Just Like a Man (30 page)

"So you grew up in southern Indiana," he was saying now, referring to their earlier conversation. "A place you think I've never heard of."

"It was very small," she assured him.

"Suburb of Louisville?"

She shook her head. "Out in the middle of nowhere."

"Farm?"

"No, we weren't fanners. We just lived in a small town. My family was more suited to that, I think," she hedged, not wanting to tell him how they couldn't have afforded to live anywhere else.

He nodded, seeming to mull that over, and she wondered what, exactly, there was in the statement to mull. "Southern Indiana is pretty," he said. "I bet your hometown is a picturesque little place. Am I right?"

Dorsey, Indiana, was pleasant enough, Selby supposed. The town, anyway. It was the area where the Hudson trailer had been situated—near the landfill, though thankfully upwind of it—that had been a tad lacking in the picturesque department.

"It was kind of charming, I guess, now that I think about it," she said, injecting a brightness into her voice she didn't really feel. As charming as the town was, she didn't carry many fond memories of it. Her life there hadn't exactly been enjoyable.

"And you were probably the town darling, weren't you?" he asked further. "Probably left a string of broken hearts behind when you left."

Selby told herself the faint tinge of bitterness she thought she heard in his voice was only there because it had filtered through her own bitterness. "Not really," she said uncomfortably.

"You're being modest," he said. And again, she thought there was just a hint of something sour in his voice.

But when she looked up at him and found him smiling at her, with nary a trace of distastefulness in his expression, she decided she only imagined it, that the source of it was her, and not him. "No," she told him. "I'm not."

"Your family is still living there?"

She nodded. Oh, yeah. Hudsons never strayed far. Not just because they couldn't afford to, but because they were an indifferent, apathetic lot, for the most part. They didn't want to learn about or experience anything unless it had an effect over whether or not there would be supper on the table come evening. "They're still there," she said. "I don't imagine they'll ever be going anywhere."

"Town founders, huh?" Thomas guessed. "Firm roots and lots of traditions, right?"

Selby did smile at that. He made her family sound like they were the bastions of the community instead of the basement-dwellers. But all she said was, "Yeah. Right. Town founders." Hey, the Hudsons had lived in Dorsey for generations. And belittling the Hudsons had been a town tradition for generations, too. Because before the Hudsons were basement-dwellers they'd been cellar-dwellers. So she wasn't really lying when she agreed.

"You have brothers? Sisters?" he asked.

"Three older brothers," she told him.

"So you're the baby of the family."

"Yep."

"Bet they really watched out for you, didn't they?"

"Oh, yeah," she said mildly. Her brothers had always been watching for her to come home at night. They'd been hungry, after all. They'd wanted their supper. And they'd needed their clothes washed for school or work the next day. God forbid they should take care of any of that themselves. Why should they, when that was Selby's job?

"And I bet your folks doted on you, too, didn't they?"

"Mm-hm," she said. Doted on her paychecks was more like it.

"And you were probably involved in all kinds of activities at school."

"Oh, sure," she said, biting back her derision. "Cheerlead-ing, gymnastics, Spanish Club, yearbook staff. I was involved in all those hip extracurriculars in one way or another."

Because she
had
been involved with those school activities. In one way or another. After all, she'd been teased by the cheerleaders on a regular basis, since being the fat girl who lived in a trailer made Selby their prime target. And she'd been laughed at in PE by all the gymnasts because she couldn't even pull herself up onto the uneven parallel bars. She'd really enjoyed that activity. That had been followed a couple of times by the activity of being thrown fully dressed into the showers and having to go to Spanish class soaking wet, where the activity of being laughed at even more had come into play. And, of course, there had been her favorite activity, having her photo appear in the yearbook under the heading, "Most Likely to Appear Floating in the Sky over the Super Bowl."

Yep, she'd been involved in
lots
of activities in high school.

"But, gosh, enough about me," she said. "What about you?"

When Selby met Thomas's gaze again, she saw that he still seemed to be doing some serious mulling. And she couldn't have him doing that. Because if he mulled long enough, he'd realize how sarcastic she was being. And eventually he would correctly deduce that, when she was in high school, she had been a complete loser. Selby hadn't felt like a loser for a long time. Gee, not since high school, come to think of it. And she hadn't
been
a loser for a long time—not since high school. She wasn't about to let Thomas Brown take her back there again, whether inadvertently or not.

"What about me?" he asked.

She didn't want to bring up his job again, since she pretty much knew he was unemployed, even if he did deny it. She didn't want to embarrass him. So she asked, "Did you grow up in Indianapolis?"

Pax looked at Selby and battled the edginess that was burrowing deeper into him every time she answered one of his questions. He'd been right about her, he realized. She really was like all the girls he'd gone to high school with, pampered, coddled, popular. Always given every opportunity without so much as having to ask for it, always taking whatever else she wanted.

Then he remembered she'd asked him a question and he nodded. "Yeah, born and bred."

"Where did you go to school?"

"Madison High School," he told her. "It doesn't exist anymore. They tore it down to build… something else."

What he didn't tell Selby was that he'd been responsible for his school's quite literal downfall. He'd bought his old high school and the land surrounding it from the city for an outrageous amount of money, enough to enable the board of education to build three more schools, and then he'd razed the sonofabitch to the ground. On top of it, he'd built his empire, the CompuPax Pavilion. He worked there, slept there, ate there, entertained there, copulated there. And not a day went by that he didn't rejoice in the knowledge that he'd toppled the building that had once brought him nothing but misery, and had built in its place an edifice of mammoth proportions that was a monument to his colossal success.

"So what made you drop out?" Selby asked, jerking him out of a place he frankly didn't want to revisit anyway.

Pax didn't mind the question. It was a normal one for her to ask, under the circumstances. And he replied truthfully when he said, "I didn't like school. I thought it was boring, and I didn't feel like I was learning anything. So I left."

She nodded, but he could see that she didn't understand. He supposed he didn't blame her. She was a woman who valued education so much she'd become a teacher. And she'd had a good experience in high school. She'd been one of the popular ones. One of the girls who stood on the corner and laughed at boys like Tommy Brown when they walked past.

Geek.

Dork.

Pizza Face.

Freak.

He tried to picture Selby Hudson among the other girls he'd known back then, hurling epithets at him for no other reason than that they were shallow and mean. But the image came out nebulous and not quite right somehow. Selby's face just wouldn't materialize in that group. Still, she had been one of those girls at her own school, he reminded himself. She'd just admitted she'd been a member of all the chic societies, a constituent of all the exclusive cliques. She'd doubtless lobbed more than a few slurs in her time, had doled out her fair share of teasing and humiliation.

Not that Pax would let something like that keep him from wanting her. And having her. Because now that he was the kind of man he was, she was the kind of woman he always sought out. The kind of woman he always wanted. The kind of woman he always had. The women who had been part of the in crowd as girls. The cheerleaders, the homecoming queens, the star athletes. The perky ones. The cute ones. The popular ones. He always dated the women who'd been Someone in high school. He courted them. Wooed them. Charmed them. Bedded them.

Then he discarded them without a second thought.

Selby Hudson, he told himself, was no different. Yeah, maybe she wasn't living the popular life now. Maybe she took the bus and lived in a crummy neighborhood and worked two jobs to make ends meet. That was what often happened to the popular kids, Pax had discovered, both the girls and the boys. Once they got out of high school, out into the real world, once they realized that no one gave a damn whether they'd played sports or been a calendar girl or valedictorian or what have you, they started having to struggle like the rest of the poor saps. And a lot of them had lost the struggle. A lot of them lived the way Selby did. None of
them
had done as well as Pax had. None of
them
was a billionaire, that was for goddamned sure.

"And now you've come back to do the work that will earn you your diploma," Selby said, once again drawing him out of that place he hated to revisit, so why did he keep slipping back there?

"Yeah, I've come back," he said. Because God knew getting that diploma would make him a hell of a lot more employable.

"I'm glad," Selby said. "Education is so important. Without it, people just flounder."

"Mm," Pax muttered. Because he honestly didn't know what else to say.

"I never want to stop learning," she continued, smiling. "I never want to reach a point where I feel like there's nothing left for me to discover, you know? I mean, people talk about how sad it would be to die before they've done everything they want to do or seen everything they want to see. But I think it would be worse to live life and have there be nothing left that you want to do or see. To be so experienced and jaded that nothing seems interesting anymore. That there's nothing left to enjoy. That, to me, would be sad."

Pax didn't know what to say to that, either. Probably because it hit way too close to home. In the past two decades, he'd done more and seen more than most people twice his age. He'd traveled the world over, had met hundreds of Very Important People, had seen every notable landmark, every geographic wonder, every scientific marvel there was to see. He'd mingled with heads of state, partied with movie stars, vacationed with industrial and technological giants. He really had been there and done that, regardless of what it was. Anytime he'd wanted to do something, see something, hear something, taste something, he'd just whipped out his platinum card and done, saw, heard, or tasted it. Usually in its natural habitat. There was nothing left that astounded or amazed him. Nothing he found particularly interesting. Nothing that dazzled. Nothing to marvel at. The world was his oyster, and he'd sucked it down with hot sauce and licked the shell clean a long time ago. And now here was Selby Hudson telling him to expand his horizons. It was almost too funny for words.

Somehow, though, Pax didn't feel like laughing. On the contrary, he felt like he wanted to…

"Pie. We gotta have pie with our coffee," he said. And before Selby could object, he hailed their waitress and ordered a slice for each of them. With ice cream. Because you couldn't have pie without ice cream. It wouldn't be right.

By the time they finished their coffee and their pie and their conversation—not that that was finished, mind you, but it was definitely winding down—it was nearing midnight. Selby actually gasped when she finally realized the time.

"I can't believe it's almost midnight. I have to go," she said, gathering up her satchel and shrugging into her big denim jacket. "I have to be at school early tomorrow. The entire fourth grade is taking a field trip."

"Where to?" Pax asked as he reached into his back pocket for his wallet. No way was he letting her buy this time.

But he nearly dropped it on the floor when Selby replied, "The CompuPax Pavilion. They've been studying the Industrial Revolution in social studies, and Mrs. Gaddie, the social studies teacher, thought it would be a good idea for the students to see how the contemporary technological revolution is sort of paralleling that. Completely changing society and the way people do things."

Pax told himself not to panic, that school field trips came through CompuPax all the time. They never made it to his office. And he rarely ever left his office. There was no reason to think Selby would run into him. Still, he was glad to know in advance. He'd be sure not to wander far from his home base.

When they stepped outside the diner, the street was deserted, save a lone male figure standing on the corner, leaning against a street lamp whose light had been broken out—probably by the very guy standing beneath it. Pax looked at Selby, thinking she'd probably planned on telling him good night right here and watching as he pulled away, so that she could go home again without him finding out where she lived. Which, of course, would have done her no good, since he already knew precisely where she lived. Her attention was on the man by the street lamp, but then she turned to look at Pax. She hesitated.

Then, "Would you mind walking me home?" she asked.

He grinned, thinking he should probably tip the streetlight reprobate on his way back. "Sure," he said. Then, smiling to himself, he asked innocently, "Which way?"

Instead of replying, Selby turned toward the building he'd seen her in Thursday night, then positioned herself so that Pax was between her and the guy on the corner. She was good at the whole self-preservation thing, he thought. And he wasn't sure why that bothered him.

They hustled across the dark, deserted street, and when they came to the front door of her building, he reached for the handle to pull it open, frowning when he realized there was no lock on it, and any streetlight reprobate could get in.