Lakeside Cottage by Susan Wiggs Page A

himself…” Wasn’t that what was always said about loonies and mass murderers? No one ever said, “He was crazier than a shithouse rat, and you couldn’t trust him any farther than you could throw him.”
    No. Like most crazies, he was always described as “a hard worker” and “model citizen…” The scariest part was, when Muldoon had hatched his plan, there had been no one to stop him. Except JD, who had literally blundered into the situation.
    It was all behind him now, he thought, finishing up at the car wash. He didn’t exactly have his life back since he’d had to go underground, but at least he had some privacy. Some breathing room. Don’t blow it, he cautioned himself, thinking of Kate Livingston and her kid. They couldn’t know it, but today’s encounter was the longest conversation he’d had with anyone since moving into the Schroeders’ cabin.
    For those few minutes, at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, he’d felt easy and natural, almost like himself again. Just a guy staying at the lake, taking some time off work, chatting with a woman who had red hair, sexy legs and a friendly kid. A woman who made him miss the things he’d never had.
    Sam’s wife, Penny, a hopeless romantic, was constantly urging him to find someone who made him feel special, to settle down and start a family. Since Christmas, he’d learned that he didn’t want to feel special. He wanted to feel like himself.
    At the time of the incident at Walter Reed, he’d had a woman in his life. Tina, a congressional aide, said she adored him. That was all well and good until he stumbled into fame. Then she went on national television andsaid she adored him. She repeated it in magazine interviews and on talk radio, and that wasn’t all. She didn’t hesitate to reveal some of the most private aspects of their relationship, including the first time he’d told her he loved her, the first gift he’d given her, his fondness for Chesapeake blue crab and his preference in sexual positions. Somehow, she had parlayed her professed adoration into a stupid self-help book called How to Date a Real Man.
    He still remembered the feeling of lying helpless, propped in his hospital bed, hearing his girlfriend, dewy-eyed with sincerity, describe the intimate details of their life. The sense of betrayal was a dull reverberation that shuddered through him, awakening memories of other occasions, other betrayals.
    Why was he surprised? he wondered. This was what people did. They took what they wanted from him and then they left.
    After the shooting, even Janet had crawled out of the woodwork and had begun calling herself his mother again. She had wept at his hospital bedside. News photographs showed her, Madonna-like, praying for his recovery.
    The irony was, he no longer needed this woman to love him and pray for him. He had needed that when he was a kid in school, desperate for affection and approval. He’d needed that when he was a teenager, crying out for reassurance and control. She hadn’t been there for him then, and when he turned eighteen he had mortgaged his future to get his mother into rehab. Everything he’d saved for college and—yes, he did dream big—medical school, he’d spent on the rehab clinic. The miracle was, his investment paid off. After ninety days at Serenity House in Silver Spring, Maryland, Janet Harris hademerged clean and sober, sincerely grateful to the son who had saved her from the overdose that would have made him an orphan.
    She was a changed person. JD had seen that immediately and Janet was the first to admit it. “I need to make a fresh start,” she’d said. “I can’t be around anything—anyone—who was a part of my life when I was an addict.”
    It took JD a little time to figure out that she meant him as well as all the dealers and pimps she’d run with while JD was growing up.
    Her desertion that summer had been a gift, or so he told himself. Her sobriety had cost him his meager