Sizzling (4 page)

* * *

LORI WAS STARTLED to find a woman lurking on Gloria's front
porch. In this upscale part of Seattle, the houses were mansion size,
the lawns perfect and no one lurked.
"Can I help you?"
Lori asked as she slipped her key in her pocket and crossed her arms
over her chest. While the woman was perfectly well dressed and seemed
normal, Lori had a bad feeling she couldn't explain.
The woman
smiled at her. "Hi, I'm Cassandra. Cassie to my friends. I'm a
reporter. I recently wrote an article on Reid Buchanan."
No
need to define which article. In recent weeks there had only been one
anyone would remember. "An article, huh? Is that what you're
calling it?"
Cassie smirked. "Oh, so you're one of
his little fans."
Lori might have a stupid crush on Reid,
but she wasn't about to admit it. Besides, this wasn't about her
feelings, it was about using one's position to try to destroy an
almost innocent— well, innocent— person.
"Do
I look like one of his little fans?" she asked bluntly. "I'm
actually just a person who wonders about today's standards of
journalism. There's a difference between reporting and being mean.
You got away with what you wrote because you're a woman. If the
situation had been reversed, the article wouldn't exist."
Cassie
shrugged. "Maybe, but I'm getting great play out of the story.
It's all true. He was lousy in bed, but as I said, that's just my
opinion. Others don't seem to agree. Is he home?"
"I
have no idea what you're talking about," Lori said, staring at
the woman and refusing to even glance at the door.
"I
can't find him anywhere and I don't think he left Seattle. There
aren't that many places he could go to hide."
"What
about with one of his fans?"
Cassie laughed. "Reid
commit to one woman? I don't think so."
Which was kind of
how Lori saw him, but she was going to ignore that for now.
"You're
trespassing on private property," she said. "Please
leave."
"Sure. No problem. Oh, by the way, do you
spend much time on the Internet?"
"What? Not
really."
"Then you probably haven't seen
these."
Cassie passed her several photos. Lori glanced
down automatically, then wished she hadn't.
There were about a
half-dozen glossy images of Reid having sex. Each picture showed him
with the same woman. The pictures were crude, explicit and grainy.
But they made the point— he was a man who loved women.
Doing
her best not to react, Lori passed them back. She felt like she
needed to wash her hands or something. "Thanks, but not before
breakfast."
"These are online. Even a ten-year-old
could download them. Are you sure you want to protect him? We should
stand together against men like Reid Buchanan."
Despite
the sick feeling in her stomach, Lori shook her head. "I'm not
interested in standing with you on anything."
She waited
until the woman left before she headed inside. The sick feeling
didn't go away. What horrible pictures. Did Reid know about them? Had
he posed for them? She wanted to believe the pictures had been taken
without his knowledge, but how could she be sure? She knew almost
nothing about him. Wanting him to be one of the good guys meant
absolutely nothing. Based on how he lived his life, he was most
likely the guilty party.
That should take care of her little
crush. It wouldn't, of course, but it should.

* * *

"YOU NEED TO WALK," Lori said, hanging on to her
patience with both hands. "Just across the room and then we can
be done."
"I'm done now," Gloria snapped. "It's
enough that damn physical therapist pushes me. At least he knows what
he's doing."
"You either do your physical therapy
and get better, or crawl back in bed and die."
"You
keep threatening me with death," Gloria snapped, "and I'm
still standing."
Lori stared at the old woman hunched
over a walker. "Barely. Don't you want to get strong enough to
kick my ass?"
"What I want is to be rid of you. Get
out. Get out now!"
The last couple of words were nearly a
scream. Lori ignored them and patted the bed. "Eight steps,"
she said cheerfully. "Seven if you don't shuffle."
"I
don't shuffle," Gloria told her icily.
"Looks like
shuffling to me."
"I loathe you with every fiber of
my being," the old woman said.
"I'm sure you do. Now
walk."
Gloria slowly, painfully, made her way across the
study. When she reached the bed, Lori steadied her as she lowered
herself onto the mattress and slowly lay down.
"Great
job," she said, careful to keep her voice neutral. She wasn't
gloating and didn't want Gloria to think she was. At least their
workout together was a distraction. Lori wanted to stay busy enough
to forget the photos she'd seen earlier. Speaking of busy…
She
opened the tote bag she'd brought with her and set several catalogs
on the table.
"You have a lot of choices," she said,
fanning out the pages. "DVDs, books on tape, your basic
shopping, although all my catalogs are discount, which I'm guessing
you don't do."
Gloria looked from the shiny pages to her
and frowned. "What
are
you talking about?"
"Something
to fill your day. Currently you're staring at these four walls, being
cranky and, frankly, getting on my nerves. You need to do something
else. Get interested in a soap, read, listen to a book, watch a
movie. I would normally add 'visit with family' but you seem to be
avoiding them."
Gloria stared at the window. "I have
no idea what you're talking about."
"Interesting.
Kristie told me that one of your grandsons stopped by early yesterday
evening. Walker. That he'd called first and you'd told him not to
come, but he'd shown up anyway."
The information had
stunned Lori. After all, in her mind, Gloria had been the abandoned
elder of the family. But first the old woman had refused to see Cal
and now she'd told Walker to go away. As much as Lori hated to admit
it, Reid might have had a point when he'd said his grandmother was a
little difficult.
Gloria narrowed her eyes. "This is none
of your business. You mention my family again and you're
fired."
Lori pretended to yawn. "I'm sorry. What?
Did you say something?"
"Don't think I can't,"
Gloria told her. "One call to the agency that employs you and
you're gone."
Lori shook her head. "You don't want
me gone. I'm tough on you and you respect that. I care about you and
you need that. You can't be mean enough or crabby enough to scare me
away, and that's new for you. So here's the question. Why are you
trying so hard to live your life alone?"
Gloria pointed
at the door. "Get out. Get out now."
Lori was about
to argue when she felt a queasiness in her stomach. She nodded and
left, heading directly for the kitchen. By the time she hit the back
hallway, she was shaking and feeling close to fainting.
A
quick glance at her watch told her she'd gone too long without food.
She knew better, but between the reporter's ambush and her morning
workout with Gloria, she hadn't noticed the time.
She walked
into the kitchen only to find the one person she most didn't want to
see. Reid.
He looked up from the thick stack of papers he was
reading and smiled at her. "I heard shouting. Should I be
worried?"
She was already pretty weak, what with her
blood sugar crashing, so the last thing she needed was a visceral
reaction to a useless, possibly horrible, man.
But there it
was— a sudden fluttering of her heart, a trembling of her
thighs that had nothing to do with needing to eat and everything to
do with needing a man.
But why did it have to be this
one?
"We're good," she said and walked to the
refrigerator, where she'd stashed a bottle of juice. But before she
got there, he was on his feet, next to her.
"Lori? What's
wrong? You look like crap."
"Gee, thanks."
"I'm
serious." He touched her cheek. "You're sweating. And
shaking."
The light brush of his fingers was nothing.
Less than nothing. Yet she found herself leaning into the contact and
imagining him touching her everywhere. So humiliating. She had to
remember there wasn't an actual person inside. That he was nothing
more than a pretty shell. A shell who liked to take pictures.
"I
have low blood sugar. I'm crashing. Go away, I'll be fine."
He
ignored her much as she ignored Gloria's demands that she go away.
"What do you need?"
Oral sex?
No, wait. That
wasn't right. "Juice. Food."
"Done."
He
pushed her into a chair and then got her a glass of orange juice. She
gulped half of it, then let the high-sugar liquid sit on her tongue
for a few seconds before swallowing.
The results were nearly
instantaneous. The trembling stopped, her body relaxed and she
started to feel almost normal.
"Better," she said,
looking at him. "Thanks. Go away."
"That's
nice," he said sarcastically. "Who crapped on your
day?"
"Honestly? You. There was a reporter waiting
for me outside your grandmother's front door this morning. She wanted
me to confirm you were staying here, which I didn't. Just to put a
little sparkle in my schedule, she showed me some pictures she'd
downloaded from the Internet. Guess who was the star?"
His
expression tightened as he swore. "I thought they were
gone."
"You knew about them?" She couldn't
decide if that was good or bad.
"They were taken about
six years ago," he said grimly. "Without my knowledge. This
woman I was with wanted proof to show her friends. One of them
suggested she get a little more publicity, so she posted them
online."
He sounded embarrassed and mad and frustrated.
Lori wanted to believe he wasn't to blame, but it was difficult. "How
have you been living your life?" she asked. "This sort of
thing doesn't happen to normal people. The pictures, the reporter.
You need to get your act together."
"I'm trying. But
stuff like this makes it impossible. I even got a court order that
the pictures be removed from the Web site. But they're still showing
up on other sites. I don't want to talk about it anymore. You feel
okay now?"
The change of topic caught her off guard.
"Yes. I have to eat something."
"To maintain a
higher blood sugar?"
She nodded. "Chocolate would be
best. Preferably from Seattle Chocolates."
"You're
kidding. That can't be good for you."
"It's not."
Like him.
"But it's my fantasy and I can have it if I
want to."
He shook his head and muttered something under
his breath. "Okay. Let's see what
real
food we've
got."
He opened the refrigerator again and began pulling
out ingredients. Shredded cheese, some cooked chicken, salsa and
large flour tortillas. Food she didn't remember being in there
before.
"Did you go to the grocery store?" she
asked.
"I went online and they delivered. There wasn't
anything in this kitchen."
At least the Internet was good
for something, she thought. "Gloria's meals are delivered fully
cooked. I bring in my own stuff."
He shrugged and dug
around for a large frying pan. "Now we have real food."
"What
are you doing?"
"Making you a quesadilla."
She
wasn't sure which shocked her more— that he knew how, or that
he was making one for her. "You can cook?"
"I
have a few specialties. I'm very multitalented."
"I
brought my lunch."
He glanced at her. "No, that's
not it. Let me think. Oh, yeah. How about 'Reid, thanks so much for
making me food and saving me from death.'"
She smiled
reluctantly. "You have a well-developed sense of the
dramatic."
"I'm used to being adored."
She
was sure of that. Although some of his fans had turned against
him.
She wondered what it would be like to be so much in the
public eye, then decided it couldn't be a good thing. Complicating an
already difficult situation was the fact that Reid had a real habit
of making lousy choices when it came to women.
As he heated
the pan and assembled the quesadilla, he asked, "How's it going
with Gloria?"
"Great. She's making
progress."
"She's a challenge," he told her.
"You can say it."
"Not even under threat of
torture."
He raised his eyebrows. "So I was right.
Admit it."
"I won't. I still believe her family
helped make her the way she is. She's alone and lonely."
"She's
crabby, difficult and mean."
"She's not mean. Not to
me."
"You don't know her well enough," Reid
said as he slid the folded tortilla onto the hot pan.
Lori set
down her empty glass and tried to find something to look at other
than the man at the stove. If she didn't distract herself, she was
afraid she'd start drooling.
It didn't seem to matter that his
character was suspect. Her body wasn't interested in the three
thousand other women he'd had sex with. It just wanted to be number
three thousand and one. How sad was that?
She picked up the
top sheet of paper from the stack Reid had been going
through.
"What's this?" she asked as she scanned a
letter from a boy wanting an autograph.
"A bunch of crap
sent over by my manager," Reid grumbled. "I let his office
handle all my fan mail, which might have been a mistake."
Lori
remembered the slams about Reid ignoring kids in need in the
newspaper article.
He flipped the tortilla. "I didn't
want to bother," he said grimly. "That's my big crime. So I
trusted others to take care of things and apparently they did a
piss-poor job. Seth's response to everything was to send a
check."
"Seth's the business manager?"
He
nodded. "I was invited to a hospital opening and didn't know.
They put me on the program and everything. That's not good."
"But
if you didn't know, it's not your fault." Wait! Was she
defending him? She resisted the need to slap herself. Didn't she
consider him useless? Hello, naked pictures. That had to mean
something.
"Tell that to the people waiting for me to
show up." He grabbed a plate from the cupboard and slid the
quesadilla onto it. "It gets worse. Some kid who was dying
wanted to meet me as his last wish. But I didn't show up. Instead he
got an autographed picture and a signed baseball."
Reid
handed her the food, then slumped down across from her. "It all
just sucks."
She was torn, both feeling sorry for him and
wanting to shake him. "You're some famous baseball player,
right?" she asked before taking a bite. The quesadilla was
perfect— hot, with melted cheese, grilled chicken and just a
hint of spice.
"Used to be."
"Then
you're in a position to make a difference on a much bigger scale than
most people. Things went bad. You can't change that, but you can fix
things. The paper mentioned some kids who got stranded with no return
ticket. Pay them back. Call the kid and go see him now. Manage your
fan mail, yell at your manager or fire him. Get involved."
Reid
stared out the window over the sink. "It's not that
easy."
Okay, now shaking him had a definite priority over
pity. "It can be. I know you were too busy with your exciting
life before, but you don't have that excuse anymore. You have a
responsibility. Be the person everyone expects you to be. Grow up.
You might surprise yourself."
"You don't think much
of me, do you?"
"No."
He gave her a
slow, sexy smile. One that gave a whole new meaning to the phrase
blown away.
If he'd shown her the slightest bit of interest,
she would have ripped off her clothes and done it with him right
there on the kitchen table.
Of course, according to Cassie's
article, Reid wasn't all that great in bed. Except she had a feeling
Cassie was lying. She had to be. Everything about Reid, the way he
moved, he teased, he spoke, declared that the man loved women. All
women.
Well, all women except her.
Reality splashed
over her like cold water. Time to end the fantasy fest. She wasn't
his type. She would never be someone he could see as appealing. If he
knew how he got to her, he would only pity her.
The thought of
that shamed her and she spoke before she could stop herself.
"Just
so we're clear, I'm not interested in you," she said coolly. "Or
anyone like you. You're no one I could like or respect."
The
words hung there in the silence. She desperately wanted to call them
back. What had she been thinking? He was Reid Buchanan— he
could emotionally eviscerate her with a couple of well chosen
words.
She braced herself for the attack as he rose and stared
down at her. But he didn't say what she'd expected.
"I
thought you were different," he said quietly. "I didn't
think you were the type to kick me when I was down. Guess I was
wrong."
And then he was gone and she was alone.
Shame
returned, but this time it had nothing to do with wanting a man she
could never have. Instead it was about hurting someone who didn't
deserve to be hurt.
She'd been trying to make herself feel
better by saying he was nothing more than an empty shell— a
pretty façade, not a real person. But she'd been wrong. Reid
was very real.
She'd been disrespectful and dismissive. Pretty
much acting the way she'd expected him to act. The way others had
acted toward her.
She'd become someone she didn't like and she
didn't know how to fix that.