fooled even herself.
Static flickered on the silent screen of Heather’s television.
Why had she taped the Academy Awards show tonight, of all nights, when she had known Joey was up for Best Actor?
Why hadn’t she ignored her messages and gone to bed? Why wouldn’t his raspy voice stop inside her brain?
Why? Why? Why? Nothing about her feelings for Joey had ever made sense. Except they were intense So intense, she’d been running from them for years.
Thus, Heather sat huddled in a ball of misery beside the low table in her bedroom chewing the red nail polish off her long fingernails as she obsessed about Joey. Without thinking she slid two photographs together on the polished oak surface so that the smiling dark faces of the identical little boys lay side by side.
At the startling resemblance, she whitened. Huge dark eyes. Devil-may-care grins. Matching cowlicks over their left temples.
Now that she was moving back to Texas, sooner or later, Joey was bound to find out. She understood her fear. But she didn’t want to think about why Joey had stirred her so deeply on other levels.
Heather Ann, promise us you won’t ever tell Joey about Nicky.
Her parents and Julia had looked so white and stricken as they’d stood beside Nicky’s crib that she’d promised... again.
Heather’s long, golden, wavy hair was swept away from her solemn face into an elegant chignon. Her mother’s diamonds glittered at her throat. With her bare feet tucked beneath the red gown and her lips free of lipstick, she looked more like the disheveled wild-child Joey had loved than the sophisticated young woman of society at the fund-raiser.
Images, especially those on film, always affected her too profoundly. The particular pictures that quickened her pulse were of five-year-old little boys with curly black hair and jet-dark eyes that flashed with mischief as they dangled upside down from a tree.
A stranger would have thought the pictures were of the same boy. But Heather had taken one twenty years ago beside the clear waters of a spring-fed creek in central Texas and the other only yesterday on the muddy bank of the brown bayou in her backyard.
A stillness descended upon her as she touched the yellowed photograph of the boy in ragged cutoffs.
“Joey—”
He’d been an innocent boy then. Tonight, the man had seemed painfully bitter and edgily dangerous.
When she brought his picture to her lips, a single tear traced down her cheek.
Once the only man for her had been Joey Fasano. Joey, who kissed with his eyes closed. Joey, who was a bad boy by day but whose face was as innocent as an angel’s when he slept.
Joey’s teasing black eyes that had always looked straight into hers and recognized her true self.
The soft, damp Louisiana air was warm and scented with roses and rain as it sifted across the wide verandas of Belle Christine, once her grandmother’s home, now hers. Perhaps it was the antebellum mansion standing proudly on its slight rise behind the Mississippi’s levee, surrounded by ancient live oaks dripping with moss, that made Heather feel not only her fear but the past and Joey’s appeal so keenly. For old houses have a timelessness, a link to the past, that modern homes lack. Suddenly the poor, ambitious boy with his head full of dreams seemed far more real to her than the polished mahogany surface of the antique escritoire beside her canopy bed or the bladelike leaves of the banana trees rustling outside against the exterior walls of her home.
Joey.
Again she was seventeen and the torn leather upholstery on the backseat of Joey’s ancient Chevy was scratching her bare thighs. Joey’s hands fumbled with the buttons of her blouse while his hot mouth explored the sweet mysteries of her body. For as long as she could remember, the highborn Heather Wade had felt the lowborn Joey Fasano pulsing in her blood.
Forget him.
Your love for him nearly destroyed you and everybody you loved.
At twenty-six, Heather was beautiful, rich, and envied by all. She was high society. Big rich. Texas royalty. Her father, who put money and power above all else, had set up a trust fund for her so she would never have to worry about money again. Her stolid bridegroom was ambitious.
But there was a shadow-side to her seemingly perfect life. A childhood illness had taken her older sister, Alison, when she was ten; later, her brother, Ben, had died in a car wreck. As her parents’ sole surviving child, Heather felt enormous pressure to make them happy.
In her third year as a photojournalist, Heather had taken a picture that had won her a Pulitzer. But the coveted prize that should have made her career, had ended it. When she’d announced her retirement, jealous colleagues had been exultant. Her family had been equally thrilled. Only Joey had called to ask what was wrong. Shaking, she’d slammed the phone down. When it had rung again, she’d run outside to avoid hearing it.
She twisted her diamond engagement ring till it cut her finger. She had to put Joey out of her mind.
Most girls would have given anything to be marrying Laurence. Her mother kept telling her that marriage would complete her as her career hadn’t. Thus, when Laurence, who was older and wiser, had led her into the purple shade of the camphor tree in her rose garden, she had not resisted when his arrogant gaze had held hers while his cold hands slipped an engagement ring on her finger.
Laurence had bought a house high in the hills overlooking Austin and signed the deed over to her as a wedding gift. He had given her carte blanche with the finest decorator in Texas. Her thrilled mother had since taken charge.
Numbly Heather had addressed a thousand engraved wedding invitations. Ten bridesmaids’ dresses had been created out of exquisite pink brocade. They would honeymoon m Maui. Julia had obtained a sabbatical from her order to care for Nicky during the wedding festivities and honeymoon.
Everybody told Heather she was the luckiest girl alive. She sucked in a quick breath, picked up the VCR remote control, and defiantly jabbed Rewind, pausing on Joey’s face. For a long moment, she stared at the television, her glazed, intense emotions blinding her so that she saw nothing and heard nothing. Somehow in that crushing silence as Joey’s features wobbled, invisible defenses inside her began to crumble.
She had fallen in love with Joey years before their adventures in his Chevy. When she was five he’d invited her to his hideout and seduced her into that game of doctor that had resulted in endless lectures from her mother and father, who had told her Joey was worse than his drunken father.
But Joey had been too much fun to resist. Despite their fathers, Heather’s clandestine friendship with Joey had blossomed into love.
Then Ben had died, and so had her world.
Later, after Joey had become a world-famous movie star, she’d figured he’d forgotten her. Even when Joey had returned to Wimberley, the town they’d grown up in, and started buying land despite her own powerful father’s attempt to stop him, she’d clung to that illusion. Hadn’t he snubbed her the two times she’d seen him on the town square?
Then tonight, in front of millions, Joey had gone and done this wild and crazy thing that touched her wild and crazy heart.
Heather’s
