by Joanne Rock
So what the hell was he doing sleeping with her? Following the feminine voice that sounded so much like her, he knew he was losing it. She couldn’t possibly be here on the newsroom floor.
Yet as he cleared stacks of paperwork and newspapers piled nearly up to the ceiling, he finally found the woman behind the voice. Her.
The woman that had been on his mind all day.
Clad in a simple brown dress that might have looked staid on another woman, Giselle still managed to look sexy as hell. Something about her constant movement, her energetic use of her hands as she spoke, made the outfit seem flirtatious as it fluttered around her thighs. And she sure didn’t look vulnerable now as she smiled at some lame joke made by one of the food reporters. In fact, she looked totally enthralled by whatever the latest culinary hack was saying to her.
Hugh listened. Spied. It was an old habit, an annoying habit, but he’d always learned twice as much by watching. And just now when he forced himself to hang back and observe the dynamics of body language going back and forth between the pair, he spotted Giselle’s nervous posture. Her feet crossed at the ankles, her smile too quick and wide to be genuine. Damn it, what other small nuances had he missed around Giselle because he hadn’t taken his time to really understand her?
Plowing past one final stack of newspaper inserts—a year-old dining guide for Miami restaurants—Hugh joined them, startling Giselle into a warm and definitely authentic smile. Making some excuse to the reviewer who already looked primed to hit on her, Hugh hustled her to an elevator before the penny-pinching henchwoman from accounting caught up with him.
“Hey, wait a minute.” Giselle peered back over her shoulder toward the starry-eyed food critic. “I was talking to him about reviewing my restaurants sometime this week.”
“Don’t worry. He’ll be there,” Hugh muttered. Probably tonight. Carrying roses.
“But I had every intention of schmoozing.” She tucked a strand of dark, curling hair behind her ear. And despite her words, she didn’t seem all that upset to be rescued from her conversation with the restaurant reviewer. “I was trying to do this right.”
“You wanted to schmooze?” He didn’t like the sound of that one damn bit. He punched the elevator button with his fist and the car took them down. “As in apply your womanly wiles to the cause of a good review?”
“As in make chitchat and form a rapport with him so maybe he wouldn’t be quick to pan my cooking.” She chewed her lip as they stepped out at street level.
A good thing since he needed some fresh air to blow away the remnants of jealousy that were stupid, petty and gnawing him on the ass anyway.
“You can’t influence the press that way, Giselle. Television reporters maybe, but not newspaper reporters.” So sue him for his bias. TV news had to be visually exciting, driven by what made glitzy sound bites. Print journalists wrote for an audience that wanted depth, substance. Or so he liked to think. “Haven’t you ever heard of journalistic integrity?”
He steered her out of the building and toward a bench overlooking Biscayne Bay. A pretty view, but not exactly quiet since the traffic from two major causeways rumbled nearby, carrying endless streams of cars back and forth between downtown Miami and Miami Beach. Heat sweltered up off the pavement, but a constant breeze off the water made the day bearable.
“Sure I’ve heard of it. That doesn’t discount the benefits of schmoozing according to Lainie. She’s made a big push for all the partners to wrangle whatever press coverage we can in order to boost our profile this first year in business.” Settling a small leather satchel by her side, she crossed her legs and eyed him from her end of the bench. “But I didn’t expect to see you here this afternoon.”
“I work here.” He got distracted by the extra inch of thigh exposed now that she was seated.
“But I didn’t know if you ever actually showed up here since half the time you’re on airplanes or overseas somewhere.”
Another reminder why he wouldn’t ever be the right man for this woman. He’d bet her brothers already had a plot of land picked out in Coral Gables for her and the lucky bastard she eventually married. His lunch churned in his gut at the thought of her with anyone else. But there wasn’t a chance in hell he could ever sit tight in Coral Gables while there were stories to be written. Women and children at risk abroad. He had a mission, damn it. No matter how tempting Giselle and her crossed legs looked right now.
“I check in every now and then. But it’s definitely nice to be able to file stories from wherever I happen to be in the world.” He flagged down a street vendor pushing a lunch cart to the next block and ordered a couple of hot pretzels and lemonades. He fully realized he was searching for excuses to keep her there a little longer. After their talk about her not being sure how long she could stick around with his fly-by-night approach to relationships, however, he kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. He half expected her to tell him to go blow any day now. Especially since big brother Nico was back in town.
As they settled into an impromptu snack, Giselle dipped her pretzel in a condiment cup filled with cheese. “So what’s it like being a jet-setting journalist? Have you been to tons of exciting countries?”
“I don’t know if you’d call them exciting. I tend to hit the politically unstable places. Or if they are stable, it’s only because some militant dictator type is in power.” He hated seeing people repressed that way. Wrote stories just so the rest of the world would know what kinds of injustices went on in those dark corners of the world.
“Ever been to Italy?”
“A few times. Only on stopovers to other places, but it seems great. Phenomenal food.”
“I have a huge number of relatives there. My father took us every year until he died, and then my oldest brother Vito managed to get us there a couple of times after that. If I hadn’t been able to find a good gig as a chef here, I would have headed over there for a few years.” She winked as she sipped her lemonade. “Italians respect their chefs.”
“Do you speak Italian?”
“Are you kidding? I spoke all of the Romance languages before I spoke English. My father only spoke Italian just to make sure his kids knew his native tongue. He loved it over here, but he was a big believer in remembering his roots.”
He shuffled this new information about Giselle, adding it to his vision of her as a hip South Beach businesswoman and coming up with a more complex picture. Before he could ask her more about her family, she reached over to swipe the cheese from his chin with her paper napkin.
“You said before that you’d never quit traveling for your stories.” The breeze off the bay tossed her hair around her shoulders, the cooling effect welcome on another steamy Miami spring day. “And I suspected from the way you said it that there was some sort of personal reason driving you, some important connection between who you are and what you do. Was I imagining that? Or is it really none of my business?”
Hugh mentally took a step back, unaccustomed to anyone asking him personal questions. Usually he was the one taking notes and drawing conclusions, not the other way around. He didn’t know if he liked being on the other side of an interview.
But this was Giselle. A woman who had offered up more of herself to him than she had to any man since Robert Flynn the two-timing sleazeball had hurt her. And now that Hugh knew firsthand what kind of background she came from, he had to wonder if she’d ever taken such risks with a man as she had with him this week. He had the feeling Nico Cesare would have strangled any guy without Hugh’s skill with words last night.
No doubt, Hugh owed Giselle a little bit of himself in return for the way she’d put her heart and her relationship with her family on the line for him.
God knows he wouldn’t be able to offer her much of anything else in return besides the truth.
“There’s some personal investment there.” He crumpled the wax paper wrapper from his pretzel and stared out over the bay, wondering where to start. “I can give you the short version,
but sometimes we reporter types can get wrapped up in storytelling. Are you sure you want to talk about this?”
She leaned back into the bench, settling in to listen. “Definitely. You already know too much about my family and me. It’s my turn to hear the scoop about you.”
“I had never been abroad until the summer I turned ten years old.” He weeded through the facts of a story he almost never shared, sticking to the essentials. “My mom was in love for the second time and I was happy for her since she took the divorce from my dad really hard. I wasn’t crazy about this guy she liked, but I tried to put aside my own feelings about him because it wasn’t about me, you know? I wanted her to be happy.” Little did he know they would have both been better off if he’d protested up-front. “And when she told me they were getting married and that we were taking a vacation to this guy’s Middle Eastern homeland, I thought it’d be okay. I had visions of coercing my mom into seeing the pyramids as long as we were on the other side of the ocean.”
Giselle shifted in her seat, already worried for the ten-year-old boy he’d been. And from the way Hugh rolled his eyes, she knew damn well he hadn’t seen the pyramids on that trip. She could practically see him at ten, full of big dreams and sensitive enough to care what his mom wanted more than what he wanted.
There were shades of tenderness in this man back then. Obviously he hadn’t always shoved them aside the way he seemed to now.
“The wedding was easy, a justice of the peace thing followed by an interminable plane ride to the most dreary country you could imagine. Hotter than Miami and with none of the color—no ocean in sight and no pyramids on the horizon. My stepdad turned into this militant he-man head of household the second we stepped off the plane. He started demanding me and my mom keep our mouths shut in public, that we stay at home ninety-nine percent of the time anyhow and that we basically become slaves to his comfort. When the two weeks were up, my mother was ready to head home as he had promised, but the guy wouldn’t leave. And worse, he wouldn’t let us leave.”
She frowned. “What do you mean, he wouldn’t let you?”
He cut his eyes in her direction. “He physically wouldn’t let my mother out of the house, and that’s all I have to say about that.” His jaw tight, hands clenched into fists on his knees, he related a past she almost wished she hadn’t asked him to remember. “We became prisoners to this new lifestyle, and when my mother managed to sneak out once to appeal to the local authorities, they informed her she had no rights before they smacked her around and sent her back home.”
Her heart twisted to think how that sensitive little boy would have reacted to seeing his mother hurt. Powerless. Afraid.
A tear nipped one corner of her eye as she watched Hugh remember that time in his life. For all that she’d lost both her parents at early ages, she always had the comfort of knowing they’d been deliriously happy. Fulfilled by life and all it had offered them.
“How did you ever get out?” She prayed—hard—that his mother had made it out with him. She’d read newspaper accounts of the perils of being born female into cultures that had zero respect for women. So different from the way she’d grown up where she’d been overprotected, but always valued. Loved.
“Remember I told you I wanted to see the pyramids?” A mischievous twinkle flickered in his gaze as he turned to look at her this time. “Before I left the States I’d started a letter-writing campaign to a grant program that provided cultural experiences for inner-city kids. I figured if I sent enough letters, or wrote an essay that was moving enough, somehow I’d get to Egypt sooner or later.”
“Already using your words to institute positive change.” She couldn’t help but smile. “Your mother must have been so proud of you.”
“My stepfather didn’t prohibit the letter-writing because it was quiet and, in his eyes, scholarly. The bastard had a small amount of respect for this since I was male.” He shook his head, obviously still disgusted with the attitude twenty years later. “Anyhow, I was permitted to mail my letter once a week and, although I couldn’t start addressing the notes to the American embassy, I began including letters to one of the Florida senators inside the envelope. Another week I’d include a letter to the local embassy. Sometimes I’d cram both in the envelope. It took six months of me writing letters that I wasn’t even sure would get forwarded, but eventually an American-looking guy tapped on our window one night and took my mom and I out of that hellhole.”
But it hadn’t been soon enough. Giselle could tell by the hard look in his eyes.
He crushed his empty lemonade cup and tossed the refuse into a trashcan a few yards away. “Apparently the lady who opened all my letters at the cultural fund looked forward to my weekly persuasive essays about why I needed to see the pyramids, and she freaked out when I started sending pleas for help instead.”
Heat radiated off the sidewalk in waves as the breeze paused. Giselle sipped her lemonade and stared out across the late afternoon sunlight twinkling on the water while she searched for an appropriate response to a story that left her aching for Hugh.
“No wonder you believe in the power of the written word.” She kept her tone light because she sensed he’d forged some sort of peace with the past, but she could only imagine what those six months had been like for a terrified boy and his mom, who’d obviously been abused. Still, she couldn’t refrain from tacking on some small form of comfort, hoping he knew how truly brave he’d been. “You used the only weapon at your disposal. A weapon most ten-year-olds wouldn’t have known how to wield.”
He nodded slowly, as if he’d told himself the same thing many times. But she suspected from the skeptical look in his eyes that it might be a lifetime before he truly believed them. “It can be a damn slow weapon, but it works.”
“And you parlayed that talent for writing into a career as a journalist.” She stared out over the bay, her face tilting into the salty, scented breeze blowing off the water. His childhood made her appreciate her family’s protective nature a little more. And while she knew without question that all of her brothers would give anything to keep her safe, she realized that she would do the same for them.
She would be as fiercely protective of any of them if the situation ever called for it.
“The journalism thing works for me.” Hugh nodded, as if reaffirming his commitment to a job that would never allow for a normal relationship. “I usually stick to stories that expose governments where humanitarian rights are threatened. But I ticked off my editor a few months ago and she got the point across by sending me back home, though she knows I like to be out in the field.”
“A story on Club Paradise was some form of editorial torment, wasn’t it?” How could she ever shape a relationship with a man whose world was so far removed from her own? A man who might one day come to see her work as frivolous compared to the kind of career he’d chosen?
She baked erotic pastries, for crying out loud.
“I saw it that way at first, too, but whether my editor realized it or not, I think there was a lesson behind the assignment.”
“Scandal sells?”
“Believe me, I was well aware of that one even though I resent our news being driven by it.” He turned green eyes on her and took his time before continuing. “But I’ve started to recognize that stories are everywhere. I don’t always need to globe-hop to find a cause because sometimes a very worthy endeavor is sitting right in my own backyard.”
A throng of people came out of the Miami Herald building and whisked by them on the way to other appointments or perhaps to head home for the day. A few birds circled the bench where Hugh and Giselle sat as if accustomed to receiving treats from the people who normally sat there.
Giselle tossed one of the pigeons the last corner of her pretzel. “I thought the Robert Flynn hoopla counted as scandal.”
“But underneath all the glitz and his high profile public image, the guy’s still just a criminal and he deserves to pay his debt to society.” He shrugged, s
hifted on the bench, his knee grazing hers. “This story reminded me that I could write outside my own experiences a little more and remain true to my personal mission.”
“A personal mission?” Oh, crap. Now she knew they could never be compatible. Her nerves tensed, realizing she could never look herself in the mirror every day and paint her Kama Sutra cookies depicting flagrantly sexual acts while Hugh Duncan had created some noble, all-fired important personal mission for his life and his talents. “Care to share the particulars of this mission?”
His shoulders relaxed as he eased back against the bench. He flashed her a grin that was special because it was all too rare.
“I just want to make sure the good guys win.”
HUGH WAS MIGHTY GRATEFUL for the smile Giselle gave him in return, even if it was a damn sad smile at best.
He hadn’t meant to let their conversation get so intense, so serious. He’d spent all his life being driven and intense. From the age of ten on, he’d been chasing away his shadows with one story after another, determined to bring a little peace and order to a scary as hell world. And he’d succeeded. He knew it from other smiles he’d received in his life—appreciative thanks from young mothers who had found their way out of dangerous situations thanks to his work.
But that didn’t mean he wanted his whole life to be one serious encounter after another. He’d burn out if he kept chasing those dark, emotional stories month after month. He needed an occasional project like the Flynn case. And even more, he needed some time to soak up regular day-to-day experiences with someone who lived and breathed Real Life.