He’d just told her his mother was a prostitute, a junkie, and waited for some shocked exclamation. When she only continued to watch him with those cool, guarded eyes, he shrugged and went on.

“She was probably about eighteen when she got pregnant with me. According to her story, she’d already had two abortions and was scared of another. She could never be quite sure who the father was, but was pretty certain it was one of three guys. She moved in with one of them and decided to keep me. When I was about a year old, she got tired of him and moved in with somebody else. He pimped for her, supplied her with drugs, but he knocked her around a little too much, so she ditched him.”

Gray tapped his cigarette out, paused long enough for Brianna to comment. But she said nothing, only sat as she was on the bed, her hands folded.

“Anyway, we can fast forward through the next couple of years. As far as I can tell, things stayed pretty much as they were. She moved around from man to man, got hooked on the hard stuff. In enlightened times, I guess you could say she had an addictive personality. She knocked me around a little, but she never really beat me—that would have taken a little too much effort and interest. She locked me in to keep me from wandering when she was on the street or meeting her dealer. We lived in filth, and I remember the cold. It gets f**king cold in San Francisco. That’s how the fire started. Somebody in the building knocked over a portable heater. I was five, and I was alone and locked in.”

“Oh, my God, Grayson.” She pressed her hands to her mouth. “Oh, God.”

“I woke up choking,” he said in the same distant voice. “The room was filled with smoke, and I could hear the sirens and the screaming. I was screaming, and beating at the door. I couldn’t breathe, and I was scared. I remember just lying down on the floor and crying. Then a fireman crashed through the door, and he picked me up. I don’t remember him carrying me out. I don’t remember the fire itself, just the smoke in my room. I woke up in the hospital, and a social worker was there. A pretty young thing with big blue eyes and soft hands. And there was a cop. He made me nervous because I’d been taught to distrust anyone in authority. They asked me if I knew where my mother was. I didn’t. By the time I was well enough to leave the hospital ward, I’d been scooped up in the system. They put me in a children’s home while they looked for her. They never found her. I never saw her again.”

“She never came for you.”

“No, she never came. It wasn’t such a bad deal. The home was clean, they fed you regular. The big problem for me was that it was structured, and I wasn’t used to structure. There were foster homes, but I made sure that didn’t work. I didn’t want to be anyone’s fake kid, no matter how good or how bad the people were. And some of them were really good people. I was what they call intractable. I liked it that way. Being a troublemaker gave me an identity, so I made plenty of trouble.

I was a real tough guy with a smart mouth and a bad attitude. I liked to pick fights, because I was strong and fast and could usually win.

“I was predictable,” he said with a half laugh. “That’s the worst of it. I was a product of my early environment and damned proud of it. No f**king counselor or shrink or social worker was going to get through to me. I’d been taught to hate authority, and that was one thing she’d taught me well.”

“But the school, the home . . . they were good to you?”

A mocking light shimmered in his eyes. “Oh, yeah, just peachy. Three squares and a bed.” He let out an impatient breath at her troubled expression. “You’re a statistic, Brianna, a number. A problem. And there are plenty of other statistics and numbers and problems to be shuffled around. Sure, in hindsight, I can tell you that some of them probably really gave a damn, really tried to make a difference. But they were the enemy, with their questions and tests, their rules and disciplines. So following my mother’s example, I ran off at sixteen. Lived on the streets, by my wits. I never touched drugs, never sold myself, but there wasn’t much else I didn’t do.”

He pushed away from the dresser and began to prowl the room. “I stole, I cheated, I ran scams. And one day I had an epiphany when a guy I was running a short con on got wise and beat the living shit out of me. It occurred to me, when I came to in an alley with blood in my mouth and several busted ribs, that I could probably find a better way to make a living. I headed to New York. I sold plenty of watches along Fifth Avenue,” he said with a hint of a smile. “Ran a little three-card monte, and I started to write. I’d gotten a fairly decent education in the home. And I liked to write. I couldn’t admit that at sixteen, being such a tough sonofabitch. But at eighteen, in New York, it didn’t seem so bad. What seemed bad, what suddenly began to seem really bad, was that I was the same as she was. I decided to be somebody else.

“I changed my name. I changed myself. I got a legit job bussing tables at a little dive in the Village. I shed that little bastard layer by layer until I was Grayson Thane. And I don’t look back, because it’s pointless.”

“Because it hurts you,” Brianna said quietly. “And makes you angry.”

“Maybe. But mostly because it has nothing to do with who I am now.”

She wanted to tell him it had everything to do with who he was, what he’d made himself. Instead she rose to face him. “I love who you are now.” She felt a pang, knowing he was drawing back from what she wanted to give him. “Is it so distressing to you to know that, and to know I can feel sorry for the child, for the young man, and admire what evolved from them?”

“Brianna, the past doesn’t matter. Not to me,” he insisted. “It’s different for you. Your past goes back centuries. You’re steeped in it, the history, the tradition.

It’s formed you. and because of it, the future’s just as important. You’re a planner, long term. I’m not. I can’t be. Damn it, I don’t want to be. There’s just now. The way things are right now.”

Did he think she couldn’t understand that, after all he’d told her? She could see him all too well, the battered little boy, terrified of the past, terrified there was no future, holding on desperately to whatever he could grab in the present.

“Well, we’re together right now, aren’t we?” Gently she cupped his face. “Grayson, I can’t stop loving you to make you more comfortable. I can’t do it to make myself more comfortable. It simply is. My heart’s lost to you, and I can’t take it back. I doubt I would if I could. It doesn’t mean you have to take it, but you’d be foolish not to. It costs you nothing.”