Passion (9 page)

Breathing hard, she scowled back for a moment; then her flash of courage gave way to fear. Her heart was racing so fast that
her chest hurt, and the way he was pushing against her made it hard to breathe, and his fingers—the same fingers that had
stroked her so gently just last night—were gripping her arm so tightly that she imagined she could actually feel bruises forming.
He was hurting her, and the certainty that he would hurt her more if she gave him reason brought tears to her eyes.

“Please don’t,” she whispered.

He stared at her, hard and threater.ing, for a long time; then, with one more black curse, he sank back in his own seat, tilted
his head back, and closed his eyes. He didn’t release her arm, but at least he stopped pushing so hard.

The silence in the Blazer was heavy, broken only by his breathing and her own occasional sniffle as she fought the urge to
cry. She was in real trouble here, she berated herself,
and all she wanted to do was curl up in a corner and sob like a frightened child. She had to regain control, had to find some
way to hold on to it until another opportunity—a better opportunity—for escape presented itself. It helped to focus her attention
on her arm, still locked in his grasp, a mix of aches and throbs and blessed numbness. Tomorrow it would be a dozen shades
of black and blue… but she would be so grateful to have survived today that she wouldn’t care.

After a time, she risked a look at John. His eyes were still closed, and his expression was troubled, so very troubled that
it sent a shiver through her.

Dropping her gaze lower, she looked for a moment at his shirtsleeve before realizing exactly what it was she was looking at.
He wore a dress shirt, long-sleeved, the cuffs rolled up practically to his elbows. The shirt was neatly pressed and pristine
white except on the right sleeve, where a line of irregularly shaped stains dotted the fabric. They were like splatters from
a child’s paint box, red, bright red.

Blood red.

With a heated flush, she remembered the way, only moments ago, she had struck out at him, digging her nails into his skin
in an effort to free herself. She could see welts, puffy and red against his tanned forearm, could see a few pale scrapes
where she had scratched but done little damage.

And then there was the blood.

“Your arm is bleeding.” She said it flatly, without emotion, without the slightest hint of the satisfaction she took in knowing
that her frantic efforts to free herself had caused him at least a moment’s pain, with no sign at all of the shame that accompanied
the satisfaction.

“It’ll stop.” He sounded just as flat, just as unfeeling, but his fingers tightened briefly around her arm. Then he raised
his head and looked at her, his blue gaze locking with hers. “Don’t make me hurt you, Teryl.” His words were simple, his voice
quiet, but it was a plea as surely as her own earlier request—
Please don’t
—had been.

“Let me go,” she whispered.

“I can’t. I need you.”

“Please… I’m not worth anything to you. I don’t have any money. My family doesn’t have any money.”

“I don’t want money.”

That wasn’t a reassuring response. If he was telling the truth, if he had no interest in making a trade of her freedom for
someone’s cash, then what did that leave for a motive? Sex? Murder?

Or both?

Choking back another pitiful plea, she forced herself to ask quietly, calmly, “Then what do you want?” It was better to know
what she was up against. Better to find out what he intended to do to her than to wait, unknowing and afraid, for him to do
it.

On the highway an eighteen-wheeler rushed past, buffeting them, rocking the Blazer from side to side. He glanced in the rearview
mirror, then, still holding her arm, awkwardly shifted into first gear and eased the truck farther onto the shoulder. There
he shut off the key and turned in his seat to face her. “You never asked my last name.”

Teryl felt a twinge of discomfort, tinged again with a sense of the ludicrous. There was an accusation in the cool, weary
tones of his voice, a rebuke that said she should have been more careful, should have shown some caution, some morals, some
simple common sense. It made her own voice defensive when she replied, “I didn’t think it was necessary. I didn’t think, after
last night, that I would ever see you again.”

But when she had, when she had turned around in the hotel lobby and he’d been standing there, she had been pleased. She had
been
so
pleased. Now she wished he
had
just walked out of her life. Now she wished he had never walked into it. And the words he said next merely doubled her wishes.

“My name is John Smith… but you probably know me better as Simon Tremont.”

Teryl stared at him—simply stared. Of all the things in the world he could have said, that was the one she wasn’t prepared
for, the one she never would have expected. He thought—he believed—he was Simon Tremont.

Oh, God, he was crazy. She had been kidnapped by a crazy man. She had gone to bed last night with a man who was absolutely,
one hundred percent, certifiably insane, and now he’d taken her hostage. Now he intended to—To do what? To play out his fantasy?
Was she meant to be the adoring fan to his Tremont? Was that why he’d chosen her—because she hadn’t bothered to disguise her
admiration for the author? Or was it simply because she’d been so damned easy?

“If I let go of you,” he began haltingly, “will you promise not to try to get away?”

The crazy man was asking for a promise, and she gave it readily, unable to speak over the lump of fear in her throat but nodding
instead. He didn’t immediately release her, and when he did, it seemed an effort. She could actually see him forcing his fingers
to loosen, to uncurl from around her arm. The instant she was free, she drew back as far as possible, and she cradled her
arm to her chest, using her free hand to gingerly rub the place where he’d held her. Already her skin had turned red and dark
purple. Already there was swelling around the damaged tissue that would soon form ugly bruises encircling her forearm in roughly
the same shape as his hand.

And he expected her to believe that he didn’t want to hurt her, she thought bitterly.

Staring out the bug-splattered windshield, he drew a deep breath, then spoke in a flat, unemotional voice. “Tell me what you
know about Simon Tremont.”

Yesterday he had asked if Tremont was a pseudonym, and she had lied. This morning he had asked where Tremont called home,
and her only answer had been a nonanswer. She wasn’t going to answer this time, either, she decided. She wasn’t going to tell
him anything he could use to support his delusions.

But, if she was reading the grimly accepting expression on his face correctly, he didn’t really expect an answer. His words
confirmed it. “Let me tell you what you know about him. He’s been with the Robertson Agency from the beginning. He signed
with Rebecca while she was still in New York City, and with his first two books, she earned enough
to move the agency to her hometown of Richmond. She had never met Tremont, never even spoken to him—until recently, at least—and
neither had anyone else, not even his editor at Morgan-Wilkes. All of their contact with him had been by mail.”

So far, so good
, Teryl thought. But none of this information was private. Every devoted Tremont fan knew that much. It was all part of his
mystique.

“He lives—” John broke off with a pain-filled grimace, then started again. “He lived in Colorado in a place so remote that
most people in the area never knew he was there, and he got his mail at one of those mailbox places in Denver. At least, he
did until a few months ago.”

The muscles in her jaw clenched and tightened. How many devoted Tremont fans knew he’d lived most of the last eleven years
in Colorado? How many knew his mailing address had, indeed, been a Denver box? For that matter, how many people knew his real
name was John Smith?

But none of that would be impossible to uncover, she silently insisted. In this high-tech age, if you were resourceful enough—and
fanatical enough—you could learn virtually anything about anyone. And if you were claiming to be that person you were interested
in… Well, that was fanatical enough for her.

“You want to know how much Tremont made last year? So much that he quit counting the zeroes on his checks. So much that if
he quit the business today and never wrote another word as long as he lived, he still couldn’t spend all that money.”

“You haven’t told me anything that isn’t common knowledge,” she said, her voice quiet and even, carefully pitched not to upset
or anger him. “All of Tremont’s fans are well acquainted with the mystery surrounding him. As far as the money, he’s the best-selling
author in the country. Of course he makes a fortune.”

He looked at her for the first time since he’d released her, his troubled gaze settling heavily on her. “Are all of his fans
also well acquainted with the fact that the Thibodeaux books are your all-time favorite Tremont books? While they’re all
asking for Philip’s story, do they know that you’re more interested in Liane’s? That you even included a note with one of
his contracts asking if he was going to write her story?”

A chill settled deep in her stomach. Her friends who also read Simon’s books knew how much she loved the Thibodeaux series.
They knew that, while she found Philip interesting, she was fascinated by the younger sister. But he wasn’t her friend, damn
it, and not even they knew she had written that note. Hell,
no one
knew except her… and Simon… and this man.
How?

“It wasn’t a contract,” she disagreed, hostility—and fear—sharpening her voice. “It was a royalty statement. How do you know
about that?”

“Because you sent it to me, damn it!”

His shout, and all the rage behind it, made her flinch, shrinking back against the door until she could retreat no farther.
“This is crazy,” she whispered. “How could you be Simon Tremont? I’ve
met
Simon. I’ve talked to him. I’ve sat across a table from him. I’ve
read
his work.”

Lowering his head, he rubbed his eyes with both hands, then blew his breath out. When he looked at her again, the anger was
gone, not just controlled but completely hidden behind the blank weariness that etched his face. “You’ve met a man claiming
to be Tremont. What proof did he offer? What proof did you ask for?”

“He knew Rebecca. He knew me. He was the man I’d talked to on the phone. He knew everything there was to know about Simon’s
business. He knew Simon’s real name, knew his address—”

Interrupting her, John recited the address—box, city, and zip code—from memory. “Sound familiar?”

Stunningly so. But she responded almost immediately with a stunner of her own. “He wrote
Resurrection
.”

The silence that followed her triumphant pronouncement was repressive, and the rising temperature, too warm now and sticky
as the heat from outside seeped in, made it more so. She wished for cool air, for a blast from the air conditioner, for noise
or music, for anything to alleviate her discomfort
and chase away the suffocating closeness in the cab as John stared at her.

“He wrote
Resurrection
,” she repeated, her voice softer now, gentler. “You can’t explain that away, can you? If he’s not Simon Tremont, how did
he come up with the story? How did he write the book that perfectly matches the outline that’s been sitting in our files for
more than a year? How did he write the best book that Simon Tremont has ever written?”

She waited a moment, but when he said nothing, she gave a little shake of her head. “You can’t explain it,” she said finally.

“No,” he said at last, quietly. Defeatedly. “I can’t.”

Maybe she had won, she thought, hope rising, expanding. Maybe now he would acknowledge that he couldn’t pull this off. Maybe
he would turn around and take her back to New Orleans. Maybe he would let her go.

But her hopes were shattered as quickly as they had formed. “I need your help, Teryl.” Desperation shadowed his voice, made
it unsteady and made her skin crawl. “I’m not asking you to trust me. I’m not asking you to believe me. I just need your help
to prove that I am who I say I am. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m not going to kill you. But I have to have your help.”

Her gaze locked fully with his. “And if I don’t give it?”

His fingers knotted around the steering wheel, and a corresponding knot formed deep in her stomach. “Then I’m prepared to
take it.”

“You’re threatening me.” Her tone was accusatory, her expression belligerent. “You just said you wouldn’t hurt me, and now—”

“It’s not a threat, Teryl,” he said quietly, silencing her. “It’s a promise.”

She had never been so utterly miserable in her life.

Teryl rested her head so that the shoulder strap from the seat belt offered some support, but with every bump on the narrow
road they were following, her forehead banged
against the window, and the muscles in her neck were tight enough to spasm any minute now. Her back hurt from long hours in
the same cramped position—as far from John as she could get—and she was hungry, sleepy, and needed a bathroom desperately.

She was almost too miserable to be afraid.

But not quite.

Reaching up, John turned on the map lights, then pulled a road atlas from between his seat and the console and tossed it onto
her lap. Sometime this afternoon, somewhere south of Montgomery, he had done the same thing, had instructed her to find a
route to Virginia that would keep them off the interstates. She hadn’t asked why; she had assumed that it had something to
do with all those state troopers they kept seeing, first on I-10, then on 65. Maybe he had thought she would do something
crazy, like this morning—something to get their attention, something to force a confrontation.

She had thought about it, had thought about it long and hard, especially when one young female trooper had come up alongside
them. She had thought about grabbing the wheel again, about creating enough of a disturbance to get the woman’s attention,
even about forcing both the trooper’s car and the Blazer off the road, but she had hesitated, too afraid of failing and rousing
John’s anger, and after a moment the woman had passed them and disappeared up ahead.