Escapade Read online

  “I’ll grow under if you don’t help me,” he said in exasperation. “Don’t you understand that they’ll kill me?”

  “No, they won’t. Marc Donner may have mob ties, but he’s no killer. You’re a con man at heart, brother,” Josh said imperturbably. “Con them. After all, you got yourself into this mess.”

  “Get myself out,” Brad finished for him. “Sure.” He rammed his hands into his pockets. “Somebody will let you know when to send flowers and pretend to grieve for me.”

  “I would,” Josh said honestly. “But if I get you out of it again, I’ll spend the rest of our lives doing it. This time you have to do it alone.”

  “Thanks for nothing.”

  He should be used to it, Brad thought on his way out. He never won an argument, he never got his way. Josh would let the gambling syndicate assassinate him without blinking an eye. They said brotherly love was sacred, but here was Josh dropping him into boiling oil. He was too stubborn to admit that his brother was right. He didn’t want complications, either. He wanted to enjoy his life. Gambling had always been part of it. He loved the risks. Why did he have to give them up? Surely, if he worked at it, he could find a way out. He had to, now, if only to show Josh that he could.

  * * *

  WARD JOHNSON WATCHED Dora finish up the work on the computer and shut it down, his eyes thoughtful and more wistful than he knew.

  “Why didn’t I marry you?” he mused aloud.

  She flushed, smiling like a girl as she glanced at him. “You never noticed me,” she reminded him. “I was always the wallflower, hiding in the back of the class and never raising my hand all through school. I was too shy to even smile at you.”

  “Gladys wasn’t,” he said with a bitter laugh. “She seduced me in the gym after class one day, on the floor behind the lockers. Two months later she said she was pregnant by me, and I married her. What a mistake. She wanted a rich man. She tried to make me into one by pushing me and pushing me, but I didn’t have the ambition or the talent.” He rubbed the back of his neck and shook his head. “When she couldn’t force me into brown-nosing for an executive job, she hit the bottle. She’s still hitting it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I. It’s affected our son all his life. These days, he’s forever in trouble with the law,” he added heavily. “When I try to make him stop drinking and smoking pot, he laughs and says I never try to stop Mom, and isn’t alcohol a drug? What do I say to that? Of course it’s a drug, but she won’t stop. She knows I hate it. That’s why she does it, to punish me.”

  Dora smiled a little nervously. “Some women don’t seem to take well to marriage, I suppose. Your wife...perhaps she’s very ambitious and smart. If she’d gone out for a career, she’d probably have made it to the top and have all that money she wanted.”

  “She’d have been happy,” he agreed. “But she thought she wanted me and kids.” He shrugged. “Do any of us know what we really want?” He stared at her. “How about you?”

  “Oh, Edgar and I are happy, I suppose. The boys will both be in junior high next year. Edgar is a deacon in church, and I teach Sunday school.” She stared into her lap. “He teaches, so we have to be so circumspect and above reproach.” She smiled wistfully. “Just once I’d love to go to some swank party and throw off my clothes and swim naked in someone’s swimming pool.” She laughed at her own fancy. “Can you imagine my doing something like that, at my age?”

  He frowned. “Why not? You have a beautiful figure, Dora.”

  Her face changed, became radiant. She flushed and looked at him. “Do you...really think so?”

  He felt young again. Free again. He stared at her and saw the shy sixteen-year-old he’d gone to school with, just as she must have seen the slim boy who was just as shy around her.

  “Come here, honey,” he said softly, standing in front of her. He opened his hands and held them out to her.

  The look on his face was explicit. Dora hesitated. “Ward, I can’t... ”

  “Yes, you can,” he said huskily, his face hardening. He reached down and pulled her up, into his arms. They went around her, staying her against the length of his body. “I have nothing! Nothing! Neither do you. We’re both trapped, like mice in a maze. My God, doesn’t life owe us a little happiness?”

  “I’m married,” she moaned.

  But his mouth covered the frantic words and pushed them back against her teeth. He tasted of coffee and passion, nothing like her very proper Edgar, who hadn’t touched her in two years. She was a voluptuous woman with a passionate core that had barely been touched in sixteen years of marriage. Often she thought she’d only married Edgar because no other man wanted her. But Ward did. She could feel that he wanted her, feel his desire like a brand against her belly.

  She moaned and opened her mouth, trembling a little when his hands went to the skirt of her dress and began to push it up.

  The office was closed and locked. The window shades were drawn. No one could see in. They were alone.

  Dora felt Ward’s hands on her breasts, her belly. He touched her with desperate need, and she gave in without a protest. She forgot Edgar and all her principles in the heat of what Ward was doing to her starving body.

  “Here,” he choked, moving her so that she was sitting on the edge of the desk. He kissed her again and again, drowning her in his need. All the while his hands were working, pushing aside her clothing. There was a metallic rasp.

  His mouth grew insistent. She felt his big hands shift her on the desk, and then she felt him in stark intimacy, probing at her. There was a muffled groan, then his body seemed to clench as he pulled roughly at her hips and went into her.

  She cried out at the intimacy and the pleasure. Edgar was all but impotent, but Ward wasn’t. She clung to him while he buffeted her, his mouth against her, his gruff moans of pleasure vibrating in his throat. Her last conscious thought as he increased the rhythm was that she was going to have bruises on her hips because his grip was strong and painful. Then a wave of pleasure spread all over her in a shock of heat. She shuddered just as she heard Ward cry out hoarsely and go rigid in her arms.

  For a few seconds she was submerged in the drowsy aftermath of pleasure. Then came reality and shame and self-contempt.

  They hadn’t even undressed. She’d given herself to a man to whom she wasn’t married. She’d committed adultery.

  She began to cry.

  Ward righted their clothing, murmuring soft words of apology the whole time. “God, I’m sorry, Dora,” he said miserably, holding her close. “I’m so sorry! It’s been years since I had a woman...”

  She swallowed, dabbing at her wet eyes with the back of her hand. “Doesn’t your wife sleep with you?” she asked through her tears.

  “No,” he replied. “Not for years and years.” He lifted her face to his eyes and grimaced. “I’m sorry. You’re so sweet, Dora, so much a woman. I’ve watched you and wanted you...but I shouldn’t have let it happen.”

  She gnawed her lower lip. “Edgar,” she began, stopped, and tried again. “Edgar can’t...in bed,” she whispered.

  “For years and years?” he asked softly.

  She hesitated. Then she nodded and lowered her head to his chest. His shirt was damp with perspiration, but he felt comfortable and familiar. “I enjoyed it. I’m so ashamed!” she wept.

  His hands were hesitant as he patted her on the back and then began to caress her. “I enjoyed it, too.” He groaned and bent to kiss her, softly. “Will it really hurt anyone if we make each other happy?” he asked miserably. “They don’t want us, and we do want each other. It would just be that, you know. I wouldn’t make any trouble for you or try to break up your marriage. And no one would ever know. Only the two of us. Who would it hurt?”

  “No one, I guess,” she said, rationalizing it because she wanted him, too. She wanted to be loved, needed, a
dored. She wanted to feel like a desirable woman. She wanted to experience sex as a delightful form of communication instead of as an unpleasant duty.

  Ward hugged her close, his eyes closed, trembling at his good fortune. He had Dora, for a little while, at least. He had a woman who enjoyed him, who didn’t rage at him in a drunken frenzy or deny him her bed. It was such a pleasure to hold a woman who smelled of perfume and flowers instead of a bony shadow of a woman who reeked of sour whiskey.

  “It will be all right,” he said, clinging to her. He felt the cold chill of desperation as he formulated how they could keep their secret from their spouses, hold on to their little oasis of hope in a desert of despair and hopelessness. “We’ll manage.”

  Dora hoped they would. Guilt was riding her, but surely she deserved something besides work and duty and service!

  Later Ward walked her to the parking lot, very correct in the distance he kept between them. He didn’t pretend that what they were doing was either all right or noble. He knew that it could easily lead to shame and public disgrace and even tragedy. But he was too weak to fight it. Apparently so was she. He remembered lines from a song or poem, about people leading lives of quiet desperation. He understood now what they meant. He was stealing a few hours’ pleasure to escape his hopeless loneliness. He hoped the price he and Dora would ultimately have to pay wouldn’t be too high.

  Amanda sensed a different atmosphere in the office the next day. It wasn’t something tangible, but there was a strained, almost forced reserve between Ward and Dora. In fact, they seemed to have trouble not looking at each other.

  When they went out to lunch, Amanda pretended not to notice that they got into the same car, but immediately she figured everything out. She didn’t approve, and she knew Josh wouldn’t. But she could hardly tell him something that was only a suspicion. After the way they’d parted, perhaps he wouldn’t even speak to her. She couldn’t remember ever having a serious argument with Josh before. She didn’t like being at odds with him.

  She stared at the computer screen, determined to concentrate on the matter at hand. She noted with an accountant’s keen accuracy the changes Ward had made in the sheets he’d faxed to Josh. These reflected a wholesale percentage rise in classified ad prices and display ad prices, and even job press prices, in increments that were barely noticeable unless someone saw the books on a daily basis and recognized the bulk rates for the ads and various printing jobs. But she did. She glared at the spreadsheet, wondering if Ward Johnson really expected to pull off the deception.

  If he planned to raise those prices to correspond with his figures, he might actually manage it.

  The price increase had been Amanda’s idea, but Ward had made Josh think it was his own. She wanted to throw things and scream. Ward had outfoxed her. She could go running to Josh yelling foul, but that wasn’t her way.

  She’d have a better chance if she slowly initiated other changes to improve revenues at the Gazette. And Josh would believe her when she finally told him whose idea it had been. He knew, if nothing else, that she never lied.

  Amanda wished she’d never known what it was like to kiss him, to be held by him, wanted by him. Her nights were tormented, and her days were full of thoughts of what their nights could be like. But she couldn’t continue to brood, or her mother’s family’s newspaper enterprise would go down the tube. There was no way Amanda would let her inheritance slip by her as easily as Josh had. At least the newspaper held the promise of a secure future.

  She went to the back, where Tim Wilson was running the big Heidelberg press, its hydraulic action sounding like a jazz rhythm as it lifted each printed sheet into a neat pile. They used the offset press for most jobs, but there were still some that demanded the accuracy and precision of the Heidelberg.

  “I want to talk to you about something,” she said, perching herself on a stool beside him.

  “Sure,” he said, grinning. He was in his thirties, tall and slightly balding, and happily married with a brand-new son. Everyone liked him. “What is it?”

  “When you set up a job, it’s before we’ve had the customer come in and read the proofs, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes,” he confessed. “I don’t like it, but Mr. Johnson says we’ve done it that way for fifteen years and he doesn’t want to make anybody mad.”

  “The way we’re doing this isn’t cost-effective,” she said. “The cost of setting up the job is offset by having to do it all over again because it wasn’t proofread first. The same thing is happening with jobs we do on the offset press. Negatives and plates are expensive to make. We’re throwing away money.”

  “That we are.”

  “I want the customers to read proofs before we print jobs from now on. You or I can call and ask them to come in and look over the proofs and sign a paper attesting to that.”

  Tim whistled softly. “Ward won’t like it.”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “Ward doesn’t have to know, if we’re careful,” she told him. “He’s always out of the office on Thursdays, and sometimes on Fridays. He involves himself with the newspaper, yes, but he leaves most of the printing decisions to you.”

  “That’s true.” Tim smiled apologetically. “Stings, doesn’t it?” he asked gently. “This whole operation belongs to your family, and you don’t have any say in how it’s run.”

  “That’s going to change,” she assured him. “If I have to fight Ward and Josh Lawson both.”

  He chuckled. “You’re like your dad, aren’t you?”

  “I never thought so before. Maybe I am, a bit. Will you do it?”

  “If I get fired...” he began slowly.

  “I know. You have a family to support. Tim, I can always appeal to Josh if I have to. Believe me, you won’t lose your job, even if I do.”

  She looked and sounded sincere. He knew already that she never made promises she couldn’t keep. “Okay,” he said finally. “We’ll give it a try.”

  “I want to do an inventory, too,” she added. He groaned, and she smiled. “Don’t panic. I’ll make sure we have help. But it’s overdue. I want to see what we have. Then we can decide what we need.”

  “You’re actually planning to run this business to do more than break even, aren’t you?” he asked with pure delighted sarcasm. “Damn. There go my four-hour coffee breaks.”

  She laughed. “There’s a first time for everything.”

  “So they say. I’ll do my part. But it’s your funeral.”

  “Then I’ll take my chances.”

  As it happened, the implementing of the new system was done pretty much with Ward’s nebulous approval. Amanda caught him one day just after a very long lunch with a radiant Dora, and he agreed without any argument to Amanda’s casual suggestion that clients proof job work before it was printed. His involvement with Dora, which was becoming pretty obvious to his coworkers, might very well work to her advantage, Amanda mused. While Ward was indulging his libido, she had the time and opportunity to indulge her business sense and get the press back on its financial feet.

  It would take a little stealth, but she was more than capable of that. Besides, she thought wistfully, it would keep her from brooding over Josh. He hadn’t called or written. Brad, however, was back in town, and he had called her. Neither of them had mentioned Josh, although he sounded belligerent. Amanda wondered if he’d argued again with his brother. They hardly did anything else lately, he said. She’d accepted Brad’s offer of lunch because she needed to hear about Josh, even if it was secondhand. She was dying to know if Terri had shown up, if Josh was falling into Terri’s arms again. She had no pride when it came to that question. She had to know.

  They went out to lunch that Friday. He was less animated than usual, something she noticed immediately.

  “Josh is in town, isn’t he?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant. They’d just finished their salads and were waiting for
the main course to be served.

  “Does it show?” he mused.

  “I’m afraid so. You look absolutely driven.”

  “I am driven.” He propped his head on his hands and stared at her across the table. “You might as well know that I’m in debt up to my neck because I went a little overboard one night in a Las Vegas casino. The owner wants his money yesterday, but I can’t raise it.”

  “Did you tell Josh?”

  “Yes,” he said tersely. “I told Josh. He said that if he bailed me out again, I’d never stop gambling.”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

  “But you agree with him, don’t you?”

  “It isn’t what I think that matters,” she replied. Her green eyes were compassionate. “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t raise twenty thousand dollars on my own within a month’s time. I certainly can’t borrow that much, considering how far I’m overdrawn. I can’t even mortgage my house—I’m still paying off the interest on the loan.” He smiled at her with a whimsical expression on his handsome face. “I don’t suppose you’d like to shoot me? That would solve my problems. Then at least I won’t get dropped in some river with lead shoes on.”

  She chuckled. “I wouldn’t call getting shot solving a problem. I wish I could loan you the money,” she said, smiling at him gently. “I’d do it in a minute if Ward Johnson wasn’t in the picture. But, if I staked you, I’d stand to lose the paper. That’s what I’m fighting for right now.”

  “I know.” It touched him that she was willing even to think about such a strategy. They had a long history, and she cared about him, even if it wasn’t with the same passion he knew she felt for his brother. He suddenly hated Josh. He didn’t deserve someone like Amanda. He wasn’t as concerned about her as Brad was. Brad would have loved her and cherished her and treated her like a queen. His eyes narrowed. Hold that thought, he mused, watching her lovely face intently. If he could straighten out his life and pull himself together, mightn’t she turn to him after all? He had overheard their last conversation and knew his brother had rejected her.