by Hal Ross
“Care for a drink before take-off?” he asked, snapping his seat belt.
She kept her gaze on the window and the tarmac outside. “Sure. It might take the edge off the possibility of dying next to someone I detest. But I think we have to wait until we’re airborne.”
He removed a mini-bottle from his travel bag. It had a medical prescription label around it, which explained how he got it past security. Ann watched in bemusement as he divided its contents—Scotch, obviously—into two paper cups.
“Explain this to me again,” she said, accepting the drink from him, “your obsession with this doll.”
Jonathan held his cup up to the overhead light for some reason Ann couldn’t fathom. “This is one time I’m not going to let you operate behind the scenes,” he said finally.
Ann bit back on her anger. When had she ever? She kept things close to the vest, certainly. But she wasn’t dishonest—never that.
“Why do you hate me?” she heard herself ask.
Jonathan opened his mouth, looking startled then thoughtful, just as the plane’s engines rumbled to life. Ann didn’t catch what he said. Having finished her drink, she crumpled the paper cup and stuck it in the magazine pouch in front of her. She held her jaw tight as the plane lurched and reversed from the gate. She checked her seatbelt. Again. As though it would do her even a prayer of good if she were coming down from thirty-three thousand feet. Or five thousand, as the case would probably be.
“You are scared,” Jonathan said, watching her. He sounded surprised.
“Go to hell.”
“Not until I know if you ever intended to marry Matthew.”
“What?”
His expression was benign when Ann’s gaze jerked away from the window. It occurred to her that he might have brought the topic up at this precise moment to divert her attention from take off. The sound of the engines became deafening to her oversensitive ears. She was hurtling, trapped in metal. Then—oomph. Off the ground. Higher. Higher.
Ann recalled one other conversation she’d had with Jonathan on the subject of Matthew, going on fifteen years ago. It had been at Felicia’s Long Island beach house. Just before Mattie had died.
“I told you I wasn’t going to,” she said, the scene still vivid in her mind. “I promised you I wouldn’t marry him.”
“But what did you tell him?” Jonathan persisted.
“I didn’t have time to answer him, one way or the other.”
“Time? What are we talking about here? Thirty seconds?” Any tolerance she’d seen in his eyes abruptly shuttered down. “On the one hand, we have, Ann, will you marry me? On the other, we have, Thank you, Matt, you flatter me, but no. How much time is that?”
“You bastard.” Ann’s heart seized, even now, after so many years.
“Spare me the histrionics. Just tell me the truth.”
She might have—the why of it all, the hell behind her decision. Might have. The Scotch was mellow in her stomach and she felt it loosening her tongue. She could have told him that she had had no right to Matt because his heart had been utterly innocent and kind. He had never been suspicious like Patrick and Jonathan. He’d loved her from almost the start. But he’d deserved so much more than her, someone without the baggage she carried, and the guilt.
“I need another drink,” Ann said abruptly. The plane was leveling off at cruising altitude. She loosened her grip from the armrests.
Jonathan caught the flight attendant’s attention. “A Molson for me and a Dewars for the lady, please.”
The second Scotch promised to go down more smoothly than the first. Ann sipped and thought almost longingly of her Gameboy. But when she opened her briefcase, she withdrew the script and the storyboard for the commercial shoot instead.
“What’s that?” he asked.
She slid her gaze to him without moving her head or saying anything.
“Let me see. Please?”
Ann detected a hint of real interest in his voice. She handed him the storyboard.
It was done in color, in sketch form, with fifteen squares. Each of them represented approximately two seconds of film time. He looked at it for a long while.
“Doesn’t do a thing for me,” he said finally.
“You’re not a girl.”
“You noticed, huh?”
Only in her most vulnerable moments, Ann thought but dared not say. She snatched the board out of his hands. “I’m trying to educate you.”
He settled in his seat, tilting his head back and shutting his eyes. “Educate away. I’m all ears.”
Ann rubbed her temples. “Why should I bother?”
“Because I’m interested. And I’m not a novice, you know.”
“Really?”
“Believe it or not, over the years I’ve absorbed a great deal.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes, over the dinner table, for instance, when I was a kid.”
“You and your father used to leave meals to play pool in the den.”
He cracked one eye at her. “How would you know? You weren’t around then. And just to set the record straight, it wasn’t pool.”
“Felicia told me. What was it then?”
“He was interested in my painting. He always wanted to see what I was working on.”
For some reason, that stilled Ann’s heart “Did your mother know?”
He shrugged. The gesture seemed stiff. “I’m not sure.”
Ann had never known Frederick. He’d died a few years before she’d come on the scene, which would have made Jonathan sixteen at the time. “You were a teenage Rembrandt?”
He smiled. “I was an artist in the womb. I remember the finger paints Santa brought me when I was two.” He paused. “Did you always want to be a shark?”
It hurt. “I always wanted to survive.”
“You’re doing more than that, Ann.”
“Not at anyone else’s expense.”
“We’ll see.”
“Fuck you, Jonathan.” The words were torn from her, unpremeditated and heartfelt.
“I seriously doubt if we’ll ever get that close.” He sat up. “Give me a look at that storyboard again.”
She passed it to him.
“I want to know why we’re doing this in Toronto.”
“Because filming in New York or Hollywood would cost us upward of $150,000,” she said, “and I want to control what expenditures I can.”
“What’s Toronto going to cost?”
“Less than half that. In both time and money.”
“Is Toronto as good?”
“The Canadians seem to think so. You were born there, weren’t you?”
Jonathan nodded, then gestured at her seatbelt. “Better tighten up. We’re getting close to landing.”
Ann gripped the belt with both hands and groaned inwardly. What the hell was she supposed to do with him in Toronto?
CHAPTER 7
Cold rain was drumming down when they stepped out of the terminal at Lester B. Pearson Airport.
“Feel testy about sharing a cab?” Jonathan asked.
“You find one, I’ll pay for it.” Ann ducked back through the doors to wait inside. Pride always came with a price, she thought.
She watched through the window as the downpour flattened his dark hair and soaked through his jacket. He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets and eyed the creeping traffic. Cars stopped now and then to suck in waiting passengers; doors slammed, tires sloshed, and water splattered.
Ten minutes later, Ann hurried into the waiting taxi, while Jonathan stowed their bags in the trunk. Then he got in beside her and pulled the door shut.
Fifty gridlocked minutes later, the cab spit them out in front of the Sheraton Centre. The rain had given way to a light mist that tangled the air. Ann paid the driver and went inside to stand in line at the check-in desk. When she felt his breath on the back of her neck, she spoke without turning. “If I wake up tomorrow morning to find your butt camped in front of my door, look
out.”
“If they haven’t had a cancellation since yesterday, you’ll find me on the floor in your room.”
She jerked around to face him. “You don’t have a reservation?”
“I tried. They were full.”
“Well, go somewhere else! This city is full of hotels.”
“Can’t. That would negate my whole purpose for being here.”
“Jonathan, this is asinine.”
“I’ll probably agree with you after a night on the floor.”
Ann whipped back to the registration clerk, disbelieving and incensed. She got her room and took both keys. She dangled them briefly in front of his nose, then dropped them smartly into the pocket of her jacket. His scowl offered her a modicum of satisfaction.
Jonathan stepped up to the desk, his gaze cutting back to her as she took long, sure strides toward the elevator. He wondered if she knew she blushed when she got angry. Until a few hours ago, he hadn’t known how easily she could be irritated.
It was well past ten o’clock when Jonathan let himself into his hotel room, pleased that they could accommodate him, after all. He draped his jeans over the shower door to dry and called room service. Waiting for his meal, he considered various long distance calls he could make. He vetoed the idea of touching base with his mother; he didn’t want her to know where he was. Then he thought about Carmen Cole.
They had been seeing each other for four weeks now. She was an investment banker with incredible, burnished red hair and skin the tone and texture of ivory. Carmen possessed just enough freewheeling independence to forestall Jonathan’s tendency to feel cornered. Good manners would dictate that he let her know he’d arrived safely, but he couldn’t recall if he’d even mentioned the trip.
Jonathan returned the phone to its cradle and went to take a shower. When he finished and stepped out of the bathroom, room service had arrived. He pulled on a pair of sweat pants and collected the steak and French fries. He found the remote for the TV, then began to eat with only half his attention on the screen.
Ann had never really answered his question about Matt, he thought, and now, hours later, he was not at all sure why he had asked it in the first place. Maybe he’d been looking for a response he could live with.
Years ago she had made the promise to him that she would not accept Matt’s proposal. They were walking barefoot on the beach, and she was wearing a long, diaphanous dress beneath a denim jacket. She’d fussed repeatedly when the sea had lapped at her hem, stopping to gather it up and wring it out. He’d suggested that they walk farther up the beach, away from the tide, and she’d looked at him like he was incapable of appreciating some fundamental joy of life. To prove her wrong, he’d waded into the water, too, until his jeans were soaked to the knees.
He’d finally had to ask her straight out. “Are you going to do it? Are you going to marry him?” Mattie had told him that morning that he’d asked.
His question had stopped her cold. When he looked at her, he’d found her perfect face tilted toward the sky, framed by moonlight. The opaque glow had caught her tears and they glimmered on her face.
Later, he’d captured that moment on canvas. He’d caught the heartbreak in her eyes, the bitterness, and the fierce, determined hope in the set of her jaw, even without understanding the conflict of emotions. He’d never sold the painting. To the best of his knowledge, the piece was still in storage with other personal works he wouldn’t share.
“I’m not going to marry him,” she’d said finally, “but I refuse to explain myself.”
“I don’t need you to. I just want you to leave him alone.”
She’d brought her gaze back to his then, and there was a change of countenance. The heartbreak and hope were gone, and all that remained was bitterness. “I might have made him happy. But we’ll never know, will we?”
She’d turned and started up the beach again. This obvious rejection had made him feel small. Small and randy. He remembered the twitch of her hips as she’d picked her way through the sand, her skirt gathered up, wads of it held in each fist, showing legs that were tanned and strong. He’d let her move ahead of him because the sudden rush of wanting her was so unforeseen and cataclysmic, he hadn’t trusted himself to move forward.
She’d been living with them for two years by then. She’d recovered from her flu but never left. Where had she come from? What did she want from them? Did his mother even know? Sometimes her smile seemed sharp enough to cut glass. At other times, the color would wash from her face, her eyes going stark and vulnerable.
Jonathan could picture Patrick in those days. He had spent nearly every available moment on her heels, waiting for her to do … something. He’d harangued Felicia over the legalities of harboring a runaway. For his part, Jonathan had never expected Ann to cause them harm, but he couldn’t help himself from watching and waiting, never exactly anticipating what might come next. He hadn’t actually started to hate her until she lied to him.
“Give me your word!” he had shouted after her that night.
“I already did!” She’d answered without turning, the breeze catching her voice and flinging it back to him.
Damn it, it had been a promise. One she’d broken.
Jonathan now returned to the bathroom and ran himself a glass of water, drinking deeply. “What the hell did you do, Ann?” he said aloud. She’d changed her mind, of course, had said yes, had gone back on her word to him, sometime between the night on the beach and the night on the boat, all of two days later.
But what if he was wrong? He paused, then shrugged. He didn’t want to go there. At least, not tonight. There was his mother to think about and his reason for being in Toronto. He mustn’t lose sight of his mission—to protect his mother’s interests at all costs.
No other woman in his life had earned his respect the way Felicia had. Her honesty and compassion, her understanding, even when he explained to her that he did not want any part of the business she had built from the ground up.
Jonathan finally turned out the bathroom light and went to the bed. He picked up the phone and had the hotel operator put him through to Ann’s room.
“Hmmm,” she answered. Her voice was thick with sleep. While he was prowling his room with memories nipping at his heels, she had been sleeping. That bothered him in a way he couldn’t understand.
“Just making sure you’re present and accounted for,” he said. “See you in the morning.”
He hung up midway through her answering growl.
CHAPTER 8
The following morning, Jonathan was already in the lobby waiting for Ann when she arrived downstairs.
“If you slept more often, you might not need this,” she said, taking the cup of coffee out of his hands and drinking deeply. “Is there any way I can talk you out of going with me?”
“Why would you want to?”
“Out of respect for Felicia. I wouldn’t want to bore one of her offspring to death.”
“Good try. Let’s go.”
He started for the door. Ann drained the coffee and left the mug on the concierge desk. When she got outside, he had a cab waiting.
It was a ten minute ride to the studio. When they got out of the car, Jonathan reached into his pocket and counted out the correct change.
“You know, this really is ridiculous,” Ann muttered.
He answered without looking at her. “So you’ve said at least six times in the last twenty-four hours. Now, would you move aside so I can pay the guy?”
“That’s what I meant. There’s no reason you should pay for this out of your own pocket. The company will cover our expenses.”
He passed the money to the cabbie. When he turned back to her, they were standing too close.
“Ann, I can afford it.” He caught her chin in his hand. “You went after the wrong brother.”
How could it happen like this? she wondered. One moment they were civil, then everything flared. Ann dropped her briefcase to wrap both hands around his wrist.
They stood that way, locked in place, both of them suddenly angry, both unwilling to back off.
“Stop this,” she hissed. “Leave him alone, damn it. Leave Mattie out of this!”
“Want me to promise the way you did?”
“What on earth is the matter with you?”
“Maybe I’ve finally decided to get to the bottom of everything, once and for all.”
Ann moved one hand to swat at his. But something was jumping in her stomach. “Knock it off.”
Jonathan released his hold on her. She breathed in deeply once, twice, trying to get her equilibrium back. Then she bent to snag her briefcase again and headed into the studio.
The building was a converted warehouse. As she signed in with the uniformed guard, she became aware of the musty odor of the place. She glanced at Jonathan, waiting for some comment about cutting corners. She decided not to give him the opportunity and moved forward, up a winding corridor.
It ended at the entrance to a cavernous loft. By the time she reached it, he was behind her again, too close.
“You’ve used these people before?” he asked as they pushed through a solid metal door.
There it was, Ann thought, the jab. Or at least the prelude to one. “Once or twice.”
“And?”
“I was satisfied,” she said shortly, and she blushed.
Rattled her again, Jonathan thought. He wanted to wonder about that, but his attention was caught by the set. It was a child’s bedroom: a dresser, cupboard, school desk, storage chest. The pinks were vivid, the whites pristine. People swarmed. A man in his mid-forties spotted Ann and pushed out of the crowd. He had spare blond hair and a nose that looked as though it had been punched more than once. Jonathan couldn’t get a good read of his eyes through the lenses of his glasses.
“Ann.” The guy caught her hand—affectionately, Jonathan thought. The once or twice she’d worked with him had apparently been memorable occasions.
She was wearing that smile again, Jonathan decided, the one that could cut glass. She took her hand back. “Guy Brewer, Jonathan Morhardt,” she said, making the introductions.