Mr. Fix-It

by Crystal Hubbard

  Khela quietly cleared her throat and then introduced her other tablemates even as she wondered why Carter had yet to release her hand.

  “Tell me, Carter,” said Martine Kendall, one of Cameo Publishing’s best-selling Regency authors, “are you a writer, too?”

  He chanced a glance at Khela, who was staring resolutely into her salad plate. “No,” he said simply. The rest of the table waited in vain for him to elaborate. He took a bite of his salad instead.

  Khela looked at him, pleased at how relaxed he seemed with nine pairs of expectant eyes boring into him. At fifty-five, Martine was handsome in a dated Alexis Carrington from Dynasty kind of way. Early in her career she had flourished as a mystery writer, and Khela knew that Carter’s unembellished “No” would not keep her at bay.

  “Carter is a jack of all trades,” Khela hurriedly explained. “When people have, uh, problems, they come to him. And he fixes them,” she finished lightly.

  His hand tightened around hers as he rested it on her thigh. “Actually, I handle the operation of—”

  “You’re a troubleshooter!” Garland chimed in gleefully. “A genuine corporate runabout. I should have guessed.” He pointed his fork at Carter. “The cut of the suit never lies. You’re corporate, not creative like the rest of us here!”

  Garland’s guffaws drowned out the polite laughter of the women. Khela was glad to see that Garland’s interruption derailed Martine—so glad, her hand relaxed within Carter’s.

  “Let’s talk about something other than work,” Martine said with a roll of her heavily lined eyes.

  “I had contemplated slipping out for an update on the Red Sox-Yankees game,” Carter said, sitting back and hanging his hand over the back of Khela’s chair. When his thumb brushed softly over the skin between her shoulder blades, her ever-present blush began to burn. “But honestly, Ms. Kendall, I’m enjoying all the shop talk. It’s surprisingly stimulating.”

  His thumb continued to ignite sparks of heat that traveled beyond Khela’s cheeks. He splayed his fingers, drawing his fingertips lightly over her bare shoulder blades until the warmth of his hand came to rest on her right shoulder, close to her neck. Khela turned her face slightly to the right, and his index finger whispered along her jaw. A pleasant shiver moved through her.

  “You’re a man,” Carmen Almeida said to Carter. Carmen wrote multicultural romances under the pen name of Carrie Fiore for Cameo’s Sizzler line. “I need a man’s opinion.” She cast a disdainful glance at Garland, who was using the flat surface of his knife as a mirror to tidily twist one end of his Snidely Whiplash moustache. “I’m working on a novel about a woman who isn’t sure which of two men fathered the child she’s carrying.”

  “Why darlin’, that hardly sounds romantic,” offered Kitty Kincaid, a sixty-something author from Georgia who cultivated the same Southern belle image she assigned to the heroines of her lengthy, Savannah-based historicals. She pressed the diamond-laden fingers of her left hand coquettishly to the base of her throat. “But I suppose anything goes in those hot-blooded contemporaries you churn out by the dozens, Carmen. I myself would never create a leading lady of such questionable morals.”

  Carmen’s long blue-black hair was arranged in fetching layers of curls atop her head. Elegant tendrils of her hairdo quivered with subdued anger, which sent color rushing to her terra cotta skin.

  Writers rarely criticized each other’s styles and genres, at least to their faces, but the tension had begun brewing between Carmen and Kitty at the start of the evening, from the moment Carmen’s A Hard Man Is Good to Find and Kitty’s The Cutlass and the Corset were listed as nominees for the much-coveted Romance Reader’s Choice award…the engraved crystal teardrop now sitting at Carmen’s right elbow.

  “Kitty,” Carmen began sweetly, “you stick to your thirty-year-old antebellum virgins and I’ll keep peddling realistic characters modern women can identify with.”

  Black-clad waiters glided in to replace their salad plates with the second course, and the table was spared Kitty’s response. Carmen, who had selected the grilled Maine lobster tails with orange chipotle vinaigrette, returned her attention to Carter.

  “If you were one of the men in the situation I described, what could the woman say or do to make you sympathetic to, rather than disgusted by, her predicament?”

  January Rose—her actual name—injected her thoughts on the subject. “I know your work, Carmen, and I know you.” She gave Carmen an approving wink, and the heavy laugh lines about her dark eyes deepened. “There’s no way you have your heroine knocking boots with two men.” With a sly look at Carmen, she added, “Unless they were identical twins.”

  Carmen’s brow lifted. “Very perceptive, Rose,” she grinned. “In my manuscript, my heroine—unbeknownst to her, of course—is drugged at a party, and has sex. She’s sure it was with the man she’s been dating, until she turns up knocked up, and the man’s twin claims that he was the one who was with her around the time the baby was conceived. Even worse, he claims that she was the one who seduced him at the party.”

  “Clever,” Garland said as he piled cucumber, dill and champagne compote atop a sizeable bite of the salmon he’d chosen for his entrée. “Clear-cut villain at work.”

  “Carter?” Carmen prompted. “How would you react to being told that your twin brother could possibly be the father of a baby you desperately want to be yours?”

  He finished chewing a bite of his grilled chicken and touched his napkin to his lips. “I suppose my gut reaction would be to distance myself from both my brother and the woman. But loving both, I’d have to find a way to forgive and accept the situation. A brother is blood. That’s an unbreakable bond. And if I loved this woman…” His awareness of Khela suddenly became keen and he felt her gaze on him. “If I loved her, I know I wouldn’t let her go. No matter what.”

  He met Khela’s eyes then, and he didn’t notice the way his response left the table spellbound.

  “What are your thoughts on the subject, Khela?” Kitty asked.

  “I—I…” she stammered. Thoughts? She had none. To produce thoughts, one had to be capable of thinking, and with the soft golden light from the chandeliers sparkling in Carter’s eyes, Khela’s brain relinquished control to parts of her body residing well below her brain. “I…”

  “Khela?” Carter stroked the backs of his fingers along her cheek. “Are you okay?”

  Another pleasant shiver coursed through her before she could snatch her gaze free of his. “I-was-just-thinking-about-the-exploding-genitalia-of-the-drone-honeybee,” she said in a rush, her hand trembling as she raised her water goblet to her mouth and took long, noisy gulps.

  “I beg your pardon, honey?” Kitty drawled.

  “That certainly bears explaining,” Garland chuckled.

  “Nature has interesting ways of ensuring parentage.” Once again, embarrassment set Khela’s face on fire from the inside out. “There are thousands of male honeybees—drones—in a hive, but only one female. Competition for the queen is fierce, so to make sure that her babies have only one daddy, nature devised a bomb.” The table, Carter especially, was intrigued, so Khela went into greater detail. “When the drone mates with the female, he sticks his palp—”

  “Now it’s my turn to beg your pardon,” Carmen deadpanned. “What’s a palp?”

  “His reproductive organ?” January guessed, peering at Khela over the top of her purple-rimmed half-glasses.

  “Right,” Khela said. “When he consummates the deal with the queen, the process eviscerates him. The drone dies at the moment of climax.”

  “What a way to go,” Garland said under his breath, winking at Carter, who almost spat out a mouthful of grilled asparagus.

  “No other male can mate with the queen because the dead drone’s palp blocks entry,” Khela said. “Nature found a foolproof way to ensure parentage.”

  January whistled. “Suicide. The ultimate proof of paternity.”

  “The Argentine Blue-Bill ha
s a spiny penis with a bristled tip,” Khela went on, “kind of like a bottle brush. These ducks are pretty promiscuous, and scientists theorize that the tips evolved as a way to remove the sperm of previous ducks when an Argentine Blue-Bill male mates with a female.”

  “Ew,” Carmen chuckled.

  “My dear Khela,” Kitty gushed, “you never fail to entertain and educate, and when I look at you here with this handsome, adoring man stuck to you like hair on a biscuit, I am persuaded that you truly are a torchbearer for romance.”

  The Torchbearer Award would be presented after dessert, and with two courses remaining, Khela felt her time was running out. She had no appetite, and now that Kitty had actually mentioned the award, Khela literally felt as though she were suffocating. She plucked the napkin from her lap and dropped it atop her chicken. “Would you please excuse me?” She sprang from her chair and was halfway to the exit before Carter and Garland could even stand.

  * * *

  “I like your friends.”

  Khela inched closer to the narrow strip of flat stone separating a pair of the two-story windows forming the harbor side wall of the banquet hall. With Boston’s skyline puzzled together in glittering lights before her and hundreds of guests enjoying raspberry sorbet enrobed in Belgian chocolate behind her, Khela was ready to gnaw her own leg off to escape the upcoming award ceremony.

  Carter’s appearance at her side calmed her—a little.

  “You didn’t have to follow me.” Her fingers dug into the flesh of her upper arms, and she shivered. “I just needed some air.” Of course, if she’d known that the April night would be so chilly, she would have run to the lobby instead.

  “Ms. Kincaid seems to think she offended you in some way,” Carter explained.

  “Go in and tell her I got the vapors. She’ll appreciate that.”

  Carter peeled off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. His proximity, his clean woodsy scent in the jacket and the weight of it covering her in warmth down to her knees almost made her turn and bury herself in his embrace. Even though she remained still, he must have sensed her need because he rested his hands on her shoulders and gave them a comforting squeeze.

  “Are you still cold?” His breath caressed her left ear.

  “No.” The breeze carried away the quiet syllable.

  “But you’re shivering.” His hands moved to her upper arms, raising goosebumps under the jacket to prickle her skin.

  “I’m nervous,” she lied, before truthfully adding, “I’m really not looking forward to standing before all those people at the luncheon tomorrow. Tonight’s different. I don’t have to make a speech. All I have to do is stand there and look pretty and grateful.”

  “I have a feeling that you’ll be fine.”

  Khela turned then, her gaze met his, and before he could cloak his expression with indifference or merriment, she translated the look in his eyes: she had managed the pretty part. She gripped the lapels of his jacket, pulling it closer about her shoulders.

  “Uh…” Wishing that he still had his jacket to hide the evidence of his reaching attraction to Khela, Carter shifted his eyes toward the banquet room. The lights had dimmed and three soft beams from overhead illuminated the podium set on a stage lining one wall. “I think you’re on soon.”

  He discreetly opened one of the glass doors just enough to hear the matronly president of the national Romance Authors of America Organization finish up her spiel.

  “Once every ten years, the romance writing arm of the ECWA nominates five authors to whom we are indebted, for without their brilliant stories, hard work and dedication, the genre of romantic fiction would cease to hold its own against those who refuse to acknowledge it as a legitimate form of literature. Most of you know who you are.”

  A soft rumble of chuckling traveled through the darkness. Khela almost applauded the president’s words. Many of the writers in the room, specifically those published by university presses, had a tendency to openly joke about romance.

  “Khela Halliday’s debut novel, Satin Whispers, was a Cameo Publishing Private Collection release ten years ago, when she was a twenty-one-year-old senior at Fieldcrest College in St. Louis, Missouri. That book landed on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists and led to an unprecedented seven-book deal with Cameo Publishing. The rest, as they say, is history. Ten years and eighteen books later—fourteen of them bestsellers—Khela has written for Cameo’s Private Collection, Treasury, Whisper, Sizzler and Unlaced lines, and next year, her first young adult series will debut with Cameo Sass books.”

  The president paused for a round of polite applause. “Khela has made us laugh, cry, think and wonder, but most importantly, she has made us believe in the power and possibility of true love,” she continued. “Tonight, we honor one of the best among us. Without further ado,” the president said proudly, “I’d like to present our guest of honor, Ms. Khela Halliday, with the Torchbearer Award for Excellence in Romance Fiction. Congratulations, Khela!”

  The banquet hall exploded with applause, startling Khela into Carter’s arms. Her ears ringing and on fire, she allowed Carter to escort her back into the room and up to the stage.

  The moment took on a dream-like quality, as though she’d been swept into a fairy tale, or worse, one of her own over-the-top romances. The skirt of her diaphanous gown tickled her ankles as she climbed the three short steps, assisted by Carter, who handed her off to the ECWA president. The gilded chandeliers, the marbled floor, the women in jewels and ball gowns, the men in dapper tuxedos and cutaway coats—it was too awesome to be imagined.

  At a table in the middle of the room, Daphne led a standing ovation. Her fiery mane of waist-length curls lashed her tablemates as she waved her arms and beat her hands together like a trained seal.

  Her date, a bonafide Latin stud named Russ, Rex or Raphael, loitered at the open bar, flirting with an unimpressed blonde barmaid. Daphne had a knack for finding men who were completely wrong for her. But at least she found guys. Unlike Khela, the fraud. The night was a lie, right down to Carter, the handsome prince who slowly backed away from the stage, softly applauding, the golden stage light giving his eyes warmth and depth that Khela could have basked in all night.

  Carter was the biggest lie of all.

  Tears burned Khela’s eyes as she crossed the stage. She cast a last look at her last-resort date, and he blew her a kiss with the debonair ease of a modern Cary Grant. Applause erupted anew, and, as she accepted a handshake, a kiss on the cheek, and the heavy Torchbearer statue from the association president, Khela burst into tears. She forced a smile, and it hurt her face so much that her tears intensified. She struck them away, and again found Carter. With his pinkies hooked in the corners of his mouth, he let loose a stadium whistle that made the table of black-clad mystery writers next to him clap their hands to their ears.

  Instead of being glad that he was finally impressed, Khela fought the urge to upchuck. She was no champion of romance. She was a big fat liar, and as she stood on stage, her back bowing under the weight of the Torchbearer teardrop, she felt as though guilt would roast her alive from the inside out.

  Carter’s smile faded as he studied her face. Her tablemates were clapping, but each of them—save January Rose—had a lean, hungry look aimed not at Khela but at the award clutched in her arms.

  Carter suddenly realized that there wasn’t a romance author in the room who wouldn’t trade places with Khela right there on the spot, and he wasn’t fooled by her empty smile, or her tears.

  Those aren’t tears of humble joy or happiness, he thought. They’re tears of misery.

  He caught her eye once more, and wrinkling his brow, he mutely conveyed his curiosity and concern.

  Khela looked right into the blinding stage light, hoping that he hadn’t read the horrible thought stuck on a continuous loop in her mind: I’m a phony, and you’re nothing more than a prop.

  * * *

  Khela’s eyes still stung from the tears she’d shed
onstage as she walked through her complimentary suite. Someone at the East Coast Writing Association had either a diabolical sense of humor or a complete misunderstanding of what romance writers were really like.

  I’m here for business, she grumbled to herself, scanning the room, not a honeymoon.

  Champagne chilled in silver buckets propped on one end of the full bar in the living room and an ornamental stand next to the dining table. Plump, fresh strawberries heaped around a tiny gold chafing dish full of glossy dark chocolate formed a centerpiece on the cocktail table between two long sofas set before the dazzling view of Boston Harbor.

  Khela walked through the office section of the suite and into the master bedroom to change, where she was assaulted by the sight of a beautiful Chippendale four-poster abundantly sprinkled with blood-red rose petals.

  She grabbed her suitcase in both hands and hauled it onto the bed, crushing rose petals and releasing their delicious fragrance. She tried to ignore it as she selected pale-grey yoga pants, white cotton bikini briefs and a matching camisole, and then slammed the suitcase shut.

  She went into the bathroom and found that her presumptuous hosts had also corrupted that room by drawing a pearly milk bath decorated with fresh violets and lilac spray roses, the water kept warm by temperature controls set to a comfy 88 degrees. Khela scowled at yet another bottle of chilled Dom Perignon and the two champagne flutes accompanying it. She plunged her arm into the bath and flipped the drain lever, and with satisfaction, she spent a moment watching the water start its journey to the Atlantic.

  She quickly changed, leaving her ball gown in a heap on the floor, and brushed her hair into a ponytail before stomping barefoot into the living room. She drew up short when she spotted Carter, still in his tux, idly standing at the window with a half-full tumbler in his hand.

  Chapter 3

  “Men like him should come with a warning label.”

  —from Hazardous to Your Heart by Khela Halliday

  She’d forgotten that he had his own cardkey to the suite, so she certainly hadn’t expected to find him standing at the windowed wall, framed by the harbor nightscape. The rugged, rough-edged maintenance stud she’d invited to the convention was so convincing in his costume that, for a moment, she believed him to be what she’d wanted him to be: the perfect romance hero sprung from the pages of one of her books.