L.T. nodded. Regally. “Unfortunately, he’s not offering his name on the byline. And we have to work with what we can get.”
She whipped around to glare at Buck again. “Come on. Write it yourself.”
He only shook his head.
“You…” Evil epithets lurked right behind those lips he couldn’t wait to kiss again.
But she held them in. She sat back in her chair, regrouping. Buck could practically see her quick mind working. Cornered but still swinging, she tried again. “I can’t see any reason to pay you, if you’re not doing the writing.”
“Fine. Leave my agent out of it.”
“We will. And I’ll get someone else to write the piece. Someone really good. Mike Gallato should be available, now the Wise Brothers thing fell through. I can call him right now and we can—”
“No,” said L.T. “You’re going to write it. And you’ll do a fine job. It’ll be good for you. You need to get out in the field now and then, anyway.”
“Listen very carefully,” B.J. said in a voice that could have flash-frozen the testicles off a bull. “I’m not going to do this.” Her eyes were wild, her mouth a thin line. Two bright spots of color rode high on her cheekbones. Other than that, her face was much too pale.
Buck frowned. Had Jessica been right?
Was she sick?
He wanted to ask her for himself if she was okay. But he didn’t. B.J. absolutely refused to show weakness, anytime or anywhere. If he asked, he’d get nothing but a snarled denial. No point in going there.
She said, tightly, “Buck. Listen. I assure you. If you don’t want to write this yourself, it’s going to be no problem finding someone else, someone really…top-notch. Someone much better than I would be.”
Again, for a split second, he wavered. But not long enough that she could see it in his eyes. He was going for it. Going the whole way. And, whether she liked it or not, she was going with him.
True, at the moment, she was madder than a peeled rattler at him for roping her into this. But she’d get over it. He’d have as long as he could keep her in California to make her admit that the two of them were far from over. A big job, admittedly. But Buck Bravo was accustomed to life-and-death challenges.
“No,” Buck said. “I want you, B.J. You come with me to California and write the story. Or the whole thing is off.”
L.T. sipped his brandy and waved his cigar. “Sorry, B.J. But it looks like the decision’s been made for us.”
Three
Trapped and fully aware of the fact, B.J. stewed all the way home in the back of her father’s big, black limousine.
Looks like the decision’s been made for us, L.T. had said.
“Us,” B.J. muttered under her breath as the car hummed across the Henry Hudson Bridge. Us? She should have ripped that prize rhino head off the far wall when her father said that, just got up and ripped it off the wall and stabbed him to the heart with that big, fat horn.
For the first time, as she rode through the nighttime streets of uptown Manhattan, she actually considered quitting Alpha.
But the magazine—and her dream of running the whole enterprise someday—had been her life. She simply wasn’t ready to walk away from it.
Not yet.
Not ever.
And because she wasn’t ready to walk out, she was off to California at ten tomorrow morning.
Off to California, with Buck…
Not twelve hours later, B.J., Buck and Lupe Martinez—sleek and exotic as always in her trademark black—took off from Teterboro for Reno.
B.J. kept to herself during the plane ride. She sat at the opposite end of the cabin from Buck and Lupe, put on a pair of headphones and tried to zone out with the help of her trusty iPod. She did her best not to seethe—not too much, anyway. She composed a long series of e-mails to Giles on her laptop, instructions on how to handle the various challenges he’d be facing while she was away, notes on priorities, on whom to deal with immediately and whom he could safely ignore for a while. Between e-mails, she shut her eyes, leaned back and concentrated on letting go of her anger and frustration. Anger meant tension and tension seemed to trigger unpleasant activity in her pregnancy-sensitized stomach.
She did understand that she would have to work through her rage and get past it; it would be pretty difficult to get Buck’s story if she refused to talk to him. Besides, who was she kidding? In the next few months she’d be talking to him, anyway—about his upcoming fatherhood.
Though she’d never given a thought to having kids before, now that B.J. found herself pregnant, she’d discovered she actually wanted the baby.
Okay, so maybe she wasn’t so hot at the male/female relationship thing. She’d accepted the fact that she would probably never marry. This could very well be her one chance to have a baby and she was grabbing it—even though it was bound to wreak serious havoc on her career.
She’d manage, somehow. She had an embarrassingly large trust fund, courtesy of L.T., so money would be no problem. She’d hire nannies. The best that her nice, fat fortune could buy.
And since Buck was the dad, she probably would have to deal with him. How much would depend on how large a part he intended to play in her baby’s life.
And no, she wasn’t telling him the big news yet. No way. She needed to get through this trip with him, get the damn feature written. Until that was done, she refused to complicate the situation with him any further.
In Reno, a rental SUV awaited them. They piled their bags and all of Lupe’s equipment in the back and climbed in. Buck took the wheel and Lupe jumped right in behind him, leaving the front passenger seat for B.J.—if she wanted it. She didn’t. However, she did need to practice being civil to Buck.
So she hopped in front and sent Buck a quick, bland smile. There. Civil. Sort of. And that was certainly enough cordiality for now. He started up the car and she aimed her gaze straight ahead.
The ride to Buck’s hometown took over an hour. B.J. watched the impressive scenery roll past. Especially after they left Nevada’s high desert behind, it was gorgeous out there. The bare hills and scrubby trees gave way to tall evergreens and sharp, dramatic stone peaks. Overhead, the sky was a pale wash of clear blue. No snow, except higher up than the road ever took them, on the topmost peaks. They wound down the mountains, into the green, shady depths of canyons and then back up to sub-alpine heights, where the trees grew farther apart, white-barked and twisted-looking, and the gray ground lay littered with silvery rock.
Lupe kept up a steady stream of chatter from the back seat—about the “crystalline” quality of the light, about how she wouldn’t mind pulling an Ansel Adams and doing her own series on the Sierras in dramatic black and white.
Buck answered Lupe’s occasional questions, but other than that, he didn’t say much. B.J. kept quiet, as well. She avoided turning Buck’s way. She might be slowly allowing herself to adjust to the reality of this situation, to accept the fact that she was headed for New Bethlehem Flat whether she liked the idea or not. But she still wasn’t quite ready yet to have anything resembling an actual conversation with him.
They reached Buck’s hometown at a little after four in the afternoon. B.J. got a quick view of a picturesque mountain village as they rounded a curve. And then they were winding their way down into a valley—or really, maybe more like a big canyon. The highway became Main Street, which consisted of a strip of pavement lined with cute old-fashioned buildings, some of clapboard, some of brick, each with a jut of porch providing cover for the rustic wooden sidewalks.
Buck turned right on Commerce