Florida Knight

by Blair Bancroft

  Shutting out the sight of Cat standing, hands on hips, waiting for him to move, Raven pictured the party scene, so typical of LALOC’s efforts to re-create the past while accepting the restrictions of modern times. The campfire had been carefully controlled within an old hod bucket someone had decorated with punched-out fleurs de lis. But the smell of the wood fire, the snap and crackle of resin in the pine logs, had been exactly as he remembered it from long-ago Boy Scout days. Barring the incident in the Assembly Hall, it had been a day of nostalgia. Families, children, new friends, all the so-called “old-fashioned” values. Enough to set a man of thirty-six wondering what he was going to do with the remainder of his life.

  They’d gone from Feast Hall to campfire revelry, somehow keeping in medieval character even as they passed the exterminator’s van backed up to the Assembly Hall. It had been a good party, an almost gentle, if amply liquid, camaraderie of a kind Raven had thought extinct. They were good people, these LALOC members who tried so hard to follow a Dream.

  Cat had not turned on the lantern. She was a dark silhouette, outlined against the tent’s screening by one of the campground’s spotlights. Raven shoved the small nylon table out of the way, pulled the second camp chair close to his own. “Hey, Cat,” he coaxed, patting the empty chair, “come over here and sit down. I think we both need to cool off before we hit the sack.”

  Cat knew she shouldn’t have had that last beer. Bubba had handed it to her, and she’d accepted. Rene, the troubadour, had reached the point of the evening when he was offering a particularly naughty ballad. Cat listened, sipped her beer, and never thought about the consequences. Now, here she was, alone with Raven, when they’d both overindulged. Admittedly, just a trifle, but she was afraid that might be enough. Between the emotional turbulence that constantly enveloped them and stress of the job they were trying to do, control hung on a hair’s breadth.

  Yet sitting next to Raven in a camp chair was a lot less dangerous than going into the tent’s bedroom, lying down beside him. As if four feet were any less dangerous than four inches!

  Slowly, Cat stepped forward, lowered herself into the chair, carefully arranging the folds of the blue-green silk gown she’d worn for Feast. She turned her face outward, toward the now-deserted campground. Raven’s physical presence seemed to reach out and grab her, hug her to him. His male scent surrounded her, choked her breathing. Panicked, Cat gripped her hands together in her lap. If Raven made the slightest movement, she was going to scream and run.

  As if she would.

  She might try to take him down, but she was as likely to reveal her personal problems to the entire campground as she was to rise up and fly home. She had far, far too much pride.

  “You’re going to have to tell me about it sometime,” Raven said. “What better time than now?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “So there is something to tell,”

  “Nothing you’d want to know.”

  “Yes, I would.” Raven hesitated, then added, “And I think you need to tell it.”

  “I don’t tell anybody.”

  “Then it’s time you did.” Determined. Inexorable.

  The panic was so bad, Cat’s throat was closing up. Pain stabbed through her neck and chest like hot knives. “I can’t!” was all she could get past the obstruction that was cutting off her breathing.

  Now wasn’t the time for him to turn back into a cop, but that was the voice which came at her out of the darkness. Impersonal, professional. The dispassionate tones of a man who would never touch her. Not even when she needed it. Like now.

  “This is the time and place, Kate. We’re both a little reckless tonight. Better to talk than . . . well, hell, you know what I mean. Secrets are easier to tell in the dark. We’ve got a cool night to clear our heads, plus the magic of being far away from the world we live in. Come on, woman, what better time than now?”

  “Michael . . . could you get me some water?” Better. Only a whisper, but she’d managed a few words. No, not so good. They’d both let the Dream that was LALOC slip, dissipated by thoughts of the outside world. They had reverted to being Kate and Michael, with all the problems that went with their mundane lives. She heard him rummaging in the cooler against the back wall, the pop of the seal on the cap, felt the plastic bottle laid gently into her hand. “Thanks,” she murmured.

  Kate gulped several swallows as if her life depended on it. Was he right? Was this the time to face her demons? Was her terror merely habit? Or did she, perhaps, fear discovering her demons weren’t all that awful? That other people had endured far worse without abdicating from their lives? That she, the Florida Kingdom’s Lady Knight, was hiding when she should have been brave enough to embrace the new life she had made for herself without fear?

  Kate took another swallow of water. “I’m not sure I can do this.”

  “Have you ever told anyone? Mona? Barbara Falk?”

  “No.” Pain stabbed through her, she gasped for air.

  Michael tensed, reached out. She jerked away. Hugging her arms to her stomach, Kate ground out, “I’m okay. I just didn’t realize thinking about it, after all this time, would hit me so hard. Give me a minute.”

  “Forget about it. I shouldn’t have pushed it.”

  She felt, rather than heard him, subside into his chair. When she peeked out of the corner of her eye, he had his head down almost to his knees, his hair, blacker than the night, gripped savagely in his hands. “Michael?”

  “Mm-mm?”

  “It’s been a long time since I thought of myself as a coward. It’s something of a shock to discover it’s still true.”

  Pools of darkness stared out of his shadowed face. “If there’s anything you’re not, Kate, it’s a coward.”

  “But I am,” she insisted. “I ran away from . . . a situation, made a new life. At the time I was proud of myself. Now . . . I realize I only made half the journey back to a normal life. Instead of facing my problems, I simply cut them off without facing my demons. I’ve used a dream world as a buffer against reality. I made myself physically strong, but built a moat around my mind. No one was going to hurt me again because I was never going to get close enough to let them. A sterile environment, but it’s taken me a lot of years to realize it.”

  “And I get the honor of being the catalyst.” Michael groaned.

  “Not your fault. Somebody had to do it.”

  “I sort of had another position in mind.”

  Didn’t he just! Kate’s stomach flip-flopped while other parts of her anatomy exploded into heat. This time it wasn’t pain that clogged her throat. “G’night,” she managed, half-rising to her feet.

  Michael’s hand shot out, clamped her arm. “Not so fast. No escape, Kate. I can’t grope in the dark any more. I need to know what’s going on with you.”

  “Why?” Kate’s anguished sob echoed around them.

  “Because I care about you, dammit,” Michael shot back. “Because I want to jump your bones and damn well need to know why I can’t!”

  “Oh.” Incredibly, Kate felt her trembling lips curve toward a Mona Lisa smile. “You think you make my need-to-know list, huh?”

  “Right!”

  “Michael . . .” Kate tried forming one last protest. Failed. “It’s nothing, really. Thousands of others have the same story. I just didn’t cope with it as well as some.” She considered. “Maybe better than others,” she qualified. “But . . .” Her voice trailed away on a sigh.

  “Begin at the beginning,” Michael ordered. “The whole thing, Kate. I want to know it all.”

  Chapter 17

  Kate shifted in her chair. “It’s nothing, really. I locked it away a long time ago, never to be resurrected. Until you came along.”

  Liar, liar! Ridiculous to blame others. Particularly Michael, who was bucking for Good Guy of the Century. “Sorry,” she murmured. “Truth is, things were disintegrating before I met you. I wouldn’t—couldn’t—look back. And I’d just begun to realiz
e there was nothing in my future but emptiness. I was caught in my own narrow tunnel, barely able to define the problem, let alone know what to do about it. And then you came along.”

  “Good or bad?” Michael challenged.

  “You don’t give up, do you, lieutenant?”

  “Never.”

  “Good, I guess,” Kate conceded. “All right,” she added irritably, “I’ll be truthful. You made me realize what I’d missed. What fear and shame had done to my life. Meeting you, discovering I could feel . . . something. I was forced to look back, analyze what went wrong. That’s when I began to suspect that by putting it all behind me—refusing to even think about it—I’d turned a pretty common event into the Nightmare Horror of my life. At the time I was so sure I knew what I was doing . . .” Kate’s soft confession faded, diminishing into the surrounding darkness.

  “So let me be the judge.” Michael reached through the gloom, found the hands clasped in her lap. They were icy cold. Gently, he squeezed. “Come on, Kate, let’s hear it.”

  “I’m . . . embarrassed.”

  “Go way back. Tell me about your parents, how things were when you were a kid.” Michael removed his hand, granting Kate some space.

  Her sigh echoed out into the crisp April night. He was asking about yet another source of guilt. She’d had everything, yet been so resentful. In its way her childhood had been almost as painful as adulthood. How much of it had been her own fault? Those years could probably stand some serious re-examination as well.

  Kate scrambled for an objective viewpoint on her childhood. It wasn’t easy. “My father was a big-time politician. You’d probably recognize his name. He had an eye for beautiful women, so I’m told no one was surprised when he started dating my mother, who was the hottest new star on Broadway. Unfortunately, she was careless . . . and then there was me.”

  Again, Michael’s hand reached out, Kate thrust it aside. “There was a hasty marriage. My mother had to drop out of her long-running show.”

  “At least she kept you . . . didn’t have an abortion,” Michael pointed out.

  “True,” Kate conceded. “It might have been okay if I’d been your typical little girl, but I was a great ugly gawk from the moment I was born. Totally my father’s child, with no sign of cute, petite, or even appealing. If I hadn’t looked so much like my father’s mother, I think mom would have thought somebody switched babies.

  “She tried, she really tried,” Kate amended. “Looking back after all this time, I realize she did attempt to do the mother-daughter bit. We simply had nothing in common. Except . . . I loved backstage, particularly the costume rooms. Every show she was in, that’s where I’d hang out. Every moment I got away from my keepers, that is.”

  “Keepers?”

  “Money was never a problem. “Nannies, governesses, cooks, housekeepers—you name it, we had it. My father’s life ran on one schedule, my mother’s on another. Sometimes I wondered if they ever saw each other. It wasn’t until years later—when mom retired from the stage—that I realized they weren’t married just to avoid scandal. Mom settled into being the perfect political wife. Dad won his umpteenth re-election, and they seem genuinely happy.”

  “Even though you got lost in the shuffle.”

  “I could have handled things better,” Kate protested hastily. “My parents were genuine celebrities. I didn’t have to be such a brat about it. Look at Chelsea Clinton. She had it far worse than I ever did.”

  “You were a child, Kate. You needed their time, their attention. Love.”

  “I was a sullen ghost at the feast. Awkward, hanging back, always aware of the shock on the faces of my parents’ friends when they saw me. ‘This can’t be your little Katherine!’ Kate mimicked. “Every time it was like a knife in my heart when I should have squared my shoulders, stood proud.”

  “Children aren’t supposed to go it alone, Kate!”

  Though warmed by Michael’s anger, Kate remained determinedly charitable. “My life wasn’t all bad, I just let myself think so. When my parents dined at home, I learned the art of conversation, the importance of being able to talk intelligently on an astounding variety of topics. They never hesitated to say they were pleased when I got good grades or a role in the school play. Always playing a boy, of course. But all I saw was that my friends had parents who took their kids on vacation in the summer—the beach, the national parks, Disneyworld. I got sent to camp. All summer, every summer. I always got the feeling my parents breathed a sigh of relief the minute I went out the door.”

  Kate paused. There was just enough light Michael could see her shake her head. “Ghastly childhood, right?” she mocked. “I had absolutely everything, and I thought I was the saddest case in Manhattan. Poverty cried around me, and I walked by like it didn’t exist. Truthfully, I never saw anything but myself, my friends, and my mostly absentee parents.”

  “Typical teenager,” Michael intoned.

  “Oh, come on, Michael!” Kate groaned.

  “Granted, you had an unusual childhood. But even so-called normal parents can mess up on child-rearing. It’s so easy, it’s scary. It doesn’t matter how much money you have or don’t have, Kate. Teens see only their own personal world. And no parents of a teen ever did anything right, no matter how hard they tried. Teens see only what they want to see. It’s part of growing up, growing away, becoming independent.”

  “What makes you such an expert?” Kate snapped.

  “I’m an old man. My friends have teenagers. And . . . I still remember what it was like. I had the world’s greatest parents, and I thought they were unenlightened ancients. And it’s not so long since the family agreed Mark never quite made it out of his teens. He kind of got stuck in fantasy land.”

  “You think that’s what the teen years are—fantasy land?”

  “Fantasy or angst, take your choice. Depends on your outlook.”

  “Yeah . . . well, I did the angst,” Kate admitted. “I couldn’t wait to go off to college. And, of course, the parents were cheering me on. You know . . . hip, hip, hooray, the kid’s going away!”

  “Didn’t feel sorry for yourself, did you?” Michael chided.

  “Okay, so I was a Class A pain. I blamed all my mistakes on my parents. If only they loved me . . .” Kate jumped up, strode to the door, zippered the screen entry flap into place with a single vicious downward roll. “I was such an obnoxious brat,” she burst out, turning back to Michael. “I guess I deserved what happened.”

  “If it was bad, Kate, you didn’t deserve it. You were a thoughtless kid, like ninety-nine percent of others that age.”

  Kate sank back into her chair. “What happened, of course, was that I searched for love in all the wrong places. The football team, the basketball team, the baseball team . . .”

  Michael’s throat closed, as if strangling on the words that nearly burst free. “K-Kate . . . ?”

  “Okay, so it wasn’t that bad,” she admitted swiftly. “But I did mostly date guys who were into sports. The others weren’t ready for a girl built like me.”

  “Then what?” Michael probed.

  “About what you’d expect,” Kate sighed. “My dates gave it the good old college try, faded away when they got nothing more than a fast grope in the dark. I was sort of embarrassed over being a virgin, but my body insisted on fighting back even when my mind was willing. And none of the jocks seemed anxious to wrestle with a girl almost as big as they were.”

  “And . . . ?”

  Kate slid down in her chair, propped her chin in her hands. “It was inevitable. I’d set myself up for it. The Big Challenge. Which jock was going to successfully storm the citadel? All that sort of sophomoric nonsense.” Kate’s words slid past the palm of her hand that was almost covering her mouth, as if trying to repress her story. “In my junior year a transfer student hit the campus. A football star lured away from a smaller school. He was new, different, actually planned to be a lawyer instead of a professional jock. He was six-four and outweighed me
by a hundred pounds.

  “I look back, even now, and don’t see any way I could have reacted differently. I wasn’t naive. I’d been raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. I knew the score. Tag—his name was Taggart—heard about me and couldn’t resist the challenge. I was beginning to think I was the last virgin in the whole school . . . and there was no way my mind was going to win out over my body with Taggart Parrish. The problem was . . . I hardly knew him at all. I had no idea . . .”

  “No idea what?” Michael prompted as Kate’s voice trailed away.

  “It wasn’t rape. I knew it then, I haven’t changed my mind. But it surely wasn’t romance. Or anything I’d believed love—even lust—to be.” Kate winced, forced her thoughts past lips that didn’t want to move. “I was too young and stupid to realize it was my soul that was being raped. That the rough sex we had, the relationship we developed, was all about power. About control. Me, Tarzan—You, Jane.”

  Kate gulped for air, plunged farther into forbidden territory. “I was so pitifully grateful Tag stuck with me, that he didn’t just score and go on to the next, I took everything he dished out. We went where he wanted to go, did what he wanted to do. I was like some large puppy trailing along behind him, grateful for every crumb of attention. “Awful, isn’t it?” Kate asked abruptly. “ Even after all these years, I feel sick.”

  “How long?”

  “Years.” Kate straightened, squared her shoulders. Defiant in finally confessing her stupidity. “We went off to law school together.”

  “You went to law school!”

  “I not only went, I passed the New York bar exam on the first try.”

  As grim as he was feeling, Michael smiled at the sudden flash of pride in Kate’s voice. “So what went wrong?”

  “Tag’s need for control got worse. He had to know where I was every minute, the names of everyone I talked to. All day, every day. For a while I told myself he was simply jealous. I should be pleased he cared so much. But then . . . he got violent.”

  Michael sucked in his breath, his hand shot out, hovered over her shoulder, then formed into a fist that dropped back to pound silently against his knee.