“Sent who away?”
“Loreen, of course. But I’m not going to say any more. It isn’t my place. You take that picture over to your Uncle Roy and ask him to explain.”
“Uncle Roy?”
“I’ll bet you fifty dollars that picture got put in the donation pile on purpose. So it was out of the house. You go ask him.”
“But-”
“I’m no gossip. A man should clean up his own messes, in my opinion, and this one’s been a mess for nearly thirty years.”
With that, she hung up.
Eve stared at the receiver in her hand, utterly mystified. “It’s a picture,” she said to it, and hung it up. When she did so, it beeped, signifying that a call had come in while she’d been talking. She pressed the playback button.
“Eve, it’s Mitch.” He sounded agitated. She’d been right, then. He’d probably driven past a wreck on the freeway. “I’m sorry, but I have to cancel our plans tonight. Something’s come up with the deal, and it’s important I figure out the best way to fight this fire. I’m looking at flights to New York right now. I’ll fly up there on my own dime if I have to. I don’t know if…whether you…” A sigh of frustration. “I feel like shit. I’ll do my best to straighten this out. Goodbye.”
The answering machine winked off, leaving Eve sitting in her best tangerine dress with no evening, no answers and most important…no Mitch.
Eve Best, you’re not going to take this sitting down.
Within sixty seconds, she’d grabbed her bag and car keys and was backing the car out of the driveway. If he booked a flight online, she had maybe twenty minutes while he scrolled through his options. Add ten to that if he checked out of the hotel. If the traffic gods smiled on her, she could get to the Ritz before he walked out.
The time for sitting around and waiting was long gone, if it had ever existed. She’d already decided that she was tired of living a life on the surface, endlessly talking about things that mattered instead of actually taking a risk and experiencing them.
Well, she was going to take a risk now. If Mitch got on that plane, something deep inside told her he wouldn’t come back. Okay, so he hadn’t responded quite the way she’d expected him to when she’d brought up a future together. She could handle that. Hadn’t she done a whole show on the caveman mystique? She and the girls had even turned it into a catchphrase: the “cave moment.” That crucial juncture in a relationship when a guy pulled away and went into his cave to think or flee or whatever they did when they faced the naked truth of a woman’s feelings. Sometimes he never came out. And sometimes he had to be coaxed out with the warmth of a good fire.
Eve had plenty of fire, and she wasn’t about to let Mitch fly out of her life without getting one more taste of it.
Twenty-three minutes later, she pulled up to the front doors and leaped out.
“Hey, aren’t you Eve Best?” The valet looked about twenty, so Eve pulled out all the stops in the smile she turned on him.
“How sweet of you to recognize me,” she said. “Would you mind looking after my car for just a moment?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, blinking at the sheer wattage of the smile, and she tossed him the car keys and a tip.
“Thank you, sugar.” God, she was turning into her grandmother. But hey, whatever worked.
Two steps inside the lobby, she realized the hotel was hosting some kind of computer electronics convention. Crowds of men wearing everything from iPods to Ralph Lauren milled on the carpet. She wove between them, heading for the front desk-and arrived in time to see Mitch turn away, tucking his credit card into his wallet and picking up the handle of his rolling suitcase.
“Mitch!”
He blinked as she rushed up to him. “How did you get here?”
“Drove. Fast. Tell me you didn’t check out.”
He glanced over his shoulder at the mob pressing itself toward the harried clerks behind the counter. “I have a ten o’clock flight to LaGuardia. Just as well. This place is a madhouse.”
“Ask them to reinstate you.”
“Are you kidding? My room’s probably already gone.”
She thought fast. “Then come home with me.”
His face looked tired-not quite defeated, but getting there-and her heart squeezed. “I can’t, Eve.” She took his arm and guided him toward the door. He didn’t seem to notice. “My boss talked to the executive committee and they want to change the terms of the deal. Apparently they want you to be the next Letterman.”
“Letterman doesn’t do daytime.” She smiled her thanks to the valet and Mitch, who obviously thought she was taking him to the airport, got into her car. She’d let him think that. For now.
“I know. They want you to move to New York, and they’ll create a late-night show for you.”
Sliding behind the wheel, she said, “We already agreed I’m staying here.”
“Yes, but the deal memo isn’t signed yet. My instructions are to get you to agree to the new terms, or else. So I’m going to New York to meet with them personally. It’s a long shot, but I have to convince them they’re shooting themselves and the network in the foot.”
“You don’t need to go all that way.” She sped up the on-ramp to the freeway.
“I feel I do. Nelson said he’d set up a phone call, but that won’t cut it. I have to do this in person to have any chance of convincing them.”
One exit. Two. The next one was hers.
“It’s a helluva trip, though.” He rubbed the back of his neck, as if stress were making his muscles seize up. “There aren’t any nonstops at this time of night, so I have to route through North Carolina and Philly. I get in at some ungodly hour in the morning, but I had to take what I could get. I just hope I’m coherent.”
The things he was willing to do in order to keep his word-or at least the network’s word. Talk about above and beyond. That meant something, didn’t it? Surely he couldn’t be motivated strictly by loyalty to the network? There had to be more to it than that.
“I have a better idea.”
“You do? Hey!” He sat up as she took her exit. “This isn’t the way to the airport. Do you want me to miss my flight?”
“You don’t need to kill yourself doing this, Mitch,” she told him. “You don’t need to fly to New York when we have a network feed right at the station. What’s the point of technology if not to use it?”
He stared at her, and then his gaze narrowed, as if he was remembering something. “You have a video linkup. I saw it the first day I was there.”
“Right. We can beam your pitch right to CWB’s head office. And I happen to know a damn good executive producer who could run, say, a kick-butt presentation with a voice-over and graphics if you wanted. We’re all in this together, right?”
She pulled into her driveway and shut the engine off. He was looking at her as though she had just announced the cure for cancer.
“I knew there was a reason I was crazy about you,” he said.
She grinned. Maybe her tangerine sundress wasn’t going to be wasted tonight. After all, it was the color of fire.
17
“YOU’RE RIGHT. It was a total cave moment. All men have them and all women have to learn to deal with them.”
Jane brushed the excess powder off Eve’s nose and turned her face toward the light with the gentle fingers of long friendship.
“I agree.” Nicole, with her ever-present clipboard in her lap, pulled her legs up under her and watched the two of them in the dressing-room mirror. “When a woman tells a guy she thinks it’s more than a fling, his first instinct is to run.”
“But last night…” Eve’s voice trailed off, and she caught Jane and Nicole exchanging an amused look. The station’s dressing room had become the equivalent of a girls’ clubhouse, and she’d just told them everything. Except about the puzzling photograph. That was private-and she wasn’t sure she wanted to dig any more, anyway. Grandmother thought it was nothing, so it probably was. She had bigger fish to fry.