Flash and Fire (2 page)

He looked over to where Amanda was sitting. Her long, pale blonde hair curled about her shoulders, tied back from her face with a blue ribbon. He wondered if she was wearing her usual perfume today. The distinct scent preceded her whenever she entered a room. It was a blend of sexuality and innocence that appealed to his sense of irony.

The chemistry was there, all in place. He knew something would happen between them. Something hot and potent and fleetingly satisfying. All that was needed was the right time, the right place. The right match to set to her fuse.

He could wait. He wasn’t going anywhere. At least, not yet.

Amanda pulled her hair up off her neck, wishing she still had her hair clip. She had lost it running toward third base after Kyle Anderson had hit that double. At least she thought it was called a double. Baseball didn’t interest her in the slightest. Why grown people thought it was entertaining to sit with their behinds growing numb waiting until someone with a stick hit a ball was beyond her.

When Jonathan Fennelli, the station’s PR man, had approached her about coming out today, she’d had every intention of turning him down. But he had hit her where she lived. Tall, handsome, Italian, Jonathan knew how to persuade.

“It’s not just for fun, Amanda.” He had flashed two rows of perfectly aligned teeth that had come to him thanks to the generosity of the good-humored wealthy widow who enjoyed his regular nocturnal visits. “We’re playing for charity. We’ve got a benefit game set up against the Channel Five newscasters and the money collected from attendance is all going toward the Disabled Children’s Fund. You can’t turn down a bunch of little kids, Amanda.”

She had known it was useless to argue from that point on, but she had tried. “Jon, I don’t know which end of the bat to aim.”

He had laughed, displaying the charm that had gotten him out of a tiny town in Georgia, and into a lucrative position with K-DAL. “You don’t aim it, and it’s the large end that hits the ball.”

Amanda sighed in defeat. “Not if I’m swinging it. I really think you should ask—“

“I’ve gone through everybody, Amanda,” Jon told her, taking her hands in his familiar supplicatory fashion. “But Chuck pulled a tendon and is going to be out of condition for the game and I can’t get Egan to budge.”

That had sounded about right. Egan Simeon was gaining weight lately. A lot of it. He had been sampling far too much at the restaurants he reviewed for the Friday features. She suppressed a grin.

Jon’s soulful brown eyes began to shine. “Ah, you’re weakening, I can see it.”

“Jon, I don’t—“

“Don’t” was a word Jonathan didn’t allow to get in his way. “No” was another.
 

“Please? I’d take it as a personal favor, and it would look good in your personnel file.”

So she had agreed, not because she cared about notes in her personnel file, but because she couldn’t bring herself to say no to the cause they were playing for.

Now she wished she had.

She could be sitting in her air-conditioned home, listening to Carla moan about how homesick she was, or hearing Christopher scream with glee as he found something new to shatter. Even those irritants seemed welcome right now in the face of the oppressive heat and her public humiliation.

She didn’t do humiliation well. Or humility, as her father had pointed out time and again. He was good at that, pointing out what he referred to as her failings. From early childhood, Amanda had known that she was a disappointment to Henry A. Foster because she wasn’t as malleable as her mother was. A disappointment because she hadn’t gone to law school the way he had wanted her to, with the ultimate goal of joining his firm. A disappointment because of a hundred different reasons that had grown too numerous to catalogue.

Amanda sighed as she thought of the slight, slender man with iron-gray hair and patrician features that inspired trust and respect in clients and juries across the country. Trust and respect, but not love.

Old Henry wouldn’t have known what to do with it if he had it. Her mother had loved him to the last breath in her body and he had treated her with the same indifference that he showed to the lowest clerk in his office.

Henry Foster’s treatment of his wife had been a bone of contention between father and daughter. The last time Amanda had seen her father was four years ago, at Sondra Foster’s funeral. He hadn’t shed a single tear, hadn’t behaved as if someone who had shared thirty years of his life had passed away. There was no grief, no emotion, almost no interest. Only a show of duty. The rift between Amanda and her father had grown immeasurable in the space of that afternoon.

Amanda had left home that same afternoon, with her father’s prophecy of failure ringing in her ears.

Her father definitely wouldn’t have understood roasting in the sun, “making a public spectacle of herself”’ either, she thought now, not even for a good cause.

Almost in defiance, Amanda stuck out her chin and tried to pay attention to the game. God, she wished she had something to drink. The inning progressed in slow motion. Hernandez hit a single. That left just Rafferty between Amanda and her turn at the bat.

Time to strike out again, she thought wryly.

“You look as if you could use this.”

Amanda started, surprised that someone had come up so close to her without her having heard him. Shading her eyes, she looked up. Pierce Alexander was standing next to her, his tall, well-muscled body blotting out the sun. He would have liked that image, she thought. He was offering her a bottle of soda.

Beware of investigative reporters bearing gifts
, she mused.

But the orange soda looked tempting. As did, she thought with a critical eye, the man who was offering it. She knew there were a lot of women at the station ready and willing to catch Pierce Alexander’s eye. A lot of women who would probably think she was crazy because she was trying to avoid him.

But a lot of women didn’t have her drive, her goals, or her temperament. And they didn’t have her background. She’d been burned enough.

The last thing she needed was a smoldering male in her life who thought life was the biggest joke of all.

Though he was good-looking in a dark, dangerous sort of way, that didn’t negate the fact that she found him exasperating. He went about his job in an entirely different fashion than she did. While she struggled, he leaned back. And frequently enough, their results were about equal.

Because of his looks, Pierce received more recognition than she did, even though hers was the prime spot on the air. Last month, a popular women’s magazine had run a contest asking women to write in and name the man they would most like to be marooned on a desert island with. Pierce had come in third.

As far as she was concerned, he came in dead last. She had more important things to do than opt for a quick tumble between the sheets, satin or otherwise. And that was all, rumor had it, that the man was interested in. Quick, impersonal sex with no strings. Well, she had strings, and they were all going to stay tied.

Raging thirst or not, she ignored the bottle of soda. “No, thank you,” she answered, turning her face away.

Chapter Two

On any other day, Pierce would have just shrugged and walked away, disinterested. But that was just it. He wasn’t disinterested. So instead, he eased his six-foot frame next to Amanda on the bench. Ken Riley shifted aside to make room.

It amused Pierce that she stiffened ever so slightly, as if she was bracing for something. Maybe they both were, he thought.

“Is that all you can say to me?” he asked.

Ignoring him obviously wasn’t going to work. So she turned and looked at him. “What?”

He took another long pull on the bottle. Amanda watched, despite herself, as his mouth drew away from the lip of the bottle. Though unintentional, it was still a very sensual act. She flexed her shoulders, feeling the tension heighten.

Pierce looked at her for a long moment before explaining. “That’s what you said to me when I asked you out. ‘No, thank you.’”

“I was taught to be polite.” Taught was the wrong word. It had been drummed into her head, time and again, she thought, turning away. She was raised to be polite, so as not to reflect badly on her father and embarrass him.

The count was three and two. One more pitch and she’d be up, one way or another. The tension progressed from her shoulders in a ragged path down to her stomach.

Her face was shiny with perspiration. For some reason, that aroused him. She’d probably look that way, he mused, after having hot sex. And someday, he was going to find out if his estimation was accurate.

“Were you taught to be stubborn, too?”

The man didn’t give up, did he? It was what made him a good reporter, she supposed. It also made him damn annoying. She waved away a fly that buzzed by her head.

“Turning down a soda is not being stubborn.”

And turning you down is being smart, she added silently.

He liked the slight flash in her eyes as annoyance registered there. She was doing a slow burn now, like a curling iron that had been left on to heat up. He found that attractive and had no idea why. It made no sense, but then, people rarely did. And he was a card-carrying member of the species.

“It is if you’re thirsty.”

Go away, Alexander. She dug in obstinately. “Who says I’m thirsty?”

The laugh was short, mirthless, and, she felt, at her expense.

“In this heat, lady, the buildings are thirsty. Here. I haven’t got anything that’s catching.” Pierce took her hands and put them around the neck of the bottle, wrapping his own over them for a brief second.

It was enough. It wasn’t only the pavement beyond the park that was sizzling.

His crystal-blue eyes mocked her gently, as if daring her to run away. Daring her to stay. Her eyes held his as she took the barest of sips, her lips touching the opening of the bottle where his lips had been just a fraction of a second before.

It was stupid to suppose she felt something. And yet, she couldn’t really deny that she had. There had been a jolt, a streak of electricity. Something. The skin on the back of her neck prickled.

Just the heat. Pure and simple.

Her stomach knotted. Okay, maybe not that simple. And not that kind of heat.

She blew out a small breath as she lowered the bottle, hardly having drunk at all.

Pierce had something that was catching, all right, or at least dangerous. She was not blind to the fact that he had his own brand of charm. It was different from Jon’s. Jon’s was easy to detect. Jon’s was blatant, and as such it was harmless. Jon was affable, funny. He didn’t make her feel uneasy, as if nuclear warheads were about to go off all along the coastline.

Pierce did.

Pierce’s charm went deeper, ran a subtler course. Maybe it wasn’t even charm at all, but something more. Amanda had seen him out in the field with the cameramen. Had seen him talking to people at the scene of a disaster. He had a way of saying a few words and getting people to trust him, getting them to talk to him when they might have completely shut out someone else. It wasn’t so much what he said as the way he said it. His manner drew people out. It offered them a sympathetic ear, sanctuary, whatever they needed at the moment.

And yet, despite all that, there was something about the man that threatened her, that threatened her peace of mind. Made her restless without her being able to put it into words. It was like pouring vodka into a bowl of punch. She couldn’t smell it, couldn’t see it. But she knew it was there.

“The best way to drink,” Pierce began slowly when she made no move to do so, “is to lift the bottle to your lips and tilt it. Otherwise, the relationship never gets off the ground.”

In a heartbeat, as everything grew still around her, he leaned forward and lightly touched the outline of her mouth with his finger, as if to reinforce his words.

The day became ten degrees hotter.

Amanda pulled back. Her lips burned as if he had used the tip of a match to touch her instead of his finger. It took her a moment to find her tongue.

“Maybe that’s the whole idea.”

From a million miles away, she heard Jon’s voice call
ing her. “Amanda, I said it’s your turn.”

With a sudden burst of energy, Amanda thrust the bottle back into Pierce’s hand, grateful for the excuse to break eye contact. She felt like a mongoose escaping a deadly cobra.

She rubbed her damp palms against the back of her shorts. It didn’t help. Amanda could feel Pierce watching her as she stepped up to the plate.

With a sigh of resignation, she took the bat from Jon’s hands. “Are you sorry you talked me into this yet?” God knew she was sorry he had.

“Not yet,” he laughed. ‘We’re still leading.”

No thanks to me.

Amanda wound her fingers around the bat the way Paul had coached her. Another trickle of sweat slid down from her forehead and zigzagged along the hollow of her cheek. Her throat felt parched, dry. It was the only part of her that was.

“Strike one!” the tall, reedy man behind her in the umpire’s suit announced.

Damn, she hadn’t even moved a muscle. The ball had appeared low when it had come sailing toward her. Paul had told her to only hit the ones that looked as if they were going to smash her chest.

Amanda rotated one stiff shoulder, trying to get comfortable. She was dirty, grimy; the bat felt as if it weighed a ton; her eyelashes were sweating. And for some unknown reason, Pierce Alexander was stalking her. It was not her definition of a good day.

She took a swing at the next ball and missed it by a huge margin.

“Strike two!”

Amanda glanced at Jon, who patiently shook his head.

For one irrational moment, she felt like feeding the
bat to him. It was his fault she was in this ridiculous situ
ation in the first place.

No, Amanda, she upbraided herself the next moment, it’s your own fault. No one was responsible for what she did or didn’t do but her. That was the way it had been since she was twelve and made up her mind not to be manipulated for anyone’s benefit any longer. She had no one to blame but herself for standing here, dripping while she waved a stick impotentlv through the thick air.