by Cara Summers
She could handle this interview. So what if she didn’t have three pages of questions or a clue as to what angle to take yet? She’d find it.
“You should find everything you need right there,” Hunter said.
The papers she held contained a brief profile of Mark Hunter, along with a résumé. Donald Trump would probably find the information impressive. But as she skimmed through it, Rory discovered that it gave very little away about the man she’d talked to at the pool or in the tree house.
Finally, on the third page, something caught her eye. He’d lost his entire family—his parents and a brother—when he was barely nineteen. A tight band settled around her heart as she glanced up at him. “I’m so sorry. That must have been horrible—to lose your whole family when you were so young. My sisters and I were orphaned when we were twenty, but we still had each other. Did you have any other relatives?”
“No,” Hunter said.
When he didn’t elaborate, she asked, “How on earth did you manage?”
“I don’t see how that’s pertinent.”
“It’s part of what made you who you are.”
“I’d rather stick to what’s on those papers.”
Rory didn’t doubt for a moment that he’d have preferred to control the interview just as much as he wanted to manage what she wore and what they did when they made love. She was going to have to find a way to change that, so she took a moment to study him.
He looked confident and thoroughly at ease, his hands folded in front of him on the desk. This was a man who’d be perfectly at home in a boardroom. But behind that facade was someone who’d also be perfectly at home in a street fight. Hunter was both those men. Even now, there was a leashed energy radiating from him that hadn’t been acquired in an Ivy League school. And there was no explanation for that on the three sheets he’d given her.
What was it going to take to get him to open up to her? And what was it going to take to get him to hand over control later tonight when they made love again?
She skimmed through the information again. He’d attended Harvard and he’d played polo—so there must have been money or connections. Looking up at the wall behind his head, she spotted something she’d noticed when he’d first ushered her into the room. “Harvard. Lucas Wainwright graduated from Harvard, too. Is that where you met him?”
There was just the slightest hesitation before he said, “Yes. We were classmates.”
She rose and moved closer to the photo. “Which one are you?”
“I’m not in it. I dropped out right after my parents died. You’re very observant.”
Her brows shot up. “I wouldn’t make a very good reporter if I weren’t. Why did you drop out?”
“Financial reasons.”
A partial truth, she decided as she studied him. “I wanted so much to drop out of college after my parents passed away, but my sisters wouldn’t hear of it. I started to call them the school police.”
“What would you have done if your sisters hadn’t pressured you to stay in school?”
Rory moved to perch on the edge of the chair again. “I would have traveled. Is that what you did?”
“A bit.”
“Where?”
“Here and there. Everything that’s pertinent to my work at Slade Enterprises is right there on those papers.”
And everything else is a big secret, Rory thought. Well, she’d always been fascinated by secrets. But the man sitting in front of her didn’t look to be someone who would part with them easily. She skimmed down his work history and blew another bubble. What she needed was a question that would take him off guard and make him open up.
“You’re nervous,” he said as she licked the bubble gum back into her mouth.
“A little,” she said. “I want to do this right, and you’re not cooperating.”
He gestured to the papers. “I’ve laid everything out for you. You should be able to write a good article from that.”
She set the sheets on the desk. “It’s not that this won’t be helpful, but the problem is this tells me only about your success in business.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I’m a businessman. I thought that would be the angle you’d take.”
She smiled at him. “Have you ever read Celebs?”
He shook his head. “No, I can’t say that I have. But I’ve seen it on the newsstands.”
“You should be able to tell by the headlines and the cover pictures that it’s not the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. The people who read it are looking for the story behind the story.”
“Gossip?”
She laughed. “It’s number two on the list right after love for making the world go round. But we’re a cut above the tabloids. And we prefer to say that we take a more personal slant on a celebrity’s life.”
Hunter frowned a little. “What if I told you that my work is the whole story?”
She shook her head as she moved forward to sit on the very edge of her chair. “It’s not. Oh, it explains part of who you are—the person who went to Harvard for a year and got snapped up by Jared Slade when he was just building his business. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When I look at you right now, that’s what I see, just the surface stuff—a very self-contained man who prefers to be in control, someone who weighs every decision he makes very carefully.” She lifted the papers and set them on the edge of his desk. “I’m really not going to be able to use much of what you’ve given me here.”
Hunter studied her for a moment. “Just what is it that you’re after?”
She met his eyes steadily. “The secrets. What lies below the surface. I want to know why you dropped out of Harvard, what you did after that. I want to know what kind of books you read, what kind of sports you play besides polo, what it’s like to work for a man like Jared Slade.” Acting on instinct, she decided that she might as well go for broke. “I want to know if Jared Slade really exists and why someone set a bomb off in his suite at Les Printemps.”
9
CAREFULLY MASKING HIS SURPRISE, Hunter studied Rory. He hadn’t expected either question, and she’d fired them off like a pro. That should have bothered him. Instead, he couldn’t help but admire her technique. Clearly, this wasn’t going the way he’d planned, but that seemed to be par for the course with Rory Gibbs. Was her unpredictability why she fascinated him so?
She’d been in almost constant motion from the moment that he’d led her into the room. She’d fidgeted her way through the papers he’d prepared for her, blowing bubbles and tapping her feet. Even now, she was perched on the edge of her chair like a butterfly that might take flight at any moment. Was that why he was constantly tempted to reach out and grab her? For a moment, he let himself imagine what it might be like to do just that—to pull her across the desk and onto his lap.
“Well?” she asked. “Who wants to hurt Jared Slade?” Then she frowned. “Or is it you they want to hurt?”
“Me?” Startled by the question, he narrowed his eyes. But it wasn’t just curiosity he saw in hers. No, it was a flood of concern, and he couldn’t help but be moved by it. “Why would you think someone would want to hurt me?”
She waved a hand. “Because you’re here, isolated.”
“I’m enjoying Lucas Wainwright’s hospitality while I finish up the business that brought Jared Slade to D.C. That’s all. Why do you think that my boss doesn’t exist?”
Leaning back in the chair, she rested her elbows on the arms and steepled her fingers. “I have this theory that he’s just a figurehead like Betty Crocker, and that people like you really run his businesses.”
Hunter smiled and hoped that it reached his eyes. “Jared Slade is every bit as real as I am.” Her mind was as sharp as a razor, and if he wasn’t careful…
“Why all the secrecy then?” she asked.
Hunter met her eyes very steadily. He couldn’t recall the last time anyone had made him feel as if he were walking along the edge of a cliff. “Mr. Slade pref
ers his privacy.”
She tapped her fingers on one arm of the chair. “He’s hiding something, isn’t he? And it must have something to do with the person who planted the bomb.”
Hunter raised both hands and made a T. “Time out. I agreed to give you an interview, but I’m not at liberty to discuss Mr. Slade, and there won’t be any mention of the bomb in your article.”
“Okay.” Rory moved to the edge of her chair again. “Why don’t we just get back to those questions that I originally asked? Why did you drop out of Harvard and what did you do in those five years before you joined Slade Enterprises?”
Hunter couldn’t help but admire the way she’d manipulated him. She wouldn’t press on the bomb issue if he answered the more personal questions. She was good. He should have foreseen that and prepared for it. The information on the three sheets he’d given her would check out, but if she wanted personal information on Mark Hunter, he would have to create it out of whole cloth. It wouldn’t be the first time that he’d created a personal background story for himself. But he’d never before done it off the cuff and for a reporter.
Was it the fact that she posed a risk for him that intrigued him? If he could figure out exactly why she appealed to him so, he could control it.
“I won’t promise to answer every question you ask,” he said finally.
“Fair enough.”
“And I want to read the story before you send it to your boss.”
“You want to censor it?”
He shrugged. “Take it or leave it.”
“Are you going to answer the questions that I’ve posed so far?”
“I think I can agree to that.”
“Then you’ve got a deal.” Rory plucked a pen out of a container on the desk and turned over the three sheets of paper. Then she edged her chair closer to the desk.
“One other stipulation,” Hunter said. “For every question you ask, I get to ask you one.”
Surprise flooded into her eyes. “Why?”
“I’m curious about Rory Gibbs.”
She shrugged. “Okay. Sure.” Then she shot him a quick grin. “But if you write it up and decide to sell it, I get to okay it first.”
He couldn’t help smiling back. “You’ve got a deal.”
“Okay. Tell me about Mark Hunter.”
“That’s not a question.”
“Okay. First, what made you drop out of Harvard?”
“I already told you that I dropped out of Harvard for financial reasons.”
“You couldn’t afford to go there after your parents died?”
“That was part of it.”
She waited, tapping her pen on the desk.
Hunter thought of several stories he could make up, but he’d learned a long time ago that when you were lying through your teeth, it was better to stick as closely as possible to the truth. “I wanted a change, a new start.” That was partially true. By the time his family had laid out the little scenario they’d wanted him to play a part in, he’d very much wanted a whole new life as far away from the Marks family as he could get.
“So you were running away from your old life?” Rory asked.
“I’d rather look at it as running toward a new one.”
“Why did you need a new life?”
“Isn’t it my turn for a question?” Hunter asked.
Rory shook her head. “You have to finish answering this one first. Why did you need a new start?”
Persistence was something else about her he had to admire. Because he hadn’t prepared the answer, Hunter chose his words carefully. “My family always thought of me as a black sheep. My older brother was one of those people who did everything right. Since in my parents’ eyes, I never quite measured up to him, I fell into a habit of proving to everyone that I never would.” He paused with a frown. “I’m not sure I’m explaining it right.”
“You’re explaining it perfectly. I had the same problem with my sisters. After my father left, I even went through a period when I thought it was my fault that our father had left us. So I started—I think the term the school psychologist used was acting out. Basically, I skipped classes at school and got into fights.”
Hunter studied her. She spoke so matter-of-factly about her insecurities. He wanted to change that. “So you thought of yourself as a black sheep, too?”
She shot him a smile. “I thought of myself more as an ugly duckling.”
“You’re not ugly at all,” he said impatiently. “The first time I saw you, I thought you were incredibly cute.”
Rory snorted. “Cute? You mean like a puppy?”
This time Hunter pushed down the impatience. “A cute lady wearing sexy red boots and a cap. The contrast intrigued me. And when I saw you again in Silken Fantasies, I thought you were some kind of sex goddess.”
“Really?”
Hunter raised a brow. “I’ve never followed another woman into a dressing room and made love to her. I had no business doing that with you. I don’t have any business wanting you right now. But I can’t seem to stop myself. Every time I look at you, there seems to be a total disparity between what I know I should do and what I want to do.”
She was listening to him now, really listening. He could tell by the way her eyes had become totally focused on his.
“A few minutes ago, I wanted to reach across this desk and drag you onto my lap. Then I would have kissed you and touched you until you could think of nothing but how it feels when I make you come.”
Her pulse was fluttering at her throat. Hunter wanted to taste her right there, but he wanted something else even more. “Promise me something.”
“What?” Rory asked.
“When you dress for dinner tonight, put on that red dress and the pearls. Then you take a good look at yourself in the mirror and think princess.”
She snorted. “Princess?”
“No. I mean it. And see if I’m not right.”
Rory’s eyes narrowed. “You’re trying to build up my self-confidence.”
“You don’t do enough of that for yourself. So what if you’re different from your sisters? You have your own unique qualities. You need to believe in them more and push them to work to your advantage.”
Rory blinked. “That’s what my father advised me to do. Is that what you did to compete with your brother?”
Hunter frowned as she scribbled something on a sheet of paper. “No.”
Rory glanced up, then reached out to lay a hand over his. “I’m sorry. Of course, you couldn’t do that. There wouldn’t have been time, not when he was snatched away so suddenly.”
Hunter saw the quick rush of sympathy in her eyes and felt it in her touch. Once again, he was moved by her concern. They’d both lost family, he realized. He wasn’t even fully aware that he’d turned over his hand and linked his fingers with hers, but suddenly, he was tempted to tell her what had really happened that summer when he was nineteen. Not the edited version he’d given Tracker, but the real story.
He couldn’t afford to do that, he reminded himself. Rory Gibbs was a reporter. If he told her the real story, she would be that much more likely to connect the dots between Mark Hunter and Hunter Marks.
Still, it bothered him that she felt bad about something he’d fabricated.
“I never should have asked that question,” Rory said. “It was clumsy of me. I’m sorry. I’m a beginner at this interviewing thing.”
“For a beginner, you’re very good at it,” Hunter said. She’d only begun and she’d already steered him in directions he’d didn’t want to go.
“Thanks. I’ve never done anything this important before.”
“And your question was a good one. I was too hasty in saying no.” Releasing her hand, he leaned back in his chair. “Before the…accident, I was acting out, too—drinking, coming home late, letting my grades slip. After I reached a certain age, I gave up on competing with my older brother.” It hadn’t done any good. Sports had been an area where he could outshine Carter, but
his parents had always gone to Carter’s games and not his. Carter Marks III had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and he’d been raised to take over the family business. Hunter’s mother had made it clear to him that the only reason he’d been conceived was that she was hoping for a daughter.
“What happened after the accident?” Rory asked.
Hunter gathered his thoughts. It had been years since he’d allowed himself to remember this part of his life. “I wanted to create a new life and prove to myself that I could be better than anyone could have dreamed.” Even as he spoke the words, Hunter realized that there was a lot of truth in them. Beneath the anger and disillusionment, he’d been driven by a desire to prove something to himself. And to his family.
“How did you go about doing that?”
Hunter narrowed his eyes. “Oh, no, you don’t. It’s definitely my turn for a question…or two or three.”
Rory wrinkled her nose. “You can’t blame a girl for trying.” Then she leaned back in her chair. “What do you want to know?”
Are you wearing the red thong? That was the question that popped into Hunter’s mind and he barely kept it from popping out of his mouth. He had an agenda here, too, he reminded himself—and he’d better stick to it. “Tell me about your boss at Celebs and what it’s like to work for him or her.”
Rory grinned. “That’s not a question.”
He nodded. “Okay. Who is your boss, and what is it like to work for him or her?”
“It’s a her. Lea Roberts.” Rory’s fingers tightened on the pen she was holding and she chewed on her bubble gum.
“She makes you nervous.”
“A little. She’s very good at what she does. I was lucky to be assigned to her. She’s demanding. But she’s been very encouraging. Most of the time.”