“Was it all bad?” he asked.
“That’s not fair.” She rested her elbows on her knees and buried her face in her hands. “You know it wasn’t. You had your moments.”
“We had our moments. You haven’t forgotten the weekend we spent in St. Kitts, have you?”
She had, actually, until he’d mentioned it. “That was fun. It was nice.” She deliberately understated how much fun that weekend had been. They had been dating for five months when Jordan surprised her with the trip. He had been attentive and caring, and just when she’d thought things couldn’t get better, he’d arranged to have a hot air balloon ride over the island. On the day they had returned to Boston, Jordan’s road exploits began appearing in Psst! Miranda hadn’t believed the stories at first. A true journalist never put too much stock in unattributed reports.
It was Jordan himself who had given credence to the gossip.
Miranda had been in St. Louis covering one of Jordan’s interleague games against the Cardinals. She had gone to the team’s hotel to surprise him with a piping hot deep-dish pizza and a cold six-pack of beer. Jordan always registered under a false name to avoid the hordes of “baseball Bambis” that hunted him down in every city. When “Oliver Closhoff” tossed open his door and stood there, wearing skin-tight sports briefs, a smile, and acres of rippling chocolate muscles, Miranda had thought his sexy outfit was meant for her.
He had grunted her name in surprise as she moved past him and into the suite…where a pair of blonde baseball Bambis in various degrees of undress lounged on his emperor-sized bed.
“You’ve got the wrong room, lady,” the green-eyed blonde with the dramatic overbite had said. “We ordered us up some lobster and champagne, not a pie and suds.”
“You’re right,” Miranda had said, glaring coldly at Jordan. “I definitely have the wrong room.”
“Give her a nice tip anyway, Jordan,” a blue-eyed blonde with gigantic breasts had generously advised.
“Quiet, Kit,” Jordan had growled.
“I’m Linda,” the blue-eyed blonde had corrected as the green-eyed one whined, “I’m Kit.”
Jordan had glanced over his shoulder and said, “Whoever you are, shut up.”
Miranda had sped from the room, and she’d thrown the hot pizza at Jordan when he attempted to stop her at the door. He had bellowed her name as she hurried down the corridor and toward the elevators, but Jordan hadn’t bothered to pursue her. Before her flight had landed back in Boston, Meg and Dee had broken the story in Psst!—complete with a quote from Jordan stating that he “was pretty much done with Miranda anyway.”
As she sat in her living room, listening to Jordan plead for another chance, she wished she had another hot pizza to throw at him.
* * *
“‘I’m so excited!’” Bernie sang. “‘And I just can’t hide it!’” He grabbed Miranda and shook her. She sluggishly wobbled back and forth. “Tonight’s the night, butterbean! Our Lucas is coming for us tonight!”
Miranda stood in the men’s room off the second-floor corridor, where Bernie had dragged her to enlist her help in choosing the perfect outfit for Karmic Echo’s make-up concert. She found it impossible to work up any enthusiasm. The concert was in less than four hours, and Lucas was surely in Boston already, yet he still hadn’t contacted her.
She had regretted her last words to him more and more as his return to Boston had drawn nearer. She’d made it perfectly clear that she hadn’t intended to ever see him again. Perhaps that’s why he’d kept his distance.
“Miranda!”
“Huh?” She snapped to attention. “What did you say?”
“I’ve been calling you for five minutes. What’s the matter with—you’re not dwelling on your midnight visit from Jordan, are you?”
“Goodness no. I was thinking about…well…”
Bernie stood in front of the mirror. He took off his blue silk tie and put on a debonair, black-on-black paisley, both of which he’d purchased at Harrods. “Use your words, honey, I can’t read that perplexing little mind of yours.”
“I was hoping that Lucas would have called me. Or sent a postcard. Or something.”
Bernie slowly turned to face her. “You’re acting like a girl. This is scaring me.”
“Forget I said anything. It’s stupid. It’s pointless. He’s probably already forgotten about me.”
Bernie turned and leaned heavily on the edge of one of the basins lining the wall. “Good grief, Peppermint Patty. How long has this been going on?”
“Since we left Wales.” She covered her face in shame with the overlong sleeves of her Boston Breakers shirt.
Bernie went to her and put an arm around her. Sort of. He didn’t get too close for fear of wrinkling his black shirt. “Baby didn’t stand a chance. Sir Lucas fought the dragon and won your damaged little heart.”
Miranda flung her arms into the air. “Will you please explain to me why people call him Sir Lucas? Is it some kind of nickname?”
“Lucas was knighted a few years ago for his work with the International Children’s Rescue Fund and the Cancer Research Society of Great Britain.” Bernie started a stream of water and wet his hands before patting down his neat afro. “I told you that he was a knight when I prepped you for your date.”
Miranda slumped against the dingy mustard tile of the wall. “I thought you were feeding me another fairy tale metaphor. Man, I thought Jordan was a mistake, but this…I’ve outdone myself. How can I be so stupid?”
“I don’t like this ride, chile, and I’m getting off. Let me know when you want to talk sense instead of self pity.”
“He’s a knight, Bernie.” Miranda grew more dejected with each passing second. “He lives in a castle. Meu Deus, he even shops in a building that looks like one!”
“Harrods,” Bernie said in a mock English accent as he spritzed his hair with a citrus conditioning spray. “You gotta love a mall with turrets.”
Miranda slid to the floor. “For six weeks, all I’ve been able to think about is a man with whom I have absolutely zero chance of a future. All this time, I’ve been nursing the secret hope that he’ll ride in and sweep me off my feet. I bought into the fairy tale when I, of all people, should know that there are no happy endings. There are just endings.”
Bernie tore himself from the mirror to see her sitting on the floor in a miserable heap of knees and oversized sweatshirt. “Honey, you have reached a whole new level of nastiness. I won’t pee in here, let alone sit on the floor.” Using the very tips of his fingers, he helped her stand.
“I’m serious, Bernie. I’m really unhappy.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “Yes, I do. First of all, you’re always unhappy.” He held up a finger when she started to protest. “Yes, Miranda, you are. I didn’t notice it until we were in Wales. Happiness made you beautiful. That was the first time I’d ever seen you truly happy, and now I finally have a basis for comparison. Second of all, I think you should go home. Right now. And don’t give Lucas Fletcher another thought.”
He may as well have told her to go home and practice biting the back of her own neck.
“Do as I say,” he commanded. “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it was always yours.”
“I swear, Bernie, if I had any other friends, I’d cut you loose so fast. Was that supposed to be at all helpful?”
He gave her a genuine hug. “It’s written on the wall over there. I was just reading it out loud.” He gripped her shoulders and spoke directly to her. “Go home. If you need me, you can always page me at the concert.”
“Could I go to the concert with you?”
“Either you’re beginning to stink of desperation, peanut, or someone forgot to flush one of these toilets.”
“I know!” she grimaced. “And it’s so embarrassing.”
“Go home,” Bernie said very precisely. “Take a shower. Read a book. Count the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. It
’s Saturday night and I can’t babysit you any longer because I have to get to the Arena. Your knight awaits!”
* * *
Even though Miranda lived only two miles from the Herald-Star, it had taken her almost an hour to get home. She had spent most of the time sitting behind the wheel of her car, stuck on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston’s evening rush-hour congestion. Ordinarily, her horn would have joined the broken symphony coming from the other cars, but she couldn’t work up the heart to honk at anyone, not even the pierced and tattooed teenaged skateboarder that had darted into the street from between two parked cars.
Two blocks from her apartment, she had stopped at Mama Brown’s Sandwich Shop on Columbus Avenue to get a cubano for dinner, and she had forgotten to put a quarter in her parking meter. She hadn’t batted an eye when she’d left the shop to find a neon-orange ticket under the wiper blade of her Toyota. Boston’s meter people were the human equivalent to the Ebola virus: they struck fast and hard and there was nothing you could do once you were tagged.
A stranger’s car illegally occupied her assigned spot behind her apartment building, leaving her to park a bit too close to a fire hydrant four blocks away, but she didn’t cuss or complain. Her sandwich tucked under her arm like a rugby ball, she had stepped in gum as she had walked home, telling herself that she would feel better after the concert, once Lucas had performed and left town again. She wouldn’t miss him any less, but she wouldn’t feel quite so neglected once he was in a different time zone.
She took a shower, which didn’t help her mood, and then dimmed her lights and put on some music. It only reminded her of Lucas, even though she was listening to Al Green and not the type of music Karmic Echo played. She lay on the sofa, her forearm covering her face. “I can’t go on like this,” she said. “I’m acting like an infatuated seventh-grader. And I never acted this way even when I was a seventh-grader.”
What am I gonna do?
The answer that came to her was as obvious as it was simple. “I could call him, damn it.”
She sat up. That was it. All she had to do was call the Arena and ask for Lucas’s manager. The man might give her a song and dance about Lucas being too busy to talk to her, but at least she’d know once and for all where she stood.
Her door buzzer sounded just as she started for the wall phone in the kitchen. Bernie had his own key and no one else ever visited, so that meant her uninvited guest was probably the very person she didn’t want to see.
“Jordan!” she hissed through gritted teeth, wondering what part of “Don’t ever bother me again” he’d failed to comprehend during their short goodbye the previous night. She ignored the buzzer and went for the phone. She searched through her work address book, looking for the business card Kenneth Morgan had given her at Conwy. It was as good a place as any to start and might actually have a useful phone number on it.
Her visitor leaned on the buzzer. The noise was maddening, but at least the building manager had heeded her warning to never let anyone into the building on her behalf. The persistent buzz eventually stopped and Miranda assumed Jordan had finally given up, until she heard footsteps tromping up the fire escape outside her open living room window. She ran to the front closet and grabbed her emergency defense system—a Louisville slugger. Pressing herself to the wall by the window, she was ready to knock her intruder out of the ballpark.
“Miranda?”
Her whole body went weak at the sound of the voice she had heard only in her dreams for the past month and a half. “Lucas?” She dropped the bat and opened the window wider, and Lucas climbed into her living room with the easy grace of a shadow. For a moment he stood there, looking at her. She wore a silky black shirt that was two sizes too big and unbuttoned to the middle of her chest. Black, man’s-style sports briefs revealed the sensuous lengths of her elegantly muscled legs and the supple rounds of her backside. She looked more delicious than she had in any of the memories he’d conjured during their time apart.
Miranda smiled for what felt like the first time in years.
“I called your paper but I was told that you’d gone for the day.” He framed her face in his hands. “Your home number is unlisted, or I would have called first. I had to come by. I had to see you.”
“I can’t believe you’re here.” She clasped his wrists, squeezing them warmly.
He took her hands and pressed his lips to their backs. He was touched by the tremble in them. “Are you disappointed?”
Smiling, she shook her head. “Surprised. Not disappointed.”
“I have missed you so, Miranda,” he said, grossly understating his feelings. Her parting kiss in Wales had bewitched and bedeviled him, and had replayed so many times in his mind, he had worn holes in the memory. Throwing himself fully into the Asian leg of the tour was the only way he’d been able to give himself any peace.
“You could have called me.” She cringed. That was the thing she’d least wanted to say to him.
“If I’d heard your voice, I would have dropped everything and come to you on the Concorde,” he said. “Karmic Echo would have been sued for millions, my mates would have strung me up with my own guitar strings and the world would have known that I’d gone ziggy for a woman I’d only just met.” The backs of his fingers tickled over her cheeks, and the innocent gesture sparked a meltdown deep within Miranda’s lower abdomen. “I could wait for you because I knew you were worth waiting for. You missed me?” Lucas dared to hope.
Never one to easily share her feelings in words, Miranda jumped into his arms, wrapped her legs about his waist, and kissed him, burying her fingers in his hair and tasting the night air on his lips. He supported her weight with one arm, and cradled the back of her head with his free hand. Her lips parted and coaxed him into deepening the kiss, and she felt him rise between her legs.
“Good,” he said in a husky voice between kissing her throat and suckling her earlobe. “I was hoping we could pick up where we left off.”
“I was just worried,” she said on a heavy breath as she set her feet back on the floor.
“About what?”
“About not seeing you again. And about seeing you again. How did you get here without causing a riot?”
“I rode a bike over from the Arena.” He pointed to the Harley-Davidson motorcycle parked below her window. “I hid in plain sight, as it were. Just another guy in a helmet on a hog.”
The motorcycle explained his scuffed leather pants and jacket. She appreciatively eyed the big bike. “That looks like way more fun than Bernie’s Vespa.”
“I’ve been crazy the past several weeks.” He cradled her to him, kissing her fingers one by one. “Right here, right now, I finally feel sane. I want you to come to the show tonight, as my guest. I brought an extra helmet.”
“Give me a minute to change.”
“I like what you have on.” He toyed with the plunging neck opening of her shirt.
She slowly withdrew from his embrace. “I think I’ll wear my athletic singlet. Or maybe my high-cut Bermuda shorts and thong sandals.”
He laughed as she trotted off. Miranda bounded up the open stairwell to her bedroom. When she caught her reflection in the mirror above her dresser, she did a double take. She didn’t recognize the wide, shining kaleidoscope eyes, or the fresh, relaxed features. For the first time, she looked as though she were dancing to the joyous music of her own heart. Bernie’s right, she mused silently. Happiness makes me beautiful.
Chapter 6
It had taken Miranda exactly two minutes to pull on a pair of slim black jeans and black penny loafers. But once she was dressed, she had spent another ten minutes trying to decide what book to take to the concert. “It’s just something to keep me busy backstage,” she had explained as she’d tucked the paperback into her coat pocket. Lucas had laughed all the way down to the street.
Once they had reached the Arena, Miranda was certain that the ride on the Harley would remain the best part of the evening. Lucas had moved in and out o
f Boston’s awful traffic with the ease of a lifelong resident. Sitting behind him, framing him between her legs with her arms tightly around his torso, had been as enjoyable to her as it had been to him, perhaps more. Lucas had liked the feel of her against him so much that he had driven around the block twice before roaring into the restricted section of the underground parking garage.
Lucas, and by extension Miranda, began receiving the VIP treatment the instant he took off his helmet and shook out his hair. While waiting crewmen nattered like howler monkeys at Lucas, he helped Miranda from the bike as though they had merely stopped for burgers and fries on any Main Street in America.
A Karmic Echo crewman took the bike and helmets while Lucas maintained charge of Miranda, holding her hand tightly to keep her from being separated from him once they entered the Arena’s congested underbelly. Miranda was no stranger to this part of the building. She had often been one of the media sheep forced to flock around hockey or basketball players to gather quotes or finish interviews as they went to their limos and chartered buses. Security was much tighter now because of Karmic Echo’s presence. Lucas led Miranda through four security checkpoints and still had yet to reach the dressing rooms. People were everywhere, some in the green uniforms of Arena security while others were part of Karmic Echo’s huge road and stage crew. Most of the people milling about were female Karmic Echo fans who had scored limited access backstage passes from radio shows, the tour’s sponsors, Karmic Echo crewmembers or the Arena.
Miranda almost jogged to keep up with Lucas’s brisk pace. She held his hand in both of hers, sure that if she let him go she’d never find him again. She half wished she were out on the concert floor with Bernie, but when Lucas smiled at her, she decided that she was perfectly happy where she was.
After what felt like a mile of twists and turns through half the population of Eastern Massachusetts, they were ushered into a large, quiet odd-shaped room that looked like a typical hotel room—at a very expensive hotel. A white leather sectional sofa lined the wall opposite a giant, flat-screen plasma television. A fully stocked bar, on which sat a gigantic fruit basket filled with Cristal champagne and Godiva chocolates, rested against the wall facing the door. Another wall was completely mirrored and framed by theatre lights. A wide white shelf bisected the mirrored wall, forming a table upon which sat a guitar case.
Crush Page 10
