“I wouldn’t blame you, I make them myself,” Ty said laconically. “My family’s antics were so outrageous, they turned themselves into cartoons who can only be comprehended by lampooning them. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pope himself has told a Howe joke or two.”
Shannen remembered how proudly Tynan had talked about his family nine years ago, before the Howes’ infamous fall from grace. His father, the venerable congressman; his brother, the brilliant accounting executive who’d made his company stock a Wall Street darling. And the other Howes, seemingly equally gifted and talented, who’d turned out to be equally conniving and corrupt.
But back then the Howes had sounded like superbeings to her, so very far removed from the Cullens, who eked out a livelihood from their West Falls diner. She had been so sure that Ty’s true reason for breaking up with her had been based on class and status, not on her age. That it wasn’t that she was too young for him, but not good enough for him, a wealthy, worthy Howe.
“It must’ve been—” she paused, searching for a tactful word but could do no better than “—strange for you, when everything…happened.”
“It was strange when everything happened.” He repeated her tortured attempt at diplomacy with a low rumble of laughter. “What’s also strange is hearing you—Straight-Shooting Spitfire Shannen—suddenly go ‘weaselly’ with words.”
He’d turned her own gibe back on her. He was deliberately provoking her. She should stalk off without a backward glance, after throwing the tube of ointment in his face.
But empathy for what had befallen him through no fault of his own kept her still. And standing there, she felt the heat emanating from his body, smelled his clean male scent.
She resisted a powerful urge to take the one step needed to close the small gap between them. To put her arms around him and lean against his solid warmth. To offer him comfort. And more…
She knew she couldn’t, she shouldn’t.
And she didn’t. Frustration surged through her. She felt bone tired and suddenly hostile enough to start swearing.
Shannen looked down at the tube of ointment in her hand. “How am I supposed to explain where this came from? An all-night drugstore I found in the jungle?”
She heard the edge in her voice. That baiting, quarrelsome edge. As if she were trying to pick a fight with him.
To prolong their time together, to keep from touching him? Shannen jerked her head up and saw Ty watching her. The way he did when he was behind the camera. Always watching her.
He arched his brows.
She guessed what he was thinking. “We are not like a soap opera couple!” she snapped.
“If you say so.” He gave her ponytail a quick tug. “Tell them you brought the ointment with you from home. Smuggled it in with your personal hygiene stuff.”
“Lauren will know that I didn’t.”
“Say that you don’t tell her everything. We both know that’s the truth.” He leaned down and lightly kissed her forehead. “Good night, Shannen. Sleep well.”
“I will,” she whispered after him.
“Lucky you. I know I won’t.”
“And remember, no more contact between us.” Shannen’s whisper, as adamant as it was soft, followed him as she walked away from him. “None at all. This is over, Tynan. You stay on your side of the camera and I’ll stay on mine. Do you hear me? I mean it.”
“I hear you, Shannen.” His soft laughter echoed in the tropical night.
His laughter was long gone by the time he reached his tent. Ty clutched the rejected bottle of iced tea in his hand; he’d left behind the sandwich and cookies for whatever jungle scavenger should happen to find them. Unlike Shannen, the gulls or animals wouldn’t turn down free food.
He’d begun to ruminate over her refusal to accept the meal during his late-night walk across the island. How she had resisted the temptation to eat, though he knew how hungry she was.
Why do you want to help me to cheat? Her words kept replaying in his head like the maddening hook of an advertising jingle.
Worse, he faced the fact that until she’d refused the food and made her pointed reproach, he hadn’t considered what he’d done to be cheating at all. What he’d wanted to do was to help her. Period.
She was hungry and he wanted to feed her was the way he’d seen it from the moment he issued his decree for her to meet him tonight. If she should end up in his arms, so much the better, but his primary motive had been to give her food and drink.
To help her cheat.
Ty grimaced. Was this how it started for the others in his family? Doing something that seemed perfectly reasonable—even good!—when it was obvious to others from the start that it wasn’t?
Did the Howes possess a defect in the ethics gene? Or was it an insidious element absorbed from growing up a Howe. His honesty gene could be afflicted, too.
Maybe that would explain why he had lied to Shannen about losing all his money. He and his mother and sister Jessie Lee all remained independently wealthy despite the rest of the family’s travails, thanks to their own irrevocable trust funds.
Or had his reply been a self-protective response after hearing Shannen admit she’d liked the idea that he was very rich? Her words resounded in his head and he still wasn’t sure if she’d been serious or sardonic when she uttered them.
From the time he had first learned that some people were nice to you only because they wanted what your money could buy—be it candy or baseball cards or jewelry or a luxurious life as a pampered wife—Ty had been on the alert.
Who knew if he’d been dishonest or cautious when he told Shannen that whopper tonight? Certainly he didn’t.
Nature versus nurture. Had that conundrum ever been solved? He should offer himself up to be studied, Ty thought grimly. For the past seven years—since the first family scandal broke, bringing down the others in turn like a crashing line of dominoes—he had seen himself as a good Howe. The one too good to be saddled with the perfidious Howe name, so he’d become a Hale, determined to make it a name to be proud of.
He wasn’t feeling proud of himself now. Shannen wanted to win Victorious fairly, and though it had been unintentional, he’d tried to sabotage her.
But had it been unintentional? The question rocked him. Had he deliberately tempted her because he didn’t want her to win? And was he also testing her by pretending he’d lost his portion of the Howe fortune? After all, she was in this game to win a million dollars. He’d been filming what she was willing to go through to get it.
He did want Shannen to win, Ty insisted to himself. Or more precisely, he didn’t want to see her hurt, and it surely would be hurtful for her to be voted out of the game.
But if she were to win…
He could envision the aftermath of a win easily, simply by recalling past winners in the early popularity days of the reality game shows. The winner would be whisked between New York and Los Angeles for appearances on TV talk and radio shows. There might be offers from companies to star in commercials. If the winner was a girl, a plethora of men’s magazines would dangle plenty of cash as an incentive to pose nude.
Ty’s blood chilled at that thought. Cortnee could accept a nude centerfold offer and he wouldn’t blink an eye; he wouldn’t even buy the issue. But if Shannen were to pose nude…
He pulled off his clothes and threw them on the ground, cursing as he swung himself down on his hammock to lie inside his sleeping bag.
For the past nine years Shannen had been lost to him, and now that he’d found her again, now that he knew she felt something for him—and her responses to him definitely told him that—he was not going to share her with zillions of slavering males who pinned a nude layout of her on their walls.
He closed his eyes, picturing her naked. A sweet torture that guaranteed he wouldn’t be falling asleep anytime soon.
As he lay there, common sense eventually reasserted itself. Shannen wouldn’t pose nude for any magazine. She wouldn’t take a nibble of a sand
wich when she was hungry and she wouldn’t strip naked for a centerfold layout.
But if she won the game, her life would definitely change from her current one as a hospital nutritionist in the small town of West Falls. She claimed it wouldn’t, but he knew otherwise.
Money changed everything. And why would a beautiful young woman, enjoying a taste of fun-filled celebrity, want to make room in her life for him?
He might use the name Hale, but Shannen knew the disreputable truth about his family. Jessie Lee had been right on target when she’d said that nobody in their right mind would want to carry the burden inflicted by the scandal-ridden, joke-provoking name Howe.
Not only was Shannen in her right mind, she had done quite well without him since they’d parted.
And now, just as their relationship was heating up, the game was ending. Their time together on the island was drawing to a close.
Would she agree to even see him, when the game was over?
Possibly…if she lost. Fame was fleeting and fickle when it came to winners and losers. If she were merely one of the losers, instead of The Winner, he would at least have an opportunity to convince her that she wanted him— Tynan Hale—in her life.
If she won…
Ty thought of all the new people she would meet, the new men she would meet. Men who hadn’t called her “white-trash jailbait”—a slur she clearly couldn’t forget; men who didn’t come saddled with a name and family eponymous with corruption and public disgust.
If Shannen won Victorious, she would be lost to him again, this time forever. The more he considered it, the more Ty was convinced that was true.
No more contact between us. This is over. I mean it, she’d said tonight, and though he’d glibly replied that he heard her, Ty knew he hadn’t, not really, not until right now.
Now the impact of her words reverberated within him. She was ending their relationship before it had a chance to evolve into intimacy, exactly what he had done nine years ago. He hadn’t relented then; he couldn’t have. Didn’t she understand that?
He mentally argued his case against making love to a seventeen-year-old girl. Maybe if he’d been a seventeen-year-old boy, the playing field would’ve been even, but he had been a responsible adult….
So he’d stuck to his decision back then.
Suppose that Shannen stuck to hers, whether winning or losing this game. And just in case that wasn’t torment enough, he could also ponder the timing of her “no more contact” edict.
She had issued her decree after he’d informed her that he was no longer rich. Suppose he had said yes, his inheritance remained intact, and that due to savvy investing, he was even richer today than he had been nine years ago? That he worked as a cameraman because it was interesting and challenging, not because he needed the job to pay his bills?
Would she have been open to “more contact” if she’d known that?
Five
“Ty, what’d you think about that shocker revelation last night? You know, that Jed secretly slept with both Keri and Lucy and then voted against them, like it meant nothing to him? Which it probably didn’t, the rat!” By the sound of her voice, production assistant Heidi was highly indignant.
Ty was testing camera angles, adjusting light filters while waiting for the twins to emerge from their tent. Heidi flitted around him like a manic mosquito, talking nonstop, holding his coffee for him.
He said nothing, hoping she would take the hint and keep quiet. It was barely dawn—he’d slept about a total of an hour last night, and he hadn’t given a single thought to the “shocker revelation” about Jed, Keri and Lucy.
With a long-suffering sigh, he reached for his coffee. Heidi handed it to him, chatting all the while. He’d obviously been too subtle with his hint; she hadn’t picked it up.
“The other PAs, Kevin, Adam and Debbie—think it’s possible that Cortnee made it all up, to turn the others against Jed,” continued Heidi. “I mean, the fact she’s still in the game when she’s never been able to do anything to help win a single contest, and that she seemed like such an airhead at the beginning—well, I guess this proves that she’s not, doesn’t it?”
Heidi waited expectantly for Ty to answer. Since he hadn’t been paying attention to a thing she’d said, all he could offer was, “Huh?”
“Cortnee turned out to be shrewd,” explained Heidi. “She figured that Jed would talk the others into voting her out, so she had to strike first. Saying Jed had sex with Keri and Lucy guaranteed that the twins would turn on him. Did you see the looks on their faces when Cortnee dropped her bombshell? Shannen looked ready to puke in disgust, and Lauren—well, she was devastated, poor thing.”
The mention of the twins immediately caught Ty’s attention. He well knew Shannen’s “ready-to-puke-in-disgust” look but, “Lauren was devastated?” he echoed. He’d definitely missed that.
“Well, yeah. It’s obvious Lauren has this big crush on Jed, and to hear that he—”
“You’re sure it’s not Shannen with the crush?” Ty cut in, feeling his face flame with horror. He sounded like an insecure eighth-grader!
He was truly drowning in the rocky seas of lovesickness with that inane question. He knew Shannen didn’t have a crush on Jed, yet he couldn’t stop himself from seeking reassurance that she didn’t. Oh, he was a lovesick fool, all right!
But Heidi thought he was making a joke, and she laughed obligingly. “Some crush that would be! Shannen usually looked at Jed like she wished she could dismember him.”
“She looks at a lot of people that way,” murmured Ty. Himself included, at times.
“Yeah, she does. But Lauren’s so sweet, and remember how she’d just gaze at Jed and praise him and stand up for him when the others dumped on him? There was no mistaking which twin was which when it came to Jed.”
“Do you think Shannen knows her sister has this crush on Jed?” asked Ty, his interest so piqued that he didn’t bother to ponder what would’ve previously been unfathomable to him—that he would ever stand around eagerly gossiping with a production assistant.
“That’s what we’d all like to know!” cried Heidi. “If you stop and think about it, we’ve never heard a personal conversation between the twins in the whole time we’ve been filming. We know all kinds of things about the others because they talk about themselves all the time. But the twins—zip, nada, nothing.”
“Aside from mentioning the diner their family owns and occasionally quoting their grandmother, neither one has revealed anything about herself or her sister,” Ty agreed.
Though he was glad Shannen didn’t feel the need to bare her soul in front of the cameras, it was driving him crazy that she didn’t feel the need to bare her soul to him away from the cameras, either. She remained a closed book, one he wanted to open.
“The twins just stick to making comments on what’s happening on the island,” said Heidi. “Do you think they’re hiding something?”
“Um, hard to say,” he mumbled. Shannen was already keeping a lot of secrets—their past relationship, his true identity, their clandestine meetings in the island grove. But was she hiding something else?
“Kevin says the twins are masters of deception,” Heidi reported.
“Maybe not deception.” Ty’s tone was thoughtful. “But certainly discreet. Their personal conversations obviously take place when the cameras aren’t around.”
“Wouldn’t it be cool to shoot a scene of Shannen asking Lauren about Jed?” enthused Heidi. “I wish there was a way for us to interact with them and suggest it, but then we’d be accused of interference and get fired. Oh, look, here comes—” A twin emerged from the tent. “—one of them, although I can’t guess which.”
Ty knew exactly who it was. Lauren. He filmed her going to the spring for her morning ablutions, all the while anticipating the pleasure and pain of seeing Shannen again. The two feelings had become so intertwined, he could hardly separate them.
But as an endlessly long hour passed, his a
nticipation was supplanted by mind-numbing boredom.
The contestants noticed Shannen’s absence, too.
“I can’t believe your sister is still sleeping,” said Konrad.
He, Rico and Cortnee sat around the fire with Lauren, their cups filled with the morning brew of boiled water flavored with two used tea bags shared among them. Breakfast was always the leanest meal of the day.
“You don’t think she’s, like, dead, do you?” Rico sounded only half-jesting. “Maybe someone ought to check on her.”
“She’s sick,” declared Cortnee. “She was gone a really, really, really long time last night. When she came back, she sounded like she was gagging or sobbing or something. I asked her if she was okay and she said yes, but I didn’t believe her.”
Ty almost dropped his camera. Shannen had been sobbing—as in crying? He watched the entire production crew come alive with curiosity and felt the protective urge to drive them away. So he could go to Shannen inside that pitiful tent and…
Shannen crawled out of the tent at that moment.
“Shannen!” Lauren jumped to her feet and rushed over to her twin. “Cortnee said you were sick last night. Why didn’t you wake me up?”
Quick as lightning, Reggie Ellis moved in with his camera for a super close-up.
Shannen’s actions were just as swift and instinctive. She put her hand over the camera lens. “Get that thing away from me,” she ordered, “and don’t ever shove it in my face again.”
A stunned Reggie stopped filming and stared mutely at the equally amazed contestants and crew.
“Cut!” ordered Ty, who was the senior crew member at the camp at this early hour. It was an unnecessary command, since both Reggie and Paul, the only two with cameras besides himself, weren’t shooting anyway.
Ty walked over to Shannen. “Are you all right?” he asked quietly, restraining the urge to touch her arm, her face, her hair, just to have some physical contact with her, however slight.
All in the Game Page 7
