Barbara Daly - You Call This Romance!?

She was gazing earnestly at him again, but there at the end he thought her gaze slid off to the right a little. “It’s tax deductible,” he said without thinking, because what he was thinking about was Faith’s full pink mouth. Forget the mouth! “I’m charging the dry run to my firm,” he added, improvising rapidly, “because I can apply the kind of information we’ll be gathering to my other clients.”

“Would have been for him, too,” Faith said. “Tax deductible, I mean. Anyway, I was slaving away in the M stacks and files, and then—” she paused, and a dreamy look came over her face “—one day when I was doing an online search for ‘Moroccan Meteorological Trends’, I noticed a book called Explore Madagascar, and then another one, The Romance of Mozambique, and Don’t Miss Macao. So of course I had to find out what those places were like.”

“You forgot about Marrakesh.” How could she forget about Marrakesh when she could remember the names of three books she’d read maybe eight years ago that weren’t even about Marrakesh, the topic she was supposed to research. The flight attendant hovered over them, and although Cabot didn’t drink martinis, the word just fell out of his mouth, probably because it was alliterative.

“Oh,” Faith was saying to the woman, “I’d love some white wine, but I’d better not. I’ll have—”

“What about a Mai Tai?” Cabot said. “Or a Manhattan.”

“I was about to say tomato juice,” Faith said, giving him an odd look. “I’m barely competent stone-cold sober. And this may be vacation time for you, but I’m working.”

While the attendant got the drinks, it occurred to Cabot that Faith was spilling out the story of her work history to make a point, and that the point might come as unpleasant news for him and his current enterprise.

“So how did the job end?” he asked as soon as he’d taken a restorative gulp of vodka.

Her mouth turned down again. “I woke up one morning and realized he was expecting me to hand him his Marrakesh background the very next day and I had almost nothing for him but basic geography and a printout of a Web site for tourists. So I checked out every old movie that had been set in Marrakesh and filled in the details from those.”

“Uh-oh,” Cabot said, “most of those were probably made on an MGM lot.”

“But still,” she argued, “I figured that somebody at MGM would have done better research than I had. Unfortunately, they’d done that research in 1938 or ’39 or ’40.” She sighed deeply. “He had to set the book in 1941 and make it a World War II espionage story.”

“And it bombed.” He was getting bombed, too.

“No, the publisher promoted it as his first historical novel and it stayed on the bestseller list for sixty-three weeks.”

“But he’d already fired you.”

“And I’d already taken a job as interpreter for an aide to the ambassador to Argentina. Want to hear about that?”

“Well, I…”

“That was going well—I’m quite fluent in Spanish,” she murmured modestly, “until one day I got distracted during one of his conversations with a lobby group—something about beef. I hadn’t listened to what he was saying, so when it came time to translate I had to make something up.” She halted, then turned to him, looking quizzical. “Do you remember that little civil uprising in Argentina about seven years ago? When the beef producers marched on Buenos Aires?”

The last drops of vodka dribbled down the front of his shirt, but Cabot didn’t care. “You did that?” he said. He felt as if he were strangling.

It was suddenly crystal clear what the point of Faith’s story was. Every job she took ended in disaster. And what she was now was a travel agent, his travel agent, Tippy’s double.

And she was warning him that she was all too likely to blow it.

The question was how? He could think of many, many ways. That was a big part of his job as a publicist, thinking of all the ways something could backfire. So he would spend the next four days creeping warily through a dark forest, waiting for the ogre to pop out and eat him alive.

And little did she know, this beautiful, delicate woman who sat beside him in an obvious state of performance anxiety, that inside him was an ogre threatening to pop out at any moment and nibble her into a passionate frenzy.

HE’D BEEN WRONG. He wasn’t going to spend the next four days creeping through a dark forest. The ogre manifested itself right there at the reception desk of the Inn of Dreams in downtown Reno. “What do you mean you don’t have three additional rooms reserved?”

“Um, Cabot…” Faith murmured.

“I mean, we have two rooms for your crew and a honeymoon suite for you, Mr. Drennan, and you’re pretty darned lucky we had that cancellation, because this is the weekend before Valentine’s Day.”

Cabot gazed at the man for a long moment. “Excuse us for a second,” he said, and pulled Faith over to the side. She was wearing a stricken expression.

“I forgot to book a room for myself,” she whispered.

“You forgot to book a room for me,” he corrected her. “And the hotel staff thinks we’re really on our honeymoon, right?”

“Well, of course,” Faith said. “If they thought we were just advancing the honeymoon, they wouldn’t treat us the same way they’ll treat you and Tippy in July.”

That, at least, made sense. “You didn’t register in Tippy’s name.”

Her eyes were very wide and very gray. “Of course not. We’re registered as Mr. and Mrs. Cabot Drennan.”

Something lurched inside Cabot’s stomach, but he stoically ignored it. “Well, let’s see what we can do about this,” he said gruffly, and herded her back to the desk. “We really have to have three extra rooms,” he told the clerk. “As you can see,” and he gestured back toward Raff, Joey and Chelsea, who milled about restlessly, sensing a problem, “I have three crew members of various, um, sexes and persuasions.” This was merely an excuse. Raff and Joey were rooming together. That third room was for him, and every second he spent with Faith made the need for a room of his own more crucial.

The clerk merely shrugged.

He knew a stone wall when he saw one. “Excuse us again,” Cabot said, and withdrew his people into a huddle in the artificial shade of an artificial potted palm.

“Okay,” he said to his entourage, “it looks like we have to get along with two extra rooms. I’ll share a room with Raff and Joey can bunk in with Chelsea.”

“No!” Joey shrieked as he stamped his foot.

“Why not?” Cabot said, aware that Faith’s lovely gray eyes were following the conversation anxiously.

“You promised me Raff,” Joey said, and fell into a pout.

“Hey, hold on a minute,” Raff said, scowling. “If Chelsea has to share with somebody, it has to be you.”

“That’s right, Joey,” Cabot said. “I can’t share with Chelsea.”

“Unless you want Carlos to break your neck,” Chelsea said in a soft, gentle voice with an accent that spoke of a Southern upbringing. “He’s real rigid about things like that.”

“Ah,” Cabot said. He’d met Carlos, a wrestler, whose adoration of Chelsea was the only indication that he possessed a brain, and the only indication that inside the quiet Chelsea was a tiger about to escape from the zoo. He sent a meaningful glance around the group, then settled it on Faith.

“We’ll have to manage somehow, I guess,” he said. “It is a suite, after all. It’ll have a living room. With a sofa. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

“No, I’ll sleep on the sofa. This is all my fault and I’ll accept the consequences.”

“Don’t argue. Tradition decrees that the biggest person sleeps in the smallest space.”