Nine Lives - Danielle Steel Page 0,4

before it got any later.

She was lucky. As soon as she met Tommy at the bus stop, he told her that he’d been invited to a friend’s house the next day to hang out, stay for a barbecue, and then spend the night. He had made friends more easily than she had. But he was only twelve, and boys were less complicated than girls her age. Most of the girls had boyfriends, or they moved in a pack. She didn’t have a pack mentality, didn’t want to show off, and she didn’t know how to play the games that attracted boys her age. Paul liked that about her. She seemed like a nice person, and she was easy to talk to. She was pretty too, in a totally natural way. She had shining dark hair, green eyes, and didn’t wear makeup. She was tall and thin and had a good body. He had the feeling that she didn’t know she was beautiful.

After she dropped Tommy off at his friend’s the next day, she took the bus to where the track was. It was a bitter cold day. She had to walk the last few blocks and her face and hands were frozen when she arrived. There was a small crowd of mostly men sitting in bleachers, watching the track. She got there just in time to see Paul race. He came in third out of a dozen boys and men older than he was. They were riding mostly rebuilt motorcycles. The bike slid after he crossed the finish line, and he had a nasty gash on one arm and had grazed the side of his face. He was bleeding when she got to him, and she helped him clean the arm. He didn’t seem to care that he was hurt. He was glowing with the excitement of having come in third. All the others in the race pounded him on the back and one of them handed him a beer. He didn’t even feel the graze on his face in the emotion of the moment. He offered her a ride on the back of his motorbike to where he lived, which he said wasn’t far away.

When they got there, she was shocked to see the seedy part of town he lived in, and the ramshackle house where he left his friend’s motorbike in the garage. Then they walked back to his house, which was barely more than a cottage. It smelled of sour cooking and looked gray and dingy when they walked inside. He watched her face for her reaction, but she didn’t seem to care. She was more interested in him than where he lived. She was the only girl he’d ever brought there.

“How does your face feel?” she asked him.

“Great!” He looked a mess and had dirt all over his jacket and had torn a sleeve when he cut his arm. “It’s the best time I’ve had yet.”

“Are you serious about racing motorcycles when you finish school?” He nodded enthusiastically and had a light in his eyes that reminded her of how her father looked when he talked about flying planes.

“I am. I want to be the best at something when I’m older. Some kind of racing. I love motorcycles.” She could see that he did. He poured her a soda from the nearly empty fridge, and they sat down on a sagging, beat-up couch and talked for a while, and then she said she had to go. She had a long ride home, and she wanted to be there when her mother came in from work. She didn’t like to have to tell her where she’d been. “Do you want to go to the movies tomorrow?” he asked her, and she nodded with a slow, shy smile.

“Yes, I’d love to.”

He walked her to the bus stop, and she thought about him all the way home, and that night. She didn’t say anything to her mother. She met Paul at a movie complex downtown the next day. She was surprised to see that he was driving the motorcycle, and she rode on it with him after the movie, then let him take her to within a few blocks of her house. Her mother would have killed her if she had seen it. Motorcycles or anything high risk were strictly forbidden. Emma was afraid that she or Tommy would turn out to be like their father. She didn’t even want Tommy to play sports, and all he