fine,” she whispered.
Fine? Her tone cut him. Ever after he would hate that word.
There was scarcely a pulsebeat in her slender, blue-veined wrist. Her icy skin was almost translucent.
She was so changed, so lifeless, fear squeezed his heart like a vice.
“Please...just go away,” she whispered in a strange almost thready voice.
He lifted her hand and laced his brown fingers through hers. “What about our baby?”
Her voice broke on a sob. “There is no baby.”
His own eyes filled with tears. Fighting them, he squeezed her hand and held on tightly. He gasped for air. He gasped again. He felt like a drowning man with nothing to hold on to. “But—”
“I want you out of my life, Joey. It’s the only way.”
“Heather.” He felt sick at his stomach and unable to breathe in the dark, airless room. “You listen to me. We’re still getting married—”
“No,” she said in a rehearsed, robotlike tone. “I want to start over... fresh.”
“With some rich guy like Roth that your daddy—”
“Daddy says if this gets out, me having been pregnant, people won’t understand. They’ll judge him. He says that I’ve been difficult my whole life.”
“He’s difficult and demanding. Not you. You’re not supposed to be some perfect doll who follows all his orders. You’ll shrivel up and die...if you do that.”
“He says that just this once I need to think about him and act like a normal daughter, that I have to do the predictable, respectable things, that I have to finish school... and...and forget you.”
“Yeah. Well, you tell him it’s not that easy. ’Cause I won’t ever, ever forget you. And I won’t ever let you forget me, either.”
“Don’t make this harder, Joey. Please—If you and I hadn’t dated, Ben would still be alive.”
“Is that what they say? What he says?”
“I can’t hurt them any more than I already have, especially Daddy, especially right now.”
“It’s not like I planned Ben’s death or I wanted to get you pregnant,” Joey cried. “I didn’t want to hurt them. I love you.”
He felt her fingertips flick through his thick, black hair that had probably dried into unruly tangles and then withdraw as if she were afraid to touch him because she wanted to so much. “Daddy says I’ve gotten into more trouble than ten kids.”
“You haven’t gotten into nearly as much trouble as me, babe,” he said, attempting his old teasing tone.
“Daddy says you’re a bad influence.”
The soft finality in her stone-calm voice as she kept quoting her daddy killed something inside him.
“I thought you loved me.”
Slowly she unlaced their joined fingers and shut her eyes.
“Heather—”
Tears leaked through her lashes and wet her white cheeks.
“Heather ....”
She bit her lips.
“Don’t do this, babe. Don’t leave me. You know I can’t make it without you. You’re all I’ve got. All I ever want. You’re everything.”
The door opened. “Fasano, you’ve had your time with her. Now get the hell out of here before I sic the law on you.”
Her father was standing beside Laurence Roth in the doorway. Her other relatives were peering at him like he was some kind of wild beast they’d run to ground and were about to slaughter.
“You all think you know so much. You don’t know her. You’re killing her. You’re killing both of us.”
“Get out, Fasano, before I lose my patience. You’ve already cost me one child. You’d better leave quick, boy, before I decide to use my considerable power to break you for what you’ve done to Heather.”
“Joey....” Her pleading whisper came from behind him. Joey turned back to Heather. Her eyes were closed, and tears streamed silently down her cheeks. “Go....”
He’d hurt her. He’d made her cry. Her family had never thought he was good enough. She’d always hated having to sneak around to see him. Now, because of Ben and the baby, they really hated him.
He’d lost her. How would he go on? He wasn’t rich or important like they were. She was everything to him. Everything.
More than anything, he wanted to take her into his arms and hold her till she stopped crying. He wanted to press his head into her breasts, to rock her back and forth, to never let her go. Travis Wade would probably kill him if he touched her.
Joey tossed his head back at a cocky angle and swaggered past Wade and Roth with the silent, insolent pride of a kid who had nothing else.
Joey didn’t know where he was going.
Without Heather, he didn’t care.
All he knew was that he was leaving Texas. And he wasn’t coming back till he was as rich and powerful as all of these arrogant bastards.
Then he’d make them pay.
One
A lot of smart people don’t believe in the devil, but Heather Wade knew better. Because sure as shooting, the very same devil who sent the snake to Eve also sent Joey Fasano slithering her way. It was easy for other rich girls whose daddies were senators to be good. It was hard for Heather.
Impossible when Joey was around. He brought out the worst in her. That’s why she’d fallen in love with him as a girl.
That’s why she was determined to forget him now that she was a full-grown woman on the verge of matrimony.
Tall and broad-shouldered, black-eyed and black-haired, Joey Fasano had been born sinfully handsome. He’d been as smolderingly intense as a box-office sensation years before he became one.
Maybe some seven-year-old little girls would not have found the various sorts of devilment he proposed in his hideout as exciting as she. Not all would have thought it a lark to snatch the Reverend Scott’s wife’s lacy panties off her clothesline after Joey pointed out how they snapped like a fat pirate’s pantaloons in the wind. But then it never did take much more than a sexy wink and devil-may-care grin to show her how much more fun the crooked path with the likes of him was than the straight and narrow with more staid folk.
And now, six years after she’d given that gorgeous snake in hunk’s clothing up for good, whose scalding eyes should be burning a hole out of her television screen
