by Diana Palmer
body who can get past my pet rattlesnake is welcome to drive my car."
"Your what...?" Tippy burst out, looking around at her ankles.
He grinned. "My alarm system. That's what I call it. I've got an electronic monitoring system installed somewhere in the engine—if anybody tries to hot-wire the car, or steals it, it will take about ten minutes for the police to find it. Even in New York City," he added smugly.
"No wonder you look so confident," Rory said. "It sure is a beaut of a car, Cash," he added wistfully.
"It is that," Tippy remarked. "I can drive, but it's impractical to have a car in this city," she said, indicating the abundance of taxis buzzing up and down the streets. "Usually, when I went on modeling jobs, I didn't have time to waste looking for parking spots. There are never enough. Cabs and subways are quicker when you're in a rush."
"They are," he agreed. He glanced down at her, fascinated by her fresh beauty that was only accentuated by the lack of makeup.
"Where are you shooting the movie?" he asked.
"Here in the city, mostly," she said. "It's a comedy with touches of a spy drama mixed in. I have to wrestle with a foreign agent in one scene, and outrun a gunman in another." She grimaced. "We only just started filming before we broke for the holidays, and I've got bruises everywhere already from the fight coordinator's choreography. I actually have to learn aikido for the film."
"A useful martial art," Cash remarked. "It was one of the first forms I learned."
"How many do you know?" Rory asked at once.
Cash shrugged. "Karate, tae kwon do, hapkido, kung fu, and
a few disciplines that aren't in the book. You never know when you'll need to fall back
on that training. It comes in handy in police work, now that I'm not stuck behind a
desk all the time." "Judd said you worked in Houston with the D.A.'s office," Tippy
said.
He nodded. "I was a cybercrime expert. It wasn't challenging enough to suit me. I like
something a little less routine and structured." "What do you do in Jacobsville?" Rory
wanted to know. Cash chuckled. "I run from my secretaries," he said sheepishly.
"Just before I phoned your sister about coming up for the holidays, the new one quit and dumped a trash can over my head." He made a face and touched his dark hair. "I'm still picking coffee grounds out of my hair." Tippy's green eyes widened. She stopped and looked up at Cash. She couldn't believe he was telling the truth. She remembered how efficiently he'd stopped the assistant director on her first film from touching her when she'd objected to his familiarity. Rory was laughing. "Really?" "She wasn't really cut out for police work," he said. "She couldn't talk on the phone and type at the same time, so she didn't do much typing." "Why...?" Tippy fished.
"...did she empty a trash can on me?" he finished for her. "Damned if I know! I told her not to force the lock on my filing cabinet, but she wouldn't listen. Is it my fault my baby python, Mikey, jumped out of the drawer at her? She scared him. He has a nervous condition." They'd both stopped now and were staring at him. He sighed. "Isn't it strange how snakes make some people nervous?" he asked philosophically.
"You have a snake named Mikey?" Tippy exclaimed.
"Cag Hart had an albino python that he gave to a breeder after he got married. The python's mate had a litter of the cute little things, and I asked for one. The day he gave me Mikey, I didn't have time to take him home so I put him in the filing cabinet, temporarily, in a little plastic aquarium with water and a limb to climb. It was working very nicely until my secretary jimmied the lock. Sadly, Mikey had escaped and was sitting on top of the files in the filing cabinet drawer."
"What did she do?" Rory asked.
He scowled. "She scared the poor little thing half to death," he muttered. "I'm sure he's going to have psychological problems for the rest of his. "Afterward!" Rory interrupted. His dark eyebrows rose. "After she screamed bloody murder and threw my spare handcuffs at me, you mean?"
Tippy just stared at him, her green eyes twinkling.
"That was when she dumped my trash can over my head. It was almost worth it. She had a spike haircut and black lipstick and nail polish, and body piercings with little silver rings all over visible space. Mikey's slowly getting over the trauma. He's living in my house now."
Tippy was laughing too hard to talk at all.
Rory shook his head. "I almost had a snake once."
"What happened to it?" Cash asked.
"She wouldn't let me out of the pet shop with it," Rory sighed, pointing at his sister.
"Doesn't like snakes, hmm?" he drawled with a wicked glance at Tippy.
"It wasn't because I was afraid of it, it was because he couldn't take it to school
with him and I'm not home long enough to take care of a pet. But if you really need a secretary, as soon as I finish this
movie, I'll have my nose pierced and my hair spiked, first thing," she said, tongue in
cheek.
Cash's perfect white teeth flashed at her. "I don't know. Can you type and chew
gum at the same time?"
"She can't type a word. And she is scared of snakes..." Rory began enthusiastically.
"Stop right there," Tippy murmured with a quick look at her brother. "And don't you
let him corrupt you," she cautioned. "Unless you want me to tell him your fatal
weakness!"
Rory held up both hands. "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. Honest."
She pursed her full lips. "Okay."
"Look! There's the guy with the bagpipes! Give me a twenty, sis, would you?" Rory exclaimed, nodding toward a man in a kilt standing just outside a hotel near the park with a set of bagpipes. He was playing "Amazing Grace." Tippy pulled a large bill from her fanny pack and handed it to Rory. "Here you go. We'll wait here for you," she said with an indulgent smile.
Cash watched him go, his eyes sliding to the bagpiper. "He plays well," Cash said.
"Rory wants a set of bagpipes, but I doubt the commandant would be inclined to let him practice in his dorm." "I agree." Cash smiled wistfully as he listened to the haunting melody. "Is he here often?" he asked her.
"We see him all around the neighborhood," Tippy replied lazily. "He's one of the nicer street people. Homeless, of course. I slip him some money whenever I have a little extra, so he'll be able to buy a blanket or a hot cup of coffee. A lot of us around here indulge him. He has a gift, don't you think?"
"He does. Know anything about him?" he added, impressed by her concern for a stranger.
"Not much. They say his whole family died, but not how or when.. .or even why. He doesn't talk to people much," she murmured, watching Rory hand him the bill and receive a faint smile for it as the piper halted for a moment. "New York is full of street people. Most of them have some talent or other, some way to make a little cash. You can see them sleeping in cardboard boxes, going through Dumpsters for odds and ends." She shook her head. "And we're supposed to be the richest country on earth."
"You'd be amazed at how people live in third world countries," he remarked.
She looked up at him. "I had a photo shoot in Jamaica, near Montego Bay," she recalled. "There was a five-star hotel on a hill, with parrots in cages and a huge swimming pool and every convenience known to man. Just down the hill, a few hundred feet away, was a small village of corrugated tin houses sitting in mud, where people actually lived."
His dark eyes narrowed. He nodded slowly. "I've been to the Middle East. Many people there live in adobe houses with no electricity, no running water, no indoor facilities. They make their own clothing, and they travel in pony carts pulled by donkeys. Our standard of living would shock them speechless."
Her breath drew in sharply. "I had no idea."
He looked around the city. "Everywhere I went, I was made welcome. The poorest families were eager to share the little they had with me. They're mostly good people. Kind people." He glanced at her. "But they make bad
enemies."
Tippy was looking at the scars on his lean, strong face. "Rory's commandant said that they tortured you," she recalled softly. He nodded and his dark eyes searched her light ones. "I don't talk about it. I still have
nightmares, after all these years."
She studied him curiously. "I have nightmares, too," she said absently.
His eyes probed hers, seeking answers to the puzzle she represented. "You lived for a long time with an older actor who was known publicly as the most licentious man in Hollywood," he said bluntly. She glanced toward Rory, who was sitting on a bench, listening as the bagpiper started playing again. She wrapped her arms close around her chest and wouldn't look up. Cash moved in front of her, very close. Strangely, it didn't frighten her. She met his searching gaze. It almost winded her with its intensity.
"Tell me," he said softly.
That softness was irresistible. She took a deep breath and plowed ahead. "I ran away from home when I was twelve. They were going to put me in foster care, and I was terrified that my mother might be able to get me out again—for revenge because I called the police on her and her boyfriend after he..." She hesitated.
"Come on," he prompted.
"After he raped me repeatedly," she bit off, and couldn't look at him then. "I wouldn't have gone back to her, not if it meant starving. So I went on the streets in Atlanta, because I had no way to earn money for food." Her face clenched as she remembered it. Cash's expression was like stone. He'd suspected something like that, from the bits and pieces of her life that he'd ferreted out.
She continued quietly, "The first man who came up to me was handsome and dashing. He wanted to take me home." Her eyes closed. "I was hungry and cold and scared to death. I didn't want to go with him. But he had the kindest eyes..." She swallowed the lump in her throat.
"He took me to his hotel. He had an enormous suite, luxury fit for a king. When we got inside, he laughed because I was nervous and promised he wouldn't hurt me, that he just wanted to help me. I was so scared, I spilled a glass of water down the front of my shirt." She smiled. "I'll never forget the shock on his face as long as I live. I had short hair and I was never voluptuous, even back then, but the wet shirt..." She looked up at Cash, who was listening intently. "But of course, he wasn't interested in me in
that way..." Cash's lips parted on a soft explosion of breath. "Cullen Cannon, the great international lover, was gay?" he asked, astonished.
She nodded. "He was. But he hid it with the help of women friends. He was a sweet and gentle man," she recalled wistfully. "I offered to leave, and he wouldn't hear of it. He said that he was lonely. His family had disowned him. He had nobody. So I stayed. He bought me clothes, put me back in school, shielded me from my own past so that my mother wouldn't be able to find me."
Her eyes misted as she continued her story. "I loved him," she whispered. "I would have given him anything. But all he wanted was to take care of me." She laughed. "Perhaps later, when he'd put me in modeling classes in New York, he liked the image it gave him to have a pretty young woman living with him. I don't know. But I stayed there until he died."
"The media said it was a heart attack."
She shook her head. "He died of AIDS. At the last, his biological children came to see him, and they buried the past. They resented me at first, suspected me of trying to play up to him
for money. But I guess they finally realized that I was crazy about him." She
smiled. 'They tried to make me take his apartment over, when he died, tried to give me
a trust account out of their inheritance. I refused it. You see, I nursed him the last year
he lived."
"That's why you didn't model for a year, just before you were offered your first
film contract. They said you were in an accident and had to heal," Cash recalled.
She was flattered that he remembered that much when he'd literally hated her in
Jacobsville. "That's right," she said. "He didn't want anybody to know about him.
Not even then."
"Poor guy."
"He was the best man I ever knew," she said sadly. "I still put flowers on his grave.
He saved me."
"What about the man who raped you?" he asked bluntly.
She looked at Rory, who was talking to the bagpiper. Her expression was
tormented. "My mother said he was Rory's father," she managed.
Now his intake of breath was really audible. "And you love Rory."
She turned to him. "With all my heart," she agreed. "My mother's still with Rory's
father, Sam Stanton, on and off. They are both drug addicts. Sam and my mother
have fights and he beats her up and she calls the police. He always comes back."
"How did you end up with Rory?" he asked.
'The police officer who saved me the last night I was at home—when Sam raped me—called me when Rory was just four years old. I was still living with Cullen and he was powerful and rich. Cullen went with me to see Rory in the hospital after he was severely beaten by his father. My mother was quite taken with Cullen," she recalled coldly. "So after Rory was re
leased she brought him to the hotel where we were staying. Fishing, for money. Cullen offered to buy the child. And she sold him to us," she added icily. "For fifty thousand dollars."
"My God," he bit off. "And I thought I'd seen it all."
"Rory's been with me ever since," she told him. "He's like my own child."
"You never got pregnant...?"
She shook her head. "I was a late bloomer. I didn't even have my first period until I was fifteen. Pretty lucky, huh?" She pushed back wisps of red hair. "Real lucky." "But your mother wants Rory back now." "The money ran out years ago. She's having to get her drug money by working in a
convenience store, and she doesn't like it. Sam works when he feels like it, and I don't think he does anything legal, either. My attorney paid my mother off last year when she threatened to go to the tabloids about the brutal way I was treating her," she scoffed. "Rich movie star allows poor mother to live in poverty while she rides in stretch limousines." She smiled cynically. "Get the picture?"
"In Technicolor," he agreed coldly.
"So now she's decided she wants Rory back. She sent Rory's lather up to the military school and he tried to get him out. Rory told the commandant what his father had done to him—and to me—and the commandant called the police. The rat ran for his life before they got there."
"Good for the commandant."
"But that doesn't rule out kidnapping. I'd pay anything to get Rory back, and they know it. I don't sleep very well these days," she added. "Rory's father has a cousin who lives near here, in a really bad part of town. They're close, and the cousin has his dirty fingers in a lot of illegal pies."
Cash was doing mental gymnastics. "Does Rory care for his father or his mother?"
"He hates our mother," she replied. "And he doesn't know that Sam Stanton is his real
father." "You haven't told him?" he probed. "I haven't had the heart to," she
explained. "He took a real beating from Sam. The psychologist says he'll have
mental scars for the rest of his life from that ordeal."
"How about you?"
"I've lived through enough to make me strong, with occasional lapses. But mostly,
I'm tough," she murmured.
"Not tough enough, just yet," he commented. "But you will be, if you hang around with me long enough." She glanced at him with a teasing smile. "Am I going to?" He shrugged. "It's up to you. I have a few quirks." "So do I. And a few hang-ups," she added.
He put his hands in his pockets while he stared down at her, to the music of New York traffic. "I don't like ties very much. I'm making no promises. I want to see you while I'm here. Period."
"You don't pull any punches."
He nodded.
She searched his dark eyes. "I don't find you repulsive," she said bluntly. "That's new.
But I've got some terrible scars of my own. I can put on a good act as a vamp when I'm around men. But it's all a ruse. I haven't ever had consensual sex."