This Just In... (Harlequin Superromance) (20 page)

“How?”

Sabrina didn’t have a good answer. “It just was.”

“Yes, because your home is here. With us.”

Sabrina felt a prickling behind her eyes. She’d thought about it many times and just as quickly discarded the idea. She hadn’t fought so hard to get her job and life back here to give it up. She couldn’t go back. She just couldn’t.

Not even for Noah.

“I can’t,” she said, as she said every time Marissa mentioned it.

“Fine, but I’m going to keep asking.”

“Why?” Sabrina really wanted to know. “Not that it doesn’t make me feel incredibly loved, but why is it so important? You hated me only a few months ago and you took Noah’s side.”

“I miss you,” Marissa said.

The prickling sharpened and Sabrina blinked, though there was no one to see if she let the tears roll down her cheeks.

“You sold me a false bill of goods, wheedling your way back into my good graces. I barely got to make you pay for that article. I feel I didn’t get all my punishing in. And now you’ve added the cowboy-boot situation to the mix. Really, Sabrina, how can I make you pay when you live so far away?”

“If anyone can find a way, it’s you.” She swiped the back of her hand across her eyes and coughed to clear the thickness in her throat.

“Are you crying?” Marissa wanted to know. “Stop it. I like it better when you get all snarky and bossy.”

“I do not get bossy.”

“You do. You
so
do.”

“And you don’t?”

“Of course I do. How do you think I so easily recognize the trait in others?” Marissa sighed. “Quit being stubborn. You’re not happy there.”

She wasn’t, and fear that she’d once again made the wrong decision bubbled up. Sabrina fought back, breathing in and out slowly until her lungs felt normal and her leg stopped bouncing. “I will be happy,” she told Marissa, hoping she sounded more certain than she felt. Thinking negatively was doing her no favors.

She had her job. Her health. She’d won her job back, and that hadn’t been easy. It was something to be proud of. Just as soon as she found her place, literally and figuratively, she’d be back to feeling like herself.

Even if she wasn’t sure who that was anymore.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

N
OAH
SPENT
THE
DAYS
after his minibender busying himself with work and his ignored campaign. Since there was no longer anyone to fill up his free time, he filled it himself. Calling meetings with his campaign advisory committee and discussing his platform, getting new photos taken, his poster and other marketing materials printed, finishing his budgets for the dealership and driving back and forth between his two locations.

He’d barely been to the dealership located outside Wheaton over the summer. Too often he had plans with Sabrina or other events that pulled at his time. He should have handled his schedule better, should have made time. He vowed to address the problem immediately.

Plus, it got him out of Wheaton. He drove over on the following Tuesday and booked himself into a hotel with the intention of staying until the weekend. There would be meetings to hold, sales numbers to run, problems to solve. He looked forward to immersing himself in everything. Only they didn’t need him.

He’d staffed the dealership well. His new manager, the one he’d hired just before the heat of summer, was fantastic. Engaged and observant, she had the dealership running like a well-oiled machine. Coupled with his competent team of sales professionals and the best mechanics in town, the place turned a profit and ran smoothly even in his absence. They were happy to see him, of course, to show off their successes and plans for future ones, but they didn’t need him. Noah stayed anyway. Because no one at this dealership watched him with sympathetic eyes or asked how he was feeling.

He was fine. Perfectly fine. Better than fine.

And when Noah drove back to Wheaton it was with a renewed dedication to winning the upcoming mayoral election. Not just because Pete wasn’t a good candidate for the town, but because he needed the community’s vote. A vote that told him that they wanted him to stay.

* * *

S
ABRINA
STARED
AT
THE
marked-up papers sitting in her in-box in her newly regained cubicle. Her editor was a traditionalist and still preferred to make revisions on paper, fearful that something might get lost electronically. This wasn’t the article on Big Daddy and son, which had run last week, but her latest article. Clearly, her editor had not been as enamored of the words as she had.

She swallowed her irritation and, if she were completely honest, the hurt. Back in the day—okay, a year ago—her articles had only received the lightest edits. But all of the pieces she’d submitted since her return had received the same bright red critique.

Her sleek messenger bag felt heavy on her shoulder and she slipped it off and hung it over the back of the rolling chair at her desk. The sounds of the newsroom clacked around her, louder than she remembered.

She sat in the chair, pulling the pages from her plastic tray and flattening them on her desk. Slashes and question marks, notations in the margins stared back at her, but she barely noticed them over the one word that jumped out at her from the bottom of the page.

Crap.
In block letters and underlined twice.

A low rolling boil started in her blood. Her work was not crap. The article was insightful and charming and fresh. The complete opposite of crap. This would have been gold in Wheaton. Sabrina reminded herself that she wasn’t in Wheaton anymore and scowled at the page when she read what was written below the underlined crap.

You’ve gone soft?

As if she’d gone soft. She’d fought and clawed and badgered anyone linked to her job for nearly a year looking for a toehold to come back. And she’d found it. How was that
soft?
Not to mention the fabulous red boots she was wearing. Given the right trajectory and force the tips could draw blood. Not even a little soft.

In fact, she felt like kicking something right now. Or someone.

The noise of the cubicled office added to her ire. Fingers hammering across keyboards like they were trying to communicate in Morse code, phones with the ringers turned up full blast and, worse, the conversations that followed, every person seemingly unaware that she could hear every detail being shared. No offense to any of them, but Sabrina didn’t want to know that Nerissa had slept with a guy who had a hair sweater hiding under his dress shirt last night, that Shirley’s niece was refusing to enter rehab and that Marvin’s wife had given the entire family food poisoning on the weekend.

She thought longingly of her Wheaton apartment where the only sounds were the birds outside or Noah knocking on her door. But this wasn’t Wheaton.

Sabrina wasn’t used to the cacophony of city living yet. Last night she’d actually woken up when a fire truck siren had roared past The Cave. She told herself that she just needed a little more time to settle in and ignored the tiny voice that asked if three weeks wasn’t long enough.

Apparently not. It had probably taken her two months to get used to the quiet of Wheaton, so it made sense it would take at least that long to re-acclimate to the bustle of Vancouver.

And she was doing better. She’d gone out with her old city friends twice last week. So she’d gone home early the second night. She’d been tired and what was wrong with admitting she needed a little beauty rest? She’d even glanced through the vacancy listings in the paper yesterday, though most longtime Vancouverites knew the only way to find a good apartment was through word of mouth or to call apartment management companies directly. By the time listings reached the public, the good ones were long gone.

Still, she was making an effort.

Sabrina shoved down the irritation threatening to spill over when the occupant of the cubicle next to hers—someone new who hadn’t been around when she left—answered his cell phone while already talking on his landline and thought it was reasonable to carry on conversations with both parties at the same time. Ridiculous.

Well, she couldn’t stay here. How could any sane person work in this kind of environment? Without glancing around, she gathered up the papers and crammed them into her messenger bag. She’d deal with them, with everything, back at The Cave.

Sabrina’s boots slammed against the sidewalk all the way home. She felt marginally better when she entered the dim apartment. For once, the space was blessedly quiet. Just a wash of sunlight trickling through her high windows and the squeaks that were common in older buildings. The Stompson Twins were probably still sleeping off their carousing from the night before. She’d heard them arrive home just after one in the morning, clomping around in their hard-soled shoes, turning on the stereo and walking back and forth until she felt like screaming. Though the noise only lasted about thirty minutes, Sabrina had stared at her water-marked ceiling until four.

As she plunked her laptop onto the kitchen table—she hadn’t gotten around to setting up an office area—she considered making some noise herself to give them a taste of what it was like to live with ignorant neighbors, but hitting the ceiling with a broom seemed petty and like a lot of work. Not to mention she feared bringing down a rain of plaster on her head and who knew what else. Asbestos? Mold? A dead mouse? She shuddered and pushed aside the desire for revenge. She wouldn’t be here much longer, and she could put up with anything, even the Stompson Twins, temporarily.

Her laptop hummed to life, and Sabrina pulled out the notes and read through them again. There were a lot. No easy fixes, but that was okay. She’d proved that she could handle tough assignments. Still, a cup of coffee wouldn’t go awry. She made a big pot and after pouring herself a jumbo cup, she sent off a quick email to the editor and staff, letting them know that she’d be working from home today. She didn’t worry that it would get lost electronically. Then she got down to work.

The overriding tone of the notes was that she’d been too easy on her subject, a sweet nineteen-year-old actress who’d been working in Vancouver since she was a kid but had recently landed a role in a Hollywood blockbuster due to film this winter. Movie reviewers and bloggers believed the film would be the next
Twilight
or
Hunger Games
and would catapult the young actress and her costars into the celebrity stratosphere. Sabrina’s editor wanted her to be tougher. Everyone was writing fluff pieces—they’d stand out by being hard-nosed.

But seriously, there was nothing hard about the girl. She’d been unfailingly polite, well-spoken, cheerful and quite funny. Charm and charisma were the hallmarks of any successful actor, Sabrina knew that, but this girl was the real deal. Exactly what was Sabrina supposed to write? She took a sip of her steaming coffee even though it scalded her tongue.

Fine. They wanted snarky cattiness? She’d deliver. And she’d show everyone, her editor, her friends, her colleagues that her time in her hometown hadn’t turned her soft. Not even a little. That she was more than capable of handling anything the city might throw at her.

The morning disappeared while Sabrina slaved over the words. She referenced her interview notes over and over, looking for pauses, phrasings that could be twisted to suit her purpose. She stopped only twice to refill her giant red coffee mug.

The Stompson Twins arose, stormed around awhile and then left. Sabrina noticed only when their matching spindly legs caused a shadow to fall through her window. How two people with so little body fat could manage to make so much noise was a mystery. Other building residents came and went, their footsteps thumping on the concrete stairs outside. The coffee pot emptied. The sun passed its apex and began to descend.

Sabrina remained glued to her laptop, writing, deleting, rewriting. She polished, revised and tightened. She checked her notes against the material she’d derived from other sources—the actress’s publicist, other news articles from reputable sources. Then she checked them again. As the last bit of daylight drifted away, she sat back, leaning against the hard wooden slats of her kitchen chair.

Her butt was numb, her stomach churned from too much coffee and not enough food, her shoulders and forearms were tender from typing, but she was done.

Her masterpiece was complete, and it was worthy of the title. She smiled as she read the lines. Sharp and clean and bitchy. Her editor would love it. So would all her city friends. Sabrina could imagine them now, laughing wildly over Sunday brunch as they repeated a particularly ruthless sentence.

It would be her grand reintroduction. Her statement that this time she wouldn’t be leaving and that no one could take her place.

But instead of soothing her, the laughing faces of her city friends changed and morphed into those of her friends in Wheaton. Marissa and Kyle. The kids. Ellen, Trish, Mrs. Thompson. George and all the friends she’d made at Cedar Oaks. Her customers at the coffee shop. Her parents.

Noah.

Only none of them were laughing. Their eyes didn’t shine with schadenfreude or approval. They didn’t smile or nod. Instead, they looked downright disappointed in her.

Sabrina shook her head to clear it. Why was she thinking about them? The chances of them even reading the article were slim. Okay, fine. Maybe she’d received some emails and texts from town residents complimenting her on her article last week. Maybe they would read it. No big deal. They’d know that she was being facetious, that she didn’t really think poorly of the actress, right?

But her stomach twisted and even when she poured the rest of her coffee down the sink and drank some water instead, it wouldn’t stop churning.

This was crazy. She wasn’t soft. The actress would understand, if she even bothered to read it. It was just business, a way to sell papers. Nothing personal. And sometimes these snarky articles did more to increase the subject’s profile than the softball pieces their publicists were always angling for. Wasn’t that what the actress and her team were after? Coverage to increase name recognition, building her brand so that she could demand a higher salary and more perks in her next contract?

Sabrina rinsed the cup out and stuck it in the rack to dry. Or would the actress feel like Marissa? As though she’d been betrayed by someone who’d acted like a friend. The churning grew more aggressive. Was this how Noah felt when she told him that she’d used her article on him to get her job back?

Sabrina told herself it wasn’t the same situation at all. She and the actress had no personal connection and if the girl was naive enough to think that they were friends, then that was her fault. It would be a good lesson. She shouldn’t be so trusting with the media because there were plenty of jackals out there who wouldn’t pause to consider her feelings. They’d jump all over anything she said; some would even create rumor and supposition if they thought they could get away with it. Sabrina would be doing her a favor because her article wasn’t that nasty, just a little reminder of what the actress could expect from others if she didn’t protect herself more carefully.

The taste of coffee lingered in her mouth. Sharp and bitter, even after she brushed her teeth. This wasn’t just about the coffee. She put her toothbrush away and returned to her computer. Maybe she could ease up on some of her snarkier observations a tad.

But when she clicked on the menu to open her recent documents, a different title caught her eye. George Cuthbert. It had been the last article she’d written for the
Wheaton Digest
and had run the week after she left.

No one had taken over the series. Sabrina knew because she checked the paper online every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. She knew she should be a bigger person, but she was glad the series had folded. It was hers, her idea, her baby and she didn’t like the idea of someone else putting their grubby paws all over it.

Those interviews had been fun. There had been no publicists in the background ready to put a stop to the proceedings if they didn’t like the way the questions were framed or the answers their client gave. There was no hedging of words or spinning of stories. Of course people had wanted to show themselves in their best light. That was human nature. But no one had lied or obfuscated, refused to comment or claimed that a particular subject was off-limits.