Renegade Read Online Free PDF Page B

continued quietly, “The first man who came up to mewas 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.
    â€œHe 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.”
    â€œThe 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 upto 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.”
    â€œThat’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.”
    â€œPoor guy.”
    â€œHe was the best man I ever knew,” she said sadly. “I still put flowers on his grave. He saved me.”
    â€œWhat 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.”
    â€œHow did you end up with Rory?” he asked.
    â€œThe 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 werestaying. Fishing, for money. Cullen offered to