Judith McNaught (28 page)

"Like that a little better?"

108

"Well," she said, trying to sound severe despite the laughter still shimmering in her eyes, "I can forgive you for kidnapping and terrifying me, but it's a hanging offense to give me tuna while you eat steak." Julie

would have been content to eat in peaceful silence, but as she cut the first bite of steak he noticed the bruise on her wrist and asked her how she'd gotten it.

"That's a football injury," she explained.

"A what?"

"I was playing touch football last week and I got tackled."

"By some big halfback?"

"No, by a small boy and a big wheelchair."

"What?"

It was obvious that he craved conversation as much as he'd claimed, and Julie managed to give him an abbreviated version of the game while she ate. "It was my own fault," she finished, smiling at the memory.

"I love basketball, but I've never understood football. It's a game that makes no sense."

"Why do you say that?"

She waved her fork dismissively. "Consider the players, for a start. You have a fullback and a halfback

and a quarterback. But there's no three-quarters back. You have a tight end but no loose end." His burst

of laughter collided with her last sentence as she finished, "It's definitely not my game, but it doesn't matter, because my kids love it. One of my boys is probably going to go to the Wheelchair Olympics."

Zack noted the softness that crept into her voice and the glow that lit her eyes as she spoke of "my boys," and he continued to smile at her, marveling at her capacity for compassion and her sheer sweetness. Unwilling to let her stop talking, he cast about for another subject and asked, "What were you doing in Amarillo the day we met?"

"I'd gone there to see the grandfather of one of my handicapped students. He's quite wealthy, and I hoped to convince him to donate money to an adult literacy program I'm involved in at school."

"Did you succeed?"

"Yes. His check is in my purse."

"What made you decide to become a teacher?" he said, strangely unwilling to let her stop talking. He'd chosen the right topic, Zack realized when she gave him a heart-stopping smile and warmed to her subject with gratifying immediacy. "I love children, and teaching is an old and respectable profession."

"Respectable?" he repeated, startled by the subtle quaintness of the notion. "I didn't think being

'respectable' was of much concern to anyone these days. Why is it so important to you?"

Julie evaded the all-too-perceptive comment with a lift of her shoulders. "I'm a minister's daughter, and Keaton is a small town."

"I see," he said, but he didn't completely see at all.

"There are other professions that are just as respectable."

109

"Yes, but I wouldn't get to work with people like Johnny Everett and Debby Sue Cassidy."

Her face glowed at the mere mention of Johnny's name, and Zack was instantly curious about the male who seemed to mean more to her than her almost-fiancé. "Who is Johnny Everett?"

"He's one of my students—one of my favorite students, actually. He's paralyzed from the waist down.

When I first started teaching at Keaton, he never spoke and he was such a discipline problem that Mr.

Duncan wanted to send him away for special education with mentally handicapped kids. His mother

swore he could talk, but no one ever heard him, and since she never let him out of the house to play with the other kids, no one could be sure she wasn't trying to make her son seem
…
more normal. In class, Johnny would do disruptive things, like knocking books onto the floor or blocking the doorway during recess—small things—but they were constant and so Mr. Duncan decided to send him off to a special school."

"Who is Mr. Duncan?"

She wrinkled her small nose with such distaste that Zack grinned. "He's our principal."

"You don't like him very well, I take it?"

"He's not a bad man, he's just too rigid. He would have been right at home a hundred years ago when a student who spoke out in class was disciplined with a hickory stick."

"And Johnny was terrified of him, is that it?"

She giggled merrily and shook her head. "Actually, it was just the opposite. Quite by accident, I discovered that Johnny hated being treated with kid gloves. He
wanted
to be disciplined."

"How did you discover that?"

"One night, after school, I was in Mr. Duncan's office being chewed out, as usual."

"You get into trouble with the principal?"

"Constantly," she averred, her smile bursting like sunshine. "Anyway, on that particular day, Johnny was

waiting for his mother to pick him up, and he overheard what was happening. When I came out of the

principal's office, there he was—grinning at me from his wheelchair like I was some sort of hero. Then he said, 'You gonna get a detention, Miss Mathison?'

"I was so startled to hear him talk that I nearly dropped the armload of books I was carrying. But when

I assured him I wasn't going to get a detention, he looked disappointed in me. He said he guessed girls never got detention, just boys. Normal boys. That's when I knew!" When he looked baffled, Julie hastened to explain, "You see, he'd been so sheltered by his mother that he'd been dreaming of going to school like ordinary children, but the thing was, neither the other students nor the teachers were treating

him as if he was ordinary."

"What did you do?"

She leaned back against the sofa, her leg curled beneath her and said, "I did the only kind and decent thing I could do: I waited and watched him all the next day, and the moment he tossed a pencil at the little

110

girl in front of him, I pounced on him like it was a federal crime. I told him he'd deserved a detention for

weeks, and from now on he was getting one just like everyone else. Then I gave him not one, but two days' detention!"

Laying her head against the back of the sofa, she slanted him a soft smile and said, "Then I hung around

school to watch him and make sure I was right about what he was up to. He looked happy enough, sitting in the detention room with all the other little rabble rousers, but I couldn't be sure. That night, his mother called me on the phone and tore into me for what I'd done. She said I'd made him ill and that I was heartless and vicious. I tried to explain, but she hung up on me. She was frantic. He wasn't at school the next day."

When she fell silent, Zack prodded gently, "What did you do?"

"After school, I went over to his house to see him and talk to his mother. I did something else on a hunch; I took another student with me—Willie Jenkins. Willie is a totally macho kid, the class cutup, and

the hero of the third grade. He's good at everything, from football to baseball to cursing—at everything except," she clarified with a sideways grin, "singing.

When Willie talks, he sounds exactly like a bullfrog, and when he sings, he makes this loud, croaking noise that makes everybody start to laugh. Anyway, on

a hunch, I took Willie with me, and when I got to Johnny's house, he was in the backyard in a wheelchair. Willie had brought along his football—I think he sleeps with it—and he stayed outside. As I went into the house, Willie was trying to get Johnny to catch the football and he wouldn't even try. He looked at his mother and then he just sat there. I spent a half hour talking to Mrs. Everett. I told her I honestly thought we were ruining Johnny's chances to be happy by treating him as if he were too delicate to do anything but sit in a wheelchair. I'd finished talking and still hadn't convinced her, when all of a sudden, there were shouts and a crash from outside and we both ran out into the backyard. There was Willie," Julie said, her eyes shining at the memory,

"flat on his backside in a heap of overturned trash cans, clutching the football with a grin on his face a mile wide. It seems that Johnny couldn't
catch
the football very well but—according to Willie—Johnny has a right arm as good as John Elway's! Johnny was beaming and Willie told him that he wanted Johnny on his team, but they'd need to practice, so Johnny could learn to catch as well as pass."

When she fell silent, Zack asked softly, "And do they practice?"

She nodded, her expressive features glowing with delight. "They practice football, along with the rest of

Willie's team, every day. Then they go to Johnny's house where
Johnny
coaches
Willie
with his schoolwork. It turned out that although Johnny didn't participate in school, he was absorbing everything like a sponge. He's extremely bright and now that he has things to strive for, he never quits trying. I've never seen so much courage—so much

determination." A little embarrassed by her emotional enthusiasm,

Julie lapsed into silence again, and concentrated on her meal.

When he was finished eating, Zack settled back against the sofa and propped his ankle on the opposite

knee, watching the flames leaping and dancing on the hearth, as he gave his dinner companion a chance to finish her meal without further interruptions from him. He tried to concentrate on the next stage of his journey, but in his state of sated relaxation he Was more inclined to dwell on the amazing—and perverse—quirk of fate that had caused Julie Mathison to be sitting across from him. Throughout all the

long weeks of working out every detail of his escape

—throughout the endless nights he'd lain in his cell,
111

dreaming of his first night in this house—not once had he ever imagined that he'd be other than alone.

For

a thousand reasons, it would have been far better if he
were
alone, but now that she was here, he couldn't just lock her in a room, bring her food, and pretend she wasn't. After the last hour in her company, however, he was sorely tempted to do exactly that, because she was forcing him to recognize

and reflect on all the things he had missed in his life and the things that were going to be lacking in it for all

time. At the end of a week, he'd be on the run again, and where he was going, there'd be no luxurious mountain cabins with cozy fires; there'd be no more poignant conversations about handicapped little boys with prim third-grade teachers who happened to have eyes like an angel and a smile that could melt stone. He couldn't remember ever seeing a woman's entire face light up the way hers had when she talked about those children! He'd seen ambitious women light up at the possibility of getting an acting role

or a piece of jewelry from him; he'd seen the world's finest actresses—on stage and off, in bed and out of it—give thoroughly convincing performances of passionate tenderness and caring, but until tonight, he had

never,
ever
witnessed the real thing.

When he was eighteen years old, sitting in the cab of a semitruck, bound for Los Angeles and almost strangling on tears he refused to shed, he'd vowed never, ever to look back, to wonder how his life might

have been "if only things had been different." Yet, now, at the age of thirty-five, when he was hardened beyond recall by the things he'd done and been and seen, he looked at Julie Mathison and succumbed to the temptation to wonder. As he lifted the brandy snifter to his lips, he watched a log tumble off the grate

in a shower of sparks and wondered what would have happened if he'd met someone like her when he was young. Would she have been able to save him from himself, to teach him to forgive, to soften his heart, to fill up the empty spaces in his life? Would she have been able to give him goals greater and more

rewarding than the acquisition of money and power and recognition that had shaped his life? With someone like Julie in his bed, would he have experienced something better, deeper, more profound,

more lasting, than the mindless pleasure of an orgasm?

Belatedly, the sheer unlikelihood of his musings hit him, and he marveled at his own folly. Where in the hell would he have ever met someone like Julie Mathison? Until he was eighteen, he'd been surrounded

by servants and relatives, whose very presence were daily reminders of his social superiority. Back then, the daughter of a small-town minister, such as Julie, would never have entered his sphere.

No, he wouldn't have met her then, and he damned sure wouldn't have met someone like her in Hollywood. But what if he had, by some quirk of fate, met Julie there? Zack wondered, frowning with concentration. If she'd somehow survived unscathed in that sea of social depravity, unbridled self-indulgence, and raging ambition that was Hollywood, would he have really
noticed
her, or would she

have been completely eclipsed in his eyes by more glamorous, showy, worldly women? If she'd walked into his office on Beverly Drive and asked him for a screen test, would he have noticed that lovely fine-boned face of hers, those incredible eyes, that lithesome figure? Or would he have overlooked all that because she wasn't spectacularly beautiful and built like an overfilled hourglass? If she spent an hour

in his office talking to him there as she had done tonight, would he have truly appreciated her wit, her intelligence, her unaffected candor? Or would he have hustled her out because she wasn't talking about

"the business" nor giving any indication that she'd like to go to bed with him, which would have been his

two primary interests.

Zack rolled his glass between his hands as he contemplated his answers to those rhetorical questions,

trying to be brutally honest with himself. After several moments, he decided that he
would
have noticed

Julie Mathison's delicate features, glowing skin, and striking eyes. After all, he was an expert judge of beauty, conventional or otherwise, so he would not have overlooked hers. And, yes, he
would
have appreciated her straightforward candor, and he
would
have been as touched by her compassion and gentleness, her sheer sweetness as he had been tonight. He would
not,
however, have given her a screen