by Lynn Turner
Abbie drew a deep breath and tried again. ‘I realise you’re angry, but—’
‘That had to be the understatement of the year,’ he muttered. ‘Thanks to that publicity-hungry bitch, some two-bit reporter has scooped your story!’
He smacked the cap against his leg again, apparently unaware that Abbie was gaping at him in stupefied astonishment.
‘What did you say?’ she managed to get out when she’d recovered from her initial shock.
Mal frowned at her as if he suspected she was being deliberately dense. ‘I said that some two-bit reporter has scooped your story. That’s what you call it, isn’t it? Anyway, you know what I mean. And you don’t even seem to care? He planted his hands on his hips and glowered at her. ‘Dammit, Abigail, do you love me or not?’
Abbie’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. She felt strangely light-headed. Mal started to blur around the edges, and then suddenly there were two of him. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I think … I’m going to faint.’
The last thing she remembered see was Mal—both of him—dropping the cap and lunging forward. The last thing she remembered hearing was his alarmed voice calling her name. Not Abigail, but ‘Abbie!’
When she came to he was there, leaning over her, his face a taut, anxious mask as he gently wiped a damp washcloth across her brow.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked with gruff concern.
Abbie nodded. ‘I think so.’ She started to sit up and he quickly slid a supporting arm around her.
‘Are you sure?’ he said as he wedged the pillows between her back and the headboard of the bed.
She nodded again. ‘I’m OK, really.’
Mal watched the colour return to her cheeks and evidently decided that she wasn’t ©sing to faint again, at least not in the next few seconds. He left her to go to the desk, where he poured Coke into the plastic glasses.
‘I don’t mind admitting you threw quite a scare into me,’ he said. He sat beside her gingerly, as if he was afraid of jostling her, and handed her one of the glasses. ‘I’ve never seen anybody faint before.’ His brow suddenly furrowed in concern. ‘D’you think you might be pregnant?’
Abbie spat Coke down the front of her shirt. Mal jumped back up and grabbed a handful of napkins from the desk. She gave him an afflicted look as she snatched one from him and ineffectually tried to blot the liquid before it could leave a stain. ‘Are you trying to make me faint again?’
‘Well, it’s possible,’ he defended. ‘At least, I assume it is. From what you told me about your sex life, I doubt that you’re on the pill, and I didn’t use ‑’
‘All right!’ she interrupted. If she’d been pale a couple of minutes ago, now her entire body was suffused with embarrassed colour. ‘There’s no need to enumerate all the methods of birth control we didn’t use.’
‘So it is possible,’ Mal said. The hint of smugness in his voice earned him a resentful frown.
‘I suppose so,’ Abbie muttered. ‘Though I think it’s more likely that I fainted because of a combination of hunger, exhaustion and plain old-fashioned shock.’
Mal’s lashes suddenly dropped, but not before she saw the wickedly amused gleam in his eyes. ‘Poor baby,’ he murmured with mock sympathy as he got up and made another trip to the desk. He collected the pizza and the bottles of Coke and brought them back to the bed. ‘Are you strong enough to feed yourself?’
Abbie let a theatrical sigh and a put-upon look serve as answer. She waited until his mouth was stuffed with pizza and then said, ‘Damn you, Garrett,’ in an extremely annoyed tone.
Mal grinned, swallowed and bit off another large chunk of pizza.
‘You knew!’
‘That you were a reporter?’ he said calmly between bites. ‘Of course I knew.’
‘Freelance journalist,’ she corrected peevishly. ‘When did you find out?’
‘I suspected you were the lady reporter I’d been hearing about as soon as you walked up to me in the hotel bar —’
‘Bulloney!’ she put in and was blithely ignored.
‘—but I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, until you started spinning that incredible yarn about how your boyfriend left you high and dry at some fleabag motel.’
Abbie’s teeth cleanly sliced off a section of pizza. ‘What was so incredible about that story?’ she demanded. ‘I thought it was pretty good, considering how little time I had to compose it.’
Mal smiled indulgently and leaned over to wipe a dab of tomato sauce from her upper lip with his napkin. ‘For one thing, I couldn’t see you putting up with a boyfriend who was as big a jerk as you made Larry out to be,’ he drawled. ‘And for another, no man in his right mind would have driven off and left you stranded in the middle of cowboy country—not if he ever hoped to see you again.’
‘OK, so you didn’t believe my story,’ she muttered irritably. ‘Still, you couldn’t have known for sure that I was a writer.’
‘True,’ he admitted. ‘But then I got all those phone calls while you and Deke were in town collecting your things.’
Abbie had trouble swallowing the pizza in her mouth. ‘What phone calls?’ she asked, not at all sure she wanted to hear the answer.
‘Well, first Eddie Carmichael called. He’s the waiter at the hotel bar. After the three of us left, his boss clued him in about the pretty lady he’d been gossiping with, and Eddie decided he should warn me that you were a big-city reporter.’
Abbie closed her eyes and groaned.
‘Then Iris Murphy called. Iris operates the hotel switchboard. She thought I should know that you’d just phoned a newspaper in Washington and offered them a story about me.’
Her eyes flew open. ‘She listened in oh my call! That’s illegal!’
Mal shrugged. ‘You were an outsider, darlin’. And after what happened with Roxie … well, I guess they were all trying to protect me from myself. The Garrett men do have a reputation for making fools of themselves over beautiful women.’
Abbie’s mouth quirked in a wry smile. ‘I’ll probably wish I hadn’t asked, but did anyone else call you from the hotel?’
‘Just Myrl Norris, the desk clerk. Cousin Lewis called from home. I believe you’ve met Lewis—he owns the hardware store,’ he explained with a grin. ‘He saw you leave, the hotel with Deke as he was locking up for the night. And of course Deke found out who you were from Rafe Collier and hurried down to the garage to tell me as soon as he got back.’
Abbie slumped back against the pillows with a dejected sigh. ‘I might as well have hung up a giant Press card around my neck.’ She frowned as she replaced a half-eaten slice of pizza in the box. ‘But if you knew who I was all along, why did you let me drive the Shelby?’
‘You’re a smart lady,’ Mal drawled. He moved the pizza box to the floor and, while he was bent over, took off his shoes and socks. ‘You should be able to figure it out.’
Abbie automatically scooted over to make room for him on the bed, taking one of the pillows with her. ‘You wanted Press coverage of the race?’ She made it a question, and a rather sceptical one at that.
He stood, smiling down at her as he stripped off his shirt and unfastened his jeans. ‘See, I knew you could do it.’
Abbie was completely baffled, and it showed. ‘Then what was all that business at Glady’s—“Reporters are no better than scavengers. No, they’re worse … they’re parasites,” ‘ she quoted. ‘Do you have any idea how that made me feel?’
‘Guilty?’ Mal guessed as he kicked his jeans aside and joined her on the bed. He reached for her, but Abbie shoved his hands away.
‘That was the whole idea, wasn’t it?’ she accused. ‘You intended to make me feel guilty.’
Mal reached out again. This time he didn’t let her push him away, wrapping his arms around her and throwing one long leg over hers to hold her still.
‘Get off!’ Abbie ordered.
‘No,’ he refused calmly. ‘Not until you’ve heard me out. It’s true, I did hope
you’d feel just a little bit guilty, but that wasn’t the primary reason I said those things. I wanted it to be your story, you little dimwit. If I hadn’t come on so strong, Roxie would have dug in her heels and refused to back down. Her editor friend would have had daily reports splashed all over the front page of his paper and the race would have been old news by the time we got to Washington.’
Abbie felt about two inches tall. ‘Oh,’ she muttered.
‘No, don’t you feel ashamed?’ he asked in the sexy murmur that made her toes curl.
She ducked her head to hide a smile. ‘Yes. But I already felt ashamed.’
Mal’s lips caressed her temple. ‘I know. You’ve been absolutely miserable for the last two days,, wanting to tell me the truth but afraid that if you did I’d blow my stack and drop out of the race.’
‘And fall straight into Roxanne’s clutches,’ she added as her arms crept around his neck.
‘There was never any chance of that.’ He eased a little to one side, just enough to slip a hand between them and start unbuttoning her shirt. ‘I knew what she had in mind when she suggested the race, but I also knew she didn’t have a prayer of winning. That’s why I agreed to the terms of the bet. I suspected she might try to cheat—falsify her log or something—but it didn’t occur to me that she might be so desperate that she’d risk sabotaging the Shelby,’ he admitted ruefully.
‘When I found out Tony was going to be her driver, I figured we were safe. Tony Ferris wouldn’t lie or cheat for Roxie or anybody else. I thought just having him along would keep her honest. I should have known better.’
One of his hands tugged her shirt-tail free of her jeans while the other slipped inside the shirt and found her breast. Abbie released a soft sigh of pleasure. ‘I don’t want to talk about Roxanne Winston.’ Her fingers slid into his hair and she urged him down, capturing his mouth for a hungry kiss.
‘Neither do I,’ he murmured against her cheek as he laid a string of baby kisses to her ear. ‘Let’s talk about the dynamite story you’re going to write about my engine, instead.’
Abbie’s eyes drifted shut. She combed her fingers through his hair, luxuriating in the cool, silky feel of it against her skin. ‘Let’s not,’ she said with a languorous smile. ‘Anyway, my story isn’t going to be about your engine or the race.’
‘What?’
Suddenly Mal was looming over her, an arm braced on either side of her. He didn’t look happy.
‘What do you mean, you’re not writing about my engine?’ He sounded as if she’d deliberately insulted him. Abbie hastily squelched a smile.
‘I mean that I’ve decided not to focus on the engine,’ she told him patiently. ‘I’ll mention it, of course, but my story’s going to be about Malachi Garrett, the man.’
‘The hell it is!’ he retorted. ‘You’re not wasting valuable column inches on me, when you could be writing about one of the most important technological advances of the last fifty years. My God, Abigail, you could win the Pulitzer for this story. I want you to write about my engine. Why the hell do you think I brought you along, anyway?’
Abbie was unmoved by his agitated harangue. ‘I thought it was because you’d fallen madly in love with me,’ she murmured as her palms skimmed his chest, drifted over his ribcage and settled lightly on his waist.
He frowned at her. ‘Don’t try to distract me, Abigail.’
‘Would I do that?’ she asked innocently. Her right hand moved down and around, so that her fingers could trace a series of intricate designs on the back of his thigh.
‘It won’t work,’ he warned sternly.
Abbie smiled. His body was offering contradictory evidence.
‘I wasn’t in love with you when I decided to let you drive the Shelby.’
She affected a disappointed pout. ‘You weren’t?’ Her left hand began to imitate the movements of the right.
‘No,’ he said firmly, then relented with a crooked smile. ‘I was well on the way, but trying like hell to convince myself that what I felt was nothing more than common, ordinary lust. Speaking of which …’ He reached back to capture both her hands and moved them to his chest.
‘There, that’s better,’ he muttered, ignoring the arch look she gave him. ‘Now, settle down and pay attention. You have to write about the engine. It’s important, Abbie, and not just because it’s my design. If we don’t stop squandering our natural resources, there won’t be anything left for future generations. We have to start concentrating our energies and our talents on conservation instead of reckless consumption, and the key to turning things around is going to be public awareness. That means media coverage, and lots of it.’
Abbie’s heart swelled with pride and love. Before she met him, she had heard Malachi Garrett described as an eccentric recluse, a misanthrope, a man so protective of his privacy that he had little or no use for the rest of humanity. She decided it was time someone introduced the world to the real Malachi Garrett—the man who was liked and respected by everyone who knew him; the man who worried about preserving the earth’s resources for people who hadn’t been born yet.
‘OK,’ she said huskily. ‘You’ve convinced me. I’ll write about your engine … if you’ll agree to let me do a piece about you when that story’s finished.’
He hesitated, his eyes narrowing as he considered the proposition. ‘I’m not a very interesting person, you know.’
‘I disagree,’ Abbie said with a smile. ‘I think you’re utterly fascinating.’
One shaggy brow rose a sceptical centimetre. ‘Even if you wrote it, you probably wouldn’t be able to sell it anywhere.’
‘I’ll take my chances.’
A shrewd gleam entered his eyes. ‘The kind of article you have in mind … how long would it take to put together?’
‘Several months, at least,’ she said solemnly. ‘First I’d have to do very thorough research—interview your friends and relatives, the people you went to school with, that kind of thing.’
‘I’ve attended a lot of schools, and I have more relatives than a dog has fleas,’ Mal cautioned. ‘Assuming you devoted all your time and energy to tracking everybody down, it could take a year or more. How and where would you live while you were doing all this research?’
Abbie rubbed a lazy finger over the dark stubble on his jaw. ‘I have a small nest egg. I could probably afford an inexpensive apartment, or maybe an older house. Of course it would help if I could find a roommate to share the expenses.’
‘And the housework?’ he suggested as he finally got around to easing her out of his shirt.
‘Definitely. Somebody with nice long arms and legs.’
Mal tossed the shirt over his shoulder with a grin. ‘To reach the cobwebs in the corners?’
‘And the house moss under the beds,’ she added as she wriggled out of her jeans.
He gathered her to him with a loving anile. ‘You’re in luck, Abigail Prudence. I happen to know someone who meets your requirements. He’s a very nice reformed chauvinist who just recently decided that he needs a roommate.’
‘You don’t say,’ Abbie murmured as she wrapped herself around him. ‘Anyone I know?’
‘You’re looking at him,’ he said with another devilish grin. ‘There’s just one tiny little condition.’ His head suddenly descended, his hot breath caressing her breast in the instant before his tongue sent flames licking through her veins. ‘I’d have to insist that you sign a long-term lease. Would that present a problem?’
Abbie pretended to give the question serious consideration; no mean feat when his hands and mouth were lighting fires up and down her body.
‘That depends,’ she said breathlessly. ‘How long are we talking about, approximately?’
Mal pulled himself up to face her. His velvet brown eyes glowed with tenderness and love. ‘At least thirty or forty years,’ he murmured, no longer teasing but utterly serious. Hopeful. Vulnerable. Abbie’s breath caught audibly as her throat constricted with emotion. ‘Too long?�
� he asked, suddenly uncertain.
‘No!’ She shook her head adamantly. ‘Definitely not too long. When do you think I could move in?’
The creases between his brows disappeared. ‘How long would it take you to drive from Washington to Oklahoma?’ he countered huskily as his mouth found hers.
‘Two days,’ Abbie murmured against his lips.
In fact, it took three times that long. They made a lot of stops on the way.
