Bound and Determined (19 page)

Or . . . was she upset because she’d been having sex with a virtual stranger? Did she want to know more about him just to say she did? It wasn’t logical, but maybe it was a woman thing. And Kerry wasn’t known for possessing lots of logic anyway. Warmth? Yes. She was giving and loyal and fun. Logic seemed farther down the list of her qualities.

“You want to know about my mom?” he asked—and could have kicked himself for doing it. Sex was just fine when conversation was relegated to the bedroom. Why mess with a good thing?

Because he was a schmuck and he wanted to see her smile again.

“It’d be nice to know something about you, other than your occupation.”

So his hunch had been right. But questions about his mother—it was a topic he never discussed, along with most of his personal life. His private business was private. He wasn’t keen on a trip down memory lane. The journey wasn’t pleasant. Being a woman’s lover didn’t entitle her to know everything about his life. But as Kerry buttered her toast with a vulnerable, almost lost expression, he realized that she’d been an open book about her life, given a lot of herself—starting with her virginity. The only thing he’d given her was a lot of smart-alecky comebacks and an erection.

He sighed. “My mom didn’t teach me to cook because she died when I was eleven, just like you. Private plane crash. She and my dad weren’t living together anymore. If she had lived, it would have been an ugly divorce.” Rafe tried to shrug, to shove back memories of his father shouting the same insult over and over, the one that always made her cry. “I got tired of hearing him call her a gold-digging Puerto Rican whore. I guess she did, too.”

Shock stilled her for a long moment. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to dredge up bad stuff with my question.” She took a bite of her omelet. “This is good. Thanks for cooking.”

Watching her shove the rest around on her plate, Rafe thought her compliment of his cooking was a thin way of changing the subject. For some reason, he didn’t mind so much telling her something about himself, now that he’d started.

“My mom was going back to Puerto Rico to see her priest, to ask how she might have her marriage annulled in the Church. I would have been with her if I hadn’t had a big test the day she left.”

Kerry gasped. “Oh, God. Were you at school when you heard?”

He nodded. “I’d just finished my English test. Aced it, too.” And he remembered the first time he’d cried after her death was the day he’d received his exam score . . . then realized the one person he could have shared it with, who would have been the proudest of him, was gone.

“That’s awful.” She took a small bite of her toast and ate it. “What about your dad? Did you two get along?”

Rafe abandoned the idea of eating and watched Kerry. The starch seemed to melt out of her with every word he spoke. If all he had to do to make her happy was keep talking, he could manage. Talking to Kerry was pretty easy, actually. Besides, whom would she tell? After Tuesday, he’d probably never see her again.

Scowling, he shoved that thought away.

“Not to this day. Dad was born to wealth. His grandmother was a Vanderbilt. When he got my mother pregnant while spending the summer in Puerto Rico, my maternal grandfather insisted they marry. I never knew why Dad hated me until she died.”

Kerry, too, pushed aside her plate, leaning across the table toward him. “Certainly he didn’t hate you. How can anyone hate their own child?”

“Ah, but he wasn’t convinced I was his. I look just like her, except the eyes, which seemed to come from nowhere. That was enough to convince my dad she’d been sleeping around while he got stuck with the bill. A week after Mom’s death he drove me to a hospital two states away for a paternity test.”

With a gasp, Kerry’s jaw dropped to her chest. “Did it matter at that point? You were eleven.”

“Sure it mattered. My mother had been poor and ethnic. If he could rid himself of his last link to her, all the better for him. But Mom had the last laugh. Test proved a ninety-nine point nine nine eight percent possibility that good ol’ Dad had indeed sired me. Pissed him off, too. But since he was stuck with me, he was determined to make a better man out of me.”

“At eleven?”

He shrugged. “It was a place to start.”

“That’s awful.”

“Dad decided I should go to Harvard and marry well, hobnob in the Hamptons. Wasn’t happening. I was never cooperative on my best days, but the following summer I discovered computers and everything changed. I played games, surfed the Internet when there wasn’t much out there to surf. I discovered chat rooms, wrote viruses. The more he hated it, the more I did it. It was so easy to shut him out. Of course, he ripped the phone jack out of my room. I just hung out with other guys who were plugged in and stopped coming home.”

The tone came out blasé, and Rafe prided himself on that. But he remembered that shitty summer, the first time he’d lived with his dad in almost two years. The constant shouting, followed by silences so cold they could freeze out a polar bear. That summer he’d cried himself to sleep more than once, missing a mother who would never come back, hating the father who hated him. God, he’d been twelve going on twenty.

“That’s awful.” She reached across the table for his hand.

“That’s a theme for you.” He shot her a halfhearted smile.

Continuing with the tale wasn’t on his list of favorite things to do, but Kerry was responding to him again, looking him in the eye, expressing her emotions using her sweet face and kiss-swollen mouth, touching him.

While he hated baring his childhood bullshit, he’d do it if it kept her near and responding.

“Long story short,” he concluded, “Dad was a bitter man who couldn’t accept that the marriage he thought had ruined him was his own fault. He fell into a bottle of gin while I was in high school and pretty much drowned. We didn’t talk much while I was in college. I refused to take money from him. With a few student loans and grants, I put myself through Columbia, which also pissed him off. In 2000 he put most of his fortune into dot-coms and they all went south. That sealed the deal. Today, he’s an alcoholic with only a fraction of his fortune left. I help him out sometimes, but he still likes to pretend I’m not his.”

“That’s . . . awful. I know I’ve said it before, but really, it is.” She covered her heart with a hand, eyes swimming with empathy. “His pride hurt you both so much.”

Encouraged, Rafe went on. “It’s one reason I wanted the
Standard National job so bad. With their check, I would be over the five-million-dollar mark just before my thirtieth birthday, and I’d have earned every dime on my own. And for every time he called me worthless, I’d now have a comeback. Five million of them, in fact.”

She stilled. “I took that away from you with this stupid abduction plan. Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“I want to go to the bank tomorrow and see Mr. Smikins, ask a few questions about Mark’s situation. The job will work itself out somehow, some way.” At least he hoped it would. This was one goal he would not, could not, let go of.

“I’m sure.” She gave him a sad, rueful smile. “Just don’t tell him you actually know me or think Mark might be innocent. He loathes Mark, but I’ve hounded and accused him since my brother’s arrest. I doubt he’ll be inviting me to Christmas dinner.”

Rafe couldn’t stop himself from touching her, gliding the backs of his fingers over her soft, bare cheek. “Your brother is lucky to have you. I’ve never known anyone so loyal.”

And that was the rub. As a kid, he’d have given up every one of his Hot Wheels and his Nintendo games to have anyone care about him like Kerry cared about Mark. Yes, his mom had loved him, but every memory he had of her was tainted with the anger and despair his father had constantly driven her to. As an adult, he saw that she’d spent a decade trying to make the bitter bastard love her. Instead, his father had only broken her heart a little more each day. With his mom gone, Benton Dawson III hadn’t had anyone else to torture, so Rafe had become his verbal whipping boy.

“I’m more than lucky to have Mark.” Kerry turned into his touch, kissed his fingertips. She sent him a wistful smile. “Tell me more about you.”

“You mean, like, facts?”

At her nod, he opened his mouth. He wasn’t sure where to start, now that she’d heard his major life trauma, such as it was. Why not the beginning?

“I was born May eighteenth, 1976, which I’m told makes me a Taurus. My—”

“May eighteenth? You’ll be thirty in less than two weeks?”

Like he wanted to be reminded of that. “Yeah. Lucky me.”

“You going to have a big bash with friends?”

“No.”

She frowned at his quick answer. “Why not? Even if you don’t want one, your friends should foist a party off on you. It’s their duty.”

“Not my friends. I’ve got a few I play basketball with during the week. You know, guys from the gym. My college roommate and I still get together for a two
A
.
M
. cup of coffee every now and then. I have a few friends on-line from around the world. None are the throw-a-bash type.”

“What about holidays? Who do you spend them with?”

“Holidays have never been a big deal to me. Turkey TV dinners and a new computer virus to solve give me plenty of cheer.”

Kerry frowned, her eyes going all soft. Rafe tried not to wince at how empty it must sound to her, given her bond with her brother and all. No wonder he hated Christmas.

Kerry frowned. “Who do you tell your secrets to? Who do you talk to when you really need it? What about
those
friends?”

Did he really have anyone he considered a friend in the true meaning of the word?

He shrugged. “I don’t have many secrets that need telling. I guess the closest person would be Regina, my assistant.”

“The pit bull on the phone?”

“Yeah. Been with me for four years.” He smiled. “She’s great at screening calls.”

“I’ll say. So you talk to her?”

Was that note in her voice curiosity or jealousy? After the shit she’d given him about Jason, he ought to give it back. But he couldn’t. “She’s part superassistant, part mom. She doesn’t let me forget my dry cleaning before a trip. About once a month she asks me if I’ve had someone clean my apartment lately. She’s got a couple kids, I think in college. Anyway, she pretty much views me as just an older version of her sons.”

“Oh.” That one syllable was rife with relief. “Met her kids?”

“No. I think the older one goes to NYU.” Rafe searched his memory for their names. “His name is Alan. No, Alex.” He frowned as he drew a blank. “Maybe he’s the younger one. I can’t remember.”

“So she has two boys?”

“Yeah.” Or three. He couldn’t remember that, either. Regina talked about them periodically, but he’d never really tuned in much. Yeah, she was more than an employee, but not someone to whom he wanted to spill his every secret.

“Is Regina married?”

She had been at one time. Right after she’d started working for him, she’d invited him to a party to celebrate her wedding anniversary. The twentieth? Rafe hadn’t gone, and he had no idea if she and what’s-his-name were still married. He figured it was none of his business.

Why did he suddenly feel like a real prick?

“I guess so.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

“What do you talk to Regina about?”

Besides business and schedules, equipment and invoices?

“She knows about my brush with the CIA.” Rafe latched on to that. Of course, he’d told her because doing so was ethical . . . but he had told her something he didn’t tell many. “She knows I like black coffee. Starbucks, if given a choice. She baked me a birthday cake a few years back.”

Kerry’s expression held . . . pity. She thought his life was empty; that was written all over her face. Well, it wasn’t. He had work, basketball, an occasional date, and his computers.

“You don’t have to look at me like that. I like my life. It’s uncomplicated.”

But he had no one special in his life. In her roundabout way, that’s what Kerry wanted to know. The truth was as much of a newsflash to him as it was to her. It had never bothered him before. Why did it bother him now?

“Didn’t mean to look at you like anything. Sorry.” She wore another smile so artificial, it could have come straight from DuPont.

So she didn’t believe him. Fine. In the end, no one’s opinion but his mattered anyway.

Scowling, Rafe left the table. He wandered to the bedroom, walked past the rumpled bed, to stare out the picture window at the gently rolling ocean.

His life had never bothered him because he never cultivated the people who wanted to get close. Pushing them away was easier, safer. In the end, someone would only disappoint
someone. There would be drama and crap. Or they would just drift apart, leaving a gouge in everyone’s heart.

Why
did
his life bother him now?

Kerry drifted into the bedroom then, her expression questioning. He met her gaze in silence as she made her way across the room and hugged him. Nothing else. No kisses, no preludes to sex. Just wrapping her arms around him, filtering soft fingers into his hair, breathing in tempo with him and offering warmth.

He wanted to resist. He didn’t need anyone. But withstanding her allure was like a computer junkie turning down the opportunity to debug a new Windows platform. In the end, he squeezed his eyes tightly shut and hugged back.

His insides felt as mushy as a bowl of oatmeal. He wanted to tell himself that he wasn’t clinging to her. It was a lie. How had one ringlet-laden, slightly off-center blonde reached so deep inside him that she’d dredged up both his ugly past and most of his guts all in the same day?

Now Rafe knew why being alone had never bothered him; he didn’t like being vulnerable. He’d never liked it. But he’d never had anything like this, like her. Never known anyone so impossible to resist. Most likely, Kerry would leave a hole in his heart after he’d gone. But for the first time, he wondered if having the experience, the memory of her warmth, just might be worth it.

K
erry watched Rafe wander out the bedroom’s double French doors, to the awaiting beach. Once his bare feet hit the sand, he started walking the shoreline, staring out at the water.