“Tom. Come to bed.” Ronnie reached for his hand to tug him down, not in the frame of mind at the moment to puzzle over nuances.
“I have to take care of some business first,” he said, eluding her hand by the simple expedient of grasping the covers and flipping them over her. Ronnie found herself covered to the neck.
“Business!” She sat bolt upright, the covers spilling around her to pool at her waist, indignation in her voice.
“Remember the reporter?” He met her gaze, hesitated,
then bent to cup her face with his hands and kiss her mouth. Easing her back down onto the pillows with his kiss, he caught her hands when she would have locked them around his neck.
“Tom!”
“Let me get rid of the vultures, and I’ll be back,” he said, straightening.
“You can’t just leave me!”
“It’ll take fifteen minutes, tops,” he promised soothingly. “Then we’ll have all the rest of the night.”
Ronnie eyed him with a mixture of desire and resentment. That he could think of business when she was burning with need for him was infuriating. But he wanted her too. She knew she wasn’t mistaken about that.
“Close your eyes, think pleasant thoughts, and I’ll be right back,” he said. “Okay?”
“Fifteen minutes.” The look she gave him was militant.
“That’s all it’ll take, I swear.” He kissed each of her hands, and released them. “I’ll be back.”
He turned and walked away from the bed, scooping up his jacket on the way to the door. A moment later Ronnie heard the faint click that told her he was gone. She glanced at the bedside clock: 4:20. Fifteen minutes …
Her body throbbed with passion. She turned over, flopping facedown among the pillows, burying her face in their softness. Her limbs felt curiously heavy; her head swam.
Fifteen minutes. It wasn’t very long. She would make him pay in the most pleasurable possible way for doing this to her; she would keep him up all night.
In the meantime as she waited, she would do as he had suggested and close her eyes.
The shrilling of a phone not far from her ear awoke her. The sound went right through her head, making it ache. Blinking, Ronnie rolled onto her back, trying to orient herself as she stared up at the shadowy recesses of an unfamiliar ceiling. As the screeching continued, she groped for a pillow and flung it in the general direction of the offending instrument. Her eyes widened as Quinlan walked into view around the foot of the bed.
“Morning, Sleeping Beauty,” he said, meeting her gaze, and picked up the phone. Shirtless, he wore only charcoal-gray dress trousers. A hotel towel was draped around his neck, and one half of his lower face was covered with white foam. The other half was clean shaven.
Memory flooded back.
“Great. Thanks,” he said into the phone, and replaced the receiver.
Ronnie glanced at the bedside clock: 7:05.
“Fifteen minutes,” she growled, hitching herself up against the headboard and glaring at him as he stood looking down at her.
His mouth quirked into a half smile. “You were asleep.” He bent to pick something up from the floor. Her black T-shirt, she saw, as he tossed it at her.
“Get dressed. We need to get you back to your room. That was hotel security. They’re on their way now to escort our friends from the press out of the building.”
Ronnie glanced at her T-shirt, then realized that all
she was wearing from the waist up was her flimsy bra. Not that she minded Tom seeing her like that; in fact she wished he would do more than just look.
He moved away from the bed, pulled the curtains open to admit bright morning sunlight, then headed back to the bathroom.
Covering her eyes with her hand, Ronnie groaned. The light felt as though it had a billion sharp edges, all of which stabbed through her eyes into her skull. After a moment the worst of the pain subsided, and she lowered her hand, squinting as she fumbled with the T-shirt in her lap. From the bathroom she heard the sound of water running.
Her eyes were still not focusing properly as Ronnie pulled on her T-shirt, then swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her head hurt abominably, and swam as she sat up; her mouth felt as if it were stuffed with cotton.
“Here.” He was back, crouching in front of her, offering her two aspirin tablets on one flat palm and holding a glass half filled with water in the other. He was still shirtless, his shoulders broad and surprisingly bronzed for a blond man. His face was now clean shaven.
“Could you please shut the curtains?” She accepted the aspirin and the water with a grimace.
“Head hurt?” Amusement combined with sympathy in his voice as he stood up and obligingly pulled the curtains about halfway closed.
“Yes.” She swallowed the tablets and chased them down with a gulp of water.
When she looked up, he was buttoning up a clean white shirt. His gaze slid over her.
Ronnie braced a hand on the mattress and stood up. A virulent attack of light-headedness almost made her sit down again.
“Whoa.” He was at her side, holding on to her arm.
“I’m okay.” She shook him off when he would have helped her. Walking with great care, she made it to the bathroom.
She used the facilities, washed her face with soap and ice-cold water, found some mouthwash in his shaving kit, and rinsed her mouth, then used his brush on her hair. After that she felt marginally better. Looking at herself in the mirror, she thought she looked like a perfect example of the morning after the night before. Her face was pale, with shadows under her eyes. The ends of her hair straggled limply around her face. Her black T-shirt was badly wrinkled. At least her waist pouch, which she still wore, contained a tiny lipstick and powder compact. Unzipping it, she coated her lips with deep raisin, smoothing and thinning the color until it was barely there. She was sweeping the powder puff over her face when he tapped lightly on the door.
“You alive in there?” he asked.
“I’m coming.” Ronnie restored her cosmetics to the waist pouch, zipped it up, and opened the door. He was waiting for her, fully dressed with a red tie looped untied around his neck. From one hand dangled her sandals.
“We need to go. Don’t forget you have to give a speech in just about”—he glanced at his watch—“an hour and a half.”
“Don’t remind me.” She walked up to him and took her sandals from his hand. As she did so, a vivid recollection
of how they had been removed from her feet brought her gaze up to his. He was remembering too; she could tell by the sudden hot gleam in his eyes.
“Tom …”
“Later. Right now we have to get you into your room and ready to go to work.”
Before she could reply, he opened the door and stuck his head out, glancing up and down the corridor. Wrapping one hand around her wrist, he pulled her out into the hall, heading at a brisk pace for the stairs. Ronnie’s head throbbed, as she had to almost run to keep up. She clutched her sandals in one hand.
Despite an aching head, dry mouth, queasy stomach, and Jell-O knees, Ronnie realized that she felt happier than she had in a long time. As her gaze fixed on the broad back of the man dragging her ruthlessly after him up three flights of stairs, she also knew why:
Tom.
Chapter
16
“I
SEE YOU FETCHED HER BACK
to the hotel all right and tight.” Kenny spoke under his breath as he stood beside Tom at the back of the Banning Creek Country Club ballroom, both of them propping themselves up against the cool plaster wall and watching as Ronnie was introduced. The ballroom had been converted for the University Women’s breakfast by the addition of dozens of white-clothed tables and a long, blue-draped dais. The breakfast was sold out; the applause that greeted Ronnie was warm. Tom credited himself for that. His efforts on her behalf were paying off.
“It wasn’t her.” A woman who’d been up nearly all night drinking and carrying on had no business looking as good as Ronnie did this morning, Tom thought as she started to speak.
“What?” Kenny looked at him in surprise. The volume cranked up a notch in his voice.
“I said it wasn’t her. And keep your voice down.” If his words were abrupt, Tom couldn’t help it. Defending the lady’s reputation seemed to have become his
mission in life. He knew how Kenny’s thought processes worked. Hell, his own worked the same way, and so did those of every other man he knew. A married woman dancing and drinking at a bar with men other than her husband was a slut. Especially a beautiful, red-haired woman with a body that could stop traffic. He didn’t want Kenny, or anyone else, having those kinds of thoughts about Ronnie. Whether she deserved them or not.
“But …” Kenny was bug-eyed with surprise.
“You hauled me out of bed at two in the morning and sent me off on a wild-goose chase, buddy. It took me an hour to check out every redhead in that bar, and then I worried about it until seven this morning, when I knocked on her door. She answered, Kenny. The ringer on her phone was turned off. She’d been sleeping like a baby in her own bed all night.”
“Sheez, man, I don’t know what to say,” Kenny said by way of an apology. “I thought my information was good.”
“Well, you thought wrong.”
“I am sure sorry.”
Tom’s only reply was a grunt. Ronnie was well under way by this time, still clutching the sides of the podium with both hands, though he’d told her not to at least fifty times, and rehearsed her through gestures she could use to enliven her words instead. While he had managed to get the content of her speeches changed, her style of delivery had improved only marginally, if at all. She was still as wooden as a cigar-store Indian. Oddly enough, Tom found her ineffectiveness as a speaker endearing. It made her seem kind of—vulnerable.
His balls still ached from not giving her what she had been begging for last night. It had been a near-run thing. Even when he’d gotten himself in hand enough to escape into the hotel corridor, he’d almost had second thoughts and turned around and gone back in. But sleeping with Mrs. Lewis R. Honneker IV was neither safe nor smart. If His Honor found out—if anyone found out—there’d be hell to pay. For her as well as for him.
He’d used the time in the hall to clear his head, ease the ache in his groin, and come up with a plan for getting rid of the reporter and photographer camped out in front of her room. In the end, that had been easily done: He had called hotel security and asked that they be escorted out. Oh, not at four
A.M
., because how could Mrs. Honneker or any of her entourage know the pair was out there at that time unless one or more of them were out themselves? No, he had waited until nearly seven, and pretended he’d just then spotted them in the hall. One call, and the thing was done.
Easy.
What hadn’t been easy was reentering his hotel room after what he judged was a sufficient interval. As he had all but known she would be, Ronnie was dead to the world, all stretched out in his bed, her face buried in his pillow.
No matter how much she chose to protest, the lady had had too much to drink.
She was sleeping on her stomach with the covers kicked off. Given what she was wearing, she had looked almost naked lying there. The only part of her that was decently covered was her rear, and those denim shorts didn’t hide much of that. Looking down
at her slender, creamy-skinned body, Tom had felt the lust he thought he’d gotten a firm hold on earlier start to slip its leash.
But in the end he’d done the smart thing, the gentlemanly thing, and bedded down on the floor. This morning there’d been just enough time to get her back into her room, push her into the shower, and make sure she was dressed properly and primed with coffee and answers and able to function before they had to leave for her speech.
He had deliberately left no time for a rehash of what had passed between them during the night, although he knew he was only delaying the inevitable. From the melting looks she’d been sending his way all morning, the lady wasn’t ready to let bygones be bygones. He had thought that, without the effects of booze to fire her up and with the bright light of day putting things in their proper perspective, she might be glad to pretend the whole thing had never happened. No such luck. She was going to want to continue where they had left off, and, smart, careful individual that he was, he was going to have to turn her down.
However much he might want to take the lady to bed, starting a hot, steamy love affair with Ronnie Honneker would rank right up there as one of the stupidest things he had ever done. It would be like lighting the fuse on a stick of dynamite, holding it in your hand, then wondering why the hell your hand got blown off.
She was getting to the part about Mississippi’s children being Mississippi’s future when their eyes met. Despite his best intentions, that glowing look from clear across a crowded room was enough to make his
blood heat. Though his head knew better, the rest of him wanted to sleep with her so badly that the need to do it was almost a physical pain.
He glanced away.
“So who was your company?” he asked Kenny in a growling tone, to distract himself.
Kenny shot him a sideways, defensive glance, reddened, and shrugged without replying.
“Did you happen to give Ann a thought?” Plump, smiling, wholesome Ann was, as far as Tom was concerned, the kind of woman whom the words
wife and mother
defined.
“It was a one-time thing, okay? It won’t hurt Ann because she won’t know a thing about it.”
“Good reasoning.” Tom’s reply was sardonic.
“It wasn’t anything I planned. She—came on to me, and it just happened.”
That sounded so much like Tom’s own experience of the night before that his annoyance with his partner evaporated. Except of course, he reminded himself, he wasn’t married, and he’d had the good sense to call a halt before he’d boffed somebody who was.
But it could very easily have gone the other way.
Ronnie’s speech ended, and Tom applauded with the rest. Next came the question-and-answer session. He tensed, but she handled everything thrown at her with aplomb. When a pushy woman asked her point-blank what she thought about her husband carrying on with a prostitute, Tom got so nervous he almost jumped out of his skin. What would she say?