One-Click Buy: September Harlequin Blaze

by Jo Leigh

  “I’m wearing a tangerine sundress. If that doesn’t do the job, I’m taking it back.”

  Her grandmother laughed. Maybe this was the moment of change in a relationship that, if cordial, hadn’t exactly had those moments of closeness and companionship that had marked her relationship with Nana. Although, she’d only seen Charlotte a couple of times a year, and she’d lived with Nana. Allowances had to be made. But all the same, hearing her grandmother laugh like that was almost worth the risk of revealing her hopes and fears.

  If you couldn’t trust your family with your inmost self, who could you trust?

  Hold that thought. “I went to Mirabel today,” she blurted with no lead-in whatsoever.

  A careful silence hissed gently on the line. “Did you, now? And what did you think?”

  “It was lovely. Smaller than I expected. Wonderful grounds, though. Grandmother, how come we never talk about our family?”

  “You obviously haven’t spent enough time with Roy and Anne, honey pie.”

  “They talk about ancestors and people from eighty years ago. I’m talking about what it was like recently. You know, when Dad and Roy were kids.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that it might be painful for me to think about what was, in comparison to what is now, Eve?”

  When Grandmother dropped the “honey pie,” things were getting serious. Eve gave herself a mental smack. “I’m sorry. But I was talking to a docent there-it’s open to the public now, part of the Ashmere Trust-and I had this moment of weirdness, knowing I was hearing more about my family from a stranger than I’d ever heard from you or Uncle Roy or even Nana Calvert.”

  “Who was it?”

  “A lady named Adele Pierce. She said she used to babysit Dad and Uncle Roy when they were kids. Do you remember her?”

  “Adele. Adele.” Her grandmother sounded puzzled. “Good heavens, you don’t mean Adele Crosby?”

  “She said her name was Pierce. Her married name, I suppose.”

  “She did marry a Pierce, now that I think of it. No wonder you learned a lot…that girl was the worst gossip I ever met. She could talk the hind leg off a donkey.”

  “And yet, when I wanted her to talk, she wouldn’t. There was a photograph there. She gave it to me. It showed Uncle Roy with his arm around Mom, and Dad standing off to the side. Did Mom date Uncle Roy before she got together with Dad?”

  “When was it taken?”

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t dated. But Mom had hair down to her waist, parted in the middle. And platform shoes. So I’d guess early seventies. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen.”

  “I have no memory of such a picture, or why it would be at Mirabel instead of in one of our photo albums.”

  “Uncle Roy donated copies of some pictures to the trust. Adele gave me the original, though. Maybe it got mixed in by mistake.”

  “Maybe. Your mother was good friends with both my boys, Eve. They hung around together like the Three Musketeers, until Gibson and then Roy went off to college.”

  Her tone was dismissive, as though the picture were insignificant. Maybe it was. But there was something in the expression of that boy who had become her dad-some hurt, some pain that the camera had caught-that made her reluctant to let it go. And there had been that swift change of subject on Adele’s part, too.

  “Honey pie, the girls are at the door for our book club meeting. I need to go.”

  “Bye, Grandmother. I’ll call you next week.”

  “You do that. I want to hear more about your young man.”

  Eve hung up with a smile, and went to get her notebook out of her handbag. Still no sign of Mitch, and it was ten past six. There must have been an accident on the freeway. Well, if he wasn’t here by six-thirty, she’d call the restaurant and move their reservation out another half hour.

  Adele Crosby Pierce answered her phone on the fourth ring, about when Eve expected it to jump to voice mail.

  “Oh, hello, dear. How nice of you to call.”

  She didn’t seem bothered that Eve had tracked down her phone number. But then, her mind lived in a different era, when people called to get a recipe, not to steal a person’s identity or stalk them.

  “I wanted to thank you again for showing us around Mirabel, and for giving me this picture of my family,” she began.

  “You’re most welcome. I love to introduce people to the past, you know. And today it was particularly lovely, since it was your past.”

  Nothing like plunging right in. Eve took a fortifying breath. “That’s what I wanted to ask you about, Adele. This picture that you gave me. Is there some kind of story behind it?”

  Silence.

  Eve went on, “It seemed to startle you when I asked questions about it, so I wondered if perhaps you would rather talk about it in private. That’s the reason for my call.”

  “That’s very considerate of you, dear. You’re the second person who’s asked about it.”

  “Oh? Who was the other?” Uncle Roy? Mitch?

  “I didn’t catch his name. He said he worked for your television station, though. A terribly nice young man.”

  She must be referring to Dylan’s call, earlier, and gotten it muddled up. “Anyway, I was wondering if you’d tell me about the picture, that’s all.”

  Another pause. “You know I abhor gossip of any kind, dear.”

  Eve thought about what Grandmother would think of this, and smothered a smile. “So do I. Though giving me your memories of my family isn’t gossip, is it?”

  “No, I suppose not. Yet, I don’t want to hurt anyone. It wasn’t dear Charlotte’s fault that Loreen couldn’t talk to her. Or Isabel’s either, for that matter. But I was so close to those boys, and even in those days, they would have sent her away anyway.”

  “Sent who away?”

  “Loreen, of course. But I’m not going to say any more. It isn’t my place. You take that picture over to your Uncle Roy and ask him to explain.”

  “Uncle Roy?”

  “I’ll bet you fifty dollars that picture got put in the donation pile on purpose. So it was out of the house. You go ask him.”

  “But-”

  “I’m no gossip. A man should clean up his own messes, in my opinion, and this one’s been a mess for nearly thirty years.”

  With that, she hung up.

  Eve stared at the receiver in her hand, utterly mystified. “It’s a picture,” she said to it, and hung it up. When she did so, it beeped, signifying that a call had come in while she’d been talking. She pressed the playback button.

  “Eve, it’s Mitch.” He sounded agitated. She’d been right, then. He’d probably driven past a wreck on the freeway. “I’m sorry, but I have to cancel our plans tonight. Something’s come up with the deal, and it’s important I figure out the best way to fight this fire. I’m looking at flights to New York right now. I’ll fly up there on my own dime if I have to. I don’t know if…whether you…” A sigh of frustration. “I feel like shit. I’ll do my best to straighten this out. Goodbye.”

  The answering machine winked off, leaving Eve sitting in her best tangerine dress with no evening, no answers and most important…no Mitch.

  Eve Best, you’re not going to take this sitting down.

  Within sixty seconds, she’d grabbed her bag and car keys and was backing the car out of the driveway. If he booked a flight online, she had maybe twenty minutes while he scrolled through his options. Add ten to that if he checked out of the hotel. If the traffic gods smiled on her, she could get to the Ritz before he walked out.

  The time for sitting around and waiting was long gone, if it had ever existed. She’d already decided that she was tired of living a life on the surface, endlessly talking about things that mattered instead of actually taking a risk and experiencing them.

  Well, she was going to take a risk now. If Mitch got on that plane, something deep inside told h
er he wouldn’t come back. Okay, so he hadn’t responded quite the way she’d expected him to when she’d brought up a future together. She could handle that. Hadn’t she done a whole show on the caveman mystique? She and the girls had even turned it into a catchphrase: the “cave moment.” That crucial juncture in a relationship when a guy pulled away and went into his cave to think or flee or whatever they did when they faced the naked truth of a woman’s feelings. Sometimes he never came out. And sometimes he had to be coaxed out with the warmth of a good fire.

  Eve had plenty of fire, and she wasn’t about to let Mitch fly out of her life without getting one more taste of it.

  Twenty-three minutes later, she pulled up to the front doors and leaped out.

  “Hey, aren’t you Eve Best?” The valet looked about twenty, so Eve pulled out all the stops in the smile she turned on him.

  “How sweet of you to recognize me,” she said. “Would you mind looking after my car for just a moment?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, blinking at the sheer wattage of the smile, and she tossed him the car keys and a tip.

  “Thank you, sugar.” God, she was turning into her grandmother. But hey, whatever worked.

  Two steps inside the lobby, she realized the hotel was hosting some kind of computer electronics convention. Crowds of men wearing everything from iPods to Ralph Lauren milled on the carpet. She wove between them, heading for the front desk-and arrived in time to see Mitch turn away, tucking his credit card into his wallet and picking up the handle of his rolling suitcase.

  “Mitch!”

  He blinked as she rushed up to him. “How did you get here?”

  “Drove. Fast. Tell me you didn’t check out.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at the mob pressing itself toward the harried clerks behind the counter. “I have a ten o’clock flight to LaGuardia. Just as well. This place is a madhouse.”

  “Ask them to reinstate you.”

  “Are you kidding? My room’s probably already gone.”

  She thought fast. “Then come home with me.”

  His face looked tired-not quite defeated, but getting there-and her heart squeezed. “I can’t, Eve.” She took his arm and guided him toward the door. He didn’t seem to notice. “My boss talked to the executive committee and they want to change the terms of the deal. Apparently they want you to be the next Letterman.”

  “Letterman doesn’t do daytime.” She smiled her thanks to the valet and Mitch, who obviously thought she was taking him to the airport, got into her car. She’d let him think that. For now.

  “I know. They want you to move to New York, and they’ll create a late-night show for you.”

  Sliding behind the wheel, she said, “We already agreed I’m staying here.”

  “Yes, but the deal memo isn’t signed yet. My instructions are to get you to agree to the new terms, or else. So I’m going to New York to meet with them personally. It’s a long shot, but I have to convince them they’re shooting themselves and the network in the foot.”

  “You don’t need to go all that way.” She sped up the on-ramp to the freeway.

  “I feel I do. Nelson said he’d set up a phone call, but that won’t cut it. I have to do this in person to have any chance of convincing them.”

  One exit. Two. The next one was hers.

  “It’s a helluva trip, though.” He rubbed the back of his neck, as if stress were making his muscles seize up. “There aren’t any nonstops at this time of night, so I have to route through North Carolina and Philly. I get in at some ungodly hour in the morning, but I had to take what I could get. I just hope I’m coherent.”

  The things he was willing to do in order to keep his word-or at least the network’s word. Talk about above and beyond. That meant something, didn’t it? Surely he couldn’t be motivated strictly by loyalty to the network? There had to be more to it than that.

  “I have a better idea.”

  “You do? Hey!” He sat up as she took her exit. “This isn’t the way to the airport. Do you want me to miss my flight?”

  “You don’t need to kill yourself doing this, Mitch,” she told him. “You don’t need to fly to New York when we have a network feed right at the station. What’s the point of technology if not to use it?”

  He stared at her, and then his gaze narrowed, as if he was remembering something. “You have a video linkup. I saw it the first day I was there.”

  “Right. We can beam your pitch right to CWB’s head office. And I happen to know a damn good executive producer who could run, say, a kick-butt presentation with a voice-over and graphics if you wanted. We’re all in this together, right?”

  She pulled into her driveway and shut the engine off. He was looking at her as though she had just announced the cure for cancer.

  “I knew there was a reason I was crazy about you,” he said.

  She grinned. Maybe her tangerine sundress wasn’t going to be wasted tonight. After all, it was the color of fire.

  17

  “YOU’RE RIGHT. It was a total cave moment. All men have them and all women have to learn to deal with them.”

  Jane brushed the excess powder off Eve’s nose and turned her face toward the light with the gentle fingers of long friendship.

  “I agree.” Nicole, with her ever-present clipboard in her lap, pulled her legs up under her and watched the two of them in the dressing-room mirror. “When a woman tells a guy she thinks it’s more than a fling, his first instinct is to run.”

  “But last night…” Eve’s voice trailed off, and she caught Jane and Nicole exchanging an amused look. The station’s dressing room had become the equivalent of a girls’ clubhouse, and she’d just told them everything. Except about the puzzling photograph. That was private-and she wasn’t sure she wanted to dig any more, anyway. Grandmother thought it was nothing, so it probably was. She had bigger fish to fry.

  “Can I just say that the man is fabulous in bed and funny to boot? What sane woman wouldn’t want to keep him around, and tell him so? I took a risk. I was honest. Now it’s up to him. Unless he thinks making love is the answer.”

  Jane examined her work with a critical eye. “Eve, not everyone is as forthright as you about their relationships. And it does look kind of bad that he tried to leave town practically as soon as your agreement about the show was in his hand.”

  So Jane had heard the rumors, too. “Mitchell Hayes did not romance me to get the show. He really does care about whether I’m happy.” He’d been prepared to fly all night for her. The least she could do was show some faith-unlike some people. “I’m not a teenager. I can tell when a man is sincere. And he is.” The pain she’d seen in his face was proof of that. Wasn’t it? “He couldn’t have made love to me the way he did last night if his feelings weren’t real. We all know that some men communicate through action. For them, it’s not about the words.”

  “Eve, Eve,” Nicole said, shaking her head. “You did a show about this only last week. ‘Is What He Says Really What He Means?’ Maybe you should do one called ‘It’s in His Kiss,’ like that song.”

  “I think that stripper housewife said it all,” Jane put in. “‘All that’s real during sex is sex. Anything else is gravy.’”

  “Ow.” Eve winced. “Easy on the hair.”

  “Don’t jerk back like that, then.” Jane loosened her grip on the curling iron. “We don’t want you expecting gravy when all there is is meat. No pun intended.”

  “Ha. And here I thought you guys would help me build up the nerve to try to talk with him about it again.”

  “I’ll be happier when he comes out of his cave and tells you something honest, with real words,” Jane said. “Until then, I’m reserving judgment.”

  “We still need to address this rumor that you two are an item,” Nicole added. “Even if you are, we still have to maintain your privacy. The answering service has had half a dozen calls from that rag-m
ag Peachtree Free Press, over the last twenty-four hours. Every one of them was for you. I don’t know how they got wind of who you’re dating.”

  “The tabs can screw themselves.”

  “They usually do, with the crap they print,” Nicole said. “The Free Press is one of the worst, though I must say their cameraman must love you. Your pictures are always great.”

  “I never talk to the tabs, and they know it. Okay, Jane. Am I ready?”

  “Ready and able. You’ve got half an hour to prep, so make the most of it. And here’s your bug.”

  Eve took the wireless transmitter and fitted it in her ear. Because she had a habit of rambling around before the show in an effort to control her adrenaline, Cole had invested in the bug so he could give her the countdown without tying her to her desk. With a final tug at the hem of a new beaded tank, Eve strode down the hall toward the set, where the guys in the control booth would be doing sound and lighting checks before showtime at three.

  But underneath it all the question of Mitch nagged and prodded at her. Was she wrong to want resolution? Why wouldn’t he talk about them, even when he was wrapped in her arms, with no one to listen in but the night? Communicating through action seemed to be a male thing. Maybe she needed to do that. But how?

  Through the thin false walls of the studio, the noise levels rose as the doors opened and the audience began to file in. Her thoughts spun on as her blood began to pump in anticipation. Deciding to act-to take a risk and reach out for what she wanted-was one thing.

  But finding the courage to do it was quite another. Because what if, after she tried again, he got on that plane anyway and left her?

  THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE at CWB had agreed to the video link at three-thirty, which worked out perfectly. Eve would still be on the set, mingling with her audience, and she wouldn’t be able to watch his attempt to turn this fiasco around. Mitch would rather have no witnesses, thanks. What he did want was to succeed. To come out with a gift safe in his hand-her show, intact, exactly the way she wanted it.

  He glanced at his watch. He had an hour yet. Cole Crawford had given him a brief window of time to put some bells and whistles on the presentation he’d been working on all morning. But Mitch had it all in his head. He’d been living this for weeks, after all.