"No, it is definitely not going to happen," Hayley agrees.
I hate them, I think with sudden bitter passion. But I immediately bring myself up short. Hate is such an unproductive emotion, not to mention just plain wrong. I must not hate.
Small wakes stream out from my fingers and I concentrate on them, noting how pretty they are, how serene. I take several deep, calming breaths until I have myself under control again, then chat with deliberate aimlessness as I fill Hayley in on the gossip of people with whom we had both gone to school.
We reach the shore, and I help Hayley pull the boat above the waterline. Several times I attempt to reintroduce the journalists into the conversation, but somehow Hayley always manages to deflect the subject onto something else. She does it throughout our picnic lunch and continues to do so as I show her how to use the bow and arrow.
"They are everywhere I turn," I complain at one point.
Hayley merely says, “Hmm,” and her smile is maddeningly noncommittal.
I refuse to be discouraged. "It must be particularly aggravating for you,” I say determinedly, “since you are the reason they are here. Do they always hang out at Bluey’s the way they did the other night?"
"Pretty much." Hayley nocks her arrow and takes a bead on the target I had pinned to the tree. The arrow wobbles in her grasp and barely clears the bow when she looses the draw string. "Damn. Show me again how you're supposed to balance the thing on this little doohickey."
I demonstrate the technique once more. Then I draw a deep breath, gird my loins and say with determined cheer, "I have just been struck by a brilliant idea."
There is an instant of dead silence and I narrow my eyes. Well, really. Hayley has not even bothered to glance in my direction. Would it kill her to demonstrate the tiniest bit of interest? I forged on despite the lukewarm reception to my opening volley. "I will be your new public relations liaison."
Hayley lowers the bow and turns to look at her. "Excuse me?"
"I will run interference between you and the media," I elaborate. The idea of dealing with all the outsiders responsible for disrupting my town's placid rhythms makes my stomach churn. At the same time, I know I can handle the responsibility brilliantly.
"No. Thank you."
"But Hayley..."
Without so much as a by-your-leave, Hayley raises the bow again and takes aim at the target. "No, Patsy," she says with calm finality. "I appreciate your offer, but please, just stay out of it. I have nothing to say to those people."
No, let's hear your ideas, Patsy, no What a good and true friend you are, Patsy. She doesn't even extend me the courtesy of giving the proposal a moment's consideration. Just a curt, No, stay out of it.
My admiration slips silently into something more rancorous.
Okay, that was not a resounding success. Hayley had hoped, when she suggested this outing, that she and Patsy would have a nice low-key hour or two, a chance to really get away and relax.
Well, she had enjoyed rowing the boat. And she had found learning a bit about the compound bow informative and her inept attempts to place arrows in the general vicinity of the target amusing. But Patsy seemed to have lost what little sense of humor she once possessed. There was an intensity about her now that was disturbingly close to repellent.
Pats had always lacked in the humor department. And God knew she had never been particularly spontaneous. But she had been a true friend in their senior year after Jon-Michael trashed her reputation. And once she had been sweet, which had always seemed miraculous all by itself, given the way her mother used to treat her.
Somewhere over the years the sweetness had faded. She had developed a sort of tunnel vision toward pursuing her objectives, and she was clearly oblivious to the fact that her methods trampled over other people’s sensitivities. There were painful subjects Hayley simply did not care to discuss. Why could Patsy not accept the fact and move on to other topics of conversation?
Was that too damn much to ask?
Seventeen
Kurstin walked up behind Ty and rubbed his shoulders. "What's bothering you?” she questioned softly. "You’ve been quiet all evening."
Oh, hey, what could possibly be the matter, he wondered sourly. Aside from the minor matter of the telephone call he’d received this afternoon, telling him to either produce or get his ass back to the newsroom if he wanted to have a job to come back to. He leaned into the hands kneading his neck. "Nothing."
Kurstin sighed. "Secrets," she said wryly. “I’m surrounded by people with secrets."
He tilted his head back to look up at her. "My day just turned out to be kind of frustrating," he said. "My muse deserted me, my characters refuse to speak. What can I say?"
He’d told Kurstin he was on a six-month sabbatical to write a book. "This is not exactly the stuff of earth shattering secrets." He bent his head forward again and growled a little when her fingers resumed their hypnotic massage. "Who do you know who's hoarding real ones?"
"Hayley."
"No fooling?" It took all his concentration not to tense up. "Huh. I would have thought her life was an open book, after all the publicity with her husband, the trials, the upcoming execution and all."
“It’s the execution that has her all tied up in knots. She has such conflicted feelings about capital punishment."
Like a hound on the scent of an escapee, his every journalistic instinct went on point. It was all he could do to say casually, “I would think she’d be for it.”
“I know, right?” But then Kurstin explained Hayley’s long-held stance on the death penalty and why it was tearing her apart her to still have strong leaning in that direction.
Ty stared down at the carpet beneath his feet as he listened. She had just handed him the story he'd come to Gravers Bend for. All tied up in silver ribbons. And…he didn’t have the least desire to sing hosannas.
How dicked up was that?
Hayley followed Jon-Michael up to his bedroom in the early hours after the bar closed down and pulled a handful of scarves from her purse. She pointed to the bed. “Lie down.”
"I'm beginning to think I've created a monster," he said as she straddled his chest to wrap strips of silk around his wrists. He watched as she then tied the bindings to the headboard, unsure if he cared for the look on her face. "Uh, Hayley, honey…about saying you could whip me if you wanted—?"
"No whips," Hayley tersely assured him.
"You have a bad day, sweetpea?"
"I really don’t wanna discuss it right now, Jon-Michael." She gave the scarf a tug to test the strength of her knots.
"Oookay." He sucked in his stomach when she knelt beside him and bent forward, swinging her head from side to side in gentle sweeps that brushed her hair over his chest and down his abdomen. "It's not that I’m complaining about the sex, mind you," he said in a strained voice. "I mean, I hate to speak ill of the dead and all, but if you ask me your late husband had to be the worst kind of fool to try ‘n curb your adventuresome streak. That's like having a concert pianist at your beck and call and only allowing her to play 'Chopsticks' on a Play Skool piano. But, Hayley, is this the only way we can communicate now?"
"Do you really care?" Her breath blew with humid warmth across the head of his cock, and lifting his head to watch it bob stiffly upright in direct response to the stimulation, Jon-Michael felt his lips twist in a wry smile.
"My dick doesn't seem to give a damn. But, yeah, I do care."
"Hmmm," was all she replied and then lowered her head to bestow a delicate lick.
"Wait," he panted. "Wait a sec. Let's talk about this."
"I don't feel like talking." She opened her mouth and sucked him inside.
Jon-Michael's hips came off the bed and his head pressed into the pillows, the need for conversation momentarily supplanted by need of another kind.
She eventually raised her head and knee-walked up the bed to settle herself astride him. Lowering herself until he was deep inside, she began to move. A breathle
ss while later, they were both straining to hold back the inevitable.
"Untie me," he panted. "I want to hold you."
She didn’t appear to hear him. "Saaay it," she moaned.
"Dammit, Hayley, untie me! Now!"
She moved harder on him. "Oh, please, Johnny, please. Say it." She reached for the scarves restraining him and fumbled to untie the knots. They had tightened with their movements. "Say it, say it, say it."
The knots came free.
His arms wrapped around her and he rolled them over. Digging his toes into the mattress, he surged into her. "I love you, Hayley. God! I love you. Come for me, baby. I love you so much."
She screamed his name and climaxed hard, locking her thighs around his waist and digging her nails into his back, triggering his own.
Breathing heavily, they collapsed in a tangle of arms and legs, bonded with sweat where their stomachs pressed and his chest flattened her breasts. Jon-Michael finger-combed her hair off her face and struggled to catch his breath. "You didn't put a condom on me," he panted.
Her breathing halted for a second, then slowly resumed. The infinitesimal shoulder movement she effected an instant later shifted her breasts against his chest. "Oh, well."
"Oh, well? What are the chances you could get pregnant?"
She thought about it for a moment. "Ninety-five percent nonexistent."
"Uh huh. Well, if it somehow happens anyhow, don’t even think about getting rid of our baby."
She considered the autocratic order, considered as well her own strong feelings about the rights of a woman's body and men who thought they could dictate what a female could do with it. On the other hand, any potential child would be a result of her own negligence and neither did she believe in abortion as a substitute for birth control.
Not to mention the emotional impact of knowing any potential baby would be Jon-Michael's. She expelled a little sigh of capitulation. "Okay."
He stroked her hair, seemed to hesitate for a moment, but then said, "Hayley?"
"Um hmmm?"
"Why did you let me take your virginity that night by the lake?"
When she stiffened slightly in his arms, she felt him hold his breath as if waiting for her to shove him away.
Instead she relaxed again and released the breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding. "Because I wanted to."
"Yeah, I figured that part out for myself. Why, though? Why then? I must have tried a dozen other times to get in your pants. You always laughed in my face."
She was quiet for several moments. Then she took another deep breath, expelled it and said quietly, "You were—I don't know—real that night." She shook her head, afraid she was not articulating what she had felt. "You were hurt because your dad hadn't come to your soccer game and for once in your life you were not trying to disguise your feelings with that Mr. Life of the Party facade you're so fond of hiding behind."
"So you thought you would reward me by letting me take your cherry?"
Shoving her head deep into the pillow, she gave him a level-eyed look. "You want to let me tell this my way, Jon-Michael, or would you prefer I play straight man to your sarcastic one-liners?"
"Sorry." A frown pulling his eyebrows together, he stared down at her. "At least tell me it wasn't a mercy fuck."
"Excuse me?"
"Dammit, Hayley, it's bad enough knowing I was drunk and probably careless. And you know perfectly well I'm still ashamed of the way I shot off my mouth afterwards. If you tell me you let me fuck you that night out of pity, I’m going to stick my tongue in the nearest electrical socket."
"Oh, for God's sake, Jon. You got me all hot and bothered. Pity had nothing to do with it."
"Good," he murmured and eased off her and onto the mattress, where he promptly reached to pull her into his arms. She rested her cheek against the swell of his pec and smoothed a hand down his torso, tracing the definition of his abs with her fingertips.
He crushed a fistful of her hair in his hand and she felt him raise his head to inhale its scent. "I remember that game, you know," he murmured. "I don't remember who we played, but I remember playing the best game of my life. I scored two goals."
"Yeah. I think that was what made it so hard for you to dissemble that night. You played one hell of a game and it just wasn't enough that Kurstie and I were there to cheer you on. You wanted your dad to see, too."
"If I ever have kids, I will be different than him,” Jon-Michael said with low-voiced vehemence.
She pressed herself closer. "Yes, you will. I don’t doubt for a minute you’ll be a dedicated, attentive father." And it hurt to think about, because she couldn’t picture who the mother of his children would be. She didn’t visualize it being herself—not unless her fertility this morning hit a homer from the five percent probability base. There was just too much water over that bridge. Yet the idea it might be someone else was surprisingly painful to contemplate.
"So we talked?" he prompted.
"Yes. We talked a lot. Kurstin pointed out a while back you and I used to do that quite a bit, but with all the shit that happened following your share with the team, I’d forgotten. Anyhow, after the game you, your sister and I took a blanket into the woods. We laid there and watched the wind in the trees, and we talked. Both Kurstie and I tried to get you to stop drinking but you had a pint of Black Velvet you were determined to kill off. Eventually Kurstin left to find the kegger going on at the lake, but you and I stayed. We talked some more, then you kissed me, and one thing led to another. The rest, as they say, is history."
"When did I tell you I loved you?"
"After. You were sort of euphoric about what we had done and quite insistent I was not your average, every day roll in the hay."
"See? Even loaded I had extraordinary discernment. I obviously knew a good thing when it bopped me on the head. Did I hurt you? Physically, I mean?"
"Not really. Well, a little." One of her shoulders twitched. "No more than it would have hurt with any one else, I daresay."
He combed his fingers through her hair, holding it off her face. He stared down at her. "Did you tell me you loved me back?"
For the first time she displayed a measure of discomfort. She stirred restlessly, pushing away from him. "I have to get up."
"Why? Where you gonna go? You live here now, remember?"
She said the first thing she figured Jon-Michael could not debate. "I have to pee."
It worked like a champ.
But he was waiting for her when she got back. Standing outside the bathroom door, he handed her a lightweight kimono when she walked out. He had donned his boxer-briefs. "So, did you?"
"Did I what?" She tied the robe and slid her hand along her nape to lift her hair from under the collar.
"Did you tell me you loved me back that night?"
Hayley simply looked at him for a moment. Then she sighed and nodded. "Yes. Yes, I did, all right?"
He reached for her but she circumvented the move by placing her palm flat against his chest. "But, Jon-Michael?" she said with soft-voiced finality. "I was wrong."
What the hell happened? Ty wondered. It was supposed to be so simple. Get in, get next to Kurstin, get the story, get out. Hit and run; it had been his MO his entire life and he had never given a good goddamn who got hurt in the process. Bottom line, he would do whatever was necessary to get the goods to move him that next beckoning rung up the ladder. Because he might have begun his life on the bottom.
But he had every intention of ending up on top.
So why hesitate now?
Ty sat in his deserted living room, staring at the telephone, willing himself to pick it up and make his move. He had what he had come for: he was in sole possession of one of the year's hottest stories. He should be burning up the lines getting it to his editor, because it was not a done deal until it was printed.
Hell, it wasn't a done deal until the paper with his byline hit the streets and went live online. He could be scooped right up to the instant
it released. And before this baby was in the readers’ hands, he had places to go, people to interview.
Bridges to burn.
That was the kicker. Because what about Kurstin, left on the other side when he burned that particular bridge to the ground? Ty blew out a gusty breath and shoved his hands through his hair, grinding the heels of his hands against his headache in an attempt to prevent it from pounding right through his forehead. He rested his head against the back of the couch and stared up at the ceiling. As if that held the answers.
What about Kurstin? It was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
He’d never expected what he had with her. Women were for use. Recreation. They weren't for getting under your skin like a rash that can’t be scratched. They sure as hell weren’t for...ever.
If he ran with this story, he was going to lose her. That was a simple truth. If he didn’t run with it, he would be flushing his entire career down the crapper. And what the hell would he have to offer her then?
Zip, brother, nada. He would be just one more loser in a world already overcrowded with the species.
His mouth twisted bitterly. Hell, he could visualize the whole thing now. He could see himself, the coal miner's spawn, coming to call, cap in hand, on the oh, so elegant blonde daughter of Gravers Bend's richest man. The chitchat over brandy played through his head. What do you do for a living, young man?
I’m unemployed at the moment.
Do you have any prospects?
Not really, sir. At least, none currently.
Her daddy would probably run his West Virginian ass out of town on a rail.
When it came right down to it he had two choices, only one of which was viable. The other was a fucking pipe dream that had been sweet while it lasted.
Ty reached for the phone.
Blinking against the glare of the tungsten lights blinding her the following evening, Hayley thought dully that the speed with which her life could change between one moment and the next should no longer have the power to catch her by surprise.
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