The Backup Plan

by Sherryl Woods

  Trying not to feel wounded by that, he turned to her. “Why is that exactly? When it comes to love, isn’t it usually the first instinct that’s right? You walked away from Bobby ten years ago because you knew in your heart he wasn’t the right man for you.”

  “No, I knew it wasn’t the right time for us,” she corrected. “That’s entirely different.”

  “I’m no romantic, but I’m pretty sure timing isn’t supposed to come into play when you’re talking about true love. Aren’t you supposed to get swept away by passion?”

  “And leave common sense aside? You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dinah said. “How many times have you been in love, anyway?”

  “Never,” Cord said immediately, then thought about it. “I take that back. Once.”

  Unfortunately, it had been with Dinah Davis and she hadn’t been any more enamored of him then than she was now. A wise man would have gotten the message.

  Then again, none of the other lessons in his life had come easily, either. Looked as if this was just one more he was going to have to wrestle with and see if he couldn’t make things come right in the end.

  Over dinner Dinah spent a lot of time reassessing her opinion of Cord. He was surprisingly good company, smarter than she’d ever imagined and more insightful. Of course, there also seemed to be very little he took seriously, so she was stunned when over dessert he finally got around to calling her on her decision to come home.

  He took a long, slow swallow of his beer, tipping up the longneck bottle, his gaze locked on her face. She was prepared for another impudent question, but definitely not for the topic he chose.

  “You gonna get around to telling me what you’re doing here?” he inquired in the lazy tone that teased her nerves.

  “You mean here with you tonight?” she asked, deliberately misreading the question. “I’ve been trying to figure that one out since I climbed into that truck of yours.”

  He gave her an impatient look. “Come on, sugar, you know what I’m asking. It’s one thing for you to breeze back into Charleston like the prodigal daughter, say hi to your folks and then breeze right out again. It’s another thing entirely for you to stick around for weeks. You don’t even seem that restless, not even now that you know Bobby’s not available.”

  “Believe me, I’m restless,” she replied.

  “You made any plane reservations to go back yet?”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  “I just haven’t, okay? Could we drop this, please?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, his gaze unrelenting. “Something tells me we’re finally getting to the good stuff.”

  “Good stuff?”

  “You know, the intimate little secrets about what makes Dinah Davis tick.”

  She shuddered at the thought of this man poking into her psyche. “I didn’t come with you tonight so you could analyze me or the decisions I’m making. You’re hardly qualified.”

  “I thought we established the other night that I do have some qualifications for this particular conversation,” he told her. “Come on, Dinah. Talk to me. I’m not asking you what happened over there to make you so skittish, because I can imagine.” He studied her intently. “But are you gonna let it change the course of your life?”

  “That’s not what I’m doing,” she said defensively. At his blatantly skeptical look, she sighed. “Okay, maybe that is what I’m doing, but it’s my choice, Cordell. It has nothing whatsoever to do with you.”

  “It does if you still intend to use my brother to soothe whatever itch you’re suddenly feeling.”

  “It’s not like that,” she said emphatically. “Besides, that’s a nonissue now that I know he’s engaged. I get it. You can stop worrying.”

  “Now I know you’re messed up,” he said. “If you came back here because you woke up one morning and realized you were madly in love with Bobby, you wouldn’t let a little thing like an engagement stand in your way. I said it before, you’d fight like crazy to get him back.”

  She gave him a scandalized look. “I most certainly would not. I do have some scruples.”

  “It’s not about scruples,” Cord declared. “It’s about fighting for something you want with everything in you. I know you’d probably never set out to wreck a marriage, but an engagement would be nothing more than a minor inconvenience to a woman who’s convinced that some other woman is with her soul mate.”

  “Which just shows how little you know about honor and integrity,” she snapped, then regarded Cord curiously. “Have you done a one-eighty here? I thought you were doing everything you could to keep me away from Bobby. Now it almost sounds as if you want me to break up his engagement.”

  “No, I just want to see some evidence that you’ve got that same old spunk I remember.”

  “I have plenty of spunk.”

  “Not that I can see,” he said, then added with a sad shake of his head, “It’s a sorry thing, too. I never pegged you for a quitter, Dinah, yet here you are. You’ve run away from your career. You’ve given up on Bobby in a split second. What’s next? You gonna start spending your days lolling around beside your daddy’s backyard pool and wait for some rich man to come along and marry you? That might please your mama, but it doesn’t seem to suit you unless times have changed more than I realized.”

  Dinah didn’t like the label of quitter or any of the rest of his assessment one little bit. “I wasn’t running away from anything,” she said heatedly. “I was running to something better.”

  “My brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you’ve dropped that idea, right?”

  “I certainly have and you know perfectly well why. Do we have to keep going over and over this?”

  “Yes, we do. Are you in love with him?” he pressed.

  “Yes, dammit!”

  He studied her for what seemed to be an eternity, then shook his head. “I’m not buying it.”

  She regarded him incredulously. The man had more nerve than anyone she’d ever met, and she did not mean that as a compliment. “I don’t give two figs whether you buy it or not,” she snapped.

  “Why not at least try to convince me?” he prodded. “Let’s start with the fact that you and Bobby haven’t seen each other for the better part of ten years, haven’t even kept in contact really. How am I doing so far?”

  Dinah didn’t much like the sarcasm in his voice. He was right to be so skeptical, but she wasn’t anywhere near ready to give him the satisfaction of admitting that.

  “What makes you think we haven’t been in touch?” she inquired irritably.

  He lifted one brow. “Did you know about our business?”

  “No,” she conceded grudgingly.

  “I didn’t think so,” he said, his expression smug. “May I continue?”

  She sighed. He would whether she wanted him to or not. “Please do.”

  “So you thought you’d just come on home and dive right back into his life and what? Get married? Have a few kids? Live happily ever after?”

  “You make it sound like I was hoping for something bizarre. Aren’t marriage, kids and happily-ever-after something most people want?”

  “Nothing wrong with the dream,” he agreed. “Not that I believe much in it, but let’s say it worked out that way and you got what you wanted. What was supposed to happen when you got a little bored and restless?”

  “You’re not giving Bobby much credit. Being married to him and having a family wouldn’t be boring.”

  “Not for someone like Rianna, who adores him and is perfectly content with the prospect of staying at home, raising his babies. She doesn’t aspire to anything more than being a great wife and a fantastic mother. Can you say the same?”

  Of course, he knew she couldn’t, Dinah acknowledged. Practically everyone in Charleston knew that when it came to ambition, Dinah had more than anyone else in her graduating class. She’d been openly disdainful of the traditional wife and mother path.<
br />
  “Maybe I’ve been everywhere I wanted to go and accomplished everything I set out to accomplish,” she told him.

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes,” she said emphatically. And it was true, up to a point. She could always tackle a new assignment, one more challenging, more fascinating than the last. And more dangerous, she reminded herself. That’s what had scared her in the end. She saw no need to admit any of that to Cordell.

  Cord regarded her with obvious disbelief. “Face it, Dinah. You can lie through your teeth to me and even to yourself, but we both know boredom would eventually set in. Then what? You’d abandon your family and go back to work?”

  “Of course not,” she insisted. “I would never do that.”

  “Then you’d just stick it out and be totally miserable? Now that would be a picnic for everyone concerned, wouldn’t it?”

  “You’re just being cynical, because you don’t understand the first thing about the power of love.”

  “Love’s a great thing,” Cord replied. “Powerful, even, but it’s not a miracle worker. It can’t change human nature.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said flatly. “Haven’t you heard? Love can move mountains.”

  Cord laughed. “You show me one example of that happening and I will gladly tell you exactly where Bobby is and drive you there myself.”

  “I don’t even know why I’m having this conversation with you,” she said. “You just keep twisting everything I say.”

  “Do I? Or am I simply making you see how ridiculous it was to think you could come home and recapture the past?”

  “It wasn’t ridiculous. Bobby and I made a deal.”

  Cord’s gaze bore into her. “Just out of curiosity, did this deal include remaining true and celibate?” he asked.

  She frowned at the question. “No, though I’m not sure I see why that’s any of your business.”

  “Just checking on the rules. For all I know Bobby’s been violating them by getting all mixed up with Rianna. If that were so, I might be willing to sit him down and have a brother-to-brother chat with him on your behalf.”

  She gave him a withering look. “There weren’t any rules,” she repeated. “We had an understanding. If the time came when we were ready to get married and we were both available, then that’s what we’d do.”

  “Then you can hardly blame my brother for deciding at some point to get on with his life.”

  “Of course I don’t blame him.”

  “And you, did you get on with your life?”

  She frowned at the far too personal question. “Are you asking me if I slept with any men?”

  His gaze filled with a surprising heat. “Yes, Dinah, that is exactly what I’m asking.”

  “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

  “Then you did,” he said flatly, obviously drawing his own conclusion from her reticence.

  “Okay, yes,” she snapped. Even though she owed Cord absolutely nothing, she felt the need to defend herself and her actions. “I was in a lot of dangerous situations. It was natural to reach out to someone.”

  “But no one special?”

  She thought of the one man who’d really mattered, then deliberately blocked him from her mind. The memories were still too raw, still too painful, even after all these months. She couldn’t think about any of that, not without losing it completely. One meltdown in front of Cord was enough to last her a lifetime. He obviously thought it had given him the right to delve into her psyche.

  “No one,” she lied.

  Cord’s gaze remained steady and disbelieving. “Really?”

  “Why are you pushing this?” she asked.

  “Because it’s obviously important. You’re avoiding a straight answer, Dinah. Who was he? What happened to him? Why aren’t you with him, instead of chasing after my brother?”

  Dinah flinched at his persistence. If she let him—or anyone—rip the scab off the still-fresh wound of her tragic loss, she was almost certain that she’d start screaming and never stop.

  “Tell me, Dinah,” Cord commanded, his hand covering hers.

  Images of Peter filled Dinah’s head and her pulse began to race. And then she was back there…back in hell.

  Afghanistan, six months earlier

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  Frozen in place, Dinah heard the urgency in Peter’s voice, knew in her gut that she should follow the softly spoken, but unmistakably frantic command, but how could she? He was asking her to run, to leave him to face the terrible uncertainty of armed rebels who’d stopped their car on a deserted stretch of highway. The driver had already moved away from the car toward the guerillas, possibly negotiating, but more likely joining their ranks. The men hired by foreign journalists as drivers and translators often had divided loyalties. And American journalists were good targets these days. Al Qaeda incidents garnered worldwide attention.

  “I can’t,” she whispered, hating the unexpected taste of fear and cowardice. It didn’t matter that she’d wriggled out of more hot spots in the past than some of the military’s most impressive operatives. All that counted was here and now. Fast talk wasn’t going to cut it. The situation called for immediate action and she simply couldn’t move.

  Worse, she knew she’d gotten them into this mess. She’d insisted on going out alone with Peter to get this interview, despite all the recent protocol that journalists should travel in at least two separate cars on all excursions. If one was stopped or broke down, the other might have at least a chance of getting away.

  “I can’t,” she repeated.

  “Yes, you can,” Peter said forcefully. “I mean it, Dinah! When I get out of this car, I’m going to get out shooting. All the attention will be on me. Open your door, crouch down and move. Then as soon as you’re clear, run like hell. That’s why we’ve been training. You’ve built up speed and endurance the last few months. You can do it.”

  When she didn’t respond, he shook her. “Dammit, are you listening to me, Dinah?”

  “I can’t,” she whispered again, her stomach churning. She was going to be sick. “We always agreed we’d stick together. I can’t leave you.” That was the worst of it, abandoning Peter, leaving him to almost certain death while she at least had a chance to live. None of their planning had prepared her for that.

  Working with the same cameraman for so many years had given Dinah an intuitive ability to understand the way Peter’s mind worked and vice versa. They were an award-winning team. They took risks together. More than that, she loved him. How could she possibly for get all that and go off on her own?

  “You have to,” he insisted, refusing to cut her a moment’s slack for indecisiveness. “Would you rather we both die here? Because we will, Dinah. Look at them. They’re not kidding around. They’ll kill you or, worse, take you hostage.”

  Those words, more than any others, shocked her back to the grim reality they faced. She swallowed the bile that crept up the back of her throat. They both knew what happened to hostages, especially women. They’d interviewed too many victims, read the cold forensics reports on those who could no longer speak for them selves. She’d rather die in a hailstorm of bullets, no question about it.

  “You know I’m right,” he coaxed. “At least if I know you’re safe, I might have half a chance to get away. Or you might have time to get help. We’re only a couple of miles from town. You can make it and alert the authorities. You’ll come back and save my butt.”

  But it wouldn’t happen that way, she thought, gulping back an hysterical sob. This man she’d fallen in love with, this brave cameraman who’d been through multiple wars in godforsaken places with her, was going to die here and now on a deserted road, and he was giving her a slim chance to save herself.

  That was Peter, brave and noble to the end. His courage—not hers—was the trait that had gotten them stories no one else could get. She got all the attention because her face was on-screen, but it was Peter’s images that captivated the audien
ce and had made her into a network superstar.

  Peter reached for her face and cupped her chin, his brilliant blue eyes that saw so much through the lens of a camera filled now with selfless love and determination. “Do it, Dinah! No fooling around, okay? Just do it! Understand? I can’t sit here arguing with you.”

  Accepting that there really was no choice, she finally nodded, unable to speak.

  “On the count of three, then,” Peter said with astonishing calm. His gaze unwavering, he added, “I love you. Don’t forget that, okay? Never forget that.”

  Dinah’s eyes welled with tears. She’d always known something like this could happen. The risks came with the job. These days being a television journalist, a war correspondent, wasn’t glamorous. It was dangerous and often deadly. Terrorists didn’t play by the rules. Reporters who got in their way were just as likely to be killed as soldiers or local civilians. And stories didn’t take place in nice, mostly secure hotel lobbies.

  Somehow, though, she’d never thought it would happen to her. She was careful. She calculated the odds every time she set out to do an interview. Tonight, eager for a sought-after exclusive interview, she’d made a dreadful miscalculation.

  She’d always had Peter by her side. His solidity lent her strength, no matter what atrocities they faced in the hellholes they’d been assigned to cover by the network. They were known back home for being an intrepid two some, who always came back with Peter’s incredible images of people and places others weren’t daring enough to find. His amazing videotaped pictures with her powerful words had won every one of journalism’s top honors.

  They were recognized everywhere except the most remote villages, respected by some, reviled by others. She had a feeling that recognition was behind their current predicament, that it wasn’t mere anti-American sentiment that had set them up for this ambush. They would be used as examples of what could happen to anyone who dared shine a light on terror.

  She looked at the deadly gun in Peter’s hand and shuddered. The fact that Peter was carrying a gun at all was testament to the unpredictable turn the war on terror had taken since 9/11. Rarely had journalists armed themselves in the past, and even now the practice was debated frequently over dinner and drinks wherever correspondents gathered.