Passion

by Marilyn Pappano

  When she nodded, he removed his seat belt and got out. She didn’t move at all until he came around the truck and opened her door; then she unclicked the belt, gave it a tug to make it retract, and slid to the ground. The parking lot was mostly dirt with a sparse layer of gravel scattered over it. It felt unsteady beneath her feet, and she was unsteady above. Her legs were stiff, her muscles protesting the exertion after so many still hours in the Blazer.

  He walked at her side, his hand resting lightly on her right arm, just above her elbow. To anyone watching, it probably seemed a courteous gesture, providing a bit of support to someone who was obviously shaky after a long day’s travel, but she knew the truth. She knew how quickly the nature of his touch could change from easy to hard, from supportive to restrictive. She had no doubt that if she made the slightest move while inside the office, if she opened her mouth to ask the most innocent question, or if he suspected that she was even thinking about escape, he would retaliate.

  The motel office was tiny, three walls of glass and a paneled rear wall with a door that led to the owner’s living quarters. The sound of a television, loud and distracting, came through the open door; when the bell announced their arrival, it was muted, then a voice called, “Be right with you.”

  Teryl rested both arms on the high counter while they waited. She should be thinking about escape, she acknowledged. She should be making plans, seeking opportunities, mentally preparing herself to act when or if fate presented an opportunity. For example, in spite of John’s warning, there was no reason why she shouldn’t appeal to the clerk for help. It wasn’t likely that John would harm her in front of a witness… was it? And if the clerk, who was male, happened to be a big, strong male—bigger than John, stronger than John—she would have to be a fool not to appeal to him for help, wouldn’t she?

  She was saved from answering that question, because right then the clerk came through the door. It was a man, all right—the oldest, tiniest little wisp of a man she’d ever seen. With his frail body and long, thin hands, with his bald head and little eyes and big, hooked nose, he reminded her of nothing so much as a cartoon drawing of a gangly, awkward baby bird. As a final insult, the little old man was practically deaf; John had to resort to shouting to make himself understood.

  With a sigh, Teryl leaned on one elbow so she could rest her head on her palm. Pausing in filling out the registration card, John pulled her left arm from the counter, lowering it out of the clerk’s line of sight. Apparently he didn’t want the old man—who to her looked about as blind as he was deaf—to see the bruises and grow suspicious… or maybe he didn’t want to see them himself. Maybe he was ashamed of what he’d done. That would certainly explain the flush reddening his face.

  The clerk took John’s money—far too much for a dirty little place like this—and gave him a room key in exchange. Room 14, second floor, on the end, as far from the office as they could get. They returned to the truck to get their bags, then climbed the rickety steps to the top.

  There was a light on in Room 8, Teryl noticed as they passed, but every other room was dark, the drapes open. Room 14 had no neighbors, no one whose attention she could attract with a scream. There was only the one flight of stairs, and the windows that fronted the rooms all held small air-conditioning units. John had gotten lucky. Unless he was very careless, she had little chance of getting away.

  And somehow she didn’t think he was going to get careless now.

  He unlocked the door, pushed it open, and flipped on a light, then waited for her to enter first. Clutching the handle of her suitcase in both hands, she stepped across the threshold into a dimly lit, musty, mildewy-smelling room. It was one hell of an unwelcoming place, threatening in its darkness, sickening in its smell. Suddenly she didn’t feel so tired. Suddenly stopping for the night didn’t seem such a good idea.

  Sharing a room with him didn’t seem so acceptable.

  Using his own suitcase, he nudged her forward so he could enter; then he closed and locked the door behind him. The click of the lock made her shudder with revulsion. She was trapped in an awful place with a man she knew entirely too well and not well enough, a man who may or may not be crazy, a man who might or might not kill her, and she had no one to blame but herself.

  Because just once, just one night, she had wanted to be wicked in New Orleans.

  Now she might have to pay for it with her life.

  Chapter Four

  John stopped just inside the door, setting his bag down, taking a moment to look around. The room was small, the two beds shoved against opposite walls, the space between them so narrow that the bedside table was wide enough to hold a phone and an ashtray and nothing else. The sight of the ashtray made him long for a cigarette—he’d been smoking them by the carton in the last few months, at least until he’d heard the news about Simon. Then smoking had become too nervous a habit, and he was already nervous. Already edgy. He didn’t need anything to add to it.

  The only other furniture in the room was a dresser with a TV bolted to it, mounted on a black swivel base. Automatically turning it toward him, he pulled out the button that turned it on. The audio came on immediately, but the picture, like a giant Polaroid shot, developed slowly. It was snowy and ghostly, but even with the bad reception, it was easy enough to recognize the show, a replay of “New Orleans Afternoon.”

  Without hesitation, he pushed the button and shut it off again.

  Teryl had stopped at the foot of the more distant bed. She stood there, still holding her suitcase, as if awaiting further instructions. She needed aspirin, she’d said, and something to drink and a bathroom. She also needed food—which he could get from the convenience store across the street, even if it was just packaged honey buns or more candy bars—and sleep. If that weary, bruised look was anything to judge by, she needed rest as desperately as he did.

  Sleep she would get. Rest he wasn’t so sure about. Somehow he doubted that she would be able to relax enough to get any real rest until he had been removed from her life and put away, preferably someplace with iron bars, strong locks, and soft, padded walls.

  With a dispirited sigh, he moved away from the door toward the closer bed, leaning across it to turn the air conditioner to high, then freeing the pillows from the spread. As he did, she abruptly broke her silence.

  “I’d like to take that bed.” Her thoughts so easily readable in her brown eyes, she offered what was meant to be a logical excuse for her request. “That way the air conditioner won’t be blowing directly on me because I’ll be more or less under it.”

  “You get cold easily?”

  “Y-yes, I do.”

  He glanced at her over his shoulder as he began stripping the covers off. “Right. I was in your room last night, sweetheart,” he reminded her. “It was cold enough to make ice… only you weren’t cold at all. You were hot.” He remembered just how hot—hot enough to brand, hot enough, it seemed when he had entered her, to steam—and felt his body respond. He felt the tension pooling deep in his belly, felt the hunger licking through him with a fiery rush.

  She remembered, too, with a flush that heated her face, that spread down her throat to the soft, fair skin above her breasts. She had flushed like that last night, he recalled, the first time she had come, and the second and the third. Passion had tinted her face, her throat, and her breasts, had given her swollen nipples a rosy hue, had made her so damned hot that they had sizzled where they’d touched.

  She remembered.

  And he would never forget.

  Neglecting his task for the moment, he turned toward her. “Teryl…” His voice was husky, his tone too damned obviously an appeal.

  She stiffened and avoided looking at him. “Please… I just want…”

  She didn’t finish, but he could think of several possibilities. I want to be left alone. I want to sleep unharmed. I want to be safe. I want to come out of this with my life and my sanity intact. I want to forget I ever met you. I want to forget last night ever happe
ned.

  There were any number of possibilities, except the one he would most like to hear. I want you. His actions this morning had guaranteed that he would never hear that from her.

  “You just want the bed closest to the door,” he said grimly, trying to ignore the need inside him. “The closer you can get to the door, the less distance you’ll have to cover on your way out and the better your chances of escaping once I fall asleep.” Leaning over, he grasped the edge of the mattress and half lifted, half shoved it to the floor in front of the door, blocking it completely. Then he faced her again.

  “Damn you,” she whispered, her voice curiously empty of emotion. But although her curse had been mild and unimpassioned, the look in her eyes was deadly. He recognized disappointment, along with frustration, a little bit of fear, and, overshadowing it all, anger. There was no hint of the desire he had seen last night. No hunger. No passion. Everything soft and sweet was gone—and not just gone, he warned himself. It was dead. It wasn’t coming back.

  Like everything else good in his life, he had destroyed it.

  But he would sacrifice whatever he had to to save his career.

  He would do anything short of murder—would use anyone, would hurt anyone—to reclaim the only thing in his entire life that he’d ever done well.

  And somehow, just as he had with Tom and with Janie, somehow he would find a way to live with the guilt.

  “I’ve been damned most of my life,” he said softly, bleakly, “and I know I’ll be damned for this. But when it’s over, I’ll make it right, Teryl. I swear I will.”

  Her expression didn’t change. It didn’t turn hopeful. It didn’t soften at all. “You’ll let me go without hurting me?”

  “I’ll let you go as soon as I have what I need.”

  His words didn’t reassure her. Of course, she thought he was crazy. She thought he would never have what he needed because it didn’t exist, because he wasn’t who he claimed to be. She thought he was delusional, and when she was unable to help him prove his delusions, she probably thought he would kill her. That was what he would think if he was in her place.

  She let her suitcase slide to the floor with a thump. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she announced in a numb voice, silently awaiting his permission before she moved from the place where she stood.

  He glanced across the room. Straight across from the door was a sink with a narrow U-shaped counter around it, and next to that was an open door that led into the bathroom. He gestured toward it, then turned away and sat down on the bare springs of his bed to wait.

  How could he convince her that he was telling the truth? He had tried all day to think of something that might make his story seem more credible, but he’d had so little contact with her in the past. She had, on occasion, sent him little notes—Your manuscript was received this week or Here are copies of your new contract; please initial, sign, and return to Rebecca—but that was pretty much the extent of their contact, except for the note asking about Liane Thibodeaux’s story. She had obviously not been impressed with his knowledge of that little tidbit.

  His vision blurred, and for a moment he closed his eyes, rubbing the spot between and above them where a headache had settled. He was tired, Jesus, so tired. His fingers were sore from clenching the steering wheel the better part of the day, and his jaw ached, too—from clenching it all day, he knew. From keeping his mouth clamped shut on arguments that could only hurt him, on insistences that could only convince Teryl that she was dealing with a lunatic. Under the circumstances, small talk had seemed inappropriate, and so he had forced himself to remain silent mile after mile, hour after hour, until he could think of something relevant to say. Something persuasive. Something rational and sane.

  He needed her to believe he was rational and sane.

  Even though sometimes he had his own doubts.

  No. He wasn’t crazy. He might have been for a time after Tom died, when his parents had banished him from the funeral, when they had refused to let him visit Janie all those months in the hospital. That was when he’d left California, sick with grief and guilt, seeking peace that he didn’t deserve, looking for a way out and finding plenty, but lacking the courage to take any of them.

  But he wasn’t crazy now. He was John Smith, and he had created Simon Tremont. He had written those books. He had filled all those thousands of pages with pieces of himself. He had used his grief, his sorrow, his guilt, and his failures—all his incredible failures—to write those stories.

  He wasn’t crazy.

  But Teryl thought he was. It was in her eyes. In the trembling she couldn’t control. In the way she cringed whenever he got close. It was in the fear that was as real, as raw, as powerful as her desire had been last night.

  He had to give her credit. Under the circumstances, her behavior had been pretty remarkably controlled. She hadn’t done any of the things that any normal, rational, sane person would be perfectly justified in doing when she thought her lift was at stake. She hadn’t laughed out loud at his story. She hadn’t screamed for help. She hadn’t tried to escape after that one attempt when he had dragged her back into the seat and forcibly held her there. When he had left those ugly bruises on her arm.

  Except for Janie, he had never hurt a woman before, not ever, and with Janie, while he had been solely responsible, he hadn’t actually caused the pain. The car had done that, the old convertible that he had rescued from the salvage yard and, with Tom’s help, had rebuilt from the ground up. Even that most typical teenage boy’s activity hadn’t been worthy of their father’s approval. No kid of George Smith’s was going to be a damned grease monkey, he had announced the day they’d towed the car home. Besides, he had continued, Tom didn’t have the time to waste on such a chore, and John wasn’t smart enough to do it on his own.

  He would find the time, Tom had replied evenly, and he had. He had given John time, help, even money when his own funds ran low.

  And six months after they finished, almost six months to the day after that first celebratory drive down the coast, both Tom and the car—and Janie—had ended up at the bottom of a ravine.

  John had been thrown clear.

  As usual, their father had been right. John hadn’t been smart enough or capable enough or talented enough to do anything on his own… except write. Writing was the only thing he’d ever been good at. Those books, those twelve Simon Tremont books, were the only thing he’d ever done right in his entire life, and he couldn’t let that bastard claim them as his own.

  Not even if stopping him meant hurting Teryl.

  Thought of the books—of Resurrection—made his head throb worse. He wrote Resurrection, she’d said of the man in New Orleans. If he’s not Simon Tremont… how did he write the best book that Simon Tremont has ever written? You can’t explain that away, can you?

  His mouth thinned into a scowl. No, damn it, he couldn’t explain it. How could that man—how could anyone—have written his book? His very private, very personal book. He had lived with the story—hell, had actually lived it—for seventeen years. After years of trying to forget it, he had finally faced the fact that his best chance of forgetting was to write it. To sit down at the computer hour after excruciating hour, to write things he didn’t want to write, to remember things he’d never managed to forget.

  He had known he could never do it justice as his first book, his second, or his third. He had known it was too powerful, too obsessive, a story for his fifth book or his seventh or tenth. But for number thirteen, he’d thought he could do it. The irony had mocked him—writing as his thirteenth book a story he’d feared so much. Unlucky thirteen. It had seemed fitting.

  The outline had been no problem. He had worked twenty hours a day, had replaced his need for sleep with his obsession to put it all down on paper. He had gritted his teeth through backaches so relentless that the pain had never gone away, not until the outline was in the mail and he’d slept for three days straight. He had endured headaches, sore muscles, and ey
estrain, had waded through nightmares, guilt, and sorrow. When he was finished, he’d had the cathartic feeling that maybe there was hope for him after all, and so he had titled the book Resurrection. It would be his own personal rising from the death that the last seventeen years of his life had become.

  Then reality had hit in the form of a hellacious case of writer’s block. Intending to write about fictionalized versions of himself, Tom, and Janie and actually doing it, he had discovered too late, were two totally different and totally impossible things. The memories had been too powerful, the pain still too real. The characters he’d created for Tom and Janie had been inadequate; they had both deserved so much more than the best he could give. Colin Summers, the thinly disguised version of John himself, had also been inadequate—too flawed, too overwhelmingly a failure, to carry the story. There was nothing heroic about him, nothing admirable, nothing sympathetic.

  But Colin, at least, had been true to life. Anyone who had ever known John could have recognized him in Colin.

  Instead of healing old wounds and laying guilt to rest, the book had turned into an exercise in masochism. The way things had gone, Damnation would have been a far better title. It certainly described his life, past and present.

  He was scared like hell that it also described his future.

  Hearing the bathroom door open, he opened his eyes again and glanced at his watch. It was a few minutes before nine o’clock. If she hadn’t had the bad luck to meet him yesterday, she would be at the New Orleans airport right now, probably already on board the plane that would take her home to Richmond. She would be regretting leaving New Orleans while at the same time she planned a return trip. She would be tired, satisfied, and innocently happy.

  Instead she was exhausted and frightened, and her regrets had nothing to do with leaving New Orleans and everything to do with him.