Temptation

“Let me see those,” she said, reaching for them just as the house lights went down.

“Too late,” he said as darkness fell.

For the next hour the best drama on Broadway unfolded before her eyes, but Callie couldn’t think of anything except those papers Jason had just destroyed.

No, she corrected. That wasn’t entirely true. She was reasonably aware of the arm he’d stretched across the back of her seat. And she was shivery from the skimming touch of his fingers on her bare shoulder. All in all, Jason was doing a bang-up job of getting under her skin tonight.

In the lobby at intermission she demanded to see the papers, piecing the two sections together to study the front page. It was a contract, all right. A very lucrative contract. Her mouth gaped when she saw the outrageous sum he was willing to pay her to star in the daytime show. It was less than he was paying Terry, but Terry was a seasoned actor with proven credentials in attracting viewers. She was an unknown who belonged on Wall Street, not some West Side soundstage. It reinforced her belief that television was too far from reality to be taken seriously.

She gazed up into eyes that were watching her perfectly blandly. “You don’t even know if I can act.”

“You can,” he said.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because for the past week you’ve been pretending to dislike me. The act was amazingly believable,” he assured her, then grinned. “At least to anyone who wasn’t close enough to look into those blue eyes of yours.”

“I wasn’t acting,” she swore.

“Want to bet?” he murmured, already leaning down to claim her lips before she could even form a protest.

Right there in the lobby of the theater, with tourists from Michigan and Texas and Ohio looking on with fascination, with dressed-up New Yorkers totally oblivious, he kissed her, slowly and methodically and convincingly. Weak-kneed, Callie clung to his shoulders. Her resistance turned to ashes, burned to bits by the incendiary nature of that kiss.

Okay, she decided when she could form a coherent thought again, maybe she did like him just a little. But she really hated herself for the weakness.

* * *

Sunday morning, after a night during which her torrid dreams had starred the infuriating Jason, Callie had just about decided she ought to be sentenced back to Iowa. Clearly she was too easily manipulated by a sexy smile and a little persistence. At some point, she had actually considered taping that contract back together just to earn another one of Jason’s devastating kisses.

The memory warmed her and made her want things she had no business wanting, especially with so many strings attached. Just as she yawned and stretched languorously, someone knocked. Since she wasn’t quite sure which of the males in her life was in possession of her key at the moment, she hopped out of bed and dragged on her rattiest old robe. She refused to give Jason the idea that she cared what he thought of her attire.

“Who is it?” she called out as she crossed the living room.

“Me,” Jason responded.

“And me,” Terry added.

“And me,” Neil chimed in.

Good grief, didn’t anyone sleep in on Sunday mornings anymore? She threw open the door and planted herself squarely in their path, as if that would bar them if they were intent on coming in.

“To what do I owe all this?” she asked.

“We were on our way out to brunch, when Jason came along and suggested we all go together,” Terry explained, not quite meeting her eyes. “Get moving, dollface. We’re starved.”

Somehow Callie didn’t believe for an instant that this could be explained away as innocently as Terry was suggesting. “You just happened to meet in the hall?” she asked skeptically.

“Cross my heart,” Jason swore.

“Ditto,” Terry said.

“Neil, you’re awfully quiet,” Callie observed. “Do you have a different version you’d like to share?”

Neil exchanged a highly suspect look with Terry’s boss, then shook his head. “Nope.”

“Satisfied?” Jason asked.

Callie supposed she was going to have to be. Based on prior experience, she knew a woman didn’t have a chance of getting at the truth if men conspired to keep it from her. Her ex-husband had kept quite a lot of truths from her. It had tarnished her views on the male of the species for all time.

“Give me ten minutes,” she said, turning away and leaving them to decide for themselves whether to wait inside or out.

When she emerged from her bedroom fifteen minutes later, she found them sprawled all over her living room furniture. Jason was settled in an easy chair, glancing through a magazine. Terry was stretched out on the sofa, eyes closed. Neil was perched awkwardly on a dainty chair meant for someone far smaller than his six feet two.

Callie gathered from the lack of clutter that Neil had spent most of the time tidying up as he did every time he walked into her apartment. Neil was compulsively neat, which probably explained why Terry retreated to her place so often. His own always looked as if it was about to be photographed for some interior-design magazine.

“Ready?” Jason inquired, glancing up. “Ah, I see we’re back to casual wear.”

Callie’s cheeks burned at the implied criticism. It was true, she had deliberately tugged on a decrepit pair of jeans that had been ripped or worn through in several places. She’d topped the jeans with a badly wrinkled T-shirt in a fetching shade of faded blue.

“The peekaboo effect is really quite enticing,” Terry observed. “Don’t you think so, Jason?”

“That’s certainly one word for it,” he agreed.

Callie frowned. “I don’t have to come along.”

“Yes,” Jason said. “You do.”

“Says who?” she shot back.

“Play nice, children,” Terry instructed. “We’re all going.”

He ushered them out the door with the skill of a parent dealing with a couple of squabbling toddlers. Callie was pretty sure she saw him glance at Neil and roll his eyes. She couldn’t say she blamed him. There was some evidence that he was dealing with a couple of stubborn, spoiled brats. Callie resolved to behave for the rest of the morning. It wasn’t Terry’s or Neil’s fault that she and Jason couldn’t spend more than twenty minutes together before tempers flared.

She was about to fall into step with Terry, when Jason linked his arm through hers and pulled her alongside him.

“You know why you’re so cranky, don’t you?” he inquired with a lazy drawl, pitched for her ears only.

She had noticed before that he lapsed into something bordering on a Southern accent whenever it suited him. “Where are you from?” she asked, hoping to divert his attention. She’d guessed from his comment that whatever was on his mind was likely to set her teeth on edge.

“Virginia,” he said. “Trying to change the subject?”

“You bet.”

“I don’t blame you. Acknowledging that you’re sexually frustrated must be embarrassing.”

Callie stopped in her tracks, causing Terry and Neil to come up short or run right over her. Hands on hips, she scowled up at Jason.

“How dare you!”

“Actually, I dare quite a lot,” he said. “Come on. You’re blocking traffic.”

She dug in her heels. “I wouldn’t go anywhere with you if you had the key to a buried treasure worth millions,” she declared flatly.

Terry groaned. Neil sighed heavily.

“Well, I wouldn’t,” she insisted. “I’m going home.”

Jason shook his head. “See what I mean? She’s frustrated.”

Terry regarded the pair of them worriedly. “Jason, could I give you just the teeniest bit of advice? Pointing out that Callie is sexually frustrated may not be the most diplomatic, gentlemanly thing to do.”

“No, it’s not,” Callie concurred. “Especially since it’s his fault.”

The last slipped out before she realized the implication. “Oh, jeez,” she murmured, covering her face with her hands as Terry murmured, “My, my, Mr. Kane. I gave you more credit than that.”

It was Neil who took pity on her. He tucked an arm around her waist and urged her forward. “Pay no attention to the two of them. They’re in television, you know. No class. No manners.”

“You’re telling me,” she retorted, scowling at her two tormentors.

Neil continued to soothe her with his sympathetically derisive analysis of their companions. Before she realized it, he had guided her down the street and straight to a table at a sidewalk café near Lincoln Center. Terry and Jason, apparently content to let Neil smooth over the troubled waters they’d stirred up, slid up to the table as quietly as the pair of snakes they were.

When Jason hitched his chair a little too close to hers, Callie shot him a venomous look. He rested his arm across the back of her seat, then tugged her menu over so he could share it. There was a cozy sort of intimacy to his behavior that truly irked her under the circumstances.

“Do you have any idea how furious I am with you?” she inquired curiously.

“About?”

“That little remark you made back there.”

“Just telling the truth.”

“Don’t you think the topic called for a little discretion?”

“What’s wrong? We’re among friends.”

“My friends,” she pointed out. “Why would you say something like that in front of anyone?”

He looked vaguely unsettled by her continued irritation. “Actually, it was a diversionary tactic.”

She stared at him blankly. “Diversionary? I don’t get it.”

“You will,” he said grimly.

“When?”

He glanced at the clusters of people seated around them, until he apparently found what he was seeking. “Now,” he said. “Over there.”

Callie followed the direction of his gaze and gasped as she saw a picture of the two of them kissing plastered across the front page of the Sunday edition of one of New York’s tabloids. The headline trumpeted the question Has Network Romeo Found His Juliet?

“Oh, my God,” she murmured, thunderstruck. That would certainly secure her a lot of respect the next time she went job hunting.

“It’s a really good picture,” Terry ventured.

Callie stared at him. “You’ve seen it?”

“I ran out and bought a copy as soon as Jason called this morning.”

“So this was a setup,” she said, glaring at the whole traitorous lot of them. She waved a finger under Jason’s nose. “You didn’t just bump into them into the hallway. You invited them along to protect you, didn’t you?”

“Actually, I was thinking more in terms of moral support for you,” he said.

“I’ll bet.”

“It’s true,” Terry said. “He thought it would be better for you to see it surrounded by your best friends, just in case you turned out not to be a publicity hound like most of the people in television.”

“We’re supposed to help you get over the shock,” Neil said, shooting a condemning look at Jason that made it clear whose fault he thought it was that she was in shock at all.

“It’s not so bad, really,” Terry tried to reassure her. “It’ll be forgotten by tomorrow. Remember that time the soap opera magazine reported I was having a steamy affair with my leading lady? No one even remembered her name a few weeks later.”

“That’s because you angled to have her fired for planting the rumor in the first place,” Callie reminded him.

Terry shrugged unrepentantly. “She couldn’t act worth beans, anyway.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Callie asked. “Send a letter to all the TGN stockholders and enclose a copy of the front page of the paper and suggest Jason be voted out of office?”

“An intriguing form of retribution,” Jason agreed, not looking the least bit panicked, probably because he owned a very large chunk of that stock himself. “Of course, I’ve long since convinced them that any time my name is mentioned, the network’s call letters are, as well. It’s good PR.”

“Sounds a little self-serving to me,” Callie contended. “It protects your butt since you seem like the kind of man who gets caught with his pants down relatively frequently.” She paused, then added, “Pun absolutely intended.”

“Maybe we should be thinking about a way to capitalize on this,” Jason suggested with just the faintest hint of caution in his voice as he watched Callie closely.

“I don’t think I like the sound of that,” she said.

“There’s bound to be a lot of fascination now that people have gotten a look at that picture,” Jason insisted, trying to sound as if the idea had just occurred to him. “It’s the perfect time to announce that you’re the new star of Within Our Reach. People will think we were just sealing the deal with a kiss.”

“Not that kiss,” Terry commented drily. “You link the deal and that kiss and you’ll be in court for sexual harassment.”

Callie gritted her teeth. “Forget the kiss. I am not the new star of anything. Why can’t you get that through your head?”

“Because I know what I’m doing,” Jason responded. “You’ll be spectacular.” He glanced toward Terry for support.

“You do have the kind of face the camera loves,” Terry concurred. He grabbed a paper someone had left behind on a neighboring chair. “Just look at this. You’re beautiful, darling.”

Despite herself, Callie found herself transfixed. It wasn’t so much that she looked glamorous and sophisticated that stunned her. It was the luminous expression on her face as Jason’s lips claimed hers. The photographer must have caught her before fascination had been transformed into irritation. She practically glowed. Jason appeared no less enchanted. No wonder the copywriters had jumped to all sorts of wild conclusions about their relationship.

“I don’t know,” she said, her certainty wavering for the first time. Would it be so terrible to take the job, especially considering what the amount of money mentioned in that contract would allow her to do to make her mother’s life easier?

“Trust me, darling. Would I lie to you?” Terry asked.

“In a heartbeat,” she asserted as her common sense reasserted itself. She could not allow herself to be manipulated into doing something that was totally alien to her talents and her personality. Not that closing huge stock deals didn’t occasionally require a bit of acting, but the audience was very limited.

“His motives are especially suspect when you might be the only thing between him and the unemployment line,” Neil contributed darkly.

Callie looked from Neil to Terry to Jason. “What does he mean? You aren’t holding his job hostage to make sure I take this role, are you? Not even you would stoop that low.”

“No, it’s not like that,” Jason said, though he didn’t look particularly wounded by the charge, which meant she probably had some part of it right.

“The show is in serious trouble, though,” he added. “The ratings are down.”

“They’re in the toilet,” Terry confirmed.

“The sponsors are threatening to bail on us. No sponsors, no show. That’s the nature of the business,” Jason said. “But the minute I saw you on-screen, I knew we had a chance to turn things around.”

“Could you dump a little more pressure on her?” Neil asked with disgust. “Talk about a couple of manipulating bastards.”

Callie reached over and patted his hand. “It’s okay. They’re not going to pressure me into doing anything,” she assured him. Then she looked at Jason. “Is the show really in that much trouble? Are you seriously considering canceling it?”

“It may be the only option,” Jason confirmed.

He said it so bluntly that she knew at once he wasn’t playing mind games with her. Cancellation had been discussed at very high levels at the network.

“What about new writers? A hot new story line?” she suggested.

“That’s where you come in,” he explained.

“Wouldn’t you be better off hiring some recognized actress who knows what the heck she’s doing?”

“Too expensive,” he insisted. “Besides, this will make a terrific sort of Cinderella story. The media will be all over it.”

“Like vultures,” Neil commented.

Callie sighed. She looked at Terry and thought of those vicious notes he’d wanted her to investigate, the mysterious falling cabinet. Then she considered the all-too-real threat of cancellation. Guilt weighed heavily on her.

Even so, she knew she was going to have to let him down. As silly as it seemed given her lack of alternatives, she couldn’t walk away from the profession she’d chosen to play at acting.

She gazed at Terry with regret. “I’m sorry. I really am. I can’t do it. I’m a stockbroker,” she insisted one last time, “not an actress.”

“That’s okay, dollface,” he reassured her. “If you can’t, you can’t. I’ll survive.”

Jason scowled at him. “Walker, you’re not the only one whose career is at stake,” he reminded him.

“Oh?” Neil said nastily. “Yours, too?”

“I was referring to the rest of the cast.” He fixed his gaze on Callie. “Please, it’s not as if I’m asking you to work the coal mines or to dig ditches. It’s an acting job, a very lucrative acting job. You might have fun.”

“And I might be publicly humiliated.” She met his gaze evenly. “No. I’m sorry. I can’t do it.”

She looked around the table. Terry appeared resigned. Jason seemed to be gearing up for another battle. Only Neil shot her a look of understanding, even as he tried to cheer up Terry.

“I have to go,” she said suddenly, tossing her napkin onto the table and taking off. To her relief, no one followed. She wasn’t sure she could have said no a second time, knowing how much depended on her relenting.

Miserable over having to let Terry down twice when he’d asked for her help and furious with Jason for putting her in that position in the first place, she detoured to Central Park West and walked along the edge of the park to get a grip on her mixed emotions before finally venturing home again.

When she eventually trudged up the stairs, she fully expected Terry’s door to be thrown open and at least two people to accost her for another round of badgering. When the door remained tightly shut, she sighed and continued to climb. She couldn’t help wondering if her friendship with Terry would weather her letting him down.

Not until she turned on the third-floor landing and started up the last flight of steps did she realize that someone was waiting in the shadows.

“Jason?”

When no one replied, her steps became slower and more cautious. “Who’s there?”

“Callie?” a frail, tentative voice called out.

Callie stopped in her tracks as the voice registered. “Mother? Is that you?”

“Yes.”

She took the remaining steps two at a time to see for herself. Sure enough, sitting on the top step and huddled against the wall in a coat far too warm for the beautiful spring day was Regina Gunderson.

“Mother, what on earth? What are you doing here?”

“Eunice said she’d told you I was coming.”

Callie thought back to the threat her sister had made a few days earlier. She’d forgotten all about it. Or maybe she’d just taken for granted that Eunice’s temper would cool and the latest crisis would pass. Apparently it hadn’t. The proof was right before her.

An hour ago she would have sworn that her life couldn’t possibly get any more depressing, any more complicated. She sighed heavily. It appeared she’d been wrong about that, too.

7

Eunice had lied. Regina had figured that much out the minute she got a good look at Callie’s face. Her daughter no more wanted her in New York than she wanted to be here.

The city hadn’t improved in the thirty years since she’d last seen it. It was filthy and, if the TV news shows were anything to judge by, it was overrun by thugs and gangs. From the minute she’d gotten into a cab at LaGuardia Airport, she’d been overwhelmed by the changes...all for the worse, from what she could see. The enormity of what she’d done by leaving the safety of the farm had terrified her.

The changes weren’t restricted to the city, either. Callie was showing signs of similar wear and tear. Her beautiful, full-of-life daughter appeared to have been beaten down by the twists her life had taken. First the divorce, then losing that job she’d been so crazy about. It was little wonder she appeared shell-shocked.

Regina regretted that more than she could ever say. She knew, though, that Callie would never believe her if she told her that she had envied her for breaking free of the farm, for fighting to go her own way. She had left such support unspoken for far too long, convinced that her loyalties lay with Jacob, who had violently opposed Callie’s leaving home, especially to go to New York.

Still, feeling a little blue was no excuse for letting herself go to seed. If Callie had tried to wear those decrepit clothes she had on to go out in Iowa on a Sunday, Regina would have sent her back to her room to change. Her own circumstances were so uncertain, however, that she kept that opinion to herself and tried not to let her dismay show on her face.

“I suppose you’re going to send me straight back,” she said to her daughter.

Even she recognized the odd combination of resignation and hope in her voice. She’d viewed this trip as a mixed blessing from the beginning. If she’d had her way, she’d have stayed on the farm where she’d spent the past thirty years of her life, but Eunice had insisted that Callie wanted her to come. She had practically packed her bags for her. Relief had shone on her face when she and that sorry husband of hers had dropped Regina at the airport. They’d stood at the gate until the last possible minute, probably to be sure she didn’t flee the plane before takeoff.

Regina would never understand her younger child’s compulsive need to meddle in her life. She understood her son-in-law far more clearly. He was as transparent as an old piece of lace. Tom wanted the farm. Everything he did, every helpful gesture, was meant to ingratiate himself with her so that she would see that he and Eunice got all of it when she died, cutting Callie off completely.

It just proved they didn’t know her at all. Even though she knew perfectly well that Callie wanted no part of the farm, her oldest was entitled to her share and Regina meant to see she had it. If Callie turned right around and sold it or gave it to her sister, that was her decision.

She risked another look at her daughter. “Do you want me to go?” she asked straight out. “Will I be in your way here?”

“Of course not,” Callie declared with obviously forced enthusiasm.

Unlike Eunice, Callie was a lousy liar. The truth was plain as could be on her face. A deep sorrow spread through Regina when she thought of the wide gulf between herself and her firstborn child. She knew, too, where the blame for that could be placed, squarely on her own doorstep.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Callie insisted despite whatever reservations she was harboring. “I’ve been asking you to come ever since I moved to New York.”

That was true, Regina conceded. But her husband had never wanted to set foot in a city he claimed was so filled with evil and she’d never been brave enough to cross him. Besides, she’d always feared that coming back to New York would remind her of all she had given up so many years ago. Her regrets ran deep enough as it was.

“I’m tired,” she said because she couldn’t bear to force more lies from Callie’s lips. “I think I’d like to rest for a bit.”

“Don’t you even want to take a look around the apartment?” Callie asked.

“Maybe later,” she said wearily, ignoring the vague note of hurt in her daughter’s voice. Maybe later she wouldn’t feel this deep resentment at having been shuffled off like an unwanted piece of furniture.

Callie nodded, then led the way to the guest room. She had a sympathetic expression on her face, as if she could read her mother’s mind.

Maybe she could, Regina thought as she slid between the cool, expensive sheets on the antique brass bed just like the one in Callie’s room back home. She turned her face toward the wall to avoid meeting her daughter’s eyes. After all, they’d both been trapped by Eunice and her selfish, controlling ways.