by Cathie Linz
“Need some help, Mallory?”
“Help?” I need you. I need you to do all those things you’ve told me about.
“Help rolling your ball, I mean. You’ve got one more chance to catch up with me.”
He stood on the floor of the seating area, a step below the hardwood ramp where she stood. His eyes were almost level with hers. “Help?” It seemed the only word she could utter. With the exotic images he’d evoked scrolling before her blurred vision, she wasn’t quite sure if it was a question or a plea.
He stepped up behind her, passed his left hand around her waist and used his right to guide her right arm. No wonder it felt so heavy. She had a twelve-pound bowling ball stuck at the end of it.
That’s right. She was bowling.
“If you make a gutter ball,” he whispered against her ear, “you’ll lose and I’ll take you home and do all those things I told you about.”
“All—” Her tongue was so thick, she could barely squeeze out the syllable.
His tongue nuzzled her ear. “Uh-huh. All. And we haven’t even gotten to the part where I take those very sexy, very white panties off you. All you have to do is roll the ball down the gutter and you get exactly what you want from me.”
Deliberately, his hand drifted lower, across her abdomen, whispering across the juncture of her thighs, to hover over the place he’d been describing so erotically moments before. Hot wetness flooded through her and she melted back against him. Sure enough, his thick arousal pressed against her hips.
“Remember how I told you I’d do it? My fingers touching you, my hand holding your breast Remember?”
Automatically she took a step forward, but he followed with a step of his own.
“All you have to do is roll the ball down the gutter.”
Would that seductive voice never stop? What did he want of her, anyway?
“Just drop the ball down the gutter and I’ll take those panties off you for real. I’ll spend the night proving how good we can be together. My imagination’s been running wild since Sunday, you know. We didn’t get the chance to really explore our relationship. Just drop the ball in the gutter and we’ll both discover the possibilities. C’mon, Mallory, all you have to do is drop the ball.”
Her mind bowed to the command in his voice. Her fingers relaxed and the ball dropped.
Into the middle of the lane.
Once she’d released the ball, she stepped away from his arms. A measure of sanity returned.
“You cheated!” she said.
He took a deep breath, straightened slowly and walked stiff-legged back to the scoring area. It hadn’t been a total put-on, she realized. The front of his pants tented outward noticeably.
“I never cheat. I don’t have to.”
Her composure was seeping back. “What do you call putting your hands all over me while I’m trying to roll my ball?”
Humor glinted in his eyes. “Copping a feel?”
“And trying to persuade me to throw the game by rolling a gutter ball?”
“Good strategy?”
She suddenly realized she hadn’t bothered to see how her last ball had done. She swiveled back to face the pins.
It was still staggering down the lane, moving at a tortoise-slow pace. At that barely moving speed, the variations in the lane’s planking gave its trajectory a definite side-to-side wobble.
“What do you want to bet it never makes it to the pins? I think I just won.” Cliff eyed her up and down. “I can’t wait to collect my winnings.”
Steadily, the ball wavered on, slowing down with each revolution. “C’mon, ball. Knock something over. Even a few pins will do.” Her fists clenched, she pushed her hip forward to urge the ball on. At least it was staying in the middle of the lane, so if it made it to the pins it would almost certainly knock a few over.
“It’ll never make it that far. Trust me. You lost.”
“It’ll get there. I know it will.” The ball barely inched forward, finally approaching the perfect spot for a strike, the pocket between the foremost one-pin and the three-pin just behind and to one side. “Go, baby, go! Knock ’em all down!”
But the ball wheezed to a weary halt, right beside the one-pin, giving it a nudge but not knocking down anything. The pin teetered a bit, and Mallory held - her breath. Would it fall?
“The rule says if the ball doesn’t make it to the pins, it counts as a gutter ball,” Cliff intoned with satisfaction. “You lost.”
“No! Look!” With regal slowness, the teetering one-pin finally gave up and toppled to the side, completely missing all the other pins. “I knocked one down!”
She’d tied Cliff with a score of ninety-six.
But she should have won.
MALLORY’S SMILE from her Wednesday-evening bowling adventure lingered for nearly a week. It survived crises at the station, an irritating taping session for promo shots for the upcoming May sweeps campaign, and another dead-of-night phone call from her mother. It even outlasted another network delay in interviewing her for that plum prime-time slot The promised meeting was now nearly a month away. If, that was; they didn’t hire someone else without even talking to Mallory.
But her satisfied smile couldn’t survive a week of utter neglect from Cliff.
In her spare moments, Mallory went over every detail of that memorable evening—a process that usually resulted in an unplanned cold shower. No doubt about it, Cliff was going to be an unusually creative lover. She would never have dreamed that bowling—bowling!—could be so...inspiring. Even though her physical exhaustion insisted that the evening end in separate bedrooms, the memory of Cliff’s seductive whispers generated a sensation that in olden times would have been called “palpitations.”
Yes, despite their initial misfires, sex with Cliff would be the best she’d ever had, she was sure. A man as innately sensual and intense as he was couldn’t be anything except superb in bed—once she managed to get him there. You had to expect these little awkwardnesses when starting a new relationship, she told herself firmly. Nobody’s fault, really. That was just life. All she had to do was hang in there until her schedule finally meshed with Cliffs to give them some uninterrupted free time.
So why did she feel so...well, neglected?
She understood that he was working long, hard hours. For Pete’s sake, she did the same. So what was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she just enjoy what she had without trying to scrape up trouble where there wasn’t any—or shouldn’t be any?
Nevertheless, when her phone rang at nine o’clock one evening, she leaped for the receiver. “Hi!” she said, sure it had to be Cliff calling to tell her to come right over and “get naked.”
“Darling! I’m so sorry to call you this late.” Her mother’s breathless, perpetually-confused-about-life’s-details voice greeted her.
“Hello, Mother.” Why wasn’t it Cliff calling? “Don’t worry about the time. It’s only nine o’clock.”
“Nine? But I thought—it’s nearly midnight here, and I know you’re three hours different, but I just had to get this settled...”
“Never mind, Mother. Was there something wrong?”
“No. Well, yes, dear. In a way. You remember I told you I was coming out to Stanford this spring? Well, it’s settled—or rather, I changed my itinerary again. I’ll be out there next week. I’d really like to do that lunch we talked about.”
Lunch with her mother. Now there was a treat. “I don’t know, Mother. It’s pretty hard for me to get away during the week—especially when it’s so far away. It’ll take all day to shuttle up to the Bay Area, have lunch, then take a shuttle back.”
“Oh, my dear, didn’t I say? It would have to be on a Saturday. I’ll be working closely with Peter Jonassen, you know. Such a wonderful researcher. What he found on those digs in Ur...well! Anyway, I’ll be tied up until the weekend for sure. Let me see, that would be Saturday, the fourteenth. Is that all right?”
“Well...” Mallory had hoped to convince Cliff to g
o away with her on that particular weekend. But realistically, he’d probably spend the day working anyway. Why not make her mother happy and go to lunch with her? At the very least, it would be something to do that would keep her mind off Cliff. For a while.
“Sure, Mother. I’ll be there. Just tell me where you’re staying and I’ll rent a car and pick you up.” Mallory knew her mother had a phobia about driving in an unfamiliar town.
As she scribbled down the address her mother rattled off, Mallory’s eyebrow rose. “You’re staying with Dr. Jonassen? At his house?”
“Oh, yes, dear,” her mother practically chirped. “He’s such a nice man. So accommodating. When he found out that your father wouldn’t be coming with me, he insisted I stay with him. I’ll be much more comfortable there than in some motel, he said, and it’ll be easy for him to give me rides wherever I need to go. Isn’t that sweet of him?”
Sweet. Mallory rolled her eyes. “Sure, Mother. I’ll see you then on the fourteenth.” But as she hung up, her pen tapped the paper thoughtfully. Her father was in Europe again, and her mother was flying crosscountry to work with a male professor—and staying in the man’s house, to boot Surely her mother wouldn’t...couldn’t...
No. Her parents’ marriage, strange and unsatisfying as it seemed to her, worked well for them. She was just imagining things. This Dr. Jonassen was probably in his late seventies, married, and had seven grandkids.
Never mind that, why didn’t Cliff call?
AFTER TWO MORE DAYS of waiting fruitlessly, Mallory took advantage of a break at work and picked up her office phone. The door was tightly closed and she had perhaps ten minutes before someone would come knocking and demand her presence. With fingers that trembled unaccountably, she pressed the sequence of digits for Cliff’s work phone.
“Young here.”
God, it felt so good to hear his voice! “Hi, Cliff. It’s me, Mallory.” Please don’t let him say, “Mallory who?”
“Mallory! Damn, but it’s good to hear from you! I’m up to my eyeballs in work and this is the first good thing that’s happened to me all day.”
A sigh of relief trembled through her. “I’m sorry things are so tied up there. Is there anything wrong?”
She heard his chair creak and she imagined him leaning back and putting his feet on something—a wastebasket? A drawer from his desk? “Nah. Just too much work to do in too little time. Uh, say, Mallory...”
He was going to apologize for not calling her. She could hear it in his voice. But the rules they’d established at the beginning of their relationship were suddenly emblazoned in huge Day-Glo orange letters before her eyes. He’d hate apologizing for tending to his career ambitions.
Before he could do so, she interrupted. “I’m sorry I’ve been so busy lately,” she lied. “But it’s been really hectic here at work. I guess it’s a good thing you understand about that.”
“No problem,” he admitted. Mallory fancied she heard a note of relief in his voice. “I’ve been swamped, too.”
“Well, I just had a really terrific idea.”
“Terrific, huh? Does it include bowling?”
She laughed. “Not this time. It’s going to take me a while to recover from our last excursion.”
“Darn. Bowling with you is really, um, interesting. Did I tell you how much I enjoyed last Wednesday night?”
She hesitated. “Even though we didn’t, uh...”
“Even though,” he said solemnly. “I just wanted to be with you. Maybe teach you a few bowling tricks of the trade. So to speak.”
Some tricks! Hot blood warmed her cheeks, but she disciplined her voice to a more serious note. “Um, thanks. What I really called about is this. I’ve been working so hard lately, and I know you have too, that we’ve hardly had time to, well, be together. If you know what I mean.”
His soft chuckle rippled down her spine. “Yeah, I know. And I’m not real happy about that either, as a matter of fact.”
“Well, I happen to have been given a certificate for a free stay at the new five-star Maison Shores Resort. Some kind of promotional offer to the media. And I thought if we could get away from it all, even for a night, it might be, um, fun.”
“Fun.” He echoed the word in a way that sent another thrill down her back. “Better-than-bowling fun? Or did you have something else in mind?”
“Definitely better-than-bowling fun. The certificate is for one of their honeymoon cottages.” Mallory tried but couldn’t keep the hopeful expectation out of her voice.
“Hmm. Let me get my calendar.” A rustle of papers sounded in her ear. “How about this weekend?”
Mallory pulled her own organizer toward her. “I can’t this weekend. I’m scheduled to do a shoot up in Temecula. Somebody claims they found some Bigfoot footprints in one of the wineries there, and that always gets good airplay. Can we pick a weekday?”
“Well,” Cliff suggested, “how about next Thursday? I don’t have to be in the office until noon Friday, so we could sleep in.”
“No. Thursday’s out. I’m covering the nine o’clock news for the cable news channel that night. How about Tuesday?”
“No way. I’ve got dinner with the defense team on the Bartlett trial. What about next weekend?”
This was getting ridiculous. “I can’t,” Mallory said. “I’ve promised to go up to the Bay Area for lunch with my mother on Saturday.”
“Just Saturday?”
“Uh-huh.” A thought struck her. “You know, I’m only going up and back on Saturday. It’ll be late when I get back, but...how about next Sunday? We could go straight from there to work Monday morning.”
A tappity-tap in her ear told her that he was flicking his pen against something hard while thinking about her suggestion. “You know, that might work out fine. I really ought to work on Saturday, anyway. Sunday the fifteenth it is.”
Mallory wrote the date in pen in her calendar. This was one event she refused to alter. “I’ll go ahead and confirm the reservations,” she said, but then didn’t quite know what else to say. Can we get together tonight, too? Too pushy. I miss you in bed. Too needy. How about a simple, “1 miss you”?
That one took more courage than she had.
Silence thundered on the phone lines. Finally, Cliff said, “I guess I’d better get back to work.”
“Yeah. Me, too.” But she didn’t hang up. “Cliff?”
“Yes?”
“Is it always going to be like this between us? Having to schedule things weeks in advance just to see each other’s face?”
She’d blurted out the question before she had time to consider how he might react—or even how she would react. She had the convenient affair she’d wanted—didn’t she? No strings to mess up her work schedule. No recriminations. No ugly scenes.
But not much sex, either.
“I don’t know, Mallory. I guess we have other priorities right now than each other.”
“Of course. You’re right. I’m just...tired.”
“You’ll call me, though, if you ever need me, won’t you? For anything?”
Sure. And the next time you have a free moment—say, sometime next October—I’m sure you’ll do your best to help. The bitter upwelling took Mallory by surprise. But she stifled the comment before it could spill out. “No problem, Cliff. You too. If you need anything, I mean.”
“Yeah. Me too.” After the briefest of pauses, Cliff said a simple goodbye and hung up the phone.
But as Mallory slowly lowered the receiver, she stared bitterly at her jam-packed calendar. How could this affair possibly be considered a convenience when simply finding a mutually agreeable time and place to get together took a logistics specialist?
Still, next Sunday would clear things up between them. She and Cliff would have a wonderful time and they’d both end up feeling better. He hadn’t been disappointed in her, nor was he angry or upset. He was simply being himself—an overworked, driven man struggling to rise to the top of his chosen career. His ambition
sometimes meant that personal issues and relationships occasionally fell by the wayside in life—for a time, anyway.
But it was just temporary. It didn’t mean he didn’t care about her or their relationship. It merely meant he was exactly the man she thought he was.
He was, in fact, just like her.
6
A WEEK LATER Cliff smashed the ball against the back wall of the handball court and stepped back so Todd could take a swipe. Though his stroke was as hard as ever, Cliff’s heart and soul weren’t in the regular Friday afternoon game.
He needed a heart-to-heart with his best friend.
Unfortunately, Todd, perhaps scenting a rare victory, was concentrating more on returning Cliff’s killer serves than responding to Cliff’s tentative overtures.
“Didja see that? What a great save! I’m finally gonna win one from you, good buddy.”
“Sure you will.” Cliff sent the ball on another ricochet around the court. “Todd, I wanted to ask you something.”
“Pleading for mercy already?” Todd smashed the ball back, but it took an unfortunate bounce off the corner, deadening its flight. “Damn.”
Easily, Cliff captured the ball and held on to it. He’d never get Todd’s attention as long as they were playing. “You win,” he declared.
“What? What’s going on?”
“I’m calling it quits. You win. I lose.”
“But, but—”
“Look, Todd, I need to talk to you, okay?”
“Well, sure. But you didn’t need to concede the game just to talk.”
“Yes, I did,” Cliff said grimly. “This is serious.”
With a penetrating glance, Todd shut up. They gathered their equipment bags and let themselves out of the court, heading for the locker room.
“What’s up, Cliff?” Todd finally asked as they started to undress for the shower.
Now that he had his friend’s attention, Cliff hardly knew where to begin. There were some issues he needed to discuss, but client confidentiality was also a problem. He couldn’t give even his best buddy any details of the dilemma he faced.