Ann watched him, waiting.
“That won’t get rid of the feds, of course, the SEC is a law unto itself. But Hankins has a colleague who specializes in white-collar crime and I can assure you that Tim will have the best defense money can buy if the stock tampering case comes to trial.”
Ann swallowed. “Thank you.”
He took a sip of his drink, rattling the ice in the glass. “I keep my promises,” he said.
The emphasis on the third word was not lost on her. “And in exchange for all of this you want... ?” Ann said.
“You. Just you,”
“Can’t you let it go, Heath?” Ann asked softly. “I’ll find some way to pay you back for all of this, but a marriage that will make us both miserable seems—” She broke off, at a loss.
“Too high a price to pay?” he suggested.
A waiter arrived with a platter of appetizers and he set it down between them, oblivious to the mood of the diners.
“I took the liberty of ordering something for us,” Heath said, taking another small swallow of his drink.
“Will there be anything else at the moment, sir?” the waiter inquired.
“No, thank you. We’ll order later.”
The waiter left and Heath looked around expansively. “Lots of memories in this place, huh, Princess? Well, out in the parking lot, at any rate.”
“Heath, don’t.”
“Why not? Are we going to pretend that none of it happened? That’s a pretty tall order, don’t you think?”
“I never meant to hurt you.”
“I see. You thought that leaving me walking in circles in the Big Palm bus station waiting for somebody who never came was going to make me happy?”
“You don’t know what happened that night, you never have!” Ann protested.
He sat back and surveyed her cynically. “Why don’t you inform me? I know you’re just dying to tell me your sanctified version, it should be very interesting.”
Ann ignored his tone and said, “My father interrupted me in the middle of the night as I was packing to go and meet you. Luisa had overheard a conversation I’d had with Amy and alerted him that I was leaving. He told me that if I tried to leave town with you he would have you arrested for statutory rape.”
Heath’s face was unreadable. “And?” he inquired, raising an eyebrow.
“Isn’t that enough? If I didn’t promise to transfer to that school in New England and never see you again, you would have wound up in jail!” Ann said heatedly.
“Ah, I see. Very noble of you. Self-sacrifice and all of that. Just like Romeo and Juliet. Or was it Laurel and Hardy?”
Ann stared at him in consternation. It was clear he didn’t believe her.
“How can you sit there, all prim and proper with your bare face hanging out, and lie to me like this, Princess?” he said, his tone deadly. Dangerous.
“I’m not lying!” she said, amazed that he could doubt her. “That’s exactly what happened!”
He picked up his glass again and drained it. “I guess I never told you about my father’s sister Elsie, did I?” he said neutrally.
Ann gazed at him, bewildered. What on earth was he talking about now?
“My father was the black sheep of his family. The rest of his siblings actually work, go food shopping, take showers, remain vertical after 4:00 p.m. You know, they do the normal things. My Aunt Elsie, for example, worked as the secretary to a trust officer in a Miami bank. As luck would have it, the very bank where your daddy did the bulk of his business.”
Ann waited, sure that there was a point to this ramble and sooner or later Heath would get to it.
“Now I was fond of Elsie—she was the one relative who lived near enough to visit and take the occasional interest in me. She happened to arrive the day after your abrupt departure on one of her periodic checks to see if my father was still alive, and I’m afraid in my distress I blurted out the whole ugly tale of our somewhat star-crossed relationship. So Elsie was very interested when, one week after you decamped, she found herself typing up forms for her boss that released to you the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. The person countersigning the form was none other than your father.”
Ann looked back at him, baffled, trying to follow him. What the devil was this?
“Quite a payoff for dumping the boyfriend, wasn’t it, Princess? I knew you were desperate to get away from your father, and taking off with me was one way of doing it, but in the end it must have been impossible to give up all the fine things that the Talbot money could buy.... Why settle for a Georgia hut with a teenage mechanic husband when a plush boarding school in stately New England awaits you, with the cushion of a hundred grand to make dumping the grease monkey worth your while? You found a way to get away from your old man and actually have him finance your exit! I applaud your ingenuity, Ann. I never would have guessed you had it in you.”
Ann was speechless, trying to put together the pieces of the puzzle. Suddenly, she remembered.
“You’re talking about the trust fund,” she said.
He studied her, his expression glacial.
“My grandmother had set up a trust find to finance my education and made my father the trustee. The tuition at the Hampton school was much higher than at my previous school and so my father petitioned the trustee to release the money to me, on condition that I use it for my boarding school tuition and put aside the remainder for college, which I did.”
He said nothing.
“Don’t you see? He wanted to pack me off but he didn’t want to pay for it himself. Invading the trust fund was his neat, financially sound solution. The timing of it was just a coincidence. I didn’t know his plan for footing the bill. My father didn’t pay me off to leave you, Heath, he was just using my grandmother’s money to stash me away in Massachusetts! If I had tried to use a penny of it to get back to you he would have been on the phone to the police in a second. I’m sorry if you thought the money was a bribe, but that simply isn’t true.”
He stared back at her stonily. She might as well have been talking to herself.
“You still don’t believe me, do you?” she said sadly. “You haven’t really changed at all. Eleven years ago you could never quite accept that I would throw in my lot with you, and when I didn’t show up the night we had planned to run away, you were only too willing to jump to conclusions and think the worst of me.”
“So it’s all my fault now?” he said. “You’re a blameless angel and I’m the bastard who had no faith in you?” He laughed bitterly and looked away, shaking his head, as if she were just too ridiculous to credit.
“I loved you, Heath. I have never loved anyone like that again. The only thing that could have separated me from you was fear for your safety. If you choose to think otherwise, there isn’t much I can do about it, is there?”
He signaled for the waiter to bring him another drink. “It’s interesting how you’ve made yourself the heroine of our grim little drama,” he said. “It’s even more interesting that nobody is left alive to contradict you. Hardly more than a decade has passed and, except for us, all the major players have died—your father, your mother, even poor, deluded Luisa.”
“Amy is alive.”
“Amy will say anything you tell her to say.”
Ann gave a brief, mirthless laugh. “You don’t know Amy very well.”
“Apparently I didn’t know you very well, either. I fell lite a ten-ton weight for your poor-little-rich-girl act and you used me for your own purposes until you got exactly what you wanted.”
“And what was that, in your estimation?” Ann asked quietly, her eyes never leaving his face.
“Escape!” he said. “Escape from Casa Talbot, where your crazy old man ruled you and your mother like Draco.”
“Escape to a boarding school in New England that was more like a jail than an institution of higher learning! I would rather have been in a tar-paper shack with you, Heath, and that’s the truth.”