Wild Child Read online

  “Well what?”

  “How did it go, silly? I heard you two talking. He’s changed, don’t you think?”

  “Changed?” Catherine pulled at her blouse collar, freeing it from the odd dampness around her neck. “Yes, I suppose a moment of reflection is quite a change for a man without a conscience.”

  Gwen rolled her eyes. Hopeless, her expression said.

  But Catherine never saw her friend’s gesture. She was staring past Gwen, out the center’s window. She was watching her sworn enemy get into his midnight-blue Corvette and drive away. She remembered his interest, and especially his perplexity when he was trying to describe how she’d changed.

  The truth was it astounded her to think she could make a man like Blake Wheeler question himself, even for a moment.

  Blake downshifted the Corvette Stingray into low gear and slowly released the clutch, letting the fuel-injected engine roar and vibrate like an oncoming train. The gearshift trembled in his hand. The car was straining to be given its head, and Blake savored the moment, the chained momentum. Residual energy coursed up his arm, reverberated in his thighs. It was the dynamic tension between power controlled and power unleashed that intrigued him. In machinery, in people, in all of life. A dangerous preoccupation for a man with political ambitions, he knew, but then, he’d always preferred the danger zone.

  He’d curbed that instinct very successfully in the last several years. He’d gone along with the kingmakers who saw him as political gold and made all the right career moves. But through it all, he’d never quite extinguished the notion that some men were destined to dance near the fires of discovery, to see how close they could come without getting burned.

  As he drove through the quiet, shaded streets of Cameron Bay, heading toward the courthouse, Blake thought about the fire he’d just rediscovered, Cat D’Angelo. On impulse, he pulled off the main drag and took a series of side roads until he hit a deserted stretch leading out of town. Double-shifting into fifth, he wound the Stingray’s engine up to 6,000 rpms and let her fly. The speed spiked his heartbeat like an adrenaline burst.

  When he finally brought the car to a shuddering stop, it occurred to him that if a woman could be like a car, then she was like the machine beneath him: sleek, fast, demanding. Or maybe that was his fantasy.

  In truth, he didn’t know who Catherine D’Angelo was. He was trained to read body language, to probe beneath the surface for truth. Once, a long time ago, he’d thought he had her pegged. But now, in all her adult female glory, she was sending out so many signals he couldn’t get a fix on her.

  There had been traces of vulnerability. Once, when she’d averted her eyes, he thought he’d seen a quiver of something sad in her mouth. It had made his stomach clutch, that glimpse of fragility, of softness. It had made him realize that her ferocity was protecting something tender and breakable inside her. Or maybe that was his fantasy too.

  He felt the tightness in his chest again and realized he was feeling more than concern. It was guilt. For a second she’d looked like an injured child who couldn’t or wouldn’t, admit to the pain. How much of that pain was he responsible for? How much of her anger and sadness could be laid right at the feet of Blake Wheeler?

  A memory of the trial and its firebrand of a defendant flickered before him. Sixteen-year-old Cat D’Angelo had been hostile and uncooperative from the first, refusing to give testimony against her partner in crime, an unsavory eighteen-year-old named Cheryl. He’d had a hunch Cat wasn’t involved in the theft but no proof. He’d promised her immunity in exchange for her testimony, but she’d refused. The truth was, she’d infuriated him with her recalcitrance. Settling back into the bucket seat, he reflected on the rest of it, and how she’d shocked the hell out of him with some of her other tactics.

  He drifted for several moments, remembering, before a car passed and reminded him that he was idling alongside the highway—and that he’d forgotten all about the pretrial hearing!

  He hit the gas, made a U-turn, and headed toward town. There were a lot of things about her case that had disturbed him, but it was what he’d learned afterward that haunted him the most. Her father had been one of the five men killed in the Wheeler lumber mill accident three years earlier.

  That information had hit him like a blow. It had even forced him to reexamine his tactics. He’d been the new hire with the DA’s office—a virgin—and Cat D’Angelo’s trial was his first time up. They were all waiting to see if Harlon Wheeler’s kid could cut the mustard in court. Blake had needed a conviction.

  Shifting the car into cruise, he flexed his shoulders to ease the tightening muscles in his neck. The memories were unpleasant at best. He’d been an ambitious SOB in those days, certainly not given to self-examination. But for weeks afterward, he was to wonder if he’d done the right thing. Finally he’d rationalized it in his mind. The evidence was there, hard and irrefutable. She’d been joyriding on I-5 in a stolen T-bird with Cheryl. The county sheriff had pulled them over. Both girls had been tried and convicted by a jury, and under the circumstances anything else would have been a travesty of justice.

  He’d speculated often on how Cat D’Angelo might turn out. He remembered thinking even as he’d questioned her in the witness stand that she was extraordinary in many ways. Some women were beautiful, others were alluring. At sixteen, Cat was already the kind of woman who could drive a man to leave his family, or a ship captain to steer his vessel onto the rocks. There was a bewitching, temptresslike quality about her. A romantic poet would have called her a budding siren.

  He often wondered if those very qualities had precipitated her downfall. During the trial it had come out that she had problems at home, with her mother. Precociousness and all that natural sensuality on a sixteen-year-old could be threatening to adults. It sure as hell had threatened him.

  His thoughts veered to the unpredictable woman he’d just encountered in the West End Youth Center and he smiled grimly. Nothing had changed. Cat D’Angelo was the danger zone.

  Two

  “ACKERMAN’S CHEESE PUFFS?!” Gwen, thank you!”

  Catherine gaped at the yellow and gold cellophane bags spilling out of the desk drawer she’d just opened. Somehow Gwen must have known that an emergency supply of her favorite junk food was just what she needed to decompress from the shock of her homecoming.

  “Enjoy!” Gwen’s voice sailed back from somewhere in the building.

  Catherine tore open a sack, popped a buttery cheese curl into her mouth, and sighed with relief. Ackerman’s were a local delicacy and highly prized by Cameron Bay’s younger set. Cat had picked up the habit in her grade-school days and had never been able to kick it. Fortunately, Gwen had shipped them to her at Berkeley on a semiregular basis.

  Munching intently, she sank into a chair that groaned even with the slight weight of her five-foot-six frame, kicked her feet up onto a badly scratched metal desk, and reconsidered the dingy room that was to be her office. Under the influence of Ackerman’s, she allowed that the place wasn’t as hopeless as she’d originally thought. A brass nameplate on her desk and diplomas hanging on the wall would shine things up nicely. She sampled another cheese curl and nodded her head reflectively. Not half bad, her office, small though it was, bare though it was.

  By the time she’d finished off the snack, crumpling and tossing the bag into a wastebasket, she felt almost right with the world again. The cheese puffs even seemed to have taken the edge off her encounter with Blake Wheeler that morning, if such a thing was possible.

  “Feel like talking?”

  Cat raised her head to Gwen’s smiling face in the doorway. “Sure, long as it’s not about you know who.”

  “It’s not. It’s about you know what.”

  “What?”

  “Your anger.”

  “My anger?”

  “Yes, your anger toward you know who.”

  Cat groaned as her friend entered and pulled up a chair. “That’s sneaky,” she said, plucking up another
bag of Ackerman’s. She tore off the seal and held the bag out to Gwen.

  Gwen shook her head. “Can’t be bribed,” she said, fixing Cat with a look that managed to convey both moral superiority and motherly concern. “You’ve got to do something about all that bottled-up anger, child.”

  Cat registered the twitch in her own cheek muscles, and deeper, the flame that flickered eternal in her heart. No use denying it, she decided as she bit the top off a cheese puff and chewed determinedly. “I am doing something about it, Gwen, I’m savoring it. Anger is the great motivator, you know that. It gives people courage, makes them do things they didn’t think they were capable of.” Like telling off arrogant district attorneys, she thought, which she definitely intended to do one day soon.

  Gwen shook her head. She seemed to have missed completely the significance of Cat’s argument.

  “For some people, yes,” she said, “but you’ve got too much energy bound up in resentment. You’re a walking time bomb, Cat. You’ve got this crazy obsession about Blake Wheeler. Why, you act like you’re the only person he ever sent to Purdy Hall.” She shook her head. “Let go of your grudge, child, and get on with your life . . . ”

  Cat listened in silence as Gwen continued, the soul of reason. She knew her friend was right, of course. She’d been telling herself the very same thing for years. But Gwen didn’t understand that things weren’t that simple now that Cat had returned to Cameron Bay. Seeing Blake Wheeler in the flesh had brought back all the wounds, all the humiliations. It was worse than reliving the experiences; it was like having the past walk up and slap you in the face.

  “...the wisest thing you could do,” Gwen was saying, “is to forgive and forget.”

  “Really?” Cat’s voice was sharper than she intended. “Well, I’ve got an even moldier cliché for you: ‘Easier said than done.’ ”

  Gwen looked up in surprise, and suddenly Cat’s heart was beating harder than she wanted it to. She’d done it again, struck out reflexively, and at the wrong person. Gwen cared about her. And Gwen might be the only person who did. Cat’s throat tightened, and an apology formed on her lips. Finally, she just smiled . . . confused, bemused, sad.

  Gwen’s slow nod said she understood more than Cat realized, and the warmth in her eyes said yes, everything was okay. But Cat wasn’t that easily consoled. She was thinking about all the careless ways people hurt each other without really meaning to, and how it was almost as painful to strike out as it was to be struck. Was it her personal curse to be born with a hot temper and a soft heart?

  “Got the Cameron Bay blues, do you?” Gwen’s voice was soft and calming as she rose and walked to Cat’s chair. “I’m going to leave you alone now. I think that’s probably best, and I’ve got some errands to run anyway.” She placed a hand on Cat’s shoulder. “Give yourself some time, Catherine.”

  Cat nodded, unable to look up at her friend. “Yeah, thanks,” she said. There was a sting in her throat and some unsteadiness in her fingers as slowly, meticulously, one fold at a time, she sealed off the remaining cheese puffs and slipped the bag into the pocket of her slacks. Blues? It was hell coming back. There wasn’t any other word for it but that one, hell.

  Gwen’s hand tightened on her shoulder and Cat swallowed thickly. No one else knew, or could know, how bad it was, not even Gwen. As tolerant and compassionate as her former counselor was, there were things she didn’t understand—things Cat had never told her—the conflicts locked up inside, the confusion, the shame and helpless, self-directed fury. Oh, Gwen, my good, kind friend, Cat thought, Purdy Hall isn’t the only thing I can’t forgive Blake Wheeler for.

  Gwen’s hand lifted. “You okay?”

  Cat nodded quickly. “Yup . . . go on now, get out of here. Do your errands.”

  As Gwen left, Cat swung her feet off the desk and wandered into the center’s reception area. She could still feel Blake Wheeler’s presence in the room. She could almost see him as though he were there, an energy field, a hologram. He certainly hasn’t lost it, she thought. The press had described him more than once as a man of few words: “Silent and spellbinding,” one article had said, “but compellingly articulate when he chooses to be.” Another had reported his “killer charisma.”

  Whatever the quality was, Cat thought, he never had to resort to force to get what he wanted. He simply assumed sovereignty of whatever he touched, effortlessly. If he’d been Napoleon, the Prussians would have given him Waterloo!

  The awareness set off a chain reaction of images in Cat’s head, and a soft whorl of anxiety took shape inside her. There was only one time she’d seen Blake Wheeler lose his cool, and she didn’t want to think about that now. No, she entreated silently, not now.

  But she couldn’t control the lightness or the inner agitation. Within seconds she felt the back of her neck grow hot as a decade-old memory insinuated its way into her thoughts . . .

  His hand closed on her wrist and his gray eyes pierced her like a blade. He was angry with her. She could feel it in the heat of his skin, the grainy sound of his voice. But she sensed something else ...a quickening, a current of energy. She reached out to touch him, and his fingers threatened to bruise her. “Don’t,” he warned her as a flash of desire electrified his silver eyes . . .

  Cat forced the flashback from her mind, but her heart was beating as wildly as though it had just happened. She felt a twist of excitement in the pit of her stomach, and then almost as suddenly, the cold slap of shame.

  A large bay window dominated the reception area. Cat walked to it, her hands unsteady as she pressed them to her mouth and stared out at the overcast sky. The raw intensity of the flashback had frightened her. But what disturbed her more was that suddenly she knew why she’d come back to Cameron Bay. The real reason. She’d returned to even the score with Blake Wheeler, because he deserved it, and to set him straight about Cat D’Angelo at all costs—because she deserved that.

  “Revenge,” she said, shivering at the chill that came off the glass, “such a messy business.”

  Still lost in her thoughts a few moments later, Cat didn’t notice the forlorn figure making his way down the road that fronted the center. The thin, hunched boy was drab as a Dickens character, except for an unruly mop of dark hair with a red bandanna tied around it like a headband. It was only when a car roared up behind the boy and blasted its horn that Cat was jolted out of her reflections.

  She watched with curiosity and some alarm as the shiny black Camaro, full of rowdy teenagers, slowed and kept pace with the shuffling boy. The car had a raccoon’s tail dangling from its antenna, and Cat could just make out a Bayside High School letterman’s sweater on a red-haired young man hanging out of the driver’s-side window.

  The car’s horn honked repeatedly, and the kids jeered and hooted at the boy, calling out insults. “Hey, jailbird! Get out of town, you loser!” The boy didn’t respond. Instead, he tucked in and walked faster, moving ahead of the car, and just as abruptly, the Camaro jerked forward and veered into his path, its horn blaring. The boy leapt away, and the car surged again, forcing him into a runoff ditch.

  Heat rose in Cat’s throat. Her first impulse was to storm outside and raise Cain with the young hoodlums, but she held herself back. The incidents with belligerent teenagers during her own trial had been torturous, but to have had an adult rush in and rescue her would only have made everything worse.

  She watched the boy climb out of the shallow trench and face his attackers, and her chest tightened with anger and concern. She couldn’t hear what was said, but she could see the angry thrust of the boy’s jaw and his clenched fists.

  She touched the windowpane, anticipating disaster.

  At last the boy swung around and started across the parking lot toward the center. Cat watched him approach, aware of his furious countenance and his fast stride. He’d covered half of the lot when the red-haired teenager slammed out of the Camaro and sprinted after him. In the same split second that Cat wondered why the boy didn’t turn,
she realized that the teenagers’ shouts were drowning out the sound of their friend’s pursuit. The boy couldn’t hear him!

  Cat pounded on the window and called to him. “Behind you!”

  The boy’s head snapped up and he halted, confused.

  “Turn!” Cat screamed.

  The boy swung around defensively and collided with the advancing teenager, driving a shoulder into his chest. The much-larger boy looked shocked. He obviously hadn’t expected his quarry to turn. He swayed in a state of suspended animation for a moment, then staggered backward, lost his balance on a loose rock, and sat down, hard.

  Cat suppressed a chuckle. It had looked accidental, but whether it had actually been premeditated or not, it was a darn effective move. Even the rowdy kids in the car were stunned into silence.

  She wanted to applaud, but the dark-haired boy’s triumph was short-lived. The carload of teenagers started in on him again almost immediately, spewing insults and jeers. “Slime!” one of them screamed. “West End scum!”

  The bay window shook as the boy stormed inside the center and slammed the door. Cat held her breath as he whirled around, furious. Was he angry at her for intervening? She saw the glitter of tears in his eyes and knew he was more than angry, he was enraged, at her, at them, at the planet and everyone on it.

  She knew that look, and it tore at her heart. She understood the fury, the bewilderment, even the loneliness. His eyes held all the despair of a rebel who didn’t know how to end the war—with himself, with the system. Cat had learned some things during her difficult childhood. When you lived on the wrong side of the tracks, anger was a given. When you lived on the wrong side of the law, it became an impenetrable shield. It separated you from everything that was nourishing and loving and life-giving.

  She knew this boy. She was this boy.

  He came to the window to check out the situation on the street, and Cat moved out of his way. Observing him silently, she realized that he was older than she’d first thought, perhaps even fourteen or fifteen. His stature was small, but his boyish features were as inured to hardship as any back-alley transient’s.