The Edge of Forever

by Bretton, Barbara

  Again those dark brown eyes flashed, and he could almost see the protective shield slide across them. She plunged her hands back into her coat pockets.

  So much for repartee. “Hey, I didn’t mean anything by it, Meg. It just seemed like the thing to say.”

  “And you usually say anything you feel like saying?”

  He felt a bit sheepish and a lot foolish. “Unfortunately.” He pulled a Marlboro and matches from his breast pocket, cupped his hand around the cigarette as he lit up, then took a protracted drag. “I think it has a lot to do with being a writer. Can’t always control the words.”

  She was softening a bit; he could tell by the way her strong jaw seemed to ease and her shoulders relaxed.

  “I might have overreacted.” She moved a step away from the smoke encircling him. “Writers are a lot like actors. You can’t tell when they’re being sincere and when they’re trying a bit of dialogue out on you.”

  “Is that what you think I was doing?”

  “The thought occurred to me.”

  She waved a hand in front of her face and made a face. Instantly contrite, Joe stubbed out his Marlboro.

  “Not this time,” he said. “This time I really wanted to know.”

  “I’m not a fan of personal questions.”

  “Personal questions are an occupational hazard with me.”

  “Then you’re going to have to get used to hearing me say, ‘Mind your own business, Alessio.’”

  #

  Fifteen minutes later, Meg was struggling with a deliciously sloppy Big Mac and fries, while every teenager within a ten mile radius checked out the shiny stretch with the out-of-state plates.

  Joe laughed and made a grab for her French fries. “I guess they don’t see too many limos in the drive-through lane.”

  “Ignore them,” Meg said, around a mouthful of burger. “The novelty will wear off.”

  “You’re good, Lindstrom,” He motioned back toward the drive-through. “I thought you were going to get us stuck in there.” The distance between speaker and wall had been unforgiving.

  “A compliment for a woman driver?” She clutched her throat in mock surprise. “I wish I had this on tape.”

  “A good driver’s a good driver,” he said.

  “I was teasing,” she said, although it was only partly true. “I’m so used to people being astounded I can drive this beast from Point A to Point B without causing a five-car crack-up that kind words astound me.”

  "Okay, so you can drive a stretch. I need more.” Joe’s voice was light, but there was an undercurrent of steel running through it. “Where were you born? Where did you go to school? Do you have any brothers or sisters?” He hesitated a split second. “Husband? Kids?”

  Meg slowly finished the last fry. “You can get all of that from my file.”

  “I know, but I’d rather get it from you.”

  She wiped her mouth with a yellow paper napkin. “You’re about as subtle as a five-year-old.” Actually she was enjoying his open curiosity. It was a refreshing change from the studied boredom of the wealthy businessmen she usually schlepped around in her limo. “You’re good at questions, but how good are you at answering them?”

  He leaned back in the seat. “I’m thirty-three years old. I write under the names Alex Dennison, Bret Allen, and Angelique Moreau. I’m responsible for the last three Star Trek novels. I know all the theme songs of every TV western from Gunsmoke to Bonanza to the return of Maverick. I have all my own teeth, all my own hair, and not enough time to tell you how many people are in my family.” His smile widened. “Enough?”

  Not even close, she thought. She wanted to know everything there was to know.

  “Married?”

  He shook his head.

  “Divorced?”

  He shook his head again.

  She stepped farther out on the limb. “Ever been in love?”

  He threw back his head and laughed. “Many times,” he said.“With Isobel and Yvette and Sarah and—“

  “Characters in your books?”

  He nodded. “How about you? Have you ever been in love, Meg?”

  “Not even once.”

  To her surprise, he didn’t pursue the topic. “Where were you born?”

  “Staten Island.”

  “Rich kid.”

  “Moderately comfortable.”

  “From where I grew up in Queens, you were rich.”

  “Depends on your point of view,” she said. “I never left the city until I went away to college at Elmira.”

  “And from Elmira to the Colony?”

  “That’s about the size of it. I told you it was a dull story.”

  “Why were you at Lakeland in the first place?” His lazy grin softened the sharp probe of his words. “I didn’t think they gave grants for creative driving.”

  Inadvertently she glanced back at the Hasselblad on the backseat. Joe, ever watchful, picked up on her glance and followed her gaze.

  “Photographer?”

  “Past tense.”

  “That doesn’t look like an artifact in the backseat.”

  Her mother’s volatile Italian blood pushed aside the Swedish reticence. “It’s a hobby now,” she snapped. “Not that it’s any of your damned business.”

  “The hell it’s not.” Joe’s temper was apparently a match for her own. “In case you’ve forgotten, we now jointly own a lot of property. I want to know what I'm getting into.”

  “I don’t see where we’re getting into much of anything. McCallum said the foundation will pretty much run itself.”

  “Anna’s history won’t.” He was turned completely around in his seat, his strong body invading her space, those beautiful green eyes snapping with anger. “You can back out if you want. I could handle it on my own.”

  “I’m sure you think you could, but writing potboilers hardly qualifies you for detailed work.”

  “And driving a limo does?”

  “Of course not,” she answered, pleased with herself for not letting him see that his words had found their mark. “But at least I have no illusions about my talent.”

  The insult passed him right by. She could see him leap into writer’s alert, primed for some deep psychological insight into her character that he could steal and use in his work.

  “Don’t even think about asking me to elaborate,” she warned him. “And if I find of this popping up in one of your books, I’ll—“

  He leaned over and took a sip from her coffee. “You’ll what?” His finger brushed against the lipstick imprint of her mouth, and a delicious shiver slid through her. “I’d treat you kindly, Margarita.”

  “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.” Did he have any idea what he was doing? How many times was he going to run his finger along the lipstick mark anyway? She grew acutely aware of her lips, of their fullness and texture, and she involuntarily moistened them with the tip of her tongue.

  He noticed everything—as she knew he would—and grinned.

  “You’d be the heroine,” he said, his voice low and lazy like his smile. “The woman who founded a dynasty. I’d make you a Viking princess with a castle.”

  “No Vikings,” she broke in, rolling her eyes. “Too obvious. I’ve always fancied myself as a principessa in Renaissance Italy.”

  “A Lindstrom in Rome?”

  “My mother’s maiden name was DeMartino.”

  “So that’s where those eyes come from.” He leaned back inhis seat and crossed his arms over his chest. The shoulder seams on his trenchcoat strained with the movement. “That’s one hell of a combination. Ice maiden with a heart of fire.”

  His words made her shiver but there was no way she’d let him know that. “You definitely have a way with the language.”

  He reached over and touched the long braid of hair resting over her left shoulder. “This would have to go,” he said softly. “It would have to spill down over your back like moonlight, loose so your pirate lover could lose himself in it each
night.”

  “Too bad you don’t have your word processor with you.” She wanted him to stop weaving this spell around her before she became even more entangled. “Sounds like you have your next novel mapped out.”

  “Don’t worry about that.” His voice lost that magnetic sexual vibrancy and sounded normal again. “That’s about as far as I’m going to get with it.”

  Silence dropped between them like an iron gate. He had seemed so open, so basically uncomplicated, that this revelation surprised her.

  “We need some guidelines,” she said lightly. “Sort of our own Robert’s Rules of Order.”

  “Thou shalt not ask personal questions of thy neighbor?”

  “Even if thou art a writer,” she said with a quick smile.

  “I think we can handle this,” he said. “I’m willing to do what it takes to get the job done if you are.”

  “How difficult can it be?” she asked. “We’re both reasonable adults; we both loved Anna and the Colony.”

  “And we both want to turn out the best history of it possible, right?”

  “Right,” she said. “I say we meet back at Lakeland in seven days and get back to work.”

  Joe extended his right hand and they shook on it. His hand was large and warm, just as it had been when she held it during the funeral, but suddenly her own smaller hand became the center of her consciousness. His touch, which had been a source of comfort hours ago, was anything but now and she wondered what on earth she was getting herself into.

  Chapter Four

  Mid-town Manhattan, the next morning

  Joe and his agent Renee were seated in a coffee shop around the corner from her office.

  “This better be good,” Joe said as he yawned over a short stack of pancakes with fake maple syrup. “I could be home by now.”

  “Don’t whine,” Renee said as she added some half and half to her coffee. “It’s very unbecoming.”

  “So what’s so important that you had to drag me off the highway?”

  “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “I told you that on the phone.”

  “I needed to see your face.”

  “You’re a terrible liar, Renee,” he said. “What’s going on?” He’d managed two hours sleep last night in a shithole motel halfway between Gorham and New Haven, the kind of place that made you dream of bedbugs and snakes in the toilet. “I still have a two hour drive ahead of me.”

  As usual, Renee cut right to the chase. “They’re getting nervous over at Blackwell. Audrey keeps sending up smoke signals that she needs at least a ballpark outline on your next one to keep the boys in sales happy.”

  Panic, hot and quick, rose in Joe’s chest. The thought of facing page after page of blank white paper scared the hell out of him. “Maybe I’ll come up with an idea while I’m at Lakeland House.” He forced his usual don’t-give-a-shit grin. “After all, you’re the one who said the change might do me good.”

  “We can’t wait. You have to give me five pages before you leave.”

  “Can’t do it,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t have enough of an idea for a short story, much less a six-hundred-page book.”

  “Joseph, I don’t care if you give me a variation on The Three Little Pigs Plunder the Caribbean. I need something in my hand now.”

  “As in today?”

  “As in by the time you finish those damn pancakes.”

  Joe had never missed a deadline in his professional life and the thought of doing so now disgusted him. “You could’ve told me this a week ago.”

  “I didn’t know it a week ago. I saw Audrey last night at a launch party and she laid down the law.” She took a sip of coffee and sighed loudly. “I made up some story that you were bouncing multiple ideas and only needed to pick one but I’m not sure she bought it.”

  “Great,” Joe said. “Either I blow a deadline or I hand in some piece of garbage and blow my reputation. I’m screwed either way.”

  Renee patted his hand in a studiedly maternal gesture. “If you’re damned either way, then be damned on the side of the professionals. Come back to my office. I’ll set you up with a computer and you can knock out five pages in nothing flat. That’s all I’m asking. Give me your private fantasies, last night’s dream, just give me something I can show Audrey at lunch. Then you can drive home to Princeton or back up to New Hampshire and get some sleep.”

  “I can’t write on demand.” Or on a computer, for that matter.

  “Your fantasies,” Renee urged. “Expand on one of them.” She arched an overly-plucked brow at him. “I’m sure you still have them, despite your newly monastic life-style.”

  He let his mind run free, and it zeroed in on Meg Lindstrom. He saw her pale blond hair, felt the heat of her dark gaze, knew the way her long legs would feel wrapped around him . . . .

  A slow smile spread across his face as some very intriguing possibilities occurred to him. “Fantasies, huh?” He looked at Renee, whose blue eyes were monitoring his every expression for signs of progress. “I think you might be onto something.”

  Renee started talking but her rapid-fire words were fading away from him.

  Meg fancied herself a Renaissance princess. The thought of her in a long black velvet dress, her pale blond hair loose and blowing in the nighttime breeze off the Mediterranean, was suddenly doing strange things to both his mind and his body.

  Maybe—just maybe—he’d be able to fulfill one of her fantasies and get himself out of a jam at the same time.

  And if not, he was sure as hell going to have fun trying.

  #

  Long Island, later that afternoon

  “I’m going to give up driving and start my own business,” Meg said as she and her best friend Elysse took a breather in a quiet, pub-style mall restaurant.

  Elysse looked up at her. “I know I’m going to regret this, but what business would you open?”

  “Shoppers Anonymous,” she said with a straight face. “I’ll be the moderator. We’ll meet once a week in the community room here at the mall and trade horror stories about overextended credit cards and closets full of Donna Karan with the labels still attached.”

  “You’d be a terrible moderator,” Elysse said, glancing down at Meg’s one purchase and her own bulging shopping bags. “You have absolutely no sympathy for the chronic consumer. You were born without the shopping gene.”

  “Seriously, Elly! I’m only going to New Hampshire. How much stuff do I need?”

  “We’re not talking a major makeover,” Elysse explained patiently, “but I’m getting sick of seeing you in those black work suits and that awful blue sweater.”

  Meg looked down at the awful blue sweater; it was actually a once-nice cashmere that had seen better days. “What’s so wrong with this?” she asked, touching the warm softness of a sleeve. “It cost me a fortune, Elly.”

  Elysse made a face at her best friend, “I’m sure it did,” she answered wryly. “College freshmen can’t afford much, can they?”

  “It’s not that old,” Meg said, laughing. “I’m pretty sure we were sophomores when I bought it.”

  “And we won’t go into how long ago that was, will we?” Elysse flagged down the waitress to bring their check, and five minutes later they were back in the arcade, heading toward Macy’s. Meg had been running full-tilt the last three days, trying to get everything squared away before she left for her month in New Hampshire at the end of the week.

  They were chatting about the ridiculously short and sexy black dress that Meg—despite her anti-shopping lecture—had been seriously tempted to buy when Meg suddenly pulled up short in front of a bookstore.

  “Let’s go in for a second,” she said to Elysse, whose small frame was in danger of tipping over from the weight of her purchases.

  “I never thought I’d say this, but right now I don’t care if I ever shop again.”

  “I wish Jack were here to appreciate those words,” Meg said as she led the way into the
store. “He’s probably been waiting all his married life to hear them.”

  Elysse grinned as she plopped down the packages on the floor near the psychology section. “Do you think I’d have said it if he were anywhere in earshot?” She leaned against a counter and slipped off one of her shoes. “What are we here for anyway?”

  “You’ll see.” Meg left her package next to Elysse’s and headed for the back of the store where romances and women’s fiction were displayed. She flipped through three carousels filled with books until she found the racks of family sagas she’d been looking for.

  There was nothing under Alessio then she remembered he wrote under a pseudonym.

  Medford. . . Mitchell . . . Moreau. . . Moreau! That was it! Angelique Moreau.

  Four big fat glossy novels with titles splashed across the cover in scroll embossed script stared at her from eye level in the rack. Fortune’s Daughter, Deny the Conqueror, Inherit the World, and the newest of them, Against All Odds, which featured a half-naked hero who looked uncomfortably like Joe Alessio himself. This gloriously virile man was leaning over a seductive redhead whose cleavage clearly held the secrets to world peace. Only a few artfully placed palm fronds kept Meg from learning more about the hero’s anatomy than she had bargained for. The whole scene exuded a steamy sensuality and playful lustiness, and given the man’s remarkable resemblance to Joe, Meg couldn’t put it down.

  “Will you look at that!” Elysse peeked around her shoulder at Against All Odds while clutching a copy of The Dynamics of the Nuclear Family: When Will the Fallout End. “Those boobs can’t be real,” she said with a whistle. “Where does she buy her bras? At the circus?” She grabbed the book from Meg and read the cover blurb. “’Isobel risked everything for the man she loved. An American dynasty of deception founded on one night of island passion!’” She looked at Meg. “What gives? I haven’t seen you curl up with a book in months.”

  “Times are tough,” Meg said, grabbing back the book. “I need a little fantasy.”

  “You just inherited Lakeland House,” Elysse said with a laugh. “Talk about fantasy.” She grabbed her own copy of Against All Odds and her eyes widened. “Whoa! How did I miss him?”