Starting from Scratch Page 11

  At the end of the month, she told Rocky she was taking Friday off in order to turn it into a three-day weekend. Her intent was to surprise Henry and the girls by whisking them off to Walt Disney World in Orlando. Rocky had insisted on lending her his father’s private plane and paying for the accommodations at the Disneyland Hotel.

  She didn’t argue.

  The trip was hard on Henry physically, revitalizing emotionally. Being Henry, he’d soldiered on without complaint, pretending not to be as tired as he was. Like her, he wanted this to be a memorable outing for Andrea and Beth.

  The entire time they were at Walt Disney World, Beth hung on to his hand as if someone had dropped a tube of superglue between them. Her ten-year-old enthusiasm bubbling up, she dragged her father off first in one direction, and then another, wanting him to see the same exciting things that she did.

  He saw them through her eyes and loved it.

  He loved it all, even the lines. Because he was with the three people who mattered most in his life and he was all the richer for it.

  Elisha could see her brother’s pleasure, his satisfaction in his drawn face. Though she knew the trip was tiring for him, she honestly felt that this was a great deal better for him than staying home, keeping a death watch.

  In contrast to Beth’s exuberance, Andrea was almost eerily quiet, observing it all like a section of background scenery. It was easy to see that she was torn between denial and dreaded acceptance of her father’s fate. Having fun almost made her feel guilty.

  But, because it meant so much to Henry, the girl did her best.

  They all did.

  Pretending for one another, Elisha noted. Pretense was all they had. That, and the moment.

  They spent two nights at the Disneyland Hotel in a major suite. Rocky had insisted on that, too. She smiled to herself, the only genuine smile since she’d swung by early Friday morning to pick the three of them up and take them to the airport. In the limo that Rocky had provided. There was no doubt about it. Rockefeller Randolph was one in a million.

  Too bad that all the good guys were either taken or gay, she thought. If Garry had displayed half the thoughtfulness, half the sensitivity that Rocky did most of the time, she would have proposed to him on their first date. But there were no princes in her world. No one to ride up on a white charger to whisk her away to his castle in the sky. That was something she’d come to terms with years ago. But being subjected to Rocky’s generous spirit inexplicably made her ache for what she once had believed was possible.

  Dammit, there she went again, thinking of herself. She wasn’t the major player here, Henry was. She was just a lesser, supporting character. And she was going to be as supportive as she possibly could be.

  Elisha looked at her brother sitting beside her on the plane. After three days, they were finally on their way home. Henry looked wan. Maybe she should have made the minivacation for only a day or a day and a half at the most. With each passing day, his strength left him a little more, dribbling away like tears of heartbreak. She didn’t want to be the cause of any more depletion.

  She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “Was the trip too much for you?”

  Sitting in the seats directly opposite them, Beth had fallen asleep more than fifteen minutes ago, her head leaning against Andrea’s arm. Andrea sat perfectly still, her eyes staring straight ahead at her father and yet, through her father. Her face was expressionless. She looked like an ice sculpture.

  Andrea worried Elisha.

  “It wasn’t too much for me,” he assured her, stopping to take a breath in the middle of his words. “Nothing’s too much for me as long as I spend the time with all three of my favorite girls.” His mouth quirked in a fleeting smile. “Thanks for doing this for me.”

  She moved her fingers in the air, as if to stir away the thanks.

  “You don’t have to thank me, Henry. I wanted to do this. I’ve been meaning to get away and visit the Mouse for some time.” And then she lifted and lowered her shoulders in a halfhearted shrug. “But you know how it is. Time just had a way of getting away from me.”

  He turned his head to face her. “Yes, I know how it is. And I can say this to you. Don’t let it,” he said with feeling, though it was hard for him. Someone was shooting arrows into his stomach. Large, pointy, stinging arrows. “Don’t let time slip through your fingers, Lise. Don’t retreat from life. And, above all, don’t live it through the books you work on.”

  “I don’t,” she protested, then lowered her voice when Andrea looked in her direction. She thought of the two books she had worked on last and then laughed at the idea of vicarious living. “Besides, I don’t exactly see myself as an aging sleuth or a gungho ex-commando, scaling the sides of villas in Switzerland,” she said, mentioning both Sinclair Jones’s and Ryan Sutherland’s most famous characters.

  Trying to picture her as one or the other, Henry started to laugh. Almost immediately he began to cough, clutching his abdomen.

  Her entire body was on alert as fear scissored through Elisha.

  “Can I get you anything?” she asked, ready to summon the steward that Rocky employed on board. “Water? Um—”

  Words dried in her throat.

  Helpless, she was utterly helpless and she hated it. Henry was right in his assessment. Somehow, without fully realizing just when it had happened, she had slipped off to the sidelines. There she had allowed life to whirl madly out of control around her while she handled one literary emergency after another. In the meanwhile, the big picture, her life, just went on evolving without any thought to it on her part, without any intervention on her part whatsoever.

  That had to change. But later. Not now. Now belonged to Henry.

  Getting himself under control, determined not to allow the sharp pain he felt to overwhelm him, Henry waved back her concern.

  “No, I’m fine. Really,” he added, trying to muster more feeling into his voice because Andrea was watching him with wide, frightened eyes. “Really,” he repeated, smiling at his oldest daughter. “Just drew in a little air and saliva, that’s all,” he explained. “Went down the wrong way.”

  Exhaling, he settled back in his seat once more and allowed Elisha to fuss over him for a moment because he knew she needed to. He smiled as he watched her adjusting the blanket that she’d thrown over his legs. “I’m not some infirm old man, Lise.”

  “I know that,” she said sharply. “Can’t a big sister fuss over her little brother once in a while?”

  “This would be the once, not the while,” he teased.

  Elisha didn’t much feel like teasing back. Not when all this adrenaline was coursing through her veins like molten lava flowing down the mountainside from an erupting volcano.

  Sitting back, she looked at him. “Maybe you should take Monday off,” she suggested. When she saw the protest rising to her brother’s lips, she quickly headed it off. “After all, it’s not like they’re going to fire you for skipping a day.” And then she smiled at him. “You’re too important to them.”

  “They’ll get along fine without me.” He raised his eyes to hers and added softly, so that Andrea could not hear, “You all will.”

  “No,” she replied as fiercely as she could without waking Beth, “we won’t.”

  There was nothing but kindness and understanding in his eyes. He remembered how he had felt when Rachel had died. Like the world had ended. But it hadn’t. It went on. It was something Elisha and the girls would learn, too. “You’re going to have to.”

  She stiffened her shoulders. “Don’t tell me what I have to do,” Elisha retorted, then she softened, fussing with the blanket again. “Just because you’re not feeling well right now, Henry, doesn’t mean you get to boss me around.”

  “So if I ask you to thank Rocky for me for all this,” he bantered, “you won’t do it?”

  She blew out a breath and then laughed lightly. She’d already thanked Rocky. Several times. But this time, it would be coming from Henry. Rocky w
ould appreciate that. “That I’ll do.”

  Henry settled back, a wistful expression slipped over his face. He wasn’t going to see his girls grow up, wasn’t going to see them fall in love. Wasn’t going to see them get married. Wasn’t even going to be able to see that happen for Elisha.

  He turned his head to look at his sister’s concerned face. “He would have made a great guy for you. Too bad he’s gay.”

  She laughed, really laughed, the tension breaking for a moment. It was uncanny how much they thought alike. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  CHAPTER 18

  “What the hell makes you think that you have the slightest idea about what goes on in a black-ops world?” Ryan Sutherland demanded as he strode into her office without so much as a knock on her door. He slammed the same door in his wake.

  The vibrations, or maybe it was the gust of wind he’d created, made the remainder of her cold coffee slosh dangerously in her mug. Had her cup been full, it wouldn’t have stayed that way one second into his dramatic entrance. And the pages she’d spent half the morning working on, reading and rereading because her mind insisted on wandering instead of absorbing, would have been rendered a disconcerting shade of deep brown.

  Elisha was just hanging up the telephone receiver after a lengthy forty-five-minute conversation with Sinclair. Though she loved him dearly, both on the page and off, he was, until Sutherland had been tossed into her life, the most taxing of all her authors. Her part of the conversation had consisted of trying to reinflate the man’s suddenly roadkill-flat self-esteem.

  Between talking up Sinclair’s flatlining ego and sparring with some very dark thoughts about her brother’s swiftly deteriorating condition, Elisha felt completely drained. There wasn’t an upbeat, friendly bone left in her body. Certainly not any words that might remotely lead a person to believe that she was capable of sustaining that mood.

  The last person she felt like taking on right now was Ryan Sutherland. But wishing him away wasn’t about to work. Glancing at her cup to make sure no damage had been done, she then raised her eyes to her intruder. Better to end her silence than allow his fuming to continue.

  “Because I have expertise and an imagination, not necessarily in that order,” she said, answering the question he’d just shouted at her. Sporting what appeared to be a week’s growth on his face, Sutherland looked more the part of an angry backwoodsman than an author who regularly occupied the first slot on the New York Times best-seller list. He also acted the part of the aforementioned backwoodsman. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you how to knock?” The question came out sounding more tart than she’d intended, but she wasn’t sorry.

  Sailors at sea watching an approaching squall were privy to more sunshine than she saw now on Sutherland’s face. At the mention of the female contributor to his gene pool, the man’s expression had gone from highly annoyed to a place she had no way of describing.

  “My mother didn’t teach me anything,” he informed her angrily.

  His voice seemed to be coming from a deep, dark place. It occurred to her that she had absolutely no knowledge of his background. All she knew about Ryan Sutherland was that he was forty-eight and had been a Navy SEAL. Speculation had it that at one time or another, one of the alphabet-soup government agencies, one that wasn’t widely known by the public at large, had used him as a covert operative. Others said he’d hired out as a mercenary for several years.

  But as to Sutherland’s origins, if he had any family, or what he did to unwind, none of that was common knowledge to her. She’d been remiss, Elisha suddenly thought, upbraiding herself. She knew everything there was about her other authors—their birthdays, their marital status, what teams they followed and what they liked and disliked, but nothing about Sutherland. But then, Sutherland had been shoehorned into her life at a time when her emotional world had been set on its ear, and he hadn’t exactly been a font of information himself.

  Besides, the man irritated the hell out of her.

  “Sorry to hear that,” she finally murmured. Rallying, she flashed a somewhat less-than-sincere smile. “Then let me be the first to tell you, doors are for knocking on if they’re closed.”

  Elisha was surprised to see something like a half smile emerge on Sutherland’s lips. They were sensual, she caught herself thinking. The man had great luck when it came to women, she’d recalled hearing. Part of it had to be that smile. It certainly wasn’t because of his charming manner.

  Looking at it, she couldn’t tell if the smile was sarcastic or if he was amused. If it was the latter, it was undoubtedly at her expense—as in she’d forgotten to wipe away traces of the jelly doughnut that had been her breakfast from her mouth, or worse, from her cheek.

  Trying not to be self-conscious or obvious, Elisha brushed her fingers first along the outline of her lips, then against her right cheek. She bided her time before she brushed them against the left one.

  She got her answer in the next moment. “According to what you edited, you would have been blown away in your first five minutes as a black-ops agent.”

  “Maybe not.”

  For the life of her, Elisha had no idea where the retort or the feeling behind it had come from. She was as suited to his former life as she was to being the lead ballerina in the Bolshoi Ballet.

  Less.

  But there was something very galling about Ryan Sutherland’s brand of supremacy. Try as she might to ignore it, exposure to Ryan raised a very real, overwhelming desire within her to put him in his place.

  “Lady, there’s no way that you could have survived in my world. You couldn’t have handled it.” Ryan turned the idea of her existing in his world over in his mind and then laughed. “Hell, you couldn’t have even handled the recreation part.”

  “Drinking and whoring?” she heard herself asking. “I’d take a pass on the whoring, but I can hold my own drinking.” It wasn’t something she had even remarked on once she was out of college. What was it about this man that suddenly made her want to compete with and best him?

  Ryan’s eyebrows rose like dark crescents on his forehead.

  Amusement, it was definitely amusement that she saw there, Elisha thought. He was laughing at her, damn him. If it wouldn’t have meant defeat, she would have marched out of her office into Rocky’s to demand that he place Sutherland with some other poor soul as his editor. But that would have been crying uncle and she wasn’t about to give Sutherland that satisfaction.

  “Poker,” he counted.

  Lost in her own thoughts, she wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly. She stared at him. “Excuse me?”

  This time, the smile went a little deeper into her. Like a second layer of skin toning. “We played poker to ease the tension.”

  Poker. Memories came flooding back. Memories like one endless, hot summer when her father had taught both her and Henry the fine art of the game. Taught them that winning at poker wasn’t just about luck but about skill. Mostly about skill. His intention had really been to teach Henry, but her sense of competition had won her father over and he’d taught her, as well. And she had become the better player because it meant more to her to win than it did to Henry.

  Henry had always been more noble than she was.

  She looked at Ryan now, thinking how much she’d like to wipe some of that smugness away. “I play poker.”

  The amusement on his face grew. He leaned over the desk, close enough for her to taste his words as he asked, “Sure you’re not confusing it with gin rummy? Or old maid?”

  Something went very rigid inside her. Paula had been right. The editor’s last words as she’d stormed out of Rocky’s office had been to peg Sutherland. A male chauvinist pig. Not very original, but damn accurate.

  “Poker,” Elisha repeated with feeling, her voice low, her eyes never leaving his. “Five-card stud, Texas hold ’em, Omaha, five-card draw, you name it, I’ve played it.” Atlantic City with its casinos had been a favorite place for short, usually profitable vaca
tions, when she’d had the time for them.

  The smirk on his face was a thing of the past as Ryan regarded her with genuine interest.

  Looks were obviously deceiving, he thought. At least in her case. He’d been away from his old world too long. Otherwise, this wouldn’t have been a surprise to him.

  “You’re intriguing me, Max.” He cocked his head slightly, still making up his mind. “Or are you just lying to impress me?”

  She rose from her chair, five foot seven of indignation in small, stacked black heels. “In the first place, I don’t lie—”

  Everyone lied. But she looked so sincere, he decided to play along. “Ever?”

  “Ever,” she retorted with feeling. “And in the second place, I have absolutely no desire to impress you, Mr. Sutherland. The only thing I want from you is for you to reach your full potential as a writer.”

  She was back to insulting him, and Ryan banked down a flare of annoyance. “I have.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  He blew out a breath, struggling to keep his cool.

  “And those notes you scribbled down in the margins of my manuscript—‘take this a step further,’ ‘what’s he thinking at this point?’ garbage like that—” it took effort to keep his language clean when he wanted to vent, but one thing he had schooled himself in was restricting his profanity to the company of men “—that’s going to make me a better writer.” It wasn’t so much a question as a jeer.

  “In a word? Yes.”

  Pacing around her office to let off steam, Ryan laughed at her. It was either that or breaking his word to himself about the use of profanity in mixed company.

  His steps brought him back to her desk where he stood in silence and glared at her for a long moment. “Are you up for a little bet, Max?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’ll bring you in on my poker game. I get together weekly in the city with a few of the men I used to work with.” Ryan could just hear some of the comments he was going to get for even suggesting the idea. But Murphy and Finn would understand. Conway would grumble, but he was a decent sort. This was going to be for a good cause. To teach this annoying female her place. “And if you hold your own there—” He congratulated himself on saying that with a straight face.