Passion (39 page)

In fact, she wouldn’t be surprised if he’d already done it. She had seen the legal pad on the kitchen table at lunch, had
seen all those much-handled pages. She had wanted so badly to look at it, to reach across the table and pick it up and read
what he had written. But he had seen her looking, and he hadn’t offered to let her see it, so she hadn’t asked. Soon she would.
She wanted to read the pages. She needed to.

“Wouldn’t it be interesting,” she began slowly, watching the coffee in her cup vibrate from the unsteadiness in her hands,
“if the John Smith who came into the office, the one who did the interview in New Orleans, wasn’t the same John Smith who
created Simon Tremont?”

Her boss apparently decided to humor her. “If he discovered
that he and Tremont shared the same name and he decided to pass himself off as Tremont? If he thought that he’d discovered
the easy way to fame and fortune?” She shook her head. “How could he hope to pull it off?”

“No one had ever met Tremont. No one knew what he looked like, how old he was, how he sounded. He’d cultivated such an air
of mystery that the world knew only one thing about him: he could write the most incredible books.”

“And what could such an impostor hope to gain from this?”

“You said yourself it would be the easy way to fame and fortune. It’s not so unusual, Rebecca. One of the daytime talk shows
did an entire show some time back about people who routinely claim to be someone they’re not. They even made a movie about
one of them. People were
thrilled
to meet Simon Tremont. You should have seen the way everyone at the hotel and the TV station treated him, as if he were visiting
royalty. All he had to do was lift one finger, and they jumped to fulfill his every wish. And fortune? He’s received only
one check since coming out of hiding, but we both know that every check Tremont gets is a fortune in itself.”

“And where is the real Simon Tremont during all this?”

“The same place he’s been for the last eleven years: at home in Colorado, hiding in his mountains, and absolutely unaware
that anything unusual is happening.”

Rebecca considered the scenario, and for a moment, Teryl thought, plausibility was evenly balanced with skepticism. The moment
passed, though, and skepticism won out. “But sooner or later the impostor has to get caught. He meets someone who knows who
he really is, or someone who knows the person he’s posing as. In this case, sooner or later the fake Simon would have to write
another book. His fans haven’t even yet seen
Resurrection
, and they’re already drooling over the prospect of the
next
Tremont novel.”

“But, realistically, no one expects another book for at least a year or two or even longer,” Teryl pointed out. “He can bask
in an awful lot of celebrity—and spend an awful lot of the real Simon’s money—in two years.”

“Speaking of books, that shoots down your theory right
there. The man who came to the office, who did the interview in New Orleans, wrote the most incredible of those incredible
books. He wrote
Resurrection
. Only the real Simon Tremont could have done that.” Replacing her glasses, Rebecca shuffled through the contracts in front
of her. Before she turned all of her attention to them, though, she gave Teryl an affectionate smile. “This new author certainly
fired your imagination. I like that in a book. Go back and finish reading it, then let me know what you think.”

Even though she had clearly been dismissed, Teryl remained where she was for a moment. Then, with a faint sigh, she left,
returning to the privacy of her own office, sinking once more into the leather chair, gazing off into space, and brooding
once more.

All right, so she had broached the subject with Rebecca, who had, at least, listened and hadn’t laughed her from the room.
But she hadn’t been particularly open to the possibilities, either. She’d never gotten beyond the interesting-idea-but-could-never-happen-in-reality
stage. How much less open would she be when Teryl tried again, not with hypotheticals but with details, with facts, with John’s
claims and her own doubts? If Rebecca didn’t believe such a scheme could work in a talking-about-books-and-make-believe scenario,
how much more skeptical would she be when Teryl tried to present it as reality?

She would probably be convinced that John was crazy and would have serious doubts about Teryl. She wouldn’t for more than
a moment consider the possibility that John’s claims had any basis in reality. Like any good business-person, she would go
on the defensive, would take whatever steps were necessary to protect the agency, herself, and her most important client,
including firing a disloyal employee who had violated the confidentiality of that client’s records. John wouldn’t prove a
thing, and
she
would be out of a job.

All things considered, she thought glumly as she reached for the manuscript on the corner, for the time being, at least, she
would rather not say another word.

* * *

The computer screen glowed royal blue in the dimly lit office, the cursor an annoying blink of white. Type, it seemed to command
with its agitated flutter. Type something, anything, but, damn it, type! But Simon, seated in his high-tech, top-dollar, designed-for-your-spine
chair, had nothing to say. He’d had nothing to say for days.

He leaned back in the chair, anchoring his feet on the floor, and twisted slowly from side to side. Every day he came in here,
and every night, too. He turned on the computer, and he faced this empty screen, and he tried to write. At first, his goal
had been a new book, one that would top
Resurrection
, one that would convince the world that he was, indeed, the greatest writer that lived. Soon that had become a desire to
write a chapter, just one chapter, twenty-five or thirty pages. He’d written that and far more in a day, especially there
toward the end of
Resurrection
.

Today his goal had been to write one well-crafted sentence that could lead to another. Here it was, the middle of the afternoon,
and he hadn’t yet succeeded.

Maybe it was still too soon. After those last frantic weeks of obsessing over the last book, maybe he hadn’t given his creative
self time to recharge. Maybe he needed more rest… more public appearances… more adulation. Maybe he was feeling the pressure
of having to follow up his masterpiece with something at least as good, preferably better. Or maybe he just needed to tie
up a few loose ends in his life. Loose ends tended to get messy. They could trip a man up if he wasn’t careful.

Still turning from side to side, he reached out and, with the caps lock feature turned on, typed the name of one of his loose
ends. TERYL. She was back in town, back in the office at last, and rumor was that she’d brought her lover with her. Just how
good could the guy be, to merit an invitation to come home to Virginia with her and move into her house?

IS. He pressed the spacebar, then slumped down and propped his feet on the low stool underneath his desk. His posture at the
computer had always been awful, resulting in backaches, stiff fingers, and an occasional nagging worry
about carpal tunnel syndrome. Was there an author in the world who didn’t worry? Of course, it didn’t matter to him now. If
sitting at the desk got to be a strain, he would simply hire a secretary. He would make himself comfortable, dictate his books,
and let her ruin
her
back and wrists.

Picking out the letters, he finished his first full sentence of the day. A SLUT.

Funny how things could change. In New Orleans and following his return home, he had found himself all too often thinking about
sex with Teryl. There was something terribly appealing about slutty sex with someone as sweet, innocent, and pure as she had
seemed to be. But the key word there was
seemed
. She might still be sweet, but apparently she was neither innocent nor pure. Being bad with a good girl was a tremendously
erotic prospect. Being bad with a bad girl was merely boring.

He would be a liar if he said he wasn’t disappointed. Claiming her as his own, he had thought, would be one of his greater
achievements. Now he would still claim her, at least for a night or maybe—if she was very, very good—for a weekend, but it
would be no great achievement. Apparently, if her affair with this stranger was anything to judge by, just about any man in
the world could have her. She was theirs for the taking… when, damn her, she was supposed to be
his
.

But maybe the affair wasn’t anything to judge by. Maybe there was more to it than met the eye. Maybe the guy hadn’t been a
stranger but someone she’d once known. Maybe his coming to Richmond with her had been nothing more than coincidence. Maybe
he had ties to the area, and she had simply been the impetus he’d needed to bring him home.

Maybe she’d had her fling, and there was nothing between them now but friendship. It could happen. He’d known women who could
turn it on and off like that, who could have a steamy hot relationship with a man today and be just pals tomorrow. Maybe she’d
been using the guy so she could stay longer in her precious New Orleans and was returning the favor by bringing him back here
for a while. Maybe the fact that he had come home with her meant nothing.

And maybe hell had frozen over.

The truth was, most likely, very simple: Teryl really was a slut.

Damn her for that.

Returning the cursor to the beginning of the line, he pressed the delete key and watched as the letters disappeared from the
screen. It was so easy to make the words disappear and, lately, so damned hard to make them appear. So damned hard to craft
them in a logical order, to infuse them with life, with feeling, with power. So damned hard to string them into sentences,
to build sentences into paragraphs, to turn paragraphs into chapters.

He could do it. He had tremendous talent and incomparable skill. If anyone could do it,
he
could. But not today, he thought as he leaned forward and pressed the button that shut off the computer.

Not today.

When John had made the decision eleven years earlier to move into the mountains, he’d had several reasons. Many of his happiest
memories involved the California mountains where his family had spent much of their free time hiking, camping, and skiing.
He had hoped to recapture some of those good feelings, even though he’d known it would be all but impossible, because his
worst memories involved those same mountains—a family camp-out, an argument with his father, a narrow, winding road, and a
car out of control.

He had also hoped to find peace in the Rockies, and he must have succeeded in some small measure because he’d finally stopped
trying to kill himself. At the same time, he had in a very real sense been punishing himself. He had banished himself from
society. He’d done such harm to the people he cared about that he’d believed the only fair thing was to have no contact with
anyone. All alone on top of his mountain, he couldn’t hurt anyone. He couldn’t destroy someone’s life, someone’s future or
dreams.

But all alone was no way to live. Even if it was the only way he could live.

Sometimes—usually after trips into Denver, where life was rushed and the city crowded—he’d thought he had been alone so long
that he couldn’t adapt to living with someone else. He had thought that the mere presence of another person in the house would
make him uneasy, that the loss of total privacy would grate on his nerves. He knew now, of course, that it depended on who
the other person was. He wouldn’t mind feeling Teryl’s presence more often. He would have no objection at all to giving up
more of his privacy to her, even if it was only temporary.

Maybe what he felt was a false sense of ease, since they weren’t intimate, but they made good roommates. She was a little
on the sloppy side, but that was all right, because he liked neatness and order and he honestly didn’t mind being the one
to restore it when she’d finished scattering the sections of the newspaper around the living room or when he found her damp
towels in a heap on the bathroom floor. They liked the same TV shows, had similar tastes in music, and shared a fondness for
the same old movies. They both liked to read, and she seemed as fond of quiet times at home as he was. They got along well.

Platonically well. He wished he knew how to change that, but this sunny Monday afternoon, there were no easy answers to tough
questions just waiting around to be discovered.

He’d spent most of the afternoon seated here at the kitchen table, adding to Liane’s story—in addition to thinking about Teryl—but
he had reached the point where he needed to stop writing and start thinking about the plot. He had no routine for the way
he put his books together. Sometimes, like now, he started with a character and came up with a story to fit. Sometimes the
story came first, and he had to develop characters to go with it. On rare occasions he’d been blessed with the gift of a fully
developed book, characters and plot, that seemed to write itself. On other occasions—
Resurrection
came to mind—the creative process was a torturous one.
Liane’s story, although not yet plotted, was going to be one of the easier ones.

He had Teryl to thank for that. Because she wanted this story. Because he felt a tremendous desire to give her exactly what
she wanted. Because, maybe if he
did
give her what she wanted, she might feel generous enough to fulfill a few of
his
desires.

After their brief conversation that had followed the sheriff’s phone call at lunch, she had gone back to work, leaving him
with no clue as to what she thought or how she felt. Cassidy believed someone was trying to kill him, and that was reason
enough for her to believe, also. But that didn’t mean she believed it was Tremont. It didn’t mean she believed he
was
Tremont. It just meant that she was willing to accept that someone out there didn’t like him enough to want him dead.

And that wasn’t enough for John. He wanted more. He wanted her faith, her trust, her acceptance.