Training Days (5 page)

Morgan straightened her back and shoulders in anticipation of the onslaught. She wasn’t afraid of Kitty or her temper. But she really did not like confrontation.

Kitty spun around. “Just what the fuck do you think you were doing?”

I thought I was having some of the best sex of my life.
Morgan didn’t voice this thought out loud but instead she met her producer’s angry eyes directly. In the time since Marie had left her compartment, Morgan had decided an upfront apology was the best plan of attack. It would likely be unexpected and hence throw Kitty off-balance. “I’m sorry, Kitty. I don’t know what came over me.”

Her tactic was not overly effective. If anything it served to further darken Kitty’s expression.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Kitty threw her hands in the air in exasperation. “We both know what came over you, Morgan.”

Yes. A fabulous Frenchwoman . . . twice.
Morgan felt a smirk threaten to creep over her face but she held it at bay, determined to keep her expression neutral. She would let Kitty storm it out and then, when she was out of steam, she could proceed with her explanations.

And so Morgan just stood there while Kitty ranted on about how—if she’d known that being a producer effectively meant having to be a mother to three supposed adults—she might have thought twice before signing her contract with the network. And how, if it wasn’t lost tickets or dead batteries or giving wake-up calls so airplanes wouldn’t be missed, then it was something else. And was she really the only one who cared about keeping the reputation of their show intact? And so on.

“What is it with you, Morgan?” Kitty stood with hands on her hips and looked over the rim of her spectacles. “Don’t you ever stop thinking with your clit?”

Morgan saw red. Kitty was getting far too personal.

“Only when I’m around you!” she shot back.

That was the first overt reference Morgan had made to the “Mai Tai Incident” since it actually occurred four months ago, back in February. It had been a steamy night in Chiang Mai and Morgan and the rest of the crew were sitting on the balcony of her hotel room, knocking back drinks. Morgan, having discovered mai tais a few days earlier, had declared them her new favorite drink and was on her fifth—or maybe it was her sixth— for the evening. As happens when steamy weather is mixed with little food and a lot of alcohol, the balcony talk turned rather lewd and she and Mark began comparing their tastes in women.

Mark, who had reiterated his well-known penchant for the busty blondes, stopped Morgan short from giving a description of her preferences. He put his arm around her shoulder. “Mogs likes them all, don’t you, Mogs?”

Morgan had clinked her glass to his, nodding in agreement and saying, “Any woman . . . anywhere . . . anytime!” It was at this point that Kitty asked if Morgan had ever thought of her in that way. Morgan had given a theatrical pause during which she pointedly looked Kitty up and down. “Honey”—she waved her mai tai in front of her—“if you and I were the last two women on earth and it took two women to have a baby and the Goddess herself commanded us to go forth and multiply . . . I still wouldn’t do it with you.” She and Mark fell about laughing, Nick took a nervous sip on his beer, and Kitty placed her drink on the table, stood and left for her room. Morgan had not touched another mai tai since, and neither she nor Kitty had mentioned that night again.

So now Morgan stood silent, watching for the reaction.

Kitty averted her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and index finger. She also took another long, controlled breath. When next she spoke, her voice was evenly modulated. “Okay, so it’s happened. The question now is . . . what are we going to do about it?”

Morgan, while still wishing she had not made her last comment, was grateful it had at least quelled the tempest. Not that Kitty had actually been shouting. Her tirade had been delivered between clenched teeth, designed not to be heard through the thin walls of the compartment.

“There’s nothing to do,” Morgan said, finally able to give her side of the story, however weak. “She’s gone. She left the train at Kalgoorlie. And I knew that when I invited her to my room.”

Kitty rolled her eyes at the mention of the invitation. It suitably conveyed how brainless she thought that act had been. “And she’s probably ringing the press as we speak.”

Morgan shook her head. “Trust me. She doesn’t know who I am. She’s a backpacker who’s been in Australia for less than a week. From what she told me she’s been so busy she’s probably not even looked at a television since she arrived, and with her new pub job in Kalgoorlie I doubt she’ll get a moment to do anything but pull beers and sleep for the next month. And by then she’ll have forgotten all about me.”

Kitty wasn’t convinced. “You don’t exactly have a forgettable face, Morgan.” She turned away from Morgan’s gaze and seemingly contemplated the white bed sheets for a moment. “And how did you explain me suddenly being in your sleeper?”

Morgan sucked in her breath. Kitty was probably not going to like this one bit. “I told her you were one of the colleagues I was traveling with—”

“Yes?” Kitty said suspiciously.

“—who’s got a massive thing for me and won’t leave me alone.”

Kitty pursed her lips. With her wire-rimmed spectacles and hair tied in a loose bun it gave the effect of a woman much older than her twenty-nine years. But then, Morgan always thought Kitty looked older than her years.

“Well, what was I supposed to say?” Morgan argued. “I couldn’t exactly tell the truth, could I? And . . . you could have knocked!”

“I did knock!” Kitty blustered. “And I called to you twice. But you were obviously too busy to notice. And I can tell you right now, you’re damn lucky it was me who walked in. There was another woman right outside your door who was probably on the verge of doing the same thing. If I hadn’t been walking past, then goodness knows what would have happened.”

Morgan placed her hands on her hips. Kitty was obviously exaggerating. Why would anyone just enter her room, or be hanging around outside it for that matter? Unless of course it was Marge stopping by for a late-night chat.
Oh, dear
, she thought. Maybe it had been Marge and she’d heard what was happening on the other side of the door. Then she’d surely have a tale to tell the girls at the club. “What did she look like?” she asked.

“Oh, about my age, about my height. About my hair color.” Kitty said airily. “Not your type at all.”

Touché
. Morgan mentally conceded a point to her producer. But, while relieved to hear it couldn’t have been Marge, she was curious to know why someone had been hanging around outside her compartment.
If
there had been anyone. She still didn’t quite know if Kitty was just trying to cover for her own tactless action. “Did you speak to her?”

“Yes, I spoke to her.”

“And?”

“And she was convinced it was her room. Of course I told her it couldn’t be . . .”

Morgan listened to Kitty relate all that had transpired outside her compartment, including the fact that the mystery woman had shown Kitty a ticket with a carriage and compartment number corresponding to her own.

“So you’re damn lucky I was there,” Kitty reiterated. “Because, technically, she had every right to enter.”

“So, where is she now?” Morgan asked as she folded her arms and narrowed her eyes. “If,
technically
, she was supposed to be in my room, where has she gone?”

“I don’t know.” Kitty waved away the question. “When she left she was looking for a guard. Obviously they found where she was supposed to be and she’s happily snuggled in for the night.”

Morgan stared at Kitty, still not entirely convinced. If, as she said, this woman had heard and remarked upon the activity in her compartment, then surely it should be an issue. After all, in Kitty’s own words, they “had to keep the reputation of the show intact.”

“When you said you were sure my room was booked for single occupancy, did you tell her why?”

“Of course not.”

“Did you tell her who?”

“Who was in the room, you mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

Kitty’s expression showed she was recalling the conversation. “I might have called you Morgan . . .” Her voice trailed away. “Oh, shit.”

“Hmm.” Morgan nodded. It was doubtful there would be too many other Morgans wandering around the train. And with the filming that was to take place over the next few days, it shouldn’t take the mystery woman too long to put two and two together. “We need to find this woman and find out just what she heard.”

Kitty harrumphed. “She already made it quite clear what she heard.”

“Maybe so,” Morgan conceded. “But we don’t know if she realized it was two women.”

Kitty stared blankly for a moment, then the penny dropped and her face brightened considerably. “She may just assume there was a man.” Morgan cringed at the thought, but she could see Kitty getting excited at this possible workaround to a potential public relations disaster. Her brow furrowed and she nodded more to herself than to Morgan. “And even if she thought she heard two women we can always convince her otherwise. Yes, yes. This may just work.” Kitty nodded again, obviously thinking through all the implications. “And then, even if word did leak out we could still use it to our advantage.”

“How do you figure that?” Morgan couldn’t see any positives to that sort of publicity at all.

“Well,” Kitty said blithely, “you’d still look like a slut, but at least you’d look like a normal slut.”

Morgan was temporarily rendered speechless. In the two years since Kitty had joined the show, she had shown a tight-lipped disapproval toward Morgan’s tendency to share the love around, but never before had she so blatantly voiced her opinion.

Now it was apparent that she not only disapproved of the number of partners Morgan had, but also of their gender. Morgan shouldered past Kitty. It was by sheer force of will that she managed to open the sliding door without slamming it into its cavity. “Deal with it how you want, Kitty. I’m going to bed.”

Ally woke with a start. She blinked quickly, trying to focus, but her world consisted only of shadowy figures, the darkness stripping her surrounds of both form and color. Unfortunately the darkness did not also strip away sounds and smells. Over the course of the night three passengers had formed a chorus of snorers, and yet others added a percussion of snorts and groans as they shifted in their sleep. And at surprisingly regular intervals the farter farted. The last fart was actually what had woken Ally from her doze. Obviously oblivious, he or she had let one go at high volume. As a thick, heavy odor once again assaulted her nostrils, Ally pressed a button on the side of her watch to illuminate the face.
Jesus.
She tilted her head back as far as the headrest would allow and stared at the black ceiling. It was not yet five

a.m. How much longer did she have to endure this torture? Ally made a quick calculation. The train was due in Sydney at ten a.m. on Saturday. Taking into account the two-hour time difference between the east and west coasts, she still had a whole fifty-one hours left to travel.

Fifty-one long, fart-filled hours.

Right now, Ally wished she had boarded that outrageously small plane from Kalgoorlie back to Perth. If she had, then in only a few hours she would have had her feet back on Sydney soil. She could have had a long post-flight soak in her bath and returned to the office, fresh and ready to begin work designing her Kalgoorlie executive residence. And tonight she would have done as James had wanted and donned “that sexy little black number” he was so fond of. She would have accompanied him to his client dinner at the Summit, an iconic Sydney restaurant set high on the forty-seventh floor of Australia Square. The 360degree views of Sydney, the extensive local and international wine list and the innovative menu made it a venue guaranteed to impress, and it was a favored location for James’s corporate entertaining. He had been slightly miffed when she announced she could not attend tonight’s dinner. Especially, as he pointed out, because she didn’t
need
to take “the slow boat” home. But not even Ally’s favorite Summit dish—the wok-fried chili and black-pepper blue-swimmer crab—could sway her into changing her mind.

“There’s no guarantee Josh will be feeling so generous again this century.” Ally smoothed the traces of lines that had begun to appear on either side of James’s mouth and kissed him on the nose. “It’s only one dinner. And I’ll be back on Saturday, so we can definitely go to the charity auction together on Sunday.”

James was not one to pout, at least not outwardly. Only the taut rustle of broadsheet as he nodded and returned to his copy of
The Australian
gave any indication he was less than happy. The subject was not raised again until the actual day of her departure. “It’s going to be a long week without you, Alison.” He shrugged into his suit jacket and picked up his black leather briefcase. He would be the first to leave her Croyden apartment, where he slept at least a couple of nights a week. He winked. They had made love that morning and he was in a somewhat jovial mood. “Although there’s some lucky crab out there that’s getting a second chance this Thursday.”