Roomful of Roses

She looked away from the banner headline to the accompanying story. “WAR CORRESPONDENT INJURED.” There was a small, very dark photo of McCabe and she strained her eyes to see if he’d changed much over the long years, but she couldn’t even make out his features. She read the copy. It stated that McCabe had been hurt while covering a story, and there was some speculation as to whether the incident was connected to the deaths of the two French correspondents that had been reported earlier that week. According to the story, McCabe had been roughed up and had a torn ligament in one leg and a trace of concussion, but he was alive.

“It doesn’t say where he is now,” she murmured.

“Uh, I was afraid you’d wonder about that. Be kind of hard to miss him, of course,” he mumbled.

She stared at him. Her mind was only beginning to work again after its shock. “Hard to miss him?”

“Yes. When you walk in your front door, that is,” Edward volunteered. “Big man...”

“He’s at my house?” she burst out. “What’s he doing at my house!”

“Recuperating,” he assured her. “Well, the motel’s closed down for remodeling. Where else could he stay?”

“With you!”

“Nope,” he replied calmly. “No spare room.”

“He could sleep on the couch!”

“In his condition? Couldn’t ask an injured man to do that,” he said.

“I could,” she replied coldly. “I can’t have McCabe in the house alone with me. Katy Maude’s not due home for several more weeks, she’s just getting over her heart attack, and she couldn’t take the excitement of constant arguing.”

“You and Katy don’t argue,” he observed.

“But McCabe and I do,” she reminded him. “Constantly. On every subject. And Andy will go through the ceiling!”

“Oh, him,” Edward said, dismissing the other man with a wave of his hand. “Andy’s one of those liberal city fellows. He won’t think a thing about it.”

“Are we talking about the same Andrew Slone?” she asked. “My fiancé, who went on local television to protest a theater advertisement in the Ashton Daily Bugle because it showed a woman’s bare bosom?”

Edward looked at her over his glasses. “Hmm. You might have a problem there, sure enough.”

“You set me up,” she accused. “You invited McCabe here.”

“Well, he suggested it,” he admitted. “Called to ask if we’d seen the story in the paper, mentioned what bad shape he was in...I knew you wouldn’t mind,” he added with a grin. “After all, he’s your guardian.”

“Guardian! My tormentor, my inquisitor, my worst enemy, and you’ve put him under my own roof!’ she wailed. “Why didn’t you send him to Katy Maude’s house?”

“Because there’s no one in it,” Edward said reasonably. “He can hardly walk at all, Wynn,” he reminded her. “How would he get along?”

“He’s a reporter,” she ground out. “He’s lived on pure nerve for so long that he’d probably survive without water on the desert! Doesn’t his mother live in New York now? Why didn’t he go stay with her?”

“She left the country when she found out he was coming back from Central America,” Edward laughed. “You know Marie, she’s scared to death to let him get a foothold in her house. He’d have the servants fired and the house remodeled in two days’ time.”

“Not my house, he wouldn’t,” she muttered. “Marie always did find excuses to hide out from his father and from him.”

“He’s hurt,” he reminded her. “Poor wounded soldier, and you’d turn him out in the cold!”

Her full lips pouted at him. “You don’t know McCabe like I do,” she argued.

“He wants to meet your fiancé,” he continued. “He’s concerned about your future.”

“He wants to dictate it, that’s why,” she growled, standing. “Well, he won’t get away with it. He’s not going to wrap me around his thumb!”

“Where are you going?” he called.

“Off to war,” she called back. “Where’s my elephant gun?”

“But the paper—”

“I’ll read it later,” she grumbled.

“Our paper,” he thundered. “The one we won’t get out if you don’t get in here and help me make it up!”

“I’m taking my lunch hour late,” she told him. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

Edward threw up his hands. “An hour. We’re already an hour behind schedule and she’ll only be gone an hour. Judy, I tell you...”

But Wynn wasn’t listening. She was running for her car, with sparks flying from her green eyes. If McCabe thought he’d been through a war, he hadn’t seen anything yet!

Chapter Two

Wynn could sense McCabe watching her even as she opened the unlocked door of the white frame cottage behind Katy Maude’s monstrous Victorian house on Patterson Street. She stormed in, her hair flying, her step sounding unusually loud on the bare wood floors and area rugs.

“McCabe!” she yelled, tossing her camera, purse and sweater onto the chair in the hall. But only an echo greeted her.

She turned to go into the living room, which she’d redecorated the year before with western furniture and Indian rugs. She stopped short just inside the doorway and caught her breath.

McCabe was sitting quietly in her big armchair by the fireplace, one big foot propped on the hassock, wearing leather boots and a safari suit that would have looked comical on any native of Redvale. But it suited his dark tan, his faintly tousled thick blond hair, which needed trimming badly.

All the years rolled away. He looked just as Wynn remembered him, big and bronzed and blond—larger than life. His craggy face looked battle-worn, and the light eyes that were neither gray nor blue but a mixture of the two narrowed as they roamed boldly over her slender body.

She stared helplessly, trying to reconcile her memories with the man before her. He seemed to find her equally fascinating, if the searching, stunned expression on his usually impassive face was anything to go by.

“You’re older,” she said in a tone that was unconsciously soft.

He nodded. “So are you, honey.”

Casual endearments were as much a part of him as his square-tipped fingers, but the word caused an odd sensation in Wynn. She didn’t understand why, and she didn’t like it.

“What are you doing here?” she asked reasonably.

He raised both eyebrows as he lifted the smoking cigarette in his hand to his chiseled mouth. “My plane was hijacked,” he said with a straight face.

She pursed her lips. “Try again.”

“You don’t believe me?”