Her Kind of Hero (29 page)

“What would you like me to say?”

“You might try apologizing,” he told her coldly, trying to smoke her out. “Carolyn was very upset to have such a charge made against her. I don't like having her upset,” he added deliberately and stood looking down his nose at her, waiting for her to react to the challenge.

Her fingers tightened around the pencil. It was going to be worse than she ever dreamed, trying to work with him. He couldn't fire her, Ed had said, but that didn't mean he couldn't make her quit. If he made things difficult enough for her, she wouldn't be able to stay.

All at once, it didn't seem worth the effort. She was tired, worn-out, and Carolyn had hurt her, not the reverse. She was sick to death of trying to live from one day to the next with the weight of the past bearing down on her more each day. Being tormented by Matt Caldwell on top of all that was the last straw.

She reached for her crutches and stood up, pad and all.

“Where do you think you're going?” Matt demanded, surprised that she was giving up without an argument.

She went toward the door. He got in front of her, an easy enough task when every step she took required extreme effort.

She looked up at him with the eyes of a trapped animal, resigned and resentful and without life. “Ed said you couldn't fire me without his consent,” she said quietly. “But you can hound me until I quit, can't you?”

He didn't speak. His face was rigid. “Would you give up so easily?” he asked, baiting her. “Where will you go?”

Her gaze dropped to the floor. Idly she noticed that one of her flat-heeled shoes had a smudge of mud on it. She should clean it off.

“I said, where will you go?” Matt persisted.

She met his cold eyes. “Surely in all of Texas, there's more than one secretarial position available,” she said. “Please move. You're blocking the door.”

He did move, but not in the way she'd expected. He took the crutches away from her and propped them against the bookshelf by the door. His hands went on either side of her head, trapping her in front of him. His dark eyes held a faint glitter as he studied her wan face, her soft mouth.

“Don't,” she managed tightly.

He moved closer. He smelled of spice and aftershave and coffee. His breath was warm where it brushed her forehead. She could feel the warmth of his tall, fit body, and she remembered reluctantly how it had felt to let him hold her and touch her in his bedroom.

He was remembering those same things, but not with pleasure. He hated the attraction he felt for this woman, whom he didn't, couldn't trust.

“You don't like being touched, you said,” he reminded her with deliberate sarcasm as his lean hand suddenly smoothed over her breast and settled there provocatively.

Her indrawn breath was audible. She looked up at him with all her hidden vulnerabilities exposed. “Please don't do this,” she whispered. “I'm no threat to Ed, or to you, either. Just…let me go. I'll vanish.”

She probably would, and that wounded him. He was making her life miserable. Why did this woman arouse such bitter feelings in him, when he was the soul of kindness to most people with problems—especially physical problems, like hers.

“Ed won't like it,” he said tersely.

“Ed doesn't have to know anything,” she said dully. “You can tell him whatever you like.”

“Is he your lover?”

“No.”

“Why not? You don't mind if he touches you.”

“He doesn't. Not…the way you do.”

Her strained voice made him question his own cruelty. He lifted his hand away from her body and tilted her chin up so that he could see her eyes. They were turbulent, misty.

“How many poor fools have you played the innocent with, Miss Murry?” he asked coldly.

She saw the lines in his face, many more than his age should have caused. She saw the coldness in his eyes, the bitterness of too many betrayals, too many loveless years.

Unexpectedly she reached up and touched his hair, smoothing it back as Lou had smoothed hers back in an act of silent compassion.

It made him furious. His body pressed down completely against hers, holding her prisoner. His hips twisted in a crude, rough motion that was instantly arousing.

She tried to twist away and he groaned huskily, giving her a
worldly smile when she realized that her attempt at escape had failed and made the situation even worse.

Her face colored. It was like that night. It was the way Mike had behaved, twisting his body against her innocent one and laughing at her embarrassment. He'd said things, done things to her in front of his friends that still made her want to gag.

Matt's hand fell to her hip and contracted as he used one of his long legs to nudge hers apart. She was stiff against him, frozen with painful memories of another man, another encounter, that had begun just this way. She'd thought she loved Mike until he made her an object of lustful ridicule, making fun of her innocence as he anticipated its delights for the enjoyment of his laughing friends, grouped around them as he forcibly stripped the clothes away from her body. He laughed at her small breasts, at her slender figure, and all the while he touched her insolently and made jokes about her most intimate places.

She was years in the past, reliving the torment, the shame, that had seen her spread-eagled on the wood floor with Mike's drug-crazed friends each holding one of her shaking limbs still while Mike lowered his nude body onto hers and roughly parted her legs…

Matt realized belatedly that Leslie was frozen in place like a statue with a white face and eyes that didn't even see him. He could hear her heartbeat, quick and frantic. Her whole body shook, but not with pleasure or anticipation.

Frowning, he let her go and stepped back. She shivered again, convulsively. Mike had backed away, too, to the sound of a firecracker popping loudly. But it hadn't been a firecracker. It had been a bullet. It went right through him, into Leslie's leg. He looked surprised. Leslie remembered his blue eyes as the
life visibly went out of them, leaving them fixed and blank just before he fell heavily on her. There had been such a tiny hole in his back, compared to the one in his chest. Her mother was screaming, trying to fire again, trying to kill her. Leslie had seduced her own lover, she wanted to kill them both, and she was glad Mike was dead. Leslie would be dead, too!

Leslie remembered lying there naked on the floor, with a shattered leg and blood pouring from it so rapidly that she knew she was going to bleed to death before help arrived…

“Leslie?” Matt asked sharply.

He became a white blur as she slid down the wall into oblivion.

 

When she came to, Ed was bending over her with a look of anguished concern. He had a damp towel pressed to her forehead. She looked at him dizzily.

“Ed?” she murmured.

“Yes. How are you?”

She blinked and looked around. She was lying on the big burgundy leather couch in Matt's office. “What happened?” she asked numbly. “Did I faint?”

“Apparently,” Ed said heavily. “You came back to work too soon. I shouldn't have agreed.”

“But I'm all right,” she insisted, pulling herself up. She felt nauseous. She had to swallow repeatedly before she was able to move again.

She took a slow breath and smiled at him. “I'm still a little weak, I guess, and I didn't have any breakfast.”

“Idiot,” he said, smiling.

She smiled back. “I'm okay. Hand me my crutches, will you?”

He got them from where they were propped against the wall, and she had a glimpse of Matt standing there as if he'd been carved from stone. She took the crutches from Ed and got them under her arms.

“Would you drive me home?” she asked Ed. “I think maybe I will take one more day off, if that's all right?”

“That's all right,” Ed assured her. He looked across the room. “Right, Matt?”

Matt nodded, a curt jerk of his head. He gave her one last look and went out the door.

The relief Leslie felt almost knocked her legs from under her. She remembered what had happened, but she wasn't about to tell Ed. She wasn't going to cause a breach between him and the older cousin he adored. She, who had no family left in the world except the mother who hated her, had more respect for family than most people.

She let Ed take her home, and she didn't think about what had happened in Matt's office. She knew that every time she saw him from now on, she'd relive those last few horrible minutes in her mother's apartment when she was seventeen. If she'd had anyplace else to go, she'd leave. But she was trapped, for the moment, at the mercy of a man who had none, a victim of a past she couldn't even talk about.

 

Ed went back to the office determined to have it out with Matt. He knew instinctively that Leslie's collapse was caused by something the other man did or said, and he was going to stop the treatment Matt was giving her before it was too late.

It was anticlimactic when he got into Matt's office, with his speech rehearsed and ready, only to find it empty.

“He said he was going up to Victoria to see a man about some property, Mr. Caldwell,” one of the secretaries commented. “Left in a hurry, too, in that brand-new red Jaguar. We hear you got to drive it over from Houlihan's.”

“Yes, I did,” he replied, forcing a cheerful smile. “It goes like the wind.”

“We noticed,” she murmured dryly. “He was flying when he turned the corner. I hope he slows down. It would be a pity if he wrecked it when he'd only just gotten it.”

“So it would,” Ed replied. He went back to his own office, curious about Matt's odd behavior but rather relieved that the showdown wouldn't have to be faced right away.

M
att was doing almost a hundred miles an hour on the long highway that led to Victoria. He couldn't get Leslie's face out of his mind. That hadn't been anger or even fear in her gray eyes. It went beyond those emotions. She had been terrified; not of him, but of something she could see that he couldn't. Her tortured gaze had hurt him in a vulnerable spot he didn't know he had. When she fainted, he hated himself. He'd never thought of himself as a particularly cruel man, but he was with Leslie. He couldn't understand the hostility she roused in him. She was fragile, for all her independence and strength of will. Fragile. Vulnerable. Tender.

He remembered the touch of her soft fingers smoothing back his hair and he groaned out loud with self-hatred. He'd been tormenting her, and she'd seen right through the harsh words to the pain that lay underneath them. In return for his insensitivity, she'd reached up and touched him with genuine compassion. He'd rewarded that exquisite tenderness with treatment he wouldn't have offered to a hardened prostitute.

He realized that the speed he was going exceeded the limit by a factor of two and took his foot off the pedal. He didn't even know where the hell he was going. He was running for cover, he supposed, and laughed coldly at his own reaction to Leslie's fainting spell. All his life he'd been kind to stray animals and people down on their luck. He'd followed up that record by torturing a crippled young woman who felt sorry for him. Next, he supposed, he'd be kicking lame dogs down steps.

He pulled off on the side of the highway, into a lay-by, and stopped the car, resting his head on the steering wheel. He didn't recognize himself since Leslie Murry had walked into his life. She brought out monstrous qualities in him. He was ashamed of the way he'd treated her. She was a sweet woman who always seemed surprised when people did kind things for her. On the other hand, Matt's antagonism and hostility didn't seem to surprise her. Was that what she'd had the most of in her life? Had people been so cruel to her that now she expected and accepted cruelty as her lot in life?

He leaned back in the seat and stared at the flat horizon. His mother's desertion and his recent notoriety had soured him on the whole female sex. His mother was an old wound. The assault suit had made him bitter, yet again, despite the fact that he'd avenged himself on the perpetrator. But he remembered her coy, sweet personality very well. She'd pretended innocence and helplessness and when the disguise had come off, he'd found himself the object of vicious public humiliation. His name had been cleared, but the anger and resentment had remained.

But none of that excused his recent behavior. He'd overreacted with Leslie. He was sorry and ashamed for making her suffer for something that wasn't her fault. He took a long breath
and put the car in gear. Well, he couldn't run away. He might as well go back to work. Ed would probably be waiting with blood in his eye, and he wouldn't blame him. He deserved a little discomfort.

 

Ed did read him the riot act, and he took it. He couldn't deny that he'd been unfair to Leslie. He wished he could understand what it was about her that raised the devil in him.

“If you genuinely don't like her,” Ed concluded, “can't you just ignore her?”

“Probably,” Matt said without meeting his cousin's accusing eyes.

“Then would you? Matt, she needs this job,” he continued solemnly.

Matt studied him sharply. “Why does she need it?” he asked. “And why doesn't she have anyplace to go?”

“I can't tell you. I gave my word.”

“Is she in some sort of trouble with the law?”

Ed laughed softly. “Leslie?”

“Never mind.” He moved back toward the door. He stopped and turned as he reached it. “When she fainted, she said something.”

“What?” Ed asked curiously.

“She said, ‘Mike, don't.'” He didn't blink. “Who's Mike?”

“A dead man,” Ed replied. “Years dead.”

“The man she and her mother competed for.”

“That's right,” Ed said. “If you mention his name in front of her, I'll walk out the door with her, and I won't come back. Ever.”

That was serious business to Ed, he realized. He frowned thoughtfully. “Did she love him?”

“She thought she did,” Ed replied. His eyes went cold. “He destroyed her life.”

“How?”

Ed didn't reply. He folded his hands on the desk and just stared at Matt.

The older man let out an irritated breath. “Has it occurred to you that all this secrecy is only complicating matters?”

“It's occurred. But if you want answers, you'll have to ask Leslie. I don't break promises.”

Matt muttered to himself as he opened the door and went out. Ed stared after him worriedly. He hoped he'd done the right thing. He was trying to protect Leslie, but for all he knew, he might just have made matters worse. Matt didn't like mysteries. God forbid that he should try to force Leslie to talk about something she only wanted to forget. He was also worried about Matt's potential reaction to the old scandal. How would he feel if he knew how notorious Leslie really was, if he knew that her mother was serving a sentence for murder?

 

Ed was worried enough to talk to Leslie about it that evening when he stopped by to see how she was.

“I don't want him to know,” she said when Ed questioned her. “Ever.”

“What if he starts digging and finds out by himself?” Ed asked bluntly. “He'll read everyone's point of view except yours, and even if he reads every tabloid that ran the story, he still won't know the truth of what happened.”

“I don't care what he thinks,” she lied. “Anyway, it doesn't matter now.”

“Why not?”

“Because I'm not coming back to work,” she said evenly, avoiding his shocked gaze. “They need a typist at the Jacobsville sewing plant. I applied this afternoon and they accepted me.”

“How did you get there?” he asked.

“Cabs run even in Jacobsville, Ed, and I'm not totally penniless.” She lifted her head proudly. “I'll pay your cousin back the price of my operation, however long it takes. But I won't take one more day of the sort of treatment I've been getting from him. I'm sorry if he hates women, but I'm not going to become a scapegoat. I've had enough misery.”

“I'll agree there,” he said. “But I wish you'd reconsider. I had a long talk with him…”

“You didn't tell him?” she exclaimed, horrified.

“No, I didn't tell him,” he replied. “But I think you should.”

“It's none of his business,” she said through her teeth. “I don't owe him an explanation.”

“I know it doesn't seem like it, Leslie,” he began, “but he's not a bad man.” He frowned, searching for a way to explain it to her. “I don't pretend to understand why you set him off, but I'm sure he realizes that he's being unfair.”

“He can be unfair as long as he likes, but I'm not giving him any more free shots at me. I mean it, Ed. I'm not coming back.”

He leaned forward, feeling defeated. “Well, I'll be around if you need me. You're still my best friend.”

She reached out and touched his hand where it rested on his knee. “You're mine, too. I don't know how I'd have managed if it hadn't been for you and your father.”

He smiled. “You'd have found a way. Whatever you're lacking, it isn't courage.”

She sighed, looking down at her hand resting on his. “I don't
know if that's true anymore,” she confessed. “I'm so tired of fighting. I thought I could come to Jacobsville and get my life in order, get some peace. And the first man I run headlong into is a male chauvinist with a grudge against the whole female sex. I feel like I've been through the wringer backward.”

“What did he say to you today?” he asked.

She blotted out the physical insult. “The usual things, most vividly the way I'd upset Carolyn by lying about her phone call.”

“Some lie!” he muttered.

“He believes her.”

“I can't imagine why. I used to think he was intelligent.”

“He is, or he wouldn't be a millionaire.” She got up. “Now go home, Ed. I've got to get some rest so I can be bright and cheerful my first day at my new job.”

He winced. “I wanted things to be better than this for you.”

She laughed gently. “And just think what a terrible world we'd have if we always got what we think we want.”

He had to admit that she had a point. “That sewing plant isn't a very good place to work,” he added worriedly.

“It's only temporary,” she assured him.

He grimaced. “Well, if you need me, you know where I am.”

She smiled. “Thanks.”

 

He went home and ate supper and was watching the news when Matt knocked at the door just before opening it and walking in. And why not, Ed thought, when Matt had been raised here, just as he had. He grinned at his cousin as he came into the living room and sprawled over an easy chair.

“How does the Jag drive?” he asked.

“Like an airplane on the ground,” he chuckled. He stared at the television screen for a minute. “How's Leslie?”

He grimaced. “She's got a new job.”

Matt went very still. “What?”

“She said she doesn't want to work for me anymore. She got a job at the sewing plant, typing. I tried to talk her out of it. She won't budge.” He glanced at Matt apologetically. “She knew I wouldn't let you fire her. She said you'd made sure she wanted to quit.” He shrugged. “I guess you did. I've known Leslie for six years. I've never known her to faint.”

Matt's dark eyes slid to the television screen and seemed to be glued there for a time. The garment company paid minimum wage. He doubted she'd have enough left over after her rent and grocery bill to pay for the medicine she had to take for pain. He couldn't remember a time in his life when he'd been so ashamed of himself. She wasn't going to like working in that plant. He knew the manager, a penny-pinching social climber who didn't believe in holidays, sick days, or paid vacation. He'd work her to death for her pittance and complain because she couldn't do more.

Matt's mouth thinned. He'd landed Leslie in hell with his bad temper and unreasonable prejudice.

Matt got up from the chair and walked out the door without a goodbye. Ed went back to the news without much real enthusiasm. Matt had what he wanted. He didn't look very pleased with it, though.

 

After a long night fraught with even more nightmares, Leslie got up early and took a cab to the manufacturing company, hobbling in on her crutches to the personnel office where Judy
Blakely, the personnel manager, was waiting with her usual kind smile.

“Nice to see you, Miss Murry!”

“Nice to see you, too,” she replied. “I'm looking forward to my new job.”

Mrs. Blakely looked worried and reticent. She folded her hands in a tight clasp on her desk. “Oh, I don't know how to tell you this,” she wailed. She grimaced. “Miss Murry, the girl you were hired to replace just came back a few minutes ago and begged me to let her keep her job. It seems she has serious family problems and can't do without her salary. I'm so sorry. If we had anything else open, even on the floor, I'd offer it to you temporarily. But we just don't.”

The poor woman looked as if the situation tormented her. Leslie smiled gently. “Don't worry, Mrs. Blakely, I'll find something else,” she assured the older woman. “It's not the end of the world.”

“I'd be furious,” she said, her eyes wrinkled up with worry. “And you're being so nice…I feel like a dog!”

“You can't help it that things worked out like this.” Leslie got to her feet a little heavily, still smiling. “Could you call me a cab?”

“Certainly! And we'll pay for it, too,” she said firmly. “Honestly, I feel so awful!”

“It's all right. Sometimes we have setbacks that really turn into opportunities, you know.”

Mrs. Blakely studied her intently. “You're such a positive person. I wish I was. I always seem to dwell on the negative.”

“You might as well be optimistic, I always think,” Leslie told her. “It doesn't cost extra.”

Mrs. Blakely chuckled. “No, it doesn't, does it?” She phoned the cab and apologized again as Leslie went outside to wait for it.

She felt desolate, but she wasn't going to make that poor woman feel worse than she already did.

She was tired and sleepy. She wished the cab would come. She eased down onto the bench the company had placed out front for its employees, so they'd have a place to sit during their breaks. It was hard and uncomfortable, but much better than standing.

She wondered what she would do now. She had no prospects, no place to go. The only alternative was to look for something else or go back to Ed, and the latter choice wasn't a choice at all. She could never look Matt Caldwell in the face again without remembering how he'd treated her.