Strokes of Midnight

by Tarr, Hope

  Chapter 9

  Shouldering his weapon, Drake looked over at Angelina. Kneeling on the cabin’s dirt-packed floor, the beautiful Brit was still arming up. “Crikey, Angie, get a move on. We haven’t got all bloody day.”

  Angelina looked up at him through glaring green eyes. “I always clean my gun and triple-check my taser before going out on a mission. It’s my ritual.”

  Drake yanked off his broad-brimmed hat and scoured the sweat from his forehead before it rolled into his eyes. The blooming woman would be the death of him, and they hadn’t yet cleared the cabin. “Is that so? Next you’ll be telling me you knock your heels together three times, too.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  * * *

  Max awoke the next morning late but in a better frame of mind. As much as it had hurt him to talk about Elaina, now that he had, he felt as if something had been released inside him. He showered and dressed and came downstairs humming “New York State of Mind.” The half-filled coffeepot confirmed Becky had come down already.

  When he walked into his office, coffee mug in hand, he found her at his computer. “Good morning.”

  She finished typing her current sentence and looked up. “Good morning. I hope you don’t mind me helping myself to your computer. My laptop screen is pretty small.”

  “Not a problem.” He sat his coffee down and came to stand beside her, relieved she showed no signs of being pissed off at him for cutting out on what was supposed to have been their first day of work. Last night at dinner she’d been mighty quiet, but then so had he. Looking over her shoulder, he said, “On a roll, huh?”

  She nodded, gaze drifting back to the screen. “I’m working on bio sketches for our main characters, including the antagonists. I’m almost finished with Angelina’s. I figure you can get started on Drake’s.”

  Max had lived with Drake through three books, longer if you counted the time the Aussie adventurer had first burst into his consciousness. He didn’t need a “bio sketch,” whatever the hell that was. He knew his character inside and out.

  Hoping to avoid the topic of writing exercises, he said, “I finished your book last night.”

  That obviously got her attention. She swiveled away from the screen and looked up at him. “Dare I ask what you thought?”

  “I liked it,” he said without hesitation. “I didn’t expect to but I did. I thought the Falco character was a little over the top but otherwise the story sailed right along.”

  “Over the top? How do you mean?” She turned to face him.

  “Well, if Angelina is such a crackerjack spy, why would she fall for a guy like that? I mean, it’s not like there weren’t plenty of signs that he was not only a double agent but also a player.”

  Becky bit her bottom lip as though the remark struck some kind of personal cord. “It happens. Smart, nice women fall for jerks all the time. Haven’t you ever heard the saying that love is blind?”

  He snorted. “In that case, Angelina needs a pair of night-vision goggles.”

  Becky rolled her eyes. “And this from the man who writes about a middle-aged Australian bounty hunter who’s apparently filthy rich yet can’t commit to building anything more substantial than a one-room shanty on his own property.”

  Middle-aged! Max felt his good mood slipping. “Drake doesn’t need to flaunt his wealth. It’s the land he loves, not material possessions.”

  And so began their first day of collaboration. It was clear working together wasn’t going to be the cakewalk Pat and Harry had pitched it to be. Even agreeing on a writing schedule turned into a major negotiation. Sitting down to block out the book later that day, they quickly learned they had very different ways of working. Max was a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants writer who liked to start with a general idea and flesh it out as he went along. Becky was a meticulous plotter who lived and died by her outline. She blocked out each chapter scene-by-scene through to the end before she could even think of writing the book. Surprises made her crazy, while for Max the surprise, the adventure, was half the fun.

  They also had completely opposite internal clocks. Max admitted that anything before ten was way too early for him. Working alone, he didn’t usually get down to writing until after dinner. Once the story got cooking, though, he’d sometimes write straight through to dawn. That wasn’t going to cut it for Becky. A morning person, she did her best work before midafternoon, preferably with an hour’s exercise break at lunch. Unless she was on a roll or a deadline crunch, by the time dinnertime came around she was ready to shut down her computer for the night.

  Even more challenging than meshing conflicting work habits and schedules was comingling the storylines from their previous books. It was a lot like sending your characters on a blind date with nowhere to go.

  With the tension mounting on both sides, Max suggested they move to the family room where it would be easier to relax. He went into the kitchen to put on a fresh pot of coffee. When he came out again, a mug in either hand, Becky was settled onto the couch, Scout sprawled over her feet, a notepad in her lap.

  The cozy domestic scene tugged at his heart. He couldn’t help noticing how good she looked there in his family room, how right. He carried the coffee over to the low pine table. Setting the mugs down, he hesitated, eyeing the empty plaid cushion beside her. Too close for comfort, he decided—his, at any rate.

  He glanced again at his new partner, head bent over the pad and writing meticulous notes in her neat, precise handwriting. Today’s ensemble was a soft pink sweater and jeans—and gym socks. For whatever reason, the latter struck him as really cute.

  The whole character-sketch exercise, on the other hand, struck him as a pure pain in the ass. Writing wasn’t an “exercise” you practiced. It was something you just did. When he was in that magical state known as The Zone, the words gushed out of him like a mountain stream, sometimes rushing out faster than he could type. On those occasions, he put aside whatever else he was doing and just went with it. Still, this character-sketch thing was apparently part of Becky’s process and judging from what he’d read so far of her book, it obviously worked for her.

  Trying to get into the spirit of the thing, he settled into the nearby leather chair and asked, “By the way, how old is Angelina supposed to be?”

  Pen stalling, Becky glanced up. “Excuse me?”

  He was pretty sure she’d heard him, but he repeated himself anyway. “I asked how old she is.”

  She snapped up her chin. “What difference does it make?”

  He held up his hands in the air. “Hey, you’re the one who insisted on doing character sketches. I’m just trying to get a better feel for who she is.”

  “She’s…thirtysomething.”

  “You haven’t given her a definite age?” From a few feet away, he studied her, wondering why age seemed to be such a tender topic with her. She couldn’t be much past thirty and these days thirty was the new twenty, or so the media claimed.

  “No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t. Why, is that some kind of writing faux pas? I mean, it’s not like she’s going to settle down and have Drake’s baby.”

  He shrugged, wondering if perhaps he’d hit a nerve. Could it be her snappishness over all matters age-related had to do with her own biological clock ticking? Testing the waters, he said, “You never know, she might. If she’s still in her thirties, it could happen. Women in their thirties have babies all the time.”

  Fuming brown eyes bored into him. “You make it sound so simple, so cut-and-dried, but it isn’t. Did you know that once a woman hits the age of thirty-five, her chances of getting pregnant go down by fifty percent? And that after thirty-five, her fertility declines by a steady ten percent each year?”

  Max hadn’t known that, but then he hadn’t made an in-depth study of the subject as she obviously had. In the first half of their marriage, he and Elaina had been too busy with their careers and traveling and generally enjoying each other to think about adding kids to the mix. Like so man
y people, they’d figured they had time, maybe not all the time in the world but definitely a lot more than they’d got. They’d just started seriously talking about starting a family when she’d been diagnosed.

  “Don’t tell that to Susan Sarandon,” he quipped. A fan, he knew the popular film actress had given birth twice in her midforties.

  He could see he’d been wrong to make the joke. Becky stabbed her index finger into the air, but he thought her eyes looked glittery, as if she was holding back tears. “Be that as it may, if you think I’m going to stand by and let Drake knock up my heroine and then leave her high and dry while he rides off into the sunset for his next adventure, think again, mister. Anyway, the point is moot.”

  “How’s that?”

  “If you must know, Angelina is on the pill.”

  “You’ve given her a birth-control method but not an age?”

  He felt a tickle at the corners of his mouth and struggled not to laugh. He was coming to see she took her character a lot more seriously than he did his, yet another difference between them.

  “She’s very…active.” A tinge of pink swept into her cheeks.

  “Active, huh?” Wondering just what kind of book he’d signed up to cowrite, he asked, “You mean she sleeps around?”

  She scowled. “If I said a male character was active, you’d say he was a stud, but if Angelina does the same, she’s a slut. That’s really fair—not.”

  “I didn’t call Angelina a slut, you did. And by the way, who are we really talking about here?”

  Becky hesitated. Watching her nibble her bottom lip constantly reminded him of all the amazing things she’d used that full, sexy mouth to do to his body. Try as he might, and he had to admit so far he hadn’t tried all that hard, he found himself semiaroused more often than not. The steamy scenes kept flashing through his mind like a triple-X-rated movie trailer. Seeing her every day—and every night—for the next two months wasn’t going to help with that, either. The sexual chemistry that drew them together like magnets back in Manhattan hadn’t gone away just because they’d become writing partners. Sitting across the room from her rather than beside her on the sofa, a deliberate choice, he could still feel the pull of her sensuality across the empty space.

  Setting down her coffee mug, she said, “Angelina, of course.”

  Max wasn’t so sure. “Look, for whatever it’s worth, I really don’t think you slept with me to get the book deal.” Catching her skeptical stare, he added, “Okay, I did at first but you have to admit that was a pretty amazing set of coincidences that brought us together.”

  “That was a weird day,” she admitted. “I’d just come from lunch with my editor—our editor—and she dropped the bomb on me about my book sales and then pitched teaming with you and, well, the bad news really threw me.”

  Hearing that the prospect of teaming with him counted as bad news on a par with a bombed book wasn’t exactly flattering, but he held back from saying so. If this collaboration was going to have a hope of working, he needed to get into not only her head but the head of her character.

  “Sounds serious.”

  She nodded. “I felt pretty low. After Pat left for her next meeting, I ordered a martini and then went on a thousand-dollar shoe binge at Saks.”

  “One pair of shoes cost you a grand!”

  Growing up in a well-off family, he’d never wanted for anything, but frugality was one of the core values his parents had imparted. Dropping a grand on a pair of shoes wouldn’t enter his mind. No wonder she’d been so upset when one went missing—and been so over the moon when he’d found it and brought it back to her. But considering the part those sexy red shoes had played in bringing them together, they were worth every penny.

  “Two, actually, at least before tax. I got a second pair of pumps.”

  Max hesitated. The ice had been broken. There was an opening, if he dared take it. “Since it seems to be confession time, when I first saw you on my doorstep, I thought I must be dreaming or hallucinating. I’d just spent an entire day kicking myself for not waking you up before I left that morning and getting your phone number, not to mention your last name.” He stopped, realizing he’d said a lot more than he’d meant to.

  She lifted her wide brown eyes to his face. “You wanted to see me again?”

  There was no going back now. He nodded. “I probably shouldn’t admit it, but yes, I did.” He almost said “do,” but caught himself in time.

  Her gaze slid away. She fiddled with her pen. “I probably shouldn’t admit this, either, but when I woke up in your room and found your note and the rose—that was really sweet of you, by the way—I wished I’d told you my name, my real name, so…so we could keep in touch. But I guess it really doesn’t matter at this point.” She lifted her slender shoulders in a shrug and the casualness of the gesture coupled with her matter-of-fact tone really got under his skin. “What we had in New York was a fling, a one-time deal. It’s not like we have to worry about it happening again.”

  “Right, a one-time deal.” Max sipped his coffee, just poured from the freshly made pot. He remembered stirring in his usual shovelful of sugar and yet the brew that had tasted so satisfyingly sweet moments ago suddenly tasted really bitter. “Now that we’ve squared real life away, do you think we can wrap up this character-sketch bull—business and get down to some actual writing?”

  “Not quite. We’re not finished. Actually we’ve barely started.” She reached for the notepad.

  Annoyed—okay, hurt—by her casual dismissal of their New York night, Max said, “I already know Drake through and through, and as for Angelina it’s pretty obvious she’s you in a black wig.”

  Becky’s eyes flew open. “That is so untrue. If anything, we’re almost polar opposites.”

  “Opposites, huh? If you believe that, then you not only write fiction, you must also live it.”

  She glared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You obviously love to shop. She always dresses in couture clothing right down to the designer shoes. You’re in great physical shape and she’s always running or rappeling or hanging out of something. She obviously enjoys sex and you…” He hesitated, sensing he was about to step over a line and asking himself whether or not he cared. “Well, if my recent memory serves me, you’re very good in bed.”

  She shot him a piercing look, confirming the line had been crossed. “Is that all?”

  “Not quite. She has your eyes, not the color obviously but the shape. Yours turn up at the corners just like hers do.”

  “They do?” Her shy gaze met his and Max could almost see the current of awareness pulsing between them.

  “Yes, they do.” Pressing his advantage, he said, “The one thing of yours she doesn’t have is your heart.”

  She hesitated. “Having a heart can land you in all kinds of trouble.”

  Some jerk must have hurt her badly. Probing for whatever reason—curiosity, concern or some mingling of the two, he said, “Well, she seems to take the whole British sangfroid thing to the extreme. When it comes down to it, she’s pretty bloodless.”

  Her smile vanished and her eyes turned wintry. “Just because she’s not always dissolving into a puddle of tears and standing by waiting for a man to rescue her doesn’t make her bloodless. Next you’ll be saying she’s a bitch.”

  “Well, now that you mentioned it, she doesn’t seem to care much about anyone other than herself.”

  “And I suppose Drake is a font of empathy?”

  Max felt himself bristling. He tried to give her positive feedback and she responded by attacking him. “He’s not supposed to be. He’s a man.”

  “That’s—that’s sexism.”

  “That’s reality. Look, all I’m saying is Angelina isn’t every man’s walking wet dream. Some of us like our women softer, warmer, more…”

  “More what?”

  “More like you.”

  The real-life Angelinas of the world were a dime a dozen. Women like B
ecky were rare as the prize opal he’d sent Drake out in search of in his second book.

  “Like me? But Angelina always knows just what to do and say. She always has the perfect comeback line.”

  He lifted a brow and looked at her. “You don’t do so badly yourself.”

  “She doesn’t take shit from anyone.”

  He shook his head, amazed at how adept she was at selling herself short. “And this from the woman who left five messages on my cell and then tracked me down hundreds of miles on New Year’s Day to show up at my door with luggage and a laptop.”

  “And she’s a crack markswoman, a sharpshooter.”

  “Not a skill most of us have a need for in our daily lives.”

  “And she has this perfectly straight, perfectly shiny waist-length black hair. I can put her in a tropical rainforest or in a London fog, it doesn’t matter. Her hair never frizzes.”

  “I’ve never been a fan of straight black hair. Reminds me too much of Cher. You have beautiful hair. I know women who’d kill to have curls like yours. And it’s also very shiny and silky. I noticed it the other night.”

  The intensity of his gaze holding hers sent a warm shiver shooting through Becky. Self-conscious, she reached up and tucked a curl behind her ear. The heat hitting her face told her she must be blushing. After the no-holds-barred sex they’d shared in New York—the urgent, seeking hands, the warm, wet mouths and the sultry promises they’d whispered to each other in the dark—it was nothing short of ridiculous to be embarrassed over an innocuous compliment and yet…

  Shifting in her seat, she said, “If this collaboration of ours is going to have a chance of working, we probably shouldn’t keep bringing up New York.”

  “Who’s talking about New York? I meant last night at dinner.” He broke into a very broad, very wicked grin. “You must have sex on the brain, Becka. An occupational hazard of being a romance writer, I guess.”

  “What did you call me?”

  “A romance writer.”

  “No, I mean before that. What name did you call me?”

  “Becka. It suits you. Becky sounds like a little girl’s name and Rebecca is too stiff, too formal. Becka suits you.”