A MAN LIKE SMITH

by Marilyn Pappano

  For a moment she looked so weary, so defeated. He had never imagined that the brash, bold, aggressive woman he knew so well could look so utterly lost. And there was nothing he could do to help her.

  "I made a mistake," she said, her voice low and empty of life. "I shouldn't have warned Nick. I should have let your people surprise him. I just wanted him to know…"

  "Know what? That his cover was blown? That we were coming? Or that you didn't give him up voluntarily?" He knew that last was her answer. Her promise, her integrity and her reputation meant too much to her. She had wanted Carlucci to know, above all else, that she hadn't broken her word, that Smith's uncovering of his identity had been a fluke and nothing more. "Why, Jolie? Why do you care what Nick Carlucci knows? Why do you care what he thinks? He's a corrupt lawyer, for God's sake—a criminal. He's as dirty as the man he works for. He's—"

  Fixing her gaze on him, she quietly interrupted. "He's the father of my daughter."

  * * *

  Smith walked to the French doors and faced out but saw nothing of the night-dark sky or the lights that pierced it. All he saw was Jolie's face reflected in the glass, burned into his mind. Jolie's sweet, lovely, immeasurably sad face.

  He's the father of my daughter.

  Jolie had had a child.

  Jolie—who had used up all the mothering instincts inside her, who had no room in her life for kids, who would spend time with him, go out with him and even go to bed with him but would not consider the possibility of ever having children with him—had already had a sweet little baby girl.

  With Nick Carlucci.

  He hadn't been prepared for that one. Of all the surprises she could have thrown at him, that was the biggest one of all.

  "I've known Nick all my life," she said from behind him, her voice tautly controlled but barely audible. "We were neighbors, friends. As we grew up, we became more than friends."

  In the glass, he saw her move a few feet closer. She seemed smaller than usual, and with her arms folded across her chest, she looked chilled. Frightened. In pain.

  "When I was seventeen," she went on, "Nick went away to college. At first, he came home on weekends to see me, but it wasn't long before that stopped. I thought it was because he couldn't get a ride or because of the demands of his classes or the jobs he was working to pay his expenses. I finally got to see him at Thanksgiving—we spent the entire weekend together—but then he didn't come home again until Christmas. He came to tell me that he'd been seeing someone else, that he was in love with her and he wanted to marry her. A few weeks later I found out that I was pregnant."

  "And you didn't tell him." He sounded as empty and blank as she did.

  "No. He had already made it clear that he didn't want me."

  "But he had an obligation—if not to you, then to his—" Smith didn't finish. He couldn't.

  "For two and a half years, he had told me that he loved me. He told me every time we—"

  Every time they had made love, Smith silently finished, hating the idea, the images, the mere suggestion that what she did with him, she had done with Nick Carlucci first.

  "But he lied," she went on. "He didn't love me. He used me until he found someone better, and then he dumped me."

  She moved again until she stood beside him but at the opposite side of the glass door. If he turned his head just a little to his left, he could look directly at her, but he chose instead to remain focused on her reflection. Somehow it was easier that way.

  "It wasn't long before I had to tell my parents that I was pregnant. Unwed mothers weren't a rarity where we lived, but Mama and Daddy had expected better of me. As far as my goals and ambitions, we didn't agree on much, but we did agree on one thing. They wanted a better life for me as much as I wanted it for myself. But there's no future for a pregnant seventeen-year-old girl who's not even out of high school and has been abandoned by her baby's father. All they could see ahead for me was welfare and shame and a tough life for the baby. People in the neighborhood, in the church and in the family still cared about small matters like legitimacy back then." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "They were so disappointed in me."

  And that, Smith suspected, had probably hurt her far more than Carlucci ever could.

  He waited for her to go on, but when seconds passed into minutes and she still said nothing, he finally spoke. "I suppose abortion was out of the question."

  Her laughter was choked. "My parents had twelve children. Abortion was a profanity that was never mentioned in our home. Besides, except for my lapses with Nick, I was a good Catholic girl. Abortion was never an option."

  "So you put the baby up for adoption."

  "Yes." Another whisper.

  "And you've regretted it ever since."

  Jolie remembered the day the decision had been made. It had been winter—late January—but the day had been beautiful, sunny and warm. It had been a Sunday, her father's only regular day off from both jobs. They had gone to St. Jude's—her parents didn't make major decisions without advice from their priest—where the four of them had talked in Father Francis's office. It was a small, close space with dark paneling, heavy velvet drapes closed over the single window and a grimly uninspiring painting of Jesus on the wall. The depressing office was the perfect place for the man Jolie had regarded even then as small, closed minded and grim.

  The priest, who had helped raise Nick after his mother's abandonment, who had felt a cleric's responsibility toward the boy but had never yielded to one moment's affection for him, had argued against her parents' plan. He hadn't been concerned with what was best for the baby, definitely not with what might be best for Jolie. She had believed then and still believed now that he had wanted only to see her punished. She had sinned, and he had wanted her to pay for it. He'd shown no compassion, no benevolence, no mercy.

  For a man of God, he'd had a great deal of narrow-minded, mean-spirited malice in him.

  On a matter of less importance, she supposed, her parents would have given in to him. As far as she knew, that was the only time they had stood against him. With or without his blessing, they had decided to raise her daughter as their own.

  And they had done an outstanding job. There was nothing for her to regret.

  Although she did.

  "Not for her sake, but for mine, yes. I knew it was best for her. I knew the only kind of life I could offer her—living on welfare on Serenity Street

  , trapped in a despair I would never escape—was no life at all, but still I wanted to try." She sighed softly. "I wanted so very badly to try."

  "Does Cassie know she's adopted?"

  She looked at him for a long time, for so long that after a while he broke contact and looked away. She wasn't surprised that he'd figured it out, that he knew that the daughter she'd given up, the daughter she'd kept secret in her heart all these years, was Cassie. Still, she asked, "How did you know?"

  With a shrug, he met her gaze again. "You said she was born just before you started college, that she was the only one of the kids you didn't help raise. You said she started breaking hearts the day she was born." He hesitated. "She started with yours, didn't she?"

  Knotting her fingers together, she thought briefly of the box of papers she had stored in her parents' garage when she had first feared that the FBI might come knocking at her door with a search warrant. The photograph she had slipped inside the box—a Polaroid, blurry, with bad color—was the only tangible reminder, besides Cassie herself, that she had of that stormy August day. Her mother's younger sister had taken the snapshot of Jolie, wearing a drab green hospital gown, her hair sticking to her head, her face etched with fatigue, and of Cassie, six and a half pounds of peaceful, red and wrinkled baby. Even then Cassie had had entirely too much class to make a fuss.

  "No," she answered at last. "And she never will. That was part of my agreement with Mama and Daddy."

  "What about her birth certificate?"

  "It shows that a baby girl was born in Louisville, Mississip
pi to Patrick and Rosemary Wade." At his questioning look, she went on. "Cassie was born in a little country clinic, delivered by the doctor who had tended Mama's family for forty years. When he supplied the information for the birth certificate to the state, as a favor to the family, he was willing to replace certain names with others."

  "So you pretended not to be pregnant for nine months when you were, and your mother pretended to be pregnant when she wasn't. And because she had been pregnant so much of the last eighteen years anyway, people probably didn't even notice. It was more or less a chronic condition for her."

  Jolie almost smiled at that last part. "She often wore maternity clothes even when she wasn't pregnant. Money was always so tight that she couldn't see any sense in not wearing perfectly good clothing just because it was too big. And when I started wearing clothes that were big, my friends assumed I was wearing hand-me-downs that didn't fit or was going through a sloppy phase or something. Then, as soon as school was out, I went to stay in Louisville with my aunt."

  After her last words faded away, another of those heavy silences descended over the room. She waited for Smith to say something else, to ask another question, to probe a little deeper, but for a time he simply stood there, gazing out the door. Was he absorbing what he had learned? Judging what she had done?

  Condemning her for it?

  Finally he faced her again, focusing all of his attention on her. "Is that why you don't want children now? Because you couldn't keep the one you had? Because you failed your daughter and you aren't willing to try again?"

  Moving away from the door, she sank down onto the nearest seat, an armless leather chair that was cool through the thin cotton of her pants. She was too tired to stand another minute, too tired to finish the discussion she had started. How did she ever expect to last through a midnight meeting between Smith and Nick?

  "I should have been able to make it work," she explained wearily, repeating arguments that had echoed in her mind for eighteen years. "I should have found some way. I was a smart kid, a straight-A student. I was resourceful as hell. But I took the easy way out. I put her up for adoption. Do you understand what that really means, Smith? I gave her to someone else to raise. What kind of mother gives her own baby away?"

  He sat down on the table in front of her and leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees. "One who loves her. One who wants what's best for the baby regardless of how very badly she wants to keep her. Letting her be adopted was the mature thing to do, Jolie. It was the responsible thing."

  "But it wasn't the motherly thing." She blinked back the moisture that was filling her eyes. "A mother—a good mother—would do anything in the world to hold on to her child. A good mother would fight like hell to keep her. A good mother wouldn't make the choices I made."

  "You're wrong," he said very quietly. "Only a good mother would make the choices you made."

  She wished she could believe him. It would be such a relief if she could allow herself to be convinced … but she'd been living with the guilt and the disappointment for so long.

  "You could have kept the baby, Jolie. You could have given up your dreams and your future, and somewhere along the way, you would have given up hope. You could have raised her on welfare and in poverty, and you could have watched her make the same mistakes and the same bad choices that so many poor teenage girls make, and, unless you were both very lucky, you could have watched her give up her dreams and her future. You could have watched her lose hope. But because you gave her up, because you were willing to make that sacrifice, instead of making mistakes and bad choices, she's got a bright future ahead of her. Instead of being trapped someplace like Serenity Street

  , she'll be starting college soon. Whatever she decides to do after that, you know she'll be a hell of a success, in part because she's got your example to follow—and that's an example you couldn't have set if you hadn't given her up."

  They were nice arguments, enticing arguments that someday she might invest her time, her heart and her soul into believing.

  But this wasn't the day.

  Tonight she knew that she'd made some big mistakes that she wasn't finished paying for. One was Cassie.

  Another was Nick.

  She prayed that the way she'd handled her relationship with Smith wasn't a third one.

  "The bottom line, Jolie," he said quietly, "is that no matter how hard the decision was, it was right. Cassie's had a good life. She has parents who love her, a family who dotes on her, a big sister who adores her. She's a bright, well-adjusted, remarkably mature girl with all sorts of opportunities ahead of her. She would be the last person in the world to begrudge you whatever makes you happy. She would be appalled if she knew that she was the reason you won't get married. She would be devastated to find out that she's the reason you won't have children."

  Knowing that he was right, that Cassie more than anyone would want her to have a normal life, but unable to deal with the knowledge—with the longing—she surged to her feet and paced the length of the room. "Good closing argument, counselor, but I still have a reasonable doubt. Anyway, I didn't come here tonight to talk about Cassie and me and babies." Although she managed a careless, flippant tone, those last words pierced all the way through her. "I came to invite you to a meeting."

  "Jolie—" Breaking off he watched her, his gaze troubled. Then he stood up, slid his hands into his pockets and detached himself from the situation, professionalism overtaking and blotting out his personal feelings. "A meeting with Carlucci?"

  "I hope so."

  "You know how to get in touch with him?"

  "No. But I know someone who can." With a grin that she knew bore only a vague resemblance to her usual cocky one, she hastened to add, "Don't bother asking who. I can't tell you. So … are you interested?"

  "Of course I am."

  "I'll warn you—I don't know if Nick will show, and if he does, I don't know if he'll talk to you."

  "So why are you inviting me?"

  Her grin fading, she turned serious again. She had a number of reasons for the actions she was taking tonight. She wanted one more chance to persuade Nick to cooperate. She wanted to try to protect the father her daughter would never know. She wanted to make things right with Smith, wanted to apologize in a manner more concrete than the trifling words—I'm sorry I warned Nick—she had offered when she arrived. She wanted to erase the disappointment she'd seen in him and prove herself worthy once again of his respect.

  She chose the simplest of the reasons and delivered it in the most casual of manners. "Consider it an apology. So … are you coming or not?"

  * * *

  Smith had assumed that he was at least slightly familiar with all of the French Quarter, but he had never seen Serenity Street

  . It was a depressing sight in the dark night, all gloom and shadows. He would like to believe that it looked better under the midday sun, but he knew better. Harsh daylight would show the shabbiness, would glint off the broken windows and spotlight the shuttered storefronts, the broken sidewalks and the utter lack of hope.

  It was hard to imagine Jolie living in this place. He had always appreciated her ambition; now he knew where it came from. What a place to face every day. The fact that she had nurtured any dreams at all said something about her spirit. The fact that she had achieved a number of them said plenty about her drive.

  No wonder she had wanted out. No wonder she had wanted better than this for her baby.

  Her baby. Her daughter. Cassie.

  It still hadn't quite sunk in. Logically he could process the information. After all, her situation wasn't that unusual. For a number of generations, boys had been getting their girlfriends pregnant, then ducking out of their lives. They shared the fun, but none of the responsibilities. None of the sacrifices. None of the heartaches.

  But emotionally … he was having a little trouble accepting that the woman he wanted to be the mother of his children was already the mother—albeit secretly—of a child of her own. He w
as having even more trouble accepting that the father of this nearly grown child was a man he despised, a man who had conspired to kill one of Smith's best friends, a man who stood against everything Smith stood for.

  With a shudder, he realized what that meant: if he and Jolie managed to work things out, if he ever persuaded her to marry him, he would be stepfather—again, albeit secretly—to Nick Carlucci's daughter.

  Wouldn't that be a hoot? he thought without humor.

  At his side, Jolie sighed softly. "I guess we'd better head back."

  Since they had arrived early at the meeting place—a scruffy, ragged little park that no child should have to play in—she had suggested a walk down Serenity. From one end to the other, she had pointed out important places from her childhood. Her tone had been even, empty of emotion, as if she were merely pointing out historical sites to a disinterested tourist.

  But the history in these sites was less than thirty years old.

  And he was far from disinterested.

  They had walked the length of the street; now they went back to the park. The only businesses open this late were bars, each one barely distinguishable from the other. They were all small, all dimly lit and stinking of smoke. They were all depressing little places—not boisterous like the Quarter bars that catered to tourists or the clubs that provided locals with a place to socialize as well as drink, but quiet, bleak places where the patrons cared more for the oblivion liquor could provide than the drink itself.

  As they crossed the street onto the final block where Serenity dead-ended—such an appropriate word, Smith thought—a gang of young men across the street caught his attention. "That's certainly a fine-looking bunch of boys, isn't it?"