One Ring to Rule Read online

  Back then, they would have been flocking to see what the problem was and defending her. Now she only had Amy, and she hadn’t even had time to check on her assistant before she rushed out.

  “Excuse me, can you call me a cab?” she asked the maître d’.

  “She doesn’t need a cab.” Kent put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m going back to the hotel, too. I’ll drive you.”

  Lindsey gritted her teeth. She could insist on a cab. She could go back to the hotel and lock herself in her room until morning, but dollars to doughnuts, come morning he would be sitting at the booth waiting, if he wasn’t sitting in the hall waiting for her to come out for breakfast. Maybe if she accepted this ride and let him say whatever he needed to say, he would go away. At least if he were driving, he would have to keep his hands on the wheel.

  “Fine. You drive. Where’s your car?”

  * * * *

  Kent led the way to the parking deck. The night was hot and sticky. After years of living in the country, he’d forgotten what the city smelled like. Its scent was foreign and added to his tension. He hadn’t been this nervous since the last time he’d been on a first date, about three months before he met Lindsey. A disaster, he recalled. She had been a friend of his neighbor. Impressed with the idea that he was an artist, she’d just assumed he would be good in bed. He’d been so turned off by her desire to hop into the aforementioned bed that he’d never called her again.

  Of course, he’d known Lindsey all of six hours before he told her he was sharing a room with three other guys and if they wanted to continue the game of footsie they’d been playing all through dinner, they should move to her private room. He smiled, recalling how she'd worked her bare foot between his legs while carrying on a conversation with the writer sitting next to her and in full sight of the waitress clearing the table.

  “What are you grinning about?” Lindsey snapped.

  “Just remembering old times.” Kent resisted the desire to drape his arm over her shoulders. “I have my own room at the hotel this time.”

  “Goodie for you.” Lindsey folded her arms. “Is there a reason you came here, or did you just want to torment me?”

  “I wanted to apologize.”

  “You could have done that by mail.”

  “No, I couldn’t, not after the way I left.”

  “Oh that’s right. You did sneak away and leave me a note.”

  “Lindsey, it was impossible talk to you.”

  “Impossible? We talked every day about all kinds of things.”

  Kent dug the key out of his pocket. “You always got so defensive about everything. I didn’t want to get into a shouting match with you.”

  “No, you’d rather cut me to ribbons in the middle of a Con party.”

  “It’s the only way to keep your attention. Look, I’ve spent the last four years trying to make it up to you.”

  “I haven’t noticed. Hard to when you’re nowhere to be found.”

  “You weren’t looking.” He pressed the remote to unlock his doors.

  “The comics industry is pretty small. I think I would have—You’re driving this?” She stopped at the rear bumper of his Saturn and made a face at it.

  “The truck is at home. This gets better gas mileage.”

  “This isn’t a sports car. It’s got four doors.” Lindsey pointed out.

  Kent continued around to the passenger side to open the door for her. “It’s also got a nice big trunk for groceries and daytime running lights so I get a discount on my auto insurance.”

  “But that’s sensible.”

  “You haven’t seen the truck.” He gestured to the open door. “You getting in? It really is my car.”

  “I’m just kind of surprised to see you driving something so normal.”

  He shrugged and waited for her to slide inside. Maybe he should have shown her the car first, then she would have known he’d changed. The next two days might not be as awful as he’d feared. By the time he got in, she sat with her arms folded again, glaring out the windshield.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” she told him. “Just because you settled for a plain car doesn’t mean you’re not still a sports car underneath, ready to race away at the slightest provocation.”

  “Wow, that was a great contortion of reality. Have you ever thought of going into politics? Does it occur to you that I might have a plain old reliable sedan because I have a reliable sedan life?” He stopped at the booth to pay the parking attendant the exorbitant sum they were asking.

  Why was he working so hard to get Lindsey back? He glanced at her.

  Her arms had loosened and she sat with her head bowed. A lock of her hair had escaped its braid and curled around her ears. The severe expression she’d been wearing all night relaxed by degrees. His body tightened in response. She was breathtaking, inside and out. Sharp and clever, and when her mind turned that way, amazingly inventive. She had a laugh like sunshine, and he wanted to hear it again. He clenched his hands around the steering wheel.

  “When I left you, I thought I was doing what was best for you. And I still think I was,” he told her.

  “Best for me?” Lindsey squeaked.

  “You weren’t happy, either,” Kent said.

  “Nice historical revisionism, Mr. Orwell. Is it 1984 again, or still in your world?” Lindsey snapped.

  “You weren’t doing any of the things you loved. You let all the houseplants die, and stopped going out with other people. You couldn’t seem to focus on anything. Weren’t you working on a book when I met you? Did you ever finish it?” Kent demanded.

  Lindsey shifted in her seat. He took that as a no.

  “I didn’t think so.” Kent sighed. “Lindsey, you were so driven and so ambitious when I met you that it was kinda scary, but really exciting, too. Once I moved in with you, it was like you stopped trying. You became my appendage, and you devoted yourself to my career.”

  “It worked. You were the hottest artist in comics,” she grumbled. “And I wasn’t miserable.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I don’t see why it mattered.”

  “It mattered because I hated seeing you that way.”

  “You could have said something.”

  “I tried.” He wasn’t proud of the fight they’d had when he tried to tell her he wanted her to be happy. He’d been too young and stupid to do it right. They’d ended up screaming at each other. That fight, like all the others, ended in bed, unresolved. “And to be honest, in my more self-centered moments, I didn’t really think it mattered either. I just thought you were being a drag.”

  “I tried to be more cheerful when you mentioned it,” Lindsey said.

  “Yeah, I know. That was scarier than the depression. After a while I got the idea that you might be better off without me.” He reached across the gear shift and took her hand. “It took me a couple of months to get up the nerve to go. I really loved you, but I thought you needed somebody who didn’t eclipse you. I thought without me around, you would go back to being the woman I moved across two states and learned to use the subway for.”

  “Why, so you could swoop back down on me when I was stronger and destroy me again?” Lindsey asked.

  “No. I never intended to darken your doorstep again. For six months I tried to forget you, except I couldn’t seem to stop asking people how you were.” Kent started rubbing his thumb across the fleshy heel of her hand.

  “You were spying on me?” Lindsey tried to pull her hand away, but Kent caught it tight.

  “I wasn’t spying. We do know a lot of the same people. Besides, comics is like a five-gallon fish bowl. If somebody didn’t know you, they knew somebody who did. Everything is two degrees of separation, and everybody knew about us. If I didn’t ask about you, somebody offered.” Kent ground his teeth. “Believe me, the first year was like Chinese water torture.”

  “Nobody told me about you.”

  “I know, they said you either started to cry or bit their heads off if my name
even came up.” Kent let go of her hand to turn off the freeway.

  Lindsey bit her lip. The tarot reader said she would reconsider, maybe she would. “What do you want, Kent?”

  “I want you back.”

  “What if I told you it’s too late?”

  “It can’t be,” he told her. He turned into the hotel parking garage. “I won’t let it be.” He found a space for his sensible car and shut the engine off, but made no move to get out.

  * * * *

  Lindsey hesitated, wondering what he was thinking. She could smell the warm masculine scent of him in the small space. Her skin prickled in anticipation of his touch. She found herself staring at the way his long, tapered fingers wrapped around the steering wheel. Just looking at his hands made her temperature rise. Those fingers could bring her a lot of pleasure and some desperately needed unwinding. Just one night, or even one weekend, of enjoying didn’t mean she trusted him again. She might even be able to get him out of her system. And if he thought he was making headway, he might stop tormenting her in public.

  If she thought she had a hope in hell of any of that working, she had well and truly lost her mind.

  With a strangled moan, Lindsey leaped out of the car. She strode toward the hotel with a single-minded focus that would have had the most hardened New Yorkers fleeing her path. Kent’s long strides caught up with her sooner than she wanted. “What if I told you there was somebody else? Somebody I’m serious about?” she asked him.

  “Then he’s not good enough.”

  “Why, because only you are?”

  “No, because you’re still not happy.” Kent seized the door before she could touch it, and held it open for her.

  Inside the lobby, groups of people milled around. Among them were two girls still dressed up as the hero of the main book in her line. She wanted to yell at them to go wash their faces and get their own lives. Instead, she smiled at them. They had plenty of time to learn men were traitors who would flee at the first possible opportunity, preferably when you still needed them. “I have my own line. Why wouldn’t I be happy?”

  “Lindsey, don’t be obtuse. Total strangers can tell you’re not happy. I want to make you happy, and I think I’ve got things set so I can.” He pressed the elevator call button.

  “If you think you owe me something for the great run you had in comics, I absolve you of the debt.” Another lump formed in her throat. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing to keep yourself in house, home and little sensible cars lately, but I bet the royalties you’re getting are helping.”

  “Yeah, that’s not it at all.”

  The elevator opened, and he stepped in with her.

  “Where are you going?” Lindsey demanded. If he didn’t leave her alone she didn’t know how she was going to make it to her room without crying.

  “I’m walking you to your room.”

  “I don’t want you to walk me to my room.”

  “I want to walk you to your room.” He selected her floor. “And this has nothing to do with money. Not really, anyway.”

  “Then what does it have to do with?”

  Kent sighed. “I told you when I left that I wasn’t the man for you. I wasn’t. I was pretty self absorbed, and even as fan favorite, it wasn’t like I could hope to earn enough money to keep us in house, home and sensible cars. You must remember you were supporting us, and you weren’t getting any closer to that farm you wanted to live on.”

  “Maybe you could have asked me if I minded supporting us before you moved out without telling me.”

  “Can you stop for just a minute?” Kent snapped. “I’m trying to apologize and explain to you, and you keep nagging at me.”

  “Is that the real reason you left me? Because I nagged you?”

  “No, the nagging seems to be a wonderful new facet of your personality.” Kent clenched his fists at his sides. “Lindsey, four years ago I realized you were making yourself into a living human sacrifice for me. I thought if I left, you could stop doing that. But I couldn’t get you out of my mind, so I thought I could fix it to where you wouldn’t have to sacrifice yourself for me. Took a while, but I did it. Lindsey, I made myself into the man you need.” He reached for her arm.

  Lindsey jerked back, whacking her elbow against the wall of the elevator. She winced at the pain. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Why? Because it might melt your defenses a little? Because you might remember how it felt to be touched by someone who loves you?” Kent leaned against the elevator wall, allowing his eyelids to droop. “I still remember what your satin skin felt like against my palms. I used to start rubbing your shoulders, and slowly I would work my way down your back, stroking and kneading. I used to start by lifting up your hair and kissing the back of your neck, and then I would kiss every vertebra down to the small of your back until you were melting into the sheets.”

  Lindsey tried to take a deep breath but couldn’t. She could remember his touch so vividly that the fluorescent lit, mirrored elevator seemed to be lit by candles. She pressed her hands against the cold walls, trying to cling to reality. Looking at the floor counter, she almost whimpered when she discovered she had two floors to go. She felt scorched and needy with want, but if she gave in he would just leave her again, and then she would look like a fool.

  “And when you were warm and pliable, I would turn you over to caress your breasts and belly and thighs. And I would kiss you. I would kiss you until you arched and moaned and the whole room smelled of you. Your beautiful hair would be spread all over the pillow like caramel on a sundae. You used to—”

  The elevator door opened, and Lindsey lunged for her escape. She almost stumbled over her own feet in her hurry to reach her room. Her heartbeat seemed to pulse between her thighs. She should have stayed at the party. It would have been safer there than alone here with Kent. She never should have believed she would be safe with him. Jamming her key card in the door, the red light blinked at her. It was obviously on Kent's side.

  “Lindsey, why do you keep running away from me?”

  “You ran away from me first.” She tried the card again. This time, it worked. “Leave me alone. You left once. Why don’t you just leave again?” Lindsey pushed the door closed behind her. Leaning against it, she gulped air as if she’d nearly drowned. She had, in a way. She’d been on the verge of inviting him into her room, wanting to drown in him again. Closing her eyes, she groaned. Just like she had last time.

  She had plunged into their relationship and devoted herself to it so completely that she stopped being herself. That was why she hadn’t had any friends outside of comics. If she wasn’t working with a person, she never had time for them. She was always with Kent. Always.

  Lindsey paced the room. Her body ached all over, and she felt jittery. As though she’d just bolted down ten cups of coffee. Kent had always had that effect on her, too. So did the truth.

  She needed to do something to burn off her excess energy. The hotel had a gym, but that was out because some genius architect faced it toward the lobby and gave it a glass wall so everyone walking by could see who was in there. She had no desire to be ogled and compared to Wonder Woman, or Sue Storm, or some other chick in tights. This hotel, she remembered from conventions past, had a pool on the top floor, and you had to be a guest of the hotel to use it. She knew, from an experience she’d prefer to forget, that the pool remained unused for the duration of the convention. Besides, the pool closed at nine, though her key card would still open the door.

  She located her swimsuit, a tasteful two-piece of boy shorts and a halter-top. Grabbing a towel from the bathroom, she pulled her robe around her waist and headed for the stairs. The elevator made her claustrophobic suddenly, and she didn’t want to be seen in that glass box headed for the top floor in her robe.

  The pool room was dim with watery reflections shimmering on the walls and ceiling. It smelled electric green from the pool chemicals. Floor to ceiling windows on the north side gave a breathtaking view of the
city.

  Ignoring the view and the smell, Lindsey dropped her robe and towel on a chair and dove into the deep end. She swam laps across the too-short pool until the shortness frustrated her enough to overrule the other frustration coursing through her. Then she allowed herself to float and stare at the ceiling.

  Before she met Kent, she had been driven. She’d been most likely to succeed. She’d bought into the old saw about making it in New York, and she’d left her small town to conquer the world. Her first pick jobs with the big publishers were unattainable, so she’d gotten an assistant editorship in comics, which turned out to involve a lot of running. Assistant editors also got the glamorous job of going to conventions looking for new talent. She’d been doing that for two years when she was rubbing her tired eyes and a voice asked her if she was all right. Her heart had leaped into her throat when she looked at the owner of that sexy purr.

  He was so cute and so sweet and so very talented. She’d discovered how talented not long after dinner that night and three more times before the convention opened again in the morning.

  She had felt incredibly lucky to have him interested in her. That was the first problem. In high school and college, she’d always been too threatened by boys and too threatening to them to date much. They wanted her as a study buddy, but it hadn’t bothered her too much because she’d been successful at everything she tried. Her professors had adored her even if the cute poets, writers and artists who hung around the school literary magazine offices hadn’t.

  Then she came to New York and had to start settling for second best, sometimes third. Her lack of male companionship and the fact that all her new New York friends could talk about was men—occasionally sidetracking to clothes and what clothes men would like best—bothered her. By the time she’d set off for that fateful convention, she’d started to feel like a freak.