“Ah.” Sal held up his hand to stop Jon, who was about to reply. “You’re such a sweet, innocent child, my dear. Who do you think pays all our salaries? Forget about the love and art stuff for a while, and what you’ll see is a big business machine. We’re all on Jon’s payroll.” His eyes twinkled at her. “You’re his writer. You’re truly entitled to half the net earnings from those songs you wrote together. Every time he goes on stage and performs them, every time you hear one of them on the radio, and every time some chick buys one of his CDs, there’s money rolling into your account. That’s what it’s about in the end, Naomi. We make money, a great deal of it. And you do too.”
Naomi shook her head, stunned by what was happening.
“You earned it. Forget the romance. Think business. Those songs wouldn’t exist but for you.”
They waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. There was nothing to say. When she had cried so bitterly at the London concert listening to Jon sing Secret Garden, she had in fact, been making money.
“You truly never thought about this, have you?” Sal asked. “You really did it all for love.”
This at least she could answer. “No, not love. It had nothing to do with falling in love.”
Sal grinned at Jon. “More like all the love songs you’ve ever written coming together and pouring out?” He got a sharp glare in reply.
“Yes, in a way.” She pondered his words. “But no, it’s the other way around. When I heard Jon’s voice, it was more like having to write all those songs, to hear him sing them. Something like that.”
“God, you are one sappy couple.” Sal rose. “Sign the papers, Naomi. Pick up your cards and tuck them away.”
“Do I own Coca-Cola shares?” The question had just popped into her head, the funny side of this whole thing finally asserting itself in the midst of all the confusion. Sal could not figure out why that rather sensible question should make Jon laugh so hard.
“Why yes, yes you do. Coca-Cola is always a safe investment.”
“And you were going to burn Atlanta just for a kiss,” Naomi said accusingly to Jon.
After showing Sal, Russ, and Sean to their rooms, Naomi found Jon on the deck, his bare feet on the table, his eyes closed, his face turned toward the sun. There was a steaming cup of coffee on his knee and a cigar in his hand.
“You know,” he remarked, “if I close my eyes very tight and ignore the cool breeze, this could almost be California.”
“You won’t say that in October when it gets dark at two in the afternoon.”
Something in her voice bothered him and he looked up. Naomi stood well away, regarding him with that inner stillness, her hands folded over her skirt, her posture almost formal.
“Baby?”
“This money…”
He put the coffee down on the table and the cigar in the ashtray, and closed his eyes again.
“You knew Sal was coming over with those papers.”
There was no answer.
“Jon.”
He stirred. “No. We’re not having this discussion, Naomi. If you don’t want the money, give it away. But it’s yours. It’s not a gift. Every penny of it is accounted for. It’s a huge amount, but that’s only because so much time has passed and nothing was ever spent. So no, we are not going to talk about it.”
Sitting up, he held his hand out to her. “Come here. Sit with me. It’s not important. It’s just money, for God’s sake.”
She didn’t move.
“Oh, come here, you Coca-Cola shareholder. I won’t burn your city, I promise.” He lunged for her and grabbed the hem of her skirt. Naomi resisted, but he didn’t let go.
“Besides, I probably own more shares than you do. So I’ll outvote you.”
Reluctantly she let him draw her closer and pull her down on his lap.
“So tell me. I really thought you would be pleased. There’s some disappointment here. After all, I made Sal come over for this.”
It was so hard to refuse him, nearly impossible. “In London, you took me shopping and made me buy all those things, and I felt so bad about it.”
“Ah.”
“You tortured me, Jon, you forced me to spend your money when you knew I really didn’t want to, when it would have been so easy to wait until Sal slapped down those papers on the table and I could have bought them myself.”
“But that’s the whole point. I wanted to give you those things, and I wanted to enjoy doing it. Now you don’t need me for anything anymore, and I worry that you will push me away again at the first opportunity. For just one day, I wanted that feeling of caring for you, of being able to look after you the way I should have and didn’t. Is that so hard to accept?”
“But if I had known about the money, Jon, I would have bought the bracelet to go with my diamond necklace.” It came out a little sulkily, but he could feel her relenting and softening against him.
“That’s not going to happen,” he replied sternly. “No buying diamonds on your own. That’s my prerogative. How will I ever get to see that naked vision again if you aren’t wearing jewelry that I gave you?”
“You are never serious. I’m trying to make a point.” She sighed, exhausted by his stubbornness.
Jon’s hands were caressing her face ever so lovingly, his fingertips following the lines of her cheekbones and jaw, pushing into her hairline and trailing down her throat to the hollow at its base.
“My sweet beauty. I know. But it’s not something you should worry about. I did what gave me pleasure. I’m indulging my wife-to-be. I’m entitled to it, it’s my right. Don’t you know I’d give you anything in the world?”
“I know.” She leaned into him. “But I’m so used to looking after myself, that it is hard for me to let anyone, even you, do it for me.”
“Yes,” Jon said after a moment, “That’s my fault. I can’t turn back time, so you’ll just have to get used to it now. Please let me spoil you, Naomi. That was the point of that shopping trip in London. I knew you would be able to buy anything you wanted soon enough, but I wanted to spoil you a little, nothing more. We’re getting married. So I have the right to buy you nice things, just as I reserve the right to see you stretched out on my bed with nothing on but that necklace, like a painting. God, that was a stunning sight.”
He had done it so neatly. She marveled as she walked upstairs to make the bed at how easily he had managed to turn away her concerns and make her give in again, accepting yet another piece of his life with her barely noticing. Step by slow, careful step, he was relentlessly pulling her toward him, into his existence. She found herself unable to resist him and the temptation. Bringing not only Sal but Sean and Russ here had been such a clever, insidious move, well calculated to weaken her resolve. It almost angered her..
“It’s still much too cold,” Jon called, coming in and closing the door behind him. “I hope it does get warmer at some point, or I’ll freeze solid. Do you ever go swimming in the sea in summer? I can’t imagine the water getting warm enough for a dip, it looks so forbidding. In LA, we’d be out on the beach by now.”
The quilt dropped from her hands at those words. Her heart heavy with dread, she made her way back down to where he was bent over the piano.
“I’m not going back to California, Jon.”
She said it so softly that it did not register with him right away and he mumbled, “Sure, Babe,” without looking up.
“And I don’t want Joshua there, either. I’ll fight you over this, but he will not go to Los Angeles with you. I never wanted money from you; I never wanted anything from you except your love. Not your life, not your wealth or your fame, and I don’t want any of that for Joshua either. That’s why I told him you were a brief affair. You are a public person. I will never be, not if I can help it. I want the freedom, to live my life the way I choose, not how others want it.”
Once spoken, it sounded a lot harsher than she had meant it, and final in a terrible, painful way. Jon had straightened up but had not turned toward her,
his shoulders rigid and his head bowed as he listened to the verdict she was delivering so quietly.
Silence fell between them like drops of molten lead, searing away the joy of the morning, burning the skin on his face and neck.
He tried to let the words she said wash over him in a desperate attempt at safety and the assurance that his life would not be torn asunder, but it didn’t work. She had struck too deep.
“You hate me that much.” The words came out before he could stop himself. “You hate me so much that you told our son such a sordid story, Naomi. What have I ever done to you to make you strike me out of your life so brutally? God, I never knew you had it in you to be that cruel.” He gripped her shoulders tightly.
“I know that drug raid scared you badly, and you wanted to hide and run. I took you for granted, I admit that. But what else, Naomi? Was that all? I want to know, because if we are going to make this work, I need to hear the whole story from you, the truth. I don’t believe that one night, horrible as it might have been, was enough to send you away like that.” There was dark doubt in his eyes, and deep grief. “You gave Joshua that image of us, of me using you in a dressing room as an after-show whim, a mindless, cruel moment of release and nothing more, and he carried that with him. His mother, a young, innocent girl, only a few years older than he is right now, used and tossed away. No names asked, no love, no tenderness. When in truth…in truth…I loved you more than anything when he was conceived.”
For the first time ever, he felt anger at what she had done welling up inside him, and bursting out of the hard place where he had hidden it away.
“You are going to tell me. I have a right to know. So spill.” And dear God, here she was, caught in his tight hold, crying again, and the day had turned bitter gray despite the sunshine and the warmth.
“I ran away with you. You know I ran away with you, don’t you?”
More or less he had known, but he had not bothered to ask. She had been there, with a travel bag and a passport, and that had been all he had cared about. “You had a right to go where you wanted. So why not come with me to LA if it pleased you?”
That was exactly the point, and she had no idea how to explain. “But I had nothing, Jon. I came away with you, and I had nothing of my own. We were living at your house, everything was taken care of, and I had nothing. I just drifted through life.”
“You had me.” His voice was rough with disappointment. “And I would have given you anything you asked for.”
Naomi pressed her lips together, helpless against his anger, unable to find the right words.
“And that’s just not true, Naomi,” Jon went on, “You were working, and working hard. Should I have paid you a salary for writing those lyrics? Would that have made you feel better? I was under the impression that we were a couple, and I wanted to share everything with you.”
“But we never spoke about it, Jon.”
“What was there to speak about? You were there with me, you lived with me, we shared every moment. You were my life, for heaven’s sake!” He could not see a good enough reason for what she had done.
“But that night, the night of the drug raid, Jon, I realized that I was totally dependent on you. I didn’t have one penny of my own. I couldn’t even afford to take a taxi anywhere without raiding the housekeeper’s stash. There was not a single soul that I could talk to, other than you and Sal, and you were in jail and Sal was busy getting you out.” A ragged sob shook her. “I had just turned twenty-one. You were well on your way to world fame, and there I was, only the girl you were…”
“Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare say that, Naomi.”
The breath went out of her in a troubled sigh, but she did not try to get away from him.
“Any other woman would have been overjoyed at getting pregnant in that situation, it would have meant having a hold over me, and you run? And you don’t just run, but you hide yourself away so I can never find you? Just because you wanted your independence? You and your stupid, childish pride. Me and my useless brain. I never realized. We had everything we wanted, and we could have done whatever we wished.” Finally he understood, even as he spoke. She had never asked for anything, but he had never offered. “I should have paid you a salary.” But that didn’t sound right either. “I should have asked you to marry me. Yes. Then you wouldn’t have felt like a kept woman. Would you have married me then, Naomi?”
“How should I know, Jon? Probably, yes; certainly if you had asked before I got pregnant.”
His hands dropped from her. He sat down on the couch, drained.
“Good grief, and so getting you pregnant was my death blow? So I have to be glad it took nearly three years, or you would have left even sooner, and only because I never gave you your own checkbook?”
Furious herself now, Naomi threw a pillow at him, which he caught with one hand and returned to its place. “That’s not it and you know it, Jon! I didn’t want your money. I wanted to be myself, to find my own worth, my own place in life!”
“Ah, Baby,” Jon replied sadly. “But you had all that. Didn’t you see that? Didn’t you see how valued you were for what you wrote? Didn’t you see how much I loved you? You had it all.”
Naomi was heavy-hearted. She knew she could no longer put off the phone calls to her family. So when Solveigh was finished with her daily report she locked herself into the office and phoned her uncle first. Carl listened to her tale in bemusement and without interrupting, and only when she told him about the upcoming wedding did she hear him sigh, “Very well, my dear. If this is your decision, then I will accept it. But Naomi…”
He stopped before she could ask him to.
The talk with her parents was harder.
“You are too old to fall for that rock star of yours again,” her father said, “as soon as he walks back into your life.” And why did he, anyway? Had they not they hidden her away well enough? And what about Joshua? Was she going to expose the boy to the drugs and party life of Hollywood and risk his talent and education? Had she learned nothing in the last seventeen years? What about her responsibilities to the family? How would her life be from now on? Didn’t she have any self-respect and pride?
“You are useless,” he told her. “You know what we expect of you and what you should be doing. We let you come back to us slowly and gently enough, but Naomi, you are throwing everything away again. You have a choice of important, wealthy men who have made a place for themselves in real life, in real positions, and you know you were meant to marry someone else.”
His disappointment was nearly more than she could bear.
Her mother cried, afraid to see her hurt again. To her, Naomi had confided what had really happened the night of the drug bust. It was hard, and she felt the deep shame of it all over again, but it was necessary to make her mother understand that it had not been Jon’s fault.
“Oh, but it was,” Lucia Carlsson said. “If not for his lifestyle and notoriety, there would never have been a drug raid at that house at all. What does he want now? How did he ever find out where you are? He will make you unhappy all over again. He will destroy you. You took so long to heal; in a way you never did. And now, what? He is back with you for a few weeks and you lose your head again like a star-struck teenager. You will break and be destroyed, and I do not know what to do about it.”
Naomi wept bitterly. She hid in the office as long as she could, then slipped out and walked toward the fishing depot. There was little traffic and the boats had all gone out. She stood for a long while at the water’s edge and looked at her hotel across the small bay. It was the first thing that met the eye for anyone coming in from the sea. It was well-cared for, a proud place, her haven when everything else had failed.
Her family could not keep her from being with Jon, but they would never be happy about it, and might never let go of their distrust and anger. She had not even told her mother about the wedding; she just couldn’t find the words.
Her parents would never understand wha
t bound her to Jon.
“Our biggest mistake,” had been her father’s bitter words when she had fled back home, “was that we didn’t watch you better when you were young. And this, Naomi…ruining your life for a singer, for God’s sake. You should have finished university. You should not be pregnant and alone. At the very least you should be married and cared for, with the child. Not abandoned and left to fend for yourself.”
But she had never tried to explain, had never told them the truth.
It was quiet in the lobby, only Solveigh was at her usual place between the reception desk and the office. She nodded toward Naomi when she walked in from the sunshine with her jacket drawn tight around her, arms crossed in defense.
The door to her apartment stood slightly ajar.
“…no way,” Jon was saying, “This is how it’s going to be. Sal, you need to accept this. I’m not even going to discuss this with you.”
It was delivered in a tone she had never heard from him before, adamant and fast, hard. Her hand rested on the door knob, her heart beating wildly.
“Do you know what you’re doing, Jon?” Sal was saying. “You’re putting yourself out of touch with everything that’s been important to you. This is not your life. This is just a short reprieve before life claims you again. And then what? Are you going to drag her back to LA, tear up everything she has built here for herself? You broke into her life without thinking about the consequences, and you’ve shaken it completely. What do you think will happen once you decide to pick up your career again? Take care of the boy, but don’t destroy her. She deserves better than to be dragged away and burned up by your life.”
His tirade was ended by the sound of the deck door being pushed open and the flick of a lighter.
“I came,” Jon replied in the same cold, dry voice, “I came here in the hope of solving the riddle and to win her back, if I could. Well, I did. I’m not giving her up. If it means living and working here, so be it. It’s not a bad place, and my love is here. If you can’t take it, you’ll have to find another job. That’s it.”
The Distant Shore (Stone Trilogy) Page 9
