CHAPTER TWO
CASH STOPPED BY HIS HOTEL to check in before he drove Rory to Tippy’s apartment in Manhattan, in the lower East Village.
Tippy was waiting at her door after she buzzed Cash and Rory up to her flat on the second floor. She looked like a stranger, in jeans and a pullover yellow sweater, with her long red-gold hair flowing down her back. With the casual attire and minus any makeup, she didn’t look like the elegant, beautiful woman Cash remembered from the premiere of her movie, the month before.
She fidgeted nervously as she opened the door, smiling. “Come in,” she said quickly. “I hope you’re both hungry. I made beef Stroganoff.”
Cash’s dark eyebrows rose. “My favorite. How did you know?” he added with wicked dark eyes.
She cleared her throat.
“It’s my favorite, too,” Rory laughed, coming to her rescue. “She always makes it for me on the night I come home.”
Cash chuckled. “That puts me in my place.”
She was looking around behind him. “No suitcase?” she asked. “I cleaned the spare bedroom.”
“Thanks, but I booked a room at the Hilton, down town,” he said with a warm smile. “I like my own space.”
“Oh. Right.” She laughed self-consciously, before she awkwardly turned away and hugged Rory. “It’s great to have you home for the holidays!” she said. “You made good grades, I hear, too.”
“I did,” he assured her.
“And got detention for fighting,” she added deliberately.
He cleared his throat. “An older boy called me a name I didn’t like.”
“Yes?” She folded her arms across her chest and kept staring at him, unblinking.
Rory’s eyes flashed. “He called me a bastard.”
Her own green eyes flashed as well. “I hope you knocked him down.”
He grinned. “I did. He’s my buddy now.” He glanced at Cash, who was watching the byplay with interest. “Nobody else ever stood up to him. He had the makings of a real bully, but I saved him from that awful fate.”
Cash burst out laughing. “Good for you.”
Tippy pushed back her hair. “Let’s eat. I haven’t had lunch,” she added, leading the way into a small but cozy kitchen. The table was set with an embroidered table cloth, on which rested colorful plates, cups, saucers and elegant silverware. She pulled a jug of milk out of the refrigerator and poured two crystal goblets full of it.
“Got another glass?” Cash asked as he paused by a chair. “I like milk.”
She gave him a startled look. “I was going to offer you a whiskey…”
His face tightened. “I don’t drink hard liquor. Ever.”
She was taken aback. “Oh.” She turned away with real embarrassment. She hadn’t said one thing right since he’d walked in the door. She felt like an idiot. She got out another crystal goblet and filled it to the brim with milk. He was such a puzzling man.
He waited until she had the food on the table, and she sat down before he took his own seat. His graciousness made her feel at ease.
“See that?” she told Rory. “There’s nothing wrong with good manners. Your mother must have been a charming woman,” she added to Cash.
Cash took a sip of milk before he answered. “Yes. She was.” He didn’t enlarge on the brief admission.
Tippy swallowed hard. This was going to be an or deal if he was this tight-lipped all night. She recalled what Christabel Gaines had told her once about Cash, that his parents’ marriage was broken up by a model. Apparently the memories were still painful.
“Rory, say grace,” she murmured quickly, adding another shock to Cash’s growing collection of them.
They all bowed their heads. She lifted hers a minute later and gave Cash a mischievous glance. “Tradition is important. We didn’t have any to start with so Rory and I decided on a few of our own. This was one.”
He picked up the serving bowl at her nod and helped himself to Stroganoff. “And the others?”
She smiled at him shyly. It made her look younger. She wasn’t wearing makeup, except for a light lipstick, and her hair looked fresh and clean swinging loose around her shoulders.
“We add a new ornament to the Christmas tree every year and we hang a pickle in the tree.”
His fork poised in midair. “A what?”
“A pickle, Cash,” Rory replied. “It’s a German custom, for good luck. Our grandfather on our mother’s side was German.” He finished a bite of meat and washed it down with milk. “What were your people, Cash?”
“Martians, I believe,” Cash replied seriously.
Tippy’s eyebrows lifted.
“Right.” Rory chuckled.
Cash grinned at him. “My mother’s mother was from Andalusia, in Spain,” he said with a smile. “My father’s people were Cherokee and Swiss.”
“Quite a combination,” Tippy remarked, studying him.
He stared at her curiously. “Your ancestors must have been Irish or Scottish,” he said, noting her hair color.
“That’s what I think,” she agreed, but she didn’t meet his eyes.
“Our mother’s a redhead,” Rory interjected. “Tippy’s is natural, too, but lots of people think she dyes it.”
Tippy took a long sip of milk and said nothing.
“I thought about dyeing mine purple, but my cousin, who was our former chief, said it might offend people.” Cash sighed. “That was about the same time he made me take off my earring,” he added disgustedly.
Tippy almost choked on her milk.
“You wore an earring?” Rory exclaimed, delighted.
“Just a simple gold one,” Cash admitted. “I was working for the government at the time and my boss was so politically correct that he wore a sign apologizing for stepping on bacteria and killing it.” He nodded emphatically. “That’s a true story.”
Tippy was wiping her eyes. She laughed so hard that she was almost crying. It had been years since she’d felt so lighthearted with anyone. From their rocky beginning to laughter was a big step.
“She never laughs,” Rory commented with a grin. “Especially on location shoots. She hates photographers on account of one made her sit on a rock in a bikini and she got bitten by a tern.”
“The stupid bird dive-bombed me five times,” Tippy had to admit. “On its final assault, it took part of my scalp away!”
“You should tell him about what the pigeons did to you on that shoot in Italy,” Rory prompted.
She shivered delicately. “I’m still trying to forget it. I used to like pigeons.”
“I love pigeons,” Cash said, grinning. “You haven’t lived until you’ve had them delicately wrapped in puff pastry and fried in olive oil…”
“You barbarian!” Tippy exclaimed.
“It’s okay, I eat snakes and lizards, too, I’m not strictly a pigeon man.”
Rory was all but rolling on the floor. “Gosh, Cash, this is going to be the best Christmas we’ve ever had!”
Tippy was inclined to agree. The man across from her bore very little resemblance to the antagonistic, hostile law enforcement officer she’d met while filming in Jacobsville, Texas. Everybody said Cash Grier was mysterious and dangerous. Nobody said he had a howling sense of humor.
Seeing her confusion, Cash leaned toward Rory and spoke in a loud whisper. “She’s confused. Back in Texas, they told her I kept military secrets about flying saucers in a locked file.”
“I heard it was aliens,” Tippy murmured without cracking a smile.
“I do not keep aliens in my filing cabinet,” he said indignantly. A minute later, his dark eyes started to twinkle. “I keep those in a closet in my house.”
Rory chuckled. Tippy was laughing, too.
“And I thought actors were nuts,” Tippy remarked on a sigh.
AFTER LUNCH, CASH announced that he was taking them to the park. Tippy changed into an emerald-green pant suit and put her hair in a braid, adding just a touch of makeup to her oval face.
Her apartment was on a quiet, tree-lined street. It was a transitional neighborhood that had gone from fairly dangerous to middle class. The renovations were notice able, especially in Tippy’s apartment, which had black wrought-iron banisters that led up the stone steps to her two-story apartment.
In her heyday as a model, she’d had money to burn, and briefly she’d lived off Park Avenue. But after her year’s absence from the profession, when modeling jobs became thin on the ground, she had to budget. That was when she’d moved here, just before she started shooting the movie in Jacobsville that had unexpectedly restarted her career. She could probably have afforded something better now, but she’d become attached to her neighbors and the peaceful street where she lived. There was a bookstore just down at the corner and a food market past it. There was also a small mom-and-pop café which served the best coffee around. It was lovely in the spring. Now, with winter here, the trees were bare and the city looked cold and gray.
Cash’s red Jaguar was parked just outside the steps that led into her apartment building. She did a double take when she saw it, but she didn’t comment. Rory climbed into the back seat, leaving Tippy to sit up front with Cash.
“I thought Central Park was dangerous,” Rory remarked as they strolled along the sidewalk after the short drive, glancing at the pretty carriages hitched to horses that were waiting for customers. “And should you leave your car parked there?” he added, looking over his shoulder at the beautiful car.
Cash shrugged. “Central Park is much safer now. And anybody who can get past my pet rattlesnake is welcome to drive my car.”
“Your what…?” Tippy burst out, looking around at her ankles.
He grinned. “My alarm system. That’s what I call it. I’ve got an electronic monitoring system installed some where in the engine—if anybody tries to hot-wire the car, or steals it, it will take about ten minutes for the police to find it. Even in New York City,” he added smugly.
“No wonder you look so confident,” Rory said. “It sure is a beaut of a car, Cash,” he added wistfully.
“It is that,” Tippy remarked. “I can drive, but it’s impractical to have a car in this city,” she said, indicating the abundance of taxis buzzing up and down the streets. “Usually, when I went on modeling jobs, I didn’t have time to waste looking for parking spots. There are never enough. Cabs and subways are quicker when you’re in a rush.”
“They are,” he agreed. He glanced down at her, fascinated by her fresh beauty that was only accentuated by the lack of makeup.
“Where are you shooting the movie?” he asked.
“Here in the city, mostly,” she said. “It’s a comedy with touches of a spy drama mixed in. I have to wrestle with a foreign agent in one scene, and outrun a gunman in another.” She grimaced. “We only just started filming before we broke for the holidays, and I’ve got bruises everywhere already from the fight coordinator’s choreography. I actually have to learn aikido for the film.”
“A useful martial art,” Cash remarked. “It was one of the first forms I learned.”
“How many do you know?” Rory asked at once. Cash shrugged. “Karate, tae kwon do, hapkido, kung fu, and a few disciplines that aren’t in the book. You never know when you’ll need to fall back on that training. It comes in handy in police work, now that I’m not stuck behind a desk all the time.”
“Judd said you worked in Houston with the D.A.’s office,” Tippy said.
He nodded. “I was a cybercrime expert. It wasn’t challenging enough to suit me. I like something a little less routine and structured.”
“What do you do in Jacobsville?” Rory wanted to know. Cash chuckled. “I run from my secretaries,” he said sheepishly. “Just before I phoned your sister about coming up for the holidays, the new one quit and dumped a trash can over my head.” He made a face and touched his dark hair. “I’m still picking coffee grounds out of my hair.”
Tippy’s green eyes widened. She stopped and looked up at Cash. She couldn’t believe he was telling the truth. She remembered how efficiently he’d stopped the assistant director on her first film from touching her when she’d objected to his familiarity.
Rory was laughing. “Really?”
“She wasn’t really cut out for police work,” he said. “She couldn’t talk on the phone and type at the same time, so she didn’t do much typing.”
“Why…?” Tippy fished.
“…did she empty a trash can on me?” he finished for her.
“Damned if I know! I told her not to force the lock on my filing cabinet, but she wouldn’t listen. Is it my fault my baby python, Mikey, jumped out of the drawer at her? She scared him. He has a nervous condition.”
They’d both stopped now and were staring at him.
He sighed. “Isn’t it strange how snakes make some people nervous?” he asked philosophically.
“You have a snake named Mikey?” Tippy exclaimed.
“Cag Hart had an albino python that he gave to a breeder after he got married. The python’s mate had a litter of the cute little things, and I asked for one. The day he gave me Mikey, I didn’t have time to take him home so I put him in the filing cabinet, temporarily, in a little plastic aquarium with water and a limb to climb. It was working very nicely until my secretary jimmied the lock. Sadly, Mikey had escaped and was sitting on top of the files in the filing cabinet drawer.”
“What did she do?” Rory asked.
He scowled. “She scared the poor little thing half to death,” he muttered. “I’m sure he’s going to have psychological problems for the rest of his…”
“Afterward!” Rory interrupted.
His dark eyebrows rose. “After she screamed bloody murder and threw my spare handcuffs at me, you mean?”
Tippy just stared at him, her green eyes twinkling.
“That was when she dumped my trash can over my head. It was almost worth it. She had a spike haircut and black lipstick and nail polish, and body piercings with little silver rings all over visible space. Mikey’s slowly getting over the trauma. He’s living in my house now.”
Tippy was laughing too hard to talk at all.
Rory shook his head. “I almost had a snake once.”
“What happened to it?” Cash asked.
“She wouldn’t let me out of the pet shop with it,” Rory sighed, pointing at his sister.
“Doesn’t like snakes, hmm?” he drawled with a wicked glance at Tippy.
“It wasn’t because I was afraid of it, it was because he couldn’t take it to school with him and I’m not home long enough to take care of a pet. But if you really need a secretary, as soon as I finish this movie, I’ll have my nose pierced and my hair spiked, first thing,” she said, tongue in cheek.
Cash’s perfect white teeth flashed at her. “I don’t know. Can you type and chew gum at the same time?”
“She can’t type a word. And she is scared of snakes…” Rory began enthusiastically.
“Stop right there,” Tippy murmured with a quick look at her brother. “And don’t you let him corrupt you,” she cautioned. “Unless you want me to tell him your fatal weakness!”
Rory held up both hands. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Honest.”
She pursed her full lips. “Okay.”
“Look! There’s the guy with the bagpipes! Give me a twenty, sis, would you?” Rory exclaimed, nodding to ward a man in a kilt standing just outside a hotel near the park with a set of bagpipes. He was playing “Amazing Grace.”
Tippy pulled a large bill from her fanny pack and handed it to Rory. “Here you go. We’ll wait here for you,” she said with an indulgent smile.
Cash watched him go, his eyes sliding to the bag piper. “He plays well,” Cash said.
“Rory wants a set of bagpipes, but I doubt the commandant would be inclined to let him practice in his dorm.”
“I agree.” Cash smiled wistfully as he listened to the haunting melody. “Is he here often?” he asked her.
“We see him all around the neighborhood,” Tippy replied lazily. “He’s one of the nicer street people. Homeless, of course. I slip him some money whenever I have a little extra, so he’ll be able to buy a blanket or a hot cup of coffee. A lot of us around here indulge him. He has a gift, don’t you think?”
“He does. Know anything about him?” he added, impressed by her concern for a stranger.
“Not much. They say his whole family died, but not how or when…or even why. He doesn’t talk to people much,” she murmured, watching Rory hand him the bill and receive a faint smile for it as the piper halted for a moment. “New York is full of street people. Most of them have some talent or other, some way to make a little cash. You can see them sleeping in cardboard boxes, going through Dumpsters for odds and ends.” She shook her head. “And we’re supposed to be the richest country on earth.”
“You’d be amazed at how people live in third world countries,” he remarked.
She looked up at him. “I had a photo shoot in Jamaica, near Montego Bay,” she recalled. “There was a five-star hotel on a hill, with parrots in cages and a huge swimming pool and every convenience known to man. Just down the hill, a few hundred feet away, was a small village of corrugated tin houses sitting in mud, where people actually lived.”
His dark eyes narrowed. He nodded slowly. “I’ve been to the Middle East. Many people there live in adobe houses with no electricity, no running water, no indoor facilities. They make their own clothing, and they travel in pony carts pulled by donkeys. Our standard of living would shock them speechless.”
Her breath drew in sharply. “I had no idea.”
He looked around the city. “Everywhere I went, I was made welcome. The poorest families were eager to share the little they had with me. They’re mostly good people. Kind people.” He glanced at her. “But they make bad enemies.”
Tippy was looking at the scars on his lean, strong face. “Rory’s commandant said that they tortured you,” she recalled softly.
He nodded and his dark eyes searched her light ones. “I don’t talk about it. I still have nightmares, after all these years.”
She studied him curiously. “I have nightmares, too,” she said absently.
His eyes probed hers, seeking answers to the puzzle she represented. “You lived for a long time with an older actor who was known publicly as the most licentious man in Hollywood,” he said bluntly.
She glanced toward Rory, who was sitting on a bench, listening as the bagpiper started playing again. She wrapped her arms close around her chest and wouldn’t look up.
Cash moved in front of her, very close. Strangely, it didn’t frighten her. She met his searching gaze. It almost winded her with its intensity.
“Tell me,” he said softly.
That softness was irresistible. She took a deep breath and plowed ahead. “I ran away from home when I was twelve. They were going to put me in foster care, and I was terrified that my mother might be able to get me out again—for revenge because I called the police on her and her boyfriend after he…” She hesitated.
“Come on,” he prompted.
“After he raped me repeatedly,” she bit off, and couldn’t look at him then. “I wouldn’t have gone back to her, not if it meant starving. So I went on the streets in Atlanta, because I had no way to earn money for food.” Her face clenched as she remembered it. Cash’s expression was like stone. He’d suspected something like that, from the bits and pieces of her life that he’d ferreted out.
She continued quietly, “The first man who came up to me was handsome and dashing. He wanted to take me home.” Her eyes closed. “I was hungry and cold and scared to death. I didn’t want to go with him. But he had the kindest eyes…” She swallowed the lump in her throat.
“He took me to his hotel. He had an enormous suite, luxury fit for a king. When we got inside, he laughed because I was nervous and promised he wouldn’t hurt me, that he just wanted to help me. I was so scared, I spilled a glass of water down the front of my shirt.” She smiled. “I’ll never forget the shock on his face as long as I live. I had short hair and I was never voluptuous, even back then, but the wet shirt…” She looked up at Cash, who was listening intently. “But of course, he wasn’t interested in me in that way…”
Cash’s lips parted on a soft explosion of breath. “Cullen Cannon, the great international lover, was gay?” he asked, astonished.
She nodded. “He was. But he hid it with the help of women friends. He was a sweet and gentle man,” she recalled wistfully. “I offered to leave, and he wouldn’t hear of it. He said that he was lonely. His family had disowned him. He had nobody. So I stayed. He bought me clothes, put me back in school, shielded me from my own past so that my mother wouldn’t be able to find me.”
Her eyes misted as she continued her story. “I loved him,” she whispered. “I would have given him anything. But all he wanted was to take care of me.” She laughed. “Perhaps later, when he’d put me in modeling classes in New York, he liked the image it gave him to have a pretty young woman living with him. I don’t know. But I stayed there until he died.”
“The media said it was a heart attack.”
She shook her head. “He died of AIDS. At the last, his biological children came to see him, and they buried the past. They resented me at first, suspected me of trying to play up to him for money. But I guess they finally realized that I was crazy about him.” She smiled. “They tried to make me take his apartment over, when he died, tried to give me a trust account out of their in heritance. I refused it. You see, I nursed him the last year he lived.”
“That’s why you didn’t model for a year, just before you were offered your first film contract. They said you were in an accident and had to heal,” Cash recalled.
She was flattered that he remembered that much when he’d literally hated her in Jacobsville. “That’s right,” she said. “He didn’t want anybody to know about him. Not even then.”
“Poor guy.”
“He was the best man I ever knew,” she said sadly. “I still put flowers on his grave. He saved me.”
“What about the man who raped you?” he asked bluntly.
She looked at Rory, who was talking to the bagpiper. Her expression was tormented. “My mother said he was Rory’s father,” she managed.
Now his intake of breath was really audible. “And you love Rory.”
She turned to him. “With all my heart,” she agreed. “My mother’s still with Rory’s father, Sam Stanton, on and off. They are both drug addicts. Sam and my mother have fights and he beats her up and she calls the police. He always comes back.”
“How did you end up with Rory?” he asked.
“The police officer who saved me the last night I was at home—when Sam raped me—called me when Rory was just four years old. I was still living with Cullen and he was powerful and rich. Cullen went with me to see Rory in the hospital after he was severely beaten by his father. My mother was quite taken with Cullen,” she recalled coldly. “So after Rory was released she brought him to the hotel where we were staying. Fishing, for money. Cullen offered to buy the child. And she sold him to us,” she added icily. “For fifty thousand dollars.”
“My God,” he bit off. “And I thought I’d seen it all.”
“Rory’s been with me ever since,” she told him. “He’s like my own child.”
“You never got pregnant…?”
She shook her head. “I was a late bloomer. I didn’t even have my first period until I was fifteen. Pretty lucky, huh?” She pushed back wisps of red hair. “Real lucky.”
“But your mother wants Rory back now.”
“The money ran out years ago. She’s having to get her drug money by working in a convenience store, and she doesn’t like it. Sam works when he feels like it, and I don’t think he does anything legal, either. My attorney paid my mother off last year when she threatened to go to the tabloids about the brutal way I was treating her,” she scoffed. “Rich movie star allows poor mother to live in poverty while she rides in stretch limousines.” She smiled cynically. “Get the picture?”
“In Technicolor,” he agreed coldly.
“So now she’s decided she wants Rory back. She sent Rory’s father up to the military school and he tried to get him out. Rory told the commandant what his father had done to him—and to me—and the commandant called the police. The rat ran for his life before they got there.”
“Good for the commandant.”
“But that doesn’t rule out kidnapping. I’d pay any thing to get Rory back, and they know it. I don’t sleep very well these days,” she added. “Rory’s father has a cousin who lives near here, in a really bad part of town. They’re close, and the cousin has his dirty fingers in a lot of illegal pies.”
Cash was doing mental gymnastics. “Does Rory care for his father or his mother?”
“He hates our mother,” she replied. “And he doesn’t know that Sam Stanton is his real father.”
“You haven’t told him?” he probed.
“I haven’t had the heart to,” she explained. “He took a real beating from Sam. The psychologist says he’ll have mental scars for the rest of his life from that or deal.”
“How about you?”
“I’ve lived through enough to make me strong, with occasional lapses. But mostly, I’m tough,” she murmured.
“Not tough enough, just yet,” he commented. “But you will be, if you hang around with me long enough.”
She glanced at him with a teasing smile. “Am I going to?”
He shrugged. “It’s up to you. I have a few quirks.”
“So do I. And a few hang-ups,” she added.
He put his hands in his pockets while he stared down at her, to the music of New York traffic. “I don’t like ties very much. I’m making no promises. I want to see you while I’m here. Period.”
“You don’t pull any punches.”
He nodded.
She searched his dark eyes. “I don’t find you repulsive,” she said bluntly. “That’s new. But I’ve got some terrible scars of my own. I can put on a good act as a vamp when I’m around men. But it’s all a ruse. I haven’t ever had consensual sex.”
He whistled. “That’s a heavy load to put on a man.”
She nodded.
He smiled slowly. “So, it’s back to Dating 101.”
She laughed. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
“We’ll go slow,” he said, noting Rory’s sudden reappearance. “That took a while,” he commented when the boy came back laughing.
“He wanted to know about military school. Guess what? He was a soldier in Vietnam.” Rory grimaced. “Sad, huh, that he’d end up like that.”
Cash’s eyes were haunted as he studied the man, who lifted a hand and waved before he went back to his bagpiping. Cash waved back. “Too many veterans wind up like that,” he commented quietly.
“Not you,” Rory said proudly.
Cash smiled at him and ruffled his hair. “No. Not me. How about going to the Statue of Liberty? It’s closed, so we can’t go up in it, but we can see it. Are you game?”
“Lead me to it!” Rory laughed.
Cash took Tippy’s slender hand and locked her fingers into his, noting their coldness and faint trembling. It was like electricity sparking between them. Tippy caught her breath audibly. She looked up with wide, fascinated eyes, feeling as if the ground had rocked under her feet. It was magic!
He searched her eyes. “Lesson One, Page One, Hand-holding,” he whispered as Rory paused to look in a store window.
She laughed breathlessly. It sounded like silver bells.