LaVyrle Spencer - The hellion

He turned, and as their eyes met and held, it struck them both that they'd suffered many of the same things over the years, in spite of the different roads their lives had taken.

"You, Rachel?" he asked, as if unable to believe it of her. She nodded, dropping her eyes to the fingers laced over her stomach. "But you and your daddy have always stood by each other. You seem so close."

"On the surface. But there are undercurrents."

Once again Tommy Lee felt a compelling urge to touch her. Instead, he backed away a step. "This room makes me uncomfortable, Rachel. Could we sit at your kitchen table or somewhere else?"

She hadn't expected him to stay that long. Still, looking up at him now, wondering many things about the man whose eyes she could only half make out behind the glasses, she realized that talking about everything-at last-was something they owed each other.

She led the way through a pair of white louvred cafй doors into a shining kitchen decorated in white with splashes of geranium red. The room constituted one arm of the house and had a wall of sliding glass doors that overlooked the pool. Unlike Tommy Lee's kitchen, this one hadn't a thing out of place. The white countertops and appliances gleamed. The polished vinyl floor shone. The walls were cheerfully splattered with that same geranium color, which was repeated in a set of pots hanging on a wall beside the stove and a teakettle sitting on one burner.

Rachel touched a wall switch and a tulip-shaped lamp of white wicker came alight above a small white pedestal table flanked by a pair of bentwood ice-cream chairs situated smack in front of the windows.

"Sit down, Tommy Lee. Can I get you something to drink?"

"Yes, whatever you're having."

She moved to the refrigerator, and he to stand before the wide expanse of glass. In the shadows he could make out the brick-walled backyard, the stretch of pool reflecting a newly risen moon, and an assortment of tables and chaise lounges. The house curled around to his right, hugging the pool between the glass wall of what he guessed to be a family room, leading at a right angle off the kitchen, and the bedroom wing, straight across the water. The entire view was nothing short of sumptuous.

"You really meant it when you said he'd been good to you. This is even nicer than I always imagined it to be."

The butcher knife paused over the lime Rachel was slicing. "Than you imagined?"

He glanced over his shoulder. "I used to own this land, you know. I was the original developer who subdivided it, had the improvements put in, then sold the lots. Cauley built this house, didn't he?"

"Yes, he did."

"And I saw your application for a pool permit when I was up at City Hall that spring you put it in. I always wondered what it looked like back here behind that hedge."

Rachel felt disquieted to realize Tommy Lee had kept such close track of the personal plateaus in her life with Owen.

"You've driven past often?"

She felt his eyes measuring her, though she couldn't see beyond the top half of the brown lenses. His voice was subdued as he answered, "You've never been far from my mind, Rachel." They stared at each other for a pulsating moment, then he added, "Not even when I was married."

Flustered, she turned to reach into an upper cabinet for two thick amber glasses. From an ice dispenser on the refrigerator door came the clunk and chink of cubes falling into the tumblers. His eyes followed each movement of her slim back, the shift of her silk blouse and the pull of the lavender trousers across her spine as she reached, bent, opened a chilled bottle of carbonated water, dropped lime wedges into the glasses and filled them.

She turned with the sparkling drinks in her hands and said composedly, "Let's sit down."

Despite her outward calm, Rachel knew a sudden reluctance to approach him. A dangerous flutter of physical awareness now hummed in her stomach. How silly. They were not at all the same people. She was thin and gaunt, and he was graying and too heavy, and beneath the unkind light she saw again the lines of dissipation that reiterated the truth about his life-style.

He took the iced drink from her hand, and without removing his eyes from her, pulled out her chair, waited for her to sit, then took the chair across from her. She felt his eyes intensely lingering and dropped her own to the white Formica tabletop, where a poppy-red mat held a thriving green sprengeri plant in a toadstool planter. But even without looking she knew he studied her unwaveringly, and it set her midsection trembling. Between them the old compelling magnetism tugged and seemed to draw her to him against her will.

After a full minute's silence he asked, very quietly, "So… where did you go, Rachel?"

Her eyes, dark and wide, lifted to his, but they focused on her own reflection in his glasses.

"They sent me to a private school in Michigan."

"In Michigan?"

"Yes."

"They were going to make damn sure I couldn't find you, weren't they?" He took a perfunctory sip from his glass, grimaced, and set it aside.

"They talked it over, all four of them, and decided to tell everyone here the truth-that I'd gone off to finish high school in an exclusive high-priced private school up north. No excuses. No questions. Given my daddy's bank account, nobody thought a thing of it."

"Michigan," he ruminated, staring at his glass. "How often I wondered." The room was utterly silent. Rachel waited, suspended in dread anticipation for the question she knew would come next. He lifted his eyes to hers, and his voice held an audible tremor as he asked softly, "And did you have the baby there?"

She wanted to tear her eyes away from his, but could not. How many years had she forced herself never to imagine this moment happening? Now it was here, and her emotions exploded with a force for which she wasn't prepared.

"Yes," she whispered.

He swallowed. His lips opened, but no sound came out. After several seconds he finally managed, in a strangled voice, the question that had haunted him through three marriages and the driven time since, "What was it?"

"A girl," came the nearly inaudible answer.

He jerked his glasses off, and they hung over the table edge from his lifeless fingers while he rubbed his eyes as if to stroke away the pain. He sucked in a great gulp of air. His shoulders heaved once, then sagged again. The room was as silent as they had been to each other over the intervening years.

The old hurt rushed back, sharpened by nostalgia.

He opened his eyes, stared at her delicate hand resting on the tabletop. His heavy hand moved the few inches to hers and enclosed it loosely while he watched his thumb rubbing across her knuckles. It was not at all the way he'd imagined touching her again, if he ever got the chance.

Rachel's fingers tightened. "Oh, Tommy Lee, they said you'd be told. They shouldn't have kept it from you."

He continued staring at their hands. She still wore her wedding ring on her left hand, while his held a gold florentine band with a cluster of seven large diamonds. With his thumb he drew circles around her engagement diamond, and went on tiredly. "They did. My daddy called me into his office at the lumberyard one day that spring and said you'd had the baby and that it was a girl. But somehow I always wanted to hear it from you."

Rachel's heart softened, as did her voice. "She was born April nineteenth."

Their eyes met and held. Their child's birthday would fall very shortly. Neither Rachel nor Tommy Lee could help wondering what that day would be like if they were husband and wife and she their acknowledged daughter.

"You never wrote," he mourned.

"Yes, I did. Many times. A couple I sent, but most I just threw away. I knew they wouldn't let you find out where I was. They were very powerful, you know. Once they got us to agree that adoption was the only solution, they simply"-she shrugged sadly-"took over."