Read Online If Winter Comes by Diana Palmer - Free Book Online Page B

other end. The doorbell only rang once in all
that time, and she dashed for it, her heart racing, only to find a neighbor
inviting her to a rent party for another neighbor down on his luck.
     
    How, she wondered,
could she have thought Moreland was as involved as she was? Just because he
took her out a few times didn’t mean he wanted to marry her. She knew that, but
had she really mistaken his objectives that much? All along, had he only been
angling for a way to get her into his bed?
     
    She could still blush,
remembering the way it had been between them, that strange look in his eyes as
they met hers while her body seemed to belong to someone else in her wild
abandon. She wasn’t easy, she wasn’t! But, apparently, he thought so; and she
still felt the whip of his anger even now, his smouldering silence as he’d
driven her home and left her there, without even a word of apology. She hadn’t
been crying, but surely he could have seen that she was about to. Or perhaps he
had. Perhaps it just hadn’t mattered to him one way or the other.
     
    That was the hardest
thing to face; the fact that he just didn’t care at all, except in a purely
physical sense.
     
    “No date with the mayor
today?” Bill Peck chided as she sat down at her desk on Friday morning with an
increasingly familiar listlessness.
     
    She wanted to pick up
something and throw it at him, but she kept cool. “I was writing a story,” she
reminded him. “It’s finished.”
     
    “And it’s been lying on
Edwards’s desk for the past week, where it will probably be lying this time
next year,” he reminded her. “The revitalization story’s been done to death,
and you know it. What’s the matter, honey, did your big romance go sour?”
     
    She whirled, her green
eyes flashing as they met his calculating ones. “You go to hell,” she flashed
in a tight, controlled voice. “What I do and how I do it are no concern of
yours. I don’t work for you; I work with you, and don’t you ever forget it!”
     
    A slow, mischievous
smile appeared on his face, causing her anger to eclipse into puzzlement.
     
    “That’s my girl,” he
chuckled.
     
    She slammed a pencil
down on her spotless desk. “You beast!” she grumbled.
     
    “It’s my middle name.
Now, are you finally back to normal? Business as usual?” He grabbed his coat.
“Come on, we’ve got a press conference this morning. I’ve already cleared it
with Eddy.”
     
    Eddy was his nickname
for the city editor, and if Eddy said okay, she had no choice. But she got her
purse and camera together with a sense of foreboding. “A press conference
where?” she asked carefully.
     
    “At city hall, where
else?”
     
    She froze, desperately
searching her mind for an excuse, any excuse to get out of it. Another meeting.
There had to be another meeting or an interview or a picture—oh, God, there had
to be something!
     
    “I said, let’s go,”
Peck said, taking her arm. “You haven’t got an excuse. I need some pix, and I
can’t handle a camera with this finger,” he added, holding up a bandaged right
forefinger. “I cut it on a sheet of bond paper, can you imagine?” he sighed.
“Worse than a knife cut.”
     
    “Can’t you take
Freddy?” she asked hopefully.
     
    “What’s the matter?” he
asked with a sideways glance. “Afraid of him?”
     
    She knew exactly what
he meant, and she wanted to admit that she was terrified. She almost put it
into words, but just at the last minute, she stopped herself.
     
    “I’m not afraid of
anybody,” she said instead. “My father said it was better to go through life
giving ulcers than letting other people give them to you.”
     
    “Wise man,” he grinned.
“On a trip to the Orient, did you say?”
     
    It was just the
question she needed to start her talking, and to take her mind off Moreland.
They were in the elevator at city hall before she realized what Peck had been
doing.
     
    “You did that on purpose,”
she