7 Days and 7 Nights (20 page)

25

At 10 P.M. Olivia put on her sheep pajamas and crawled into bed. She felt a bone-deep weariness that had little to do with lack of sleep and too much to do with the words she and Matt had hurled at each other earlier.

They'd spent the afternoon in full-combat readiness, both ready to strike if another offensive was launched. Dinner had been a painful affair with none of the easy camaraderie she'd come to look forward to. It was hard to believe the Matt Ransom she faced today was the same one who had taken her to the moon and back just a day ago.

Turning on the radio, she wondered what topic he'd pull out of his hat for his last show. She knew he'd never go out without attempting to eradicate her lead, but she wasn't seriously worried. After the votes she'd pulled in Saturday night, it would take a real doozy to do any more than just even the score. She'd worry about the consultant and the upcoming ratings book when she had to. Right now, all she wanted was out of this remote and this place. And out of Matt's way.

Matt's theme music came up full, and Olivia turned off the bedside light and settled in to listen. It didn't take long for her weariness to be replaced, once again, by a white-hot anger.

“Okay, guys,” Matt said. “This is it, the last show of the last day of captivity, which means the last chance to vote for Yours Truly. We've taken in a ton of money and food, thanks to you. We'll have the totals to announce tomorrow morning during our release. Ahh, what a glorious word. Release.”

She heard another tune sneak in under his voice, but she couldn't quite recognize the music.

“In fact, release is an important aspect of our topic tonight. So is freedom.”

Now she could make out the song. It was “The Wedding March,” cranked up full in all its simple glory. It took no imagination at all to picture women in white dresses floating down church aisles toward their adoring grooms.

“Tonight we're going to hear about some great escapes.” The music didn't just stop then, it screeched to a halt as if someone had dragged the needle of a record player across it.

“That's right, gentlemen. Tonight we're going to hear first-person testimonials from men who almost succumbed but”—another dramatic pause and a drum roll—“managed to extricate themselves at the last possible moment and at great personal peril.”

Male applause and cheers came up full. Olivia sat up in bed and crossed her arms over her chest. She could feel her teeth clench.

Matt came on as glib as ever. Olivia could practically hear him chortling, and she felt an overwhelming urge to go out there and drag him away from the microphone, stuff him in a footlocker, and drop him off a very tall bridge.

“All right, gentlemen. Say hello to Barry, who found a unique way out of the ties that bind. Barry, tell us your story.”

“Well, I was sitting at the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding.”

“Okay . . .”

“And I'm eating the shrimp cocktail, and I look up and notice that not a single one of the men at the tables around us is talking. These are all the guys who've married into my fiancée's family, and they're just nodding their heads and saying, ‘Yes, dear, No, dear.' ”

“Scary.” Matt said.

“Scary? I tell you, all of a sudden I couldn't breathe.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, I had to think fast, you know. I mean, you can't just pull the woman aside and say, ‘I'm sorry but I don't want to turn out like all the other poor stiffs who married into your family.' ”

“No, that probably wouldn't go over well.”

“So, I'm sitting there nodding my head like the rest of them, you know, just sort of blending in. And I'm thinking, okay, what can I do to get
her
to call this off.”

“Very good, Barry.”

Olivia could tell Matt was eating up every horrible word. All she could think of was the poor woman who was about to see her dreams blow up in her face.

“So I asked her younger sister to dance.”

“And this is grounds for calling off a wedding?”

“Not at first. But pretty soon I dance her onto the edge of the dance floor, right between our table and my future in-laws.”

“Yeah?”

“And I start kissing her, really kissing her, you know?”

Matt laughed, and Olivia heard gasps of horror play up full.

Encouraged, Barry continued. “And then, just to be sure there's no mistake what's going on, I grind my pelvis against her—a real Elvis number.”

“Jesus, Barry. What happened then?”

“Well, I can tell she's getting ready to huff off the floor, and I'm afraid no one sees what's happening, so I put my hand down the front of her dress.”

Matt remained silent.

“Then the sister screams, the place gets real quiet, and my fiancée storms over and throws the ring in my face.” Barry sounded genuinely happy.

“Did everybody just stand around and watch, or what?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I heard it turned into a real slugfest, but I wasn't there for that part of it.”

“You just left?”

“No, not exactly.”

“So where were you?”

“In the ambulance on my way to the hospital.”

“Gee, Barry,” said Matt. “This isn't sounding like the cleanest escape I ever heard of.”

“Well, her father did beat me to a bloody pulp.”

“Aw, Barry . . .”

“But you know, even now after the plastic surgery and the physical therapy, I remember all those silent men yearning to be free, and I count myself a lucky man.”

“There you have it, gentlemen, escapee number one.” Applause sound effects played, and chants of “Woo, woo, woo” came over the radio. “Our next caller managed to make his escape
without
bloodshed, but his story, too, has some, uh, real ups and downs. We'll hear from our next runaway groom in just a minute.”

Olivia spent the commercial break pacing. Matt had chosen a surefire winner for his final show. His audience was no doubt falling over itself laughing, just as Matt intended. But Olivia couldn't stop thinking about Barry's fiancée's public humiliation, her rehearsal dinner a shambles, her family's money sunk in a wedding day that would never be. Who knew what horrible tale groom number two would have to tell.

If she needed more proof of Matt's feelings about commitment and the likelihood of his ever sharing a life with someone, she had it. He had no respect for women in general or for her in particular. To him, everything was one big joke. What she wouldn't give to shake some sense into him.

“Okay, everybody, our next caller is Michael. And his story is a little different than the last one we heard, though the end result is the same. Michael, you're on the air.”

“Hi, Matt.”

“Michael. Did your escape land you in the hospital?”

“Actually, it landed me in Missouri.”

There was a pause, and Matt laughed. “We're all ears.”

“Well, Meredith and I took skydiving lessons together. We'd been talking about maybe getting married one day, and the next thing I know, we're planning to get married during a jump.”

“That's one way to keep the guest list small.”

“Yeah, it was going to be just the two of us. A friend who's a notary was going to marry us on the way down.”

“You're not going to tell me someone's chute didn't open?”

“No, everyone walked away from that jump. Well, actually, I flew away.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, as soon as the plane started climbing, I started having doubts, you know?”

“About jumping?”

“No, about getting married.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah, that's what I thought. So I'm starting to panic a little, you know. We're approaching jumping altitude, and the plane's starting to level off, and I don't think I can go through with it. Only there's no time to discuss it. We're really close to our jump site, and Meredith and the notary are already moving over to the open doorway.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, it was too loud in the plane to talk, and shouting that I don't want to get married seemed, I don't know, it's just not something you yell at somebody, you know?

“So we leveled off at twelve thousand feet, and Meredith unhooked her lead line, flashed me this big smile, and jumped. Our friend, the notary, went right after her. And I'm standing there, you know, like my feet are nailed to the floor of the plane or something.”

“Jeez, man. You just let her float away?”

“It was kind of surreal. I saw their chutes open—hers had a red heart painted on it for the wedding—and I saw them both look up, but it was too late. I paid the pilot to drop me at a small rural airport in the next state, and I just laid low for a while.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. It was a narrow escape.”

“Did you ever see Meredith again?”

“Not really. She wouldn't talk to me after that. I heard a while later that she married our diving instructor. He evidently made it out of the plane with no problem.”

Matt laughed. “You see, guys, it's never too late. Right up until the moment you say ‘I do,' you can decide you don't. Don't forget to call and make your pledges to the food bank. This is
Guy Talk
. . . where a guy can be a guy.”

And so it went, each story worse than the last. One caller had jumped ship, literally, diving headfirst off the cruise ship booked for his wedding. Another fled back down the aisle of the church with his fiancée and the flower girl clinging to the tails of his morning coat.

Olivia's slow burn began to build. She forced herself to listen to every word, took in every annoying barb and chuckle, all of it a slap in the face to every woman who had ever expected anything from the man she loved.

She wondered if he really thought all women were just grasping, needy beings trying to trap a man into taking that walk to the altar. She wanted to go out there and yank him out of his chair and show him just how full of shit he was.

When he finally signed off, still chortling over his callers' great escapes, she sprang out of bed and began to pace. She paced for a good twenty minutes, trying to blow off enough steam to ignore the affront to herself and womankind. She knew she should just go back to bed, but the more she replayed the show in her mind, the angrier she became.

When her need to tell him off became too much for her, she threw open her door and stormed into the living room.

“How dare you?” she demanded.

“I beg your pardon?”

Olivia marched up to where he stood in the center of the living room. “What is wrong with you? Have you no concern for anyone else? No sensitivity for other people's feelings?”

“Olivia, you're wearing sheep pajamas, and you're shouting like a fishwife. How do you think that's going to look to our audience?”

Beside herself with fury, she could hardly acknowledge the merit of his warning. With a hand to his chest she pushed him backward across the room and out of camera range until his back was flush up against the French doors that led to the balcony.

In the station control room, Charles Crankower, super spider, unfurled his long body from the chair it had been folded into for the last six and a half hours. Quietly, so as not to alert Matt's producer, who was still clearing up after the show, he panned the camera to frame up the shot he'd discovered earlier. His heart leapt for joy at what came into view.

Matt stood with his back to the balcony doors. Olivia stood facing him with her back to the camera. He could see Matt's face and its look of surprise. At first their body language was completely adversarial, all rigid angles and barely leashed tension. But as he watched, Olivia moved closer, and the next thing he knew, she was kissing the hell out of Matt Ransom.

With a big thank-you to the PR gods he'd almost given up on, Charles checked to make sure the camera was recording.

He would have sold his soul for audio at that moment, but he didn't dare ask Ben to turn up the microphone for fear the producer would warn the two people framed in stark relief through the camera lens. As he settled in to watch, he reflected that it was too bad he could only see Matt's face and not Olivia's. But then he reminded himself that beggar spiders couldn't be choosers.

26

Olivia pressed herself against Matt. His physical response was swift and immediate, and for some reason this made her even angrier.

Surprising them both, she kissed him. Hard. “We're all the same to you, aren't we, Matt? Push the right button, kiss the right spot, and voilà! Matt Ransom's ready for action.”

Totally on the offensive and anxious to prove her point, she rubbed her body against his. Once again, his response was immediate and unmistakable.

“So, I guess that happens for everyone, huh? Doesn't matter who it is, or what's going on. Is that right, Matt?”

Without giving him time to respond, she bracketed his face in her hands and kissed him again, using her tongue and her teeth and all of her fury.

She suckled his earlobe, ran her tongue down the side of his face, and came back to his lips. “And when I do this, it doesn't matter that it's me, Olivia? Will any pair of hands, any lips really do?”

Matt didn't answer. His erection felt like a slab of marble between them, and as she kissed him, she felt his heat rise until his skin actually became hot to the touch. His look of surprise had been replaced by sharp-featured desire that she wanted to know was only for her. “A woman is a woman is a woman, right?” she taunted. “Can you tell us apart in the dark, Matt? Do you care?”

“Jesus, Livvy.” His arms snaked around her, and his hands cupped her buttocks as he pulled her closer.

Olivia was beyond reason. Somehow she would devour him as he had devoured her and use his own lust to make him admit that what was between them was more than physical. She wasn't buying his “love the one you're with” crap a moment longer.

“Do you recognize my touch, Matt? My scent, my voice?”

Focused completely on the man in front of her, Olivia brought her mouth back to his. Her fingers moved to the top button of his shirt, and when they fumbled, she gave in to her impatience and ripped the shirt open, sending buttons flying across the room.

She ran her hands over the smorgasbord of skin. They traveled up his chest to tangle in the mat of dark hair, then followed the dark arrow back toward the waistband of his jeans.

“How about my mouth, Matt? Do you think you'd recognize that?”

She bent her head to circle a nipple with her tongue, and drew the hardening bud between her teeth.

Matt's hands slipped up under her pajama top and over her bare back, skimming, exploring, heating her skin to the same temperature as his. Olivia straightened and twined her arms around his neck. Going up on tiptoe, she pressed against him, fitting herself over the hard swell of his erection.

Desire, hot and insistent, coursed through her bloodstream, in spite of her anger.

She'd just dropped her arms and lifted her fingers to the snap of Matt's jeans when his hands clamped down on her shoulders, halting all movement. Olivia's gaze flew to Matt's face. The look there told her something was horribly wrong. She tried to turn around, but his hands on her shoulders held her in place.

“Don't move,” he ordered. “I have to figure out what to do.”

“What's wrong?”

Matt let go of her shoulders. “Don't move,” he instructed again. “And don't turn around. We seem to be on camera.”

Her heart seeming to plunge into the pit of her stomach, Olivia disobeyed. Turning, she looked up and encountered the unblinking lens of the Webcam. Her gaze flew to the TV monitor beneath it, where she could see Matt still framed from head to just below his waist, with her frozen in front of him.

She felt the heat flare up to scorch her cheeks. Good God, she had just attacked Matt Ransom in front of an Internet audience. She was beyond humiliation. She was finished.

Numb, she watched Matt stride over to the entertainment center and rip the Webcam's power plug out of the wall.

“How did the camera get pointed this way?” she asked.

“I don't know.”

“You don't know? How can you not know?”

“I just don't. During my show it was in its usual position. I never looked again after that.” He smiled tentatively. “I was preoccupied.”

“Don't you dare make jokes. My whole reputation's shot to hell in some futile attempt to force you to admit all women aren't the same.”

“I think you more than made your point.”

“You think this is funny! I have lost all credibility. Who will ever be able to listen to my advice without picturing me throwing myself at you?”

“It's not quite that bad, Olivia. Until you turned around, all they could see was the back of a blonde head.”

“Oh, right, like there's been more than one blonde in this apartment this week.”

“Well, you seemed pretty concerned that I might have you confused with someone else.”

She shot him a withering glance and started to pace. “I don't believe this!” She stopped pacing to turn on him as the pieces started to fall into place. “You. You set me up.”

“Olivia, be reasonable. There was no way I could know you were planning to corner me and, er, have your way with me.” He didn't seem particularly concerned that he'd been caught engaging in serious foreplay on camera. But this just made him all the more macho, didn't it? And what did it make her?

A prize chump.

“All week I've been trying to figure out what you were up to. ‘Relax, Olivia.' ‘Don't be so uptight, Livvy.' ‘What good is success if you can't enjoy it, Liv?' As if you cared one bit how I actually felt.”

She did an about-face and paced in the other direction, unable to look him in the eye. What in the world had she been thinking? How had she allowed her anger and frustration to get the best of her? She was totally out of control, and it was all Matt Ransom's fault.

“You feed me a tiny bit of your real self, little dribs and drabs that make me believe you're actually reachable and capable of feeling, and what do I do? Turn myself upside down trying to find the rest. I'm the one who should have my head examined.”

Matt plopped down on the sofa and put his feet up on the coffee table. “Olivia, just calm down. There's got to be a way out of this.”

But she was beyond thought, beyond giving him the remotest benefit of any doubt. Another thirty seconds and a national audience could have watched her bury her face in Matt Ransom's crotch without any understanding of the reasons why. Hell, she no longer understood the reasons why. She only knew that she had come to trust him in some subliminal way and he had betrayed that trust.

Olivia whirled around to face him. “What did you do, pay someone at the station to reposition the Webcam so you could lure me into a compromising position?”

“Lure you? Do you hear what you're saying, Olivia? Do you think I had any way of knowing what was coming?” He shook his head and spoke calmly, which just incensed her further. “I don't think
you
knew what you were going to do before you did it! When did I have the chance to warn the mystery cameraman? Calm down and let's think this through.”

“
We
are not thinking anything, Matt. There is no
we
here.”

Then she tuned him out, completely. Like she should have done the day the door clicked shut behind them.

Charles Crankower danced a little jig in the empty WTLK control room. The Webcam had been disconnected, but it couldn't have mattered less. He had exactly what he needed, exactly what he'd wanted but hadn't dared hope for.

Jubilant, he picked up his cell phone and started placing calls. The last number he dialed was the Operation Manager's home number. T.J. Lawrence picked up on the second ring.

“Crankower, do you have any idea what time it is?”

Charles smiled to himself. “I do, boss. It's 3:30 A.M, and our ship has come in.”

“Crankower, if this is some kind of prank . . .”

“No, T.J., it's nothing like that. It's the remote. There's been an unexpected development.”

He heard T.J.'s tone turn serious. “Are Matt and Olivia okay?”

“Oh, they're fine, though I suspect they may be duking it out in earnest right now.”

In a rush he told the OM exactly what had happened, careful to make it sound like the camera movement had been unintentional, just a changing of the audience view to keep things visually interesting. T.J. had always had a soft spot for Olivia, and Charles doubted T.J. would want to know to what lengths he'd gone to set her up.

“Jeez,” T.J. said. “I can't believe this.”

“Yeah, me either,” said Charles, when what he really wanted to say was,
I can't believe my good fortune
. “You'd better come down here and see the video, T.J., so you'll be prepared for the press when we go over to release Olivia and Matt from the apartment.”

“The press already knows?”

“Yeah, somebody must have been monitoring the website,” Charles lied, glad he'd had the foresight to call his contacts from his cell phone before T.J. could forbid it.

“All right, but just how explicit is this video, Crankower? Are we going to be running into trouble over that?”

“No. I'll call Legal if you want me to, but I don't think it's going to be an issue. There's no actual exposure even though it's pretty clear what's happening.”

Charles heard the rustling of sheets and pictured T.J. trying to slip out of bed without disturbing his wife. “Olivia must be totally freaked out,” said T.J. “Call Diane and Ben in to the station, will you? I'll call the apartment from my car.”

“Okay, boss. I've already called the security company to send some people to meet us at the apartment. One thing we can stop worrying about is getting coverage for the end of the promotion. If I'm not mistaken, it's going to be a mob scene.”