by Lynn Turner
Reassured, he immediately back-pedalled, going so far as to offer reimbursement for any emergency medical expenses she might incur in the line of duty. Abbie wasn’t amused. When he pressed her to check in with him as often as possible, she said she would try and then deliberately hung up on him.
‘You’ll try what?’
She spun around, one hand pressed to her chest. ‘You must be part Indian,’ she said to Mal, who was standing behind her, wiping his hands on an old T-shirt.
He grinned. ‘I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. Did you get hold of the doctor?’
‘Uh … no. He was out of the office … at the hospital. His receptionist took my message, but I said I’d try to call again later, just in case he doesn’t receive it. Have you finished checking the car? Can we eat now?’
‘Hungry, are you?’ Mal drawled. He slung the grease-stained shirt over his shoulder and clasped her hand to lead her towards the restaurant. ‘I told you to fill up at breakfast.’
Abbie knew it was a mistake to link her fingers with his, but she did it anyway. Halfway across the restaurant car park she realised that he’d shortened his normally long, loping stride, taking smaller steps so she wouldn’t have to trot to keep up with him. So he could be considerate, as well as funny and charming and devastatingly seductive. She heaved a dejected sigh. Darn the man for getting under her skin. Darn her for letting him. It would have been hard enough to face his scorn and contempt when he discovered that she’d deliberately deceived him, without the added misery of knowing she was more than halfway to falling in love with him.
Half an hour later they were back on the interstate, heading into St Louis. The roast beef sandwich Abbie had wolfed down sat like a rock in her stomach. She suspected that the antacid tablets Irma had given her were going to come in handy before long.
‘I don’t understand why we had to eat so fast,’ she complained as they passed a van with frolicking unicorns painted on the side. ‘Would it have hurt to spend an hour enjoying a nice, leisurely dinner?’
‘We can be halfway across Illinois in an hour,’ Mal replied. ‘I thought you wanted to win this race.’
‘I do. It’s just that normally I like to chew my food before I swallow it.’
The sarcastic remark earned her a good-natured chuckle, which merely surprised her, and a light tap on the chin, which startled her so badly that she almost swerved the Shelby into an oil tanker in the next lane.
‘Garrett!’ she croaked when her heart had vacated her throat.
‘Sorry,’ he murmured. ‘I didn’t realise you were so goosey. I won’t do it again.’
‘See that you don’t!’
‘At least, not while you’re driving,’ he added mildly.
Abbie turned her head to give him a suspicious look and found him grinning wickedly. ‘Now, listen, Garrett—’
She abruptly cut herself off when she saw a diamond-shaped orange sign flash past his window. ‘What did that sign say?’
‘What sign?’
‘The one we just passed.’
Mal shrugged. ‘I didn’t see it. I was watching your ears for signs of steam. It was probably one of those information things—take two-seventy north to the airport, or something like that. We’ve passed a dozen of them.’
Abbie shook her head. ‘No. This sign wasn’t green and it wasn’t rectangular. It was an orange diamond—the kind they put up when a section of road is under construction or there’s a detour ahead. You’d better get out the atlas.’
Twenty minutes later Mal was hunched over the road atlas, which was lying open on his lap, scowling as he tried to decipher the maze of intersecting, numbered lines.
‘Well?’ Abbie said impatiently. ‘Have you figured out where we are?’
‘I’m not sure. I think we should have gone north instead of south at that first detour.’
‘That was eleven or twelve miles back, for pity’s sake. Why didn’t you say something right away?’
‘Obviously because I didn’t realise we were going in the wrong direction right away,’ he said snidely.
‘You told me to go south,’ Abbie reminded him.
‘Well, I was wrong,’ he growled. ‘I made a mistake. So sue me.’
She drew a deep, calming breath. This was getting them nowhere. ‘I apologise for snapping at you. I guess fighting all this traffic has got me a little tense. I’ve never seen so many trucks and buses in my life.’
Mal cleared his throat softly. ‘I think that’s because we took the truck route at the second detour.’
‘What?’
‘Well, it was either that or end up in Memphis!
According to the damned signs, those were the only two choices we had.’
‘Wrong, Einstein. We could have stopped and asked somebody for directions.’
Better late than never, she thought as she took advantage of a red light to look around for a likely source of help. They were in luck. She spotted a fire station on the cross street, only half a block away, and parked near it.
‘Why are you stopping here?’ Mal asked with a frown.
Abbie answered as she unbuckled her seat-belt and opened her door. ‘Because firemen usually know their way around a city better than anybody, including the cops. They also have to know all the shortcuts. Bring the atlas.’
The fire fighters were friendly and eager to be of assistance, especially when they got a look at the Shelby. It turned out that two of them were members of a sports car club and had been trying to find one to race at a local track.
‘I bet she’ll really fly,’ the younger of the two said enviously when directions had been given and Mal and Abbie were ready to leave. ‘What’s her top speed?’
The question was directed at Mal. Without missing a beat he drawled, ‘I wouldn’t know. I’m just the mechanic.’
Abbie quickly climbed behind the wheel and started the engine before the young man could ask her anything about the car.
*
The directions the firemen had given them took them through downtown St Louis, around Busch Stadium and eventually on to I55 East. Abbie sighed in relief as they passed the Gateway Arch and started across the Mississippi, but she didn’t completely relax until they passed a sign indicating that they were in I64, two hundred and fifty miles from Louisville, Kentucky, and she knew they were headed in the right direction.
‘Hallelujah,’ Mal said drily. ‘I’d started to think I was going to spend my next birthday in St Louis.’
Abbie didn’t reply. She was still annoyed with him for getting them lost and costing them precious time.
‘It was a smart move to stop at a fire station,’ he said after a moment. ‘I never would have thought of it.’
‘I can believe that,’ she muttered under her breath.
‘There’s no need to be sarcastic.’
‘Sorry,’ Abbie said. She didn’t even try to sound sincere.
She heard his gusty sigh. ‘We only lost about forty-five minutes. We can make it up between here and Louisville.’
Her temper flared at the irritation in his voice. What right did he have to be irritated? It was his fault they had gone off course and wasted three quarters of an hour.
‘Right,’ she said flatly. ‘We can make up a measly forty-five minutes, no trouble. I just wish we’d spent the time having dinner, instead of following a truck convoy all over St Louis.’
‘All right,’ Mal muttered. ‘You’ve made your point.’
‘ “We can be halfway across Illinois in an hour,” ‘ she quoted, mimicking his drawl.
‘All right, dammit! I screwed up. Is that what you want to hear?’
‘It’ll do,’ she said. ‘For starters.’
‘God, you’re a shrew.’
Two angry splotches appeared on Abbie’s cheeks. ‘In that case, maybe you’d like to trade places with Tony… provided we ever catch up with him again.’
‘That was a typically asinine, typically female remark,’ Mal said in disgust. ‘The only
thing worse than being stuck with you for the next thousand miles would be being stuck with Roxie.’
Abbie feigned amazement. ‘You mean she’s an even bigger shrew than I am?’
‘Honey, she makes you look like Mother Teresa.’
It was Abbie’s turn to be snide. ‘Evidently you didn’t always feel that way.’
‘Oh, I always suspected she had the potential to be a first-class bitch. I was just too far gone to care.’
Abbie tried to identify the emotion in his voice. Was it self-mockery, or bitterness?
‘That doesn’t sound like you.’ She was careful to keep her tone neutral. She wanted him to keep talking about his relationship with Roxanne; not for the sake of any story, but for herself, to satisfy her own morbid curiosity.
‘Ain’t it the truth,’ he drawled ‘I guess everybody’s entitled to make a fool of himself once in his life. But I learned my lesson. Never again.’
Abbie had a feeling she would regret asking, but she didn’t seem able to help herself. ‘What was the lesson?’
‘That any man who puts his faith in a woman’s integrity gets exactly what he deserves. You’re all the same— always looking out for number one, using anybody stupid enough to let himself be used taking whatever you can get … usually from some poor slob who doesn’t have sense enough to realise he’s been taken for the ride of his life.’
Abbie didn’t respond to his little speech until she had examined her own reaction to it and decided she wasn’t just being defensive.
‘I’ve heard a lot of chauvinistic garbage in my life, Garrett, but what just came out of your mouth sets a new standard,’ she said with far more calm than she felt.
‘I can see this is going to be a delightful evening,’ he growled in response. ‘You asked what lesson I learned and I told you. If you didn’t want to hear the answer, you shouldn’t have asked the question.’
‘You don’t honestly believe all that crap,’ Abbie said with conviction. ‘You’re too intelligent to make such idiotic, irresponsible generalisations.’
‘Thanks,’ he muttered. ‘I think.’
‘Just because one woman took advantage of you—how many years ago?’
‘Almost three. And she didn’t just “take advantage” of me. She set me up, used me, then gave me the old heave-ho when she’d got what she was after. Namely the plans for the artificial heart I was working on at the time. She took them to a talented but naive young doctor and convinced him he’d be doing a great service for mankind if he finished refining the design. The guy was a brilliant heart surgeon, but unfortunately he didn’t know diddly about biomedical engineering.’
Abbie was stunned. No wonder he had such a low opinion of women. Apparently he’d never known one who hadn’t put her own selfish interests first.
‘All right,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll grant that what Roxanne did was terrible.’
‘Gee, that’s big of you.’
She ignored the sarcastic comment. ‘But you must realise how irrational it is to let that one rotten experience prejudice you against every woman you meet.’
‘I never claimed to be rational, Abigail,’ he drawled. ‘Just extremely cautious.’
‘Distrustful,’ she corrected.
‘OK, distrustful,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘But with good reason.’
Abbie noticed that the sky had darkened to dusk. She reached down to switch on the headlights, then spared a moment to check the gauges.
‘Have you let any woman get close to you since Roxanne left?’
There was no humour in Mal’s harsh bark of laughter. ‘Hell, no! I’m chauvinist, remember, not a masochist.’
Abbie privately thought that what he was, was a man who had been hurt once and wasn’t about to risk letting it happen again. ‘Tell me about her,’ she asked quietly.
‘Who, her? Roxanne?’ He sounded incredulous.
‘Yes, Roxanne.’
He shifted restlessly. ‘I don’t want to talk about her.’
‘You should, you know,’ Abbie murmured in the same quiet, non-threatening voice. ‘You’ve kept all your resentment and bitterness about the way she betrayed you locked up inside for almost three years, and it’s been festering all that time … poisoning you.’
‘God,’ he muttered. ‘You make me sound like a walking, talking boil.’
‘You know I’m right,’ she insisted. ‘Where did you meet her?’
‘I said I don’t want to talk about her! And what difference does it make where I met her, for pity’s sake?’
Abbie shrugged. ‘It seemed like the logical place to start.’
By the time they reached Mt Vernon, Illinois, she’d learned that Roxanne had been one of the students in an advanced engineering course he had taken over for an ailing faculty member one spring at Purdue University. That revelation had been quite a shock; Abbie had trouble imagining him in the role of professor. She wondered if he’d presented his lectures in a grease-stained sweatshirt and jeans.
Roxanne had been the brightest and most ambitious of his students. Equally important, she had been totally unlike the endless succession of women who paraded in and out of his father’s life. She was intelligent, independent, and aggressively goal-orientated. Mal had fallen hard and fast. A week after receiving a Master’s in electrical engineering, Roxanne returned with him to Oklahoma. She stayed for almost two years.
‘Those last few months, I knew she’d started to feel restless,’ he admitted. ‘After she left I realised she’d been sending out warning signals for some time. I guess I just didn’t want to acknowledge them.’ He paused, sighing heavily.
‘Hell, I couldn’t really blame her for leaving. I’m not the easiest person in the world to live with. When I get deeply involved in a project, nothing and no one else exists. Sometimes I forget to eat or deep for days at a time, and I’m lousy company. What I’ll never forgive is the cold-blooded way she set me up and used me.’
‘Have you ever considered that she may not have thought of it that way?’ Abbie murmured. She could hardly believe she was playing devil’s advocate for Roxanne Winston, but, in all fairness, she felt he should at least consider the possibility that Roxanne hadn’t ‘set him up’, as he’d assumed. ‘Had she been helping you with your work, specifically with the artificial heart?’
‘I know what you’re getting at, Abigail, but you’re way off base,’ Mal replied. ‘Yes, she’d been assisting me, but it was my project, my design. There was never any question about that. She took the plans, then passed them off as her own work to get financing from some big-shot money man on Wall Street. Within a week she’d moved in with Mr Moneybags, set herself up with an office and a staff, and started contacting potential clients … including several people she’d met while she was working with me. Every move was calculated, believe me. Roxanne doesn’t have an impulsive bone in her body. She knew exactly what she was doing from the very beginning.’
Abbie experienced a sudden flash of insight. ‘That’s what galls you most, isn’t it—the idea that she was plotting to use you all along, and you never suspected a thing?’
‘Of course it is,’ he said irritably. ‘No man likes to admit he let a woman make an utter fool of him, though lord knows it happens to all of us, sooner or later.’
‘If that’s true, it doesn’t say much for the intelligence of the average man, does it?’ Abbie murmured.
‘I think it says more about the treacherous nature of the average woman,’ he countered.
‘Of course, you would. She zapped you right in the old ego, didn’t she?’
She knew she’d hit the mark, even before his indignant retort. ‘I don’t believe you! First you nag me into spilling my guts—’
‘I didn’t nag,’ Abbie said firmly. ‘I encouraged you to talk, that’s all.’
Mal blithely ignored the distinction. ‘And then, when I’ve told you all the intimate details of an extremely traumatic experience, all you can say is “she zapped you right in the old ego”
. The depth of your sensitivity astounds me.’
‘Be honest, Garrett,’ Abbie said drily. ‘Which did Roxanne do more damage to—your heart, or your pride?’
He didn’t answer right away. She waited patiently. ‘Are you writing a book?’ he finally muttered. He couldn’t possibly have crammed any more sarcasm into six syllables.
‘No, just curious. Well? Are you going to answer my question?’
‘You have got to be the most stubborn, disagreeable, aggravating—not to mention nosy—female I’ve ever met,’ Mal complained, but his relaxed drawl let Abbie know that he didn’t mean a word of it.
‘You forgot pain in the ass,’ she said with a grin, and was rewarded with a husky chuckle. ‘I guess you’re not going to answer the question.’
‘You already know the answer,’ he told her drily. ‘It was my pride that suffered the most serious damage.’ He waited a moment, then added softly, ‘You were right. I did need to talk about it. Thanks.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ Abbie murmured. She didn’t add anything more. For some reason, that quiet, sincere ‘thanks’ had caused her eyes to mist over and a lump to form in her throat.
While she was relieved to know he wasn’t carrying a torch for Roxanne, that fact didn’t lessen her anxiety about her own situation. She had used him, too. Not as ruthlessly, perhaps, but she was furthering her own career at his expense.
If she could have seen a way out of the complicated mess she had created, she would have taken it. But Roger had made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, they had a verbal contract. If she didn’t deliver the article she’d promised him, she had no doubt that he would do everything he could to see that she never sold another story to a major newspaper.
Would Mal ever forgive her? Would he even give her a chance to explain? She considered telling him everything now, rather than waiting until they arrived in Washington. But if she did, she suspected he might be so furious that he would order her to stop the car and get out, or at the very least dump her at the next exit. Then what would happen? Even if he continued on without her, he wouldn’t have a chance of winning the race. The man might be a genius when it came to building automobile engines and artificial hearts, but he couldn’t read a map to save his life. He’d probably end up lost somewhere in Appalachia, if he managed to get that far.