Hooked (16 page)

B
enny stayed on the island expecting the worst, but no one banged down his door and hauled him off to jail. No word from Colin that any client had flipped out and gone postal. And because he was home with Eileen, allowing her to make him happy, he heard no more jealous rages. All the bad things were behind him. Benny was sure.

Then Melody called, and he almost suffocated from the weight of the black cloud bearing down on him.

“I won’t tell you where I am,” she said, “but my neighbor Joe called to tell me the police came to my apartment. They showed him a picture of Serena. He recognized her from the paper. Then they showed one that from his description sounded like you. I threw away my cell phone, and I’m using one I bought with minutes. I can’t stay away forever, Benny. I’ll have to tell the truth eventually, then my parents will find out what I’ve done, and it’ll kill them. I’m screwed either way. They’ll say I’m an accessory to murder by covering it up. What should I do?”

Benny shuffled to the bathroom and fumbled in the medicine cabinet where Eileen kept a stash of prescription antacid. Nothing over the counter was going to smother the continuous inferno blazing in his stomach. “Don’t say anything now, honey. Stay where you are for a while. I’ll send you money. Give me a little time, okay?”

“I don’t need money, but I’m not sure how long I can hold out. If they know what’s going on, then pretty soon the whole thing will be out in the open, and I’ll go to jail for lying. My parents will disown me.” She started sniffling.

“A few more days, a week tops. I’ll make it worth your while. For Benny, please.”

“Money won’t matter if I’m in prison. Maybe I can plea bargain. You know, like they do on Law and Order.”

Jesus
, he thought. “Take care, honey. Call me in a couple of days. I’ll know better what to do. Just don’t let them know where you are.” Benny hung up before he heard another word. He went into the bedroom and collapsed on the bed. He didn’t want Eileen to know about this. Not yet. Not until he figured out what to do. One thing came to mind, but he doubted it would work. What did he have to lose? He picked up the phone and called Mario Russo.

L
inc stood in the doorway of Tawny’s building.
Get in your car and go home.
But he couldn’t. He had to see her, talk to her. He pressed the buzzer. No answer. She said she had errands, but that was hours ago. He pressed the buzzer again and waited a full thirty seconds before she answered.

“Who is it?”

“Walsh.” Silence stifled the street sounds. “Buzz me in.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Buzz me in and I’ll tell you.”

“Please, Walsh. Go away.”

“If you don’t let me in, I’ll push every button on the panel. Tony will let me in; someone will.”

This time he waited longer. He had his finger on Ambrosio’s bell when the door buzzed. He pushed it open and bounded up the stairs.

She stood at the open door, without makeup, wearing a pair of baggy shorts and a tank top, no bra. Flip-flops on her feet. She’d pinned her hair up, but tendrils fell carelessly around her face. She was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen.

“This is a mistake,” she said.

“I don’t think so, and neither do you.” He kicked the door closed and moved into her.

“It’s lust. Plain, unadulterated lust.”

“It’s more, but it’s that too.”

“I can’t fight it, Walsh. I want to, but I can’t.”

“Then don’t.” He put his arms around her and drew her to him. She didn’t resist. He kissed her hair and her eyes and her mouth, and she returned the kiss with the same passion. When their lips parted, he held her close, his face buried in her hair. She smelled of soap and a hint of the citrusy jasmine perfume she always wore.

“I want you more than I’ve ever wanted any woman. So much, in fact, that it physically hurts. But that’s not all I want from you.” He lifted her chin, and they stared into each other’s eyes. “Do you understand?”

“I don’t understand any of this.” She nestled her head in the crook of his neck. “I’m not used to these feelings, and I never thought I’d feel them. I’m confused, Walsh. You’re confusing the hell out of me.”

“Because you’re holding back, afraid I’m going to hurt you. It’s happened before, and you’re never going to let it happen again. That’s the rub, isn’t it?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t I? Marblehead High School. Senior year. I don’t know the particulars, but I know enough.”

She moved away from him, her cheeks flushed a brilliant rose. Covering her face with both hands, she said, “You couldn’t leave it alone, could you? You had to put my life out there for all your cop friends to salivate over.”

He pulled her arms down and sandwiched her face between his hands, forcing her to look at him. “I didn’t do that. I got the information through a private source.”

“Why?”

“You gave yourself away the night we shared the pizza. I knew you were hiding something. I wanted to know you, to understand you.”

She drew back from him. “Oh, you mean to find out what ghastly event in my life turned me into a whore?”

Shit!
This wasn’t turning out the way he’d planned. But then, what did he expect? He’d invaded her privacy, dug into the ugly corner of her life that shaped it. He felt his face twist in the harshness of her words.

“Don’t like that word, do you? What would you prefer? Call girl? Prostitute? Hooker? Harlot, tramp, slut? All good words meaning the same thing. And they all describe me.”

“Don’t.” He moved to her, but she stepped out of his range and turned, facing the waning light outside the window, made even dimmer by the shade from the surrounding buildings.

“You want to know me? Okay, Walsh. I’ll take you back to the summer after I graduated high school. You’re so hungry for the sordid details I’ll give them to you, straight from the horse’s mouth. You won’t have to dig into hospital records or newspaper articles.”

“You don’t have―”

“No, you went to a lot of trouble to find out, you should know everything, not only what some hacker dug out of the dirt for you. It’s what you’ve wanted ever since we met.”

He could see her reflection in the glass.

“Now you will,” she said, meeting his gaze in the window with a cold, solid stare.

She seemed to slip out of the present with a deep sigh, arms crisscrossed around her, as if she were holding herself together. He came up behind her and pulled her close to offer her comfort. He waited maybe two minutes before she started, maybe three. An eternity.

“Picture the scenario. Teenage girl, innocent to the point of naïve, falls madly in love with the most popular boy in school. Captain of the football and baseball teams, smart, handsome. Every girl in school wanted him, but he chose this starry-eyed novice who thought he walked on water. A virgin, she gave herself to the person with whom she’d spend the rest of her life, never thinking of the consequences. Of course, you know what happened. Stupid teenage girl got pregnant.”

Tawny drew a long, choppy breath. Linc listened, tightened his arms around her. She was right. This was what he wanted to hear, and part of him hated himself for wanting to.

“She should have gone to her parents, but they’d put so much trust in her. She’d done everything right. Straight A student, SATs in the stratosphere, acceptance to one of the best schools in the country. How could she let them down by doing something so colossally stupid?”

She removed his arms from around her body and took a step forward. Linc wanted to keep contact, so he put his hands on her shoulders and gently massaged the tight muscles. She didn’t shrug him off.

“She goes to the boy for…for what?” Their gazes met in the window. “Help? He loved her, right? That’s what he told her to get her into bed. He’d do the right thing. Not marriage. She didn’t want that. She wanted his support. A hand to hold, a shoulder to cry on. But he was going off to college. There was no place in his life for a stupid girl who didn’t know enough to make him wear a condom.”

“He turned you away?”

She didn’t correct the exchange of pronouns and gave up the cryptic references.
“You guessed it. I was the one pretty girl in school no boy could bed. Except him. He wore his victory like a badge of honor. I didn’t know that at the time. I only knew he wasn’t going to let a pregnant girl get in the way of his life.”

“So you arranged an abortion.”

“It was one of those friend of a friend knew this doctor things. I should have gone to my parents, but I was sixteen, ashamed, and humiliated. I hoped it would stay secret, hoped my parents would never find out. If they did, I’d deal with it. I was going off to Brown in the fall, so it wouldn’t have long-lasting legs.”

“You were sixteen and going to college?”

This time he saw her weak smile reflecting back at him. “I started school young and skipped a grade in elementary school.” She released a weak laugh, almost mocking. “Hard to believe someone so smart could do something so idiotic, isn’t it?”

He turned her around and took in her beautiful face, kissed her forehead. “We’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t.”

“True, but some have much longer consequences. You can figure out the rest. The doctor ran into
complications
. At least he was smart enough to know if I didn’t get to a hospital, I’d die. He made my friend promise to take me right before he packed up his things and left town.”

Linc wiped a tear from her cheek.

“I almost did die. When I woke and found out what they had to do to save my life, I wished I had.”

He didn’t know the right words to say. Even though he knew he was crossing a forbidden line when he pried into Tawny’s past, he’d been powerless to stop. Now he needed to convince her it wasn’t prurient interest but an effort to understand her life so he could be part of it. He drew her into the warmth of his body, one hand on the small
of her back, the other cradling her head. He felt her tears slick on his neck. She stood wooden, arms welded to her sides, unresponsive.

“And you’d never trust anyone again, would you?”

She pulled away. He couldn’t read her expression. It was as if all the hurts of the past had hardened inside her, and she had trained herself to keep them there, out of the harsh glare of strangers. Or would-be lovers.

“That wasn’t a conscious objective. It just happened.” A brief smile, perfunctory at best, found its way to her lips. “I wasn’t playing games or being coy. Men wanted me because they couldn’t have me. They bought me presents to win me over, but I could only be won so far. In the beginning, I never thought of asking for payment. The first one to leave money told me to buy something pretty with it. So I did. It snowballed from there. I found the more money they left, the more worthy I became. I bought a lot of pretty things. I used men the way I guess I felt I’d been used. I had no problem with the ethics. Like I said, no one made me do anything I didn’t want to do, and no one felt shortchanged. I made sure men used protection, not for fear of getting pregnant. I knew that would never happen.”

“And your parents?”

“They were disappointed I didn’t go to them, but more concerned about my health. They coddled me the whole summer, but I was too numb to enjoy the attention.”

“Did you ever hear from the boy? Wasn’t he even interested in what happened, how you dealt with the situation?”

“Not that summer. It was like I never existed in his life, but he must have known. Small town and all that. His apathy hurt more than anything, and it took a long time to rationalize what kind of person I’d fallen in love with. A very long time.” A smile crossed her lips, this time full and satisfying.

“But then one evening, six or seven years ago, I was with…a date.” She glanced at him, unable to hide the sheepish expression. “He was a well-known playwright. Gay, but in the closet for anyone outside a small group of theater friends. We were at a table in some trendy after-theater place whose name escapes me, with the actors in his play, almost all well-known. My high school lover, Brian, that was his name,” her voice hitched as if speaking the name caused a gag reflex, “Brian saw me and made a point of coming over. He looked the same, a little heavier, hair starting to thin. I wondered what I’d seen in him, but I suppose that happens when you run into old lovers. I was gracious; he was impressed. He introduced me to his wife. Seven Sisters sort, lockjaw, pearls.” She made a funny sound, neither a laugh nor a sigh. “You know the type, although I doubt it’s your type.”

“No, not my type.”

“He called the next day. I’m guessing he must have bribed a restaurant employee to get my number from someone at our table, probably with a good tip.”

“He called you? After you met his wife? Did he know―I mean―”

“I know what you mean. I don’t see how he could have. No, he was the same sleazy guy I couldn’t see through ten years before. What goes around comes around.”

During her story, Tawny had moved to the sofa; Linc took the seat next to her. Stiff at first, she relaxed as she sank back into the deep cushions. He stretched his
legs, his eyes focused on hers, and took her hand. When her fingers curled around his, he felt they’d reached a turning point.

“Now you know more about me, but not everything,” she said. “Maybe you even think you understand me, know the reasons I chose the path I did. But I doubt it, because I really don’t know myself why I made those choices. I saw a shrink for years. He told me I understood myself and I could keep going to see him, and he could keep
taking my money if all I wanted was the company.” She laughed. “I stopped going after he said that.”

“So, what do we do now?”

“I don’t know, Walsh. I’ve unburdened my soul. That doesn’t make you mine or me yours.”

“No, but it’s a start. I want to see you when this is over. I need to help you get through this mess, clear it up so you don’t have to think about it again.” He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “And I want to make love to you, but not tonight. Not because I don’t want to, but because I do.”

“You’re a masochist.”

“No, I’m a realist.”

“Well, get real about this. I don’t know where this is going, but there are some things you’re going to have to face up to if what we have is more than lust.”

“Like what?”

“I’m going to be blunt. I was what I was, and the history isn’t going to change. I don’t want it thrown in my face out of anger or jealousy. I don’t want you ever to use it against me. You’ll take a lot of crap from your cop friends for being a sex crime investigator involved with a hooker. It’s a bad movie scenario. In fact, I could jeopardize your job. I want you to think about that before we start something that could turn into a quagmire.”

“I’ve never much cared what anyone thought. But my life is mine, not anyone else’s. I’ll worry about the job later.” He got up. “I’d better go, before I lose my resolve.”

“Promise you’ll think about what I said.”

“I will
; I promise. I want this to work.”

She walked him to the door. “You know what’s interesting about you, Walsh?”

He turned, surprised she had anything more to say, especially about him. He couldn’t read her manner. Easy, he thought, as if she were saying goodbye to an old friend. She was so beautiful he wanted to scoop her into his arms and press his lips to hers. But tonight, Tawny was chocolate cake, and he was on a restrictive diet. One bite could ruin everything. “Not too much, I imagine,” he said.