Flash and Fire (4 page)

A momentary image of Pierce, his light blue eyes looking down at her, flashed through her mind, and she felt a shiver forming, even as a trickle of perspiration zigzagged down between her shoulder blades.

No, she thought, raising her hair from the back of her neck, she had no use for handsome men with icy blue eyes. The man she would someday put her trust in, if she were so inclined, would look like a troll and have the heart of a prince, not the other way around. Once was more than enough to show her how flawed her judgment could be if she let looks blind her.

Amanda unlocked the front door, but it wouldn’t budge. Instead, it stuck stubbornly in the door frame. Disgusted, she applied her shoulder to the sweltering wood and pushed. The door gave.

“Carla, I’m back,” she announced loudly as she closed the door behind her.

She didn’t want Carla thinking that someone was attempting to break in. Her housekeeper took the stories on the nightly news to heart. Carla was quickly approaching the conclusion that she might be the last decent person left within the city limits. Another reason, as Carla never grew tired of pointing out, to move back to New Mexico. Taos was safe. The double locks on the door were Carla’s idea.

Amanda looked around. She was barely aware of the moan that escaped her lips. “Oh, God.”

Suddenly, she felt twice as tired as she had a moment ago. The living room was just beyond the front entrance.
Right now, it looked like a war zone. A war zone belong
ing to a miniature soldier.

Life had been like this ever since Christopher had pulled himself up into a standing position. Actually, that was inaccurate. Christopher had never really stood. He’d galloped. Quickly. On all fours at first, then on two
legs, and always leaving havoc in his wake. Despite pleas
and entreaties, Carla somehow could never keep up.

Amanda didn’t feel up to this today.

Being around Pierce this afternoon had done something to her, loosened something that had been tightly coiled inside her. Maybe it was because this was the first time they had ever seen one another outside of the studio. She didn’t know the reason why; she could only guess at it. But the reason didn’t really matter. What mattered was that there had been something about the way he had looked at her that made her uneasy, like he knew things about her that she didn’t.

“Heat frustration, Mandy,” she muttered sternly. “It’s making you hallucinate.” Pierce Alexander was just an ordinary man, with a liver and spleen like everyone else.

Reasoning didn’t help.

She looked around again. She wished she were hallucinating this mess. Toys, crayons, and shredded paper lay scattered as far as the eye could see, littering the floor like the multicolored aftermath of a ticker-tape parade.

Except there was nothing to celebrate.

Amanda yanked off her ribbon and shook out her hair. She spiked her hand through it. It felt gritty, just the way she did. Damn it, why did she have to be such a soft touch? If she’d been stronger, she would have just turned Jon and his bedroom eyes down. She could have spent a more useful four hours here at home.

Charity was supposed to begin at home, and home certainly did need it right about now.

Picking her way over a sprawled fighter pilot in a downed plane, Amanda crossed the threshold into the living room.

“Okay, where are you, Chris?”

As she said his name, she saw him. Her son was balancing himself on his tiptoes. Dusty red sneakers nibbed intimately against beige cushions. He was trying to keep from sinking into the L-shaped sofa that was flush against the far back wall. His object of attack was a large painting that hung just above the sofa. Amanda’s favorite.

Painting was a hobby that used to soothe her, when she’d had the time for it. This one she had painted in happier times. It was a spray of bright blue, red, and yellow flowers centered on a stark white field. The colors were warm and promising.

Muffin, a semiwhite toy poodle, was barking incessantly, cheering Christopher on from the floor. As if the boy needed encouragement.

Oh, damn.

Amanda swallowed the oath as she dashed across the room. Christopher loved to pick flowers. The denuded front yard bore silent testimony to his newly acquired hobby. Well, he wasn’t picking these, she thought with a surge of triumph. She snatched her son away from his target just as his chocolate-smeared fingers were about to make indelible contact.

Frustration passed over the child’s face like a rain cloud threatening a sudden downpour. Just as quickly, it disappeared.

“Mama.” Christopher twisted around in her arms to look up at her. “You here.”

She laughed at the perplexed note of surprise. “Yes, I’m here. And just in time, I see.”

Still holding Christopher, she sank down onto the sofa. It was like trying to hold on to a bale of wiggling worms. Christopher was all arms and legs as he mistook her attempt to restrain him for another kind of game.

It was hard to stay annoyed with her son when he looked so pleased to see her. But Amanda was bone-tired and the mess in the room looked insurmountable.

She tightened her hold around Christopher as the heel of his sneaker made sharp contact with her knee. Amanda winced. “Don’t you ever stop?”

She received no answer, but then, she hadn’t expected one. At two, Christopher’s vocabulary consisted of a limited number of words, the most frequently used being “uh-oh.” It was, Amanda thought, quite appropriate at this stage of his life. On the whole, he was too busy doing to spend time talking.

Like a budding Houdini, Christopher managed to twist out of her arms. Scrambling to his feet, using her body as if it were a mere stepping-stone created solely for his benefit, he directed his attention to the painting again.

“That’s what I like about you, Chris. You never give up. Get that from your mom, you know.”

Amanda rose and scooped her son up. This time he protested a little more strongly. She ignored him. Tucking him under her arm like a dangling, motorized rag doll, she went in search of Carla. Muffin followed, yipping all the way.

“Watch it, dog,” she warned, “or I’ll step on you.”

Uncertain, the dog scurried around in a circle until he was directly behind her.

Christopher was making self-satisfied noises as she crossed the room, heading toward the kitchen. He was pointing to the floor with the sort of pride one would expect from a master craftsman.

Amanda looked down. Batman was locked in mortal combat with one of GI Joe’s men. From the looks of it, each had lost a limb.

“Yes, I see them. Quite a mess you’ve made, isn’t it?” Amanda gingerly stepped around an overturned dump truck. “Where’s your keeper?”

The answer to her question came almost instantly.

She heard the rapid flow of Spanish sprinkled with a seasoning of English here and there. The voice was coming from the kitchen.

With a resigned sigh, Amanda walked into the room, knowing exactly what she would find. Carla Nunez was hunched over the long, gray-tiled counter, holding the base of the telephone against her stomach.

Carla’s bouts of homesickness were making the phone company rich, Amanda thought.

Her dark eyes filled with surprise as Carla looked toward the doorway. The volume of her voice dropped to a near whisper.

“Uh-oh. Yo no puedo hablar mas, Mama,” she murmured into the receiver. “Ella esta aqui.”

“Uh-oh,” Christopher echoed, crowing the word.

Getting his second wind, he began to flap wildly again. Amanda set him down on the floor, too exhausted to try to restrain him any longer. Like a released rubber band that was tethered on one end, Christopher shot back into the living room with a triumphant squeal.

“Yes, she is here,” Amanda repeated Carla’s words to her in English.

With a sheepish grin, Carla hung up the telephone.

“And she’s not happy,” Amanda concluded.

For a moment, Amanda lost her struggle with her temper. She waved her hand angrily toward the living room. “What is all this, Carla? He’s only two years old. Can’t you keep up with a two-year-old?” She scowled at the telephone. “Maybe if you weren’t on the damn phone all the time, you could stay ahead of him once in a while.”

Carla bit her full lower lip as she bowed her head. Tears shimmered on her thick black lashes.

Chapter Four

Amanda sighed as guilt nibbled at her. She wasn’t up to guilt at the moment. She certainly hadn’t meant to make Carla cry. Regret flooded her. Now she felt like a bully.

She laid her arm around the twenty-year-old’s shoulders as comfortingly as possible. “I’m sorry. Don’t cry, Carla. I didn’t mean to lose my temper. I’ve had a rotten morning.”

Carla raised her head. A small smile of absolution lifted the corners of her wide mouth. “Yeah, me too.”

Pressing her lips together, Amanda struggled to get control of her irritability. Why wouldn’t this feeling leave? It couldn’t be just the weather. This was far from the first day of heat and humidity she had experienced. She had to be feeling this way because she had made a fool of herself in front of people.

What was needed was humor. She looked for it now as she led the way into the living room.

Humor or not, the room looked every bit as awful as it had a minute ago.

She saw a dinosaur lying on its side and didn’t have the strength to pick it up. “So when does the board of health come to condemn the house?”

Carla simply lifted her wide shoulders in reply. Amanda collapsed onto the far side of sofa.

Her eyes were immediately drawn to Christopher. Her son was back at it, tottering on the edge of the sofa, fingers outstretched, reaching for his goal. This time it was Carla who pulled him away. He shrieked in protest, but remained on the floor.

There were times when his tenacity was a little wearing, Amanda thought. She looked around wearily for something to distract him. Oversized blocks were sticking out of the rubble.

She pointed to them. “Make a house for Mommy to move into, honey, since this one’s such a mess.”

Christopher threw himself into the task with glee.

At Amanda’s comment, a guilty flush crept up to tint Carla’s ruddy complexion. She murmured something under her breath in Spanish, careful not to utter the words too loudly, and sank to her knees. Using her apron as a sack, she began gathering up the multitude of toys. It looked as if every single toy in the huge box that stood in the corner had found its way to the floor.

“You’re home early.” Carla took the first armload and deposited the toys with a careless crash into the box.

Christopher looked up, a protest hovering on his rosebud lips. But then he just shrugged and went back to creating a tottering castle. The strap on his bright red coveralls slipped off his shoulder. He yanked at it and a button flew across the room. Amanda could only watch its flight and sigh.

Carla looked over her shoulder. Amanda wasn’t answering her. She tried again. “I thought you’d be gone for at least another hour.”

“We got lucky,” she answered. “The other team played worse than we did.”

Carla saw this as a reason to be happy, not sad. “Then why was your day rotten?’

If she was being completely honest with herself, there was a very basic answer to that. Amanda voiced it aloud. “Because Pierce Alexander was in it.”

At the mention of the investigative reporter, Carla forgot about the toys and visibly melted. She looked at the woman who was half her employer, half her surrogate mother, though Amanda was only eight years older. Sympathy filled her deep brown eyes.

“He ignored you?”

Amanda thought of the look in Pierce’s hypnotic eyes and felt something unwanted stir. It had been over three years since she had slept with a man. She certainly didn’t want Pierce to be the one to overturn that, even though she recognized a very basic strong pull between them. Lust wasn’t her style.

“I wish he had.”

Carla scowled, completely lost. “I don’t understand.”

That makes two of us.

“It’s too complicated to explain.” Amanda rubbed the back of her neck with her hand. She still needed that shower. Badly.

Amanda tried to will energy into her wilted body. She got as far as shifting in her seat. “Well, if I can get up enough oomph, I’m heading for the shower.”

Fisting her hands on either side of her, she dug into the sofa and propelled herself forward.

Carla nodded absently as she continued scooping very worn-looking residents of Sesame Street into the folds of her apron. She sat down on the floor and tucked her legs under her.

As Amanda left the room, Carla glanced over her shoulder at her. “Christopher is really hell on wheels, you know.”

Amanda found that she wasn’t too exhausted to grin fondly as she looked in his direction. “Yes, I know.”

At the moment, Christopher looked completely incapable of causing any problems. Anyone looking at him now, as he concentrated on placing one block on top of another, would have said that he was the embodiment of innocence. The angelic-looking face was wreathed in springy, light brown curls. Just like his father’s.

His hair color was the only thing his father ever gave him, Amanda thought ruefully. She tried to remember if Jeff had ever so much as held the boy in his arms, even once. Not a single memory came to mind. All Christopher had ever been to her ex-husband was a pawn. A pawn he had used effectively in order to get what he wanted out of her.

Which was everything.

Amanda had no doubt that if Jeff could have used the little boy to siphon money from her father, he would have gladly done that as well. But the route to her father’s money had long since been off-limits. Henry Foster had disowned his only daughter when she had turned her back on the life he had dictated for her.

Amanda smiled cryptically. It seemed that the only thing she and her father had ever agreed on was that neither one of them liked Jeff. It had just taken her longer to reach that conclusion.

Some lessons, she knew, took time. But once they were learned, they couldn’t be unlearned.

Like the Cheshire cat, Pierce’s smile, disembodied and beguiling, floated before her. Amanda blinked twice, the second time furiously.