Perfect (Second Opportunities 2)

Ready to square off and take on the hard, cruel world…

Ready to take on an ex-convict…

Ready to change her mind and stay with him in defiance of everything she had become, because she believed in him now…

Caught between laughter, tenderness, and amazement, he sent her an apologetic look. "My imagination just ran away with me."

"I'll bet it did," she said with a whimsical, knowing smile.

"What were you doing when you got busted?"

She gave him a long, amused look. "Some older boys were very kindly demonstrating a technique to me that would have been extremely useful in dealing with you. Except when I tried it on the Blazer yesterday, I couldn't remember exactly what went where."

"Excuse me?" Zack said blankly.

"I tried to hot-wire the Blazer yesterday."

Zack's shout of laughter rebounded off the ceiling and before Julie could react, he wrapped his arms around her, hauled her next to him, and buried his laughing face in her hair. "God help me," he whispered. "No one but I could manage to kidnap a minister's daughter who also knows how to hot-wire a car."

"I'm sure I could have done it yesterday if I hadn't had to stop every couple minutes and appear in front of your window," she informed him, and he laughed harder.

"Good Lord!" she burst out, dumbstruck. "I should have tried to pick your pocket instead!" His second shout of laughter nearly drowned out her next sentence. "I'd have done it in a second, if I'd guessed the keys were in your pocket." Inordinately pleased that she could make him laugh like this, Julie leaned her head against his chest, but as soon as he stopped laughing she said, "Now it's your turn. Where did you really grow up if it wasn't on ranches, and things?"

Zack slowly lifted his face from her fragrant hair and tipped her chin up. "Ridgemont, Pennsylvania."

"And?" Julie prompted, confused by her odd impression that he felt a special significance in answering that question.

"And," he said, looking into her puzzled eyes, "the Stanhopes own a large manufacturing company there that has been the economic backbone of Ridgemont and several surrounding communities for nearly a century."

She shook her head in disgust. "You were rich! All those stories about you growing up on your own, no family, living on the rodeo circuit—that's completely dishonest. My brothers believed that stuff!"

"I apologize for misleading your brothers," he said, chuckling at her indignant look. "The truth is, I didn't know what the publicity department had invented about me until I read it in the magazines myself, and then it was too late to raise hell—not that it would have done me any good in those days, anyway. At any rate, I did leave Ridgemont before I was nineteen, and I was on my own after that."

Julie wanted to ask why he'd left home, but she stuck to basics for the moment. "Do you have brothers and sisters?"

"I had two brothers and a sister."

"What do you mean 'had'?"

"I mean a lot of things, I suppose," he said with a sigh, leaning his head back against the sofa again, feeling her shift and return to their former position with their legs stretched out on the table.

"If you would rather not talk about this for some reason," she said, sensitive to his changing mood, "there's no need to do it."

Zack knew he was going to tell her all of it, but he didn't want to examine the myriad feelings that were compelling him to do it. He'd never felt the need or desire to answer these same questions from Rachel. But then he'd never trusted her or anyone else with anything that might bring him pain. Perhaps because Julie had already given him so much, he felt he owed her answers. He tightened his arm around her and she moved closer, her face partially on his chest. "I've never talked about any of this with anyone before, although God knows I've been asked about it thousands of times. It isn't that long or interesting a story, but if I sound strange, it's because it's very unpleasant for me and because I feel a little odd discussing it for the first time in seventeen years."

Julie kept silent, stunned and flattered that he was going to tell her.

"My parents died in a car wreck when I was ten," he began, "and my two brothers, my sister, and I were raised by our grandparents—when we weren't away at boarding schools, that is. We were all a year apart in age; Justin was oldest, I was next, then Elizabeth, then Alex. Justin was—" Zack paused, trying to think of the right words and couldn't. "He was a great sailor, and unlike most older brothers, he was always willing to let me tag along with him wherever he went. He was—kind. Gentle. He committed suicide when he was eighteen."

Julie couldn't stop her horrified intake of breath. "My God, but why?"

Zack's chest lifted beneath her cheek as he drew in his breath and slowly expelled it. "He was gay. No one knew it. Except me. He told me less than an hour before he blew his brains out."

When he fell silent, Julie said, "Couldn't he have talked to someone—gotten some support from his family?"

Zack gave a short, grim laugh. "My grandmother was a Harrison and came from a long line of rigidly upright people with impossibly high standards for themselves and everyone else. They'd have regarded Justin as a pervert, a freak, and turned their backs on him publicly if he didn't recant at once. The Stanhopes, on the other hand, have always been the complete opposite—reckless, irresponsible, charming, fun-loving, and weak. But their most outstanding trait, one that has bred truest throughout the male line, is that Stanhope men are womanizers. Always. Their lechery is legendary in that part of Pennsylvania, and it is a trait of which they have all been extremely proud. Including, and especially, my grandfather. I'm not sure the Kennedy men had anything on the Stanhope men when it came to wanting women. To give you a nonoffensive example, when my brothers and I each turned twelve, my grandfather gave us a hooker for a birthday present. He had a little private birthday party at the house, and the hooker he'd selected was brought there to attend the party and then go upstairs with the birthday boy."

"What did your grandmother think of that?" Julie said in disgust. "Where was she?"

"My grandmother was somewhere in the house, but she knew she couldn't change it or stop it, so she held her head up as best she could and pretended she didn't know what was going on. She handled my grandfather's philandering the same way." Zack grew quiet, and Julie thought he wasn't going to say anything else, and then he added, "My grandfather died a year after Justin, and he still managed to leave her a legacy of humiliation: He was flying his own plane to Mexico, and there was a beautiful young model with him when it crashed. The Harrisons own the Ridgemont newspaper, so my grandmother was able to keep that fact out of it, but it was an exercise in futility because the wire services picked it up and it was all over the big city newspapers, not to mention radio and television newscasts."