Dream Runner

by Gail McFarland

  Wrenching the steering wheel, she turned off Fourteenth Street onto the entry ramp for I-75 and her apartment. “At least if I go home, I can lock my door and turn off the phone and just…” Do what? Go home and forget that I’ve spent my whole life running and reaching for a dream I’ll never realize now? Holiday traffic was light but fast, and Marlea pressed her foot to the accelerator.

  Looking for distraction, she pressed the button for her radio, letting song rise against the hum of the highway.…I’ll always love my mama…Some old-school group named The Intruders singing some old-school song, something so old that the recording was scratchy over the airways. Marlea wanted nothing more than to dismiss it, but the words hit home and tore at her heart.

  Marlea felt something break in her chest and knew it was her heart. Mama. It had to have been that one word. “I promised her.” Marlea sucked back a salty tear, remembering the day she and Cyndra stood outside the stadium in LA. I promised her, and this was my last chance to keep the promise. After this, I’ll be too old to even train for the next Olympic trials. Always coming up short, and now, knowing that there would be no other races before the August deadline, all Marlea could smell was the stench of failure.

  “So what next?” Marlea slammed both hands against the steering wheel, and the Accord rocked against the asphalt. “What else can go wrong?”

  Chapter 3

  Hungover, running late, and suffering still fermenting anger, Parker Reynolds paused in the marble and gold-appointed foyer of his home. The place was palatial and had been featured in four different architectural and design magazines. The furnishings were the best his mother’s pet designer could find, all carefully chosen to reflect his taste and temperament. It was his home. Pursing his lips, he narrowed his eyes and corrected himself. The place used to feel like home—until she came along.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he fumed, wishing for a drink and knowing that he would be calling Mark Teasley first thing tomorrow to sort the whole mess out. The problem with making that call was simply that Teasley, like any good attorney, had already warned him about her. “Parker, you’ve got to put some thought into the women you invite into your life.”

  “Pity is, hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Parker muttered, debating the possible harm of going back for a bit of ‘the hair of the dog.’ Not really a good choice, he realized, knowing the possibility of his having to work before the day was out. Trauma surgery was problematic enough without alcohol thrumming through his veins.

  “Okay, so that leaves the Bloody Mary out.” Jamming a long slender hand into the pocket of his khaki slacks, Parker found coins but no keys, and that did nothing for his disposition. “If I had known then what I know now, there is no way I would have let her into my life—or my bed, for that matter,” he huffed, looking around. Turning in circles beneath the gilded chandelier was getting him nowhere, and he was already running late for rounds.

  “I give up.” He glanced at the shallow Wedgwood dish resting on the marble-topped commode. Still no keys. “Can’t imagine where they got to.” Time was growing short as he reached for the neatly secreted wall panel and keyed the intercom. “Steven, I’ll need keys and the car. The Corniche, please.”

  “Yes, sir. Right away.”

  Wishing that more people in his life had Steven’s capacity for obedience, Parker checked the time again. He wasn’t scheduled to be on call for more than an hour, but it never paid to count on things running smoothly. He loved what he did, but he hated having to rush because the same unforeseen glitches that made the kind of life-saving, in-the-nick-of-time surgery he practiced so exciting and intellectually rewarding also made it nerve-wracking.

  “God, I wish I hadn’t made this change with Fortnam. He and that little wife of his have an unscheduled getaway, so I’m the elected good guy. They get beaches and I get stuck covering for him. And after the night I’ve had.” Pushing a manicured hand through the thick, black waves of his silver-touched hair, Parker’s put-upon sigh mourned his passing youth. He could remember when the broad expanse of his mocha-colored face had been tight and wrinkle-free. Now two-and-a-half deep furrows etched his brow, and a matching pair bracketed his thin-lipped mouth.

  Worry has been known to cause premature aging, he thought, vainly ignoring his forty-five years. Who am I fooling? I didn’t look like this before Desireé ravaged my life.

  Crossing the foyer, Parker wished for the icy wash of a vodka Gimlet. Steven was taking his time pulling the Rolls convertible around to the door. As he ought to, Parker thought. Driving the car was like good sex: bold, aggressive, and satisfying. Nobody could blame Steven for being careful and enjoying the chore. While he got to drive the other cars regularly, driving the Corniche was a rare treat.

  Even I don’t drive it that often. Thinking about his dream car, Parker smiled, anticipating. Just hearing the engine purr and holding the keys was a kind of foreplay he would never tire of.

  The Corniche was a quarter of a million dollars worth of superior engineering and perfect design. If Parker Reynolds could ever be accused of loving an object, it would be the Rolls-Royce Corniche. Thinking of the afternoon he had barely saved his car from one of Desireé’s afternoon drives, the good doctor shuddered. Her drives often transported her to clubs and neighborhoods that he would never willingly venture into.

  “What the hell was I thinking?” Her name and the memory of her brought a sour taste to his mouth, especially when he thought of the odd knock at his door last evening.

  “I should have known better—opening the door myself.” Any other time, Anne, his personal assistant, would have answered the door, but no…

  Parker thumbed the heavy brass knob and pulled the curved handle of his front door. He stepped into the already hot simmering blue of an Atlanta summer morning. Stopping at the top of the curving red-brick stairs, he looked for Steven, exhaling noisily when he didn’t see him.

  Pushing at the fold in the sleeve of his oxford cloth shirt, he checked his watch and sighed again. “I pay Anne well to serve as my personal assistant, and I answered the door to a process server.” The little man had looked more like a helper for his lawn service than like someone with legal contacts. Parker hadn’t really thought much of it when the man asked his name and then shoved the large envelope into his hands.

  “I always thought they had to say something, give you some kind of warning.” But the little guy in the Braves cap and tee shirt had said nothing after asking if Parker was Parker. “He didn’t even say ‘good night.’ ”

  Not that good manners would have made much of a difference. Retreating to the air-conditioned comfort of his home, Parker had opened the envelope and extracted the contents. Legal papers? He remembered thinking of it exactly like that: legal papers?

  Who in the world would be sending me legal papers?

  He remembered Anne calling to him from the office at the end of the foyer. Straightening the papers and reading words that only Desireé’s arrogance could have conjured, Parker exploded.

  “How dare she,” he had thundered, bringing Anne on the run.

  “Who?” Anne had asked. “What?”

  Rage made breathing hard, and Parker felt his chest tighten. Peppering him with questions, Anne led him to a chair. He felt his hazel eyes bulge and his chest constrict, leaving him virtually immobile. He couldn’t even manage to loosen his grip on the papers, and when he tried to focus on the hand-delivered documents, the palsy nearly defeated him.

  Anne had pushed a glass into his hand. Parker sucked at the vodka over cracked ice, but the liquor failed to anesthetize the jolt he had suffered. It was bad enough to have spent all that time arguing with Desireé over what she saw as her due: then she got it into her head that she was owed palimony.

  “She couldn’t even spell the word before she met me, and after all the stress and embarrassment I had to endure to get her out of my home…But to send that little man to my door…” Parker nearly gagged. “Desireé knew that what we ha
d was temporary. She had to, how could it have been anything else? Now, to be accused of having had a common-law marriage with her is disgusting.”

  The low and regal growl of the approaching Corniche caught his ear. Parker descended the stairs and stood waiting like a child on Christmas morn by the time Steven climbed from behind the wheel.

  “Beautiful car, sir.” Thick-bodied, with a glossy mustache that nearly outshone his bald brown pate, Steven trailed a lusting hand along the door panel. “Looks like a beautiful day, sir.”

  “Yes, Steven, it is.” The fact that the houseman had taken the time to open the Rolls’ top was not lost on Parker. Steven’s ability to anticipate his needs and desires was one of the things that made him so good at what he did. Accepting his car, Parker felt a bit like a medieval knight accepting his charger.

  Behind the wheel, gunning the engine, Parker pulled on Armani sunglasses and settled into the leather seat. He let the engine’s liquid vibration lull him, then raised a hand to Steven and shifted gears.

  Any other day, sitting in his car under a blue sky, feeling the soothing rush of sweet passing southern air would have been enough to appease him, but not today. Today, all Parker could think of was the night before.

  “How did she even manage to come up with a scheme like this? Suing me for divorce. Divorce! As if I would stoop to marrying her! And to demand a settlement…She was little more than a whore, a concubine, and she wants to demand a wife’s rights? She’s a stupid little fool.” The Corniche seemed to murmur assent when his foot pressed harder on the accelerator. Parker tried to ignore the headache building behind his eyes.

  “Who in the world would put her up to something like this? I know she didn’t do it all on her own. Hell, how she could even manage to rouse her one or two lonely brain cells long enough to get a decent attorney on the case is beyond me.” After a night of drinking, Parker’s vodka slogged-brain refused to help him out. “This is plainly some kind of trumped-up effort to milk me of money. Anyone can see she’s a gold digger. People like me simply do not marry people like her.”

  Still, she had managed to put this little plan into action. How? “Probably came up with it with the help of a few of her less-kinky friends. Good thing for Desireé that they don’t look down their noses at her the way she looks down hers at them.”

  Elbow parked against the window frame, Parker shielded his eyes with his hand and tried to focus. “If I’d known this little affair with her was going to turn out like this, I would have thought twice before paying to pare that nose down; that and the tits and ass I paid for, too.” He blew out hard and tried not to feel like a complete fool. Truth be told, he had paid almost as much for her body as he had paid for his medical degree.

  “And she still wants more!” For a one-trick pony, Desireé had more nerve than a brass-assed monkey. She was determined to get all she could, and the damned papers she had had him served with made it clear—she could get a lot. “Too bad I fell for her one trick,” the doctor complained, remembering the things that girl could do with toys. His knees still grew weak when he thought of her singular array of talent.

  It had started with a cocktail party dare. It was a boring party, featuring musty-tasting cheese and expensive but muffled wine and liquor, the kind of stuff you ate and drank to get along with stuffy, expensive people. Then along came Desireé. At first glance, she was a bit too much: too exposed, too loud, and far too brassy in her low-cut Versace knock-off.

  “My name is Desireé Johnson. That’s Desireé, with a accent over the e. It’s French for desire.” She extended limp fingers. “What’s yours?”

  “Reynolds. Parker Reynolds,” he said, still holding the fingers.

  “Um,” she hummed, surveying the crowd over his shoulder. Spotting no one more interesting, she turned her attention back to him. “Um. Parker Reynolds. That kind of name sort of goes with this kind of a crowd.” She wiggled her fingers, and he released them. “So Parker Reynolds, what are you going to do to make me smile?”

  It was easy to see that she would never reach the point of being charming, but she was entertaining in a cheap and loose sort of way. Bored as he was, what Parker Reynolds thought he needed most right then was to be entertained, and something in him decided that it might be entertaining to make her smile. Clearly available, Desireé Johnson had an agenda of her own. Latching onto his arm, she quickly managed to separate him from the cocktail crowd—not that he needed much persuasion when she angled her décolletage at him.

  “This party is a real drag, huh?” she said with her lips close to his ear.

  “A simple social obligation,” he murmured, looking into her face and wondering what lurked beneath the heavy, inexpertly applied makeup. Not much, he decided, tossing down the last of his drink. Without shifting his gaze, he managed to hand off the empty glass and collect a fresh drink from a passing waiter. His new drink was one of the fussy wines Teasley was so fond of, and Parker wanted to ditch it, but then he would have had to take his eyes off of Desireé.

  The longer he looked at her, the more fascinating she became. What possessed a woman to dress herself in violently purple polyester and then climb up on a pair of four-inch heels? How in the world had she managed to paint her eyes, her mouth, and her cheeks so creatively? Could it be that she lived in a house with no mirrors?

  His questions ended when she reached for him. His immediate urge was to avoid the inch-long nails, but the fascination held him in place. Her thumb and forefinger closed on his ear, pulling him into the vortex of her persona. “I’ve got a little joke for you,” she whispered. “Want to hear it?”

  Silly question; of course he did.

  Her lips were thick and lush, liquid with gloss, and Dr. Parker Reynolds could hardly wait to hear what she would say.

  “What’s long and hard and filled with see-men?” She tipped her head to look deep into his eyes, letting the last word drag across her lips while Parker struggled to think of an answer. “Don’t you know?”

  “A, uh…A…” Parker couldn’t bring himself to say the obvious word out loud.

  “See?” Desireé drawled. “You’re nasty. I knew you were a nasty boy; I could tell by lookin’ at you. The answer is a submarine.”

  “A…submarine, of course.”

  “You didn’t get it.” Her laughter was soft and breathy, scented with the warm fruit of wine. The long-nailed hand she used to hold Parker’s lapel was tight, and she was closer to him than his shadow.

  “I get it. Seamen, not semen.”

  “Stupid, juvenile sense of humor,” Parker whined, remembering the encounter in far too much detail. Reaching for the preset button on the Rolls dash, Reynolds tried to fill the air around him with music. Johnny Mathis sang “Chances Are,” and Reynolds wondered why he had continued with the woman. “Maybe I just knew her for what she was and wanted to see if it was real.” He snorted a sound that might have been mistaken for laughter. It was funny, Reynolds recalled. When she made her pitch, he hadn’t seen it coming.

  “What would you most like to do with me,” she had asked, moving even closer in the crowded room, and seeming to tow him with her to a place along the Dutch blue wall. It was as if she had taken most of the air with her, but he swallowed hard and dared to dream.

  Afraid to hesitate, he told her in the crudest terms possible. He wasn’t entirely sure, but he might have stuttered on the letter ‘f’, it coming at the beginning of the word the way it did. And he wasn’t completely sure of the word that began with a ‘c’, but he was pretty sure that he had used it in context.

  “Is that a medical term?” Desireé was completely unimpressed.

  “Not really.” Parker felt himself floundering. “It was more on the order of an offer for a complete physical.”

  “You have no imagination,” she suggested.

  “Well, look here, how about this? It’s a little trick I picked up in Spain while traveling with my parents.” He plucked the maraschino cherry from her glass and popped i
t into his mouth. It took six minutes and a raised hand for him to work the stem on the tip of his broad tongue.

  Desireé’s raised brow was a study in derision. “You should practice more. Besides, lots of people can tie cherry stems into knots with their tongues.”

  “I suppose you could do better?” he challenged, folding the stem into a paper napkin.

  “Absolutely. Time me.” She not only did the same trick, she did it better, beating his time by more than five minutes. “I can do other things, too.”

  “Like what?” Intrigued, Parker fell into the oily, lipsticked smile and followed her like a happy puppy. Towing him by his tie, she backed against what he first thought was a wall, but soon discovered was a closet under the staircase. Small and dark, the closet had apparently been forgotten by Teasley, because it housed only a small stack of sealed boxes. The boxes meant nothing to Desireé, who slipped to her knees in the dark and found Parker’s zipper with no trouble at all.

  Parker inched lower in his leather seat, remembering. Between his legs, an uncomfortable bulging swell testified to the memory of Desireé’s skill and dedication to task. “The way she sucked, the girl could have changed her last name to Hoover,” he sighed, trying to keep his eyes on the road.

  Hard as it was to admit, Parker had been damned near giddy when she finally let him out of that hot little closet beneath the stairs. Carefully creeping from the closet, Parker felt an embarrassed exhilaration he hadn’t known in years. People said sex in public places, places where the threat of discovery was heavy—well, they said it was exciting…and so it was. Standing again amid the guests with their good clothes, fine wine, and finer jewelry, he had wanted to do a little happy dance, but knew it would have been inappropriate. He watched Desireé correct the line of her fading lipstick with a daintily crooked finger. Around him, no one seemed concerned.