Forcing his attention to the drawings, he explained in a soft voice what each one represented, and the new twist in the story line, and the way the park would be an important part of the cartoons. Andi’s eyes glittered with appreciation as she turned the pages, and she laughed under her breath at each situation. When she had finally seen them all, she handed them back to Justin. “Brilliant,” she said. “It’s everything I wanted.”
“Even though you didn’t think of it?” he asked, cocking a heavy brow.
“Justin, when are you going to learn?” she asked, her eyes luminous with conviction. “I’m not out to be your enemy.
It’s just that I don’t like settling for things. Everything can always be improved on.”
“But you don’t have to be the one who improves everything, Andi,” he said without rancor. “The world won’t deflate if Andi Sherman rests. And it won’t fall to pieces if you miss something. You’ve held it all together beautifully, but you’ve got to trust me to know what’s best about my part in all this.”
Andi leaned her head back against the cushions and looked off at nothing across the room, a sigh punctuating her thoughts. “I know. It’s just that it all means so much to me. It’s so important.”
“I know.” His voice was soft with gentle understanding. “It means a lot to me too.”
When quiet settled between them, tension mounting to the point that there was no place for the conversation to move except into the realm of the personal, Justin decided it was time to go.
Standing up, he took the drawings and gave a careless, feline stretch of his arms, starting toward the door. “Guess I’d better go get some sleep so I’ll be worth something tomorrow,” he said.
Was it disappointment he saw flash in the emerald depths of her eyes or only fatigue, he wondered for an instant?
“Me too,” she said, picking her Bible back up. “Thanks for coming by.” Her voice was so soft, so cautious, that he wasn’t sure how to read it. Pushing the ambiguity in her tone and her expression out of his mind, he strode back through the darkness to the elevator and rode down to his floor.
B.J. and Nathan had gone home, but Gene still lay like a cadaver across the table in Justin’s office. He shouldn’t have worked them so hard today, he thought with a smile as he sat down behind his desk. Only people like himself and Andi, who did it because they couldn’t help themselves, should be forced to stay this late. He considered waking Gene, then decided against it. He seemed to be sleeping soundly, and waking him to go home and sleep seemed to defeat the purpose.
His mind drifted four floors above him to Andi curled up on that sofa all alone. He had wanted so much to linger there with her. But she had made it clear before his trip that she didn’t want a relationship with him. Still … there was something in her eyes when she looked at him …
His eyes fell to the golden form of Khaki Kangaroo. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands as he thought what a jerk he had been when he saw it this morning. Instead of realizing that it had taken a caring person to dream up a gift like that, much less execute it, he had discounted it as cheap strategy aimed at … what? Appeasing him long enough to spring her ideas on him? Her ideas hadn’t been so far off base. Even if it had come from her staff, he knew it had been Andi’s idea. And that meant something.
As he turned it carefully in his hand, the light of his lamps played softly off the bottom of the kangaroo. He squinted and held the statue closer to the bulb, trying to make out the letters inscribed in script. “To Justin, for victories without wars. You win, I win … Love Andi.”
You win, I win, he chanted mentally. From the song by Jackson Browne, Andi’s longtime favorite singer. You win, I win … we lose. Was that what she had meant? Or was it just a rebuttal of the thought she’d uttered days ago? Neither of us can win when we’re together.
Whatever the message meant, it sent his heart careening. It was a personal gift, and he had been so ungrateful that he’d humiliated her into lying about it, only proving the point of her engraved message. You win, I win … We lose. Again the words flitted through his mind. Was that why she had cut things off with him? Had his constant resistance to her ideas—his determination to always be right—convinced her that was the only way?
He looked at the door and wondered if he should follow his impulse to go back to her office. What would he say?
Deciding that he’d know what to say when he got there, he dashed into the elevator hoping he wasn’t too late to catch her.
She was just where he had left her, but as he approached her door, he saw her simply staring with sad, sullen eyes across the room to the large window. The lonely glare in her green eyes disappeared at his knock, and she flashed a welcoming smile so convincing that he wondered if he’d imagined the sorrow.
Walking in, he answered her smile. “I was thinking,” he said softly. “What do you say we find a pizza place that delivers this late? We owe ourselves a celebration for the amazing thing that happened tonight, and frankly, I forgot to eat.”
Andi laughed with bewilderment, the sound playing like wind chimes in his heart. “What amazing thing?” she asked. “Wasn’t it an ordinary night?”
“Not by any stretch of these vivid imaginations of ours,” he said, “because tonight we finally agreed on something.”
Chapter Eighteen
We did agree, didn’t we?” Andi exulted, crossing her feet Indian-style on the sofa and facing Justin as she munched on the pizza that had been delivered moments earlier. It was amazing how hungry she suddenly was, when earlier she’d had no appetite at all. “And without casualties.”
“Yes, we did.” The lines at the corners of his eyes webbed with his grin.
“Should I send out a press release?” she teased.
He chuckled. “Somehow I don’t think the press could appreciate the significance.”
“Well,” she said, leaning her head back against the tall sofa arm. “We’d just have to make it interesting enough.” Sighing, she studied the ceiling, as if reading the headlines there. “‘Sherman and Pierce Reach Detente.’”
Justin laughed. “A little too strong, I think. How about ‘Pierce Admits to Being Jerk?’”
She looked at him with a question on her face. “Why would you say that?”
He looked down at the rough lines on his palms. “I saw the inscription on the statue,” he said. “It was sweet, and there’s no other word for me but ‘jerk.’”
Andi almost choked on her pizza. “I’ve called you that under my breath a few times. But I’m sure that’s no worse than what you would say about me.”
“Well, let’s see.” Justin glanced at the same spot on the ceiling where she’d just found her headlines. “Twenty-nine-year-old creative genius who knows what she wants and has the uncanny ability to make others want it, too.” Her pleased smile urged him on, and he brought his sparkling eyes back to her. “Her strength is staggering, her will is unwavering, her drive is …”
“Dreadful,” Andi provided.
Justin gave her that one and continued, the ticklish edge of laughter lacing his voice. “She’s unpredictable, unforgettable, indecipherable …” Her wide-eyed, surprised expression stopped his heart, making his smile dissolve over a long sigh as his eyes riveted deeply into hers, “ … and she has eyes that could either freeze or melt your heart, depending on her mood.”
Andi tried to still the pounding in her chest and countered the compliment with drollery. “Do you think they’d print that?”
“Well,” he said with a lazy shrug. “Maybe if it came as a direct quote.”
“No.” She studied the pattern of pepperonis on her pizza. “I doubt you could ever make yourself say that in public. And without sheer exhaustion, I’m certain I wouldn’t be hearing it now.” She grinned and stretched her feet out on the couch until her arches almost touched Justin’s thighs. “Besides,” she said, quirking her brows, “the press has forgotten all about me. It’s that new animator on the premises t
hat has them all talking.”
“And have you been talking back?” he probed with a grin that seemed to bring sunlight into the shadowed room.
“Of course,” she teased. “You know me. Always happy to cooperate with the media.”
“What sort of things did they want to know?” he asked, knowing he shouldn’t.
“The usual,” she said with a mischievous curve of her lips. “Your phone number, your clothing size, whether you sleep in pajamas …”
Justin’s eyes danced with laughter. “As if you’d know. And what did you tell them?”
“I told them that you rarely sleep at all.” She brought her soda to her lips to hide her devilish grin. “But that when you do, it’s usually fully clothed and sitting up straight.”
“Well, at least I dress comfortably. T-shirts and jeans aren’t so tough to sleep in, sitting up straight or not.” He looked down at the dress shirt he’d worn today because of all his meetings. “I thought I did pretty good today, keeping my shirttail tucked in for most of the day.”
“The fact that you’re wearing shirts that have tails now is a major accomplishment.”
He grinned. “It is, isn’t it?”
Their eyes locked across the distance of the couch as their laughter ebbed into smiling sighs.
When the quiet became too tense, too awkward, Andi pulled herself off of the couch and went back to the pizza box. “So we’re friends again?” she asked, turning back to Justin.
“For a while,” he conceded, watching her with unyielding regard as she refilled both glasses with the canned Cokes they’d gotten from the machine downstairs.
Trying to steady her hand under his careful scrutiny, Andi set the can back down and took her place on the sofa again. “Incredible,” she said with open honesty. “I’d almost forgotten what it was like to be either in a state of war or a temporary cease-fire all the time. Until the accident, Daddy kept me going, but it’s been relatively boring around here since.”
Justin feigned a hurt look. “You mean I’m not the only one who’s ever gotten your temper to the boiling point?”
Andi smiled. “You know better than that. Dad was almost as insufferable as you sometimes.” Another moment of quiet settled between them as they drank, watching each other over their glasses. “I’ve been curious,” Andi said finally. “I went eight years without hearing your name, and then all of a sudden you were here. Where have you been? What have you been doing?”
Justin shrugged and studied the fizz in his soda. “I’ve been planning my strategy all this time. Perfecting my craft, I guess, and deciding exactly how I was going to spring my talent on the world.” He took a drink and offered an indolent grin as if remembering foolish days. “Trouble was, not everybody saw what I had as talent. And I sometimes wondered if it wasn’t more of a curse than a gift, because no matter how bad things got, they never got bad enough to quit.”
Andi nodded, clearly understanding that kind of stubbornness. “Even when your best characters were stolen?”
Surprise skittered across his eyes, instantly making her regret her question. “You knew about that?”
She shrugged and gave an apologetic nod. “I found out when we were trying to buy your characters. It proved to me that I’d have to give more than I wanted, because I knew you’d never risk that again.”
Justin breathed a laugh. “You were right. Those were bad times.”
“But you came through it.”
Justin leaned his head back, letting the past flit through his mind as if it were the first time he’d considered it objectively. “It was revenge, I think,” he admitted. “When the jerk hired my animators out from under me to continue my series, all I wanted to do was get even, make them all eat their hearts out. Funny thing was, when the series failed, I was crushed and satisfied at the same time. I hated to see my creation bite the dust, but I was glad that God had taken care of things for me. The whole thing gave me new motivation.”
Narrowing her eyes, Andi sought bitterness in his expression, but there was none. “Motivation to get even?”
Justin contemplated the question with a twinkle of surprise in his eyes. “You know, it hasn’t even crossed my mind since I’ve been here. I guess I have other motivation now.”
Andi laid her head against the cushion and smiled at his frank self-appraisal. He was happy, she thought, and that lent her a fragile bit of joy.
“Madeline’s partially responsible for my getting back on my feet,” he said, sending her spirits crashing to earth as his eyes softened with the thought of his assistant. “She’s been with me for five years. She’s the only animator who didn’t abandon me, even though they offered her more than I could pay her. She had to take a lot of freelance work to supplement her income while she kept working for me, but she never complained. I’ll never forget that.” His eyes were soft as he spoke of her, and Andi would have sacrificed everything she owned to have him speak as tenderly of her.
Closing her eyes against the pain of too much honesty, Andi leaned her head back and clutched her glass until her knuckles whitened. No wonder he cared for Madeline. She offered no threat, no demands.
Relaxing, he went on with his quiet rambling. “When I get a big enough staff and enough money, I’m going to start work on the feature film Madeline and I have been planning for years. It’s my biggest dream. It’ll take a few years to get it to the stage I want it since it’ll be fully animated, but it’ll be worth it.” His voice warmed through the chill in her heart, and his new belief in dreams he’d shunned when she’d known him before gave her a glimmer of hope, though it had little to do with her.
“That shouldn’t be too far off, should it?”
A wry laugh contradicted her. “The budget for a high-quality film like that’s in the millions. I couldn’t even borrow that much right now.”
“How about investors?” she asked.
Justin found that amusing. “Who? I’m the new kid on the block. No one really knows who I am yet.”
“I would invest,” Andi said. “I know the depth of your imagination, and I believe you could do whatever you wanted.” Even if Madeline was part of it, she thought miserably. Sitting up straight, she leaned toward him with more conviction. “I mean it, Justin. I’d like to invest.”
The gradual hardening of his features told her she’d made a grave error in judgment. “Our agreement excluded the feature film,” he said as though offended. “If you invest in it, that will change things. I had that clause put into our agreement for a reason. I don’t want you having a stake in everything I do. I can do it without you.”
Andi sank back onto the couch and brought a hand to her forehead to hide the mist of self-deprecation filling her eyes. “Of course you can,” she whispered. Forcing a smile, she breathed a laugh. “You’d think I’d know better by now.” Her smile faded into regret, and she asked, “Why is it so hard for us to get along, Justin?” She knew the honest question would require an honest answer.
“Sometimes we’ve gotten along real well,” he said, as if he’d given the matter a great deal of thought. “But I guess those times are few and far between. Mostly because we’re both stubborn and creative people. And because of our past.”
“But we’ve both changed,” she breathed out earnestly. Pulling her feet up, she bent her knees and folded her elbows across them. “Everything’s on a larger scale here.” Her eyes sparkled as she glanced out the window at the darkness that she saw as an empty slate, waiting to be filled in. “We’re making history with dreams. God’s using us both. We’re working toward the same goal, even if we have different ways of going about reaching it.”
Justin rubbed his eyes ruefully. “It’s easy to lose focus of that goal,” he said. “Other things can get in the way …”
“What other things?”
Before he could answer, a blaring, screeching alarm cut off her words, startling them both. Andi bolted off of the couch and flew to the computer on her desk. “Oh, no! It’s a fire,�
�� she muttered, urgently punching buttons to discover the source.
Justin fled to the window, where he could see the hazy light of flames and the small Promised Land fire engines’ lights at the scene. “Looks like the Hands Across the Sea area,” he said, but Andi was already out the door, shoes in hand.
“Come on! We’ve got to get over there!”
Justin followed her onto the elevator and punched the first-floor button. The ride down was agonizingly slow, giving an open view of dark floors. “If the fire has reached the robots, we’re in trouble,” she said when they reached the first floor and rushed out across the lobby floor.
The moment they reached the humid night air, Andi knew that whatever hope she’d had was futile. The vicinity was lit in a yellow haze as flames danced from the roof of the structure. Without looking for an electric car, she took off on foot, running as if her park depended on her speed.
Behind her, she heard the wailing sirens of the fire department, and thanked God that her security guards had called them in time to keep the other buildings from going up. The trucks whisked past her and screeched to a halt in front of the building, and a dozen firemen dispersed and began to work efficiently to help the Promised Land fire fighters stifle the blaze.
Chapter Nineteen
When she reached the burning building, Andi grabbed one of her security guards. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” the man shouted over the noise. “I can’t even figure out who set off the alarm.”
Justin couldn’t hear the exchange of words, but when Andi darted off through the men, stopping at each security guard and shooting questions that most answered with a shake of the head or a helpless shrug, he went after her.
Scurrying activity and stretched hoses slowed his progress, and an instant of panic welled within him as he saw Andi move dangerously close to the entrance, peering anxiously inside as if she could stop the flames with sheer will.
“Keep her out of there!” one of the firemen shouted, his hands clamped on a nozzle as Justin pushed past him. “It may not look bad in there, but that roof is about to go any minute!”
Second Chance - 02 - When Dreams Cross Page 13