A Different Light

by Mariah Stewart

  After their driver assisted them from the vehicle, Meg snagged Athen’s elbow and steered her to the front door.

  “Smile pretty,” Meg ordered, “and be prepared to have a wonderful time.”

  The entrance hall, festooned with trees trimmed in burgundy velvet and gold lamé, was mobbed with partygoers who, like Meg and Athen, had just arrived and were awed by the grandeur of the holiday decorations. Thick green garlands, draped with huge bunches of dried hydrangea and gold mesh ribbon, wound lavishly up the wide staircase. Gold lights wound through the garlands and burgundy ribbons festooned the chandeliers. The effect was stunning.

  The throng of guests drifted in the direction of the music beckoning from the ballroom. Uniformed waiters offered delectable goodies from silver trays and served champagne in pretty flutes. Couples took to the dance floor and swayed to the music played by a band from New York generally reserved for society bashes. Athen and Meg were looking for their host and hostess just as Lydia came up behind them and placed a bejeweled hand on each of their shoulders.

  “How lovely you both look. We’re so glad you could join us.” Lydia wore a green satin gown, chosen, no doubt, to set off the incredible emeralds at her neck and her ears. “Hughes, darling, look who’s here.”

  “Ah, ladies, how delightful to see you.” He kissed them each on the cheek. Turning to the good-looking blond-haired man beside him, he said, “Jeff, have you met Athena Moran, our mayor? And Meg Moran, the leading lady of our new cable network. Ladies, Senator Thompson …”

  “It’s Jeff Thompson. Mrs. Moran, I’ve certainly heard about you. Threw a curve or two at Dan Rossi, I hear.” He chuckled and turned to Meg. “And, of course, I recognize you, Ms. Moran. I haven’t missed a broadcast since you went on the air a few weeks ago. I was just telling Hughes and Lydia, you’re a delight to watch. You’re the right balance of intelligence and humor and beauty. That’s an irresistible combination in my book. Hughes was a genius to hire you, as I just finished telling him.”

  “Why, thank you, Senator.” Meg was actually blushing for the first time Athen could ever recall.

  “Jeff,” he reminded her, signaling for a black-tied waiter. “Champagne, ladies?”

  Meg’s eyes sparkled as the well-known bachelor senator proposed a toast to the success of the Chapman Cable Network. Athen took a step or two backward, trying to ease out of the picture while at the same time scanning the room for Quentin.

  “Athen Moran?” A tall, lanky man with light brown hair touched her elbow.

  “Yes?”

  “Christopher Moore. The state attorney general’s office? We met a few months back at the New Jersey Today conference.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. How are you?” She smiled, having no recollection of ever having seen his face before.

  “Fine. Fine.” His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down along with his head. “I must say you look absolutely stunning this evening.”

  “My thoughts exactly.” Quentin appeared out of nowhere and offered her another glass of champagne.

  “Thank you both for the compliments.” She shook her head to decline the drink.

  The band began to plan a soft, slow ballad, and Athen watched as couple after couple headed for the dance floor. Quentin looked about to speak, but Christopher Moore beat him to it.

  “Dance, Athen?” Before she could respond, Christopher steered her to the center of the room. “Excuse us, Quentin,” he said over his shoulder.

  Christopher was an accomplished dancer, and Athen tried her best to keep up with him. The song ended and another began and then yet another. She begged off the fourth, having long since run out of small talk.

  “How about a cool drink?” Christopher suggested.

  “A club soda or something along those lines would be fine,” she told him, surreptitiously scanning the room for Meg and the senator, for Quentin, for anyone else she knew, but they were nowhere to be seen.

  Christopher returned bearing a crystal goblet filled with shaved ice and wafer-thin slices of lime.

  “Pellegrino okay?” He handed her the glass.

  “Just right. Thanks.” She drank thirstily.

  “Would you like to make a stop at the buffet?” he asked, obviously charmed by her company. “Everything looks delicious.”

  “In a bit.” She suddenly felt closed in by the crowd. “I think I’d like to wander and ogle the decorations.”

  “Great idea. This house is really something, isn’t it? Let’s see what’s in here.” He led the way through a wooden door with an arched top. A huge mantel dominated the room, and a fire burned brightly. They stopped to chat with several small groups gathered around it. Christopher seemed to know just about everyone there.

  Moments later, they resumed their tour. Strolling into the dining room, he whispered, “I see Dr. Logan is here with his latest wife. Let’s see, is she number five or number six? I’ve lost count.”

  “Seriously?” Athen’s eyes widened. “Five or six wives?”

  “That I know of, anyway. There, the couple right there in front of the punch bowl.”

  “You mean the thin man with the white mustache …?”

  “… and the bad toupé, yes. You’re too polite to say it.”

  “His latest wife, you said?” Athen tried not to stare.

  Dr. Logan, short, tanned, and clearly well into his sixties, was overshadowed by the tall, shapely bleached blonde hanging adoringly on his arm. She wore shiny red stiletto heels and a red and silver beaded dress that barely covered her on either end, the skirt as short as hot pants and the top as revealing as a bikini. And Meg thought I had cleavage, Athen mused.

  “This one is Mindy, if I’m not mistaken. The others, in no particular order, were, let’s see, Candy, Lisa, Cherie, Samantha, and Tiffany. That’s six. And they all looked exactly the same. As soon as they hit thirty, he dumps them and finds another look-alike.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “But true. What do you think, this one has maybe, what, six more years?”

  “I don’t know. She seems awfully young.” She frowned as a vision of Dan Rossi with the very young Mary Jo Dolan flashed suddenly before her eyes.

  Christopher’s eyebrows wiggled up and down. “Just think of all the alimony. But then again, he can afford it. He has a lively practice and inherited a bundle from an uncle. Let’s take a peek at the room across the hall.”

  They followed several other guests who also could not resist taking a tour of the Christmas wonderland. Athen paused momentarily to permit another couple to exit the room and Christopher grabbed her arm playfully.

  “Why, Athen, you’ve stopped right under the mistletoe.” He grinned meaningfully.

  Good lord, was he going to kiss her?

  “Ah, Athen, there you are. I believe this is our dance.” Quentin’s hand slid onto the small of her back. “Excuse us, Chris.”

  “Why did you do that? I was having a good time,” she protested as he led her by the hand through the entrance hall to the ballroom.

  Ignoring her question, he took her in his arms and hummed along pleasantly with the band before asking, “Would you have let him?”

  “Would I have let who what?”

  “Would you have let Moore kiss you?” His breath was warm against her ear and neck.

  “How do you know he was going to kiss me?”

  “It was written all over his face,” Quentin said. “Not that I blame him, of course. However, dragging you from one room to the next, from the dining room to the library, to the drawing room, looking for the mistletoe … well, I thought that was a bit obvious.”

  “He wasn’t dragging me,” she protested, then laughed. “Quentin Forbes, you were following us.”

  “Every step of the way,” he admitted.

  “Why?”

  “You think I’d let you disappear into the night with a womanizer like Christopher Moore? Especially after Brenda had the florist tack mistletoe up here and there?”

  The musi
c stopped and several of the dancers in the crowd applauded enthusiastically.

  “And what if I had, Quentin? I haven’t seen you beating much of a path to my door lately. As a matter of fact, every time I see you, you take great pains to run in the opposite direction. Don’t deny it, you’ve been doing it for months.”

  “I don’t deny it,” he said, embracing her as the music began again. “Have I told you how beautiful you are tonight?”

  “Yes.” She was beginning to steam and wanted no more of his flattery. “Quentin, I have had enough of this. I don’t understand you. First you’re my friend, then you turn on me and make my life just one long run through Hades. Then you like me again and you take me out and we get along splendidly. I didn’t imagine that, did I? I mean, I thought we were …”

  “Splendidly is exactly right,” he readily agreed. “You didn’t imagine anything.”

  “Then the next thing I know, you take off like a bat out of hell every time I get within five feet of you.”

  “Ten feet,” he muttered. “I tried to keep it to about ten feet. And you left out the part where you wouldn’t speak to me, remember? You were pissed off because I …”

  “I remember exactly why I was pissed off, and I apologized to you. I thought you’d accepted my apology.”

  “I did.”

  “But you’ve still ignored me for the past few months.”

  “I was cordial when we ran into each other,” he protested.

  She’d grown weary of his playful quips. “I never figured you as one to play games, but I feel you’ve been playing one with me.”

  He was silent, holding her close and slowly rubbing her cheek with his. When the song ended he took her by the hand and led her to the small morning room off the kitchen. He turned on a light and bent down to stoke the fire before placing another log on it.

  She leaned back against the table in the middle of the room, her arms folded across her chest. He turned to her, walked slowly to where she stood, and ran his hands slowly up and down her arms, staring deeply into her eyes. He kissed her mouth and her chin, her cheeks, her neck, and her shoulder before moving back to her mouth again.

  “Stop it.” She wanted an answer, even while her knees buckled and her heart pounded and she wanted him to keep on kissing her. “I want an answer.”

  “I thought things would be easier if we put our relationship on hold for a while.”

  “Easier for whom?”

  “Both of us. Okay, yes, easier for me, mostly. Look, when I did that interview with Rossi, even though I wanted to put his crooked little face through the wall, I had to be objective.” He paused and sat next to her on the table, taking her hand. “When the interview ran, you were so hurt—not because Rossi said unflattering things about you, but because I wrote the story. You thought I cared about you—and I did, very much—but that I hurt you anyway for the sake of a story.”

  “Quentin, I told you, I understood. At least, after I thought it through I did. It’s all right. I thought we’d put this behind us.”

  “It’s never going to be behind us, not as long as I remain on that beat—it’s going to happen again and again.”

  “If it’s any consolation, it didn’t hurt so much after the first time.”

  “The article I did on Wolmar, when he called you an inexperienced embarrassment to the city …”

  “I had to consider the source. They weren’t your words, they were his. Anyway, I am inexperienced, though if I’ve embarrassed anyone from time to time, it’s mostly been me.”

  “And the one where I quoted Rossi as saying that the city will be lucky if it doesn’t go into bankruptcy between now and next November?”

  “Rolled right off my back,” she said with a shrug.

  “How ’bout the one where Rossi …”

  “Quentin, this is silly. Yes, I lost my head after that first article, but since then, I’ve come to understand that it’s your job and that what you think and what you report are not necessarily the same thing. I thought I made that clear to you. At least I tried to.”

  “I figured once Rossi wins the primary, he’ll forget you’re alive. So I thought if I backed off for a few months, it would be easier for both of us. Then maybe we could pick up where we left off.”

  “Did it help? Backing off?”

  “God, no.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “It was a pretty stupid idea, if I do say so myself. I was so busy looking at you, I missed half of what you said at every press conference. Lucky for the Herald, we have another reporter assigned to cover the city.”

  “I noticed that. What’s up with that?”

  “I asked Hughes to bring on someone else for that desk. Look, I had to make a choice. If you and I kept seeing each other, as long as you were in office and I was working for the paper, there was going to be a conflict. I tried to convince myself that I could be objective, but, well, you saw how that worked out.”

  “That was my fault, not yours.”

  “It doesn’t really matter who was at fault. The point is that my reporting on the city created conflict between us. But if I quit back then, I’d have been letting Hughes down. With Brenda leaving the paper to work at CCN, I didn’t feel I could walk out on him at the same time.”

  “If you felt that strongly, why didn’t you ask Brenda to assign you to another desk?”

  “Every desk was already covered. I couldn’t bump someone else out of their job just because I wanted it.”

  “So what you’re saying is, it was easier to dump me.”

  “I did not dump you,” he protested. “I merely put you on hold.”

  “Call it what you like. It still hurt.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “And I don’t see where anything has been resolved. I’m still mayor. You’re still working at the paper.”

  “Not anymore.”

  She tilted her head to one side, not sure she understood.

  “I resigned this morning.”

  “You …”

  He nodded.

  “But I thought you said you couldn’t quit on Hughes …”

  “Three months ago, I couldn’t have done it. Hughes didn’t offer me a job at the Herald just because there was an opening at City Hall. He wanted to bring me into his family, wanted me to feel part of it since he’d married my mother, and he wanted to offer me a means of making a living while I worked on my book. I owe him, Athen. I couldn’t just walk out on him when he had no one there to pick up the slack.”

  “But Brenda’s still at CCN. That hasn’t changed.”

  “Hughes and I had a very long and very honest chat a few weeks ago. The end result was that he offered to hire someone else to cover the city. The agreement was that I’d stay until the new reporter had her feet on the ground, then I could leave if I still wanted to. We already had someone on staff who’d been going to the press conferences with me. She’s a natural. She’ll do a great job.”

  “Wait a minute, you gave up your job …?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s huge, Quentin.”

  “It is.”

  “I don’t understand why you didn’t bother to have this conversation with me before.”

  “What would you have said if I had?”

  “I’ve already said it. I understood the position you were in. If you have to write something negative, then write it. If I deserve to be criticized, say so. If not, I’ll have to defend myself.”

  “The part you don’t understand is that I could not continue to fall in love you while at the same time, on any given day, something I would have to print would hurt you.”

  “I just said, I was all right with …” She arched her eyebrows. “Were you? Falling in love with me?”

  “A little bit more every day since I met you.” He leaned closer until they were forehead to forehead.

  “Want to try again?”

  “I think that’s supposed to be my line.” He kissed her nose and nibbled on her bottom lip.

  “That was your l
ine last time.” She drew him closer, reaching up to kiss him, feeling their bodies mold together through the soft velvet of her gown.

  “Quentin.” The door swung open and Brenda rushed in. “Quentin …”

  He reluctantly disengaged his lips and looked over his shoulder at his stepsister.

  “I just got a call from downtown. There’s a fire.”

  “Where?” Athen asked.

  “Fourth Street,” Brenda said meaningfully.

  “Fourth Street …?” Athen repeated, then understanding fully what Brenda was telling them, cried, “Oh, my God, no …”

  “Come on, Athen.” Quentin grabbed her hand and led her from the room. “Brenda, see if you can find Athen’s wrap and meet me at the front door. I’ll get a car and drive around.”

  27

  The orange flames that filled the sky above Woodside Heights were visible from the end of the Chapmans’ drive. Quentin took the winding curves on two wheels, yet neither Brenda nor Athen appeared to notice.

  Fourth Street was blocked off at Schuyler Avenue and a uniformed police officer directed them to turn left, away from the fire. Athen rolled down her window and called to him.

  “Officer, it’s Mayor Moran. I need to get through.”

  “Oh, sorry.” He walked to the passenger side of the car. “I didn’t see you.”

  “How bad is it?” she asked anxiously.

  “About as bad as anything I’ve ever seen.” He leaned into the car slightly. “They got trucks up there from every company in the city and every surrounding town, but it’s not doing much good.”

  “How close can we get?” Quentin asked impatiently.

  “The city’s fire marshal doesn’t want any cars up there, on account of all the pumpers. Plus, there’s the danger of the buildings collapsing, so he doesn’t want anyone to go through. But you could probably drive a block or two more, then park and walk as far as they’ll let you.”

  Quentin was off in a shot, turning briskly at the next corner and pulling into the last empty spot closest to the blockade.

  “How fast can you move on those shoes?” He gesturing toward Athen’s feet as he put the car in park.