Front Page Affair

by Jennifer Morey

  She shrugged “Because I can.”

  He looked over her petite frame in her girly outfit. “How?”

  Shooting him a lowered brow with eyes full of affront, she said, “However. I can help you.”

  “It could be dangerous.” He took in her long, slender legs as she walked beside him. Damn, they were hot.

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t be going, either. Maybe you should let the police handle it.”

  “The police aren’t getting anywhere, and I can’t leave you here.”

  “What?”

  He stopped at the door of his charcoal-colored Subaru, turning to face her. “Trust me, I’d rather not, but someone tried to kidnap you. What if there’s another attempt? I can’t allow the chance.” And she had no idea how unbending he was on that subject. She could argue all she wanted, he wasn’t letting her out of his sight.

  “My brother won’t like that.” But she looked pleased as could be with the prospect of going with him. To help...or get a story?

  He’d have to watch her. Stealing a glance at her breasts in the beaded, sleeveless pink top, he realized he wouldn’t suffer much doing so. “He just wants to make sure you don’t get hurt.” Or worse.

  “Yes, he is very overprotective.”

  “Probably a good thing in this case. What would have happened if that man had succeeded in taking you?”

  She didn’t reply, the flicker of horrible imaginings crossing her eyes as she scanned the parking lot.

  The white BMW wasn’t around. He’d already looked.

  At last she returned her gaze to him. “Why is someone following you?”

  Why was she asking? “I have no idea.”

  “What do they want from you?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t know. The man in the BMW would have let him know once he’d had Arizona. After Braden had gone after him with the flashlight, he must have decided he’d have too difficult a time overpowering him, and then he’d seen him with Lincoln and Arizona. He would have used Arizona as leverage. It was disturbing. What did the man want? And how was it related to his sister?

  Where had his life intersected with Tatum’s to draw him into the fray? Tatum had come to see him during her trouble with the government. She’d told him then that her movements were being tracked. Now she was missing, and he’d have to take Arizona with him to find her. She was eager enough for that, which caused him to wonder why.

  “What happened to your fiancé?” He was sure that was what drove her. Lincoln had indicated as much. She had a compelling motive to involve herself in this, and it was more than getting a story.

  Deep pain sobered her eyes before she caught the reaction and stubborn determination returned. “Didn’t you say our flight departure was in two hours?”

  The fact that she refused to discuss her fiancé only convinced him further of her resolve. The story was an excuse, a small part of what moved her. The mystery of her fiancé intrigued him; her determination made him nervous.

  Using his fob, he unlocked the doors of his Subaru. Why didn’t she want to tell him about Trevor? Was it still too painful or did she think it would give him an edge in fighting her on the story he wasn’t convinced she’d completely abandoned yet? It had seemed so important to her.

  This woman had so many facets to her, and it disconcerted him that he was beginning to want to learn every single one. Intimately.

  * * *

  At last, it was time to board. Braden couldn’t stand the waiting anymore. Their flight had been delayed and being with Arizona in her blue cotton sundress had tested him long enough. He moved with her toward the jet bridge. Pulling out his wallet for his boarding pass, a picture fell out and fluttered to the commercially carpeted floor.

  Arizona knelt to pick it up.

  Seeing his ex-wife smiling in what used to be his favorite photo of her and now was merely something he’d neglected to remove and destroy, Braden snatched it from her.

  “Your wife?” she asked.

  Did they really have to go down this path? “Ex. The divorce was just final a few months ago.”

  “Oh.” She looked at his still-open wallet and saw more pictures. “You have kids?”

  He crumbled the picture of Serena and tossed it to a trash can near a thick concrete column. He made the hole. “A son. Aiden. He’s six.” That was a topic he could discuss all night.

  Arizona glanced from the trash can to him. What he could only call a grimace crossed her expression.

  “I don’t want any pictures of my ex in my wallet,” he explained.

  The hint of a smile began to push up her mouth. “I’m the youngest of eight. Everyone but me got to hold babies growing up.”

  So, it wasn’t throwing out the picture of Aiden’s mother that bothered her. “Never been exposed to children, huh?”

  “They’re little aliens who poop and scream and don’t stop wiggling.”

  “Most women love kids.” They moved up in the line toward the jet bridge. Wasn’t it a natural instinct for women to nurture? In the office he often saw groups of them hovering around newborns, cooing and coddling.

  “I’m not most women.”

  “You don’t want kids of your own some day?”

  Arizona’s eyes popped in appall. “Oh, God. No.” She shuddered, her bare shoulders shaking a little.

  Well, wasn’t this an interesting highlight. Arizona Ivy couldn’t stand kids. It reflected badly on her, and he welcomed the barrier. “What’s wrong with them?”

  “They’re on another planet?”

  Although her sarcasm was obvious, he took the message literally. He had a son. She didn’t like kids. It would never work out for them. Good to know right from the start.

  “They’re just kids,” he said. “Innocent. A clean palatte ready to absorb information and grow up to be an adult...just like you.”

  “Great. Introduce me when they’re adults.”

  He chuckled. “What happens when you encounter them?” He’d love to see that some day.

  “I find an excuse to leave the room.”

  “Don’t you mean planet?” She could be a science project. What made some women gush over babies and others turn cold?

  She sighed, no longer joking. “I guess I don’t relate to them.”

  “They’re kids.” Nobody was supposed to relate. Not on the same level.

  “They’re loud and obnoxious.”

  “Kid. Not adult.”

  “Right.”

  Braden shook his head. She really didn’t get it. “You’re missing out on a big part of life.”

  “Yeah? What’s that? Exhaustion that leads to unhappiness and lack of sex?”

  “No. The moments you remember for a lifetime. The words they say and how they say them. The questions they ask. The first time they tell you they love you.”

  Feeling her watch him, he realized he was smiling fondly, thinking of Aiden.

  “I can live without all that.”

  “Right, because you have a serious career to go after.” And sex.

  He wished that thought hadn’t entered his head.

  “Which is precisely why I prefer other women to do the childbearing.” She walked forward, hauling her carry-on.

  Braden felt better and better about her going along. Whatever had transpired when she’d bumped into him at Lincoln’s house, it was brief and over now. He could concentrate on finding his sister and not worry about Arizona attracting him into bed. Best to avoid any chance of getting her pregnant and forcing her to become one of those childbearing women.

  * * *

  Sitting next to Braden in first class, Arizona was thankful for the spacious seating. His lean body was far enough away to prevent contact. Contact was dangerous with him. He may inflame her physi
cally, but he’d failed the intellectual test. Flawed, to be sure. Son. Recently divorced. That was plenty to convince her he wasn’t her type. Especially the kid part. A shudder wracked her shoulders. And it wasn’t all from revulsion. She couldn’t stop thinking about the look on his face when he talked about Aiden.

  Beside her, Braden noticed, his perceptive eyes cynical.

  Opening her People magazine, she tried to pay attention to that. Braden’s presence was too strong.

  She watched him remove his laptop and survey the cabin of the plane at the same time, as though expecting the driver of the BMW to pop out of nowhere. He was as vigilant as Lincoln. As fearless, too. The combination of nerd and superhero was a curious mix.

  “What do you do, anyway?” Lincoln had never told her.

  “I’m an engineer for Hamilton Corporation.” As though on cue, he pulled out a pair of reading glasses and opened his laptop. Arizona watched him for a bit, disconcerted over the unbelievable comparison to her fiancé. Tall, handsome and an engineer for a high-tech corporation.

  She kept that to herself. “What kind of engineer?”

  He turned from his laptop screen, green eyes behind the anti-reflective lenses of his glasses. Still handsome.

  “Advanced technology for the military. Countermeasure equipment. That sort of thing.”

  Vague reply. “Oh.” She nodded through her discomfort. “Design and development?”

  “Most of it’s classified.”

  Her fiancé had worked in research. Top secret clearance, just as she was sure Braden had. She struggled to minimize the coincidence.

  Then something dawned on her. “Do you think it’s possible there’s a link between what you do and your sister’s disappearance?”

  He turned with a lifted brow. Clearly, he doubted that.

  “You do weapons designs for the military,” she explained further. “Your sister was a freight forwarder accused of shipping weapons to a prohibited country.”

  “Where’s the link? She didn’t get the weapons from my company.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Very. The arms her company exported weren’t ours.”

  His defensive response spoke loudly of his conviction, but it seemed forced. He refused to consider his sister could have been involved in anything sinister. In this case, Arizona agreed. It didn’t seem likely that his job had anything to do with the accusations that had ruined his sister’s reputation. The coincidence was unnerving, though.

  A baby cried from somewhere in the back of the plane. The whine of jet engines and airflow muffled voices and the movement of flight attendants.

  “Were you curious about my job because you were fishing for a connection or did something else prompt you?” he asked.

  Prompt her? What had prompted her? She registered his reading glasses.

  “I could tell you were—” a nerd, she almost said “—a college graduate.”

  He stared at her. “A college graduate?”

  “Yeah. You know, the office type.” His big chest and arms challenged her claim. So did the amusement in his eyes, entirely too...she’d rather not allow the word into her head.

  “You could tell that by looking at me?”

  She took in his stubble and the green of his captivating eyes. “Well, there are some deterring factors, but yes. I could tell.”

  “Deterring factors?”

  Never one to shy away from confrontation, she let propriety drop. “You have this masculine look about you, and yet you wear Gucci loafers and smudged reading glasses. It’s like Louis Vuitton clashing with Aeropostale.”

  “Stereotyping, are you?” He removed his glasses and wiped them with his soft shirt.

  Another non-office thing to do. Who wiped their glasses on their shirt? She smiled with an exhaled laugh.

  “While we’re on the subject, I agree with your brother. You don’t seem like the international reporter type.”

  She was having too much fun to be insulted. “You think I’m much more suited for tabloids?”

  “It’s just an observation. Sort of like the one you made about me.”

  Smart-ass. “Hey, I’m not the one who wears smudged glasses.”

  “No, but you write entertainment news and are the subject of entertainment news, like what you’re reading about in that magazine.” He gestured toward the People magazine in her lap. “An interesting dichotomy, don’t you think?”

  “Quite.” She wasn’t sure she liked his observations. She knew a lot of the people she read about. It was sort of like social media to her.

  “Why’d you get into it anyway?”

  “Jackson Ivy’s daughter...?” Her levity fell flat. The fun was over.

  This was getting too close to personal pains she’d rather not stir up. If she explained why she’d made her observation and where it had come from, she’d have to tell him about her fiancé.

  “The media will follow you no matter what you do,” he said. “So why not do something you love?”

  What did she love? She thought awhile and nothing came to her other than her undying desire to be recognized as herself rather than Jackson Ivy’s daughter. “My brother thinks I should start a nonprofit organization that takes crime victims skydiving or other high adventures. His version of entertainment that would suit me. Dad would back me.”

  “I’d get in on that,” Braden said.

  She took in his profile as he typed on his laptop. Would he? Which part? The organization or her dad backing it? “I want to make it on my own. You skydive?”

  Pausing in his typing, he turned his face toward her. “I love anything outdoors.”

  That was different from Trevor. He’d been chained to his desk and his idea of physical exercise was taking the stairs. “Wow.”

  “That surprises you?”

  “It’s just...”

  He angled his head, green eyes curious and prowling. “You think engineers are boring?”

  “No...” He definitely wasn’t boring her right now.

  “You’ve banned all engineers, is that it?” His flirtatious grin muddled her senses further.

  “No...I...” She struggled with what to say. Engineers reminded her of Trevor. It didn’t matter what type of engineer, or how different they were, for some reason just the association hit a raw nerve. Except with him. Right now.

  She had to stop all this focus on her. “Why are you so curious? Do you want to date me or something?”

  Now he was the one speechless.

  “No? Too soon after your divorce?”

  “I don’t want to date you.” He was a rigid wall again.

  His divorce had affected him profoundly; a man who’d loved his wife only to discover she didn’t love him back. Or was it only that? She sensed something deeper at work.

  “What happened? If you don’t mind me asking...”

  He averted his gaze to the front of the plane. “I wasn’t what she expected.”

  Did all men answer questions so vaguely or were there only a few? The injured ones. “Did she cheat on you?”

  “No. It had more to do with my title, or lack thereof.”

  What was wrong with engineer?

  “Her parents are rich. She has a trust fund. She’ll never have to work a day in her life. When she met me, I think in her mind she was giving me a chance. And when she realized I’d never advance to executive management, she served me and left.”

  He said it so simply. All that emotional baggage wrapped up in a few sentences. Discovering his wife’s lack of caring had to have been difficult on him. How could some women be so shallow? Did they have no consideration for the men they married? They thought they loved them at one point. Of course there were always exceptions, but didn’t the past they shared mean anything? To A
rizona, that was like erasing a relationship as though it had never happened. What a waste. She planned to cherish every second she was alive. There was no such thing as mistakes. Everything happened for a reason. Good or bad. The mistakes were just things that happened to correct the course of life. The catalysts of fated change.

  “She wasn’t what you expected, either,” she said quietly.

  They shared a long look.

  “Was Trevor what you expected?”

  “I think he would have been.” She stared over the top of the seat in front of her, falling into what-ifs. What if they’d gone to Paris instead of the Caribbean? What if they’d stayed in the hotel room all day? What if...

  “Did he die?”

  Braden’s question brought her back to him. “Yes.” Odd, how it didn’t bother her to tell him this time. “He was kidnapped in St. Thomas. His captors demanded money. My father gave it to them, but...”

  “Were his killers caught?”

  She shook her head, angry all over again.

  “Lincoln never told me.”

  “We tried very hard to keep it out of the press.” Her entire family had. For her. She wouldn’t have survived Trevor’s death otherwise. “We succeeded somewhat.”

  “Private family matter?”

  His meaning drove straight through her. She’d experienced what too much press could do to a person during a time of grief. Could she inflict that on Braden?

  “I said we succeeded somewhat,” she said.

  But could she go against his wishes? If his sister turned up dead like her fiancé, would she be able to do it?

  She wouldn’t have to.

  The news would leak out. One way or another. She’d been approached by reporters once Trevor’s kidnapping and murder had gotten out. The same would happen to Braden. Wouldn’t he rather it be her than a stranger?

  She’d convince him he would. And not by giving in to her attraction. Getting mixed up with a man on the rebound was a risk she wasn’t willing to take. Like his ex, her parents were rich. Like his ex, Arizona didn’t have to work for a living. And if that wasn’t enough, Braden was an engineer with a six-year-old son. No way.

  * * *

  Braden went into the bar for a drink. It was off the only restaurant in their hotel, a historic fort remodeled in the early sixties. There was little they could do until morning when they planned to go to the police, and it was too early to go to sleep. He wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway, wondering where Tatum was and whether she was all right. Was she frightened? Hurt?