Ulterior Motives (18 page)

“Were you upset?” Shelley asked.

“Surprised, mostly. I’d intentionally done a lot of things I knew I wasn’t supposed to, and now I’d gotten kicked out for something I hadn’t intended to happen. But once I started thinking about it, I was glad. I knew my family couldn’t fix it. I’d be on my own. Finally.”

“Did Tim—”

“Oh, sure. When he realized I was going to be expelled, he wanted to share my shame. But that would have been a waste, and I made him promise to never tell anyone. It was the right decision, too. Here he is all these years later, a serious man with an impressive academic career. Whereas I was never destined to finish college.”

“Was that when Tim switched his major to English lit?”

“Yes.”

They both laughed. Shelley studied Ross. For all her intuition, she had understood so little about him. Tim had been right. Ross was a man of generous spirit, of great gifts. And of great needs? she wondered.

“Looking back now,” he mused, “I can see it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Why?” she asked curiously.

“Well, my family kicked me out on my ear—we, uh, had some words about the incident and my general character, and I acted as badly as usual. Being left to my own devices at nineteen, as well as having all financial support withdrawn, turned out to be very good for me. It was about the only chance I had of acquiring any character.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Absolutely. I was spoiled, bored, careless, selfish, and thoughtless. I had a lot of very unattractive character traits—and you should know going into this, Shelley, that I haven’t shed all of them. I’d had everything a boy could ever want. I’d been given more second chances than you could count. I was bright enough to succeed at school but too damn stubborn to bother most of the time. I was a rich boy, so there were plenty of girls—”

“Trust me when I say your money had nothing to do with
that,”
Shelley said dryly. “But how did you get to be such a... brat?”

“Just came naturally to me, I guess.”

“Come on,” she insisted.

“I shouldn’t have been born with all that. I would have been better off if I’d always had to work my butt off—like you.”

“It’s character building,” she admitted.

“And I wasn’t cut out to be what my father wanted me to be.”

“Which was?”

“His successor, in every way. You can pound a lot of good manners and expensive tastes and correct speech into a kid, but you can’t turn him inside out and make him what he’s not.”

“No. Especially not someone like you.”

“I’m just not proper.”

“No, indeed.”

“I wanted adventure. I like change. Until the day I die, I’ll like stirring up trouble. My dad’s work seemed incredibly dreary to me, the people he dealt with bored me to distraction, and our social position strangled me. I started going my own way when I was about four years old. Since I was the only son, he wouldn’t give up on me. God forbid he should let one of his daughters take his place instead of me,” Ross said, some of his old exasperation showing in his expression.

“Your poor mother,” said Shelley. “Your house must have been a war zone.”

He looked sheepish. “It was. She wanted peace between us, but it just couldn’t happen. The harder he pushed, the more I rebelled. I even did things I didn’t want to do, just to show him there was no way I’d do what
he
wanted me to do.”

“So what happened when he kicked you out after you were expelled?” she asked.

“My sisters were upset, but my mom was devastated. I was too young and selfish to think about how they felt. I just disappeared. Free at last.”

“Where did you go?” she asked.

“Well, I thought about going to Provence. I’d always been very close to my French relatives, always happiest during the summers I spent with them. But that seemed like it would be cowardly. I’d done everything I could for nineteen years to make my family give up on me. I figured I might as well get on with my new life as an orphan.”

He grinned at her and continued, “It gets pretty weird after that. I worked some odd jobs for a while. I have a distant uncle that no one ever talked to because he was a smuggler. So, of course, I hunted him up. He had a ship—just a rustbucket really—that plied the Mediterranean and the west coast of Africa.”

“Did you really smuggle?” Shelley asked in fascination.

“Mostly we hauled regular cargo. But sometimes we smuggled wine, whiskey, tobacco, pistachio nuts, exotic oils, artifacts. Once we even hauled a load of some dreadful liquor made out of bananas that went bad halfway through the trip. God, was I sick!”

“Did you like that life?”

“I was usually in too much pain to worry about liking it.” He smiled reminiscently, recalling his initiation. “It was a tougher life than I’d ever known. I worked so hard that some nights I didn’t have the strength to pull the blanket over myself before I fell asleep. My hands were raw with blisters for weeks. It took a while for me to develop all the muscle and calluses and stamina I needed for that life. Not to mention the nerve. More than once I was afraid I’d rot in a third world prison. And I looked like the spoiled, sheltered kid I was, so I got robbed and beat up a lot at first.”

“How long did you stick with it?”

“Until I was good at it. I was determined to conquer or die. I got to be the toughest, shrewdest, most slippery guy my dear old uncle knew. By the end of my second year with him, I decided I’d learned enough and that this wasn’t the life for which I’d rebelled against my father for nineteen years. So I quit.”

“Gosh, Ross, this is better than going to the movies.”

“You haven’t touched your dinner,” he pointed out. “It’s been sitting in front of you for five minutes. Eat something.”

She put some food into her mouth, scarcely tasting it. “Well? What did you do then?”

“Oh, a lot of things. I started showing tourists around different countries in the Mediterranean. Just offered my services to people. I knew where they could find what they wanted, whether they were interested in fine food, good beaches, nightlife, sex, booze, or contraband. I worked for about five months as an interpreter and sort of general assistant for a British movie company in Morocco. Then I started working in a casino in Marrakech. I wound up running it after the manager disappeared mysteriously. People tended to do that a lot there. I turned that shabby little casino into a success in about a year. We even started attracting rich Europeans who were ‘slumming.’”

“And you gave it up when you decided that that wasn’t why you’d left your family, either.”

“It was all getting pretty sordid. I decided it was time to be near my relatives in Provence, make peace with my mom and dad. I got work after a while—”

“Managing a nightclub.”

“A pretty tawdry one, to be honest.”

“Did you sort out your family problems?”

“With everyone but my dad. We just called a cease-fire. We’re civil to each other, even talk now and then. We aren’t cut out to be close, though.”

“And after Nice?”

“I went to Paris. I was tired of living on the seamy side of life. It had been good for me. It had even been fun. But I wanted to live in nice places, meet normal people again, tell them what I did for a living. I still had expensive tastes, and I decided there was nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, though, I still couldn’t stand to be under authority of any kind. I lost two jobs in two months.”

“I can believe that,” she admitted. It was impossible to picture Ross taking orders from anyone. She smiled fondly, adoring him, pleased to have all those gaps in his past filled in, and sorry that she hadn’t seen his courage and self-honesty before. She reached across the table to lightly stroke his cheek. His eyes softened, and she could see the gesture pleased him. He pressed a kiss into her palm. “Then what?”

“Then Henri hired me,” he said.

“Why? I mean, you couldn’t have seemed very promising.”

“Well, he didn’t exactly
hire
me,” Ross admitted.

“Oh?”

“No. I sort of won the job in a poker game.”

“Really? Ross, this is great!”

“I knew I had a touch for figuring out why a place was losing money and how to turn it around. I’d done it in Marrakech and again in Nice, but I wanted a respectable job this time, as well as my independence. I found myself in a poker game with Henri Montpazier and saw my chance. When the stakes got high enough, I made an interesting offer. If I lost, I’d work for him for free for one year. If I won, he’d pay me a good salary and give me one year to prove I could turn around the most disastrous school in his business empire.” Ross added, “I won.”
 

Shelley stared at him incredulously. “
That
was the beginning of your career with Elite? That’s incredible! No wonder you’re outside the chain of command.”

“Shelley? This isn’t fodder for your business. This is between us, remember?” he reminded her.

“Yes, yes.” She attacked her dinner enthusiastically. His story had answered so many of her questions about him. For the moment, there was just one more. “Who else have you told? I mean... all of this?”

“I know what you mean.” His eyes met hers. “You’re the only person who knows all of it, Shelley. There’s an awful lot that I’m not proud of and don’t talk much about. I told you, I had to learn things the hard way. But... I’ll tell you the truth about anything you want to know.”

Her eyes were equally serious as she said, “Thank you. I’m glad.”

His mood changed, and his eyes sparkled as he asked, “But tell me, how did a nice girl like you get involved in a racket like this?”

“It’s a very dull story compared to yours. I was a tour guide in Europe. I started out by working for peanuts during the summers while I was in college. After college, I got a real job. I loved to travel. I liked working with people. I even liked it when things went wrong, because it was a challenge. I opted for fun jobs rather than ones that paid well, so I was always broke. I had a cot in a corner of a crowded flat in Paris, but I was almost never there. I did the circuits almost nonstop for five years: Great Britain, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Italy.”

“I take it the gypsy life palled after awhile?”

“Yes. I started having trouble remembering which city I was in or what language I was supposed to use. I grew to hate suitcases, hotels, backpacks, campsites, buses, campers, roads, restaurants—anything that was associated with travel. I took a leave of absence and went back to Chicago to spend some time with my family and think over my future. I was so glad to have some stability back in my life that I decided I’d had enough. It was a good run, but it was over.”

“That was when you got a job with Babel?”

“Yes. I applied to some other places in Chicago—including Elite,” she said significantly. “Babel hired me. I started out teaching and doing some office work. Everyone kept quitting, and within a year I was the assistant director. When the director of the Cincinnati school was fired, Jerome, my boss in Chicago, recommended they promote me and give me the job. He really pushed hard, because headquarters thought I was too young and too inexperienced. But they gave me the post in the end. And I’ve done a good job.”

“A very good job. I might not even be here if you weren’t doing such a good job.”

She sighed. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

Unlike their silence earlier in the evening, they seemed unable to stop talking now. They told stories about the past, shared memories of their favorite places, laughed about some mistakes they’d made and admitted their regret about others. Shelley marveled at all he’d been through, at all the complex facets of Ross Tanner. No wonder she’d been irresistibly drawn to him the first time she’d seen him. He was even more extraordinary than she had guessed.

He was still a flirt, still a smooth talker, and nearly every gesture bore the mark of his privileged upbringing. But there was so much more to him than the casual elegance and easy charm she’d first noticed. Whatever happened between them, she was very glad fate had thrown this remarkable man in her path.

The restaurant was quiet and nearly empty when Ross noticed their waitress casting meaningful looks in their direction. “I think we’ve overstayed our welcome,” he said to Shelley.

“What time is it?” She looked at her watch. “I can’t believe it! It’s past midnight!”

Ross looked around. “No wonder everyone else is gone.”

“I’ve got to get home, Ross. I have so much to do in the morning. I have to—” She stopped abruptly. It was there between them. She refused to let it spoil even a moment of their time together. She smiled instead. “We’d better pay up and go.”

Ross left a generous tip on the table to compensate for staying all evening. He helped Shelley on with her jacket, and they walked out to his car. “I think I remember how to get there,” he said when she started to direct him to her apartment.

“Don’t bother to hunt for a parking place,” Shelley said as they neared her building. “Just drop me off at the front door.”

He stopped the car and looked into her eyes. She met his gaze squarely, neither embarrassed nor uncomfortable with the question she saw there. “Not tonight?” he asked softly.