His business.
“I suppose there’s always hope for the next wedding, huh?” Ronnie asked.
“From your lips to god’s ears.” Gage crossed his fingers and broadened his smile. He knew why his show was so popular with his own gender. He had designed it that way. He had carefully devised the Fitz persona to appeal to the target demographic: single, frustrated masses of men who straddled the fence between indiscriminate bed-hopping and settling down for the long haul. But it still never ceased to amaze him when female listeners rooted for Fitz to score.
“I noticed you’re not renewing your lease.” Ronnie mercifully changed the topic and looked at the “For Rent” sign. “Did the neighborhood wildlife finally get to you?”
Gage briefly glanced at the banty hens, which were now sunning themselves in an empty birdbath on the front lawn. “No, but writing very big checks to my landlord did. It’s a great house, but a single guy like me doesn’t need all this floor space.”
“I guess not,” Ronnie agreed reluctantly. “Did you find a new place?”
“I have some in mind.” Gage tried not to wince as he thought of the efficiency apartments he’d walked through on far South Congress Avenue where the fringe of Austin’s center bumped up against shady-looking bars and commercial storage facilities. Rental properties too cheap to warrant a brochure.
“Don’t suppose I’ll see you again, will I?” Ronnie didn’t bother to hide the disappointment on her face.
“I’m sure I’ll be around.” Gage didn’t want to make false assurances. “Say, it’s always nice talking to you. But it’s a little past my bedtime.”
They walked to their respective front porches. She looked back at him and waved. Gage waved back and smiled. He assumed “Ronnie” was short for Veronica, but he’d never been curious enough to ask.
Yes, she definitely would have been no conquest, he thought as he peeled off his age-weathered black leather jacket and tossed it on a chair along with his keys. Fitz’s popularity had inexplicably taken off back when Gage was in his mid-twenties working his first gig at a radio station in Kansas City. Ever since then, he’d had no short supply of female companionship.
There had been single women desperate to get married and those who wanted to live together as a trial run. There were women with jealous boyfriends, fiancés and even one with an estranged husband she kept under wraps. Gage touched the bump on his nose thoughtfully. He certainly wouldn’t forget that one. All of them wanted to capture and tame the free spirit they assumed was part of his radio personality.
The simple truth was that Gage, although easily tamable, had been in love with exactly none of them.
He couldn’t pin it down to an exact date. But at some point in time he got tired of his love life playing out as a long-running Melrose Place mise-en-scène. Couldn’t abide seeing one more mascara-streaked face looking at him with loathing or hearing a choked voice calling him bastard, asshole and other names he — or was it Fitz? — so richly deserved. Damned if he knew.
Gage emptied the coins from his pockets. His fingers pulled out the business card Gideon had given him earlier that day. He tapped it against the bureau top.
“Tara, Tara, Tara,” he muttered to himself. He squinted his eyes shut, trying to conjure up a face to go with the surgically enhanced bosom Gideon had described. Instead he saw a pair of pert B-cups modestly covered by hideous moss green silk. His eyes snapped open.
Maid March had made an impression herself. And he wasn’t entirely sure why. Sabrina wasn’t that sexy if he judged her by Playboy standards held to the all-American girl. Her body was too petite, her frame too delicate and easy to crush. Physically, she was the very antithesis of the type of woman who usually turned him on.
And he couldn’t get her off of his mind.
Edging closer to the wings of Morpheus, Gage kicked off his shoes and collapsed on the overstuffed, pea green sofa. His eyes felt gritty and dry. He looked around at the half-packed moving boxes filled with clothing, notebooks and a small collection of electronic gadgets. That’s what his life was all about now. Keeping tabs on his bottom line until the time he no longer needed to.
Gage thanked heaven for the small mercies. A lot of his buddies, saddled with families and mortgages, were stuck in one city and hadn’t been able to pull up roots when they’d been unceremoniously pink-slipped. His profession was both portable and recession-proof. A radio jock’s salary wasn’t exactly lucrative, but he’d always gotten by comfortably, thanks to the success of his on-air alter ego.
Fitz saw to it that he always stayed on his feet and in rare form.
His success was proof that there were two types of women in the world. There was the type like Ronnie, who were enthralled by the bad-boy image Gage had cultivated for his radio personality. The other type was highly unlikely to be amused by his profession.
Like Sabrina March.
If he had told her what he did for a living when they first met, their conversation would have ended shortly after the introductions when she cast a disdainful glare in his direction. Sebastian failed to mention that the maid of honor was cute as hell when she got tipsy. Or that unlike Ronnie and his past assortment of palomino blondes, Sabrina had curiously little guile when it came to seduction. Considering that she regularly mingled with male legislators, lobbyists and other Chiefs of Staff, all well-endowed in the self-assurance department, this had surprised him the most. Gage thought of her sitting there in the sun in that shapeless dress making her port-induced confessions and blowing her bangs out of those big brown eyes. She didn’t know it, but she’d all but dared him to bring it on. Then when he’d leaned in to kiss her, she’d blinked and gulped like a girl on her first date.
Yawning, Gage rose from the comfort of the sofa and headed toward the kitchen to scrounge up whatever leftovers were in the fridge. A handwritten schedule attached to the door with an X-Men magnet reminded him that he needed to put in an appearance at a sponsored event at a popular Sixth Street bar later that night. He needed to gird his loins with a serious power sleep before he interacted with the masses of rowdy college co-eds sucking down margaritas laced with Everclear.
After wolfing down the remnants of a sandwich, he stumbled to his bedroom and drew the blackout blinds — a requisite for anyone who worked a reverse schedule. His rumpled tuxedo jacket was still draped over the bedpost. Some of Sabrina’s perfume had transferred to the collar, and a diffuse trail of smoke and flowers tantalized his nostrils.
There would probably be a little hell enough to pay when Molly and Sebastian got back from Paris. His ears would be burning as the women had one of their girl-power confabs, during which Sabrina would no doubt tell Molly that he’d … what? Gotten her drunk and kissed her silly? Not that she’d squeeze too much juice from that particular fruit. Sabrina had been a willing participant.
She’d kissed him like she’d meant it. Gage couldn’t recall a single woman who’d ever put that much heart and soul into a first kiss. Whatever irreconcilable difference put the kibosh on Maid March’s marriage hadn’t been born in the bedroom, unless she was an incredibly good actress or her ex-husband couldn’t figure out which end was up.
Fitz had listened to his fair share of callers complaining about bumbling, uneducated lovers.
Gage sank his head into the pillow and chuckled as he remembered Sabrina’s remark about kicking dirt. Fitz might have put his own spin on the tale earlier that morning, but Gage had been almost relieved that she hadn’t wanted him to take things all the way. He had no regrets about their steamy, starlit make-out session. But opening himself to anything more would have been courting the one thing he didn’t need in his life right now — complications.
Because he had discovered something else about Sabrina March.
Nothing about her would ever be simple.
CHAPTER SIX
Sabrina parked Carlton at the front desk and dispatched Moira on office errands, and then she sat at her desk and stared at a printed copy
of the budget. Certainly there had to be a way to get Violetta back. When her vision finally blurred, Sabrina wandered back into the reception area, where Carlton was disgustedly dropping a swathe of Jillian’s dried lotus pods into the recycling bin for paper.
“If I’m going to be desk-locked all day, I refuse to be surrounded by dead flora,” he said. Then he shot her a steamy look with his knock-out green eyes and sing-songed under his breath, “Fitz and Giggles.”
“Carlton,” Sabrina said with an edge of warning in her voice.
“Can’t say that I blame you for succumbing to his charm,” he went on, nonchalant. “Jackson Sprinkle fades to invisible compared to the infamous Gage Fitzgerald.”
“You know who he is?” she asked.
Carlton’s expression registered mild surprise. “You really need to get out more. His face is only plastered on KCAP billboards all over Austin. He definitely has that life-after-hockey thing going for him. He’s totally not your type, Sabrina.”
Of course he wasn’t. That’s what she’d been telling herself all along. Carlton’s validation only proved her point.
“What did I say earlier, Carlton? No more stupid. Only smart.” She tapped her brow.
“Not that it’s any of my business, but smart’s been your problem.” Carlton firmly closed the door to a filing cabinet. “Hell, Sabrina, we’ve known each other since you were banging on doors trying to get the neighbors to sign a petition for a new teen rec center. You’ve been smart all of your life. You got a smart job. You dated smart men, like your recently dismissed ex-husband. When you got back from that hellish cruise to Iceland, you finally seemed happy — not just smart. Don’t you think you deserve to do something stupid, like, oh, I dunno, get drunk and neck on the front lawn of Green Pastures with one of the bad boys?”
Just brilliant, Sabrina thought, appalled. While lost in a gibbering rage earlier that morning, she had apparently missed a critical part of “Fitz’s” on-air revelations.
“Again, not that it’s any of my business,” Carlton added smoothly with an innocent smile.
She had been sixteen when Carlton Hayes and his twin sister, Evangeline, first moved to the Corners. But the two had never been tight friends until Sabrina, impressed with his tireless volunteer work at the very neighborhood rec center she had petitioned for, had taken a chance and hired him as Theo’s communications director. Carlton slipped into his new role with ease, and Sabrina hadn’t regretted the decision.
She wasn’t fond of including men among her very best buds. Someone always ended up with a misplaced crush. However, Carlton had discreetly made his interest in the same gender clear after they’d worked together for a year. This alone made him nonthreatening. And Carlton could always be relied on for a good pep talk and noggin rubbing.
Sabrina also knew she could trust him to deliver the occasional reality check.
“Was I really that different when I was engaged, Carlton?” she wanted to know.
“Sabrina, please.” He looked exasperated. “Might I remind you of the engagement party I threw for you? You blithered on about your bridal registry, nonstop — at the San Jacinto Dinner Club. It’s not like we were having high tea.” Carlton shook his head sadly. “Any woman who obsesses over crockery and soft furnishings is definitely not in love with her man. Even Eva said—” He clamped his lips shut quickly.
“What did Eva say?” Sabrina pressed.
“It’s nothing,” Carlton muttered. “It’s stupid, really. It’s just my sister reading too much into things again.”
“You’re supposed to have my back, Carlton, not protect the people who stab me in it.” Sabrina gave him a piteous et tu, Brute? look.
“Okay, okay,” he sighed, tossing his hands up in capitulation. “She said, ‘To a career woman like Sabrina March, marriage is like haute couture. Either she can pull it off with impeccable elan, or she looks completely ridiculous in it’.”
“I take it I fall in the ridiculous category,” Sabrina said stiffly.
Evangeline Hayes, a journalist for the Lone Star Monthly, had a way of cutting directly to the chase that often involved the use of imaginative metaphors. But unlike Carlton, who could turn socially correct on a dime, she had absolutely no filter.
“Eva does have a point.” He looked at Sabrina sheepishly and shrugged slender shoulders draped in fashionable lightweight wool. “Marriage doesn’t really become you, Sabrina.”
She retreated to the Think Tank to ponder. She tried and failed to remember the first time she and Jackson kissed. The first time they slept together was woven somewhere in a busy tapestry of receptions and election year events. She couldn’t remember that either. At least not in great detail. She suddenly wished the day were over. She needed hot cocoa and a hen session in Molly’s kitchen, only Molly was still in Paris.
“Marriage doesn’t become me,” Sabrina said, staring at a pile of correspondence.
“Sabrina!” Carlton hissed, popping through the doorway. “Theo’s inbound!”
“Shit!” She lunged toward the cartons labeled “Austin Sustainables” and pulled a biodegradable coffee cup from one of the boxes. Then she deftly peeled the lid from her latte, poured the contents into the cup, and hastily stuffed the offending Styrofoam in the bottom drawer of her desk, where it joined a half-dozen others. The biodegradable container immediately began to wilt at first contact with fluid.
Charisma had been an abstract concept until Sabrina first laid eyes on the Hon. Rep. Theodore Ward at an inaugural reception at the Austin Club. The freshman legislator had walked into the room with a stunning blond wife draped on his arm, and every quark in the room seemed to go haywire with energy. Theo hadn’t been particularly policy smart at the beginning of his career, but he was naturally blessed with a statesman’s stature and the gift of gab. Sabrina had been a lowly research assistant at the time and young enough to be impressed by appearance. She could tell by the way Theo effortlessly worked his way around the room that he would wind his way up the political pecking order in a similar fashion.
“Carlton, my man! Where’s my distinguished Chief of Staff?” Theo brayed happily as he strode into the office, his car keys clattering against his briefcase. The smell of Hermes Un Jardins Sur Le Nil snaked its way into the Think Tank. “Sabrina!” Theo yelled. “Come in here and show me that pretty face.”
Grasping the flaccid coffee cup and Theo’s planner, she walked toward his office purposefully, smoothing wrinkles from her coffee-stained skirt with her free hand. Theo was already inside, unloading the contents of his recycled leather briefcase onto his desk: manila folders, law journals, pocket parts to various statutes, energy drinks, and Clif Bars.
“Armed to the teeth with caffeine and schedules, I see.” He glanced at her amicably, then set the empty briefcase aside and sank into his big leather chair. “Only my Chief of Staff is this organized first thing on a Monday morning.”
“I seem to recall that’s the reason you hired me, Theo,” Sabrina said, sitting down in a smaller chair in front of his desk. The cup in her hand was rapidly becoming soggy.
“True.” He leaned back and put his feet on the edge of his desk. “You sure made an impression on the Tide Brothers.” He tossed out the name of one of his biggest campaign donors. “Just the other day, Josiah Tide told me, ‘That wingwoman of yours is a rare breed. She has too much ambition to be stuffed in a trophy case’ — and this was after you dumped his general counsel on a luxury cruise liner.”
“Gee, Theo. Warm my heart,” Sabrina said dryly. Now the cup of coffee was a sodden mess. She grabbed some recycled paper towels from one of the boxes lining the walls of his office and blotted up the remainder of the latte, scrutinizing the Hon. Rep. out of the corner of her eye.
If there were a physical template for notable Texas politicians, Theo Ward was boilerplate. He had refined Gallic features and thick brown hair in no need of plugs. During the course of his career, Theo had acquired the roguish persona of a blockbuster action hero, wh
ich led to his nickname, the “Indiana Jones of the Texas Legislature.”
Sabrina noticed he was leaner and tanner. But something else about him looked different too. What? She remembered the copy of the budget that she’d tucked inside of Theo’s planner.
“We need to talk business, Hon. Rep.” She drew herself up authoritatively.
“Not the ‘Hon. Rep.’ again,” Theo groaned. “That means you’re mad at me. Is this because of Violetta?”
“Theo, this office simply cannot function efficiently without her,” Sabrina said earnestly. “She was like family. I hope you at least threw her a going-away party.”
She could tell by the look on his face that he hadn’t.
“I make hard choices, sitting behind this desk. Some of them aren’t choices I want to make,” Theo told her. He looked so woeful she almost felt sorry for him until he added, “You and your posse will be able to pick up the slack. There’s nothing Violetta did that you can’t personally handle yourself, Chief.”
Sabrina doubted that. The Hon. Rep. knew good and well that Violetta had relied on a steady income to pay for her oldest niece’s college tuition. And that the former receptionist had written all of his thank-you cards by hand, double-checked the school-aged Wardlings’ homework, made daily runs to the dry cleaner to pick up his suits, and sent Jillian Ward flowers on her birthday, Valentine’s Day and wedding anniversary.
Sabrina swallowed hard to suppress the ire rising in her throat. She crossed her legs, primly opened the planner and began to go over Theo’s weekly schedule, as was her custom at the beginning of the week.
“—and on Friday afternoon, there’s the ground-breaking ceremony for the Volunteer Family Counseling Center.” Sabrina reached the last item on his agenda, aware that Theo was only half-listening, his gaze fixed on a spot somewhere outside his office window.
“Remind me. What kind of center is that again?” he asked distantly.
“It’s a nonprofit that helps women — primarily those with minor children — get out of abusive environments,” she informed him, trying to hide her exasperation. “This is where you’ll talk to the press about your bill that increases funding for women’s and children’s issues. Wear jeans, your oldest boots and a chambray shirt, untucked. Chat with a lot of women, not just one or two, and for god’s sake, not just the young, pretty ones. What you want to get across to the press is that you are concerned about all women.”
Something About You (Just Me & You) Page 6