Jack decided to approach it another way. "Is there anything you don't like? Any food you absolutely won't eat?"
Faith sent him a rueful, sideways smile. "Not so far." She patted her hip. "Unfortunately."
Jack smiled back before he could stop himself. "All right, then. We'll have dim sum."
"That sounds wonderful," she agreed instantly. "What is it?"
"It's sort of a Chinese smorgasbord. You know what a smorgasbord is, don't you?" he teased.
Faith rolled her eyes like a twelve-year-old who'd found an adult's question totally lame.
It was all Jack could do not to cup her face in his hands and kiss the silly expression away. He took a quick half step to the side, away from temptation. "Dim sum is the Chinese equivalent of a smorgasbord," he told her in a deliberately professorial voice, trying to quash the sudden playfulness between them before it edged over into outright flirting. He hadn't asked her to lunch so he could flirt with her. "It's mostly finger foods like fried shrimp toast, wontons, spring rolls, different kinds of small meatballs and all kinds of steamed dumplings from pork to shrimp to sweetened bean paste, but sometimes there are little cups of soup and stir-fried dishes," he added, encouraged to elaborate by the expression of rapt attention on her face. "It depends on what the cooks have made that day. The waiters bring it out on carts with everything in separate servings on small plates. You just point to what you want when the cart goes by and it's yours. When you're finished they count up all the little plates on your table and tell you what you owe."
"Oh, stop," Faith said, and held up her hand. "You're making me drool all over myself." The smile she turned on him was dazzling. There was no holding back, no shy little sunbeam peeking out from behind the clouds. It was pure, unadulterated sunshine, beaming down on everyone within her orbit.
When a too-cool-for-words Hollywood type with a slicked-back ponytail, Italian suit and cellular phone, stopped dead in his tracks and stared at her, Jack glared at him and reached for Faith's hand. "This way," he said, threading his fingers through hers as he led her down the street toward the tiny restaurant he'd selected.
Faith was in heaven.
This is me, she thought, scarcely able to believe it, Faith McCray from Pine Hollow, Georgia, walking down Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles in the middle of a working day, holding hands with a man. A gorgeous man. No one was looking at her crosswise. No one seemed to think it was strange or shameful. No one even noticed. And, most unbelievably of all, when the day was over and she went back to Sammie-Jo's apartment, no one would be waiting to chastise her for behaving like a wanton Jezebel.
Faith vowed she would try, very hard, not to chastise herself.
Chapter 4
Once they were seated in the restaurant, Jack meant to have a serious discussion with her about the total impossibility of there ever being any kind of relationship between them, however fleeting or tentative. He meant to tell her, as gently as possible, that he really thought it would be best if she didn't even come over to finish cleaning his apartment. He meant to warn her about looking at him the way she did. And smiling at him the way she did. He meant to point out the disparity in age and experience between them. And he meant to suggest—as subtly and tactfully as he could—that if Freddie Bowen's lukewarm advances had upset her, then being on the receiving end of his vastly more heated overtures would probably send her into catatonic shock. He meant to pat her figuratively on the head, tell her she was a lovely girl, and send her on her way before anyone could get hurt.
He really meant to.
But she looked at him over a tableful of Chinese delicacies, her soft lips curved up in a delighted smile, her gold-flecked eyes alight with anticipation, and he forgot.
"Here, try some of these steamed pearl balls," he said instead, tipping a few of the tiny rice-coated meatballs onto her plate from the serving dish. "They're great with a little of the hoi sin sauce. And try using the fork while you're at it," he added, shaking his head over her attempts to operate the chopsticks. "You aren't going to get very much to eat that way."
"I've almost got the hang of it," Faith insisted, doggedly chasing a pea pod around her plate with the chopsticks. "There, see?" she said triumphantly, as the tip of one chopstick accidentally speared a meatball. She held it aloof for a moment, as if exhibiting a hard won trophy, then popped it into her mouth, obviously delighted with her success.
Jack felt a surge of protectiveness well up inside him. She was so open. So fresh. There was no artifice to her at all. No barriers. None of the emotional defenses that most people developed to protect themselves. "Where does someone like you come from?" he asked, awed.
Faith took his question literally. "Pine Hollow, Georgia."
"No, I mean—how can someone get to be twenty-four years old in this day and age and still be such a wide-eyed innocent?"
"Innocent?" She wasn't innocent. Far from it. But she thought she knew what he was saying. She lifted her chin, giving him the narrow-eyed glare she'd had a chance to perfect since Friday night. "You're calling me a hick, aren't you?"
"No, not at all."
"That's okay," she assured him, her expression melting into a sweet smile. "I am a hick. You can't hardly be from a place like Pine Hollow and not be a hick." The look in her eyes turned to one of steely determination. "But I don't intend to be one forever."
"No?" he murmured encouragingly, fascinated by the emotions that passed over her face. She didn't hide a thing.
"No." The word was emphatically stated. "As soon as I have a job I can count on, and enough money saved up—" she already had almost five thousand dollars safely socked away in a Los Angeles bank "—I'm going back to school. Actually, I'm already signed up. I'll be starting at UCLA when the fall semester begins. The woman in admissions said I can probably qualify for a student loan. Maybe even a grant of some kind. I've already sent off all the applications."
"For acting classes?" he asked, although he couldn't imagine it. She didn't strike him as being even remotely the dramatic type.
Faith laughed at that, flattered by the assumption. "Good heavens, no. I'm not nearly pretty enough to be an actress. I'm not the least bit talented, either," she added before Jack could respond to the statement about her looks.
It saved him from embarrassing himself with some stupid remark about the perfect luminescence of her lovely face.
"I'm more than happy to leave the acting classes to people like Sammie-Jo," Faith said. "She's the talented one." Her smile beamed with pride in her friend. "She's going to be a famous director some day."
"Not an actress?"
Faith shook her head, swallowing another meatball before she answered. "Sammie-Jo says acting is only a stepping-stone to bigger and better things."
"You and Sammie-Jo don't just work together at Flynn's. You're roommates, too, right?"
"Temporarily," she said, poking at a spring roll with her chopsticks. It was too big to pick up with the slender wooden implements and she couldn't figure out how she was supposed to cut it into smaller pieces without a knife. "I was only planning to stay with her a few days, or maybe a week, just until I could find a place of my own, but Miranda—that's her regular roommate, Miranda Muir—got a part in a movie. She's going to be on location for at least six weeks, so I'm staying with Sammie-Jo until she comes back. It works out perfectly for me," she told him, trying to saw through the spring roll with the edge of a chopstick, "because now I'll have a chance to learn my way around a little bit before I decide where I want to live."
"Do you have any ideas as to where that might be yet?" Jack asked, casually picking his spring roll up with his fingers.
Faith smiled and put the chopsticks down on the edge of her plate. "Something close to the campus, probably, since I don't have a car. I'd rather not get one if I don't have to, because of the expense and all. Although I guess I'll end up getting one eventually, anyway. Sammie-Jo says a car is—" She paused suddenly, eyeing him over the spring roll she held poise
d halfway to her mouth. "You must be a really terrific reporter," she said admiringly.
Jack cocked an eyebrow at her.
"You've got me sitting here, babbling away about myself like I've known you forever. I don't usually do that."
"You don't?"
"No, I'm not usually much of a talker. And I tend to be kind of cautious with people I don't know well." She bit into her spring roll, smiling blissfully as the new tastes exploded on her tongue. "Especially men," she said, after she'd chewed and swallowed. "But I feel very..." Comfortable had been what she was going to say but it was the wrong word. The way her nerves were humming had nothing to do with comfort. "...Safe," she decided. "I feel very safe with you. Isn't that strange?"
Jack snorted inelegantly. Safe, she said. When he was sitting there thinking about how much fun it would be if they were eating their dim sum back in his apartment. In his bed. Naked. Offhand, he could think of about a half-dozen more interesting uses for hoi sin sauce than wasting it as a dip for Chinese meatballs.
"Were you really a war correspondent?" Faith asked, breaking into his lascivious reverie.
Jake pulled his mind out of the gutter; Faith McCray wasn't the kind of woman you fantasized about smearing foodstuffs on. Not unless you were a complete degenerate.
"That's as good a label as any, I guess," he said reluctantly, abruptly wishing he had a cigarette. But he'd already had his limit for the day. "Mostly, I just call myself a reporter. I don't cover wars exclusively."
"What other kinds of things did—" Faith hesitated uncertainly. Sammie-Jo had said he "used to be some kind of newspaper reporter" but he'd spoken in the present tense. "What kinds of things do you cover?" she asked.
"Death, destruction, corruption, political upheaval and general mayhem." He shrugged and reached for his teacup, picking up the tiny, handleless cup between his thumb and index finger. "All the usual things that make the news every day. And it's did and will do, but not currently doing," he added firmly, taking a sip of tea. "I'm on an extended leave from the paper at the moment."
"So you're not working on something for your paper now?" she said, referring to whatever was causing him to spend so much time hunched over the typewriter on his dining room table. She'd asked the question before, earlier, but maybe he'd answer it this time.
"No," he said shortly, closing off that avenue of discussion. He set his teacup down with a sharp click. "I'm not."
Faith pushed a dumpling around on her plate. She really should let it drop, she thought. It was obvious he didn't like to talk about himself or his work. Especially whatever he was working on now. But she was unbearably curious about him and his life. She wanted to know everything there was to know about him.
"Would I have read anything you've written?" she asked shyly, diffident but determined. "From before, I mean," she added quickly, before he could take offense, "from when you were writing for your paper?"
"In Pine Hollow, Georgia?" he said, lifting his eyebrow at her again.
Faith decided that she loved that eyebrow. It was endlessly fascinating, the way he used it to convey so many different moods and emotions. Right now it was teasing her.
"We have newspapers in Pine Hollow," she told him primly, pretending insult. "Some of our more high-tone residents even subscribe to the big city Atlanta papers. And the library usually has back copies of the New York Times and the Washington Post for those of us who can read them. I read all about the Gulf War. And Somalia. Bosnia. Haiti." Her voice lowered. Saddened. The playful light faded from her eyes. "Rwanda."
"You shouldn't have," Jack said harshly, his eyes suddenly gone cold and hard. "Someone like you should never have to read about things like that."
"No one should have to," Faith said softly, wishing she dared to reach out and touch him. He looked so alone, suddenly. So stern and aloof and... just alone. It was if he'd abruptly shut himself off behind a glass wall. "Were you in all those places?" she asked, compelled by something inside her to ask. "All the—" What was the term she'd heard used? "All the hot spots of the world?"
Jack nodded and reached for his tea cup again. "Starting all the way back in Vietnam."
"Vietnam? But that was so many years ago! Surely, you couldn't have been old enough for—"
"I was eighteen," Jack interrupted. "That was plenty old enough."
She didn't make the obvious statement about him not looking his age. Because when she looked into his eyes, he did. "It must have been awful for you."
He lifted his shoulders, shrugging it off. "Not as awful as it was for most of the guys who went," he said, absently turning his half-empty cup round and round against the table with his long, elegant fingers. "I knew my way around a newsroom because of the free-lance work I'd done for a couple of underground rags here in L.A., so I got hooked up with the Stars and Stripes even before I made it out of boot camp. That's the military's version of a newspaper," he told her. "As a reporter, nobody ever expected me to charge up some godforsaken hill with a rifle in my hands while the enemy lobbed artillery shells at my head."
"But you make it sound as if it were easy," she objected. "Reporters get shot at, too. They even get killed. I've seen it on the news."
His eyebrow lifted, conveying fatalism and wry humor in a single gesture. "Not on a regular basis."
Faith stared at him, unable to believe he could really be so cavalier about the risk of getting shot at. Or worse.
"It's just part of the job," Jack said, attempting to explain it to her. "You don't think about it. You can't." He lifted the cup to his lips and drained it. "Not if you want to get the story."
"And the story's important enough to risk your life for?"
"Sometimes it is. Most of the time." At least, he used to think so. "The thing is, you usually don't know what you've got until after you've got it, so you go after every story as if it's the story. And, anyway..." he shrugged again. "The story's what you're there for. It's the job."
Faith just shook her head in amazement. "Did you always want to be a reporter?"
"It's what I've always done," he said, neatly sidestepping the question. He put the empty cup down and picked up his chopsticks. "What about you?" he asked, taking the spotlight off himself and putting it back on her.
"Me?"
"What do you want to be when you grow up?" he teased.
"Well, I..."
"You must be planning to major in something over at UCLA."
She stared at him for a moment, the caution she'd laid claim to finally surfacing. He could see her wondering whether to trust him with information about her plans for the future.
"Medicine." She said it defensively, as if she expected to be ridiculed. "I'm going to be a doctor. An obstetrician."
Jack merely nodded. "Is that a lifelong ambition?" he asked, and picked up a water chestnut between the tips of his chopsticks.
"Yes, in a way. I've wanted to be a nurse since I was a little girl." She didn't say that her choice had been influenced by the belief that nursing was the only medical career a woman could aspire to. Or that the choice had been, in reality, only a dream, anyway, because her father didn't believe in higher education for women. He wouldn't have let her attend school beyond the eighth grade if the law hadn't required it, despite the fact that she'd been a straight A student from kindergarten on.
"I never actually thought about becoming a doctor, though, until Sammie-Jo suggested it," she admitted. Don't ever let other people's expectations limit you, is what Sammie-Jo had said. "I was planning to study nursing. But I knew the minute she brought up the idea of applying to medical school instead that it was what I'd really wanted all along."
"You and Sammie-Jo are good friends, aren't you? Not just roommates."
"She's one of my best friends."
"Is she from Pine Hollow, too?" he asked, recalling the other woman's faint Southern accent. "Is that where you know her from?"
"Um-hmm." Faith paused a minute to savor a bite of shrimp toast. "We went to school
together. Well, not exactly together," she amended. "We were in a lot of the same classes because we were both in the gifted students program, but we weren't really part of the same crowd." She laughed softly, remembering. "It's still a wonder to me how we ever became friends in the first place. Sammie-Jo's people are Catholic," she added, as if that explained everything.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "And Catholics don't mix with hard-shell Christians in Pine Hollow?"
Faith considered that. "Well, some do, I guess, even in Pine Hollow. But not my family. My father says Catholics are idol worshipers."
"He sounds like a stern man," Jack said, wondering if she realized how revealing her comments were. From what she'd said yesterday and today, he was beginning to form a very unflattering picture of Faith's father. "Is that why you ran away from home?"
Faith flushed and put her half-eaten shrimp toast down on her plate. "I know I sort of agreed with you when you said that yesterday—about me running away, I mean. But it wasn't really like that. I may be a hick but I'm not a child," she said with quiet dignity. "And only children run away from home. I packed up my things and moved away."
Jack could have argued the point with her; he'd left his childhood behind years ago but had only just stopped running. Maybe for good. And maybe not. It all depended on what happened with the script he was working on. "Okay, you moved away," he agreed, tacitly apologizing for his blunder. "Why now? Why not before?"
Faith shrugged uneasily. "There were a lot of reasons." Guilt. Shame. Duty. Fear. "But, mostly, I guess, because my main reason for staying was gone. My mother died last winter," she explained.
"I'm sorry," Jack murmured, instantly contrite. He wanted suddenly, desperately, to reach across the table and offer her the comfort of his touch. And, because he wanted to so badly, he didn't. "I shouldn't have asked."
"No, it's all right. It wasn't unexpected. Or even unwelcome on her part, I think. Mama'd been sick for an awfully long time." Sick of living, mainly. "She'd always been kind of delicate and poorly. Her death was very peaceful. Very—" she groped for a word "—serene. But when she was gone, well, I was finally free to go, too," she said musingly, speaking more to herself than to him. "There was nothing to keep me there any longer."
Lovers and Strangers (The Hollywood Nights Series, Book 1) Page 6