by Shirley Jump
Then, it hit him. Allison Gray. His study partner in Trig, hell, most of his math classes. He’d sat beside her, noticed she grasped the tricky math concepts and one question after class led to another, led eventually to early morning study sessions that saved his butt senior year.
Allison Gray. He glanced again at Allie Dean.
Could it be? Two women, similar names, both liking Chinese food?
Then he shook himself. Given the proliferation of egg rolls across the USA, he’d be hard-pressed to find someone who didn’t like Chinese. And the fact that these two women, one from his past, one from his present, had similar first names, was just coincidence. They had nothing in common looks-wise, and as far as he knew, Allison Gray had moved far from Tempest immediately after graduation, maintaining few, if any, ties with anyone in town.
Especially him.
“Duncan? Were you listening?”
He drew himself back to Allie. “Sorry, got distracted there. What’d you ask me?”
“Whether you like hot and spicy food.”
“I do. But you never answered my question. Are you hot and spicy, too?”
She paused a moment, eyes on the road, avoiding his gaze. “I am now.”
“A woman of mystery,” he said, intrigued—by her, by the unanswered puzzle in his head. “Are you going to tell me more?”
This time, she flashed her smile right at him. Dead-on, that gesture had a whole lot of wattage. “I’d need to know you much better before I play too much show-and-tell.”
“I thought we got to know each other quite well back in the farmhouse.”
Her face flushed. He liked the heightened pink in her cheeks. It gave her an air of vulnerability, another shade to her personality.
“I like to keep you on your toes,” she said.
He chuckled. “You do that well.”
“That’s my plan.”
“Speaking of your plan, tell me what a location scout does. Besides show up on people’s doorsteps and demand to use their property.”
“Hey, I wasn’t on your doorstep and I didn’t demand.” She cast a teasing glance his way. “Yet.”
“The house isn’t for rent, no matter what you say.”
He saw her bite her lip and decided he didn’t just like the way she looked when she was wet, or embarrassed, but also when she was frustrated.
“Everyone has a price.”
“Not me.”
“We’ll see about that,” she said, her voice dark and husky.
He liked the determined side of her, too. Hell, did the woman have a side he didn’t find intriguing?
That sent his mind straight down a path paved with whipped cream again. So much for his plans to advance his career. So far, all he was advancing was his libido.
They reached the restaurant and pulled into the parking lot before Duncan—who couldn’t remember being at a loss of words before—thought of a rejoinder. By then, a petite Thai woman had led them to their table, giving them a quick bow. Her gaze stayed on Duncan, though, and she stammered out a quick, red-faced “Mr. Henry” before she returned to the hostess station.
“You have multinational appeal,” Allie said.
“Yeah, well, all they see is this.” He waved a hand around his face.
“And you’d rather be seen for your brains not your brawn, is that it? For what’s inside instead of what’s out?” Something flickered in her gaze—understanding?—then it faded.
“To get that, I should have gone into something other than TV. Law or something respectable, like business. Then my father would have been proud.”
“He didn’t agree with your career choices?”
Duncan shook his head as he took his drink from the waitress. “I never quite lived up to any of my father’s expectations.”
Before they could take the conversation further, they were interrupted by the task of ordering. Relief ran through Duncan. He’d rather visit Timbuktu than his past. His father’s continual disapproval, no matter how many touchdowns he scored. The impossible standard to which Duncan never measured up. The perfectionism that dictated an image, an image all based on a lie.
The two of them ordered a variety of dishes, to have a sampling of the menu. The population of Indianapolis clearly hadn’t discovered the My Thai restaurant yet. Only two other couples sat in the restaurant, talking quietly, sipping at hot green tea.
“You haven’t told me anything about yourself,” Duncan said as he loaded his plate with a little pad thai, gai yang, and yam nua. The array of scents from the Asian spices, coupled with the familiar scents of grilled meats, awakened his appetite and he dug in, pleased to find the food as good as Allie had promised.
“Maybe I want to remain a mystery.”
“Then this won’t be much of a date, will it?”
“Is that what it is?” Allie spun a lemon wedge in her icy water with a straw. “A date?”
“A man, a woman, alone, having dinner. Seems like a date to me.”
“You already know my name, my job. What I’m here for. What Chicken Flicks wants with Tempest.”
“Chicken Flicks. I still can’t get over that name.” He chuckled.
“Hey, don’t laugh. You were the one covering a live tabby dump on TV.”
He grinned. “You have me there.”
“Besides, it’s the perfect name for a company that makes your standard movies about some guy in a hockey mask wiping out teenagers engaged in various levels of sin.”
“And is that the kind of movie you want to make?”
“Of course.” Her nod came a bit too quick, a bit too short.
“You don’t strike me as the horror film type.”
“I love to be scared.” She looked at him, her emerald eyes dead-on with his. “You, for instance, scare me to no end.”
“I’m not scary,” Duncan said. “Not at all.”
“Oh, but you are, Duncan Henry. You’re the kind of guy mothers warn their daughters to stay away from. The kind fathers chase off with a shotgun. The kind who has ‘broken-heart expert’ tattooed on his bicep.”
He took a sip from his tea, avoiding the reputation she’d just nailed. Allie Dean had skated very close to the kind of man he used to be—or at least the perception he’d given off. Part of the Henry legacy, the part he disliked the most. “Sounds like you have personal experience with that kind of man.”
“Very personal.” Her gaze met his and the uncanny feeling that he should know her struck again. But there was nothing familiar in her deep green eyes, in the crimson curve of her mouth. “So, what do you do at WTMT-TV? Exactly?”
He had the feeling she already knew the answer to her question. And why shouldn’t she? He was on every afternoon and evening. That’s what he got for trying to pretend he was something he wasn’t. “I’m not exactly a reporter. I’m the weatherman.”
“So did you know it was going to rain that day at the farm, or was that just a convenient little storm?”
He grinned. “Both.”
She laughed. “What does a weatherman do, anyway? I guess I thought they just read the forecast, but I bet there’s a lot more involved than just that.”
“You really want to know?”
“We’re in sister industries. Of course I do.”
“Well, I look at the sky, then at the computer, and tell people whether it’s going to rain or”—at this, he grinned—“be sunny.”
“There’s more to it than that,” Allie pressed. “Tell me how it works. How do you really know what the temperature is going to be?”
With every other woman Duncan had dated, the short, one-sentence explanation, coupled with a bit of flirting, had been enough. No one he’d dated had ever been interested in more than the sound-bite version of his job.
“It’s, ah, pretty technical.” Leave it at that. Don’t probe any further. His witty set of answers only went so far.
“I work for a production company. I understand technical.”
Oh, shit. He couldn�
��t explain what he did. Hell, even he didn’t know what he did. And the Magic 8 Ball was back in his desk drawer, its little set of twenty answers far away.
“I don’t want to talk about work,” Duncan said.
“Then what shall we talk about?” Allie put a finger to her chin. “Oh, I know. Chicken Flicks using your property for its next film.”
He leaned forward, arms crossed over the cloth-covered table. At least she’d changed the subject, albeit to one he liked less. “Why my farmhouse? This is Indiana. You can’t sneeze without running into a farm.”
“I like yours. It has…atmosphere.”
“Or is that an excuse?”
She arched a brow. “Excuse?”
“To get to know me better.” Was she, like him, using the job to spend time with him? Who was he kidding when he’d proposed that idea to Steve? Sure, this movie thing was a scoop, a really great one, but would he be half as excited about it if the location scout had been some balding guy in his fifties?
Hell, no.
Allie leaned back, arms across her chest. “You really think I couldn’t possibly be here for a legitimate reason? That maybe this isn’t about you and me, but about my job?”
“And is that what you were doing back inside my house? Taking off your shirt, kissing me? All part of your job?”
“Well…no,” she said with a grin that said he’d touched on the truth. “That was purely for fun.”
Against his hip, his cell phone vibrated. Duncan wanted to take it off, throw it across the room. Chuck the responsibility for just one night. But he couldn’t. He already knew full well where one night could lead.
“Excuse me,” he said to Allie, cursing the timing, the interruption, but unable to ignore it. He flipped out the Motorola. “Duncan Henry.”
“Out on a date?” Katie asked.
“Yes. Did you have an emergency?”
“Mrs. Loman—” Katie’s voice broke off.
Duncan bit back a sigh and turned his body slightly away from the table. “Mrs. Loman what? Didn’t give you what you wanted?”
“No, she fell. She’s hurt and you don’t even care because you’re out with some woman on a date.”
“She fell?” Panic rose in his chest. Another accident, and again, he’d been away from home, from Katie. “Are you sure?”
In answer, Katie pulled the phone away from herself. He could hear the faint strains of someone moaning.
“Did you call the paramedics?”
“You really want Tempest’s finest volunteers in here?”
Duncan cursed under his breath. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Katie didn’t answer him, she simply hung up. Duncan immediately signaled to the waiter and asked him to grab a cab. Duncan knew he could have just as easily asked Allie to drive him back but that would have meant explaining—and explaining about Katie was something Duncan didn’t want to do.
“Seems I’m ditching you again,” he said to Allie, reaching into his wallet for enough money to cover the bill—and his conscious at leaving early. “My…employee had an accident and I need to get over there.”
“At the TV station?”
“No.” He couldn’t tell Allie about Katie. Hell, he couldn’t tell anyone about Katie.
When the accident had happened, his sister had begged him to keep it quiet. Devastated by what she had become, she’d refused to leave the house, and refused to have anyone but Mrs. Loman, their nanny when Duncan and Katie were children, come and care for her.
“Well,” Allie said, clearly frustrated by his second inopportune ditching. “Another time then.”
“Another time,” Duncan echoed, leaving one more attractive woman at a dinner table, leaving before he could ask her about the interview that would get him closer to his career goals, and wondering whether there ever would be a time for him.
Chapter 11
“Allison Gray, that’s who you are.”
Allie froze. She’d left the My Thai restaurant shortly after Duncan, leaving half-eaten plates of food on the table and refusing the waiter’s attempts to box up the leftovers. Exhausted by the day, she’d been thinking only of the comfy hotel bed.
Not who might be waiting in the shadows to expose her.
“Am I right?”
She had to face him sometime. Allie pivoted. Ira Levine stood behind her, a bag of Thai takeout in his hands, a mousy woman standing several feet away by a small dark Honda. Ira wore a cat-that-figured-out-the-canary’s-weak-spot smile.
“Excuse me?” she said.
Ira moved closer. “Seven years ago. High school graduation. You were the valedictorian, but you ran away from the ceremony before you delivered your speech. Randy Newsome captured your picture and we ran it on the front page of the Tempest Weekly.” He leaned back and beamed. “I told you, I never forget a face. Though you did make it hard by changing your hair color and the style. Not to mention losing all the weight. I mean, you look awesome.” His face reddened. “Not that I mean anything untoward by that…Oh, geez.”
“You remember my face, all these years later?”
“Well, that and your handwriting.” A sheepish grin took over his face. “That’s really what gave it away. I’ve seen you write the words ‘production’ and ‘experience’ before. I recognized the loops in your ps and ts.”
Panic clutched at her. Ira was the editor of the paper. She might as well take out a billboard and announce her identity. She wasn’t ready for her secret to be exposed, not yet. Not until she had all her pieces in place, her success assured.
Allie reached for Ira’s arm, his skin warm and flushed from the food inside the bag. Behind them, his date’s eyebrows arched possessively before she got in the car and slammed the door. Ira either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “Ira, you can’t tell anyone.”
“Why not? You’re like the story of the century, at least for this bottom-of-the-barrel town.”
“No, Ira, I’m not.” She had to make him understand, to stop him. Of all the people who knew her, wouldn’t Ira get it?
Ira stepped closer, his eyes glittering with excitement. “Allison, you’re one of those inspirational stories. Those, what do they call ’em, beef stew or—”
“Chicken Soup,” Allie supplied, then kicked herself.
“Yeah, Chicken Soup things. Hell, look at you. You’re as gorgeous as a model. I could run that graduation photo beside one of you now and—”
“No,” she said. “No, no, no.”
“Why not? Don’t you think there’s some girl sitting at home right now, overweight and crying, thinking her life will never get better? Or some nerdy kid who was shut in a locker and forgotten about until seventh period, just because he wore glasses? Think of all those misfits who are lonely and wishing someone understood them.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you, Ira. To me, to us. But I’m not here to be a poster child for the outsiders. I want to keep that past where it is—behind me. Don’t you think it’s better to forget those days in the locker? That fat girl in gym class? What good is it going to do to bring all that up? I’d rather people see who I am now than who I used to be.”
He thought about that for a second, then shook his head. “You can’t really grow up and move on if you don’t deal with the past, don’t you agree?”
“No.” Nothing would make her go back there. Allie was all about the future. She had only visited the past to give the people who had tortured her a taste of their own medicine.
Ira took a step forward, the steam from his bag wafting up to give Allie a mini-facial. “Sometimes, the overweight girl doesn’t know how much her friendship meant to the nerdy kid. How it made him feel like he wasn’t the only one on the wrong side of the popularity line.”
“I’m glad,” she said softly. The scent of pork fried rice and egg rolls and their shared memories filled the space between them, like a Chinese buffet of their past. “And I’m glad you were there for me, too. But I still can’t go back there. You don�
��t understand.”
“A story on you can make a difference, Allie, to some girl, sitting at home, feeling left out, misunderstood.”
Allie ground her toe into the parking lot, smushing the stone dust into nothing. “I’m not going back to being Allison Gray, Ira. Not for you, not for some other overweight girl, not for anyone. If you print anything about who I was, I’ll sue you for slander.”
“Slander’s spoken. Libel’s written.”
“Whatever.” She threw up her hands. “All I want to do is get this movie set up, then get the hell out of this town and never come back. I’m Allie Dean now. Allison Gray is dead and buried, along with her Slim-Fast bars and her Jenny Craig menus. Leave her be.”
Ira studied her for a long time, then gave one quick nod. “Fine. Besides, what do I know? I’m just the editor of a small town, mean-nothing paper. Forgive me for confusing you with someone else. A friend I thought I knew.”
Then he walked away, shoulders sagging with disappointment. She watched him get in his car and leave, guilt and regret weighing on Allie more than all those pounds ever had.
Duncan Henry had reduced himself to begging. Pleading. Offering untold sums of money.
But Mrs. Loman remained resolute. “You know I’d do anything for you, Duncan. Anything but this. I love Katie, but when she drinks…” her voice trailed off and she threw up her hands.
He looked down at the cast on Mrs. Loman’s ankle, white on white against her hospital bed. Katie, drunk again, had thrown a bottle across the room in yet another temper tantrum. Mrs. Loman, not expecting the puddle of alcohol on the floor, had slipped and fallen on her way into Katie’s room with a dinner tray. When Duncan got home, he found the hall littered with pea-and-carrot shrapnel.
“I understand, Mrs. Loman,” Duncan said. He sat down on the edge of her bed and laid a hand on the arm of the sixty-five-year-old woman who had been part caretaker, part grandmother to him for so many years, he couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t seen Mrs. Loman inside the Henry house. “I appreciate all you’ve done.”
Her eyes filled with unshed tears. “If anything changes, call me.”