Page 56 of Captivated
“Well, she’d have agreed with you on the second part. And she made me understand just how grateful I should be that she put food in my belly and a roof over my head. But I wasn’t feeling very grateful, and I ran away a lot. By the time I was twelve, I got slipped into the system. Foster homes.”
His shoulders moved restlessly, in a small outward showing of the turmoil within. He was pacing back and forth over the grounds, his stride lengthening as the memories worked on him.
“Some of them were okay. The ones that really wanted you. Others just wanted the check you brought in every month, but sometimes you got lucky and ended up in a real home. I spent one Christmas with this family, the Hendersons.” His voice changed, took on a hint of wonder. “They were great—treated me just like they treated their own kids. You could always smell cookies baking. They had the tree, the presents under it. All that colored paper and ribbon. Stockings hanging from the mantel. It really blew me away to see one with my name on it.
“They gave me a bike,” he said quietly. “Mr. Henderson bought it secondhand and took it down to the basement to fix it up. He painted it red. Bug-eyed, fire-engine red, and he’d polished all the chrome. He put a lot of time into making that bike something special. He showed me how to hook baseball cards on the spokes.”
He sent her a sheepish look that had Morgana tilting her head. “What?”
“Well, it was a really great bike, but I didn’t know how to ride. I’d never had a bike. Here I was, nearly twelve years old, and that bike might as well have been a Harley hog for all I knew.”
Morgana came staunchly to his defense. “That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Nash sent her an arch look. “Obviously you’ve never been an eleven-year-old boy. It’s pretty tough to handle the passage into manhood when you can’t handle a two-wheeler. So, I mooned over it, made excuses notto ride it. I had homework, I’d twisted my ankle, it looked like rain. Thought I was pretty clever, but she—Mrs.Henderson—saw right through me. One day she got me up early, before anyone else was awake, and took me out. She taught me. Held the back of the seat, ran along beside me. Made me laugh when I took a spill. And when I managed to wobble down the sidewalk on my own, she cried. Nobody’d ever...” He let his words trail off, embarrassed by the scope of emotion that memory evoked.
Tears burned the back of her throat. “They must have been wonderful people.”
“Yeah, they were. I had six months with them. Probably the best six months of my life.” He shook off the memory and went on. “Anyway, whenever I’d get too comfortable, my grandmother would yank the chain and pull me back. So I started counting the days until I was eighteen, when nobody could tell me where to live, or how. When I got free, I was damn well going to stay that way.”
“What did you do?”
“I wanted to eat, so I tried a couple of regular jobs.” He glanced at her, this time with a hint of humor in his eyes. “I sold insurance for a while.”
For the first time since he’d begun, she smiled. “I can’t picture it.”
“Neither could I. It didn’t last. I guess when it comes right down to it, I’ve got the old lady to thank for trying writing as a career. She used to whack me good whenever she caught me scribbling.”
“Excuse me.” Morgana was certain she must have misunderstood. “She hit you for writing?”
“She didn’t exactly understand the moral scope of vampire hunters,” he said dryly. “So, figuring it was the last thing she’d want me to do, I kept right on doing it. I moved to L.A., managed to finesse a low-level job with the special-effects guys. Then I worked as a script doctor, met the right people. Finally managed to sellShape Shifter. My grandmother died while that was in production. I didn’t go to the funeral.”
“If you expect me to criticize you for that, I’ll have to disappoint you.”
“I don’t know what I expect,” he muttered. Stopping beneath a cypress, he turned to her. “I was twenty-six when the movie hit. It was... well, we’ll risk a bad pun and call it a howling success. Suddenly I was riding the wave. My next script was picked up. I got myself nominated for a Golden Globe. Then I started getting calls.My aunt. She just needed a few bills to tide her over. Her husband had never risen above sergeant, and she hadthree kids she wanted to send to college. Then Leeanne.”
He scrubbed his hands over his face, wishing he could scrub away the layers of resentment, of hurt, of memory.
“She called you,” Morgana prompted.
“Nope. She popped up on my doorstep one day. It would have been ludicrous if it hadn’t been so pathetic. This stranger, painted up like a Kewpie doll, standing at my front door telling me she was my mother. The worst part was that I could see me in her. The whole time she was standing there, pouring out the sad story of her life, I wanted to shut that door in her face. Bolt it. I could hear her telling me that I owed her, how having me had screwed up her life. How she was divorced for the second time and running on empty. So I wrote her out a check.”
Tired, he slid down the tree and sat on the soft ground beneath. The sun was hanging low, the shadows stretching long. Morgana knelt beside him.
“Why did you give her money, Nash?”
“It was what she wanted. I didn’t have anything else for her, anyway. The first payment lasted her almost a year. In between, I’d get calls from my aunt, or one of my cousins.” He tapped a fisted hand on his thigh. “Months will go by, and you’ll think you’ve got your life pretty well set. But they don’t let you forget what you’ve come from. If the price for that’s a few thousand now and again, it’s not a bad bargain.”
Morgana’s eyes heated. “They have no right, no right to take pieces of you.”
“I’ve got plenty of money.”
“I’m not talking about dollars. I’m talking about you.”
His gaze locked on hers. “They remind me who—what—I am.”
“They don’t even know you,” she said furiously.
“No, and I don’t know them. But that doesn’t mean a hell of a lot. You know about legacies, Morgana. About what comes down in the blood. Your inheritance is magic. Mine’s self-interest.”
