Hot Ticket (22 page)

He entered his room and flicked on the lights. Tierney was stretched out on his bed, wearing nothing but one of his T-shirts and the biggest smile he had ever seen in his life.

“Well?” she purred. “Aren’t you even going to say hello?”

David loosened his tie. “I’m going to say a lot more than hello, Hayseed. Just give me a minute.”

He threw his sports jacket over a nearby chair and sat on the end of the bed just staring at her. Tierney. In his room. In L.A. He couldn’t believe it.

“Surprised?” Tierney asked.

“Surprised is an understatement.”

“Good!” Tierney’s eyes lit up like an excited child’s. “I wanted you to be surprised.” She sat up. “Is it a good surprise, or a bad surprise?”

David reached out, taking a strand of her hair and kissing it. “A good surprise. The best surprise,” he murmured. He still couldn’t get over it. “How did you get
in
here?”

“I know the manager. All I had to do was tell him I was your girlfriend and that I’d come to surprise you, and voilà! Here I am.”

David’s eyes caressed hers. “Are you?” he asked.

“Am I what?”

“My girlfriend.” He reached out to touch Tierney’s cheek. How soft the skin was. Soft and warm and so inviting.

“I’d like to be,” Tierney said softly.

“I’d like that, too,” David returned, drawing her into his arms.

“Good,” said Tierney, snuggling close. She wondered if he knew the yearning that had driven her here. The minute Nugent had given her the week off, there was no doubt in her mind what she wanted to do: She wanted to be with David.

She took his palm and kissed it. “I hope my being here doesn’t mess up your concentration.”

David chuckled. “I think I can handle it. Can you handle us living in different cities?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“That you are.”

His mouth touched hers, light yet insistent. She’d never tire of his kisses. Ever.

“We can’t stay up too, too late, you know,” she cautioned.

“Oh?” David asked, pressing his lips gently to her throat. “And why’s that?”

“Because we fly out to Dallas early tomorrow morning.”

David lifted an eyebrow.
“We?”

“My boss gave me the week off because I did such a great job during the snowstorm. You’re stuck with me till Monday, Hewson.”

“I hope I’m going to be stuck with you a lot longer than that,” David replied tenderly.

His words, so romantic and heartfelt, brought tears to Tierney’s eyes. She finally understood that the loneliness that had dogged her for so long came from being incomplete. Now that she was really and truly David’s, the loneliness was gone, replaced by an exquisite wholeness.

“Make love to me,” she whispered.

David kissed the tip of her nose. “Saskatchewan style or Nebraska style?”

“That depends. What’s the difference?”

“Here, I’ll show you,” said David, laying her back on the bed.

They could sleep on the plane tomorrow.

You Can’t Steal First
Annette Blair

To Connie Bilodeau, because she loves anthologies, and I love her

“Quinn Murdock, since you already have everything, except a life, we decided to jazz up your birthday memorial by getting you a man with an enormous—Ouch! Why’d you hit me? I wasn’t gonna say ‘dick’!”

Zapped from his comfort zone, Boston baseball megastar Juan Santiago, aka “Tiago the Stealer,” heard a name that sped his hidden heart and tripped his highly publicized libido. Quinn Murdock—a hundred ten pounds of dynamite, from her nutmeg hair to the toes of her funky boots, in a short, tight black leather suit—so close to his train, he could reach out and touch her—and strike out again.

Tiago realized that the rapid-fire echo on the Back Bay Station platform belonged to the stiletto boot heels of the Mighty Quinn herself, and she was on the move. Accompanied by a team of gofers—a man and four women—Quinn walked so fast, her entourage had to run to keep up with her.

Inside his train, Tiago picked up his pace for the same reason.

“Tell me again,” he heard Quinn say, “why you think train tickets are better for me than plane tickets.”

“
Luxury
train tickets,” Quinn’s exotic female gofer said. “You need a rest, a priority realignment, and the courage to face down your father and get a life. That takes time and—”

“A kick in the butt,” her fashion-plate gofer said. “You get three days on the train, as opposed to three hours on a plane. Ergo, train tickets.”

Intrigued, Tiago attempted to follow Quinn and her crew, but his passengers had paid big money for his attention, so he stopped long enough to accept a kiss, a bra, a G-string, and an invitation to a house party in Palm Beach.

His reputation had, as usual, preceded him, thanks to his publicist. Passenger ticket sales were split between die-hard members of Red Sox Nation and single females looking to kiss, screw, or marry, a million-dollar baseball player—not to mention adding to his bad-boy rep by letting him “steal” the panties they offered for his world-class collection.

Tiago didn’t particularly care why any of them took his Hot Ticket Express to Spring Training. He liked people, and he liked to party. But he did care about the good their ticket money could accomplish.

At this moment, however, in sync with more than one hissing Amtrak engine, he found the thought of Quinn as his passenger shifting from “not this train,” to “this train, this train,
thisssss trainnn
.”

“What Quinn
really
needs,” her fashionista gofer said, “is to open the locked closet in the boardroom basement of her psyche and release her inner vixen.”

No kidding,
Tiago thought. He’d known
that
since high school, though to be fair, he’d been privileged to welcome Quinn’s vixen with open arms on graduation night.

But times had changed. He read enough business news to know that she was all boardroom blunt and brass balls now. And despite
her kick-ass suit, she looked as if she’d locked her vixen away ages ago, possibly as far back as the morning after graduation, when she disappeared from his life.

“Speaking of the
real
you,” Exotic said, placing a hand on Quinn’s arm to stop her forward surge. “Did you make goal?”

Tiago stood near an open window and damned himself for caring what Quinn or her cohorts had to say.

“The
real
me?” Quinn mocked herself with a laugh. “I am so not a vixen. And yes, I did go to Daddy’s office this morning, like we planned, and I said, ‘Daddy, I need to cut the cord and get a life, so I can’t be your VP any longer. I quit!’ ”

“Go
you
!” said a brawny charm boy with the voice that belonged to the “enormous” remark.

Fashionista shook her head. “But your
father
said?”

Hah, she knew Murdock better than his daughter did. Hell, everybody knew the old shark better.

“Daddy’s decided to retire and make me president of Murdock, Inc.,” Quinn said.

As stunned as her friends, Tiago noted their silence. Go Quinn is right, if she really did want out of the paternal sinkhole. If anybody had the guts, despite her father’s presidential offer, it was Quinn Murdock. Tiago grinned. Damn, but he’d like to be there when she turned the old man down.

“I tried to say ‘no’ right off,” Quinn said, “but Daddy looked so hurt that I didn’t jump at the chance, I said I’d think about it in Florida. You brought my laptop, right?”

“Nope. Not allowed. You’re lucky we let you keep your cell phone.”

“What? No e-mail?”

Quinn
cared
what they thought? If so, she’d changed. Tiago wished he understood this life she was trying to get. What was wrong with the one she had?

He followed her, within the confines of his train, like a two-bit PI in a movie that tanked. Too bad he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

“Maybe you’ll meet someone onboard,” Charm Boy said with a grin that earned him a glare from Exotic.

Quinn caught it, too, and missed a step. “Hey, what’s going on here?”

“Can’t stop,” Charm Boy said, taking Quinn’s arm and hustling her along. “You’ll miss your train.”

“I didn’t miss the look Lucie shot you.”

“Oh that?” he said. “We’re just foolin’ around on the side.”

One of the women shrieked, and they all laughed—to Charm Boy’s disgust.

“I can’t wait to see my new wardrobe,” Quinn told Fashionista. “Thanks for choosing and packing it for me, I think.”

“Hey, the clothes are part of your gift. You should have at least one surprise to open on your birthday.”

Quinn faltered. “They’re not over the top, are they?”

“Your new clothes? Nah,” Fashionista said. “But I’ll give you a hint. There’s not a chastity belt or business suit in the lot.”

“You’re scaring me,” Quinn said, and Tiago grinned, because he didn’t think anything scared Quinn Murdock.

“Looks like we just made it,” Charm Boy said. “Here’s your train.”

“This can’t be right.” Quinn stood back to examine a section of Tiago’s pride and joy—nineteen pristine red, white, and blue vintage railroad cars, refurbished with love.

“This rattletrap’s a throwback to the fifties, and I didn’t bring my poodle skirt.” She turned to Fashionista. “Did I?”

Tiago looked down at the station platform, from the parlor car in which he stood, at Quinn Murdock, all prim, and proper, and appalled, as beautiful as ever, even dissing his train.

His heart raced at the implications—Quinn, for three days, neither of them on the wrong, or right, side of the tracks, but square in the middle.

Maybe, he’d get some long-overdue answers.

Maybe . . . they’d finally kill each other.

Quinn stepped away to read the plaque on the railroad car, and the sun came out and gilded her hair to copper. Then the wind lifted it around her face, and Tiago could swear he caught its scent. He remembered the silk of it sliding between his fingers. His body remembered as well.

“Mickey Mantle?” Quinn asked, the sudden set of her lips enhancing his hard reaction. She stepped back and read the names of the baseball greats on several cars. “You wouldn’t!” She turned on her gofers, and they stepped collectively back. “I told you about Tiago in confidence!”

Tiago’s heart skipped. Thirteen years and she still talked about him?

“Please!”
Quinn said. “Tell me this moldering old excuse for a locomotive is
not
Tiago’s Hot Ticket Express to Spring Training!”

“This is not Tiago’s Hot Ticket Express to Spring Training,” Charm Boy lied as ordered.

Tiago braced himself, as much against the train’s first halting
surge as against the razor-sharp blade of Quinn’s presence slicing open his sorry past and threatening to make him bleed.

“Let’s get you onboard,” Charm Boy said. “Damn train’s starting to move.” Despite Quinn’s protest, the man shoved her, ass-up, onto the train while Tiago bit off an objection to the familiarity.

Quinn gave her attention to fighting and cursing the ham-fisted jerk behind her, so she didn’t know who stepped out and caught her hand to keep her from falling on the tracks—couldn’t know that touching her again revved more than the Amtrak engine up front.

“Traitors,” she shouted as she turned, retrieved her hand, and caught her balance, still focused on the tricksters who got her here.

Charm Boy sprinted beside the train and tossed two suitcases in after her. One hit the floor at her feet, split, and belched enough gauze and spandex to make a hooker proud.

The second broke the bones in Tiago’s left foot.

“Effing-A,” Quinn said as she fell to her knees, rescued a rippling cellophane halter top, and shoved it back in the bag’s gaping belly. She rifled through the rainbow of bare-flesh wet dreams, and with rising anxiety, she checked the second bag, a street-walker’s shoe store. “Where’s my underwear?” she shouted. “Derek, there’s no underwear!”

Her male gofer grinned, saluted, and stopped trying to keep up, and as the distance grew between them, he rubbed his hands together at a job well done. Quinn’s female contingent caught up to him, and they high-fived each other.

Quinn screeched when she saw and about gave Tiago a stroke when she leaned out the door.
“Loserrrrrrs!”

The losers grinned, nodded, and waved.

Tiago caught the death-defying tigress around the waist and hauled her back in, against her will, his heart racing over her stunt, her scent, and her lush familiar curves. “Damn, but I forgot what a pain in the ass you are.”

Quinn Murdock—the only woman who ever ran away from
him—in his arms again. Tiago held her against him, eye to eye, her feet about six inches off the ground.

“Son of an effing bustard,” she snapped. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Put me down, you dumbass gorilla.”

Tiago chuckled. “I missed you, too.”

The pointed toes of her biker-type knee boots made hard contact with his shins.

He set her down. “Son of a—A few more bruises, Hot Stuff, and I’ll end up shining the bench at spring training.”

“Turn your back on me, and you won’t make
that
cut.” Despite her bluster, Quinn stepped away from him to come up against the undulating Pullman car at her back. Tiago’s heart skipped when the chasm between the platform and the car opened and closed beneath her, as if trying to suck her down and swallow her whole.