Escapade (10 page)

She paused at the staircase, her eyes fixed accusingly on Josh’s. “You didn’t tell me that Terri was coming here.”

His eyes went cold. So Brad had told her. Why shouldn’t he? Brad had no idea of the undercurrents at work here.

“I didn’t think it concerned you,” he said with quiet hauteur. “I only found out about it minutes ago, and besides, Terri is none of your business.” He waited for the snub to register. When he saw the anger narrow her green eyes, he turned away. “I’ll put the corporate jet at your disposal. You can leave when you like tomorrow.”

That was a definite closed door. She knew that set of his broad shoulders. He was inflexible. He had Terri in his sights. That was why he didn’t want Amanda. If only it didn’t hurt so much to know it!

“I thought Terri was married,” she said through tight lips.

He glanced at her with urbane amusement. “So?” he asked with forced indifference to her pain. His hands balled into fists in his pockets, and he even managed to smile mockingly. Her disgust and contempt at his morals showed on her face, but it got no reaction from him beyond a faint tautening of his jaw.

“I see.”

He turned away with forced nonchalance. “I’ve got some phone calls to make. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Certainly.” She didn’t see the steps as she climbed them. Her father’s death had devastated her. Her father hadn’t loved her or wanted her. Josh didn’t want her. Would anybody ever want her? she wondered. She’d always been a leftover person in the world, but it had never hurt so much before.

He’d done it, he told himself. He’d made her think Terri was back in his life, and now she’d leave without a protest. Her pride would see to that. But he felt no triumph.

She’d go back to San Antonio, and he’d get a grip on
himself. His life would go back to normal. So would hers. One day they’d regain their old relationship, and the world would settle back into place. He went into his office and closed the door. He was, he considered, lying through his teeth.

T
he next morning Amanda changed into a pale blue silk suit. Silk was wonderful for tropical climates, she mused. It kept you cool. But even in a cool climate it was warm, and it seemed to breathe, like skin. If only it didn’t wrinkle so easily!

She put her hair up neatly and fixed her makeup before she took her purse and went downstairs.

“I’m ready to go,” she told Josh.

He turned from where he was standing on the balcony. Brad was putting their bags in the launch. At least, he told himself, Brad would keep up her spirits. He had no one to keep his up. His heart was on the floor at her feet, if she only knew it.

“Have you enough money?” he asked her coldly.

She was puzzled by the ice in his voice. He sounded as if he hated her. “I have enough,” she said. “I have a credit card, too.” She clutched her purse. It felt like a life preserver. She smiled at hi
m forcibly. “Thanks again…
”

“It was no hardship,” he replied curtly. He glanced at the door as Brad stuck his head inside for a minute.

“The Lea
r
jet’s gassed up and waiting. Get a move on, chicken!” he teased.

“I’ll be right there,” she called.

“See you back home, Josh,” Brad added, and vanished.

Josh didn’t speak to him. He’d tried to get his brother to talk to him the night before, but Brad had just smiled and said there was nothing to talk about. Josh felt as if everyone were deserting him. It was his choice. But it was no choice.

He stared at Amanda, so quiet and withdrawn. It was like saying good-bye forever. He felt it, as she must, and saw the suggestion of pain in her soft green eyes as they searched his with visible, aching need.

“Do you have to look at me like that?” he asked harshly.

“Like what, Josh?” she asked, knowing it disturbed him and triumphant with the knowledge.

His chest rose and fell quickly. His lips thinned. “Damn it all, Amanda!” he said under his breath.

His willpower was no match for those eyes. In one smooth motion he caught her arm, pulled her unceremoniously into his study, and slammed the door, his dark eyes blazing with emotion he couldn’t control. She smiled with pure delight, and his good intentions vanished like smoke.

He pushed her back into the mahogany panels of the huge door with the weight of his steely body, and while she was thinking that her suit would be wrinkled beyond repair, he bent and his mouth opened on her lips.

The surge of pleasure was instantaneous, incandescent. She moaned with aching abandon and began to move under the aroused crush of him, her hips undulating softly, her breasts flattened under the pressure of his chest.

“Yes, you want me,” she whispered, clinging to his neck. “You know you do!
…
”

His mouth bit into hers again and probed it with expert skill until she was moaning and trembling, her legs barely able to support her. He had her hips in his hands, and he was tugging her into him rhythmically, making her feel the power and heat of his arousal.

She met him halfway, and time stood still until at last he lifted his head and looked into her dazed eyes. He cursed his own weakness for her. He couldn’t do this. He had no right. His face hardened.

“Can you te
ll me that you still want Terri,
after that?” she asked through swollen lips. “What can you have with her that you couldn’t with me?”

Terri. The name brought him back to cold sanity.

He pulled away from Amanda, and his features froze as he looked down into faintly triumphant green eyes. “Freedom,” he returned. Her eyelids flickered. “Terri won’t expect to marry me for a few heated hours in bed.”

“I’d give you more than that,” she said huskily.

His eyes narrowed. “Bargaining with me, Amanda?” he asked. “Sex in exchange for a wedding band? Or maybe,” he added mockingly, “for control of a newspaper?”

She flushed angrily. “That was low, Josh.”

He ran his hand through his thick blond hair. “Go ahead. Tell me you’re not like that,” he challenged. “Tell me that it’s my heart you want, not the power and money and prestige that go with it. Tell me you wouldn’t do anything to get control of your mother’s newspaper.”

She threw up her hands. For just a minute she’d thought she was winning. But he was the iron man again.

“
Oh, for God’s sake, have you gone daft?
”
she muttered. “You know I’m not mercenary!”

“Women have bargained their bodies with me for years,” he said with blunt cynicism. “Most of them got diamonds and fur for their favors. But Terri,” he added, lying deliberately, “will settle for my body, since she’s got Mikapoulis’s millions.”

Her eyes flashed. She wanted to swing at him, but that wouldn’t do. “I wish you joy of her,” she said through clenched teeth.

“
I’ve already had it,” he mused. “And I will again. She and I have no business dealings together.”

It took every shred of dignity and control she had not to slap that mocking smile off his handsome face.

“And you and I do,” she said.

“That’s right,” he said unpleasantly. “Now we’re business partners, which puts you in a totally different bracket. In two years you’ll have forty-nine percent of the paper. By then you’ll have earned it. Until then,” he added, “Ward Johnson is the man in charge.”

“It isn’t Ward Johnson’s paper, it’s mine! My legacy from my mother!” she raged at him. She realized that her outburst was going to go against her, and she controlled herself. “I don’t know what Johnson told you, but he’s losing money hand over fist. I’ll prove it to you if it’s the last thing I do!”

“You do that,” he agreed.

She drew herself up to her full height. “I will!” she said with mangled pride. “And from now on, as you said, it will be business between us. Just business. No personal remarks, no personal contact. I’ll take that newspaper right out from under you, if you aren’t careful.”

His eyes went black and cold as ice. “Don’t make an enemy of me if you don’t have to,” he said with soft menace.

She felt chills at the thought. “I wouldn’t dare.” She laughed hollowly. “After all, I have to depend on you to keep my inheritance solvent until I inherit it, don’t I?”

He didn’t say anything. After a minute he turned away. “Good-bye, Amanda,” he said, barely trusting his voice through a red rage of anger, frustration, and passion.

She jerked open the door, her hand trembling on the knob.

“Amanda!”

She almost jumped at the curt tone. “What?” she asked without looking.

There was a faint pause. “Phone the house when you get to San Antonio. I want to know that you got home safely.”

“Do you care?” she asked haughtily.

“Care!
…
” He looked violent for an instant, and there was something unfamiliar in his eyes, his face. But she couldn’t register what it was, and he turned away before she could analyze it.

She took one last look at his back and closed her eyes for an instant as she turned away. “Good-bye, Josh,” she said.

He didn’t say another word.

The walk to the launch was the longest she’d ever taken. It was another milestone of disappointment in a recent past filled with them.

At least she still had a job to go to and the hope of a little money to inherit. Many people had less.

She forced herself not to think about Terri, probably
even now waiting to rush into Josh’s bed despite her marriage. If she did, she’d cry. She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t afford to show any weakness now. She had to be strong.

J
osh waited until he heard the launch crank up and pull away before he went to the curtains and peered through them. His big hand contracted on the soft, sheer fabric as he watched the launch grow smaller and smaller in the distance. He felt a wave of pure anguish.

“Amanda!” he whispered. His voice would have sounded no less anguished if he’d suffered a knife twisting through the heart. She was gone. He was alone as he’d never been before. Unless it turned out that his suspicions were unfounded, he’d be alone for the rest of his life.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

S
an
Antonio was muggy and wet when Amanda emerged from the private jet. She was wearing the same blue silk suit she’d started out in that morning, but it was more wrinkled now after having been confined to a seat in the plane for several hours. Josh’s inexplicable surge of passion before she’d left the house had added to her dishabille. She couldn’t quite equate that desperate hunger with the antagonism that had followed it or fee deliberate referenc
e to Terri. It wasn’t like Josh t
o be hurtful. She felt a deep sense of loss.

After bidding Brad a fond good-bye, she strode into the lobby of the airport. Mirri met her there, rising from her seat on the aisle to hug her friend enthusiastically in welcome.

“It’s been dead here without you!” she exclaimed as they walked out into the dreary parking lot, palm trees shimmering in the heat beside them. “I parked just over there. Come on, before the rain starts again. It’s hardly stopped this w
eek, and we’ve had flooding…
not where you live,” she added, smiling at Amanda’s worried look.

“I couldn’t care less. I’m worn to the bone,” Amanda said wearily. “I’m going to have to fight Josh for every inch of that job press. He still retains control, and I can’t think of a way around him. There are no outstanding shares—everything is split between Josh and me. The only chance I have at control before my twenty-fifth birthday is to marry or prove that my father was crazy.” She sighed. “He wasn’t crazy. And I don’t want to get married.”

Mi
rr
i whistled. “Did you and Josh fight the whole time you were on Opal Cay?”

“Not quite, but we parted swinging,” Amanda muttered. She took a deep breath. “How are you?”

“Same as always. Beautiful and unappreciated. How was Opal Cay?”

“Relaxing, at times,” Amanda said, hoping her face didn’t give the show away. “Business as usual for Josh, of course, but Brad kept me company for a few days. He flew in with me on the jet, but he had some stops to make on the way to his house. That’s why I phoned you in Nassau and asked you to meet me. I hope you won’t get into trouble with your boss.”

“Not me. He worships the ground I walk on,” Mirri said with dry humor. “Any day now he’s going to collapse at my feet and beg me to notice him.”

“What an interesting prospect,” Amanda murmured. “So you and the taciturn Nelson Stuart are still getting along?”

Mirri shrugged. “If they burned me at the stake, he’d be the last person to do a rain dance.”

“Maybe he’s hiding a secret passion for you,”
Amanda ventured as she got into the car. “He doesn’t date anybody, does he?”

“Not since I’ve been working in the office,” Mirri replied. “Some of the other operatives give him strange looks, but he doesn’t cast wandering eyes at any men, either, so I know he’s straight. Maybe he has a broken heart.”

“That’s possible.”

“If he has a heart,” Mirri added.

She might have been surprised to see the redoubtable Nelson Stuart standing near his car at the airport, watching her. He’d driven in to pick up a visiting agent, not having realized that Mirri had lied about wanting to sit with her sick grandmother in the hospital. His brows drew together. She’d catch hell for lying to him. He hated lies and subterfuge, especially from women. Besides, she could have saved him some badly needed time by picking up his visitor here.

On the other hand, the visiting agent, Fletcher Cobb, was a single man with a reputation for being a vet
eran womanizer, and throwing Mirr
i at him would be unforgivable. He watched her curiously, his dark eyes never leaving her as she got into the car. She was so flighty that sometimes she made him think of rainbows and butterflies. Imagine that, he mused, with his no-nonsense approach to life.

He had no time for rainbows, butterflies, or women. His job saw to that.

But every once in a while he permitted himself to think about Mirri. It was stupid. He laughed silently at his own folly. His redheaded co-worker probably had more
notches on her bedpost than all the men in the office combined. He despised that kind of woman. Which made it even harder to understand why he couldn’t stop looking at her sometimes.

He turned to walk into the airport. To a casual observer, he looked like a man who didn’t know what tenderness was. The truth was that he’d never had the opportunity to find out. Nelson Stuart was not a frivolous man.

I
n the car, Mirri was chatting easily to Amanda about work and a new concert at the civic center while Amanda’s mind was on Josh and the way they’d parted. “When do you go back to work?” Mirri asked.

“Tomorrow. Which reminds me,” Amanda said, frowning, “how is it that you managed the time to meet me? Did you bribe someone at your office to let you off?”

“Bribe a special agent? I’m shocked!”

“Come on!”

“I told Mr. Stuart that I had to visit my sick grandmother in the hospital.”

“Your grandmother has been dead for fifteen years.”

“He doesn’t know that. He knows nothing at all about me.
”

“You should have told him the truth.”

“If I had, I’d still be in the office answering the phone and typing out arrest records and reports.”

“I could have gotten a cab.”

“Don’t be silly,” Mirri said gently, and smiled. “You’ve had a bad time of it, and you needed me. God
knows Nelson never will. Anyway, it’s no big deal. He’ll never find out.”

That blissful ignorance lasted until Mirri deposited Amanda at the small two-bedroom cottage behind the two-story red-brick house where Amanda had grown up. Leaving with a promise to meet her friend for supper at six, Mirri drove back to work and found an angry Nelson Stuart perched on the edge of her desk, waiting for her.

Amazing, she thought, watching him, that such a cold, broody, melancholy man could also be physically attractive. She’d never found any man appealing in that way before. In fact, her single experience with men had been traumatic and had left her afraid of all of them. But Nelson Stuart was tall and powerfully built, with the face of a plainsman and the carriage of a king. He had a regal elegance that sat well with his natural reticence of character.

Mirri would have loved to climb into his arms and tell him the sad story of her life. But that was laughable. He looked at her with eyes that spoke volumes about his opinion of her character. Apparently he approved of nothing about her. That blind condemnation was what put her back up and made her so antagonistic toward him. It was self-defense, faking him out, so that he’d believe she found him amusing when the truth was she found him devastating.

“I hope your sick grandmother is better,” he said as she approached the desk, holding her purse to her breasts like a shield.

“She’s, uh, much better, thanks,” she said warily.

“Yes, so I noticed.”

Her face stilled. “I beg your pardon?”

“She bears an amazing resemblance to Amanda Todd, don’t you think?”

“Caught in the act,” Mirri said with irrepressible humor. “Okay, boss, you found me out. I went to the airport to get Amanda and drop her off at the cottage. If you want to shoot me, I’ll get you some bullets for your gun.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “It isn’t funny.”

“Of course not.” She composed her features and struck a serious pose.

His eyes twinkl
ed for an instant with kindling humor before he got up and turned his back to her. “Next time tell the truth,” he said curtly. “I’d have given you permission.”

“Why do you do that?” she asked impulsively.

He scowled at her. “Do what?”

She moved a little closer, peering up at him like a curious cat. “Try to blank it out when something amuses you,” she explained. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile, really.”

The personal bent of the conversation made him nervous. He glared at her. “My reactions are none of your business. Get back to work, please
.”

She reached out without knowing why and put her hand on his arm to delay him. The reaction she got was immediate, decisive, and a little intimidating. His hand came up and deflected her fingers just as they made contact, wrapping tautly around her wrist in a warm, firm grasp.

“Don’t ever do that,” he cautioned in a voice soft enough to be menacing. “I don’t like to be touched.”

She flushed. “I
…
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean
…”

He dropped her wrist, his eyes glittering darkly. “Your kind of woman disgusts me,” he said through his teeth. “Blatant, wanton, purely pleasure-centered. I can’t imagine why you think I’d want any part of you, even if I was desperate for a woman!”

Her face went pale. “You’re wrong about me,” she began. “Dead wrong. I’m not—”

“You couldn’t tell the truth in a pinch,” he replied, and walked away from her, calmly lighting a cigarette as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

Mirri stared after him in shock. She’d always known that he didn’t like her, but his cold contempt really shook her up. She did dress in a blatant fashion, but it was all camouflage, an act. But he didn’t, or wouldn’t, see beneath the mask she presented. Perhaps he’d been in love with a woman who was like her adopted persona and was taking out his wounds on her. He couldn’t have known how deeply he’d hurt he
r. She was anything but a play-
girl.

Nelson went back to his office, forcing himself not to look back. He’d
been shocked at the look on Mirr
i’s face, at its unnatural whiteness. He didn’t try to hurt people. But she got under his skin. One flamboyant woman had already taken him for a ride and crushed his pride. Her touch had inflamed him, made his knees go weak. He’d had to make her back off before he did something really stupid, like making a grab for her. He closed his office door and leaned against it, taking a deep, steadying breath. God, he wanted her! He was going to have to get her out of this office before he caved in. Every day she wore on his nerves more and more.

Later, while she was having dinner with Amanda, in a small Italian bistro, Mirri blurted out the whole story.

Amanda had known that something was wrong. Her friend was wearing a very simple beige dress, with her long hair in a neat bun and very little makeup. She looked like a shadow of her usual self.

“So that’s it,” she said gently. She smiled. “Love rears its ugly head, I gather?”

Mirri actually blushed. “Not for the iceman, it doesn’t,” she said with resignation. She fingered her coffee cup, watching the ripples move across its silvery surface. “He hates me. What am I going to do? I hate to leave my job because my boss thinks I’m a tramp.”

“Listen,” Amanda said gently, “why don’t you go to him and tell him everything.”

Mirr
i’s eyes widened into saucers. “Are you nuts!”

“He isn’t what he seems, any more than you are,” Amand
a
told her. “Can’t you look deep enough to see that he’s been hurt, too?”

“I wondered
…
” She lifted her eyes. “But it isn’t something I can just blurt out.”

“Then invite him out for a meal, or just a cup of coffee. Somewhere away from the office, so that you can talk to him.”

Mirri tingled all over. “He wouldn’t go with me,” she said after a minute, grimacing.

“Try it.”

The other girl sighed and then smiled wistfully. “Well, nothing ventured, I suppose. But he’ll just slap me down, you know.”

“I don’t know. Neither do you. Give it a try.”

Mirri gave her a toothy smile. “Can I quit first, and then ask him out?”

“Chicken.”

“Shades of Stephen Austin Elementary!” Mirri laughed. “Is that a double-dog dare?”

“You bet.”

“In that case”—she lifted her cup in a mock toast— “here’s to success. If I lose, you have to find me a new job.”

“No problem there. I own half a newspaper, if I can ever convince my nemesis that I’m capable of running it.”

“You’ve got a marvelous head for business. Of course you can run it.”

“I know that. I wish I could convince Josh,” Amanda said bitterly.

“You can’t tell Josh anything. You have to show him,” Mirri mused. She studied her friend closely and then crosse
d her hands over each other. “
What went on down on Opal Cay? You look different. Did Josh finally get around to making a pass?” She knew how Amanda felt about Josh.

Amanda averted her face, but
not quickly enough. She saw Mirr
i’s knowing smile and grimaced. “Well, yes. But Terri’s back in his life. He decided that I was dying to exchange my body for a wedding ring or control of the newspaper. He said so,” she added when Mirri looked incredulous.

“My gosh!” Mirri gasped. “Has he finally gone off the deep end after years of living on the edge of pandemonium?”

“I don’t know. He was furious with me. I’ve never seen him like that.”

“That doesn’t sound like Josh.”

She frowned. “Yes, I know. Perhaps this whole financial mess Dad left has affected him. He’s worried about Brad, too.” She put her head in her hands. “Terri is married, but Josh doesn’t seem to mind.”