Judith McNaught (55 page)

"If you want dignity, don't shack up with escaped convicts."

Julie felt as if he'd hit her in the stomach. Without a word, she got out of the car and slammed the door.

She was reaching for the doorbell when Ted jerked her arm away. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"I've already told you the only thing I lied about that could get me into legal trouble if it were known,"

Julie said, jabbing at the doorbell. "Now I'm going to tell Carl and you at the same time what you're obviously
dying
to know. After that, there's nothing to tell."

Carl answered the doorbell and Julie marched passed him into the slate foyer and spun around.

Oblivious to Katherine who was already halfway down the winding staircase, she glared at a stunned Carl and said bitterly, "Ted tells me the two of you have figured out that I'm lying about everything. He tells me if I want dignity and privacy, I shouldn't

'shack up' with escaped convicts, and I'm sure he's right!

So here it is, the whole truth: I told the FBI that Zack did not physically abuse me in any way, and he didn't! He risked his life trying to save mine, and not even you two, who obviously despise him no matter what I say, can twist that into 'physical abuse.' He did not hurt me. He did not rape me. I
slept
with him.

I slept with him and I would have gone on sleeping with him for the rest of my life if he'd have wanted me

to! Are you satisfied now? Is that enough for you? I hope it is, because that's all I have left to tell you! I don't know where Zack is! I don't know where he's going! I wish to God I did—"

Carl pulled her into his arms and glared at Ted.

"What the hell is the matter with you, anyway, upsetting

her like this?"

Ted was so stunned that he actually looked to his ex-wife for support, but Katherine only shook her head and said, "Ted is very good at making women who love him cry. He doesn't mean to, he just can't forgive us when we break his rules. That's why he's a cop and that's why he's going to be a lawyer. He likes rules. He loves rules! Julie," she said, taking her arm, "come into the library with me. You're exhausted, which neither of your brothers seem to realize."

Following behind them, Ted glared at Carl and said,

"I did not intend to upset her, I simply told her not to hide anything from me!"

"You could have tried using a little tact instead of demanding answers and making her feel like a tramp!"

Carl bit out as he strode into the library with Ted beside him.

Julie sank into a chair and gaped in guilty surprise as an unprecedented family feud suddenly erupted in full force with Katherine in the lead: "You both have a lot of nerve prying into Julie's personal life and sitting in judgment on her," she informed them angrily as she marched over to a mahogany liquor cabinet

and poured wine into four glasses. "Of all the monumental hypocrisy! She may think you're both saints

because you've always made sure she thinks that, but I know better." She picked up Julie's glass and her own and left the other two sitting on the cabinet.

"Ted, you took my clothes off in this very room before

we had our first official date, and I was only nineteen years old!"

Julie automatically accepted the wine as Katherine pointed at a burgundy leather chesterfield and indignantly reminded him, "You took off my clothes and you made love to me on that same sofa! As I recall, you were very pleased and surprised when you realized I was still a virgin. An hour later, you made love to me again in the swimming pool and again in—"

"I remember!" Ted snapped, stalking over to the liquor cabinet and picking up the other two glasses of

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wine. He thrust one of them into Carl's hand and said, "Unless I miss my guess, you're going to need this

in about ten seconds," just as Katherine confirmed his prediction and rounded on his hapless elder brother:

"And you, Carl, you're a
long
way from being any saint! Before you were married you slept with—"

"Leave my wife out of this," he warned tightly.

"I wasn't going to mention Sara," Katherine said with cool derision. "I was thinking about Ellen Richter

and Lisa Bartlesman, when you were in your senior year of high school, and then there was Kaye Sommerfeld, when you were nineteen, and—"

Julie's horrified, laughing plea caused them all to turn toward her. "Stop it! Please," she said, caught somewhere between amusement and limp

exhaustion, "just stop it. We've all ruined enough illusions

about each other tonight."

Ted turned to Katherine and raised his glass in a mocking toast. "As usual, Katherine, you've managed

to criticize and embarrass the hell out of everyone else while leaving yourself above reproach."

The antagonism seemed to drain from her. "Actually, I have the most to be ashamed of."

"Because you stooped to sleeping with me, I presume?" he said with bored indifference.

"No," she said quietly.

"Then why?" he demanded.

"You know the answer to that."

"Surely not because our marriage failed?" he scoffed.

"No, because I
made
that marriage fail."

His jaw clenched as he angrily rejected the softly spoken—and astonishing—admission. "Why the hell are you hanging around in Keaton anyway?" he snapped instead.

Katherine turned back to the tray of drinks and inserted a corkscrew into a second bottle of chardonnay. "Spencer says that I have a subconscious need to come back here before I marry him in

order to confront all the local censure that I ran away from when our marriage went on the rocks. He says that's the only way I'll regain my self-respect."

"Spencer," Ted pronounced with a disdainful glance,

"sounds like an asshole."

To his amazement, his fiery ex-wife gave an infectious laugh as she turned and toasted him with her glass.

"What's so funny?" he demanded.

"Spencer," Katherine explained unsteadily, "has always reminded me of you…"

Julie put her untouched glass of wine aside and stood up. "You'll have to argue without me here to referee. I'm going to bed. I
have
to get some sleep."

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Pulling on a robe that Katherine had lent her, Julie walked quietly downstairs and found Katherine in the

library, watching the 10 P.M. news.

"I didn't expect to see you down here until morning,"

Katherine said with a surprised smile as she stood up. "I made up a dinner tray for you though, just in case. I'll get it."

"Was there anything important on the news?" Julie asked, unable to keep the apprehension from her voice.

"Nothing about Zachary Benedict," Katherine assured her. "You were a main topic of the state and national news, however—your return home from captivity, apparently safe and unharmed, I mean."

When Julie dismissed that with a shrug, Katherine put her hands on her hips and teased, "Do you have any idea how famous you've become?"

"Notorious, you mean," Julie joked, falling into their habitual friendly banter and feeling vastly better than she had in the last two days.

Nodding toward a stack of newspapers and

magazines on the lamp table beside Julie's chair, Katherine

said, "I saved those for you in case you wanted them for a scrapbook or something. Look through them while I get your tray, or have you seen them already?"

"I haven't seen a newspaper or a magazine in a week," Julie said, reaching for the magazine on top and

turning it over to the cover. "Oh good God!" she exploded, torn between anger and laughter as she gazed

at her own face on the cover of
Newsweek
magazine beneath a lurid headline that read, "Julie Mathison—Partner or Pawn?" She tossed that aside and flipped through the rest of the stack, astonished to see pictures of herself plastered across the front pages of dozens of national magazines and newspapers.

Katherine came back in carrying a tray and put it on the table in front of her.

"The whole town has rallied around you," Katherine said with a brief glance at the
Newsweek
cover.

"Mayor Addelson wrote an editorial for the
Keaton
Crier
reminding everyone that no matter what the big-city press says about you, we know you here, and we know you'd never 'take up with' a criminal like

Zachary Benedict. I think those were his exact words."

Julie's smile wobbled a little and she laid the paper aside. "But you know better. As you heard me tell Carl and Ted, I did 'take up' with him."

"At the time, Addelson was rebutting that truck driver's statement that you seemed to be

collaborating

willingly in Benedict's escape—frolicking in the snow and all that. Julie," she said hesitantly, "do you want

to talk to me about it—about him?"

Looking at her friend, Julie remembered the confidences they'd exchanged over the years. They were

the same age and had become fast friends almost from the moment Ted introduced them to each other.

When Ted and Katherine's marriage fell apart, Katherine had gone back to college and then moved to

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Dallas. Until now, she'd adamantly refused to return to Keaton, but Julie had visited her often in Dallas at Katherine's insistence. The special friendship that had sprung up instantaneously had somehow survived

time and separation, and it was as vital and natural as it had always been. "I think I
need
to talk about him," Julie admitted after a pause. "Maybe then I'll get him out of my system and be able to start thinking

of the future again." Having said that much, she lifted her hands palm up and said helplessly, "I don't even

know how to begin."

Katherine curled up on the sofa as if she had all the time in the world and suggested a starting point:

"What's Zachary Benedict like in real life?"

"What's he like?" Julie mused, drawing a knitted afghan over her lap. For a moment she stared past Katherine's shoulder, trying to think of how to describe Zack, then she said, "He's hard, Katherine.

Very

hard. But he's gentle, too. Sometimes, I actually ached inside from the sweetness of the things he did and

said." She trailed off and then tried again, with examples. "During the first two days I actually thought he

might kill me if I defied him. On the third day, I managed to escape from him on a snowmobile I found in

the garage…"

Three hours later, Julie finished, having told Katherine almost everything with the exception of intimate

moments, which Julie didn't attempt to hide, but didn't describe in specifics either.

Katherine had listened in complete absorption, interrupting only for clarification, laughing at things that

were funny like their snowball fight, gaping in disbelief at Zack's jealousy of Patrick Swayze, frowning at

other times—sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with disapproval. "What a story!" she said when Julie

finished. "If it was anyone but you telling me this, I wouldn't believe a word of it. Did I ever tell you I used

to have a big crush on Zachary Benedict? Later I simply thought of him as a murderer. But now…"

She

broke off as if unable to put her thoughts into words, and then she finished, "No wonder you can't stop thinking of him. I mean, the story doesn't have an ending, it just sort of hangs there, unfinished. If he's innocent, then the story is supposed to have a happy ending with the real murderer going to jail. The good guy isn't supposed to spend the rest of his life living like a hunted animal."

"Unfortunately," Julie said grimly, "this is real life, not the movies, and that's the way the story is going to

end."

"It's still a lousy ending." Katherine insisted. "And that's all there is to it?" Repeating the last thing that Julie had told her, Katherine summarized,

"Yesterday at dawn, you both got up, he walked you out to the

car, and then you drove away? Just like that?"

"I wish it had been 'just like that'!" Julie admitted unhappily. "That's how Zack wanted it to be, and I knew it. Unfortunately," she added, trying to keep her voice steady, "I couldn't seem to do it that way.

Not only did I start to cry, I made everything even worse by telling him I loved him. I knew he didn't want to hear it because I'd blurted it out the night before, and he pretended he didn't hear me.

Yesterday,

it was worse. Not only did I humiliate myself by telling him I loved him, but he—he—" Julie trailed off in

shame.

"What did he do?" Katherine asked gently.

Forcing herself to look at her friend and to keep her voice emotionless, she said, "He smiled like an adult does to a foolish child and informed me that I did not love him, that I only thought I did because I don't

know the difference between love and sex. Then he told me to go home where I belong and forget all about him. Which is exactly what I intend to do."

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Astonishment and bewilderment furrowed

Katherine's forehead into a frown. "What an odd, ugly way

for him to behave," she said sharply, "given the sort of man you portrayed him to be until then."

"I thought it was, too," Julie said miserably,

"particularly when I was almost certain that he cared about

me. Sometimes, there was a look in his eyes, as if he

—" She broke off in disgust at her gullibility and said

angrily, "If I could go back to yesterday morning and do it over again, I'd pretend I was perfectly happy to be going. I'd thank him for a great adventure, then I'd drive away and leave him standing there! That's what I should have—" She trailed off, imagining the scene in her mind, then very slowly she shook her head, negating the whole idea, struck by a realization that made her feel much better. "That would have been an incredibly stupid, wrong thing to do," she said aloud.

"Why? You'd have your pride," Katherine pointed out.

"Yes, but I would have spent the rest of my life thinking he might have loved me, too, and that if we'd