Crush (23 page)

Miranda’s own face stared back at her from Box #25. Meg had used a cropped shot of Miranda’s notorious fire escape farewell photo. “Miranda Penney, Sportswriter, October–Present” ran beneath the photo.

Box #26 injected a tumult of sickening emotions into Miranda’s bloodstream. The box had a white silhouette of a head and shoulders against a black background. A big, fat gray question mark was centered over the face. “Who’s next in line?” was beneath it.

“
Psst!
has learned that 18-year-old songwriter/chanteuse Tess Cullor is the most likely candidate for the Number-26 spot,” Miranda read to herself. “Lucas’s label, Bilious Records, is trying to broker a deal with the precocious newcomer who hails from West ‘O The Mississippi. Our sources tell us that Miss Cullor has the voice of an angel and a face to match. We’re working on acquiring a photo of Lucas’s (maybe!) next flame, so keep your eyes on
Psst!
With Lucas being incommunicado, we haven’t been able to ask the man himself.”

Miranda leaned back onto her sofa and covered her eyes with her hands. “Eighteen,” she muttered. “That girl is half his age.”

Bernie clapped a hand on her knee. “I didn’t bring this over here to upset you, baby love, you know that. I didn’t want you to be surprised when you went into the newsroom tomorrow. Sully has already changed your mailbox nameplate from Penney to 25.”

“Mark McGwire was number 25, too,” Miranda said. “It’s a good number.”

“Only if you’re a baseball player,” Bernie joked. He sobered under Miranda’s pained expression. “You can’t let Meg and Dee get the best of you with this.” He tapped the Top 25 layout. “These women don’t matter. Lucas is with you.”

“Right,” Miranda said, standing up to go to the kitchen.
But for how much longer?
she wondered to herself. She opened her laptop. She looked at Lucas’s e-mail for a second before deleting it and snapping the laptop shut.

* * *

Lucas, in a plane high above the clouds, tried to speak softly to keep his fellow relief aid workers from overhearing his heated phone call with Miranda. He hadn’t heard her voice in over a week, nor had she returned any of his e-mails. He had been keeping up with her stories via the
Herald-Star Online
, and he, too, had seen
Psst!
’s Top 25 piece. It hadn’t bothered him, and he hadn’t expected it to bother Miranda as much as it clearly did.

“Have you really been with all of those women?” Miranda asked. It was eight in the morning on an overcast day in Boston. She was still in bed, curled up in a ball in one corner of it. The darkened hues of her stained glass wall bathed the room in somber light.

“I’ve been seen with hundreds of women, Miranda,” Lucas said. He hunched over the phone, shielding his head and voice from his flying companions. “That doesn’t mean that I’ve shagged them all.”

“What about Number 26?” Miranda was making herself nauseous just by talking about the feature. “Does Meg know more about your love life than you do? She certainly knows more than me. She says that you’re supposed to be at some club in St. Louis tomorrow night, to see Tess Cullor sing.”

“I hear young artists all the time.” He stroked a hand over the stubble covering the lower half of his face. “As for St. Louis, the details were only e-mailed to me yesterday. Meg LaPirahna has obviously got a connection at Bilious who relays information to her faster than my manager relays it to me.”

“What’s the band called?”

“Vera Chipmunk 5-Zappa.”

Miranda grudgingly admired the name. “That’s a character in a Kurt Vonnegut book.”

“
Slapstick
,” Lucas said. “I know.”

“She must be a very smart girl.”

“She reminds me of myself at that age. Totally driven.”

“How did you find out about her?” Miranda’s jealousies were slowly ebbing the more she learned about potential Number 26.

“When we were in St. Louis last year, one of my roadies heard Tess perform at a riverfront club called Under The Bridge. He passed one of her demos on to my label, and I’ve been asked to consider recording a duet with her, to help launch her career. The girl is very talented, Miranda, much more so than I was at her age. She’s not prefabricated. She writes and sings her own stuff, plays seven instruments and fronts the band.

“Talk to me, Miranda,” he pleaded softly. “Obviously something has happened to make you speak to me as though I were a steaming heap of donkey sh—”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she insisted sharply. “Go to St. Louis. Do whoever you want.”

“Whatever.”

“Excuse me?”

“You said, ‘Do
who
ever you want.’ Don’t you mean ‘whatever?
’
”

Miranda didn’t answer. She picked at a fraying spot on the bed sheet.

“Do you actually believe that I’m going to St. Louis to hook up with an 18-year-old girl?” he whispered.

“It’s a possibility. We both know that.”

“I had a life before I met you, Miranda,” he said patiently, “but I never knew how empty it was. I breathed life into you that night on stage, but you breathed it right back into me. I have not been the same man since you came into my life. I’m a much happier man.”

Miranda spent a thoughtful silence contemplating his words. They did little to steer her thoughts away from what most troubled her. “Is she pretty?”

Lucas hesitated. “The label says she’ll sell a million records with her looks alone.”

Miranda was surprised, and ashamed, of the strength of her jealousy.

“Would you like to come to St. Louis with me?” he asked. “If I arrange for a ticket at Logan, can you meet me in St. Louis?”

“Why?” Miranda bit. “So I can sit alone in the penthouse at some hotel while you meet with your singer? You’ll come back at dawn full of apologies, you’ll kiss me, and tell me how you just couldn’t get away.”

“Miranda,” Lucas said carefully, “I think you have me confused with someone else.”

She slapped a hand over her eyes and choked back the envy clogging her throat. “I’m sorry. Lucas, I’m…that was uncalled for. It was unfair and mean, and I’m sorry.”

“Clearly, I’ve been away too long.”

Miranda wanted to weep at the compassion in his voice. She knew she didn’t deserve it.

“After St. Louis, I’m off to Conwy to record some tracks for my next album,” he said. “Will you have any time to join me?”

“I don’t have any days off until Valentine’s Day weekend,” she said. “I took two vacation days this week.”

“Then I’ll meet you in Boston on Valentine’s Day,” he vowed. “That’s ten days off. And wear something red, or else I’ll have to pinch you.”

“Lucas?”

“Yes?”

“I miss you.”

“Then spend the next ten days replying to my e-mails,” he suggested. “This half of the Pact of the Velvet Tumescence has been sorely neglected.” When he heard her laugh, he was finally able to hope that everything would work out for the best.

* * *

Lucas had flown back to Washington, D.C., and he’d returned to the same hotel suite that he’d last shared with Miranda. He had showered and shaved and had handled all of his necessary correspondence and communications. Wearing a thick, warm hotel bathrobe, and nothing else, he lounged on the sofa and stared at the starry sky over America’s capitol.

Beneath a distant part of this same lovely sky was a woman whose eyes rivaled the jewels that twinkled at him from above. He mused on her fears and insecurities, and realized that she’d come by them honestly. Her father had disappointed her. Her last boyfriend, Jordan, had devastated her.

The fragile pieces of Miranda’s broken heart rattled within an exterior toughened by her will to hide the true depths of her pain. Her lingering wounds were never more obvious than when they made love. She never surrendered completely to him as he couldn’t help but surrender to her. She kept her soul tethered, as though it were the one part of herself she refused to share.

Miranda deserves no less than a man who will be one-hundred percent faithful, and who will love her with his whole heart, truly and for always,
Lucas thought. “I’m that man,” he said aloud. Thoughtfully stroking his chin, he sat up and set his bare feet on the floor. “Now to think of a way to convince Miranda…”

Chapter 10

Miranda tried to use two glasses filled with water to weigh down the pages of the cookbook opened in the middle of her stovetop. The glass on the right tipped over, spilling some of its contents into her cashew nut gravy and the rest onto the bright red rear burner. The resultant cloud of angry steam blinded Miranda to the chicken breasts spitting and squeaking in
dendi
on the front burner. In her effort to dissipate the steam by waving a scarcely used oven mitt, Miranda noticed flames leaping from a corner of the cookbook, which had come into contact with the red-hot eye. Conceding defeat, she used the glass of water on the left side of the book to extinguish the flames.

She turned her back to the steaming, smoldering, spitting and singed affair that was supposed to have been
vatapá de frango
, a romantic and home-cooked Valentine’s Day dinner meant to make up for the grief she’d caused Lucas on his return trip from Central America. He hadn’t mentioned her behavior again, and she was grateful for it, but she couldn’t forgive herself for having behaved like a jealous adolescent.

She took up her glass of red wine and pressed it to her sweating forehead. Cooking, no matter what anyone said, was damn hard work. Chasing down a Heisman Trophy winner was easier than stuffing a chicken breast with mortadella and wrestling it shut with a series of knots and strings that would have given Houdini a bleeding ulcer.

When the phone rang, she hurried to answer it, grateful for the excuse to leave her culinary disaster behind. She pressed the speakerphone button on her wall-mounted telephone. Bernie’s voice came through loud and clear, singing an Air Supply song.

“Why do you sing ‘I’m All Out Of Love’ every time I put you on speakerphone?” Miranda demanded as she returned to the stove, suspicious of the sudden quiet of the chicken breasts. “I really hate that song.”

“Why do you put me on speakerphone when you know all I’m going to do is sing ‘I’m All Out Of Love?
’
” Bernie countered. “How’s my little Honey Julia Child this afternoon? I haven’t seen any fire engines yet. That’s a good sign.”

“The
feijoada
came out well,” Miranda said.

“Yes, well, you’ve always had a way with black beans and collard greens.”

“I went all the way this time,” Miranda proudly stated. “I used farofa yucca flour, orange slices, and made the vinaigrette.”

“How did the entrée turn out?”

“Too well done.”

“Café Brasil begins delivering at five,” Bernie said. “Sir Lucas doesn’t have to know that you didn’t do it all yourself.”

Miranda wrapped a kitchen towel around the handle of the skillet. The plump, seasoned bundles of chicken breast she had first set in the hot skillet were now charcoal corpses. She put the skillet under cold water, and jumped back when the first droplets ricocheted at her within a cloud of thick, smoky steam.

“Are you okay over there, Miranda?” Bernie asked. “It sounds like you’re deep-frying a baby elephant.”

“I don’t suppose you have a Café Brasil menu you could fax to me?”

“Get it online. What time are you expecting Lucas?”

“Around seven.”

“Do you need any help getting dressed?”

“No, but thanks for the offer. I’m wearing red.”

“Tell, tell!”

“I’m wearing those disgraceful red boots you gave me Halloween before last.” She pressed her wine glass to her lips and smiled, waiting for Bernie to ask the next logical question.

“The Emma Peel boots!” He clapped. “What else?”

“Never you mind,” Miranda said casually.

“That’s my girl.” Bernie pretended to weep with joy. “There’s hope for you yet.”

She turned off all the burners and removed the sodden cookbook to her trashcan. “My street was closed off this morning. Only residents are allowed in. Did you hear anything at the paper today, about what might be going on?”

“I didn’t go anywhere near News today,” Bernie said. “All that murder and rape and politics gives me irritable bowel syndrome.”

“What are you doing for Valentine’s tonight?” Miranda asked.

“Well, darling,” Bernie began, “while you were off fiddle-de-deeing with Lucas Fletcher on New Year’s Eve, I was making the acquaintance of a very interesting antiques seller. We’re going to Olives. An antiques dealer and Todd English all in one night…I couldn’t have scripted a better Valentine’s Day.”

“I hope you have a good time,” Miranda said.

“Likewise, I’m sure,” Bernie responded. With that, he started singing again, and Miranda hung up the phone.

“Lost in love,” she repeated as she sat down at her laptop to call up the menu for Café Brasil. She hummed the song, her anticipation of Lucas’s arrival mounting as she selected a feast fit for a god.

* * *

Miranda, dressed in red, was lighting the candles on her dining table when her buzzer rang. It sounded in one long irritating note rather than the code of two short, one long and two short notes that she had worked out with Lucas. She blew out her match and grabbed her Manchester United sweatshirt from the coat tree before she depressed the first button on the recently installed security panel next to her front door.

The security panels were equipped with video and audio monitors and had been installed in every unit in the building to protect residents from overzealous Karmic Echo fanatics who had been inadvertently buzzed in by unsuspecting residents. Miranda’s mail had been stolen numerous times, as had the nameplate on her mailbox. All of it had eventually shown up for sale online. The nameplates had fetched a game fifty dollars each, but a postcard of a kangaroo eating a hotdog—addressed to ‘M.’ from ‘L.’ with a Sydney postmark—had sold for two thousand dollars. Coincidentally, that was the amount of bail the seller had to post after being charged with mail theft.

Miranda, keeping her own security in mind along with that of her neighbors, didn’t buzz her visitor up straightaway. “Who is it?” she asked into the intercom.

“Delivery, ma’am,” a young man in a white shirt and navy trousers said.

“Could I see your service badge?” A fake delivery was one of the oldest and simplest cons to pull off. Miranda was sure that the world’s first reporter had invented it.

The young man held a card before the camera. QWIX, Inc. was printed on it in big, blue block letters. The
Herald-Star
used QWIX, but it was easy to fake a business card. Miranda recited the phone number on the card over and over so that she wouldn’t forget it as she hurried to the phone and dialed the number. “Hi, my name is Miranda Penney,” she said before the QWIX operator could finish his recitation of the company’s long motto. “Can you tell me if you have a delivery scheduled for me tonight?”

“Ma’am?” the courier at the door said, the intercom feeding his voice throughout her living room.

“Penney, Miranda,” the dispatcher said. Miranda heard the tap dance of his fingers on a keyboard. “Yes. QWIX has you down for a hand delivery at seven. Our courier should have been there by now.”

“He’s here,” Miranda said. She brought the phone with her to the security panel and buzzed up the courier. “I wanted to make sure he was the real thing. Thank you.”

Before she unlocked, unlatched and unchained her door, she looked through the peephole to make sure the courier was alone and unarmed—that he wasn’t packing Polaroid. Satisfied that he was clean, she opened her door.

“That’s some outfit, Miss Penney,” the courier said, scanning her from sweatshirt to boot heel. “Are you expecting someone tonight?”

Miranda’s cheeks turned as red as the knee-high, kidskin boots she wore with her formless, oversized sweatshirt. “You have a package for me?”

The young man handed her a box wrapped in brown paper. It fit in her palm. She signed for it, and bid the nosy courier goodbye. She closed the door and sealed it tight before studying the little box, which had no markings. Miranda was equally excited and frightened. What if the box had come from one of Lucas’s more disturbed fans? What if there was an explosive device in it? Or a poison dart frog? It was just the right size for that.

“I’ll call Bernie,” Miranda decided. “I’ll get him to come over and open it.”

She remembered the phone in her hand, and as she raised it to dial Bernie’s number, it rang.

“Have you opened the box?”

Miranda’s skin pleasantly prickled at the sound of Lucas’s voice. “I was just about to call someone to come over and open it for me. I’m worried that it’s a black widow spider, the perfect Valentine’s gift from one of your more unhinged fans.”

“Open the box,” Lucas said.

Miranda circled her dining table. It was set simply for two, and the flames of three candles danced merrily in anticipation of Lucas’s arrival. The box sat on the edge of the table. “Where are you?” Miranda asked.

“Open the box,” Lucas repeated, a faint tremble in his voice.

“Why do you sound so funny?” Miranda picked up the box and shook it. It seemed empty.

“Because it’s winter in New England and open the bloody box, woman!” he laughed.

“Okay, okay,” Miranda said. She pressed the phone to her ear with her shoulder while she peeled away the brown paper to reveal a black velvet ring box. She released a long exhalation with, “Lucas,” on the tail of it.

“Open the box, love,” he said tenderly.

She held her breath and snapped open the tiny lid. A nervous giggle escaped her when she saw a folded piece of paper tucked into the slot that typically accommodated a ring. She set down the box and unfolded the paper. Lucas’s bold, neat lettering was on it:

Sometimes a big rock does mean something.

“Lucas?” she said curiously.

“Hmm?”

“Where are you?”

“Right outside your living room.”

She hurried to the window and tossed open her curtains as she skidded to a stop. Her jaw dropped, and the phone fell from her hand to bounce on the hardwood floor. Lucas was right outside the window, indeed. He was across the street and twenty feet off the ground, on a giant hunk of black rock that had no earthly right being on a flatbed truck blocking the street. The rock, and the man waving his cell phone on top of it, belonged on a beach in Wales under the light of an orange-pearl moon.

He pointed to his phone and she scurried to pick up hers.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said.

Her smile was so big, it hurt. “Now I know why my street was closed off today, and why there are no campers in front of the building.”

“I do my best,” Lucas said.

“Are you coming up?” She glanced at the brownstones lining the opposite side of the street. “The neighbors are starting to stare. And take pictures.”

“I have to ask you something first,” he said. “It’s very important.”

Her smile wavered. Her heart slipped into her throat.
Everything’s perfect
, she thought anxiously.
Don’t ruin it, please…

“Miranda?”

“Yes?” she croaked.

“Will you…buzz me in?”

A goofy belly laugh of relief burst from her. “Run!” she ordered before disconnecting the call. She raced to the buzzer and leaned on it until she heard his footsteps bounding up the stairs. She cracked the door open as she yanked off her sweatshirt and threw it at the coat rack, where it landed in a pool of blue at the base. She took her place by the dining table and was wrapping her hand around the neck of a chilled bottle of wine when Lucas tossed the door open.

Miranda turned with a flip of her shining hair. Lucas watched it fall softly in place around her shoulders. After kicking the door shut, he stood there, drinking in the mouth-watering vision of her. He had sprinted up four steep flights of stairs, but by no means was he out of breath. That didn’t happen until his gaze took in the full picture of Miranda.

From the top of her head to her knees she was as bare and beautiful as Eve before the fall. From the knees to the tips of her stiletto heels, she was something else entirely. Her skin seemed to glow from the fire of an all-over blush, and her hair was loose and voluminous. Her breasts were like dollops of caramel cream sprinkled with cinnamon, and they seemed fuller and jauntier than he had remembered. And her legs…her legs were twin towers of sensual elegance that beckoned him to discover the fleece-covered treasure at their convergence. The sight of her ignited him from the waist down, but her smile sent one of Cupid’s holiday arrows directly through his heart.

“You told me to wear something red.” She would have run to him if she hadn’t been sure that she would trip in her kidskin stilts and break her ankles. “I didn’t have anything to go with the boots, so…” She cast her eyes in a lingering gaze downward before meeting his once more.

Lucas quickly closed the distance between them. His hands were cold and seemed to sizzle when they touched the warm skin at her waist and her back. Underneath his long, black wool coat he wore jeans and a blue sweater, the same clothes he’d worn on their first date at Conwy, and she could almost smell the North sea air on him. His eyes searched hers, mutely conveying how much he had missed her.

He meant to speak to her, to tell her how happy he was to see her and how eagerly he had awaited their reunion, but his mouth had other plans. When he leaned in to kiss her, she sidestepped him, luring him toward the stairs. “I hope you’re hungry,” she said. She struggled to sound matter-of-fact and kept her gaze on his lips. “I sweated over a hot stove all afternoon.”

“You cooked?” His voice was gravelly. He followed her, his eyes devouring the sexy grace of her body as it climbed the first wide stair. He placed his hand low on her hip, stopping her. He liked the way her skin jumped at his touch. He was glad to know that she wasn’t the only one struggling.

“I almost burned the place down.” She turned. From her perch, she was able to face him eye to eye. She set her elbows on his shoulders and nipped at his lower lip, drawing out of reach when he tried to capture her mouth in a kiss. “I ordered in.” She gave him the full effect of her emerald and topaz gaze. “We could eat now, or—”

He tugged her roughly to him, clasping her buttock in one hand and gripping the back of her head in the other. He kissed her as though his life depended on the quality of the kiss, and she frantically peeled his coat from his body. She struggled backwards up the stairs. Her hair spilled from Lucas’s grip as he held her head to his, devouring her mouth in a kiss meant to show her exactly how much he had longed for her.