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No, Mr. Bondurant, he did not. He didn’t love my mother, either.
If he had, why had he cheated on her? Why had he made a habit of adultery all his married life? Why had he lied and denied her mother’s accusations, and engaged her in those vituperative shouting matches that had filled Barrie’s nights with misery and terror? Why had he continued torturing his family with his affairs until he died of a heart attack in a Las Vegas hotel room while his bimbo of the month was anointing his loins with coconut-flavored love gel? He hadn’t even had the consideration to drop dead in a decent manner.
And what had Barrie’s silly, stupid mother done? Had she ever rebuked him for betraying his marriage vows? Had she reviled him for ignoring his daughter, for being too busy screwing around to notice any of her rites of passage from infancy through young adulthood? Had she ranted and raved at him for being the least affectionate, least attentive parent in history? Even after his death, had she told anyone what a royal son of a bitch he was and always had been?
No. She had buried him in grand style, and then, unable to conceive of life without him, she went home and swallowed a bottle of pills.
One week, two funerals.
Yes, Mr. Bondurant, you surely struck a nerve.
Barrie stepped from the shower and reached for a towel. She’d read the books, listened to the talk shows. She knew the psychology. Girls rejected by their fathers usually went one of two ways: They became nymphomaniacs, looking for love and attention in whatever form, from every man they encountered, or they rejected men altogether, usually in favor of other women.
Barrie had done neither.
She hadn’t become a slut, craving male attention and relying on it for her sense of self-worth. Nor had she taken the other path. Her sexual appetite was whetted only by men. When she was with one whom she found physically attractive, charming after a fashion, intelligent to some degree, she enjoyed sex very much. Her one unbendable rule was that she set the time and the place and the parameters of the relationship. She called the shots.
Until this morning’s sexual episode.
Never had she lost control like that. That kind of mindless, heedless, reckless plunge into passion was hazardous to one’s psyche. Case in point, her own mother. Barrie had vowed not to repeat her mother’s fatal mistake of loving blindly and having that love abused.
Barrie would share her body when desire and circumstances permitted. But she had sworn never to let her head, and certainly not her heart, get fucked.
* * *
Gray woke just in time to see the pillow coming down over his face.
Instinctively he tried to reach for the pistol beneath his pillow, but his arms were pinned down by a pair of knees, one on either side of him, as his attacker crou
ched over his chest. He strained and struggled. He arched his body. He tried to pull in air that wasn’t there.
And the bastard was laughing.
Gray recognized the laughter a split second before the pillow was tossed aside. Spencer Martin’s face hovered above his, grinning. “You’re going soft out here on the frontier, old man.”
Gray threw him off and rolled out of bed. “You damn lunatic. I could’ve killed you.”
“Haven’t you got that backward?” Spence said, still laughing. “I could’ve killed you.”
“What the hell are you doing here, sneaking into my house, playing games? Jesus, what time is it? I gotta pee.”
“Glad to see you, too, Gray.” Spence followed him as far as the bathroom door. “You’ve lost a few pounds.”
Gray reached for a pair of blue jeans hanging on the back of the door. As he stepped into them, he appraised his former colleague. “You’ve put on a few. The White House chef must still know his stuff.”
Spence kept his rare grin in place. “Know what I’ve missed most since you left?”
“My charm?”
“Your total lack of it. Most people kiss up to me. I’m the President’s trusted adviser and best friend. No matter how rude I am, people go out of their way to kiss my ass. But not you, Gray. You treat everybody the same. Like shit,” he added.
“So that’s why you’re here? You miss me?”
He led Spence through the house and into the kitchen. He had only one clock in the house, and it was over the stove. He checked the time. Almost daylight. It had been twenty-four hours since he’d entertained Barrie Travis in this room. The unsettling symmetry of that didn’t escape him.
“You never were much for laughs, Gray. But you were good to have around. You served your purpose.”
Gray shot Spence a telling look. “Yeah, I did, didn’t I? I was there when you needed me most.” He held the stare for several tense seconds before turning away. “Coffee?”
