The Brain and The Beauty

It took an amazingly long time for Jeremy to realize he’d been conned. She’d been leading him to this conclusion all along. He had to respect the ingenuity. It was a sign of gifted intelligence to look at problems with originality and resourcefulness. Perhaps her son wasn’t as different from her as she thought.

Because she was beginning to intrigue him, he filled his voice with firmness and finality. “I can’t help you.”

To his amazement, she looked shocked at his answer, as if she’d really expected him to change his mind. “Can’t or won’t?” she challenged.

“Can’t and won’t. I can suggest someone, a counselor,” he said when she finally took a breath. “Maybe the two of you can see him together.”

“I don’t want a counselor,” she insisted. “I want you.”

Even knowing what she meant, her words lanced through him. “You don’t understand what you’re asking. Didn’t you hear that I eat small children for breakfast?”

“That’s not what some of your former students said.”

He couldn’t believe it. She’d shocked him again. “You contacted my students? What right do you have to…?”

“The rights of a mother. Do you think I would come all this way if I hadn’t checked you out? My son’s future is at stake!”

“Look, let’s get this thing settled once and for all. I am not going to teach your son or any other child.”

Abby frowned and Jeremy wondered if he had finally gotten through to her.

“I didn’t ask you to,” she responded. “I want you to teach me.”

Chapter Three

“What are you talking about?” he asked. “You’re not a genius.”

Abby felt the heat rise on her face as he bluntly stated the obvious. “That’s the point.”

“What’s the point?” he asked, obviously confused. “I thought you wanted me to enroll Robbie in my program?”

“That was never my intent. I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but I’m not sure you’d be a good influence on him.” The last thing Robbie needed in his life right now was a twisted and scarred recluse as a role model.

He appeared stunned. “Then what do you want?”

“As I said, I want you to work with me.” Although it galled her to confess it to this man, she knew he would accept nothing less than the truth. “I’m not smart enough to do this myself.”

“To do what?”

“Decide Robbie’s future. He can’t attend a normal elementary school and the higher level schools won’t take him. Obviously you’ll agree that home schooling is not an option. How can I know what’s best for my son? I don’t have a Ph.D. or any of those other letters you have tacked on behind your name. I never even went to college, for heaven’s sake.”

“What has college got to do with anything?”

He sounded truly perplexed and she couldn’t help wondering if it was a new experience for him. Join the club. “I didn’t pay much attention in school,” she admitted. “I was always too busy going to parties or hanging around with my friends to bother with anything as boring as studying.”

“Do you think that if you’d paid attention in algebra, you’d have been prepared for someone with Robbie’s intellect?”

She shrugged. “Maybe not, but I’d be a step closer. I was so sure that there’d be plenty of time to get serious.” She took a deep breath and continued, determined to get it all out. “I met Robbie’s father when I was only sixteen. He was older than me, already finishing college with top grades and expectations for a fast track to success. When he said we looked good together, I thought he meant we belonged together. We were married when I was just eighteen.”

Jeremy listened to her story without expression. She wasn’t even sure if he was actually listening, or if his mind had wandered off the way Robbie’s sometimes did, until he responded. “Didn’t your parents have anything to say about that?”

“We eloped. My parents were killed in an accident when I was young. I lived with my grandmother. Ted convinced me he had everything figured out and I believed him. Turns out, I was wrong.”

“You were young. It’s called immaturity. Most kids are like that.”

The fact that he was defending her made her feel worse. “Were you?”

He shook his head. “Hardly.”

Of course not. She tried to picture him skipping classes to go to the beach or spending his time studying the fine art of flirting, but she failed.

His eyes focused on a spot beyond her head and she could tell he was looking into the past. It didn’t appear to be a comfortable place. “I’d have given just about anything to be able to have a normal, carefree childhood.” As soon as the words left his mouth, he appeared shocked to have said them.

She got a mental picture of a young Jeremy, with his awkward clothes and remarkable brain. Had no one seen beyond those things, to the person inside? Was that how Robbie felt? It made her even more determined to figure out what he needed to be happy.

“At first everything was fine,” she said. “Ted went to graduate school while I worked. He was smart and ambitious.” And he’d made it clear that she shouldn’t bother trying to understand the complicated life he’d mapped out for them. “Then Robbie came along and everything changed. We could see right from the beginning that he was different. At first Ted treated him like a trophy to be trotted out and placed on the mantel for friends to see, but then it started to become clear that Robbie’s abilities far outmeasured Ted’s and he began to see his own son as a threat. Ted just didn’t seem to know what to do with him.” It had been a shock to discover there wasn’t much substance behind her husband’s confident exterior.

“But you did?”

She laughed at the notion. “Sometimes I felt as helpless as if I was the infant, only there was no one to give me the answers or take care of me. I’ve been struggling to stay one step ahead of him ever since.” Without meaning to, she stepped closer. “He’s my own son and I can’t even understand what he’s saying half the time. I’ve got two months to figure out what’s best for his future and I’ll do whatever it takes to help him.”

“You must be desperate if you’ve decided to center your plan around me.”

“I am.” She didn’t think she’d realized just how much was at risk before she’d met him.

Abby had expected him to be different. But dealing with Robbie had made her believe that she could deal with different. She’d known she would be asking a lot of a man whose solitary life wasn’t exactly a secret, but for her son’s sake she’d been willing to try.

But this awareness of him had caught her completely by surprise. She told herself it was a result of her attempts to find out about the man behind the brain, but there seemed to be something more basic, more dangerous, about her reaction to him. And she was very much afraid it had nothing to do with his mind.

Abby might not know much, but she knew anything deeper between them was out of the question. She had enough problems without allowing another superhuman into a life that was already too far from ordinary. Besides, if her husband had thought she was stupid, she could only imagine what Jeremy would think of her.

He’d turned to tend the mysterious concoction he was brewing, remaining silent for a long stretch of time before responding. “For the sake of argument, let’s just say that your frivolous teen years did contribute, marginally, to the difficulties you’re facing now. Exactly what are you hoping to learn? Calculus for beginners? Quantum physics in twelve easy lessons?”

“I want to find out about you.”

His head bolted up. “You want to study me? What kind of aberration do you think I am?”

She stepped closer, only the counter separating them. “I think you’re a man who looks at a rainbow and sees sunlight reflecting through little drops of water.”

“Refracting,” he corrected.

Abby shrugged, conceding the point, believing her own had just been made. “I see a spray of reds and blues and greens floating across the sky. I wonder what I’d do with a pot full of gold.”

He looked bewildered by her response.

“I bet you fall asleep by adding columns of numbers in your head,” she challenged.

“If I’m lucky.”

Abby wondered what kinds of problems and anguish would keep a man like him awake. If they were anything like the nightmares that sometimes woke Robbie, they must be doozies. “You have experienced the kind of things Robbie is going through. You understand things I will never comprehend.”

Jeremy stared deep into the murky brown liquid in front of him, no longer seeing the mixture’s progress. Dear heaven, it was worse than he’d imagined. She did see him as a freak. Maybe they should put him in a cage and let children throw candy at his head.

Worse yet, when he looked across his kitchen at the stunningly beautiful woman observing him, his thoughts weren’t the least bit cerebral. Desire was strong and real, and completely unacceptable.

“So you’d like to make me into your own personal guinea pig?”

“Of course not. I just want to ask you some questions, see what makes you happy, what you would have done differently if you’d had the chance.”

She wanted to know what he would have done differently? He thought of the series of accidents and mistakes that had shaped his life. But the past didn’t matter. Not even the most brilliant minds in the world had figured out a way to turn back time.

However, the future still waited for Robbie and others like him. Jeremy had once thought he could make a difference. He’d been wrong.

She seemed to mistake his brooding silence as a sign to continue. “If I’m going to enroll Robbie in the fall, I haven’t got much time, so it wouldn’t require much of a commitment from you,” she explained, clearly having thought this out completely. “You wouldn’t have to do anything, really, just be yourself and tell me what it’s like.”

“Is that all?” he asked dryly.

“Well, I suppose it might be a bit of an inconvenience from time to time. I figured, with all I have to learn, that I might have to be here quite a bit.”

A bit of an inconvenience? He supposed that was one way of looking at things. “What possible reason would I have to agree to such an undertaking?”

“I understand that I’m asking a lot of you, but I’m not asking you to do it for free.”

“You’re planning to offer me a stipend for invading my life and dissecting it into little pieces?”

“Well, actually, I wouldn’t be able to pay you, but I would be willing to trade services. Your talents in exchange for mine.”

Because she was beginning to intrigue him, he made his expression purposely leering. “That’s an interesting proposition. What exactly are your special talents?”

She gave no indication that she noticed his double meaning. “I’ll clean your house for you.”

“You’ll do what?” he blurted. Her offer was the last thing he expected—or maybe the second to the last. The thought of her cleaning was almost too incredulous to be true. With those delicate features, dainty hands? “Sure you will.”

“That’s what I do. After my husband left, I discovered I didn’t have the schooling to get a job good enough to support us. I was a waitress for a while. You’d be surprised by the kind of money you can make just serving people food.”

Looking at her, Jeremy wasn’t surprised at all. He imagined people would throw money at her to keep her coming back.

“But waitressing caused me to be away from Robbie too long and too late. So now I clean people’s houses. It’s the perfect solution. I can make my own hours and be around for Robbie. I can work anywhere, there’s always somebody who needs help, and I’m good at what I do.”

He could see that she’d given it a lot of thought, but he couldn’t believe she’d chosen a path others would consider subservient. “What about your husband? Didn’t he provide support?”

“I didn’t want the strings he attached. He wanted me to send Robbie to boarding school, said he had the right to make the decisions if he was going to pay. I wasn’t going to send my son away.” She seemed to dare him to disagree. “We’re doing fine on our own. I started out with only a few houses, but the business grew so much that I hired a whole fleet of other women to work with me. One of them is taking care of the company until I get back. If I have to leave Pittsburgh permanently because of Robbie, she wants to buy it from me.”

She was serious. She was offering to do menial labor in exchange for his opening his life to her prying eyes. She had to know that if he had required domestic assistance he would have arranged it, yet she’d made the suggestion anyway, obstinately going after what she wanted in a way he could almost admire. He pictured the way she had examined his house so curiously before and realized her interest might have been more professional than personal, but that didn’t change the facts. Like the rest of the world, she saw him as nothing more than a mutant specimen.

“Why me?” he couldn’t help but ask. “There are a lot of smart people in the world. Most of them are better-adjusted than I am.”

“You worked with kids. I figure you saw what worked, what made them fulfilled and happy.”

“Not always,” he answered, his voice grim as he thought about the past.

“But sometimes? Even if you’ve only discovered what doesn’t work, you’ve already got a head start on everything I have to learn. You’ve been there. I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like.”

“You might not want to know.”

“I have to find out. Robbie’s whole life depends on it. What if I make a mistake? What if I’m responsible for ruining his life because I made the wrong decision?”

The memory of one young face in particular swam across the swirl inside the pot. Leonard had been young when he’d first come to Jeremy’s attention. Not much older than Abby’s son was now. “You’d have to learn to live with it,” he answered finally.

“I’m not willing to take that chance. He’s my son. I have to do the right thing. He deserves that much at least.”

Jeremy felt himself weakening. What she was asking was unthinkable, but if he agreed to be the subject in her little pet project he might actually be able to make a difference in one life. The potential of helping those whose intelligence made them different from others was what had prompted him to open Still Waters in the first place. He’d naively hoped to give those special children a place where they could feel normal, where they could explore their minds without drawing attention to their differences.

Eventually, he knew, her amazingly intelligent child would grow up to be nothing more than an extremely intelligent adult. But whether he survived the journey and thrived was still in question. She was giving Jeremy a chance to help without the risks that he would harm instead.

He reminded himself that was not his problem. But the part of him that had once thought that wisdom brought responsibility made him irate.

“Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve been with a woman?” he asked abruptly.

She swallowed audibly. “No.”

“It has been a very long time. If you’d like I could tell you down to the hours and minutes.” He couldn’t help but wonder if he was trying to talk her out of the bizarre scheme, or himself.

“I don’t think that’s the issue here.”

“Which just goes to show what you know.”

Trying to maintain his eroding common sense, he checked the mixture and found it ready. He strode past her, catching a hint of her scent, something clean and clear. It caused him to slam open the cabinet door where he’d stored a collection of odd-shaped boxes, pots and containers for this project. He lined the selection of items up along the counter, catching her bewildered expression from the corner of his eye.

“Do you understand what you’re asking?” he asked. “You want to invade my life, pick it apart and use it to guide your son to a life completely different from my own?”

“Yes,” she agreed, as if satisfied that he’d grasped the concept. He saw regret and perhaps pain in her gaze, but that didn’t stop her. “I’m not giving up, no matter what you say. This is too important.”

“And what if—when—I decline your offer?”

“Not even then. I’m planning to stick around whether you agree or not. I figure I can find out enough about you by asking around. I don’t know what else to do.”

Jeremy took a deep breath and searched for logic. Whatever she lacked in higher intelligence—if anything—she certainly made up for in stubbornness. Of course, determination alone wouldn’t be enough to sway him. He’d been known to go up against the entire academic community for something he believed in. Something like his students, for instance.

He believed her when she said she’d stick around until she got what she wanted. She’d hound him whether he agreed or not, making a nuisance of herself, reminding him of everything he could never have, and digging up a past that should remain buried.

Or he could chase her away the easiest way possible, by giving her what she wanted—a glimpse into the life of a brilliant misfit. She wouldn’t last long.

If she truly wanted to help her son, she’d take what she saw and dedicate herself to making sure he turned out differently. In a roundabout way, maybe he could help the boy.

Or, at the very least, he wouldn’t be able to hurt him.

“If I agree…”

She actually gave a little jump of joy into the air, causing Jeremy to regret his decision even before he’d finished making it. Who actually leaped for joy? he wondered. There’d be no more leaping if he had anything to say about it.

He narrowed his eyes at her. “If I agree, there will be certain guidelines that have to be adhered to.”

“Absolutely. Whatever you say. You won’t be sorry.”

He was already sorry. She was a beautiful woman under the worst of circumstances, but happiness actually made her glow. He was going to have to make sure that this association didn’t last long. “The first, and most important rule, is that there are no children allowed. I will not work with your son, teach him, talk to him, or see him. Is that understood?”

“Hmm. I think I got the message.”

He refused to be amused. “I hope so.”

She managed to control her smile, a fact for which Jeremy was absurdly grateful. “Secondly, you may ask any questions you wish, but I may choose not to answer. Certain areas are off-limits. If you push, I will refuse any association in the future.”

She nodded eagerly. “That sounds fair.”

For some reason, he didn’t believe her. But she’d find out he was serious soon enough if she tried to cross that line. Whatever problems Abby and her son faced, they weren’t nearly as important to him as protecting his past mistakes from prying eyes.

Jeremy returned to the pan and observed the mixture inside. “It is time for me to continue with the next step of my project. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave now.”

“Sure. No problem.” Now that she’d gotten what she’d come for, she seemed equally eager to depart. She’d headed toward the door, steps away from Jeremy’s returned peace of mind, when she stopped suddenly. “Can I ask you one more thing before I leave?”

Jeremy sighed. “Why not?”

Apparently missing his sarcasm, she pointed to the pan he’d been tending all morning. “What are you making there, anyway?”

He’d been so sure she wouldn’t ask. The fact that he’d miscalculated once again didn’t bode well for their limited future together. “I am making soap,” he admitted finally.

“Really?” She scanned the necessary chemicals, tools and molds, bewilderment and apprehension once again returning to her face. “I know you’re a supergenius and all, but you know you can buy that stuff at the store, right?”

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