oney stood in the fading afternoon light on the porch of the Bullpen and asked herself what she was doing there. It was New Year's Day, and she had spent her entire hospital visit avoiding the clown. She had even slipped out early so she wouldn't have any more private parking-lot conversations with him. Tomorrow he was leaving, and it would all be over.

As she turned the knob and walked inside, the tulle skirt of her princess gown rustled in the stillness. She knew she had to hurry. Although he had been occupied with the children when she had left, she didn't know how much longer he planned to stay, and she would be mortified if he caught her going through

his things.

She bit her lip as she stepped inside the musty room, ashamed of herself and yet unable to leave. His identities swirled in her head, separating, melding, and separating again: the menacing Dev, the warm, loving clown, and Eric himself, a dark enigma. Surely there would be something in his belongings that would tell her who he was. She had to put an end to this sick fascination. Otherwise, she would be left with another ghost.

His windbreaker was thrown over the orange vinyl couch, and through the doorway she could see a pair of jeans tossed on top of the old iron-framed double bed. Eric's clothes. An old flannel work shirt that belonged to Dev hung over the back of a chair. As she looked at these bits and pieces of his identity, she felt a despondency that was different from the ever-present pain of Dash's death.

Once he left tomorrow, she probably wouldn't ever see him again, not even when she went back to L.A. Eric lived in the insulated world of the superstars, so their paths weren't likely to cross by accident, and the decisions he made about her career would be handled through her agent. She had only now to solve the mystery, and to convince her heart that Eric and the clown were really one.

She smelled the particular odor of greasepaint even before she walked into the bathroom. Like many actors, he stored his makeup in a fishing-tackle box, which lay open on the lid of the toilet. A tube of clown white and small round tins of red and black rested on the back of the sink, along with a dark pencil and several sable brushes. She slumped against the door frame and stared blindly at the makeup. It was true then.

She gave a small, shaky laugh at her own silliness. Of course it was true. She knew they were the same person. Her mind did, anyway. But somehow her heart kept refusing to make the final connection. Again, she wished Eric would go and leave the clown behind. Everyone loved clowns. Caring about a clown wasn't a betrayal.

"Well, now, look who came callin'. Princess Popcorn 'erself."

She spun around.

He stood a few feet away, the painted smile on his face curling around a genuine one beneath. She began to stammer an explanation for her presence, but then realized he didn't seem to care. It was almost as if he had been expecting to find her waiting for him.

"Yer crown's crooked," he said with a grin.

"It's not a crown. It's a tiara." She was nervous, and when she reached up to take it off, her hair became tangled in the combs that secured it.

"'Old on there, Princess. Let me 'elp you."

He stepped forward and extracted the tiara from her hair. The touch of his hands was so gentle she had to fight against the soft sensations spreading through her. "You do that like you've had lots of practice."

"I'm good friends with a couple of little girls who've got long 'air, too."

His easy manner disappeared. He turned his back on her and walked out into the living area. She followed him.

"Tell me about them," she said.

He stood by the window with its shabby, water-spotted curtain and toyed with her tiara. His strong, thin fingers, tan from the sun, looked out of place against the delicate filigree of metal and rhinestones. They were indisputably Eric's hands—hands that knew her intimately—and she looked away from them.

"Their names are Rachel and Rebecca. Rachel's a lot like you, Princess. She's tough and stubborn, and she likes gettin' 'er own way. Becca is—Becca is sweet and soft. 'Er smile could stretch yer 'eart wide open."

He fell silent, but even from the other side of the room, she could feel the strength of his love for his daughters.

"How old are they?"

"They're five. Six in April."

"Are they ugly like you?"

He chuckled. "They're the prettiest little girls you ever saw. Rachel's 'air is dark like mine. Becca's is lighter. They're both tall for their age. Becca was born with Down syndrome, but that 'asn't stopped 'er one bit." He turned the tiara in his hands and ran his thumbnail over the small combs, making a soft, pinging sound. "Becca's got lots of determination—always 'ad, right from the beginning—and her sister Rachel makes 'er keep up." Again, his thumbnail scraped over the prongs. "At least she used to...."

He gazed at her, cleared his throat. "They would 'ave loved you in that outfit, Princess. Both of'em are suckers for royalty."

He looked as if he wished he hadn't said so much, but there was even more he hadn't told her. Why

was he separated from these daughters he obviously loved so much?

He walked over to her and handed back the tiara. "I'm leavin' tomorrow, you know."

"Yes, I know."

"I'm gonna miss you. Princesses like you don't grow on trees, now do they?"

She prepared herself for the joke that would come, but the mouth beneath his clown's painted grin was unsmiling. "You don't know 'ow beautiful you are, do you, Princess? You don't know 'ow just lookin' at you makes me old 'eart thump,"

She didn't want to hear this. Not from the clown. She was too vulnerable with him. But if not from the clown, then who? She tried to smile. "I'll bet you say that to all the princesses."

He reached out and touched her hair. "I never said it to a one. Only you."

A traitorous weakness spread through her. She looked up at him with pleading eyes. "Don't..."

"Yer the sweetest princess I ever met," he said huskily.

She no longer knew who she was talking to, and tiny wings of panic began to beat at her insides.

"I have to go now."

She turned her back on him and walked to the door. But when she got there, she stopped. Keeping her eyes straight ahead so that she didn't have to look at him, she whispered, "I think you're wonderful."

She groped for the door knob. Twisted it in her hand.

"Honey!"

It was Eric's voice, not the clown's. She spun around.

"I'm tired," he said, "of being a prisoner."

And then, as if it were happening in slow motion, he pulled off his wig and eye patch with a single movement of his arm.

His silky hair looked as black as the midnight sky next to his stark white face. His turquoise eyes were full of agony. Run away! her mind screamed. But she stood paralyzed as he withdrew the oversized white handkerchief that protruded from his pocket and lifted it to his face.

"Eric, no..." She took an involuntary step forward.

The lip rouge smudged into the white, the large eyebrow blurred. Helplessly she watched as he removed the layers of makeup.

It was a little murder.

Her eyes began to sting but she blinked the tears away. Bit by bit, the clown disappeared. She told herself she wouldn't give in to grief. She was already mourning the passing of one good man, and she would not mourn another. But the tears continued to form.

He was the instrument of his own destruction. When he was done, he dropped the soiled handkerchief and met her gaze full on.

Residues of his clown's makeup still clung to his skin and eyelashes, but there was nothing comical about his appearance. The face that had been revealed was one she knew— strong, handsome, unbearably tragic. She understood that he had made himself vulnerable to her in a way he had never done with anyone else, and it filled her with fear.

"Why are you doing this?" she whispered.

"I wanted you to see me."

There was a naked, hungry expression in his eyes that she had never witnessed before, and in that moment she knew he was going to tear her apart just as Dash had done. Even so, she couldn't turn away. All of her old assumptions about him no longer worked, and she realized she would never be free of him if she couldn't unlock his mysteries. "What are you running from?"

He gazed at her with haunted eyes. "From myself."

"I don't understand."

"I destroy people." He spoke so quietly she barely heard him. "People who don't deserve it. The innocents."

"I don't believe you. You're the gentlest man I've ever seen with children. It's as if you can read their minds when you talk to them."

"They need to be safe!" he exclaimed, the statement exploding into the quiet of the room.

"What do you mean?"

"Children are real and precious, and they need to be safe!" He began to pace, and she felt as if the room had grown too small to contain him. When he spoke, the words tumbled from his lips as if they had been dammed up for too long.

"I wish there was a place where I could keep them all safe from harm. Where there weren't any car accidents or diseases or anyone who could hurt them. A place where there were no sharp corners or even any Band-Aids, because no one would ever need them. I wish I could make a place where all the kids that nobody wanted would come to stay."

He stopped walking and gazed into space. "And I could spend my time in this clown's costume making them laugh. And the sun would shine, and the grass would be green." His voice faded to a whisper. "The only rain that fell would be gentle, with never any thunder. And my arms would be as wide as the world so that I could stretch them out and protect everything that was too small and too tender to protect itself."

Tears glistened in her eyes. "Eric..."

"And my daughters would be there. Right in the middle where nothing bad could ever get to them."

It was his children. He had stripped himself bare, and she understood that whatever haunted him, whatever was driving him to the edge, was connected with his children.

"Why aren't you with them?"

"Their mother won't let me see them."

"But how could she be so cruel?"

"Because she believes—" His mouth twisted. "She won't let me near them because she believes I molested them."

The word, coming from his lips, wouldn't register in her mind. "Molested them?"

He spoke through clenched teeth, every syllable tortured. "She believes that I sexually abused my daughters." His face was ageless and emptied of all hope.

Stunned, she watched as he twisted away from her and fled from the Bullpen. His feet pounded on the wooden steps, and then all was quiet.

She stared at the empty doorway. Seconds ticked by as she tried to take in what he had said. Her brain dredged up old newspaper stories about scoutmasters, teachers, priests— men who ostensibly loved children but were found to have been molesting them. But her heart dismissed the possibility that he could be one of these men. There were many things in life of which she was uncertain, but nothing on earth could ever convince her that Eric Dillon, in any of his guises, could willfully hurt a child.

She ran outside after him. It was dusk and the sky was streaked with garish ribbons of scarlet, lavender and gold. He had disappeared. She ran through the trees toward the lake, but both the eroding shoreline and the crumbling pier were vacant. For a moment she didn't know what to do, and then a stillness inside her told her where he must be.

As soon as she cleared the trees, she saw him climbing Black Thunder to the top of the lift hill. Despite his hostility toward the coaster, he had instinctively chosen the same destination that so relentlessly drew her. Human beings had always gone to the mountaintop whenever they needed to find the eternal.

His purple shirt and polka-dot trousers blended in with the blazing Technicolor sunset behind him as he made his purposeful climb to the top. She understood the necessity of his journey because she had made it so many times herself, but something inside her couldn't let him make it alone.

Drawing the billowy tulle of her skirt through her legs from the back, she tucked as much of the excess material into the gown's sash as she could manage and began her ascent. She had made the climb a hundred times before, but never with the encumbrance of five yards of white tulle, and she moved awkwardly. Halfway up she tripped. She caught herself just before she lost her footing and swore softly.

The sound was enough to draw Eric's attention and he called down to her in alarm. "What do you think you're doing? Get down. You're going to fall."

Ignoring him, she stuffed the gown back into her sash with one hand while she held on with the other.

He was over the rail in a second, on his way down the side of the frame to meet her. "Don't come any farther. You're going to trip."

"I've got the instincts of a cat," she said, as she resumed her climb.

"Honey!"

"Quit distracting me."

"Jesus..."

His shiny black pirate's boots and then the legs of his purple trousers came into view. "I'm under you," she warned. "Don't come any farther."

"Hold still. I'm going to move alongside you and help you back down."

"Forget it," she said breathlessly. "We're a lot nearer the top than the bottom, and I don't have the energy to climb back down right now."

He must have decided it was more dangerous to argue with her than to let her do as she wanted because he stayed at her side until they reached the top. Then he slid under the rail and, grasping her arms, drew her up beside him.

They collapsed next to each other, sitting on the track, their legs hanging through the spaces between the ties. "You're crazy," he said.

"I know." Her skirt billowed over both of them and down through the open framework. Pieces of tulle snagged on rough surfaces in the wood, and the moons and stars in her lap caught fire from the sunset.

They were silhouetted against the color-streaked sky with the world in miniature below them—treetops like small green sponges, the lake a mirrored sliver, the tiny finger of a faraway church steeple. From their perch in the sky, they were forced to remember that another more dangerous world existed beyond the safe parameters of this dead amusement park.

She gazed down the legendary first drop. "Do you know what happens when you hit the bottom?"

"What?"

"You go back up again," she said softly. "Always back up. With a roller coaster, hell is only temporary."!!!Please, God, let it be true.

"When you've been accused of molesting the two people you love the most, hell is a way of life," he said harshly. "Fathers do it all the time, you know. Inhuman, perverted bastards, desecrating the most sacred responsibility a man can have."

"But not you," she said. She spoke the words with certainty, not questioning.

"No, not me. I'd kill myself before I'd hurt my daughters. I don't mean that as a figure of speech, Honey. I mean it literally. I love them more than my own life."

"Why did their mother accuse you?"

"I don't know!" he exclaimed. "I don't know why. I only know that she believes it's true. She truly believes I've done these—these unspeakable things to them." He ran his fingers through his hair, his speech growing agitated. The words had been held back for too long, and now they came in torrents.

As they sat in the fading light of a new year at the top of the lift hill, he told her of the death of his stepbrother Jason and how his guilt had haunted him for years. He spoke of his marriage to Lilly and the birth of his twin daughters, of the joy the girls had brought him and the horror of their mother's accusations.

As she listened to him, she didn't once doubt that he was telling the truth. She remembered the games he had played with her: the harsh words, the air of menace he could assume at will. All of it was illusion. Only the clown's gentleness had spoken the truth about who he was.

She heard what he wasn't saying, too, and glimpsed the awful sense of responsibility he seemed to bear for all of the evil in the world. Finally, she understood his curse. He thought he should fix everything.

She couldn't address that pain, but she could address the other. "You may be hurting your daughters even more by not fighting for them," she said gently. "Losing a parent when you're so young is a terrible thing. It changes you forever. My mother's death shaped everything I've ever done, even the way I fell in love. Because of her death, I've spent my whole life trying to make a family for myself. Dash had to be my father before he could be my husband. You don't want that for them, Eric. You don't want them to

spend their adult lives looking for you in every man they meet."

His face was haunted, his despair so absolute that she yearned to give him physical comfort, but she was afraid to reach out to him. Afraid he would misunderstand. She had allowed him to make love to her, but now a simple touch on the knee was too intimate.

"I can't do anything," he said. "Lilly's going to put them into the underground if I make a move to get them back. Then they won't have anyone."

Honey felt sick. She couldn't imagine any woman being so vindictive. Why did Lilly hate Eric so much? For the first time, she truly grasped the complexity of his dilemma.

"I'm sorry," she said.

He stood up, rejecting her pity. "Let's climb back down. Stay with me."

The descent was easier than the ascent. Even so, Eric stayed beside her, his hand catching her arm whenever he thought she looked unsteady. By the time they reached the ground, the sunset had faded and it was nearly dark.

They stood quietly for a moment. His face was in deep shadow. Beneath all the masks he had thrown up, all his identities, she felt the goodness that ran like a core of gold straight through him. "I can't imagine what your daughters must be feeling to have lost you."

To her surprise he lifted his arm and buried his hand in her hair. At first he said nothing, simply wove a strand through his fingers. When he spoke, his voice was husky and vulnerable. "And what are you going to feel when you lose me?"

The flutters of panic returned. He mustn't touch her. Not like this. She wasn't his to touch. "I don't know what you mean."

"Yes, you do. Tomorrow when I leave. Will it make any difference to you?"

"Of course it'll make a difference." She pulled away from him and walked toward a pile of scrap lumber.

"One fewer pair of hands to work on your coaster?"

"That's not what I mean."

"Then what?"

"I'll—" She turned back to him. "Don't ask me questions like that."

"Come back with me, Honey," he said quietly. "Leave the coaster and come back to L.A. with me.

Now. Not three months from now when it's done."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"I have to finish building it."

All his softness disappeared, and his mouth set in a grim, harsh line. "How could I forget? You have to build your great monument to Dash Coogan. Why did I think I could compete with that?"

"It's not a monument! I'm trying to—"

"To find God? I think you've got God and Dash tangled up in your mind. It's Dash you want to find on that coaster."

"I love him!" she cried.

"He's dead and no roller coaster in the world has the power to bring him back."

"He's not dead to me! Not ever to me. I'll always love him."

The light was too dim to see clearly, and so she wasn't certain that she saw him wince. But the sorrow in his voice was unmistakable. "Your body wasn't as faithful as your heart, was it?"

"That was just sex!" she cried, as much to herself as to him. "Dash wouldn't have cared about that. He understood about sex."

His voice was low and flat. "What did he understand?"

"That sometimes it's—Sometimes it's meaningless."

"I see."

"We've both been lonely, and—Don't try to make me feel guilty. We didn't even kiss, Eric."

"No, we didn't, did we? You did other things with that beautiful mouth of yours, but you wouldn't kiss me."

He took a step toward her, and she knew he was about to change that. She told herself to move away, but her feet remained rooted to the ground. At that moment she would have given all she had for him to slip one of his masks back on—any of them. She finally realized how much his protective identities had also protected her. Stripped bare as he was now, no barriers separated them. Not skin or bone. She

could feel the pain of his yearning as if it were coming from her own heart.

"Do you know that I've been dreaming about your mouth?" His eyes were dark, his voice husky.

"I'm cold," she said. "I'm going back to the trailer."

"How it would feel. What it would taste like."

He cupped her arms in his palms. His breath was soft. She couldn't move as he lifted his hand and gently brushed his thumb over her lips.

They parted automatically. It had been so long since she had been kissed, and he was so very beautiful, right to the center of his soul. His thumb outlined her bottom lip, touched the bow at the top. He dipped his head, and his thick, dark lashes fanned his cheekbones.

She felt the warmth of his mouth draw nearer and was pierced with a longing so fierce that she knew if she gave into it, she would have committed such an unforgivable act of betrayal that she could never again live with herself.

Just as his lips were about to settle over hers, she jerked away. "No! No, I won't do this! I won't betray my husband."

She had never seen anything as sad as the expression on his face. His eyes shimmered with pain that pierced her to the very core, and he seemed to collapse into himself.

"I'll bet you would have kissed the clown," he whispered.

She ran from him then, fleeing his presence and the sweet, sad seduction she had almost not been strong enough to resist.

Eric stood next to the coaster long after she had disappeared into the trees. His eyes were dry and scratchy. He told himself he had been living with pain for so long that a little more wouldn't make any difference, but logic couldn't ease the anguish. As the night wind whipped the trees, he found himself remembering the child she had been, the way she had followed him with those puppy-dog eyes, begging him to pay attention to her. Even then, something about her had drawn him in.

Now she was a woman, and he loved her. Despite her hostility and her rejection, he knew that she understood him in a way no one else ever had. Although she had never had a child herself, she understood the depth of his love for his children. And her fierce, disciplined drive to finish her coaster—no matter how much it might alarm him— mirrored his own obsession with his work. She even seemed to know why he had to live in other people's skins. Despite the differences in their backgrounds, despite the lies and deceptions, she felt like the other half of himself.

And she didn't want him. Instead she wanted a dead man.

A fresh attack of pain began to rush at him, howling and yipping, ready to sink its teeth in. Before that could happen, his mouth gave a savage twist, and he flung up his shield of cynicism.

He was the Prince of Studs. Women came after him, not the other way around. All he had to do was snap his fingers and they lined up for his pleasure. He could have them any way he wanted: blond, brunette, old, young, big tits, long legs, step right up and let the big star take his pick. The women of the world were his to command.

Upside down?!!!Certainly, sir.

Two for one?!!!We aim to please.

But this woman didn't understand the rules.

She didn't understand the most basic fucking rule of the universe! She didn't understand that big movie stars!!!were entitled to any woman they wanted!

This woman didn't care that he might be the best goddamn actor of his generation. He could be a bricklayer for all the difference it would make to her. She didn't care that he was a millionaire twenty times over, or that she was the only person in the world he had ever spilled his guts to. And she didn't even read goddamn People magazine, so how could she know that he was Sexiest goddamn Man Alive?

Eric turned away and headed back to the Bullpen to pack his things. As he left Black Thunder behind, he knew that he had done a lot of stupid things in his life, but the stupidest thing he'd ever done was to fall in love with the grieving Widow Coogan.