Passion (45 page)

“Honey, if I had come forty-five minutes earlier, I would have taken you to bed.” He moved away from the fender then, going
to the passenger door and opening it. “I know it’s almost time for you to get back to work, so I won’t keep you. I just wanted
to bring you something.”

Teryl watched as he hesitated, then reached inside. What he came out with sent a little shiver of anticipation down her spine.
The little yellow pad was in pretty shabby shape, wrinkled and crinkled from all his handling. He needed to pick up
a computer, she thought, one of those little notebook PCs that weighed next to nothing and were capable of just about anything.
One that would fit in a briefcase… or a suitcase. One he could use at her house… or in a hotel… or on some remote deserted
island.

Holding on to the binding of the pad, he offered it to her, but didn’t immediately let go. “Read this, will you? I’m not asking
you to show it to Rebecca or anything. Just read it and let me know…” Breaking off, he stared at the house next door before
finally looking at her again. “With my first book, I thought there was something there—an interesting story, a decent style,
something readable—but I couldn’t honestly say without doubt that it was
good
. Eventually, I learned. I knew whether what I wrote was worth keeping or just garbage. On the rare occasions when it was
outstanding, I knew that, too. Then I started working on
Resurrection
, and I developed this mental block, and…” Again, he broke off, sighing this time. “I think this isn’t bad. I can’t say whether
it’s good, but it
feels
good. Anyway, just read it and let me know if my instincts are getting back on track or if it really is garbage, will you?”

Her fingers closed around the bottom of the pages. “I don’t know that my opinion is worth anything, but…”

“This one’s for you. Your opinion is the only one that counts.”

His smile was uneasy, more than a little embarrassed, and it gentled her own smile. “Do you want me to read it right now?”

“No. Take it to your office.”

She pulled the pad from his fingers, but resisted the urge to flip it open right there, to start reading right then. He started
to turn away then, but she called him back. “John?”

He gave her a questioning look.

“I have fifteen minutes of my lunch hour left. Want to find a private spot and help me pass the time?” She was teasing, of
course, and he knew it. Still, it coaxed a grin from him, and it brought him a few steps closer.

“A request for privacy from the woman who seduced me
on a public street and damned near finished the job in a taxi-cab? Isn’t it a little late to develop a sense of modesty?”

“I’ve always been modest.” When he reached for her wrists, she let him take them, let him pull her near. “Besides, you have
it backward.
You
seduced
me
.”

He raised his hand to her hair, barely touching it, lightly stroking it. “No. You seduced me with your voice and your eyes
and your smile. With your innocence and your trust and your openness.” Bending his head, he touched his mouth to hers. It
wasn’t a kiss, not really, just a brush, sweet and gentle, mouth to mouth. It was as innocent as a child’s kiss, but it carried
a man’s promise. It made her ache.

“You’d better go in now,” he said, withdrawing, circling around the Blazer to the driver’s door. “Be careful coming home.
I’ll be waiting.”

Hugging the pad to her chest with both arms, she watched him drive away, waiting until he was no longer in sight before she
turned and started up the walk to the porch. In her office, she closed the door, got comfortable at her desk, and flipped
past the top two blank pages to the beginning of John’s work. John’s story.
Her
story, he’d said.

Half an hour later, she still sat in exactly the same position, one thought circling repeatedly through her head: she had
been wrong. Terribly, horribly wrong.

Her chest felt tight, her throat clogged, and her eyes were damp, but not because the pages she’d just read were so touching.
There were some bittersweet passages and one particularly effective scene, but that wasn’t the reason for her own emotional
excess. John was.

I’m sorry, John. Sorry I didn’t believe you, sorry I didn’t have faith in you, sorry I didn’t trust you
.

She knew so few things for certain in her life, but she had no reservations whatsoever about this: the man who wrote these
pages had also written every single one of the Thibodeaux books. Whatever small uncertainty had survived the last twenty-four
hours had vanished in the last thirty minutes. There was no doubt in her mind. None in her heart.

John hadn’t lied. He wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t suffering delusions.

He
was
Simon Tremont.

Sweet Jesus,
he
was the man she had admired, had worshiped and respected and idolized, all these many years.
He
was the one who had written those incredibly touching, real, and very scary books that held the place of honor on her shelves
at home.
He
was the man she’d been dying to meet.
He
wasn’t the crazy man, the impostor, the fraud.
He
was the stranger who had fulfilled her wicked fantasy in New Orleans.

God help her,
he
was the man she’d fallen in love with.

A knock sounded at her door, but she didn’t call out an invitation. She wasn’t ready to be disturbed yet. She wanted to simply
sit here, absorb what she’d read, what she’d discovered, and think. Feel. Understand. Regret.

But the knock at her door was Rebecca, who wasn’t turned away by something so minor as a closed door. After a second series
of raps, she opened the door and invited herself inside, taking a seat on the padded bench. “Preoccupied?” she asked, adjusting
a pillow behind her back.

“Hmm.”

“With business?”

Teryl gripped the pad a little tighter. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Want to discuss it?”

She hesitated. John had asked only for her opinion. He hadn’t given her permission to show the pages to someone else. Still,
how could he object to Rebecca seeing it? From the very beginning, she’d been the first person to ever see his work. She was
his agent, even if she didn’t realize it at the moment. She’d handled all of his books and there was a good chance she would
sell this one, too… once she was convinced that he had the right to write about these characters. If he could be convinced
to stay with her.

After a moment, she flipped the blank pages over, then offered the pad to her boss. “Read this first.”

It took Rebecca four pages, maybe five, to recognize the female character, who bore no name in those first pages. Teryl suspected
that John had simply intended to write about some anonymous character, a woman who, after a lifetime of
normalcy, regained consciousness following an accident to find herself blessed—or cursed—with the gift of a healing touch.
He had realized only later that the woman wasn’t anonymous at all; she was Liane Thibodeaux.

Teryl
had recognized her within two paragraphs, but then, she’d always been partial to Liane. Her first night in New Orleans, when
she’d gone to the French Quarter to wander about alone, she’d been unable to shake the feeling that if she could only find
the right street, turn the right corner, or walk into the right shop, she would find Liane there, painting her portraits or
talking with her brothers or simply roaming the city where she’d been born. She was that real to Teryl.

When Rebecca did realize what she was reading, the muscles in her jaw tightened and a frown wrinkled her forehead. Teryl had
to give her credit for not stopping right then and pointing out that this character was the property of Simon Tremont, that
whoever had written this had no right to appropriate her for his own purposes. That would come, Teryl was sure, but Rebecca
continued reading.

When she finished, she closed the pad but didn’t return it. “I’m impressed.” After a moment, she hesitantly asked, “You didn’t
write… ?”

Teryl shook her head.

“May I ask who did?”

“The man I met in New Orleans.” Teryl laced her fingers together to hide her uneasiness. “I misled you yesterday when I said
I
might
see him again. The truth is he’s here in Richmond. He came back from New Orleans with me, and he’s been staying at my house.
He wrote that this week.”

There was another long moment of silence. “He’s very good. Obviously he’s a big fan of Simon Tremont. The style is very similar.”

It was much more than similar, Teryl thought. It was identical.

Then came the warning. “But you know he can’t use these characters. They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,
but this sort of copying comes much closer to infringement. He can’t simply take Simon’s characters from the earlier books
and use them.”

Teryl didn’t respond to that.

“Has he been published before?”

“Yes. Twelve books. But not under his own name.”

Still more silence. No doubt Rebecca was remembering their conversation from yesterday. Wouldn’t it be interesting, Teryl
had asked, 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? No doubt she was wanting to ask, And what is his own name? No doubt she was reluctant to
hear the answer.

“Is he looking for representation? Is that why you have this?” She didn’t give Teryl a chance to reply. “Naturally, I’d want
to read more of his work. I would want to see that he can sustain the quality for the length of an entire book, but I would
be willing to talk to him, if that’s what you want.”

“That’s not what this is about, Rebecca. He already has an agent.” Drawing a deep breath, she launched into her explanation.
“I met John in New Orleans. He had driven down from Colorado for the Tremont interview. He told me a very interesting story
about how someone had found out all the details of his life, how this person had assumed his identity, taken over his career,
moved into his life. I thought it was crazy. I thought
he
was crazy. But I was wrong. He’s not crazy, and he’s not lying. He
is
Simon Tremont.”

“Which makes our Simon Tremont an impostor. A fraud.” Rebecca smiled broadly and, laying the pad aside, started to rise from
the bench. “Nice joke, Teryl. Funny. Now, we have real work to attend to, so—”

“It’s not a joke, Rebecca. Listen to me, please.” She waited until her boss sank down again. “I admit it sounds outrageous.
I didn’t believe it myself in the beginning. But, Rebecca, John knows
everything
about Tremont. He knows the terms and figures from every contract Tremont’s signed. He knows the details of your association
with Tremont. He knows the names of the assistants who worked for you before me. He’s seen all the correspondence between
this office and Tremont. He knows all the negotiations on Tremont’s behalf between this office and Morgan-Wilkes. Rebecca,
he knows things about Tremont’s career that
I
didn’t know.”

Rebecca was staring at her, dismay darkening her face. “You brought him here, didn’t you? You opened the records to him. You
let a stranger—a crazy, insane stranger who was making outrageous claims—have access to Simon Tremont’s files. Teryl, how
could you? How could you jeopardize us like that? You know those records are confidential! You know you have no right showing
any part of them to anyone!” Rising to her feet, she paced to the bookshelves, found herself face-to-face with a whole shelf
of Tremont titles, then turned to Teryl again. “Damn it, do you know what you’ve done? If Simon finds out about this—the
real
Simon—he’ll probably leave the agency and be perfectly justified in doing so! You might have cost us our biggest client!”

“He’s
not
the real Simon,” Teryl said defensively. “He’s an impostor.”

“Well, that ‘impostor’ wrote the single best book I’ve ever read in my life! Explain that, Teryl.”

Resurrection
. Everything kept coming back to that damned book. Teryl stood up and slipped her shoes on, just so she wouldn’t feel at such
a physical disadvantage, then folded her arms across her chest. “I can’t explain it. Simon—the impostor Simon—somehow got
hold of John’s outline. He somehow learned to write like John.”

Rebecca’s response was sharp with anger and sarcasm. “Oh, I see. He
somehow
got hold of an outline that fewer than a half dozen people had ever seen, and he
somehow
learned to write like one of the best authors in the world, and he
somehow
managed to write the book that even that best author couldn’t finish.” She paused to let those words sink in, then shook
her head in dismay. “Teryl, I’m disappointed in you. I thought you were smarter than this. I thought you were more professional
than this. I cannot believe you are so enamored of this man that you would help him try to defraud my agency.”

“It has nothing to do with my feelings for him,” she protested. “When I agreed to help him, I wasn’t trying to prove that
he is Simon. I thought I could prove that he wasn’t… but I couldn’t. He knew too much. He knew everything.”

“If he’s Simon Tremont, then he can prove it. He can bring in his copies of all the contracts Simon has signed over the years.
He can show me his royalty statements, his correspondence, his fan mail, all the records he’s collected in the last eleven
years.” Rebecca waited a moment, then went on. “He can’t do that, can he? He can’t show me his contracts or anything else
because he doesn’t have them. Because he’s not Simon.”

“His house burned down over a week ago. Everything was destroyed.”

“How convenient,” Rebecca said snidely.

“The fire was caused by bombs. About the time your Simon decided to go public, someone blew up John’s house in Colorado while
he was inside. Someone tried to kill him.” The look her boss was giving her made Teryl want to squirm. She rushed on before
the other woman could say anything. “I spoke to the sheriff there, Rebecca. He has no doubt that the intent was murder and
that John was the intended victim.”