Reckless Passion by Stephanie James

dozing in that sleeper!"
    "We had...things in common, I suppose you'd say," Yale admitted.
    "How much in common?" Dara glanced at him suspiciously. "Don't tell me you try to take the law into your own hands, too? Not a proper, upstanding accountant like you!" She didn't bother to keep the scathing tone out of her last words.
    "No," he said, a strange smile coming easily to the hard mouth. A reminiscent sort of smile. "But I know what it's like to avoid the police. Remember, there are a lot of illegal stills up in those blue hills where I come from."
    "Illegal stills?" Dara drew in her breath as realization dawned. "Yale! You didn't! You weren't a...a..." She broke off suddenly enthralled. "How did you work your way through college?" she demanded.
    He flicked her a derisive glance and then brought bis attention back to his driving. "I did what paid the most," he told her laconically.
    "You ran moonshine? Illegal whiskey?" She was fascinated.
    He nodded once, not looking at her.
    "They still do that back there?" she pressed, intrigued.
    "The business is bigger than ever. The Feds will never kill it. You folks on the Coast have your million-dollar drug busts, and back in the hill country we had our million-dollar illegal liquor busts."
    "It seems different somehow, though. I mean, I've never really thought of moonshine whiskey as being in the same category as imported drugs like heroin."
    "You don't think white lightning's taken its share of victims?" he asked coolly. "It's a hell of a lot more dangerous than a lot of drugs!"
    "Well, I suppose it's as dangerous as any alcohol..." she agreed slowly.
    "Alcoholism isn't the only problem associated with it," Yale snapped. "Anyone buying it runs the same risk of getting contaminated stuff as someone scoring any other drug on the street. Some of it really will cause blindness. Not to mention the possibility of lead poisoning. There are a lot of 'shine addicts back in the states around the Appalachian Mountains."
    "One thinks of it as a kind of folk tradition or something," Dara said, lifting a hand in a small, helpless gesture.
    "Oh, it's a tradition, all right," Yale conceded bitterly. "Passed down from father to son. The kids grow up in families where being an adult male means being able to drink the stuff. They can't wait. And it goes on from one generation to the next"
    "And the women?" she asked softly, curiously.
    "They have to live with the men who are addicted. Most of the violence the stuff produces comes out in the home. You can use your imagination."
    Dara sat silently for a moment, thinking of the memories she had stirred awake in Yale's mind by her rashness the previous evening.
    "Did you know how bad the stuff was when you were running it?'' she asked tentatively.
    He just threw her a pitying glance. "Do I look like the naive type?"
    " Er , no."
    "It was the only game in town when I was growing up. About the only viable industry in the area. It sure as hell was where the money was at, and I knew from the start I was going to need two things to get out of those mountains: money and an education. I needed the first to buy the second."
    "And you got it." It was a statement of fact.
    "I got part of the education and then I got married to a high-school acquaintance who saw me as her ticket out of the mountains." His mouth twisted with astonishing bitterness. Dara felt a cold chill down her spine.
    "Then what happened?" She knew she ought to stop asking questions, but something drove her on, demanding to know the whole story.
    "Then I needed more money and a more legal way to get it." Yale shrugged. "I got a job driving trucks for a couple of years. It worked. We got out of the mountains."
    "And...?"
    He slanted a glance across the seat, taking in Dara's intent expression. "And she found someone who could take her farther than just out of the mountains."
    "She left you?"
    "Yes. Best for all concerned, as it turned out," he went on with a philosophical inflection. "She married