There were pictures of some of his more outrageous Hollywood stunts with fire, explosions, leaping off buildings. Interspersed among the pictures of the sports were the ones with the women. Movie stars, socialites, waitresses. Travis hadn’t been discriminate. He liked pretty women no matter where they were born or what they did.
He closed the door, leaned back against it for a moment, and looked around him. He would turn thirty this year and he was tired from all of it. Tired of being under his father’s control, tired of making money for a man who had too much of it.
His mother had been right to run away and hide, but he knew how guilty she felt that Travis was protecting her. But the way he saw it was that she’d spent a lifetime protecting him, so he owed her.
Right now Travis’s worry was that his mother was marrying some man just to release her son. His fear was that his mother’s guilt was overwhelming her, and she was going to start the divorce proceedings just to give her son freedom.
But Travis knew that his mother had no true idea what she was asking for if she went for a divorce from Randall Maxwell. Ruthless was too mild a word for the man.
On the other hand, there was no way Travis could describe how much he’d like to have his own life back. Even though the last four years had worn him down, before he got out, he wanted to make sure that his mother wasn’t walking into something just as bad as her marriage had been.
Travis left the trophy room and locked it securely. Only he knew the combination, and none of his many girlfriends had ever seen inside it.
He went to his bedroom, a sterile place with no personality, and into his closet. One side contained his sports clothes, the other his work suits. At the end were what Penny would call “normal” clothes, jeans and T-shirts, a leather jacket. It took only moments to throw them into a duffle bag.
He stripped down to his briefs and glanced at his body in the mirror. He had almost no fat on him and he worked to keep his muscles strong. But his skin was marked with scars from burns, punctures, surgical repairs. He’d broken his ribs more times than he could count, and under his hair was a deep scar from where a misfired piece of steel had come close to killing him.
Minutes later, Travis was dressed and ready to go to dinner with a man who needed some reassurance that the business he’d started from scratch would continue. Travis knew that what the man really needed was a shoulder to cry on. With a sigh, he left the apartment.
It was 8:00 P.M. and Travis had been driving for hours to reach Edilean. The car Penny had bought for him was an old BMW. The engine sounded good, but he could barely get eighty out of it. No doubt that was Penny’s idea of how to keep him from exceeding the speed limit. She’d put a packet of hundreds in the glove box, and he’d had to smile. If Travis used a credit card, his father would know where he was. He well knew that his father kept close watch on him. It was one thing to have charges in Paris but another to have little Edilean, Virginia, show up on the statement.
“Just until Mom is safe,” he said aloud as he downshifted. At least Penny hadn’t insulted him by getting an automatic. She’d let him have some fun!
At the thought of that word, Travis thought of last night. Trying to comfort a man nearing seventy hadn’t been easy. But Travis knew that if he didn’t attempt it, no one else would. His father often said in disdain that Travis didn’t have a shark’s heart. It had been meant as a put-down, but Travis took it as a compliment.
He’d managed to get away from dinner by eleven. He wanted to sleep because he planned to leave early for Edilean.
But the next morning, just as he was ready to leave, his cell rang. It was his father. It
was 7:00 A.M. on a Saturday morning but his dad was at work.
“Where are you?” Randall Maxwell demanded.
“Leaving town,” Travis said in a cold voice that matched his father’s.
“Forester can’t handle this deal.”
“You’re the one who hired him.”
“He’s a good number cruncher and he sucks up to the clients. They like him.”
“Then when he tells them their jobs are gone, he can hold their hands,” Travis said. “I have to go.”
“Where is it this time?” Randall muttered.
“Watch the sports pages.”
“If you get yourself killed,” Randall said, “I’ll—”
“You’ll what, Dad? Not attend my funeral?”
“I’ll say hello to your mother.”
For a moment Travis froze in place. Why had his father spoken of her now? Had he heard something? That a Lucy Cooper had been mentioned in a Richmond newspaper hadn’t been enough to alert him, had it?
Travis decided to brazen it out. “You’re pulling out the big guns this morning. You must want something bad.”
“I need you to go over this deal. There’s something wrong in this contract, but I can’t figure out what it is.”