Диана Палмер – Renegade (страница 6)

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 to ward 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 bag piper. “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 in heritance. 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 released 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?”