If Winter Comes (10 page)

Eddy was his nickname
for the city editor, and if Eddy said okay, she had no choice. But she got her
purse and camera together with a sense of foreboding. “A press conference
where?” she asked carefully.

“At city hall, where
else?”

She froze, desperately
searching her mind for an excuse, any excuse to get out of it. Another meeting.
There had to be another meeting or an interview or a picture—oh, God, there had
to be something!

“I said, let’s go,”
Peck said, taking her arm. “You haven’t got an excuse. I need some pix, and I
can’t handle a camera with this finger,” he added, holding up a bandaged right
forefinger. “I cut it on a sheet of bond paper, can you imagine?” he sighed.
“Worse than a knife cut.”

“Can’t you take
Freddy?” she asked hopefully.

“What’s the matter?” he
asked with a sideways glance. “Afraid of him?”

She knew exactly what
he meant, and she wanted to admit that she was terrified. She almost put it
into words, but just at the last minute, she stopped herself.

“I’m not afraid of
anybody,” she said instead. “My father said it was better to go through life
giving ulcers than letting other people give them to you.”

“Wise man,” he grinned.
“On a trip to the Orient, did you say?”

It was just the
question she needed to start her talking, and to take her mind off Moreland.
They were in the elevator at city hall before she realized what Peck had been
doing.

“You did that on purpose,”
she accused gently.

He glanced down at her,
cocking his hat at an angle over his pale brow. “Who, me?”

“Yes, you, you lovely
man.”

He grinned at her.
“Like to adopt me?”

“No. You’re too tall.”

He squatted down a
little. “How about now?”

“Lose a hundred pounds,
and we’ll talk about it,” she assured him.

The conference room was
crowded, but she didn’t spend one second looking around for Bryan Moreland. She
took a seat beside Peck in the back section and lowered her eyes to her camera,
keeping them down resolutely while she pretended to fiddle with light settings.

“You don’t think you’re
going to get me a shot from here, do you?” Peck asked as he sat down beside
her.

“I’ll use the
telescopic lens,” she said under her breath. All around them, news people were
milling around. A couple of them, radio reporters whom she recognized from
other stories, called to her, and she managed a frozen smile and a tiny wave of
her hand in response.

“What in hell is the
matter with you?” Peck asked. “You look like you’re trying to get smaller.”

“Will you please shut
up?” she begged. His voice was loud, and it carried. “Please sit down and
pretend we aren’t acquainted.”

“But we work for the
same paper,” he argued.

“Not for long, if you
keep this up,” she whispered back.

“You
are
scared
of him!”

“Shut up,” she said
through her teeth, making a prayer of it as Bryan Moreland’s big, husky form
came into view. He swept the room with his dark, cutting gaze, and she felt the
impact of it like a physical blow when his eyes stopped on her averted face.
She stared straight ahead, ignoring him, while her heart felt as if it were
going to jump out of her body.

She didn’t look at him
again until he was at the podium, with the City Council and the City Planning
Commission gathered around the conference table with him. She recognized Edward
King and Tom Green immediately.

“What’s this all
about?” she asked Peck in a muted whisper.

“The airport,” he
replied with a grin. “You made somebody take notice with that run-in with King,
didn’t you?”

She shifted restlessly
and forced herself to listen to Moreland’s deep curt voice describing plans for
the new airport and the expansion of services it would mean by national
airlines. For the first time, the city would have an international airport; a
tribute to its rapid growth.

But when he finished,
the land purchase still hadn’t been discussed, and she noticed that the mayor
didn’t throw the floor open for questions, as he usually did at the end of a
press conference.

She got her things
together and started to dart out the side door, but Bill Peck left her, calling
back that he had to talk to Tom Green, and Carla got trapped between the nest
of chairs and a group of news people passing tidbits of information back and
forth. The next thing she knew, she was looking up into Bryan Moreland’s dark,
quiet eyes.

Her heart dropped, and
she could feel her knees trembling. She let her gaze fall to his burgundy tie.

“Good morning, your
honor,” she said with a pitiful attempt at lightness.

“Five days, two hours,
twenty-six minutes,” he said quietly.

She looked up, feeling
all the dark clouds vanish, all the color come back into her colorless world as
she realized the meaning behind the statement.

“And forty-five
seconds,” she whispered unsteadily.

He drew in a hard, deep
breath, and she noticed for the first time how haggard he looked, how tired.
“Oh, God, I’ve missed you,” he said in a voice just loud enough to carry to her
ears and no further. “I wanted a hundred times to call you and explain…I know
what you must have thought, and you couldn’t have been further off base. But I
got busy…Oh, hell have supper with me. I’ll try to put it into words.”

The need to say yes was
incredible. But she was cautious now, wary of him. He could hurt her now,
because he could get close, and she wasn’t sure she was willing to take the
risk a second time.

He read that hesitation
and nodded. “I know what you’re afraid of. But trust me this once. Just listen
to me.”

She shifted and let a
long breath seep out between her lips. “All right.”

“I’ll pick you up at
six.”

She nodded her assent
and looked up, hypnotized by the strange expression in his eyes.

“Don’t look at me like
that,” he whispered deeply. “There are too many cameras in here.”

She knew what he meant
without any explanation, and her face colored again.

“Reading my mind?” he
asked with a wicked smile as his eyes dropped to the soft, high curve of her
breasts. “Read it now.”

She pulled her coat
tight around her and tried to breathe normally. “I…I’ll see you later, then,”
she managed weakly.

He chuckled softly as
he moved to let her pass by him. His eyes didn’t leave her until she was out of
sight.

She was like a teenaged
girl on her first date, waiting for him that night with her hair hanging loose
over her shoulders, the single green velour evening gown she owned clinging to
her slender curves like a second skin, bringing out the soft tan of her bare
arms and shoulders.

She couldn’t help
feeling nervous. What was he going to expect from her now? The fact that he’d
missed her hadn’t really changed anything. And what about her? What was she
willing to give? What did she truly feel?

In the midst of her
mental interrogation, the doorbell screamed into the silence, and she jumped
just before she ran to answer it.

He walked in by her
even as she opened the door, his scowl fierce, his eyes dangerous.

“Hard day?” she asked
softly.

“They’re all hard,” he
said, turning to look down at her. The anger drained out of his hard face as he
studied her soft curves with an expression that grew warmer, possessive, as the
seconds throbbed past.

His massive chest rose
and fell heavily under his dark evening clothes, his ruffled silk shirt. “Oh,
honey,” he said finally, deeply, “that is one hell of a dress.”

“Do you really like
it?” she murmured inanely, speaking for the sake of words, while her eyes told
him something very different.

“I hope you haven’t
gone to any great pains with your makeup, little girl,” he said finally, moving
closer, “because I’m about to smear the hell out of it.”

Her lips parted under a
rush of breath while he pulled her against his big body, molding her slowly
against him.

“It’s been too long
already,” he said in a harsh whisper, bending his dark head until she felt the
warm, uneven pulse of his breath against her trembling lips. “I can’t get that
evening out of my mind, Carla….”

His mouth hurt. It was
as if the hunger he felt made violence necessary, and his big arms bruised in
their ardor while he took what he needed from her soft ardent mouth.

“Sleep with me,” he
whispered against her mouth. “I need you.”

“Bryan…” she breathed,
drawing back as far as the crush of his arms would allow.

“God, don’t make me
wait any longer,” he growled unsteadily. “I’m so hungry for you I can hardly
stay alive for wanting you. Carla, little Carla, why are you holding back? You
won’t regret it.”

She swallowed and her
eyes closed. “Bryan, there’s never been a man,” she said in a haunted voice.

She felt his arms
stiffen around her, felt his breath catch.

“What did you say?” he
asked.

She drew a steadying
breath. “I said, I’ve never slept with a man.”

“But, at the farm…My
God, woman, you were on fire…”

Her eyelids pressed
hard together as a wave of embarrassment swept over her, and her pale cheeks colored.
“I know. But it’s still true.”

There was a long pause,
and then his big, warm hands came up to force her face out of hiding, so that
he could search it and her misty eyes.

“It was the first time
for you…touching, being touched?” he asked finally, and there was a new
tenderness in his voice.

All she could manage to
do was nod. Her throat felt as if it had been glued shut.

The hard lines in his
face relaxed, smoothed out. He looked at her as if he’d never seen a woman
before. His dark eyes went down to her soft body, lingering on the high young
curves that his fingers had touched so intimately.

“I remember looking
down at you,” he said absently, “and there was an expression on your face I
couldn’t understand. Now it all makes sense.”

She chewed on her lower
lip, vaguely embarrassed, because she remembered that moment, too—vividly.

He turned away, ramming
his big hands into his pockets with a heavy sigh. “Well, that tears it,” he
said roughly.

She stared at his broad
back, her eyes drawn to the thick, silver-threaded hair that gleamed like black
diamonds in the overhead light.

“I’m sorry,” she
murmured inadequately.