But not theirs.
Parking beside his truck, she climbed out. She was halfway to the door before she saw John, sprawled in the old wooden chair in the shade of the patio, his legs outstretched, his head back, his eyes closed. Leaving her purse on the first chair she passed, she headed in that direction, her steps slowing when she took in the scene behind him.
Two chairs had been drawn close to the iron-and-glass table, which had been draped with a sheet and, atop that, her one and only tablecloth. Pillows had been brought from the living room to cushion the chairs, and plates, silverware, glasses, and napkins were laid out on opposite sides of the table, separated by a centerpiece of flowers from the garden. A carafe of iced tea, sweating in the heat, sat beside the flowers, and in the corner a layer of smoldering charcoal was burning down in her little grill.
“You’re making dinner?” she exclaimed when she reached him.
He replied without opening his eyes. “Don’t sound so surprised. I’m a hell of a cook, although all you’re getting tonight is steak, baked potatoes, salad, and ice cream. You like chocolate?”
“I love chocolate. This is so nice.” No man had ever cooked for her before, not even something so simple as heating a can of soup. Gregory, when he’d lived there, had never set foot in the kitchen for anything more than a beer, and not even that if she was home to get it for him. “I’m impressed.”
“Good. Then thank me.” He reached out and unerringly located her hand, using it to pull her down into his lap. Before she even got settled, his mouth was on hers, his tongue coaxing her teeth apart.
When he finally ended the kiss and raised his head to look at her, she caught her breath. “I like the way you say hello,” she said, feeling more than a little weak.
“I like the way you say thanks.” He lifted her, got more comfortable, then drew her head over to rest on his shoulder. “Your dress is damp in back. Why?”
“The air-conditioning went out in my car.”
“Take the Blazer tomorrow, and I’ll take yours in to get it fixed.”
“That’s okay. I don’t mind taking it. Besides, I can’t drive a stick shift.”
“You’re kidding.” He worked open the clasp on the big wooden clamp that held her hair off her neck, then combed it free. “I thought everyone learned that when they were kids.”
“Maybe out West,” she teased, “but not necessarily around here.”
“My first car was a stick—an old Chevy convertible that I got for a hundred bucks. When I bought it, it didn’t run at all. The doors didn’t close, and the windows wouldn’t roll up. We had to replace virtually everything on it, but by the time Tom and I finished with it, it looked and ran better than new. We loved it.” He gave her a teasing grin. “All the girls loved it.”
“I bet they did,” she murmured in agreement, although she doubted the car had had anything to do with all the feminine attention he’d gotten. She’d seen a photograph of him when he was a teenager; she remembered how teenage girls’ hearts fluttered over big, handsome, six-foot-plus, blue-eyed, blond-haired boys. In fact, though she was far from adolescence, her own heart was doing more than a little fluttering right now. “Do you wish you still had it?”
Underneath her weight, she felt him tense a little. “I wish I’d never laid eyes on it.”
So it was the car—his first car, the convertible that all the girls loved—that he was driving when he’d had the accident. So much for sweet memories of that particular rite of passage, she thought grimly. Still, after a brief silence, she spoke. “Do you want to talk about it?”
* * *
John gave her question a long moment’s consideration before finally replying, “I don’t think so. Not today.” Then, in a voice that was determinedly lighter, though just as serious, he remarked, “What I really want to do is slide my hand under your dress and see if I can make you turn that sweet shade of pink that you get just before you come.”
“I’m sure you can,” she said, her voice throaty from the sudden heat that he knew was building inside her. “It’ll probably help if you kiss me again, like you did last night when we were standing beside the bed.”
“Like this?” He brushed his mouth across hers. “Or like this?” Catching her lower lip between his teeth, he tugged at it and gently sucked it. “Or—”
“Like this?” she interrupted. Holding her hands to his face, she kissed him hard, thrusting her tongue inside his mouth, mimicking the actions that had aroused her so thoroughly the night before. It was working, too; when she twisted closer to deepen the kiss, he felt his erection swelling against her hip.
All day he had been thinking about this—touching her, kissing her, wanting her. He had awakened with one hell of a hard-on this morning, only to discover that she’d left for work hours earlier. He could have gotten off so easily, lying there in her bed, surrounded by her presence, her combined fragrances light in the air, not quite masking the musky scents of their sex. Oh, yeah, he could have gotten off with no more than a stroke or two.
But he hadn’t. He had tolerated the discomfort until it finally went away, but it was so easy to call back. Simply seeing her at lunch had brought it back. The talk about seduction, about finding someplace private, and that nothing little kiss before he’d left… All those things had made him remember, had made him feel again, had made him want again. Just now, all he’d had to do was look at her when she’d gotten out of her car, and he would swear he had started getting hard right then. Right now he was hard enough to break… and she was hot enough to burn. She had turned until she was across his lap, and his hands were underneath her skirt, high on her thighs, and their kiss was getting damned near desperate. Forget the coals that were burning down, the meat that was marinating, the potatoes ready for baking. Cooking dinner hadn’t been a good idea, not when he was feeling like some randy sixteen-year-old kid offered the once-in-a-life-time chance of all the sex he could endure.
He was pushing her skirt up, moving his hands to her hips, preparing to open his jeans and slide her slowly down the length of his sex when something—a small sound, a prickly feeling, whatever—made him stop, made him remember where they were and open his eyes. “Uh, Teryl?”
“Hmm.” She was leaving kisses along his jaw at the same time her hands tried to pull his shirt from his jeans. He would have stopped her, but his hands were buried deep underneath her skirt and he wasn’t quite sure, under the circumstances, how to remove them.
“Teryl, there are kids watching us,” he murmured.
She became utterly still, met his gaze, then turned just her head to where he looked at the three round, unsmiling faces only a few yards away. Then she became even stiffer. “Oh, gee,” she said, sounding half-strangled. “Hi, guys. Look, John, my mother has brought some of the kids to visit.”
“Your mother?” he whispered fiercely. Looking past the children to the driveway, he saw the van and the graying, plump woman approaching them with a baby on one hip and leading a second child by the hand.
“Let me up.”
“Oh, right.” He gripped her legs when she would have wriggled free. “Honey, I have an erection here like you wouldn’t believe,” he reminded her in a harsh, hushed voice, and, damn her heart, she grinned at him.
“Of course I would. I’m sitting on it. Let me up. I’ll help her with the kids, and you can go sit at the table. With the tablecloth.”
Reluctantly he let her go, taking advantage of her distraction as she hugged all three kids at once to rise from the chair and slide into the distant chair at the table. It wasn’t comfortable—sitting like that, wearing tight jeans, aroused enough to hurt, and meeting Teryl’s mother. He had the damnedest luck.
Then some part of him acknowledged how lucky he was to even be here. He never should have met Teryl, never should have come here, never should have gotten close enough to her to get aroused enough to hurt. He did have the damnedest luck.
Leaving the kids, she met her mother halfway, gave her a hug
and a kiss, then took the baby from her while she greeted the other child. She wanted a half dozen kids of her own and to take in a few dozen more, she’d said once, and he could believe it. She was obviously comfortable with the children, especially the baby, and they seemed to adore her. The baby nestled right in, and the other little one clung to her skirt while she and Mrs. Weaver talked.
Someday in the not-too-distant future she would have her babies, while he had never even considered the possibility of fathering children. If pressed for a reason, he would say it was because he would never marry, but there was more to it, he knew, than that. In his research, he had learned much about the adults that emotionally abused children became—and that was the only label, much as he disliked it, that described what his parents had done to him. Many of those adult children became perfectly normal parents themselves who loved their kids and did the best they could by them. Some abused their own children, the way they had been abused, and many others made a conscious choice not to have kids. They were afraid that they might be like their parents, that they might treat their children the way the parents had treated them, that they might inflict that sort of damage on another generation of helpless kids.
He hoped he wouldn’t—was pretty damned sure he wouldn’t—but he couldn’t be positive. He couldn’t say unequivocally that he would never hurt someone who was dependent on him for his emotional well-being. Hell, he’d never even had any exposure to little kids, but he knew they cried, they fussed, and they behaved unreasonably. They got on the nerves of the best parents and could probably make even someone like Teryl lose her temper from time to time. How could he even make a guess what a cranky two-year-old on a bad day could drive him to?
“Who the hell are you?”
Drawing his gaze from Teryl, he settled it on the child who had spoken. She was six, maybe seven, with wispy blond curls and steady blue eyes. In a dress with ribbons and lace, she would look like a perfect little angel; even in grubby shorts and a T-shirt, she came close. Her voice fit the image, too—soft, delicate, like glass chimes in the wind—which made her language, jarring from any small child, even more so. “I’m John.”
Ignoring the two boys who hung back, she came closer, scuffing her rubber thongs on the stone, clasping both hands over the back of the opposite chair. “Are you Teryl’s boyfriend?”
“Sort of.” Before she could ask another question, he asked his own. “Who are you?”
“Alex.”
“Are you Teryl’s sister?”
“Sort of. Are you having a picnic?”
“We’re cooking out.”
“Why? It’s too damned hot.”
“It’s not so hot in the shade, and I wanted—”
“Are you sleeping with Teryl?”
He felt a dull blush creep up his neck to his face and his command of the English language slip away. “I don’t… uh, that’s not… we…”
“That’s what boyfriends do, you know. They spend the night, and everyone has to do what they say, and they yell if you bother them, and if you really bother them, even if you don’t mean to, they hit you and do things.”
John simply stared at her, cold inside, understanding all too well the situation she had come from, knowing more than he wanted about the yelling but nothing at all except from books, thank God, about the hitting and the “things” that were done. He had no idea what to say to her, but fortunately Teryl’s mother saved him from having to try. Reaching the table, she sat down in the chair and scooped the little girl into her lap, holding her with both arms around her waist.
“No, honey, that’s not what boyfriends do,” she said gently. “That’s what some bad people do. When two people like each other a lot and want to be together, then they become boyfriend and girlfriend. They have fun together, and they do nice things for each other. They don’t hurt each other, and they don’t hurt anyone else. Do you understand?”
Nodding, Alex slid to the ground, her shorts twisting at her waist, her shirt hanging crooked. She stood still long enough for Teryl’s mother to straighten her clothes, then she placed her hands on her hips and looked directly at John. “I understand,” she said. “But I’m still not ever having any damned boyfriend.”
As she ran off to join the two boys, Mrs. Weaver sighed. “I’m sorry about that. We’ve had Alex only a few months, and she’s still dealing with a lot of hurt and anger and guilt.”
And she would be dealing with it, he suspected, for many years to come. As he had and still was. But she had something he’d lacked: Teryl’s mother and her father and, to some extent, Teryl herself. The Weaver family just might be enough to heal anything.
“So, Teryl, aren’t you going to introduce us?” She looked from him to her daughter, and John followed her gaze. Teryl was cuddling the baby to her breast, her smile soft, her voice softer. She was definitely good mother material; he thought with a pang of envy that some other man would be the father to her children.
She came closer, standing between them, swaying from side to side to rock the baby. “Mama, this is John Smith. John, my mother Lorna Weaver. And this—” She moved closer to him, bending to put him and the baby on the same level. “This is Kesha.”
He acknowledged Lorna with a nod and a polite, “Mrs. Weaver.” Although he didn’t speak to the baby, he did look at her—her ebony skin that smelled of powder, her soft black curls, her round brown eyes, and her single-toothed grin—and he touched her, stroking her clenched fist with one fingertip. She was so small, so fragile, and yet she wrapped her fingers around his with surprising strength.
“It’s a pleasure meeting you, John,” Lorna said, leaning back in the chair. “I’d like to say Teryl’s told me a lot about you, but since I’ve hardly seen my daughter in the last few weeks, I don’t know anything.”
From the corner where she had gone to make a set of brass chimes tinkle for Kesha’s pleasure, Teryl sent a chiding smile her way. “John’s from Colorado. He’s got business here. He grew up in California, he’s got a sister who teaches school in Florida, he used to live in New Orleans, and—” her smile turned into a grin—“he likes old movies. He was watching Summer Splendor just last night.”
“Ah, Summer Splendor. That was an interesting time—when movies told stories and weren’t merely showcases for special effects. These days actors don’t act; they simply react to whatever effects the computers will put in later.”
John studied the woman across from him with an intense frown that slowly turned into recognition. “You’re Lorna Terr—” He looked from her to her daughter, who was still grinning. “Terrill. Jeez, I never made the connection.” He shook his head in disbelief. “I used to have every movie you ever made.”
“I’m flattered… I think. That ‘used to’ doesn’t sound so complimentary.”
He gave Teryl a chiding glance for keeping her secret before turning back to her mother. “I lost them in a fire and haven’t had a chance to replace them yet.” He looked again from mother to daughter. There was no family resemblance that he could identify. Lorna’s hair, bottled blond all through her career, brown and graying now, was lighter in color and coarser in texture than Teryl’s. Her eyes were blue, Teryl’s brown. Her bone structure, concealed now by the extra weight she carried, was strong, clean, while Teryl’s was more delicate. The only thing they shared in common wasn’t physical: they were both generous, warm, loving women.
So Teryl took after her father or perhaps one of her grandparents.
“You had tremendous talent. I always thought it was unfortunate that you chose to retire so early. Summer Splendor was your last movie, wasn’t it?”
Lorna nodded. “Philip, my husband, and I wanted children. The studio wasn’t interested in letting me play other kinds of roles, and they certainly weren’t interested in seeing me pregnant, so, as soon as filming ended, we came home to start a family. We started with Teryl, and twenty-nine years and over two hundred children later, we’re not finished yet.”
“I lived
in L.A. then,” he said. “I can still remember some of the fuss about your retirement. No one wanted you to go—except all the young actresses who were hoping to take your place. None of them ever succeeded.”
She reached across the table and patted his hand. “That’s sweet of you to say. Heavens, you must have been just a child. Six? Maybe seven?”
“A little older.” At the time, the news hadn’t meant much to him. But as he’d grown older, as he’d become more of a fan, he had remembered. It had been quite a story: the beautiful young starlet, as big a sex symbol as Monroe and ten times more talented, giving up the fame and glamour of Hollywood to go home with the husband none of her public had known existed.
The two women continued talking as a faint uneasiness settled in John’s stomach. The timing, he realized, was off. If Summer Splendor had been the last movie Lorna had made before Teryl was born, the film should be, depending on the month of Teryl’s birth, twenty-nine or thirty years old. But it wasn’t. He was a hard-core fan of the actress and the movie; he knew the stars, the producers, the directors. He knew the studio and when and where it had premiered. He was sure of the filming dates, as sure as he was of his own birthdate.
Summer Splendor had been made only twenty-seven years ago.
Why would Lorna lie? Why would she claim that the movie had been made two to three years earlier than it actually had? Why would she claim that Teryl had been born after the filming had been completed instead of two years before?
The obvious answer sent a chill down his spine. If Teryl had been born two years before the movie, there was no way she could be Lorna’s daughter. None. Lorna had worked steadily, rarely taking off more than a few weeks at a time, completing eighteen films in a ridiculously short few years. She had played sexpots and society belles, the seducer and the seduced. She’d been sexy, steamy, sophisticated, and glamorous. There was no way she could have been pregnant during those years. No way, in the wardrobes the studios chose for her, that she could have gained so much as five pounds without it showing.
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