o you still feel bitter toward Dash and Honey?"

The Beau Monde reporter crossed her legs as she asked the question and regarded Eric through the red metal frames of her glasses. Laurel Kreuger reminded him of a Gap ad. She had a New York intellectual look—slim and attractive with short no-fuss hair and minimal makeup. Her clothes were casual and oversized: turtleneck, baggy khaki trousers, boots, a Soviet army watch.

A Beau Monde cover story was worth some inconvenience, but she had been interviewing Eric on and off for several days; it was Sunday, his only day off, and he was getting tired of it. Trying to channel his restlessness, he rose from one of the hotel penthouse's two facing couches and wandered over to the window, where he lit a cigarette and gazed down at Central Park. The trees were still bare of leaves,

and their branches whipped in the March wind. He felt a momentary nostalgia for California, even though he'd only been away for a month.

He finally replied to her question. "Dash and Honey got married at the end of eighty-three, more than five years ago. I've been too busy since then to give it much thought. Besides, I was basically already off the show when it happened."

As he exhaled, the smoke spread skeletal fingers against the glass, blurring but not quite obscuring his reflection. His face seemed both sparer and harder than it had been during his years on the Coogan show, although it had lost none of its male beauty. If anything, the sullen, brooding quality he had exhibited in his twenties had, in his thirties, matured into a dark sexuality that made the alienated anti-heroes he frequently played on-screen so dangerously compelling.

The Manhattan Sunday traffic crept by far below as the reporter continued her probing. "Regardless of the fact that you were no longer a regular on the Coogan show, you were certainly outspoken at the time."

He drifted back over to the couch where he had been sitting facing her. "A lot of us were. If you'll remember, we had four seasons of that show in the can, and the producers were just getting ready to put it up for syndication. We were all expecting to make a lot of money on that deal. When news of Dash and Honey's marriage broke, it went right down the toilet. Ross Bachardy had to give the show away."

"That sounds bitter to me."

"Money's money." He sank back onto the striped cushions. "If I'd known what was going to happen with my career, I wouldn't have worried."

"Apparently being nominated for this year's Best Actor Oscar changes one's perspective."

"Not to mention one's bank account."

"So you decided to forgive the lovebirds their transgressions?"

"Something like that."

"Do you still talk to either one of them?"

"I was never close to either Dash or Honey. I speak to Liz Castleberry every few months."

"Coogan still shows up once in a while in commercials and doing guest shots, but Honey's pretty much a mystery lady," Laurel said. "Occasionally somebody will spot her on the Pepperdine campus taking a class, but other than that, she doesn't seem to leave their ranch very much."

"A major waste of talent. She never had any idea how good she was. Still, I'm not surprised she's made herself scarce. The press beat up on her pretty badly."

"She lied about her age for so long that no one believed her when she finally told the truth. The fact that people thought she was seventeen instead of twenty when she and Coogan ran off made it even worse."

He stabbed his cigarette into the ashtray next to him.

"Ross Bachardy was the one who concealed her age, not Honey."

"You sound like you're defending her."

"In some ways, she got a bum rap. In other ways, she and Dash screwed over a lot of people's futures."

"But not yours."

"Not mine."

She glanced at the notebook in her lap. "You've been getting some heady press lately. Gene Siskel said

he expects you to be the premier actor of the nineties."

"I appreciate the vote of confidence, but predictions like that are a bit premature."

"You're only thirty-one years old. You've got a lot of time to prove the critics right."

"Or wrong."

"You don't believe that, do you?"

"No, I don't believe that."

"You certainly are self-confident. Is that why you decided to come to New York to do Macbeth?" She glanced down at her tape recorder to make certain the cassette wasn't running out.

He put his finger to his lips. "The Scottish play."

She regarded him quizzically.

"Actors consider it bad luck to refer to this play by its title. It's an old theatrical superstition."

Her mouth gave a wry twist. "Somehow I don't think you're the superstitious type."

"We have another two weeks before we finish our run, and I'm not taking any unnecessary chances, especially in a production this risky."

"I'll say it's risky. Casting you and Nadia Evans, two of the screen's reigning sex symbols, as Lord and Lady Macbeth was hardly conventional. The critics walked into the theater with their fangs bared. Both of you could have fallen on your faces."

"But we didn't."

"It's the sexiest production of Mac—er the Scottish play I've ever seen."

"Sexy's easy. It's all that blood and guts stuff that's hard."

She laughed, and a current of sexual chemistry sparked between them. It wasn't the first time it had happened, but once again he dismissed the idea of taking her to bed. It was more than the AIDS crisis that had made him selective about his bed partners. His first year with Lilly, when he had tried so hard to establish real sexual intimacy with her, had stripped him of his ability to enjoy sex for its own sake. He no longer went to bed with women he didn't like, and he definitely didn't go to bed with members of the press.

"You don't give a lot away, do you, Eric?"

He reached for his cigarettes, stalling for time. "What do you mean?"

"I've been interviewing you for several days, and I still don't have the foggiest notion what makes you tick. You're probably the most closed person I've ever met. And I don't just mean the way you dodge personal questions about your divorce or your past. You don't ever let anything slip, do you?"

"If I could be any tree in the world, I'd be an oak."

She laughed. "I must admit you've surprised me. Tell me why—"

But before she could begin another line of questioning, the door of the penthouse burst open and Rachel Dillon charged in. Her dark, tangled hair flew back from a small, delicate face whose soft features were marred only by a smear of chocolate near her mouth and a round Band-Aid plunked at the center of her forehead. Along with purple jeans and pink high-top sneakers, she wore a Roger Rabbit sweatshirt accessorized with a cast-off rhinestone necklace that had belonged to her mother. She was six weeks shy of her fifth birthday.

"Daddy!" She squealed with delight as if she hadn't seen him in weeks when, in fact, they had only been separated for a few hours. Throwing out her arms and nearly sending a vase of silk flowers toppling in the process, she raced toward him.

"Daddy, guess what we saw?"

She didn't notice the copy of the Sunday Times that lay on the floor directly in her path. Rachel never noticed any obstacles between herself and what she wanted.

"What did you see?" With a well-practiced motion, he swept her up just as she slid on the papers, catching her before she could bang her head on the nearby coffee table. She threw her arms around his neck, not out of gratitude for being rescued from potential disaster but because she always gave him crushing bear hugs after even the shortest separations.

"You guess, Daddy."

He drew her wiggling, energy-charged form into his lap and breathed in her particular strawberry scent of little-girl's hair faintly overlaid with sweat, since Rachel never walked when she could run. A panda-shaped barrette dangled from the very end of a dark brown lock. While he gave her question serious consideration, he slipped it off and set it on the end table. Rachel's barrettes were everywhere. He'd even pulled one out of his pocket in the middle of a press conference thinking it was his cigarette lighter.

"You saw a giraffe or Madonna."

She giggled. "No, silly. Daddy, we saw a man do peepee on the sidewalk."

"And that's what we love about the Big Apple," he replied dryly.

Rachel nodded her head vigorously. "Daddy, he did. Right on the sidewalk."

"Your lucky day." He gently touched the Band-Aid on her forehead. "How's your owie?"

But Rachel refused to be distracted. "Daddy, even Becca the goody-goody looked."

"Did she now." Eric's eyes grew soft, and he gazed across the room toward Rachel's twin sister Rebecca, who had just come through the door and was holding hands with Carmen, the girls' nanny. She gave him her sweet smile. He winked at her over the top of her sister's head in the secret signal they had developed.!!!Rachel got here first as usual, but she'll soon be bored, and then you and I can settle in for a nice long cuddle.

"Daddy, did Mommy call on the telephone?" Rachel bumped his chin with the top of her head as she spun around. "Daddy, she said she'd call me today."

"Tonight, honey. You know she always calls at bedtime on Fridays."

Growing bored right on schedule, Rachel bounced off his lap and raced over to her nanny to grab her hand away from Becca. "Come on, Carmen. You said we could do finger paints." Before she left for the bedroom, she turned back to her sister. "Becca, don't be mushing with Daddy all day, you pokey. After me and Carmen finish, I'm gonna show you how to tie your shoe." Her face grew stern. "And this time you better do it right."

Eric resisted the urge to leap in and protect his fragile, damaged daughter from her domineering sister. Rachel was impatient with Becca's slowness, but she was also big-hearted and fiercely protective of her. Although he had discussed her sister's Down syndrome with her as soon as she was old enough to understand, she refused to accept Becca's slowness and was merciless in her insistence that she keep up. Maybe in part because of her unrelenting demands, Becca was progressing more rapidly than the doctors had expected.

Eric knew that, despite public perception, children born with Down syndrome were not all the same. They ranged from being mildly to moderately retarded, with a wide variation in mental and physical abilities. The extra forty-seventh chromosome that caused Rebecca's Down syndrome had left her mildly retarded, but there was no reason to believe she couldn't live a full and useful life.

As Rachel disappeared, Becca came toward him, her thumb in her mouth. The girls were fraternal twins instead of identical ones, but despite Becca's slightly slanted eyelids and the gently depressed bridge of her nose, they still bore a strong resemblance to each other and to him. Smoothly extracting her thumb, he gathered her into his arms and kissed her forehead. "Hi, sweetheart. How's Daddy's girl?"

"Becca is boo-tee-full."

He smiled and hugged her. "You certainly are."

"Daddy boo-tee-full, too." Becca's speech was slower than Rachel's, full of word omissions and sound substitutions. Although it was difficult for strangers to understand her, Eric had no trouble.

"Thanks, champ."

As she settled back against his chest, a deep sensation of peace came over him, just as it always did when he held her. Although he could never have explained it to anyone, he felt as if Becca were the universe's special gift to him, the only absolutely perfect thing in his life. He had always feared himself around the defenseless, but protecting this fragile child had begun to remove that haunting burden. In a way that he didn't entirely understand, the gift of Rebecca had let him atone for what he had done to Jason.

He had gotten so wrapped up in his daughters that he had nearly forgotten Laurel Kreuger, who was avidly taking in this scene of domesticity. Although he had never made any attempt to hide Becca's condition, he hated exposing his children to the press, and he absolutely forbade having them photographed. Even though it wasn't Laurel's fault the children had come back early from their outing,

he resented this intrusion into his privacy.

"That's it for today, Laurel," he said abruptly. "I have some business to attend to this afternoon."

"We were scheduled for another half hour," Laurel protested.

"I didn't know that the girls would be back so soon."

"Do you always drop everything for them?" Her question held the faintly judgmental undertone of someone who has never been a parent.

"Always. Nothing in my life—not Beau Monde, not even my career, is as important as my daughters." It was the most revealing statement he had made to her since their interviews began, but he could see that she didn't believe him. Despite the fact that she had been dismissed, she made no move to gather up her tape recorder or notebook.

"You and your ex-wife have joint custody, don't you? I'm surprised you didn't leave the girls with her for the past few months instead of uprooting them by bringing them all the way across the country."

"Are you?"

She waited for him to explain, but he remained silent. He had no intention of letting her know that Lilly was incapable of dealing with the girls for very long. In theory, the girls were supposed to divide their

time equally between their parents, but in practice they were with him ninety per cent of the time.

Lilly loved both her daughters, but for some reason that he couldn't fathom, she blamed herself for Becca's condition and her guilt made her ineffectual at meeting her daughter's special needs. In some ways the situation was even worse with Rachel. For all Lilly's intelligence, she seemed to lack the resources to deal with her strong-willed daughter, and Rachel rode roughshod over her.

Laurel continued to watch him cuddle Becca. "You're going to spoil your reputation as the last of the tough guys. Although that might not be a bad idea. Some critics call it your fatal flaw. They say that no matter what role you play, you always seem alienated."

"That's crap."

"Not according to a recent critical analysis of your work." She flipped over some pages in her notebook. "I quote, 'Eric Dillon's solitary performances mark him as one of society's loners. He is an actor who lives on the edge: sexually dangerous, permanently alienated, a voluntary* discard. We feel his pain, but only as much as he allows. He gives us a twisted sort of brilliance, hard and difficult to crack. Ultimately, Dillon is gorgeous, hostile, and ruined.'"

He shot up from the couch, his daughter caught firmly in his arms. "I said that's enough for today."

Becca looked up at him, her eyes widening with alarm. He forced his muscles to relax and rubbed her arm. Then he glared at the reporter.

Apparently Laurel decided she'd pushed him far enough because she immediately gathered up her things and stuffed them into her tote bag. When she was on her way to the door, however, she hesitated.

"I have a job to do, Eric. Maybe after all this is over, we could—You know. Have a drink or something."

"Or something," he said coldly.

After Laurel had left, he soothed Becca, then sent her off to play with her sister while he made some phone calls. When he was done, he went into the spacious room the girls shared and nodded at Carmen so she could slip away to take a much-needed break. Crossing to the end of the room, he observed Becca sitting at the low table patiently finger-painting red circles on white butcher paper.

Transporting the girls across the country for three months hadn't been easy. The hotel room was set up with their play equipment, along with multicolored plastic milk crates filled with toys and books. He'd arranged for a special school and a speech therapist for Rebecca and put Rachel into a private nursery school. Still, he believed the advantages of keeping the girls with him outweighed the disadvantages of uprooting them.

Rachel, growing bored with finger-painting, began to practice her cartwheels. There was too much furniture in the room for gymnastics, and he waited for the inevitable, which wasn't long in coming. As she threw herself over, she caught her heel on the comer of one of the milk crates and gave a howl of outrage.

He squatted down. "Here, let me rub it."

She glared at him, transferring the sole responsibility for her gymnastic failure onto him.

"Daddy, you ruined it! I was doing it right till you came in! It's all your fault."

He lifted one eyebrow, letting her know that he had her number.

She was one of the few people in the world who didn't have any qualms about facing him down and she returned him raised eyebrow for raised eyebrow. "Cartwheels are stupid."

"Uh-huh," he replied noncommittally. "Doing them in here isn't too smart, either."

He straightened and walked over to stand behind Becca, brushing his hand along the side of her neck. "Good work, champ. Give it to me when it's dry, and I'll hang it in my dressing room at the theater." He turned back to Rachel. "Let me see your painting."

She regarded him sullenly. "It's stupid. I ripped it up."

"I think somebody needs a nap."

"Daddy, I'm not cranky. You always say I need a nap when you think I'm being cranky."

"My mistake."

"Daddy, only babies take naps."

"And you certainly aren't a baby."

Becca piped up from the table. "Me want to show Patches Becca's painting, Daddy. Me want to show Patches."

Rachel's crankiness instantly vanished. She jumped up and raced over to grab Eric's leg. "Yeah, Daddy! Let Patches play with us. Please."

Both girls regarded him with eyes so full of entreaty that he laughed. "Couple of con artists. All right. But Patches can't stay too long. He told me he has to perform some major carnage this afternoon. Not only that, he has a meeting with his agent."

Rachel giggled and ran for her bureau, where she quickly pulled open a drawer and extracted a pair of her navy blue tights. She raced back to him, the tights extended, and then rushed for the Band-Aid box.

"Not a Band-Aid again," he protested as he sat down in one of the small chairs, wrapped the navy tights around his head, and then knotted the legs to the side in the manner of a pirate's scarf. "You're going to end up with a father who's lost half of his right eyebrow. Let's just pretend."

"Daddy, you got to do the Band-Aid," Rachel insisted, just as she always did when he protested. "You can't be Patches without a patch, can he, Becca?"

"Becca want to see Patches."

He grumbled as he peeled the wrapper from the adhesive strip and secured it at a diagonal across his right eye, from the inside corner of his eyebrow to the outer edge of his cheekbone. Becca's thumb crept toward her mouth. Rachel leaned forward in anticipation. They watched in silent fascination, waiting for that magical transformation when their daddy changed into Patches the Pirate. He took his time. No matter how humble his audience, that special moment of transformation was sacred to him, the time when the boundary between illusion and reality grew indistinct.

He breathed once. Twice.

Rachel squealed with delight as he squinted his eye beneath the Band-Aid, crooked one edge of his mouth, and completed the transfiguration.

"Well, now, and what do we 'ave 'ere? Two bloodthirsty wenches, if me eyes ain't deceivin' me." He gave them his fiercest glower, and was rewarded with piercing squeals. Rachel began to run away from him, as she always did. He jumped up from the small chair and quickly scooped her off her feet.

"Not so fast, me pretty. I've been lookin' for some 'earty mates to carry off on me pirate ship." His eyes traveled from Rachel, squealing with delight and squirming beneath his arm, to Becca, watching gleefully from her seat at the table. He shook his head. "Nah. On second thought, I'll be throwin' you back. The two of you look puny." He set Rachel down and, arms akimbo, regarded her ferociously.

Rachel immediately grew indignant. "We're not puny, Patches. Feel this." She raised her arm and made a muscle. "Becca, show Patches your muscle."

Becca did as she was told. Eric dutifully leaned down and examined both sets of thin little arms. As always, the fragile delicacy of their bones struck fear into his heart, but he hid it and whistled with admiration. "Stronger than you look, the both of you. Still..." He fixed Becca with a dark scowl. "Are you good with a rapier, lass?"

"He means a sword," Rachel whispered loudly to her sister.

Becca nodded. "Vewwy, vewwy good."

"Patches, me too," Rachel squealed, "I'm great with a rapier." She launched them into the part of the game she liked the best. "And I can cut off a bad guy's head in a single swoop."

"Can you now?"

"1 can even open his stomach and let his blood and guts and brains spill out without blinkin' me eye."

Eric was noted for his faultless concentration, but he nearly lost it as Rachel tried, for the first time, to copy his accent. He had invented the rules of this particular game, however, and he checked any display of amusement. Instead, he regarded them doubtfully.

"I don't know. Raidin' and plunderin' is serious work. I need somebody with a strong 'eart fightin' at me side. The truth of it is..." He sank down into the chair next to Becca and whispered conspiratorially.

"I'm not too fond of the sight of blood."

Becca reached out and patted his shoulder. "Poor Patches."

Impish lights sparked Rachel's eyes. "Patches, what kind of pirate can't stand blood?"

"Lots of 'em. It's a 'azard of the occupation."

"Patches, me and Becca love blood, don't we, Becca? If you let us come with you, we'll protect you."

"Me protect Patches," Becca offered, winding her arms around his neck.

He shook his head doubtfully. "Mighty dangerous, it is. We'll be raidin' ships full of lions with jaws powerful enough to eat up little girls." They listened wide-eyed as he described the perils of their raid. He'd learned from experience that they were especially taken with cargoes of exotic animals, but any reference to either robbers or big dogs frightened them.

Eventually Rachel spoke the words she said each time. "Patches, can my mommy come with us?"

He paused for only a moment. "Is she strong?"

"Oh, yes. Very strong."

"She's not afraid of blood, is she?"

Rachel shook her head. "She loves blood."

"Then we'll take her right along with us."

The girls giggled their pleasure and his heart swelled. In fantasy at least, he could give them the mother who was so frequently absent from their daily lives and so very ineffectual when she was present.

Then Patches the Pirate settled down to spin magic yarns of sea voyages, tales complete with valiant little girls sailing the seven seas and vanquishing all their enemies. They were tales of bravery and determination, tales where little girls were expected to stand their ground right along with the men and fight to the end.

Spellbound, the children clung to every word. As they listened, they heard only the rich bounty of their father's imagination. They were too young to understand that they were watching the man who was perhaps the best actor of his generation play the only role of his career in which he was alienated from absolutely no one.