Flash and Fire

by Marie Ferrarella

  Normally, Pierce would have gone, if for nothing more than to stand back and observe the others. But today he wanted to be alone.

  Alone with this feeling that was gnawing away at him. It wasn’t often that he was this attracted to a woman, this distracted by one. In his opinion, women were always more trouble than they were worth. Even under the very best of conditions, they aroused a temporary madness that set everything on its ear and played havoc with a man’s mind.

  And then they walked out on you. Or worse, they stayed.

  Self-centered and needy, self-seeking, every last mother’s one of them, whether their breasts made his fingers itch and his mouth go dry or not.

  He took another pull of the can.

  The thirst remained.

  Restless, he picked up the remote control from the coffee table and began flipping through channels. An old black-and-white western with a young John Wayne bled into a commercial for denture cream that blinked into a golf tournament.

  He kept pressing the channel button, hardly waiting for the picture to stabilize in front of him before flipping to another station.

  It was damn annoying, feeling this way. He didn’t like having his mind cluttered with the image of some woman.

  There was only one cure. Once he had her, he figured that would be the end of it. The attraction would be over. It usually was. It was the challenge that piqued his interest, not the prize.

  Maybe that was why Amanda appeared so desirable to him. She resisted. Not coyly, the way Cheryl in editing had, but firmly. Cheryl had held out for two weeks before giving in.

  He grinned, remembering. The combustion between them had been almost instantaneous. He’d hardly walked through her door before she was tearing the clothes from his body. He’d lost interest after a couple of days. But they had been a hell of a couple of days.

  He’d never liked things easy. Didn’t trust them if they were. It was the hunt, the chase, the promise of victory that intrigued him, that aroused him and set his hormones humming.

  One woman was more or less like another once the conquest was a foregone conclusion.

  Just once, he had thought that it would be different. Once, with Marsha.

  Got kicked in the teeth with that one, didn’t you, Alexander? he mocked himself as he paused on an African wildlife documentary.

  He stared fixedly as a monotone voice droned on about daily life for a pride of lions. He remembered his hard-won lesson. He’d been a foreign correspondent at K-MMN in Minneapolis at the time. It was March, and it was snowing. He thought back. March twelfth, 1991, the day he’d had his baptism into the real world and learned once and for all that no woman was worth it.

  He had just returned from the Gulf zone. Though he’d thought he had hardened himself to it, the atrocities he’d witnessed had turned his stomach.

  All he’d wanted, he remembered, was a safe haven to hide in for a few days. Naively, he’d thought of Marsha’s arms. All he had wanted was to scrub the dirt of war from his body and to make love to her until everything else disappeared.

  He remembered letting himself in and catching the faintest whiff of her perfume even before he closed the door. Anticipation hardened him as if he were some adolescent sneaking a look at his older brother’s copy of Playboy.

  And then he’d heard the voices coming out of the bedroom, the guttural sounds of pleasure that arise when two people make love.

  Rage had filled him.

  A man had a right to expect to find his wife waiting for him. A man had a right, he thought, his fingers tightening around the can until it bent beneath them, not to come home after a month in a hellhole and find his wife in bed with another man.

  He’d thrown the son of a bitch out the door. He’d very nearly tossed him out the window. But at the last minute, Pierce had decided that neither the bastard nor Marsha were worth going to jail over. So he’d settled for throwing the guy’s clothes out the window and shoving the bastard naked out into the hall.

  Pierce laughed to himself as he visualized the scene now. Maybe the guy had gotten lucky going down in the elevator.

  Marsha hadn’t had the brains to be afraid, hadn’t recognized how close she had come to meeting her own demise. Instead, like a preening, vain peacock, she’d lashed out at him.

  Kneeling on the bed, her body still glistening with sweat, Marsha had tossed her head defiantly and screamed obscenities at him.

  As if it was his fault that she was a whore.

  “What am I supposed to do, get off by watching the big-shot foreign correspondent on the television set? Watching night after night, just to get a glimpse of you? I’m not a groupie, Pierce.”

  She shook her head, her eyes mocking him. “You’re not that big a deal.” Knowing she’d hurt him, she’d gone for the jugular. “I’ve got needs. Needs you’re not man enough to fill.”

  Pierce had never hit a woman, but he had come close to hitting her then. But that would have made him no better than the people he had just left behind, halfway around the world. The people he had silently condemned.

  Curling his fingers into his hands, Pierce had told his wife that she had two hours to clear out and then began to leave the room.

  “Two hours!” she’d shrieked. Incensed, she had scrambled off the bed and grabbed his arm. “Two hours? Who do you think you are, ordering me around? This stuff is half mine, you worthless pr—“

  He’d quietly seized her by the throat then, one powerful hand closing over that slender column he had thought about all the way over on the plane. He felt the pulse there jerk beneath his palm.

  “Two hours,” he’d repeated, then let go of her and stalked out.

  He had gone to the closest bar he could find and got roaring, stinking drunk. When he’d returned to the apartment several hours later, hardly able to stand, Marsha was gone. And with her, the last shred of any illusions he had about women, as well as all his expensive camera equipment and his CD collection.

  So when this one came along, her body hot, her eyes cold, and he felt himself being reeled in, he saw a perverse humor in it. Maybe he needed to have the lesson retaught every couple of years or so.

  He flipped through the channels, completing an entire round before beginning again. He settled on an “I Love Lucy” rerun. There was something comforting about the familiarity of the people and the plot. He didn’t need the sound on. He knew the dialogue by heart. His grandmother had loved the show and always laughed at the jokes, especially when she was drinking. He liked her better when she was drinking. She wouldn’t beat him then.

  He set down the remote.

  No, he wasn’t looking to learn any new lessons, or have the old ones reinforced. All he wanted to do was pleasure himself, and Amanda, for a few hours. Nothing more.

  Pierce took pride in the fact that, despite his negative philosophy about the intrinsic worth of their souls, he’d always been very careful to leave women sexually satisfied. He’d never believed that sex was meant to be a tool to use to hurt someone. Pierce had never received any complaints when it came to what happened between the sheets.

  It was outside the sheets that things tended to get loused up.

  He sighed, rubbing the can across his forehead. He felt a headache starting.

  Amanda was preying on his brain, and he didn’t like it. He knew he was going to have to scratch that itch of his. And soon, he thought, if he was going to get anything worthwhile done.

  He’d already decided that he was going to stick around Dallas for a while and give this position a decent shot. Being a foreign correspondent had lost its luster. He was tired of eating strange foods and looking at strange faces. More than that, he was tired of crawling over dead bodies and fleeing hotel rooms that blew up moments after he’d escaped. He wanted to stay put for a while, maybe even put down some roots.

  He was getting too old to think he was immortal.

  Lucy was stuffing her face with chocolates. He decided to give the lions another try. Picking up the remo
te, he flipped through several stations. The lions had disappeared. In their place was a man in a beard, singing to a gathering of small children.

  “Enjoy it while it lasts, kids,” Pierce muttered.

  He shut off the television and rose to his feet.

  Walking into the kitchen, he pitched the empty can into a box he kept on the floor next to the trash. He might be a bastard, as Cheryl had labeled him when he’d turned down her invitation for another “sleep-over,” but he was an ecologically minded one. Even bastards recycled, if they had a conscience. And he had one.

  About some things.

  With an ironic smile, he opened a kitchen drawer and took out a pack of cigarettes. There were ten cigarettes missing and the pack was half crumpled. He’d thrown it into the garbage, then fished it out again and tossed it into the drawer instead.

  That had been last week, when he’d decided to give up smoking. It was a semiannual ritual he put himself through. Every so often, he figured he owed it to himself to try.

  It never lasted more than a week. It wasn’t a craving so much as boredom that always brought him back to it. Boredom and restlessness. He’d bummed a cigarette from someone at the park today and the game had begun all over again.

  Pierce shook out a cigarette. Digging through the jumbled mess in the drawer, he found a book of matches. He placed the cigarette between his lips, then cupped his hands around the slender shaft out of habit as he lit it.

  He inhaled deeply, letting the smoke curl through him, soft and sultry like the limbs of a woman in the afterglow of lovemaking. He held it in until it seemed to fill up every part of him.

  Damn, but he wanted her.

  Blowing the smoke out slowly, he formed a ring and watched it hang in the air before dissolving like the dreams of a child grown to manhood.

  He glanced down at the pack and read the perfunctory warning stamped on its side. It was nice to know, he mused cynically, that the surgeon general worried about him. Nice but unnecessary.

  Hell, everyone had to die of something, he thought. It might as well be of a vice he enjoyed.

  Chapter Seven

  The alarm went off, and Amanda woke up feeling like hell.

  The night had gone by choppy and fragmented, like shards of shattered glass. Pieces of disjointed dreams floated away from her, just out of reach, mocking her with half shapes.

  She felt as if she hadn’t slept at all.

  She didn’t even remember changing out of her clothes and getting into bed, but obviously, she must have. Probably five minutes ago.

  The alarm was still ringing. Reaching out, she slapped the buzzer down. The whine slowly died away, and she sighed. She lay there, trying to piece together yesterday, working backward.

  Christopher had wanted to play when she had returned home after seeing Whitney. For an hour, she’d lost herself in a world that was bound by toys, childish squeals, and sticky hugs. Desperate to escape into it, she’d played with her son on all fours, creating battle scenarios with him and sending multicolored building blocks toppling onto unsuspecting commandos.

  When Christopher had finally shown signs of winding down, Amanda had bathed him and put him to bed while Carla lost herself in the second installment of a miniseries.

  Amanda had read to him for another half hour, although she knew he wasn’t able to comprehend the story she’d selected. Snow White’s triumph over evil to live happily ever after didn’t make sense to the two-year-old, but Amanda had needed to hear the story once more herself. The sound of her voice was soothing to him and the forced, cheerful cadence she had assumed while reading eventually managed to soothe her as well.

  She’d closed the book and watched him sleep. Amanda had sat there longer than necessary, her fingers wrapped around the plastic book cover. It was hard letting go of the last bastion of childhood, she thought, but everyone had to do it eventually.

  A self-deprecating smile had curved her mouth. Some of us just do it a little later than others.

  By the time she had left Christopher and headed for the den, she felt ready to do whatever had to be done to help Whitney.

  It was the child within her who had reacted so violently to Whitney’s confession. Amanda knew that she had no right to make him into a plaster saint. After all, he was a human being, just like everyone else.

  Well, perhaps not like everyone else, she had amended, smiling to herself.

  No matter what he had done, he had done it for all the right reasons. Whitney Granger had always been and always would be a man with scruples. His very existence helped her to believe that goodness and decency still existed. It was easy to lose sight of that in her line of work. Doing the news, she was exposed to horrors on a daily basis. It sometimes felt as if everyone was just out for himself and no one cared anymore, no one loved.

  Even her father and her ex-husband reinforced that feeling.

  But she knew, because Whitney resided in it, that the world wasn’t all dark, all cold. Not even all black or white. There were shades in it, not just of gray, but of blue and red. Whitney was like the occasional human interest story that cropped up. He was the stranger who went out of his way to help a needy man.

  The stories were few and far between, but they kept her going.

  Slowly closing the door of the den behind her, Amanda had gone to her desk, sat down, braced herself, then slit open the envelope Whitney had given her and begun to read.

  She’d made notes on a legal-sized yellow pad, searching for the right words to use in the news release she would give the next day. She had already made up her mind that she was going to do it without first mentioning it to the station manager. With any luck, she planned to treat this as if it was just a news bulletin, handed to her right before airtime.

  Amanda knew she ran the risk of losing the news item if she talked to Grimsley first. They both knew he held a grudge against her, and he wasn’t a forgiving man. More than likely, Grimsley would give the story to someone else to follow up on and then release.

  Or he’d decide to turn it into a closing feature, possibly even an expose. None of those alternatives would be fair to Whitney. Complying with what he had asked of her was the least she could do for him.

  The situation was going to be hard enough for Whitney to deal with as it was. The news release would generate waves, horrible waves that couldn’t be escaped. It would open a Pandora’s box for Whitney that could never be shut again. People remembered scandals long after they forgot the good a person did. There would be an investigation. Perhaps a trial and even a prison sentence.

  Amanda shivered.

  The public would be quick to cast stones. There was nothing the people loved as much as a hero—unless it was a scapegoat.

  And Whitney would be their newest candidate, until someone else came along.

  Reading Whitney’s statement, she’d had to blink back tears.

  Amanda had no idea how long she worked. She’d fallen asleep at her desk, her fingers resting on the computer keyboard, her head nodding. A neighbor’s dog, barking at what she presumed was probably a cat dashing across someone’s yard, had woken her. She’d dragged herself to her feet and managed to stumble off to bed.

  And now dawn had arrived, a great deal faster than she was happy about.

  She took a deep breath, then slowly opened her eyes. Thick shafts of light sliced their way through the drawn light blue blinds.

  It was morning.

  Today she had to make Whitney’s announcement. An oppressively heavy blanket of despair wrapped itself around her, trapping the very air in her lungs.

  Wishing for the merciful oblivion of sleep, Amanda closed her eyes again. It didn’t do any good. She knew that even if she were able to fall asleep again, there would be no escaping this. Whitney had made it plain that the announcement had to be made as soon as possible, before his blackmailer leaked the story to the press.

  And she was the one who had to do it.

  Amanda kicked her sheet back, angry at the
world, and sat up. Glancing at the clock, she saw that it was almost seven. Christopher was usually up by now. Why hadn’t he come barreling into her room the way he usually did, ready to bounce on her bed and on her stomach?

  Thinking back, she vaguely recalled hearing noises outside her door just before the buzzer had slashed sleep aside. Now that she thought of it, that had probably been Christopher trying to get into her room. Carla must have dragged him away. The woman definitely had her virtues.

  Amanda forced herself out of bed and caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirrored wardrobe door. Her hair was wild, her face pale and puffy. She had looked better in her life. A lot better. And a lot more human.

  For some perverse reason, she thought of Pierce. Maybe she should let him see her like this. One look and he would certainly back off, she thought with a smile.

  In a careless movement, she ran her hands slowly over the swell of her hips and wondered, just for a fleeting moment, what it would be like to make love with him.

  Hot. Passionate. And fast. So fast that the breath would undoubtedly be knocked out of her.

  Well, it was something that she didn’t intend to find out about. She’d wondered about bungee jumping too, but there would be no leaping off cliffs in her future. Making love to Pierce, she thought, would probably have the same effect.

  What was he doing in her head at this hour of the morning, for God’s sake? She had work to do.

  Amanda dragged her hand through her tangled hair, pushing it out of her eyes. What she needed, she decided, was a good run to clear her head.

  She reached into the far recesses of her closet and pulled out a pair of faded denim shorts and a baggy sweatshirt. She’d cut off the sleeves when the weather had turned sultry. It was a purely functional outfit, meant to be serviceable, not to impress. She ran for her health, not to be fashionable. There was a tear under the right armhole that she had been meaning to sew. She had just never found the time.