by Diana Palmer
She froze. “I did accept,” she reminded him.
“I want you back in the house by midnight,” he told her. “I’m not going to have my secretary walking around in a yawning stupor because of late nights. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” she said through her teeth. “It’s clear.”
She got out of the car and marched into the house, oblivious to the heat, the sound of the Rolls purring down the driveway—and the pair of dark eyes that watched her until she was out of sight.
Defiantly, she wore a new, exotic dress for the date, a swirling confection of aqua chiffon that had a neckline that just escaped immodesty. She put her hair up into a loose topknot, leaving tiny curls around her face, and loaded her throat and wrists with perfume. She paid more attention than usual to cosmetics as well, and a stranger stared back at her from the mirror in her room.
“Wow,” Lillian said when she came downstairs, “who are you out to impress?”
“A comrade at arms,” she replied tightly. “An ex-reporter who makes me laugh, which is a nice change for me.”
“Hmm,” Lillian said. “A new fella?”
“One of Mr. Devereaux’s employees, if we have to get technical about it,” came the reply. “And a very nice man.”
“That reminds me,” Lillian said, “the Mister called while you were in the tub to say he wouldn’t be in until late. He said to remind you about midnight—that make any sense?” she added with a frown.
Dana flushed. “Oh, yes, it makes sense,” she replied, thinking she’d come home when she was bloody well ready, and if he didn’t like it, he could lump it!
Lillian eyed her closely. “I don’t suppose you’d know why he was in such a bad mood? I asked him if he was taking the dragon out, and he said, ‘hell, yes, he was,’ and that it was all your fault.”
She felt an empty sensation in the pit of her stomach. Surely, he hadn’t planned to take her out to supper…?
The doorbell rang, cutting into the conversation, and Pat Melbourne was standing outside the door in a stylish rust-colored jacket with matching shirt and dark slacks, and a warm smile.
He gave her a long wolf-whistle when he finished his thorough scrutiny. “Lovely lady, I feel inadequate to escort a princess.”
She frowned thoughtfully. “Doesn’t that have something to do with lily ponds and magic spells?”
“And your friendly neighborhood frog,” he added with a grin. “Shall we proceed? My pumpkin awaits without.”
“Wrong fairly tale,” she reminded him. “And, personally, I prefer unicorns to pumpkins.”
“I’ll remember.”
Unicorns. Adrian. She sighed as she got into the comfortable coupe with Pat. Everything seemed to remind her of the dark prince, even the night. Her mind drifted back to that walk in the garden when the white roses were all around them—to the lake and the feel of his big arms swallowing her on the dance floor. She felt her heart leap. And then, there was today, and the bracelet. She’d worn it against all her misgivings, and she touched it now, ran her fingers over that cold green fire that burned no less than the feeling in her heart for the man who’d given it to her. It matched my dress, she told herself, and turned her attention quickly to Pat.
“How did you get into reporting in the first place?” she asked him.
He laughed softly. “I was kidnapped by a wandering tribe of itinerant poets who sold me to an editor,” he told her. “You have to admit it sounds more romantic than saying I went through four years of journalism school and walked right into a job as a police reporter.”
“I was general assignments,” she replied. “I wasn’t sure I could handle the police beat.”
“It can get rough,” he recalled. “I covered a murder once and the suspect’s brother caught me in a dark alley one night and beat me up. He was a professional fighter it turned out, and the publicity hadn’t helped him any more than it had helped his brother.”
“Ouch,” she murmured. “Did it do any lasting damage?”
“Sure did,” he admitted with a grin. “It destroyed my faith in humanity.”
She laughed. “Were you at it long enough to get hardboiled?”
“Anybody who stays in it for more than three years full-time gets hardboiled,” he said quietly. “You can’t keep caring with an amateur’s intensity—it’ll tear your guts out. You found that out, didn’t you?”
She nodded. They were stopped at a traffic light, with the brilliant street lights and business signs making visual fireworks all around them in the darkness. They highlighted the soft lines of her face.
“I covered a flood,” she said quickly. “Most of the victims were children.”
“I understand,” he replied. “That kind of thing you don’t ever get hardened to. Maybe it’s a good sign. What good is a reporter who can’t feel?”
“Not much. But things get to me more than they used to.”
“Did you talk about it to someone?” he asked, pulling the car forward as the light changed.
“Yes.” “Oh, yes,” she could have told him, “I rambled on and cried for an eternity in my boss’ arms in the middle of the night.” But that might have sounded just a bit unconventional, so she kept it to herself.
“Still want to go back to it?” he persisted.
She took a deep breath. “I don’t know. That’s honest. Sometimes I feel as if I don’t even exist. I’m just a pad and a pen and a camera. Do you know, I get invited to places I couldn’t even get into if I weren’t a reporter?!”
He nodded. “It goes with the job. And,” he added humorously, “you catch the devil for everything that ever goes wrong—classified ads with missing phone numbers, society news with misspelled names—and never mind that you don’t have anything to do with those departments. You work for the paper, so it’s your fault.”
“Gosh, you really do miss it, don’t you?” Dana teased.
He drew a deep breath. “Yeah. I really do miss it. But I don’t plan to stay single all my life, and I had to make a move or end up begging jobs as a copywriter just to keep my hand in. It gets in your blood.”
“I know. Part of me wants to go back.” She lowered her eyes. “Part of me wants to forget that I ever knew how to type.”
“The advantage of being a personnel chief for a plant,” Pat told her, “is that if a bank gets robbed at two a.m., nobody calls you up to tell you about it.”
She smiled. “How lovely!”
“Your boss didn’t want you to come out with me tonight,” he said as he pulled the car into the parking lot of a seafood chain restaurant and cut off the engine. “Does he have a claim on you?”
She drew a long breath. “Three years ago I was working for a magazine and I put on a disguise and went to work for Adrian Devereaux as a secretary to get the inside story of his wife’s death. To make a long story short, a terrible error was made that the proofreader didn’t catch, and it ruined him. He lost everything. It’s taken him those years in-between to climb back up to the top, and somebody has to pay for what happened. Since I wrote the story…well, you get the general idea.” She glanced at him, at his suddenly set features. “I think I might have preferred your professional fighter in a dark alley.”
“You could walk out,” he said shortly.
“He could have me brought back.” She fingered the beautiful bracelet. “Besides,” she added softly, “it isn’t as bad as I expected it to be. In many ways, he’s a very lonely man.”
He muttered something noncommittal and came around to open the door. “I hope you like seafood,” he said. “I didn’t even ask…”
“Oh, I like seafood very much. I once did a story,” she recalled, “about a retired seaman who did woodcarvings.”
“Tell me about it.”
And she did. They traded memories, and stories, all evening. Pat was easy to be with, easy to talk to. She enjoyed it, and sensed that he did too. It was good to just sit and talk shop, to talk about writing and reporting with someone who cou
ld say more than, “oh, how nice,” and change the subject.
“Let’s do this again,” Pat said as he let her out at the front door just after one o’clock in the morning.
“All right,” she agreed with a smile.
“Saturday? We’ll drive up into the mountains, and I’ll show you a small town that’ll make you think you’re in Germany.”
“Really?” she teased. “Well, I’ll hunt up my dirndl!”
“Eight o’clock too early for you?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’m am early bird. See you then.”
“It’s a date. Goodnight.”
She waved to him and went up the steps lazily. She was still recalling bits and pieces of conversation when she got inside, only to come face to face with sudden reality.
Adrian stood at the foot of the steps, still fully dressed except for his jacket and tie, looking like a stormy day.
“I said midnight,” he told her quietly.
“I’m simply years past my sixteenth birthday,” she said in a juvenile voice, raising her face impudently. “Unless you want to adopt me and put me back in patent leather shoes and ruffles, you’d do better to live your own life and let me manage mine. I’ve been doing it without your help for a long time.”
His eyes narrowed, glittering and angry. “You belong to me for six months, Persephone,” he reminded her, “and for those six months if I yell jump, you ask ‘how high?’ Is that clear?”
She stood her ground. “I work for you. I don’t belong to you!” she threw back at him.
“Don’t you, honey?” His eyes centered on the lovely bracelet she’d forgotten to put in her purse, watching the light scatter it into green glints of fire against her slender wrist. “You might as well be wearing a brand. Did you tell Melbourne where it came from?”
“He didn’t have the bad manners to ask,” she returned.
“Why are you wearing it at all?” he demanded in a tone that held the suggestion of a threat.
She swallowed nervously. “It…matches my dress,” she said in a thin voice.
He shouldered away from the banister he’d been leaning against and came toward her lazily. He stopped just in front of her and touched a big, gentle hand to the bun on top of her head.
“Did you have fun?” he asked carelessly.
“We…we went to a seafood restaurant and had fried oysters,” she replied, drowning in the scent of his masculine aftershave lotion, the nearness of his big, warm body.
“And talked shop?” he persisted gently.
“Well, yes,” she said weakly. Her eyes traced the open collar of his shirt. “We…we talked about stories we’d covered and I told him about the…the flood….”
“You told me about it, too, remember?” he asked in a slow, seductive tone. “In my arms at two in the morning.”
“I don’t have nightmares anymore,” she murmured evasively.
“I frightened you out of your wits,” he recalled gently. “I thought you were worldly, and sophisticated, and found to my horror…”
“Please, I’m very…tired,” she whispered quickly.
His fingers traced the flush in her cheek. “Do I torment you, little girl?” he mused deeply. “It works both ways, you know.”
She lifted her curious eyes to his. He caught the wrist that was adorned by the emerald bracelet and put it to his lips in a gesture that was strangely exciting.
“Happy birthday, Persephone,” he murmured. “You look like an angel and I feel like the devil, and I really think you’d better get up those stairs while I remind myself how immoral it would be to seduce a little taffy kitten seventeen years my junior.”
The look in his eyes made her head for the stairs. “I thought that required a little cooperation,” she said over her shoulder with forced bravado.
“Dana.”
She turned and met his eyes, saw the confidence, the patience in them.
“After the first thirty seconds,” he said very quietly, “you wouldn’t be fighting me.”
She swallowed down the fear. “I call that conceit.”
He smiled, a sensuous smile that made her pulse race. “Little girl, if you think I’ve gone through my entire routine with you, you’re even less sophisticated than I gave you credit for.” The smile deepened. “I think, very soon, I’m going to fill in some of the gaps in your education.”
“Oh, no, you’re not!” she returned.
His eyes went up and down her slender figure, lingering on the deep cut of the bodice. “A challenge like that can be a subtle invitation, did you know?”
“No, but I’ll bet the dragon does,” she said without thinking.
Both dark brows went up together and knitted. “The dragon?”
In too deep to back out, she lifted her face proudly. “Miss Braunns,” she said carelessly.
A tiny smile curved his mouth. “Jealous, honey?” he asked insolently.
She flushed angrily. “I don’t envy her in your bed, if that’s what you mean!” she flashed.
“How would you know, little cat,” he asked in a low, soft tone, “since you’ve yet to share my bed in that respect? Not forgetting,” he added wickedly, “that you’ve slept in my arms.”
“That was…that was entirely…innocent!” she faltered.
“On your part,” he corrected. He paused to light a cigarette. “I learned the tortures of the damned before I finally got to sleep,” he said quietly.
She gaped at him, her eyes curious as they met the deep hunger in his.
“If you don’t stop looking at me like that…” he warned in a tight, husky voice.
The hint was enough. She turned and ran up the stairs.
Nine
It wasn’t until she and Pat were pulling into the small remodeled Alpine village of Helen that Dana began to wonder why Adrian had been waiting for her the night before.
As they wandered through the Bavarian-style shops and merged with the crush of tourists, it played on her mind. Could it be possible that he was jealous of her? For just an instant, she was on top of the world—until she remembered that he’d been out with Fayre. Probably he’d only just got in himself and was on his way upstairs when he heard her arrive. Her heart fell.
“Hey, why the long face?” Pat teased, and pulled her arm through his as they walked back toward the car. “There’s a short order place across the street. Let’s get a few hot dogs and some fries and go picnic on the Chattahoochee. Would you like that?”
Her face lit up. “Oh, yes! Could we go to that little roadside park in Roberts-town?” she asked.
“I thought I was showing you someplace new,” he teased.
She shook her head with a smile. “I used to work for a small weekly a few miles away. I know this part of the state like the back of my hand.”
“We live and learn,” Pat said with a wry shake of his head.
It was like finding a tiny spot of heaven, the little roadside park with its towering oaks leaning out over the wide, bubbling river and its stone tables and benches. Dana barely took time to eat before she clambered down the bank, holding on to the exposed roots of a huge sycamore, and walked barefooted into the cold water.
“Careful you don’t fall in,” Pat called to her from the safety of the bank.
“I’m a river rat,” she called back. “I’ve been all the way down to Helen in this river in an inner tube, and I’ve got the scars to prove it.”
“Crazy woman,” Pat sighed. “Typical reporter. Why do we take risks like that, hmm?”
She gazed at the fast running water as it slipped over the huge boulders made smooth by years of watery friction, at the low hanging branches, with their emerald green leaves, at the shady, watery peace of the river.
“Pat, would life really be worth living without a little danger?” she asked quietly.
He shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
She closed her eyes and listened to the water as it whispered noisily in its banks, wondering vaguely at the p
eace it gave her. The sound of running water once had fostered nightmares. Now, when she thought about it, all she seemed to remember was a pair of hard arms holding her, rocking her, and the sound of a deep voice murmuring against her hair. She sighed with a tiny smile.
“I hate to break up what looks like a lifelong love affair,” Pat called, “but it’s getting late, and it is a two hour drive back.”
She waded back to shore and pulled herself up on the bank. Her face was alight with pleasure as she smiled up at Pat.
“Thank you for today,” she told him. “It’s been delicious.”
He chuckled. “I couldn’t have put it better myself. I enjoyed it too, and I wish we could stay longer. But sometimes the job goes home with me, and this is one of those weekends. Thanks,” he added darkly, “to our mutual boss.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, following him to the car.
“Call it homework,” he said with a wry grin.
She grimaced. “Spite would be a better adjective.”
“You told me he didn’t have any claim on you,” he said as he cranked the car and pulled out into traffic.
“We had an argument about the time I was supposed to get in last night,” she replied quietly. “One of many small disagreements that keep cropping up. It’s me he’s really after, not you, even though it may seem like it.”
“In that case,” Pat grinned, “maybe you could get him to give you overtime work instead of me.”
“Patrick my friend, for you I’ll try,” she laughed.
But she didn’t. Because for the next few days, Adrian Devereaux was as remote and cold as one of the outer planets. He barely spoke to her except on business, and each time Patrick called for her at night to take her out, he shut himself up in his den and didn’t even speak to the young man. It came as something of a shock when he came home early Friday afternoon and told her to start packing.
“We’re going to the lake for the weekend,” he said shortly.
“We?” she echoed.
“You and Lillian and I,” he growled, “who the hell did you think I meant?”