Controlled Burn (21 page)

He ran up the stairs and poked his head into Cobb’s office. “I have an emergency, Chief. Okay, not a real medical emergency or anything. But I have to do something.”

“Boudreau just shared the latest gossip with me. Go. And don’t bother coming back today. I’ll cover because you’re either going to be worthless and mopey or
you’ll get the girl and forget to come back, anyway. And don’t you dare flip that emergency light switch in your truck. No lights for personal shit.”

Rick used the remote start on his truck so it was already running and ready to go when he climbed into the driver’s seat. After buckling his seat belt, he gunned the engine and drove through the city as fast as traffic allowed, taking a few
shortcuts here and there.

Using his phone’s hands-free connection to the truck, he called Marie. “I need her flight info, Marie. Airline. Gate. I could walk around that airport for three days and not find her without a starting place.”

She gave him the information and the hitch in her voice told him she was getting emotional. “Good luck, honey.”

When he reached the right terminal,
he lucked out and saw a police officer he knew from a charity marathon he used to run back when he thought running was fun. With permission to leave his truck at the curb for ten minutes, he went inside and scanned the lines waiting for security screening. She’d been in a cab and hadn’t had that much of a head start on him.

She saw him first. When he found her in line, she was looking at
him and those pretty eyes hit him hard. They weren’t smiling today. He held out his hands, trying to gesture to her to please just give him a minute.

She hesitated so long, he wasn’t sure she was going to give him a chance. Then she made her way back the way she’d gone, squeezing her way past the people in line behind her and trying not to hit anybody with the carry-on bag slung over her
shoulder.

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” she asked when she reached him.

He wanted to touch her face or to stroke her hair. Something. But he had to earn that right back. “I couldn’t let you go without talking to you one more time. I want to apologize for losing my temper when we talked about the house. I felt like you were implying I was trying to screw Joe and Marie over and it hurt.”

“I didn’t think that and I’m sorry the words I used made you feel that way. It wasn’t meant to be personal, but you hurt my feelings, too, so it got messy.”

“It was mostly me, Jess. It’s no excuse, but the house has been a roller coaster and Danny...the nightmares were bad and I didn’t sleep well and it made me oversensitive. I understand that you make those kinds of decisions differently.
I really do. I was so stupid and I don’t want to lose you because of it.”

“I don’t...I didn’t...” She pressed her lips together, her eyes wide and shimmering with tears.

“I love you.” He touched her face then because he couldn’t stop himself. Cradling her cheek in his hand, he wiped away a tear with his thumb. “That’s the important thing. I love you and I want you to stay with me. I
want us to figure out our future together and have children and take them to Joe and Marie’s new place for Sunday dinners. I want us to be a family, Jess.”

“You say
family
like it should mean something to me. My mother took off when I was three and never looked back. I just met my grandparents and I’m thirty-four years old. How the hell would I know anything about family? You see how I messed
things up because emotion is hard for me to balance.”

“You don’t have to balance. You just love. Like you love Joe and Marie. They’re your family and you’re taking care of them because you love them. And how about your old man? You know how being a financial advisor or whatever you call it isn’t
your
dream. You wanted to be an event planner, and you still do, but you do the finance stuff
anyway and you kick ass at it because it’s
his
dream and you love him? That’s family, Jessica.”

“I want the family I see in the picture frames at the store,” she said, her eyes shimmering with tears.

“Those are models, Jess. God knows that ain’t me. I’m real and I have bad days and sometimes I say stupid things, but I love you.” He paused, not knowing what to say next and just hoping
the right words would come out. “I love you so much you won’t need a picture to capture it because I swear to God you will feel it every day of your life.”

“I love you, too,” she whispered, and Rick’s knees almost buckled from the relief. He’d thought—hoped—she did, but he was afraid he’d blown it so badly she’d never say the words. “I don’t know when it happened. Weeks ago? But I know standing
in that line, waiting to be thousands of miles away from you, was breaking my heart.”

“Don’t get on the plane today. Come home with me and let me show you just how much I love you. That way, every time you get on that plane, I’ll know you’re coming back to me as soon as you can.”

“Yes, I’ll go home with you.” She threw her arms around his neck and smiled up at him. “We’ll make our own
family.”

“I can’t wait.” He kissed her and then raised his eyebrow because it always made her smile. “As a matter of fact, we should go get started on that right away. You don’t absolutely need anything in your checked bag, do you? It’s probably zipping around a conveyor belt right now.”

Jess reached up and ran her fingertip over his eyebrow. “The only thing I absolutely need is you.”

* * * * *

If you fell in love with Shannon Stacey’s voice in CONTROLLED BURN

you’re going to love
THE KOWALSKIS
.
See where it all started in

EXCLUSIVELY YOURS
by Shannon Stacey.

Available Now.

Chapter One

“You got busy in the backseat of a ’78 Ford Granada with Joseph Kowalski—only the most reclusive bestselling author since J. D. Salinger—and you don’t think to tell
me about it?”

Keri Daniels sucked the last dregs of her too-fruity smoothie through her straw and shrugged at her boss. “Would
you
want anybody to know?”

“That I had sex with Joseph Kowalski?”

“No, that you had sex in the backseat of a ’78 Granada.” Keri had no idea how Tina Deschanel had gotten the dirt on her high school indiscretions, but she knew she was in trouble.

An
exceptionally well-paid reporter for a glossy, weekly entertainment magazine did not withhold carnal knowledge of a celebrity on the editor-in-chief’s most wanted list. And having kept that juicy little detail to herself wouldn’t get her any closer to parking her butt in an editorial chair.

Tina slipped a photograph from her purse and slid it across the table. Keri didn’t look down. She was
mentally compiling a short list of the people who knew she’d fogged up the windows of one of the ugliest cars in the history of fossil fuels. Her friends. The cop who’d knocked on the fogged-up window with a flashlight at a really inopportune moment. Her parents, since the cop was in a bad mood that night. The approximately six hundred kids attending her high school that year and anybody
they
told. Maybe short list wasn’t the right term.

“It was 1989,” Keri pointed out, because her boss clearly expected her to say something. “Not exactly a current event. And you ambushed me with this shopping spree.”

Actually, their table in the outdoor café was surrounded by enough bags to stagger a pack mule on steroids, but now Keri knew she’d merely been offered the retail therapy
before
the bad news. It shouldn’t have surprised her. Tina Deschanel was a shark, and any friendly gesture should have been seen as a prelude to getting bitten in the ass.

“Ambushed?” Tina repeated, loudly enough to distract a pair of Hollywood starlets engaging in some serious public displays of affection in a blatant attempt to attract the cheap tabloid paparazzi. A rabid horde that might include
Keri in the near future if she didn’t handle this correctly.

“How do you think I felt?” Tina went on. “I reached out to a woman who mentioned on her blog she’d gone to high school with Joseph Kowalski. Once there was money on the table, I made her cough up some evidence, and she sent me a few photos. She was even kind enough to caption them for me.”

Keri recognized a cue when it was
shoved down her throat. With one perfectly manicured nail she hooked the 8x10 blowup and pulled it closer.

A girl smiled at her from the photo. She wore a pink, fuzzy sweater, faded second-skin jeans and pink high heels. Raccoon eyeliner made her dark brown eyes darker, frosty pink coated her lips and her hair was as big as Wisconsin.

Keri smiled back at her, remembering those curling
iron and aerosol days. If the EPA had shut down their cheerleading squad back then, global warming might have been a total non-issue today.

Then she looked at the boy. He was leaning against the hideous brown car, his arms wrapped around young Keri’s waist. Joe’s blue eyes were as dark as the school sweatshirt he wore, and his grin managed to be both innocent and naughty at the same time.
And those damn dimples—she’d been a sucker for them. His honey-brown hair was hidden by a Red Sox cap, but she didn’t need to see it to remember how the strands felt sliding through her fingers.

She never failed to be amazed by how much she still missed him sometimes.

But who had they been smiling at? For the life of her, Keri couldn’t remember who was standing behind the camera. She
tore her gaze away from the happy couple and read the caption typed across the bottom.

Joe Kowalski and his girlfriend, Keri Daniels, a few hours before a cop busted them making out on a back road and called their parents. Rumor had it when Joe dropped her off, Mr. Daniels chased him all the way home with a golf club.

Keri snorted. “Dad only chased him to the end of the block. Even a
’78 Granada could outrun a middle-aged fat guy with a five iron.”

“I fail to see the humor in this.”

“You didn’t see my old man chasing taillights down the middle of the street in his bathrobe. It wasn’t very funny at the time, though.”

“Focus, Keri,” Tina snapped. “Do you or do you not walk by the bulletin board in the bull pen every day?”

“I do.”

“And have you not seen
the sheet marked ‘
Spotlight Magazine
’s Most Wanted’ every day?”

“I have.”

“And did you happen to notice Joseph Kowalski has been number three for several years?” Keri nodded, and Tina leaned across the table. “
You
are going to get me an exclusive feature interview with the man.”

“Or...?”

Tina sat back and folded her arms across her chest. “Don’t take it to that point, Keri.
Look, the man’s eleventh bestseller is going to be
the
summer blockbuster film of the decade. More A-listers lined up to read for that movie than line up on the red carpet for the Oscars. And he’s a total mystery man.”

“I don’t get why you’re so dedicated to chasing him down. He’s just an author.”

“Joseph Kowalski isn’t just an author. He played the media like a fiddle and became a celebrity.
The splashy NY parties with that gorgeous redhead—Lauren Huckins, that was it—on his arm. Then Lauren slaps him with a multi-million dollar emotional distress suit, he pays her off with a sealed agreement and then he disappears from the map? There’s a story there, and I want it. Our readers will eat him up, and
Spotlight
is going to serve him to them because you have access to him nobody else
does.”

“Had. I
had
access to him.” Keri sighed and flipped the photo back across the table even though she would rather have kept it to moon over later. “Eighteen years ago.”

“You were his high school sweetheart. Nostalgia, darling! And rumor has it he’s still single.”

Keri
knew
he was still single because the Danielses and Kowalskis still lived in the same small New Hampshire town,
though Mr. and Mrs. Kowalski lived in a much nicer house now. Very
much
nicer, according to Keri’s mother.

“You’ve risen fast in this field,” Tina continued, “because you have sharp instincts and a way with people, to say nothing of the fact I trusted you. But this...”

The words trailed away, but Keri heard her boss loud and clear. She was going to get this exclusive or her career with
Spotlight
was over and she could start fresh at the bottom of another magazine’s totem pole. And since her career was pretty much the sum total of her life, it wasn’t exactly a threat without teeth.

But seeing Joe again? The idea both intrigued her and scared the crap out of her at the same time. “He’s not going to open up his insanely private life to the magazine because he and I wore out
a set of shocks in high school, Tina. It was fun, but it wasn’t
that
good.”

Now she was flat-out lying. Joe Kowalski had set the gold standard in Keri’s sex life. An ugly car, a Whitesnake tape, cheap wine and Joe still topped her personal “Ten Ways to a Better Orgasm” list.

Tina ran her tongue over her front teeth, and Keri had known her long enough to know her boss was about to deliver
the kill shot.

“I’ve already reassigned your other stories,” she said. It was an act of interference entirely inappropriate for Tina to do to someone of Keri’s status at the magazine.

“That’s unacceptable, Tina. You’re overstepping your—”

“I can’t overstep boundaries I don’t have, Daniels. It’s my magazine, and your promotion to editorial depends on your getting an interview with
Kowalski, plain and simple.” Then she reached into her purse and passed another sheet to her. “Here’s your flight information.”

* * *

The reclusive, mega-bestselling author in question was trying to decide between regular beef jerky or teriyaki-flavored when he heard Keri Daniels was back in town.

Joe Kowalski nodded at the cashier who’d actually left a customer half-rung up in
an attempt to be the first to deliver the news. It wasn’t the first time Keri had been back. If she’d gone eighteen years without a visit home to her parents, Janie Daniels would have flown out to LA and dragged her daughter home by an earlobe.

It was, however, the first time Keri had come looking for him that he knew of.

“She’s been asking around for your phone number,” the cashier
added on, watching him like a half-starved piranha. “Of course nobody will give it to her, because we know how you feel about your privacy.”

And because nobody had it, but he didn’t feel a need to point that out. But he was surprised it had taken Keri as long as this to get around to looking him up, considering just how many years Tina Deschanel had been stalking his agent.

“Maybe she’s
on the class reunion committee,” Joe told the cashier, and her face fell. Committees didn’t make for hot gossip.

Members of the media had been hounding his agent for years, but only Tina Deschanel, who took tenacious to a whole new level, was Keri Daniels’s boss. Joe had been watching Keri’s career from the beginning, waiting for her to sell him out, but she never had. Until now, maybe.

While he wasn’t a recluse of Salinger-esque stature, Joe liked his privacy. The New England dislike of outsiders butting into their lives, combined with his own fiscal generosity—in the form of a ballpark, playgrounds, library donations or whatever else they needed—kept the locals from spilling his business. By the time he struck it big, classmates who’d moved away didn’t remember enough about
him to provide interesting fodder.

Nobody knew the details of the lawsuit settlement except the lawyers, his family and Lauren—who would be financially devastated should she choose to break her silence. And, as unlikely as it seemed, he and Keri had never been linked together in the media reports his publicist monitored. He managed to keep his private life pretty much just that, despite the
hype surrounding the movie.

“You’re not old enough for a class reunion,” Tiffany said, batting her way-too-young eyelashes at him.

A
half dozen of each
, he decided, tossing bags of beef jerky into his cart. He had a lot more list than cart space left and he kicked himself for not making Terry come along. She could have pushed a second cart
and
run interference on nosy cashiers. She was
good in the role, probably from years of experience.

As if on cue, the loudspeaker crackled. “Um...Tiffany, can you come back to register one, please? I have to pick up my kids in ten minutes.”

The girl rolled her eyes and started back toward the front of the town’s tiny market, but not before calling over her shoulder, “She’s staying with her parents, but I guess you already know where
they live.”

Yeah, he guessed he did, too. The only question was what he was going to do about it. He and his entire family were preparing to leave town for two weeks, and it would be a shame if he missed out on whatever game Keri was playing.

Assuming it was even true. Not that she was in town, but that she wanted to give him a call. In his experience, if there wasn’t enough dirt to
keep a small town grapevine bearing fruit, people would just add a heaping pile of manufactured fertilizer.

Joe gave a row of pepperoni sticks the thousand-yard stare. If Keri Daniels
was
looking for his phone number, it had to mean somebody had spilled the beans. The rabid pit bull of a woman she worked for had discovered her star reporter had once been the girl of Deschanel’s favorite prey’s
dreams. If that was the case, he and Keri were heading for a reunion and
this
time Keri could do the begging, just like he had before she’d run off to California.

Two hours later, after he’d unloaded his groceries at his own place, he faced his twin sister across the expanse of their mother’s kitchen. Teresa Kowalski Porter was
not
a happy woman.

“You are one dumb son of a bitch.”

Whereas he liked to play with words—savor them—Terry just spat them out as they popped into her head.

“I thought you were a moron for putting up with her shit then,” she said. “But now you’re going back for a second helping?”

“I’m ninety-nine percent sure her boss sent her out here in order to use our history to manipulate me into giving the magazine an interview.”

“Keri Daniels
never needed any help when it came to manipulating people. And I don’t even want to think about that other one percent on an empty stomach.”

The entire Kowalski family had once held some resentment toward Keri, but Terry’s had festered. Not only because his sister knew how to hold a grudge—although she certainly did—but because Keri had hurt her even before she’d gotten around to hurting
Joe.

Terry and Keri had been best friends since kindergarten, despite how corny their names sounded when said together. The trouble started during their freshman year when Mr. Daniels got a big promotion. Between the new style Daddy’s money bought and a developing body that just wouldn’t quit, Keri had soon started circling with a new group of friends. By the beginning of sophomore year,
Keri had left Terry in her social dust, and she hadn’t been forgiven. Joe’s relationship with Keri had been the only thing to ever come between him and his twin.

And that’s why he’d come to Terry first. “Aren’t you even a little curious about how she turned out?”

“No.” She pulled a soda from the fridge and popped the top without offering him one—never a good sign. “She broke your heart
and now, almost twenty years later, she wants to capitalize on that and sell you out to further her career. That tells me all I need to know about how she turned out, thanks.”