LITMIR.BIZ

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turned off the ignition nailed it down for her. Still, when she could pry her hands from her mouth, it was to hear herself ask, “We’re stuck, aren’t we?”

      “Yes, Ms. Mercer, we’re stuck,” Sean answered, running a hand through his hair, then exhaling his breath in an angry whoosh. “If it weren’t for the guardrail—but never mind that. Someone else from the meeting will be along soon enough, I’m sure.”

      “I—I was the last one to leave the school,” Cassandra told him. “Smitty let me lock up.”

      He sliced her a quick, angry look. “The janitor allowed you to lock the school? That’s not in your job description, is it, Ms. Mercer?”

      Cassandra rolled her eyes, wondering if the man ever listened to himself speak. “No, Mr. Frame, it’s not. But there was no reason for Smitty to be late for his dinner because I wanted to get a few files from my office, now, was there?”

      He lowered his head, reaching up to rub at the back of his neck. “No. No, I suppose not. I apologize. Sometimes I come on too strong, don’t I?”

      Cassandra wanted to stick her little finger in her ear and give it a shake, just to clear the passageway. She couldn’t have heard the guy right. “You’re a businessman, Mr. Frame,” she said in reply, wondering how her parents had managed to instill such good manners in their only child, when that same only child was obviously harboring a second personality, one that wanted to say, “Strong, Sean baby? Do the words like a Mack truck mean anything to you?”

      A clap of thunder equal to the decibel output of five Rolling Stones concerts playing at the same time shook the mountain.

      Cassandra couldn’t help herself. She whimpered. “Oh, God,” she groaned, then pulled her feet onto the seat, wrapped her arms around her lower legs and buried her head against her knees. “Watch for the next lightning bolt, would you? Please,” she mumbled. “And then count one-one thousand, two-one thousand, until we hear the next boom, okay? I want to know how far away that lightning is.”

      “How very scientific, Ms. Mercer,” Sean commented, then added, “or we could simply pretend that God is bowling, and the sound we hear is the pins going down? That’s the fairy tale they told us at the home.”

      Cassandra turned her head slightly toward him and looked at him through the deepening dusk, forgetting about the storm raging outside. “The home? Are you an orphan, Mr. Frame?”

      That would explain a lot. He was urbane and sophisticated, yes, but she hadn’t been able to help noticing that he had this edge to him. It was a slightly rough edge, as if he had one foot firmly anchored in the tough but civilized corporate world, and the other somewhere to the left of success, standing in a more human, fallible, even vulnerable place.

      His smile revealed straight white teeth, with one top tooth just the slightest bit crooked, showing that he’d never had braces. “And here you were, Ms. Mercer, all this time believing I’d been hatched from an egg like the other reptiles. But, no, I wasn’t an orphan. Not in the ordinary sense.”

      She frowned. “There’s an un-ordinary sense?”

      “Actually, there is, and it’s becoming more frequent all the time. You see, my father abandoned us before I was born, and my mother had this habit of forgetting where she’d put me from time to time. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t give up custody so I could be adopted when I was still young and reasonably adorable.”

      Cassandra didn’t hear the next clap of thunder, much less react to it. “That’s horrible!”

      “It was all right, once I got used to it. I’d spend time with her, then in the home, and occasionally, in someone’s house as a foster child. It was an interesting childhood, and one I strove to overcome from the time I was old enough to know what I wanted. What I needed to do to get what I wanted. It was also a childhood I made certain Jason avoided. Three miles, Ms. Mercer.”

      “Three—oh! The lightning is only three miles away? It might as well be on top of us!” Cassandra buried her head against her knees once more, then flinched as a tumbling boulder crashed into the side of the Jeep, mashing it more firmly against the guardrail.

      To keep her mind occupied—to keep from screaming—she concentrated on the other things Sean Frame had said. She looked at him again, wishing it were darker so she couldn’t see his intelligent hazel eyes, his incongruously long, lush black lashes.

      “Your own childhood must have made it doubly important for you to have Jason raised in a firm family situation,” she commented at last. “And yet, after allowing him to live with his mother since he was born, you’ve now taken total custody and moved him here to Grand Springs. How does that equate with this image of permanency you’re talking about?”

      He looked at her for a long moment, during which Cassandra realized that he was talking, telling her about his personal life, only to keep her mind off their current predicament, off the fact that they might, at any moment, become a part of the mountain. That was rather sweet of him—which didn’t mean that she liked him. She couldn’t possibly like him!

      “Sally remarried about two years ago,” he explained. “When Jason was fifteen. He didn’t take it well, didn’t care much for Bob, her new husband. And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t much like the fact that there’s now a new baby in the household.”

      He shook his head. “Sally doesn’t know the first thing about dealing with teenage boys, I’m afraid, not that she was much better when Sean was younger. I tried to be there for him, but I was building my company and working ninety-hour weeks. And a child should be with his mother, or so the books say. When he ran away from home for the third time in a month, she called me in hysterics and said it was my turn. I agreed, wholeheartedly, and Jason moved in with me. Now, instead of fighting Sally’s ridiculous coddling of my son, I’m fighting your off-the-wall methods, which are equally softhearted and maddening. And Jason is still—what do you call it?”

      “Acting out,” Cassandra told him, bristling. “And now I understand why! How could you not have told me about the new stepfather? The new baby? Don’t you know that these things have a profound impact on a boy Jason’s age? He loves his mother, and now his mother has a new man in her life, a new child. Of course he’s feeling displaced, unloved, passed over.”

      “Oh, really. You should have seen his bedroom, Ms. Mercer. From the time he was born, that kid had everything he ever wanted.”

      “Material things are no substitute for love. I’m telling you, he was feeling displaced, shunted aside. And then his mother goes and proves it to him by all but throwing him out of the house, straight at a man who pulled himself up from nothing and probably thinks a child like Jason is spoiled rotten and in need of a good smack upside the head to settle him down.”

      “There you go—more mumbo jumbo, more textbook pap meant to—”

      But Cassandra cut him off. “God!” she exclaimed, laying her head back against the seat as she slumped down on her spine. “That poor kid! I’m surprised all he’s done is break a couple of windows and almost fail a couple of classes.”

      “Let’s just hope you haven’t told Jason that almost failing a couple of classes and breaking a couple of windows is permissible behavior because he now lives with his father instead of his mother,” Sean shot back, reaching up a hand to jerk loose his designer tie and then roughly unbutton the collar of his designer shirt. “Or is this the new ‘in’ thing with guidance counselors—explaining away unacceptable behavior and placing all the blame on the parents and not the kid?”

      “Mr. Frame,” Cassandra began, pulling herself upright on the seat. “You have no idea how difficult it is to deal with the teenage child. I see what he does in school, yes, but unless I am informed as to his home background, his relationship with his parents, his general physical health—circumstances that are not apparent when I sit across the desk from a mulish young boy who thinks he hates everything and everyone in his life when, in reality, he is simply a painfully unhappy lump of insecurity and fear—well, it just makes

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