“I don’t believe you.”
“Here—” He pulled out his wallet, tugged several sheets of folded paper free and tossed them into her lap.
She picked them up. Internet information, run off on a printer, dated the afternoon in question.
She raised her gaze to his. “I still can’t understand why you’d touch me if you discovered this.”
“And I can’t understand what one has to do with the other.”
She groped for the words to explain what she felt. The duality that lived within her. The darkness she could never quite conquer. The truth she hid and never shared with a soul.
“Isabelle is perfect and beautiful. But if you understood what lived beneath…that I’m Belle in here—” she thumped her chest “—and I’m ugly beyond redemption—”
He touched one finger to her chin and turned her face toward his. “You’re Izzy to me. Funny and smart.”
She winced. Secrets and lies—she didn’t think she’d ever be able to share them all. Not even with him.
“Smart,” he repeated. “Talented. Gentle. Giving. Kind. From the skin all the way into your heart.”
“And you’re delusional.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
“So have I.”
“Who told you you weren’t beautiful?” he murmured. “Who made you believe it, too?”
He used her own words against her, and made her want to tell him everything she’d hidden for so long.
“I’m not beautiful. Not inside where it counts. Inside I’m lost and lonely and dumb. And when I look in the mirror, I’ll always be—be—”
She faltered, and he took her hand in his. “What?”
“Fat. Just because I lost weight and grew into my face doesn’t make me any less the fat little girl who never had a friend.”
“Ah, I wondered about that.”
How could he be so nonchalant? “Don’t you hear what I’m saying? I was fat. Huge, in fact. No one liked me. Then I dropped out of school. No wonder I can’t spell.”
“And didn’t you hear what I’ve been saying? Spelling is overrated, and being fat isn’t the end of the world.”
“Obviously you’ve never been a teenage fat girl.”
“True enough. But that’s behind you. Why do you let the past affect the present?”
“Because for me the past lives in here.” She touched her heart. “And in here.” She raised her hand to her head.
“You need to make it stop.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“No. No, it isn’t. I haven’t let the past die, either. I still let memories hurt me, and I’ve lived my life so I can’t be hurt the same way again. Until I met you, anyway.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We’re not done talking about you,” he warned as he pulled her close. “But maybe it’ll help you to understand why I was such a jerk in the beginning. Why I understand how a person’s past can leak into their present and flood their future.”
“I know why you behaved the way you did. You were forced to help me. You have better things to do than teach a ditzy underwear model your job.”
“If you keep calling yourself names, I’m gonna get mad.” He sighed. “I have…or make that I had an aversion to beautiful women.”
“What?” She leaned back so she could see his face. He wasn’t kidding.
“I know. What kind of man am I? But you see…” He struggled with the words.
She wanted to help him, but she wasn’t sure how.
“My mother is a very beautiful woman. It killed her to have a son like me.”
“Strong, proud, brave, a marine?”
“Shh.” He hugged her, then held her a moment. “She’s not here. You don’t have to defend me.”
But Belle wanted to. Just as he defended her—even to her.
“I never knew my father,” he continued. “My mother kept trying to replace him—five times now.”
“She’s had six husbands?”
He shrugged. “She was a woman who needed to be taken care of. Between men, she leaned on me, and those were good times, when it was just the two of us. But they never lasted long. There was always another man around the corner. I embarrassed her. How could someone as beautiful as her have a son who resembled…well, a hound dog.”
Belle’s eyes narrowed. Without knowing it, her hands had clenched. She wanted to meet Gabe’s mother—in a dark alley, just the two of them.
“I can see why beautiful women annoy you.”
“I’m not done yet.”
“There’s more?” she muttered.
He took a deep breath as if bracing himself for the rest. Instinctively, Belle slipped her arms around his waist and held on.
“Her name was Kay Lynne. She was seventeen. The prettiest girl in school. A cheerleader, class president, homecoming princess.”
Belle growled. She didn’t like Kay Lynne already.
“Down girl.” He passed a hand over the top of her head, and she quieted. “When she asked me to take her to the dance, I knew it was a joke. But she kept following me around. Sitting with me at lunch. Calling me. After a few weeks…” He shrugged. “I was eighteen. Never had a girlfriend, and she wouldn’t leave me alone. So I took her to the dance, then we started dating.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“She was the prettiest girl in school. I was the biggest guy.”
Belle frowned. She was missing something here. “So?”
“Boys bothered her constantly. Once she started dating me, they backed off—because I made them.”
“Okay. I still don’t see where this is going.”
“Neither did I.”
He paused, and Belle knew he’d never told anyone what he was about to tell her. It would probably hurt him to say the words as much as it would hurt her to hear them.
“I never saw it coming. I was in love with her. Foolishly, blindly, stupidly crazy for her. And she was laughing at me all the time.”
She inched out of his arms so she could see his face. But he was staring into the past and not at her.
“We went to the prom. She didn’t come back from the ladies’ room for quite a while, so I went searching for her. She was with a group of friends, standing just outside the door on a balcony. I heard every word.”
“What did she say?” Belle whispered, and slid her hand into his.
“One of the girls asked her if she was serious about me, because I was definitely serious about her. Kay Lynne laughed. Of course she wasn’t serious. After all, she wanted children, and could anyone imagine what my children would look like.”
Anger flashed through Belle with a heat and intensity that surprised her. She wanted to meet Kay Lynne in a dark alley, too.
“She was a vicious, selfish, vapid little girl, Gabe. Forget her.”
“There’s more.”
Hell.
“The entire relationship was a setup. Kay Lynne had a boyfriend away at college. He’d suggested she pick out the biggest, dumbest geek in school and give him a thrill. That way none of the other guys would bother her. He wouldn’t have to be jealous, and I’d do anything she asked of me because I’d be so damn grateful just to have her. Then when he came home from school for the summer, she could dump me and never look back.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was my own fault. I should have known no one like her would ever want someone like me.”
“She threw away the most beautiful thing she could ever have hoped to have.”
He shook off her praise as he always did. “That’s my story. Let’s hear the rest of yours.”
They were back to her, and suddenly she couldn’t sit still. So Belle extricated her hand from his and stood. “What else do you want to know?”
“Why would a woman with your health issues choose a career dependent on appearance?”
“I didn’t choose the career—the career chose me.”
“You should do something else.
Something less stressful.”
“What we should do and what we can do are often two very different things.”
“You can do anything you want to do.”
“No, I can’t. I never got past the eleventh grade. All I’ve got is what you see.”
“You sell yourself short.”
“No, I face the truth.”
“The truth being that you have to risk your health, your very life for your job? That’s bullshit, Izzy. Quit. Nothing’s worth such a risk.”
“There you’re wrong.”
“You need to see your face on television so badly?”
Agitated, she began to pace. “I admit I want this show to do well because it’ll be a step up. No more posing in skimpy spandex on a beach in the sunny winter. No more taping low-cut outfits to my skin so I don’t fall out of them when I walk. No more wedgies for weeks on end until I can’t remember what it’s like not to have one. So sue me. I want something else for me, too.”
“Too?”
No moss on Gabe Klein. He picked up on every little word that she said. Well, she’d told him everything else; why not tell him the rest?
“My family need money.”
“Give them some.”
“I give them most of it. And that’s still not enough.”
His gaze sharpened. “Why?”
She could imagine what he was thinking—drugs, gambling, other overindulgences of the rich and famous. But, as in most cases, the truth was far from glamorous.
“My father was a farmer. We didn’t have much, but we made ends meet. Until one Saturday when he was clearing an old tree and a widow maker crushed his legs.
“He lived, but he couldn’t work.” She went silent as she remembered her father’s pain and her mother’s tears. “Those words don’t describe how our lives were torn apart. My father was always a happy man, full of energy. He loved the outdoors. He was big, bluff, tanned…and then he was in a wheelchair—sickly pale and too quiet.”
She began to pace again. “My mother, brothers and I tried to keep the farm going, but in the end all we could do was hang on and go deeper into debt. My mother didn’t have any schooling past sixteen when she had me, and my three brothers were too young to get jobs. We’d never had enough money for insurance, and now my father needed extensive medical care, special help—the house even had to be altered.”
“So you learned first aid and CPR.”
She gave a wan smile. “Among other things.”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen. I’d had a late growth spurt, and it was just like that ugly duckling story. I didn’t become a swan overnight, but near ’nuf. I still had some baby fat, and one day I was listening to some of the girls talk at school. It was cool to eat like mad, then throw up.”
She shrugged at the disbelief on his face. “Teenage girls are the craziest people on the planet. Believe me. They’d pass around tips about laxatives, speed, water pills, fasting. Weird diets like eggs, bananas and hot dogs only. High protein, low carb. You name it, they knew about it.”
“You have to be kidding.”
“I wish I were. I tried out a few of their ideas, lost some more weight, and people started to remark that they’d always thought I’d have a pretty face if I could just find some self-control and lose the weight—”
“Morons,” Klein muttered.
“Because I’d lost weight, I started to feel special for the first time in my life—”
“Being special doesn’t have one damn thing to do with your weight!”
“Really? Tell it to the world, Klein.” He scowled and opened his mouth to argue. “Let me finish. You did.” His mouth snapped shut. “I read up on eating disorders. Biographies and interviews of ballet dancers, actresses, just plain folks. Instead of being horrified, I was intrigued. Books, magazines—they were full of brand-new ideas. I made up my own variations—coffee for breakfast, milk for lunch, an apple for dinner, with water to take off the edge of hunger in between. But try doing that for a week. I’d be so hungry I’d lose control and eat too much.” Her head spun just remembering that time in her life. “But I knew how to fix that.
“Then I discovered exercise. If I jogged every day, I could actually eat almost normally and still lose weight. Talk about a head rush.”
Klein was staring at her as if she were another person entirely. Maybe now he’d understand the truth about her. Maybe now he’d turn his back and walk away.
Instead, he narrowed his eyes. “What did your mother say?”
“As I recall—congratulations. I had turned up thin and beautiful when she wasn’t paying attention. I’d become an asset, and she wasn’t going to question how I’d gotten that way. Not when I could save them all. And since I’d dreamed of saving them, I didn’t mind. When I was seventeen, there was a beauty contest in Richmond.”
“And you won.”
She nodded. “The prize was a modeling contract. More money than any of us had ever dreamed of. But I had to quit school. Our debts were high, but I paid them off. I saved the house and the farm, got my father some psychiatric help. But the surgeries and the setbacks kept coming. My mother had to take care of my father, and my brothers needed to stay in school.”
“Why?”
Her eyes widened. “They certainly aren’t going to be able to become lingerie models. Call it silly, but men who don’t finish high school don’t do as well these days as they used to. I can help them, and I will.”
“You’re trapped.”
She blinked. He’d put words to the secret feelings inside her. She was trapped by love and responsibility. There was no way out. But that same love and responsibility made her argue the truth.
“I’m not trapped. I’m blessed. I was given a gift so I can take care of the ones I love. It was like a miracle. Just when we needed help the most.”
“That’s your mother talking.”
She scowled. “I can’t quit, and I certainly can’t make a fuss about this job and get fired.”
“Fuss? Why would you need to make a fuss?” His eyes narrowed. “What haven’t you told me?”
“You asked what set me off tonight.” She quickly filled him in on the afternoon’s excitement, then spread her hands wide. “Take your pick.”
He shook his head. “Quit this job, Izzy. You can get another.”
“Eventually. But not right now. I need the money I was promised for doing this show. The circulation in my father’s left leg has gone bad. Something has to be done immediately, or he’ll lose it.”
“And there you are, trapped again. You’ll do this show, however they want it, even if doing it their way ends any chance you might have of becoming more. Am I right?”
She saw her father’s tired, pained face and her mother’s desperate eyes. She heard her brothers’ voices, deepening from childhood to manhood, thanking her for a chance.
“Yes,” she answered. “I’ll do anything I have to do for the people I care about.”
“So will I.”
Before she could ask what that meant, he got up and walked out the door. She’d been expecting him to leave since the moment he walked in. So why was she surprised when he did?
KLEIN’S HEAD SPUN at all Isabelle had told him. He’d read about eating disorders, but reading didn’t bring home how devastating they could be to the person afflicted, or to those who cared about them.
Anorexics could become so thin they permanently injured vital organs, even lost the ability to bear children, and this was if they didn’t die before they admitted they were ill.
Bulimics had other problems—not as severe, but nothing to be blasé about. In fact, bulimics often went undiagnosed and untreated longer because they weren’t obscenely thin, and they were able to function near to normal.
What with the pressures of Isabelle’s job and her family, Klein could understand the resurgence of her illness. He wanted to help her, to make everything right, to take all her problems and solve them himself, but he couldn’
t. One other thing he’d read: the only way for an anorexic or bulimic to get better was to want to.
He couldn’t solve her family troubles, either. He’d give her everything he had, but he was a cop. He didn’t make much money. All that he’d saved he’d put into the farmhouse, trying to make it into a home. Even if he had every cent back, it wouldn’t be a drop in the bucket compared with what she needed. But there was one thing he could do—one thing he was very good at.
Klein returned to the station and tore through his desk until he found his address book. Two minutes later Garrett Stark answered the phone in Savannah.
“What can I do for you, Detective Klein?”
“It’s ‘sheriff’ now. But never mind that. I’m calling for a personal favor.”
“Anything.”
Klein raised his eyebrows. “Anything?”
“Of course. I know we didn’t hit it off at first. But then I thought you were a scheming lothario, after Livy.”
Klein nearly choked at the image of himself as a lothario. Was everyone delusional? “That’s all right, I thought you were lowlife scum.”
“I was.” Stark laughed. “Now that we’re done exchanging compliments, you were a good friend to my family when I didn’t even know I had one. Anything you want that I can give you, consider it yours.”
Klein was used to being everyone else’s friend, helping whenever help was needed. He had so rarely needed it, had even more rarely asked for it. He wasn’t quite sure how to handle being guaranteed anything right off the bat.
“Uh, your agent.”
“Andrew? What did he do? Scare someone to death again?”
“No, it’s not like that. I need an agent to handle a television script.”
“You’ve got a television script? Since when do you write?”
“Not me. A friend. Would your agent handle that or know someone who might?”
“Call him.” Garrett rattled off his agent’s number. “If anyone can help you, that someone is Andrew Lawton.”
“FAX MACHINE?”
Klein also discovered that Lawton didn’t spare breath or time for such niceties as verbs. He was required to puzzle out the meaning for himself.
A Sheriff in Tennessee Page 20
