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“You might make an exception in cases like this,” she burst out, sitting across from him on the sofa.
“I’m a tough old bird. My hide’s just about bullet-proof.”
She handed him the plate with his sandwiches and chips. “How long will it take for it to heal?”
“Another month or so,” he said with obvious distaste. “The bone has to knit back properly.”
She stared at his leg again. “Are you wearing a cast?”
“No. The bone’s not broken clean through. But it aches all the time, and I don’t walk well. There’s a lot of me for that bone to support.”
Her eyes ran up and down him quickly. “Yes, there is,” she agreed.
“I really do need a place to stay,” he said over his coffee. “It’s not easy for me to get around in this condition. Surely even in this little town, people will be able to understand that. I don’t care about gossip, but I imagine you do.”
“Yes,” she agreed, glancing at him warily. “Andy’s going to go right through the ceiling, regardless.”
“Let me handle Andy,” he said generously. “Man to man, you know.”
That didn’t quite ring true, but perhaps she’d misjudged McCabe. She hoped so.
“Won’t you be bored to death staying in Redvale for a whole month?” she asked as she finished her sandwich and washed it down with coffee.
“If I didn’t have anything to do, I might,” he agreed. “I don’t have another book due for six months, and I was between assignments, so I took a job here in town.”
She stared at him with dawning horror. “What job?”
“Didn’t Ed tell you?” he asked pleasantly. “I’m going to edit the paper for the next month while he goes on vacation.”
Chapter Three
Wynn felt as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. She simply stared at him.
“Edit the paper?” she echoed. “Ed’s paper? My paper? You’ll be my boss?”
“You got it,” he said pleasantly.
“I quit.”
“Now, Wynn...”
“Don’t you ‘now Wynn’ me!” she said, setting down her coffee cup with a loud crack. “I can’t live with you and work with you for a solid month and stay sane!”
He lit a cigarette and watched her with an odd, quiet smile. “What’s the matter, honey, afraid you won’t be able to resist seducing me?”
She went scarlet and started to jump to her feet. Unfortunately, in the process, her knee hit the tray and knocked it off onto the floor. Bits of ham and bread floated in a puddle of coffee at McCabe’s feet while he threw back his head and laughed uproariously.
Her slender hands clenched at her hips and she counted to ten twice.
Before she could think up something bad enough, insulting enough, to say to him, the phone rang. Gritting her teeth, she grabbed up the receiver.
“Hello!” she said shortly.
There was a hesitation and a cough. “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 spent her life avoiding his father...and now, McCabe. She’s independent, she doesn’t need him. And who else is there?” he added.
She stared blankly at the half-made-up page. “At his age, there must be a woman or two.”
“No.”
She looked up. “How do you know so much about him?”
“I helped raise him, remember? He used to hang around my house as much as he stayed at his own. We’ve kept in touch all this time.” He glanced at her over his glasses and smiled. “I always wanted to be a war correspondent, you know. But I had a family, and I didn’t feel I had the right to take the risk. McCabe’s shied away from permanent relationships for much the same reason, I imagine. Rough thing for a woman to take, having her man on the firing line most of their married lives.”
Wynn had thought of that, but she wasn’t admitting it. Neither was she admitting how many newscasts she’d chewed her fingernails over before she stopped watching them altogether, or the kind of worrying she’d done about McCabe over the years. He shouldn’t matter, of course, he was only her guardian.
“Wynn, are you listening?” Ed asked shortly. “I said, I’ve still got a hole on the front page. Go call the fire chief and see if they’ve had any fires overnight, okay?”
“Sure thing, Ed.”
The hectic pace kept her from thinking about McCabe any more until quitting time. The phones rang off the hook, people walked in and out, there were additions and deletions and changes in ads and copy until Wynn swore she’d walk out the door and never come back. She threatened that every Tuesday. So did Ed. So did Judy. So did Kelly and Jess. It was a standing joke, but nobody laughed at it on Tuesday.
At five o’clock, the pages were pasted up and Kelly was driving them the thirty miles to the printer. The wreck Kelly had covered earlier took up a fourth of the front page. It had been a tragic one involving people from out of town, two carloads of them. Wynn was sad but involuntarily relieved that no one from Redvale had fallen victim. It was harder to do obituaries when you knew the victims.
She dragged herself in the door at a few minutes past five, weary and disheveled and feeling as if her feet were about to fall off from all the standing she’d done. She already missed the air-conditioning at the office. She didn’t have it at home, and it was unseasonably hot.
“Is that you, Wynn?” McCabe called from the kitchen.
“It’s me.” She’d forgotten for an instant that he was here, and her heart jumped at the sound of his deep voice. She tossed aside her purse and paused to take off her suede boots before she padded in her hose onto the tiled kitchen floor.
He glanced up from the counter where he was perched on a stool, making a chef’s salad.
“Long day?” he asked, glancing down at her feet.
“You ought to know,” she returned. “Can I help?”
“Make a dressing, if you don’t have a prepared one.”
“What’s the main course?” she asked, digging out mayonnaise and catsup and pickles.
