Roomful of Roses. Diana Palmer

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СКАЧАТЬ “Uh, Wynona?”

      “Andy!” she gasped, glaring at McCabe. Her hand twisted the cord nervously. “Oh, hi, Andy, how are you?”

      “Ed said you’d gone home for lunch,” her fiancé said suspiciously. “He said you had a visitor. A guest,” he emphasized. “Wynona, have you gone crazy? McCabe may be your guardian, and an older man, but he’s a bachelor and we’re not married and you simply can’t let him stay there!”

      His thin voice had gotten higher and wilder by the second, until he was all but shouting.

      “Now, Andy,” she said soothingly, trying to ignore McCabe’s smug grin, “you know how it is. McCabe’s been injured and he’s not even able to walk!”

      “Then how is he going to get to bed? Are you going to carry him back and forth!”

      She started laughing. She couldn’t help it. First McCabe appeared out of the blue with bullet wounds, and now Andy was hysterical....

      “Wynona?” Andy murmured.

      “Have you got a wheelbarrow I could borrow?” she asked through tears.

      “A what? Oh, I see.” He chuckled politely, and then sighed. “I’m jumping to conclusions, of course. But I remember McCabe. Can I help feeling threatened?”

      “I’m engaged to you,” she reminded him, furious at McCabe’s open eavesdropping.

      “Yes, I know,” Andy said, softening audibly. “It just hit me sideways, that’s all.”

      “McCabe is my guardian,” she said, glaring at McCabe, who was watching her with a wicked smile. She looked away quickly. “Anyway, he’s old.”

      “He’s a year younger than I am,” Andy murmured.

      “I didn’t mean that!” Wynn twisted the telephone cord viciously. “It’s press day, Andy, I’m just not thinking straight.”

      “It’s just another Tuesday,” her fiancé said shortly. “I don’t know why you make such a big thing about Tuesdays.”

      “You’d have to be a reporter to understand, I guess,” she said generously. “Look...”

      “Invite him to supper,” McCabe said sotto voce.

      She gaped at him. “It’s Tuesday!” she burst out.

      “I heard you the first time!” Andy shouted.

      “I’ll cook,” McCabe said simultaneously.

      “Don’t be absurd, you can’t even stand up!” she threw back at him.

      “Are you implying that I’m drunk?” Andy asked, aghast.

      “Not you—McCabe, McCabe!” Wynn ground out.

      “McCabe’s drinking, and you’re there alone with him?” Andy gasped.

      Wynn held out the receiver and cocked her head at it threateningly.

      “Don’t do it,” McCabe advised. “I can manage to get something together before you come home. I’ll sit down and cook.”

      She eyed him warily. The old McCabe was arrogant and commanding, not pleasant and cooperative, and she was immediately suspicious. “You wouldn’t mind?”

      “No,” he said. “I’d love to see Andy again. Invite him over. About six.”

      She felt as if she were walking obligingly into a shark’s mouth, but it had been years since she and McCabe had spent any time together. Perhaps his experiences had changed him. Mellowed him. She was even in a forgiving mood. Didn’t he seem different?

      “Andy, come to supper at six,” she said, holding the receiver to her ear.

      “Supper?” Andy brightened. “Just the two of us?”

      “McCabe’s here, too,” she observed.

      “We’ll just ignore him,” Andy said. There was a pause. “He isn’t going to stay for the wedding, to give you away?”

      “If he does, we’ll let him be bridesmaid,” Wynn said darkly.

      Andy giggled. “That’s cute, McCabe in ruffled satin...”

      She started laughing and had to say a quick good-bye and hang up before she really got hysterical.

      “Bridesmaid?” McCabe murmured with pursed lips. “Remember that old saying, Wynn—I don’t get mad, I get even?”

      “I can outrun you,” she reminded him.

      “Yes. But I’m patient,” he returned. His eyes narrowed and ran over her slender body in a way that made her frankly nervous. “I can wait.”

      “I’ve got to get back to work. After supper,” she continued, moving toward the kitchen to get a towel to mop up the spill, “we’ll discuss your new lodgings.”

      “Suits me,” he said obligingly.

      That really worried her. McCabe never obliged anybody.

      She went back to work with a frown between her wide-spaced green eyes. It deepened when she saw Ed.

      “You didn’t mention that you were taking a vacation,” she said with grinning ferocity. “Or that your brother-in-law was coming to stay in your house. Or that—”

      “Have a heart, could you say no to McCabe?” he groaned.

      “Yes! I’ve spent the past seven years doing just that!”

      “He’s like a son to me,” he said, looking hunted as he paused in the act of pasting up the last page of the paper, the front page, with a strip of waxed copy in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. “He’s been shot to pieces, Wynn.”

      She straightened wearily and the fight left her. “Yes, he told me.”

      “I just hope he’ll give himself time enough to heal completely before he goes back down there.”

      She felt the blood leaving her face. “You can’t mean he’s talking about going back?”

      He shrugged. “You know McCabe. He loves it, danger and all. It’s been his life for too many years.”

      “He could stay home and write books!” she threw back. “He’s a best-selling author, why does he need to risk his life for stories someone else could get?”

      “Ask him.” He cut off another column of copy and pasted it around another story in neat pieces, just right for a two-column headline. “I think it’s the lack of an anchor, Wynn. He doesn’t have anyplace that he feels wanted or needed, except at work.”

      “His mother loves him.”

      “Of course she does, but she’s СКАЧАТЬ