Flash and Fire (7 page)

He cut her short. No more dodging shadows. He was through with that. “I want to get this over with. I’ve let a lot of people down.” He peered at her face and received his answer. “By the look in your eyes, I’d say you’re one of them.”

She was too much of a professional to wear her feelings on her sleeve, she admonished herself. But her disappointment was too raw for her to come to grips with. “No, I—"

He placed a gentling hand on her shoulder. Amanda stiffened slightly, involuntarily, then struggled to relax. This was Whitney, for God’s sake. Whitney.

But that was just the trouble. This was Whitney.

“Alicia had the same look on her face when she packed yesterday.”

Amanda smiled sadly at him. “That’s what you get for being everyone’s knight in shining armor.”

She wasn’t going to be like Alicia, she told herself. Alicia was shallow, self-serving, and narcissistic. She’d deserted her husband in his time of need.

Amanda placed her hand over his on her shoulder. “I never thought Alicia was worthy of you. Now I have proof. And so do you.”

She ached for him. But she also ached for herself, for she had just lost her only idol, and with it the last snippet of her innocence.

Whitney didn’t bother commenting. He and Alicia had long ago become strangers living under a single roof. A very large single roof that allowed them the freedom of not having to get in each other’s way, of not having to bear up under each other’s shortcomings.

Perhaps it was even better that she was gone. But he did miss his children.

Whitney looked at Amanda. “Will you do the story, Amanda? I don’t want the hounds of hell at my throat without a friend there to run interference.”

“Of course.” Her voice sounded hollow to her own ears. Suddenly, they were equals, and she didn’t want them to be. The price was too high and the sacrifice too great, at least for her. She wanted her shining knight returned, intact. “I’d be a bad newscaster if I didn’t.” She raised her eyes to his. “And a bad friend.”

She sighed, picking up the envelope and holding it in her hands. She looked at it as if it contained orders for an execution. Swallowing, she dropped the envelope into her purse.

“I’ll read it when I get home.” She looked up. “I’ll have questions.”

He nodded. What he had written down documented everything to the best of his recollection. But there might have been points he’d overlooked. “I’ll try to answer them as honestly as I can.”

“I’d never expect anything less of you.” But he had cheated, stolen.

He saw the ambivalent emotions washing over her face. “I’m not a saint, Amanda,” Whitney said softly. “I never was.”

Wrong—you were mine. “I’ve always thought saints were highly overrated, Whitney. And very boring.” She closed her hand over his, reassuringly.

But I don’t want to do this story. I don’t want to hear it, or admit that it exists.

“Thank you.” He smiled at her. He hoped that in time she would find it in her heart to forgive him for disappointing her. He’d been hungry, fighting his way up from poverty. But he had never been desperate. Not until his business had been in danger of going under. “Then at least I can count on one person in my corner.”

“I’ll be there,” she promised.

She wanted to say more to him, a good deal more. She wanted to offer him comfort, she thought as she got behind the wheel of her car.

But she couldn’t offer him comfort. She was in too much need of it herself.

“Why, Whitney, why?” she whispered. Tears rose and spilled, dampening her cheeks. This time, she drove very slowly.

Chapter Six

Pierce let himself into his apartment. Shoving the key into the front pocket of his jeans, he closed the door behind him. He was home. Or as home as he could be anywhere.

It was a small, first-floor apartment with one bedroom, a compact living room, and a tiny kitchen. But it afforded him a view through his bedroom window of a man-made stream and its miniature waterfall. It was artificial, but the sound was soothing.

Right now, he needed soothing.

There was a dull ache running through his body. It had nothing to do with the game he’d just played. It was the kind of ache a man felt when he’d been around a desirable woman. And Amanda Foster was that. Desirable, with a capital D.

He went directly to the refrigerator and found it just as he’d left it—nearly empty. Three cans of beer surrounded half a chicken salad sandwich he’d gotten from the deli down the street and lost his taste for and a carton of take-out Chinese he’d brought home Friday. Or was that Wednesday?

Pierce opted for the beer. It was fresh.

Throwing yesterday’s newspaper off the recliner and onto the floor, he planted himself on the chair and made himself comfortable.

Or tried to.

The ache wouldn’t leave.

His thoughts turned to Amanda again. He wasn’t sure just what it was about her that was getting to him. He’d certainly been around more beautiful women. Hell, he wasn’t even sure if he actually could call her beautiful when he thought about it. Her mouth was just a little too wide and her figure just a little too athletic. Her breasts looked as if they were hardly a handful.

His palms itched.

There was no getting around it. There was something there, something in her eyes, that had him spinning as if he were being sucked down into a giant whirlpool. And the way she moved, with an underlying sensuality she didn’t seem conscious of, promised him one hell of a time if he ever bedded her.

Not if, when, he corrected.

He didn’t like the fact that she had gotten under his skin.

Needing the cold contact, he wrapped both hands around the can before pulling the tab. A whisper of fizz and a wreath of snowy foam emerged. Pierce tilted the can back, letting the bitter liquid cascade down his throat and soothe the fire in his insides.

It helped, but not much.

Jon had invited the whole team down to Jerry’s, a local tavern, to celebrate their having beaten the other
station. To Jon, any victory was a triumph with a capital T,
any defeat just a temporary setback. It was all in how you looked at things, Jon had laughed.

Normally, Pierce would have gone, if for nothing more than to stand back and observe the others. But today he wanted to be alone.

Alone with this feeling that was gnawing away at him.
It wasn’t often that he was this attracted to a woman, this distracted by one. In his opinion, women were always more trouble than they were worth. Even under the very best of conditions, they aroused a temporary madness that set everything on its ear and played havoc with a man’s mind.

And then they walked out on you. Or worse, they stayed.

Self-centered and needy, self-seeking, every last mother’s one of them, whether their breasts made his fingers itch and his mouth go dry or not.

He took another pull of the can.

The thirst remained.

Restless, he picked up the remote control from the coffee table and began flipping through channels. An old black-and-white western with a young John Wayne bled into a commercial for denture cream that blinked into a golf tournament.

He kept pressing the channel button, hardly waiting for the picture to stabilize in front of him before flipping to another station.

It was damn annoying, feeling this way. He didn’t like having his mind cluttered with the image of some woman.

There was only one cure. Once he had her, he figured that would be the end of it. The attraction would be over. It usually was. It was the challenge that piqued his interest, not the prize.

Maybe that was why Amanda appeared so desirable to him. She resisted. Not coyly, the way Cheryl in editing had, but firmly. Cheryl had held out for two weeks before giving in.

He grinned, remembering. The combustion between them had been almost instantaneous. He’d hardly walked through her door before she was tearing the clothes from his body. He’d lost interest after a couple of days. But they had been a hell of a couple of days.

He’d never liked things easy. Didn’t trust them if they were. It was the hunt, the chase, the promise of victory that intrigued him, that aroused him and set his hormones humming.

One woman was more or less like another once the conquest was a foregone conclusion.

Just once, he had thought that it would be different. Once, with Marsha.

Got kicked in the teeth with that one, didn’t you, Alexander? he mocked himself as he paused on an African wildlife documentary.

He stared fixedly as a monotone voice droned on about daily life for a pride of lions. He remembered his hard-won lesson. He’d been a foreign correspondent at K-MMN in Minneapolis at the time. It was March, and it was snowing. He thought back. March twelfth, 1991, the day he’d had his baptism into the real world and learned once and for all that no woman was worth it.

He had just returned from the Gulf zone. Though he’d thought he had hardened himself to it, the atrocities he’d witnessed had turned his stomach.

All he’d wanted, he remembered, was a safe haven to hide in for a few days. Naively, he’d thought of Marsha’s arms. All he had wanted was to scrub the dirt of war from his body and to make love to her until everything else disappeared.

He remembered letting himself in and catching the faintest whiff of her perfume even before he closed the door. Anticipation hardened him as if he were some adolescent sneaking a look at his older brother’s copy of Playboy.

And then he’d heard the voices coming out of the bedroom, the guttural sounds of pleasure that arise when two people make love.

Rage had filled him.

A man had a right to expect to find his wife waiting for him. A man had a right, he thought, his fingers tightening around the can until it bent beneath them, not to come home after a month in a hellhole and find his wife in bed with another man.

He’d thrown the son of a bitch out the door. He’d very nearly tossed him out the window. But at the last minute, Pierce had decided that neither the bastard nor Marsha were worth going to jail over. So he’d settled for throwing the guy’s clothes out the window and shoving the bastard naked out into the hall.

Pierce laughed to himself as he visualized the scene now. Maybe the guy had gotten lucky going down in the elevator.

Marsha hadn’t had the brains to be afraid, hadn’t recognized how close she had come to meeting her own demise. Instead, like a preening, vain peacock, she’d lashed out at him.

Kneeling on the bed, her body still glistening with sweat, Marsha had tossed her head defiantly and screamed obscenities at him.

As if it was his fault that she was a whore.

“What am I supposed to do, get off by watching the big-shot foreign correspondent on the television set? Watching night after night, just to get a glimpse of you? I’m not a groupie, Pierce.”

She shook her head, her eyes mocking him. “You’re not that big a deal.” Knowing she’d hurt him, she’d gone for the jugular. “I’ve got needs. Needs you’re not man enough to fill.”

Pierce had never hit a woman, but he had come close
to hitting her then. But that would have made him no bet
ter than the people he had just left behind, halfway
around the world. The people he had silently condemned.

Curling his fingers into his hands, Pierce had told his wife that she had two hours to clear out and then began to leave the room.

“Two hours!” she’d shrieked. Incensed, she had scrambled off the bed and grabbed his arm. “Two hours? Who do you think you are, ordering me around? This stuff is half mine, you worthless pr—“

He’d quietly seized her by the throat then, one powerful hand closing over that slender column he had thought about all the way over on the plane. He felt the pulse there jerk beneath his palm.

“Two hours,” he’d repeated, then let go of her and stalked out.

He had gone to the closest bar he could find and got roaring, stinking drunk. When he’d returned to the apartment several hours later, hardly able to stand, Marsha was gone. And with her, the last shred of any illusions he had about women, as well as all his expensive camera equipment and his CD collection.

So when this one came along, her body hot, her eyes cold, and he felt himself being reeled in, he saw a perverse humor in it. Maybe he needed to have the lesson retaught every couple of years or so.

He flipped through the channels, completing an entire round before beginning again. He settled on an “I Love Lucy” rerun. There was something comforting about the familiarity of the people and the plot. He didn’t need the sound on. He knew the dialogue by heart. His grandmother had loved the show and always laughed at the jokes, especially when she was drinking. He liked her better when she was drinking. She wouldn’t beat him then.

He set down the remote.

No, he wasn’t looking to learn any new lessons, or have the old ones reinforced. All he wanted to do was pleasure himself, and Amanda, for a few hours. Nothing more.

Pierce took pride in the fact that, despite his negative philosophy about the intrinsic worth of their souls, he’d always been very careful to leave women sexually satisfied. He’d never believed that sex was meant to be a tool to use to hurt someone. Pierce had never received any complaints when it came to what happened between the sheets.

It was outside the sheets that things tended to get loused up.

He sighed, rubbing the can across his forehead. He felt a headache starting.

Amanda was preying on his brain, and he didn’t like it. He knew he was going to have to scratch that itch of his. And soon, he thought, if he was going to get anything worthwhile done.

He’d already decided that he was going to stick around Dallas for a while and give this position a decent shot. Being a foreign correspondent had lost its luster. He was tired of eating strange foods and looking at strange faces. More than that, he was tired of crawling over dead bodies and fleeing hotel rooms that blew up moments after he’d escaped. He wanted to stay put for a while, maybe even put down some roots.

He was getting too old to think he was immortal.