Fahrenheit (15 page)

He dipped his head and covered her mouth with his. Her lips were soft, just as he remembered them to be, and her mouth…that mouth could drive him crazy with words and with action. He let his tongue slip inside, caressing her, learning every crevice of her mouth as if he possessed the right to own it so completely. He did possess the right. Whether she knew it or not he planned to marry her. That thought alone should have sent him running scared, but it didn’t. His mother had always told him when he met the right woman he would know without any doubt, without any reservation he would just know. And with Eve he knew. She was the one woman he wanted forever with. She was the only woman who intrigued him, excited him, aroused him just by simply being—and she didn’t even know it. She didn’t know the power she had. It was like a sword that could cut a man in two or save his life.

He pulled her closer to his body, tightening his hold on her as he slipped one hand in her hair and pulled her head back, exposing her neck to his mouth where he placed succulent kisses trailing down the soft contours of her delicate column before regaining possession of her mouth. She moaned and he answered her by deepening the kiss that much more.

When he pulled away they were both breathless, both clinging to each other as if they could never let go.

“You have to stop kissing me like that,” she whispered breathlessly in his ear. “I might forget how to breathe if you don’t.”

“I know how to administer mouth to mouth,” he grinned. She laughed a husky laugh.

“I bet you do. But what if my heart stops before you can breathe into me?”

“I know CPR too.” He let his hand slide up and down her back.

“Well then I guess I have nothing to worry about.” She kissed his cheek before pulling out of his embrace. He reluctantly let her go.

“Can you stay for dinner?”

“Yeah. The chief let me leave early.”

“Oh, Adam. I hope you’re not getting in too much trouble…”

“No. It’s not that. I have a lot of hours logged and overtime is stacked high on my time card right now. The budget won’t allow for more. So, I have the rest of the week off.” He smiled at her. “I wonder what I’ll do with it.”

“Dinner,” she caressed his arm. “For starters. Then I can figure out how to help you enjoy your time off.”

“Yeah? What did you have in mind?”

“A little time at the beach could be fun. Marine Land, not Flagler. And maybe a trip into Orlando for a little shopping.”

He laughed. “Shopping isn’t exactly what I want to do with you, Eve.”

“I know, but I need to see if I can find a comforter to match these drapes.” She pulled him into the bedroom, where only an air mattress sat taking up space.

“Didn’t you just buy a comforter?”

“Yes,” she nodded. “But it doesn’t match the drapes—and I love these drapes. See,” she pulled a deep wine red set of drapes from the packaging. “I like these because they have the energy efficient backing. It blocks out light, keeps down on noise and keeps the heat and cold from seeping through the windows into the room. But I can’t find bedding to match up here.”

“I can take you down to Orlando.”

“I still have the rental. I can drive.”

“I have a truck. If you buy a lot we’ll have more room with my truck.”

She shrugged. “Good point.”

“Now, about the beach. If we go will you be wearing a bikini?” He wiggled his eyebrows.

“I might be so inclined; if you’re good.”

“Yeah;” his voice lowered. “And what are you planning to do if I’m bad? Spank me?”

“Nah, you’d like that too much.” She took his hand and led him out of the bedroom. “I’ll think of something.”

Mitch loved the thrill of the story. Clandestine meetings with sources was the thing that really got his blood pumping through his veins. It had been a long time, too long, since he had really had this type of action. He was well aware that people still thought he was the big cheese in reporting, but his absence from places like New York or D.C. had put a dent in his negotiating power. There used to be a time when he could walk into a CNN studio and everybody knew his name, bent over backwards to cater to him, and wanted him for the story. Now he was lucky if the receptionist knew him. Some of that was just the change in staff, but the rest of it was the change in his status. He was just a small town news man now. Sure,
Beyond Flagler
had some killer opportunities for big stories, but the paper was nothing in comparison to the bigger New York players. He needed to get back there.

His work in Egypt had pushed him back into the sites of some of the New York power players, but, and there was always a but, the real story had been the pictures. “She comes with you or you don’t come at all,” Derrick Owen, head of
National Affairs
—a network of print and television media that rivaled the
Times
and CNN—had told him point blank what he thought of him. Back in the day just being Mitch Decker had been enough. Now, he needed pint sized Eve McGregor to go with him to get through that door.

He liked Eve. She was cute, would probably be a wildcat in the sack if she ever gave up that virgin ‘till marriage stance she had adopted; and she was, by far, one of the best photojournalist he had met in years. He knew from the moment she had interned at
Beyond Flagler
that she had potential to be great and so he snatched her up. He made sure she was assigned to him during her internships. He made sure she felt a strong, highly compelling reason, to come back and work in the small town south when, had she been thinking bigger, she would have taken her portfolio straight to the
Times
and they would have given her a job in a heartbeat. Instead, he had assured her that the two of them, his stories and her pictures, would make a knockout combination. She had known of his work, knew of the awards he had won, the stories he was so well-known for, and she jumped at the chance to work with the “Mitch Decker.”

What he liked most about her wasn’t just her good looks. He could shag the receptionist and be done with it. No, what he liked was her talent, and her willingness to get the story. She had put herself in the thick of some heart-stopping dangerous situations just to get a photograph, and he loved that. She wasn’t a sissy photographer. She was a hardcore photojournalist who was going places. He just needed her to help him get back to where he wanted to be before she realized just what opportunities she had awaiting her.

This story was going to help him get back. Forget the fires. Those were small fries compared to what he was working on now. That apartment complex bomb had nothing to do with the recent string of fires. If he could uncover the truth, expose a bigger story…God, he would be back on top so fast it would make their heads spin. He was ready. He needed this. When the cops pushed the bomb off on the arsonist he knew they were wrong. He figured they probably knew it too, so he poked around trying to find out if there was a secret investigation going on. To his surprise, there wasn’t one. Maybe he could crack this story wide open and show up how stupid the local authorities were all at the same time.

He thought he had hit a dead end until he got a call from an unidentified woman. She agreed to meet him, to divulge what she knew, but she wouldn’t do it in daylight. She wanted safety, and to her that meant meeting under the pier under the cover of night. He shrugged it off. He had, without a doubt, met stranger people in far more dangerous places, at far more dangerous hours of the night for a story. She seemed harmless.

So when he drove to Flagler Beach and parked he had no reservations. His blood was pumping hard. His adrenaline was rushing. This was going to be the story to put him back on top. Well, he would of course need Eve. That was still a requirement for the job he wanted. He was close to getting her to be able to think the decision to leave Palm Coast was hers. He needed her to believe, even if only for a little while, that he was doing her a favor by taking her with him, and not the other way around. The only complication right now was that firefighter. Before him, Eve would have never thought twice about an opportunity like this. When he mentioned going to London and covering the riots she was ready to go. The only thing that stopped them was that the paper wouldn’t go for it. They wanted him to stay behind and cover the fires. As if the fires were the big story! Nobody outside of the area even cared about the fires. They had been burning for months and not one stitch of national coverage had arisen. He had to get out of there. He had to come back. And he had to do it this year. His window of opportunity was closing—fast—and he couldn’t have that.

“Mitch Decker?”

“Yeah,” he looked at the short, slender woman in front of him. She had bleached blond hair with a hint of black roots showing. He resisted the urge to grin. She was attractive enough—except for the hair. She should have gone a shade of blond darker because the bright, almost yellow, color she had just wasn’t working with her alabaster skin tone.

“I’m the one who called you.” She pulled a cigarette from the pack, put it up to her lips and was ready to light it up.

“Do you mind not doing that?” Normally he would put up with certain things when trying to get a story, but he couldn’t stand the smell of cigarette smoke. Since he was standing downwind from her he was sure he would get the brunt of it if she lit up.

“I’m just nervous.” She slid the cigarette behind her ear.

“I can understand that, but you said you wanted this to be secret, so let’s not draw attention to ourselves.” He wanted to tell her meeting under the pier wasn’t exactly the best source of cover, but she had insisted on the location and since he wanted the story more than her safety, he didn’t bother. “Do you have a name? Something I can call you?”

“I don’t want my name in the paper.”

“You’re a confidential source,” he nodded. “I promised you that on the phone.”

“Right,” she looked around nervously. “You can call me Jill.”

“All right Jill. Call me Mitch.” He tried to put her on first name basis, make her trust him. He was an expert at getting people to trust him. He had to be an expert. Getting the story depended on breaking down barriers.

“I told the cops what I saw, what I heard, but they just ignored me. They said I must have been wrong, but I wasn’t.”

“Tell me,” he tried to keep his tone comforting. She was already twitching like a jittery bug he didn’t want to make her run scared before he got what he needed.

“I saw a guy. I hadn’t seen him before. He was big, and he was kind of cute so I watched him for a little while. He was hovering around building one hundred so I put on my shoes and went out. I was going to try to flirt with him. I saw him walk around to one of the empty apartments. I thought maybe he was a worker after that because he had this bag with him and the apartment was empty, but yet he got in. Anyway,” she looked around nervously. “When I got close to the door I heard him on the phone and he said something like, “Are you sure this is the right building. It won’t kill her if it’s not;” and that is when I got scared. I backed away and went back to my place.”

“Did you call the cops?” From what he had heard there were at least two bombs, one was in a building near the pool area and the other in an apartment within building one hundred. His source told him the one near the pool was nothing at all, it was more of a flash type bomb, but the one in building one hundred had been powerful. Hell, it had completely taken out building one hundred, nearly leveled building two hundred, and building six hundred, which was on the other side of the leasing unit, which was the only thing separating building six hundred and one hundred, it took half the roof off that one too. His source told him that most of the damage to other buildings came from the debris from building one hundred. That had to have been one powerful bomb to cause the damage it had. Eve got lucky because her unit was in the middle of building two hundred and down on the first floor. Had she been in a corner unit, and on the top floor, she probably wouldn’t have made it out if the fire crews and officers hadn’t gone door to door trying to get everybody out.

She shook her head no. “I thought about it. I wasn’t sure that I should. I mean I could have just been hearing things wrong. But later that morning, once the front office opened, I went down to the office and told them I saw somebody in there. Not long after that we all got jolted with the emergency evacuation. I knew then that it was the guy, and he had been planting a bomb. He was trying to kill somebody.”

Mitch ran his hand along his jaw. Who could possibly have been that important living in that complex that warranted a bomb? A bullet was the norm, unless whoever hired the man wanted to make a statement to somebody. This was getting good, but he needed more. He needed something he could put in the story and go with it.

“But the real kicker is I saw him again. I hadn’t seen him before that morning, but I saw him again just the other day. I had to think about what to do and then I saw your article in the paper next to that picture of the firefighter and I knew I could tell you.”

Mitch resisted the anger he felt from the fact that she had mentioned the picture, and the firefighter as the main focus of his story. At some point he would have to get rid of Eve or she might just take his glory from him. For now, he needed her. For now, he would make her think everything he was doing was to bring out the best in her, to get her to the top, but once he got what he wanted he would have to do more than just drop her. He would have to ruin her—otherwise she might just ruin him.