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  “I’m not saying other couples don’t plan, but most other prospective mothers don’t have to agonize over their looks and figures if they get pregnant like my mother did. She’s always accusing the camera of putting five or ten pounds on her as it is.”

  He turned to me.

  “It’s just not comforting to know that if your mother had gotten that part or that modeling job, you might not have been born.”

  “You would have been born sometime, Ryder. They obviously wanted children.”

  “Yeah, but it would have been a different sperm. I might have come out nicer.”

  “You’re nice. Stop it.”

  “Right. Anyway,” he continued, looking back up at the ceiling, “we were all in Italy at the time. My father had been cast in a lead role in one of those cheaply made westerns. You know, the ones that made Clint Eastwood famous? I guess he was thinking he would become the next Clint Eastwood, so we went to Italy. I was only nine, and Summer was four at the time. I guess it’s an understatement to say I was a mischievous brat. I hated being told what I could and couldn’t do, especially by some nanny.

  “My mother used to threaten me with ‘I won’t love you anymore.’ I remember wondering if that was possible. Could your mother or your father turn off their love for you that easily? Even when I was that young, I would think that if they could, it couldn’t be real love.

  “Anyway, I ran away from home a few times while we were there. One time,” he said, smiling, “I was hiding just outside the villa and watching everyone frantically searching and calling for me. I was spotted eventually, and they were really angry that I would let them agonize so much.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “My therapist says it was my call for attention. The way I saw it, it was the kindest way he could come up with to tell my parents they were too into themselves. They didn’t see it that way, of course. There had to be something wrong with me. I was punished, practically locked away until almost the end of my father’s shoot.

  “My mother was nearly six months pregnant at the time. She was always good about not showing her pregnancy until about the seventh month so fans didn’t know, and they had been successful keeping it out of the entertainment press.

  “When I was finally permitted to rejoin the human race, my mother, Summer, our nanny, and I went to a place called Positano in Italy. My mother wanted to do some shopping, and we were going to be permitted to go swimming in the ocean. Most of the shops are along this steep hill, at least the shops my mother wanted to visit. I thought we were taking too long to reach the beach at the bottom, so I decided to take off myself. Our nanny realized I was gone, which threw my mother into a panic. She left Summer with our nanny and began looking for me. I wasn’t that far down the hill. She saw me, and called after me, and I started to run and was nearly hit by a man on a motorcycle. She screamed, ran after me, tripped, and took a nasty fall.”

  “And that was when she miscarried?”

  “Yep. She had to be taken to the hospital. She was also pretty scraped up. The story about her pregnancy and miscarriage leaked out. Afterward, my father wouldn’t talk to me except to bark an order here and there, and a dark silence fell over us all. Summer wasn’t that upset, even at four. She was already jealous of the new baby that might come. I couldn’t blame her. We shared so little in terms of parental love and concern that the prospect of dividing what little we had into thirds disturbed her.”

  “You were just a little boy. They can’t be holding that against you now.”

  “Oh, my therapist has an answer for that, too. He says I’m holding it against myself but making it easier for myself to live with it by transferring my self-blame to them. He says as long as I can believe they hold a grudge, I’m comfortable with it.”

  “Maybe that’s true, Ryder.”

  “Maybe it is; maybe it isn’t,” he said, the anger seeping into his voice. “You felt the tension just now. Was it all my imagination?”

  I knew I was walking on thin ice. It was on the tip of my tongue to say he might be the one who was mainly bringing on the tension. From what I had seen, he wasn’t exactly nice to them, either. But I was hesitant, as cautious as a soldier trying to disarm a bomb.

  “Very few people know this stuff about us—about me, I should say,” he said. “No one at Pacifica does, obviously.”

  “I’m not going to be the one to talk about it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  He was, but he didn’t want to admit it. “I’ve never trusted anyone with the story, except, of course, my therapist,” he said after a moment. “Somehow, maybe because of the hard life you had, I felt I could trust you.”

  “You can, so shut up about it,” I said, and he smiled.

  “This is all too depressing. We need the California fix,” he said, sitting up.

  “California fix? What’s that? I hope not something to do with drugs.”

  “Not unless you consider golden sunshine, sparkling pools and fountains, pristine tennis courts, and a putting green drugs. C’mon. Let me show you our Disneyland.”

  He reached for my hand as he slipped off the bed, and we walked out, through the living room to some patio doors and out to the rear of the property. For a moment, we stood there looking at it all. Their property had a better view to the west than the Marches’ estate had. There was more ocean to see in the distance.

  “Well? Not too shabby, huh?”

  “It’s all very beautiful. You could spend time quietly here, too.”

  “Somehow, because it’s my house, I can’t,” he said. “Of course, the pool is half the size of the one at the Marches’, and they have two tennis courts and a lake.”

  “They have, not me,” I reminded him. “Think of it this way. You’re at home. I’m at a hotel.”

  He laughed. “You ever golf?”

  “No. Donald belongs to an expensive golf club, and Jordan goes at least once a week with some of her friends, but I’ve never gone.”

  “They never offered to take you?”

  “No. They used to take Kiera when she was younger, but she was so disruptive that they stopped.”

  “Let’s putt around. I’m pretty good. I’m better than my father, in fact,” he said, and led me to the shed where the equipment was kept. He gave me one of his mother’s clubs to use and gathered up dozens of balls.

  “I thought your mother didn’t golf. How come she has all this?”

  “As I tried to tell you before, you will see that we have lots of things we don’t use very much. That’s called being successful.”

  I laughed and followed him to the putting green. He set us up four feet from the hole.

  “I was given professional lessons, of course,” he said. “So was Summer, but she was so bored that she began deliberately to hit the ball in the opposite direction. Okay, so here’s how I was taught to putt. You have to practice hitting the ball straight at the hole so you can focus on your stroke and not on what they call the break. If you get the stroke down but miss the break, it’s just a matter of speed.”

  He got behind me, put his hands on my arms, and began to show me the putting stroke. His lips were grazing my cheeks.

  “We’ve got to make sure this putter is straight back and straight to your line,” he said, his voice softening. Gently, he moved me into the proper stance, his body against mine. I did try to concentrate, but his breathing and the feel of his thighs and his waist against me began to quicken my own breath.

  “You smell so good,” he whispered.

  I tried a few strokes, and he tried to correct me, but we both sensed that this was going to be futile. His excitement was building. I didn’t acknowledge it or move away. I wanted to turn in his arms and bring my lips to his. I might have done just that if we hadn’t heard, “That’s disgusting!”

  Ryder’s arms dropped instantly to his sides, and we both looked back at the patio. Summer was standing there with her hands on her hips.

  “I saw what you were doin
g to her,” she said, whining and wagging her head. “What a way to pretend you’re not doing it. So don’t be complaining about me.”

  “Shut your dirty mouth!” he shouted.

  “That’s what you should be doing!” she screamed, and went back into the house.

  He glared after her and then took a deep breath and turned back to me. “Sorry about that.”

  “Maybe she’s just feeling miserable, Ryder. I could try to talk to her.”

  “Talk to her? I ask only people I don’t like to do that,” he said, and shook his head the way a dog might to throw off water. “Forget about her. Take some more putts. The object is to sink fifty in a row.”

  This time, he stood back to watch. I saw him glaring back at the house periodically. I tried to swing the way he had shown me, but I couldn’t concentrate. It was like navigating through a minefield around here. Where was the softness? Where was the kindness and love that made them into a family?

  I kept hitting the balls, but I made only one in ten attempts.

  “I’m terrible at it,” I said.

  “I guess this is stupid,” he said, taking the club from me. He practically ripped it from my hands. “It’s the blind leading the blind, anyway. I don’t play enough to justify teaching someone else.”

  “I thought you were telling me to do the right things.”

  “How would you know?”

  He marched back to the shed to put everything away.

  “You’ve got to have more confidence in yourself,” I said when he slammed the shed door shut.

  “Exactly. Do you know where I can get that? Is there a bank or something where I can withdraw some self-confidence? Or maybe someplace on the Internet. With one click, I can download the self-confidence I need, huh?”

  “I simply meant that you should give yourself a chance, Ryder.”

  “For what?” he said, starting for the house.

  “Maybe just for me right now,” I told him, and he stopped and considered.

  I held my breath. Was he going to come up with something so nasty that I would want to charge right out of there, get into my car, and drive off? I felt as if I was tottering on a cliff of emotion.

  He smiled. “So, what am I, a challenge for you?”

  “Seems to me it’s the other way around,” I replied.

  His smile widened. “Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry again for being a nasty bastard. In fact, if it continues, I might have that tattooed on my forehead soon.”

  “That’s better than what I had tattooed once on me.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Really? You didn’t tell me about that.”

  “I never tell on the first date, and we really haven’t had a first date yet.”

  He laughed and reached for my hand again. On our way back to his room, he introduced me to their maid and cook, Martha Cooper. She was an African American woman in her fifties from Louisiana who had been trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Texas. I gathered that she had been working for the Garfields for the last two years. Ryder told me she had always worked for celebrities. He said the world of the rich and famous was like a closed little club in which the members shared not only servants but also beauty and health references.

  “This sharing is another thing that makes them all feel special,” he said as we headed back to his room. “Not that they need much more to do that.”

  “You sound prejudiced,” I said, only half kidding.

  “Huh? Prejudiced?”

  “Don’t hold their fame against them. They’re not inferior just because they’re well known.”

  That brought another smile to his face. I was beginning to think that if I could accumulate smile after smile, I might be able to make a difference with Ryder Garfield. The worry was that I would try too hard and lose him that way, too.

  “That’s my sister’s room,” he said, nodding at a closed door.

  He paused and looked as if he might go charging at it to pound on it and start yelling at her again. Then he looked at me and thought better of it. We went into his room and he closed the door.

  “Tell me about this tattoo,” he said, and threw himself onto his bed. I hesitated. Neither Jordan nor Donald had mentioned it to me ever since. Occasionally, I looked at myself in a full-length mirror, but I was more comfortable pretending that it didn’t exist. It was all just a nightmare.

  “C’mon,” he said. “You let the cat out of the bag.”

  I began to describe the club Kiera and her friends had created, Virgins Anonymous, in more detail and how they had shown me their tattoos, which I was later to discover were removable, temporary.

  “Why would you do it, anyway?”

  “They convinced me it was sort of an initiation rite, only they convinced me to do a real one.”

  I described how they had taken me to a tattoo parlor and voted on what I should have put on me. He sat listening intently. I was worried that he might think less of me when he learned how I had been so easily duped. I even told him that was the reason I didn’t like describing what had happened to me.

  “The few people I did tell always looked as if they thought it was as much my fault as Kiera’s and her friends’ fault.”

  “If they did, they’re stupid,” he said. “You were pretty vulnerable then, considering all you had suffered and how alone you felt.”

  “True, but I couldn’t help feeling stupid.”

  “Where was this tattoo?”

  “Here,” I said, turning to place my hand over the spot that was just above my rear end.

  “What happened to it? Is it still there?”

  “No. It was removed, but there’s a scar.”

  He stared.

  “You want to see it?”

  “Yes, but not because I don’t believe you,” he said.

  I thought a moment, and then I began to unfasten my belt. I turned my back to him and slowly began to lower my jeans. He said nothing, but before I could raise them again, I felt his lips on my scar. They felt hot, and when I felt the tip of his tongue, my heart began to thump. I closed my eyes as his hands moved around my hips and gently held on to mine. Ever so slowly, he guided my jeans farther down, hooking my panties, too. He kept kissing me softly. When my jeans and my panties were down to my ankles, he turned me and kissed me on the lips.

  Gently, he pulled me onto the bed, and we kissed again. He lifted his face from mine and stared.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he said, stroking my hair. “From the moment I saw you, I couldn’t get you out of my head.”

  “You certainly didn’t show it.”

  He smiled. “I figured any girl who could take it and give it back like you did had to like me.”

  “Weird logic.”

  “I know.”

  We kissed again, his lips moving over my chin and onto my neck. A voice inside me was clamoring, This is too fast. Calm down. Yet I didn’t push him away. I held him tighter and searched for his lips again and again. His breathing was outracing mine.

  “Ryder,” I said softly.

  “I dreamed of you in my bed just like this,” he whispered.

  He worked my blouse over my head, unfastened my bra, and gently dropped my clothes over the side of the bed. Then, with his kisses, he carved a trail between my breasts, over them, and down my stomach.

  There was a shouting match going on inside me now, caution against passion. I made small attempts to stop, but they grew weaker and weaker. I felt as though I were chained, handcuffed by my own overwhelming desire.

  He stood up and fumbled with his own clothing, throwing it off as if it was his clothes that were on fire and not him. When he started to bring himself back to me, I put up my hand.

  “Ryder, I don’t want to end up like your sister did.”

  He smiled and opened the drawer on the nightstand beside his bed to pluck out a contraceptive. I think the sight of it so handy had what most would think was an unexpected reaction in me. I knew Kiera and her friends would think the boy they were
with was sophisticated enough for them to be with him. From the way they talked, they wanted nothing to do with innocent young men. But the thought that threw cold water over me was the possibility that Ryder had brought other girls here, right to this very place, and was always prepared.

  “Wait,” I said, moving to get my panties and jeans on.

  His smile slowly fell away like a leaf descending. Confusion and disappointment rushed into his lips and his eyes. Before he could ask anything, my cell phone rang. I fumbled with my jeans, scooped up my blouse and bra, and snatched the phone out of my bag. It was Jordan.

  “Where are you?” she asked, as if she could see for miles and through house walls.

  “I’m still at Ryder Garfield’s home. I’ve been invited to dinner here. They’re having lobster fra diavolo.”

  I turned my back to Ryder. He started to dress.

  “I remember you love it, but Donald would like you home for dinner,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know his reason, Sasha, but he was very adamant about my calling you to tell you. Please do as he wishes.”

  I looked at Ryder. He had his pants on but was sitting on the bed, holding his shirt and glaring down at the floor. His face was still quite flushed, as I imagined was mine.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes,” I snapped.

  She had never heard that tone in my voice. It gave her pause. “Drive carefully,” she said, and hung up. I held the phone for a moment and then flipped it closed and finished dressing. Ryder didn’t speak. He just sat there staring at the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He looked up at me, his eyes narrowing. Then he held up the contraceptive between his thumb and forefinger. “This spooked you?”

  I didn’t answer. I kept dressing.

  “What, would you rather I didn’t use it?”

  “No, of course not,” I said.