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  “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.”

  “Why didn’t your grandfather simply get a divorce if he didn’t care about her?”

  “I asked my grandfather that same question the summer before I went away to Yale. He and I were celebrating my forthcoming college career by getting drunk together in his study. Instead of telling me to mind my own damned business, he’d had just enough to drink to tell me the truth and not so much that he wasn’t lucid.” He reached for his brandy and tossed down the rest of it as if he were trying to wash away the taste of his words, then he stared absently into the empty glass.

  “What did he tell you?” she asked finally.

  He glanced at her as if he’d almost forgotten she was there. “He told me that my grandmother was the only woman in the world he’d ever loved. Everyone thought he’d married her to merge the Harrison fortune with what was left of his own, particularly because my grandmother was a long way from being beautiful, but my grandfather said that wasn’t true, and I believe him. Actually, when my grandmother grew older, she became what is sometimes called a handsome woman—very aristocratic looking.”

  He stopped again and Julie said in disgust, “Why did you believe him? I mean, if he loved her, it seems to me he wouldn’t have cheated on her like that.”

  A sardonic smile tugged at his lips. “You had to know my grandmother. No one could meet her high standards, least of all my devil-may-care grandfather, and he knew it. He told me he just gave up and quit trying to do it soon after they were married. The only one of us my grandmother ever actually approved of was Justin. She adored Justin. You see,” he explained with something closer to genuine amusement, “Justin was the only male in the entire family who looked anything like her people. He was fair like she was, medium height instead of tall—in fact he had a striking resemblance to her own father. The rest of us, including my father, all had the Stanhope height and features—me, in particular. I happened to have been a dead ringer for my grandfather, which, as you can imagine, did not endear me to my grandmother in the least.”

  Julie thought that was the most ridiculously biased thing she’d ever heard, but she kept her feelings to herself and said, “If your grandmother loved Justin so much, I’m sure she would have stood by him if he’d told her he was gay.”

  “Not on your life! She despised weakness, any and all weakness. His announcement would have revolted and shattered her.” He slanted her a wry look and added, “Considering all that, she certainly married into the wrong family. As I mentioned earlier, the Stanhopes were rife with every kind of weakness. They drank too much, drove too fast, squandered their own money, then married people who had enough to revive their flagging fortunes. Having fun was their one and only avocation. They never worried about tomorrow or gave a damn about anyone but themselves, not even my own parents, who died on their way home from a drunken party, driving over a hundred miles an hour on a snowy road. They had four children who needed them, but it didn’t slow them