It didn’t mean he wanted that sex to be with her.
Not that she took his rejection personally, she hastened to assure herself. She wasn’t disappointed that he’d turned her down. She knew herself well, knew that if he had accepted, if he had let her do the things she had volunteered to do, when it was over, she would have been humiliated. She would have wanted to die.
Still, honesty forced her to admit that it would have been nice—in some odd, perverted sort of way, the cynic interjected—to think that his lust had more to do with her as a woman and less to do with his long-term abstinence.
When the bathroom door opened, she stiffened. He came out and into her peripheral vision. Without actually looking at him, she could see that he wore cutoffs and nothing else. If she risked a look at his face, she knew she would see that his hair was wet, darkened by the water to a golden brown, and slicked back away from his face like hers.
But she didn’t take that risk. She simply stared harder at the television.
He tossed his dirty clothes on the table, set his shaving kit there, then reached for the jeans. He transferred something from the jeans to the right-hand pocket of his cutoffs, something small enough to hide in his hand, and then at last he came to her, crouching in front of her, reaching around without touching her to work loose the knots that held her.
Teryl offered a silent prayer of thanks as the cord fell away from her right wrist. Bringing her hands around in front of her, she yanked it off her other wrist, then clenched it into a tight wad in her fist. “Bastard,” she whispered.
He didn’t speak. He simply moved, resting one knee on the floor so he could work his fingers into his pocket. Removing the item he had placed there just a moment ago, he wordlessly offered it to her.
It was a few inches long, red and silver, compact. For a moment, she stared at it, not quite comprehending what it was, not quite understanding what he intended her to do with it. Then he pulled out one of the silver blades, held it by the tip and again, handle first, offered it to her.
Fighting the urge to both laugh hysterically and cry great tears of relief, she took it from him, wrapping her fingers tightly around the handle. It was a knife—a Boy Scout knife, for Christ’s sake—and it made short work of the damnable cord she was holding. By the time she was finished with it, he would have been hard-pressed to find a piece long enough to make its two ends meet, much less restrain someone with.
When she returned the knife to him, he closed the blade, then slid it into his pocket again. Then he got to his feet and extended a hand, offering to help her up. She got up on her own, though, wiping her hands on her shirt, drying their dampness. She started to turn away toward her bed, but, as relief turned to anger, on impulse, she spun back around. “Don’t you ever do that to me again, you son of a bitch,” she warned as, with both hands, she struck him a blow on the chest, shoving him at the same time and knocking him off-balance. “If you try, I swear I’ll kill you.”
The second bed was right behind him, taking up the space he needed to regain his balance. As she watched, he fell backward, making the mattress squeak, banging his shoulder on the suitcase. She heard his curse, low and gritty and underlaid with pain, and for the first time all week she noticed the stitches in his right arm.
How had she overlooked them before? She had been naked in bed with him Tuesday night… but the room had been dimly lit and she had been carried away with lust and wickedness. His arm had not been the part of his body that interested her most.
She had noticed the injury the next morning, she remembered, when she had damn near wrecked them on the interstate; once he’d brought the truck—and her—under control again, blood had stained his shirtsleeve. She had even mentioned it, had pointed out that his arm was bleeding, but he hadn’t seemed interested, and, really, she hadn’t cared, either. Since then she had seen him without a shirt each night, but always like tonight: after he had untied her. After she’d gotten herself worked into a frenzy. After she’d been incapable of noticing much of anything except that she was free.
Now, though, she could see the laceration. It was long, neat, almost as if made by a scalpel. A dozen or more stitches were placed at regular intervals, tidy little knots with the ends sticking up above the skin like little ears. She wondered how he’d gotten the injury, wondered if the fire that had destroyed his house had somehow been responsible, wondered if it had been caused by the bombs whose existence she had so easily dismissed.
Reluctantly, damning herself for caring, she wondered if her actions Wednesday morning—grabbing the steering wheel, sending them careening across the lanes, then struggling to escape the truck—had worsened the injury or the pain.
As she sank down on her bed, across the narrow space, he sat up on his own bed. There were white lines around his mouth that eased when he blew his breath out in a heavy exhalation.
“What happened?” Guilt made her voice sharp, her tone accusatory.
“Why bother asking when you don’t believe anything I say?” His own voice was weary. When she didn’t respond, though, when she simply sat there and waited, he gave an answer anyway. “I was walking into the office when the first bomb exploded. The concussion blew out all the windows and knocked me to the floor. It happened too fast to remember everything, but I imagine it was a piece of falling glass that sliced my arm open. All I know for sure is the place went up in flames, and I went out through a hole in the wall where a twelve-by-twenty-foot window used to be.”
Her gaze shifted to the suture line again. He’d said the house was all glass and wood, wood that would burn like kindling and glass that would burst into millions of shattered pieces. A chunk of window glass could have made a cut like that. Hell, a flying chunk of glass could become a deadly missile. He was fortunate to have escaped with no injuries more serious.
Listening to that last thought echo in her mind, she became still. She sounded almost as if she believed him—about the bombs, at least. But if she accepted that part of the story as truth, didn’t she then have to accept that the rest might also be true? After all, bombs were hardly the method of choice among killers today, unless a person was special or the cause was. If he was simply poor deluded John Smith who wrongly believed that he was a famous author, why would anyone want to kill him? And assuming that someone did want him dead, that he did have an enemy or two out there, why would anyone go to all the trouble of building three bombs to take him out? Why not just shoot him, stab him, or run him off the side of the mountain? Why not simply knock him unconscious, then set his house on fire?
Bombs just seemed—to her way of thinking, at least—too much. Overkill.
Unless, as John had suggested this afternoon, the person had had two goals: destroying the proof that the man the world now knew as Simon Tremont was an impostor… and destroying all evidence of the real Tremont, including the man.
John could have survived a gunshot wound or a knife wound. To get run off the side of the mountain, the person would have had to catch him out there—not an easy task with someone as much a hermit as he’d been. As for a fire, there was always a chance that could be survived, too.
But a bomb? Three bombs, one at each exit from the house and one in his bedroom? What were the odds that a man could be inside a house when three bombs exploded and escape with nothing more than a gash on his arm?
Astronomical.
And what were the odds that he was lying about the bombs? That he had set the fire himself? That he was, as he had confessed to thinking earlier, indeed crazy?
Pretty damn good.
At least, finally, there was something she could check out. When she got home, she would find out what county Rapid River, Colorado, was located in, and she would put through a call to the local sheriff. She would ask him about John Smith, would ask about any recent house fires, about any possible bombings.
She would find out if that much of his story, at least, was true.
Chapter 8
The man known as Simon
Tremont prowled the perimeter of his office, pausing in front of a bookcase to pick up an award, stopping at the credenza to study the family snapshot there, resting one knee on the windowseat while he looked out into the darkness. It was the middle of the night, a time when most people were asleep. He didn’t need hours of sleep, like those people. When he was writing the last two hundred pages of Resurrection, he’d gotten by on little more than a few hours’ rest each day. He’d written much of his best, his strongest, most powerful stuff in the middle of the night.
But tonight he wasn’t working. He had intended to. He had come in here, switched on the computer, set up a new file, and typed a heading of Chapter 1 onto the first page. That had been two hours ago, and he hadn’t yet typed another word.
Maybe it was too soon to go back to work. The mental exhaustion of Resurrection wasn’t yet far enough in the past. The exhilaration of the interview already completed and of all those scheduled in the weeks to come hadn’t yet faded. It tended to go to his head—all those famous, powerful people, clamoring for a little of his attention. It made work hard to think about. It made those bare-bone skeleton characters for his new book tough to care about. It made sitting alone in this office with nothing but the whir of the computer’s fan for company difficult to adapt to.
How quickly fame had corrupted him, he thought cynically as he turned away from the window. For years he’d been happy to go unknown. Then the trip to New Orleans had given him just a taste of what he’d been missing, of what had been denied him.
And he had liked the taste. He liked it a lot.
The time was fast approaching when he would never settle for anonymity again. When he would live life the way Simon Tremont should. He would buy a mansion that befitted his status, would buy vacation homes in every place he’d ever thought he might like to visit. He would travel, going first-class all the way, maybe in his own plane, with his own pilot. He would socialize with the rich and the famous, would be the richest and the most famous of them all. People—common people, people who never in their wildest dreams had guessed who they were dealing with—would take notice when he passed. They would want to approach him, but he would be totally unapproachable. Except to a select few.
Moving away from the window, he resumed his exploration of the office. For the last month that he’d worked on the book, this place had been his home. His sanctuary. His life. He had worked at the desk, had paced that long strip of carpet in front of the window, had slept on the sofa against the wall. He had sometimes feared during that frantic, driven, obsessed time that if he left the office, he would cease to exist. But as long as he stayed there, as long as he remained at his computer, as long as he had eaten, slept, and dreamed—oh, God, yes, dreamed—Resurrection, he had been safe.
It was still his safe haven—only fair, he supposed, since, in a very real sense, he’d been born there. John Smith, a sorry excuse for a man if ever there was one, had created Simon Tremont, and now Simon had taken over. As far as he was concerned, John Smith no longer existed. Now that Simon had come out, as it were, he no longer needed John. Simon was the powerful one. Simon was the rich one. Simon was the one with legions of loyal fans who admired, worshiped, and yes, even loved him. They didn’t have the vaguest idea in hell who John Smith was.
Simon was the one every fan, from Teryl Weaver to his editor in France, loved. Simon. Not John.
In the beginning, he had thought of himself as John, a relatively normal, anonymous man with an alter ego named Simon. In the beginning, he had thought John was real and Simon was just a pseudonym, just an empty name to hide behind. Lately, though, he’d discovered that he had been wrong. John wasn’t the real one, not by a long shot. John had been the puppet who ran things until Simon was ready to take control.
With Resurrection, Simon had become ready. Now he didn’t acknowledge John. He called himself Simon. He thought of himself as Simon. He was even planning, when the time was right, to legally change his name to Simon. John Smith would cease to exist, and Simon Tremont would live on in his place.
When the time was right.
He passed the file cabinets, four of them, four drawers tall. They were big and old, make of oak, nicked here, scraped there, and they were filled with the life and times of Simon Tremont. Two drawers held blue box folders, expanded to the max to hold his original manuscripts—the original manuscripts of Simon Tremont. After he was dead, they would be worth some bucks. Maybe he would donate them to a museum, to some place worthy of Tremont originals.
Investment information—prospectuses, quarterly statements, annual reports—filled an entire drawer of its own. He had more money sitting around in mutual funds than most people could even dream of. The tax records in the fourth cabinet showed how his income had risen from a paltry $13,000 twelve years ago to so damn many zeroes last year that it was hard to count that high.
Other drawers were filled with contracts, research, notes, and correspondence. He had every note he’d ever received from his editor and his agent—and from his agent’s pretty, sweet assistant, Teryl.
She wasn’t back from New Orleans yet. He’d made it his business to find that out. Not only had she not come back, but no one knew when she would. Rumor was she was down there getting her brains fucked out, presumably by the same man who had been in her room the night Simon had called her.
If the rumor was true, he had misjudged her. He had been taken in by her sweetness and innocence, when she was nothing but a horny little tramp. If he had known that the day of the interview, he would have ignored Sheila Callan’s interference when he’d been about to invite himself along on Teryl’s sight-seeing jaunt. He would have sent the publicist off to spend the evening with her butch assistant, and he would have screwed sweet little Teryl every which way but straight. He would have shown her things she’d never known existed, would have done her in ways she’d never been done.
He would have treated her like the slut she apparently was, and she would have liked it.
If the rumor was true.
Soon he would find out. Eventually Teryl would come home, and when she did, getting her into his bed would be a simple matter. After all, he was Simon Tremont, and Teryl Weaver adored Simon Tremont. She would do anything for him.
He was counting on that. He’d been counting on it for a long, long time.
In the meantime, his own bed wasn’t lonely. Even now it wasn’t empty, but for all he cared, it might as well be. The woman there was merely a means to an end. She satisfied his requirements at this time. When that was no longer true, he would remove her from his life. He would replace her with Teryl.
Once again he arrived at the family photo on the credenza. This time he picked it up, holding the silver and brass frame in both hands. It was an old picture, taken long ago on a bright summer day when the sun cast long shadows and cutoffs and T-shirts were the uniform of the day. They were smiling, both of them—happy, healthy people with their entire lives ahead of them.
Now they were dead, and—the woman in his bed notwithstanding—he was alone.
That was the way he liked it, the way he wanted it.
At least, until the time was right to change it.
With a cool smile, he returned the frame to the credenza, but he didn’t use the easel back to stand it upright. Instead he laid it facedown. The photograph was one of his most treasured possessions, but he didn’t want to see it anymore. He didn’t want any reminders of what once was. He would focus only on what would be.
Simon Tremont. Author. Celebrity. Star. Legend.
Richmond, the highway sign read. Forty-six miles.
John had never looked forward so much to arriving in a city… or dreaded it so much, either. On the one hand, he was itching to get into Rebecca Robertson’s office. More than anything in the world, he wanted to prove to Teryl that he was Simon Tremont. He wanted to prove to her that he wasn’t lying, that he wasn’t crazy, that he wasn’t someone deserving of being warily watched all the time.
And what if all that wasn’t enough? What if she still refused to believe him? What if the impostor knew as much about Tremont as he did? After all, the guy had written the most impressive work she’d ever read.
What if he couldn’t convince anyone, least of all Teryl?
What then?
The question was too bleak to consider.
Beside him, Teryl stretched, yawned, resettled. Like yesterday afternoon, she’d been pretty quiet today, though not an angry sort of quiet. Not frightened or moody or pouting. Just thoughtful. What would it take to persuade her to share those thoughts with him?
Things that he didn’t have. Such as her trust.
“I wonder if Rebecca’s fired me yet.”
The look he gave her was sharp, surprised. He had been so intent on taking her home to Richmond and not letting his best chance at reclaiming his life escape that he hadn’t thought that far ahead. He hadn’t considered the possibility that her boss could, indeed, fire her—missing work for two days without clearing it first certainly seemed good grounds for it—but it was a very real one. If she did get fired, if she was cut off from access to the records in Rebecca’s office, where did that leave him?
“Do you think she has?”
She smiled faintly. “No. The job may not be much, but I’m good at it. Before she hired me, Rebecca went through assistants like water. She tends to be a little demanding. She expects a lot from herself and from the people who work for her—too much, I think sometimes. Anyway, I’m a great assistant, I have no ambition to move up and onward, I don’t mind running personal errands for her, and I don’t mind her demands. Besides, I make amaretto coffee exactly the way she likes it.”
His sudden uneasiness calmed, he turned his attention back to the road. “How long have you been working for her?”
Passion Page 18
