The Calamity Janes Read online

  “So, what’s the deal, Emma? Where are you going?” he asked, deliberately keeping his tone calm.

  “I need to get home,” she said without meeting his gaze.

  Determined to keep up the pretense that her behavior was nothing out of the ordinary, he glanced at the clock. “It’s early yet. Just call Mrs. Harrison to check on Caitlyn, then we can order that dinner I promised you.”

  She was already shaking her head before the words were out of his mouth. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Then stay while I eat. I’d like the company.”

  “I don’t think so. You don’t need to get up. I’ll call a cab.”

  Clearly something was going on that Ford didn’t grasp. Something in the past couple of hours had made her panic. He recalled what Ryan had said just before Emma had left Winding River, that she was running scared. If she’d been frightened of what was happening between them then, it was little wonder she was panicky now. He couldn’t let her run this time. She might never stop.

  “Emma, what’s this all about? Why are you running away?” he asked, deliberately choosing words that would annoy her.

  “I’m not running away,” she claimed, her cheeks flushed with indignation at the accusation.

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “Just because I have responsibilities does not mean I’m running away.”

  “We talked about our plans for the evening. We were going to share dinner, make love and then I was going to take you home later. Aside from the sequence of events, what’s changed?” He tucked a finger under her chin and forced her to face him. “Did I miss something here? Wasn’t this as good for you as it was for me? If not, you need to tell me.”

  “Typical male ego,” she said sarcastically. “All you’re worried about is your performance in bed.”

  “No,” Ford said patiently. “What I’m trying to do is get to the bottom of your sudden change of heart.”

  Sparks flashed in her eyes. “There’s something wrong with me because I want to go home?”

  “No, not because you want to go home. Because you want to do it right this second. And there’s nothing wrong with that, either. I just think I deserve an explanation. Obviously something has shaken you. Come on, Emma. Talk to me. If this isn’t about the sex, what is it about? Is it about the two of us?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, regarding him impatiently. “You’re not going to be satisfied until I spell it out for you, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then it is about the sex,” she said with heart-stopping candor.

  Even though he was convinced it wasn’t that simple, Ford felt the breath go out of him. He’d just had the most incredible sexual experience of his life and she had a complaint? How could they have been on such different wavelengths? He’d watched her eyes, seen the wonder when she reached her climax. He’d felt her trembling beneath him, felt the way her body responded to every caress.

  “Okay, lay it on me,” he said, bracing himself for the worst.

  “It was good,” she said with obvious reluctance. “In fact, it was very, very good.”

  Now he was totally confused. “And that’s bad?”

  “It’s awful,” she admitted. “This was supposed to put an end to the attraction, right? Wasn’t that what we both expected?”

  “Hoped for, maybe, but expected? No, that is not what I expected,” he told her, relieved that his initial grasp of the problem, at least as she saw it, was pretty much on target.

  “Well, I did. I wanted it to be over after this, because you can’t matter to me.”

  “I can’t?” he said cautiously. Wasn’t it usually the man who was commitment shy? Just his luck to find a woman who was terrified of happily-ever-after just when he was beginning to think about it.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “But, somehow, after this, I do matter?”

  She nodded, looking so genuinely miserable that he couldn’t bring himself to laugh.

  “Darlin’, you’re going to have to explain that one to me.”

  “Nothing’s changed. You’re still a journalist, and I cannot, I will not get involved with a newspaperman. This…” She waved her hand around to include the rumpled sheets, his hand, which rested possessively on her thigh. “It’s wrong. We couldn’t be more wrong for each other.”

  “I think that horse may already be out of the barn. We’re involved, and saying we can’t be won’t change anything.”

  “Of course it will. I don’t have to see you again—not like this anyway. I’d hoped I wouldn’t even want to, but that was a mistake.” She sighed. “A huge mistake.”

  Despite her words, Ford was taking heart from the sentiment behind them. “No, you don’t have to sleep with me ever again, but I would certainly be disappointed if you didn’t. And, to be perfectly honest, I think you would be, too. We’re good together, Emma. Better than good. We’re incredible.”

  “In bed, maybe.”

  “In bed, definitely,” he corrected. “And in other ways as well.”

  Her chin tilted up. “Well, it’s not going to happen, not the sex, not anything, and that’s that,” she said flatly. “I will not have you in my life. Ford. I must have been out of my mind to let it go this far. I should have been honest from the minute we met and told you straight out that there was no future for us.”

  “Because of what I do for a living?” he asked carefully, needing to be absolutely sure he was getting the correct message here.

  “Yes.”

  Ford had done his best, he had clung to his patience by a thread because she was so evidently rattled, but this was the last straw. He was getting damned tired of being blamed for something some other journalist had apparently done to destroy her trust in everyone associated with the media. For her to continue to hold it against him, even after all these weeks when she’d seen the kind of man he was, was infuriating. No, it was more than that. It was insulting.

  “Okay,” he began slowly. “If it’s what you really want, what you’re determined to do, I’ll let you go, not just tonight but for good…on one condition.”

  “What?” she asked, eyeing him suspiciously.

  “Tell me why you have it in for journalists. I think I deserve to understand that much at least, especially since you claim that’s the only reason we can’t be together.”

  “They’re not trustworthy,” she said, uttering the blanket condemnation with a perfectly straight face. “I can’t be with someone who isn’t trustworthy.”

  “You can go into court and defend a man who’s guilty as sin of repeated drunk-driving offenses without making any moral judgments, and yet all journalists are untrustworthy, including one you know as well as you know me?” he asked with barely concealed irony.

  “One thing has nothing to do with the other,” she insisted.

  He shook his head. “You’re going to have to do better than that. I’m not letting you off the hook this time. I want specifics.”

  To his astonishment, he realized there were tears leaking from her eyes and spilling down her cheeks. “Emma?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  His annoyance faded in the face of her very real anguish. “I think you need to. Please tell me. I’ve asked you before and you’ve put me off, but I have to know. Did someone misquote you?”

  She shook her head. “If only it had been something that simple.”

  “What then?”

  When she lifted her gaze to meet his, there was a brief flash of anger in her eyes, but mostly she just looked sad. “I never even talked to him, not even once, but nobody would believe that,” she whispered with a hitch in her voice.

  “Him?”

  “A reporter for one of the Denver papers.”

  “What happened?”

  She sighed then, but she finally began to talk. “There was a story about a case I was handling. Very high profile. Very tricky defense.”

  “Okay,” he said quietly, then
waited for the rest.

  “They all thought I had spilled confidential information about a client to a reporter.” She looked as stricken as if it had happened just yesterday. “My partners were ready to fire me. After all, there it was in black and white, information only I could have known, enough to put my client behind bars. Maybe that’s where he belonged, but that wasn’t the point. I would never, never do something so unethical.”

  Ford held his breath through the soft confession. She glanced at him and he saw the terrible price she had paid for what had happened, for having her integrity called into question by the people she worked with, people she respected.

  “I believe that,” he said. “I know you’re not capable of doing anything like that.”

  She met his gaze. “Do you really?”

  “Of course. Did you clear your name?”

  “Eventually.”

  “How?”

  “I proved that someone else had leaked the information, that the reporter knew the information wasn’t coming from me but linked my name to it anyway for a price.”

  Ford was stunned. “Who would do such a terrible thing?”

  For the longest time, he thought she might not answer. Her lower lip quivered, but finally she drew in a deep, shuddering breath and faced him with a look of resolve on her face. “My husband.”

  He felt as if the wind had just been knocked out of him, which, of course, was nothing compared to the way Emma must have felt when she made the discovery. “What? How? Why the hell would he do something like that?”

  “To get me fired,” she said wearily. “He wanted me to stop practicing law. He’d begged, pleaded, cajoled, ordered. It was a control thing with him. He couldn’t stand it that I was thought of as his equal, that I brought home as much money as he did. He belittled me every chance he got.”

  “And you stood for that?” he asked, incredulous and yet somehow not surprised. It was why she felt so strongly about Sue Ellen’s reasons for staying so long with Donny.

  “For far too long,” she admitted. “I’m not proud of it, but he was the father of my child. I wanted to believe that once he saw how good I was, he’d be proud of me.”

  “But he wasn’t,” Ford guessed.

  “Not even close. Since nothing else had worked, he decided to discredit me, to get me disbarred. He went to an acquaintance at one of the papers, a man known for not being particularly scrupulous about where he got his information. Kit fed him the information about my client on the condition that I be the one quoted. Naturally the story was too juicy for the man to resist. Apparently he had no qualms at all about using the information and linking my name to it—only in the most carefully chosen words, of course.”

  “The man told this to the authorities? He admitted that Kit had manipulated the whole thing?”

  “Never,” she said with disdain. “He was so blasted self-righteous. He claimed he was protecting his sources, that he’d never actually said I was the one who gave him the information, but it was all there for anyone with half a brain to reach the conclusion that I was the one who’d leaked the story.”

  “Then how do you know your husband was involved?”

  “I hired an investigator. He discovered that there was a rather timely deposit in the reporter’s bank account that he couldn’t deny. It matched a withdrawal that Kit had made from our account. When I confronted Kit, he didn’t deny it. He said he’d done it because he loved me.”

  “Dear God,” Ford whispered. “I’m sorry. But surely you know that not all journalists are like that. The business has its sleazy reporters, but most are honest, hardworking people who care about getting the facts right and exposing corruption, not becoming corrupt themselves.”

  “Intellectually, I suppose I can accept that,” Emma said, then touched a hand to her stomach. “But in here, I lump the whole lot of you together with that slime who conspired with my ex-husband.”

  “I suppose that’s understandable,” Ford said slowly. “But I’m going to change your mind, Emma. I promise you that. I’m going to do whatever it takes to prove to you that I’m not one of the bad guys.”

  Unfortunately, he had no idea how he was going to pull that transformation off. Her distrust was deep-rooted and, now that he knew the reason why, he could also see that it was understandable. Proving to her that the reporter who’d harmed her had been the exception, not the rule, wasn’t going to be as simple as reminding her that it was never wise to stereotype. It was going to take time and patience. And with Sue Ellen’s case the only thing bringing Emma back and forth to Winding River on a frequent basis, he was going to have to work quickly or he would lose her.

  He glanced at her profile, let his gaze travel the curve of her spine, the swell of her breast. He felt himself grow hard, felt his heart begin to pound, and reached a conclusion. Losing Emma was not an option.

  Emma couldn’t believe she had told the whole horrible story to Ford. Few people knew the depths to which Kit had sunk in his attempts to control her life. It was part of the agreement she’d made with him at the time of the divorce. She had promised to say nothing, as long as he didn’t contest the divorce and cleared her name with her law firm. Because his career was so all-important to him, he had agreed. She hadn’t given him any choice.

  She would have used the same leverage to keep him from claiming custody of Caitlyn, but it hadn’t been necessary. The doting new woman in his life had gotten pregnant before the ink was dry on the divorce papers. He’d been able to focus all of his obsessive attention on the second Mrs. Rogers. She was more than willing to stay at home and be kept in style.

  When Emma thought back to those days, she couldn’t believe she had survived them. She had been as close to despair as it was possible to get and still pull out of it without counseling or prescription drugs. Sheer determination and a commitment to her own career and to Caitlyn had kept her going.

  Even so, she had paid a price. She didn’t trust easily, and certainly not journalists. Rarely did she even trust men in general. No, that wasn’t entirely true. What she didn’t trust was her own judgment when it came to men. Ford had somehow slipped past her defenses and gotten closer than any man had in years.

  For a week after the night in his hotel room, she had difficulty falling asleep. The memories of his touches, of his tenderness, made her restless. The yearning she had hoped to end that night had only intensified. The prospect of going back to Winding River, of seeing him again, both terrified and excited her.

  She wasn’t sure what she’d expected when she’d told him the story of Kit’s betrayal. In truth, she hadn’t given a thought to how he might take it. She had simply responded to the confusion that her hurry to leave his bed had stirred in him. Once the words had begun, they had tumbled out in a rush, leaving her oddly relieved when they were out in the open. Only the Calamity Janes had heard even part of the messy story of her divorce, and she hadn’t given them as much of it as she’d given Ford. She’d managed to keep her family in the dark about most of it, as well. Matt and Wayne would have beaten Kit to a pulp if they’d known the rest.

  Ford had said very little, but he had enticed her back to bed, where he had simply held her until her tears had dried. Then he had taken her home, kissed her so thoroughly it had made her knees weak and promised to call the minute he got back to Wyoming.

  He had called the next day and again the next night. In fact, he had been phoning regularly, but she hadn’t taken any of the calls. She knew he had hoped that her resolve would waver, but it wouldn’t, so what was the point? She had made her decision. Prolonging the contact wouldn’t be wise for either of them.

  But she couldn’t put off going back to Winding River forever. A trial date had been set for Sue Ellen and in the intervening weeks Emma had a dozen different witnesses she needed to depose. She was flipping through her calendar, trying to make a decision about the timing of her trip, when her secretary buzzed.

  “It’s Lauren Winters on line two,” she said.r />
  “Thanks, Liza.” Emma grinned as she answered the call. “I thought you were on location for your next movie.”

  “I am, but there’s this incredible new technology. It’s called the cell phone. It even works from the wilds of Vancouver.”

  “Okay, very amusing. It’s just that you’re usually so absorbed with work at the start of filming, we never hear from you. What’s up?”

  “Just checking in. I hear you’ve been away from Winding River for a few weeks now. Hiding out, are you?”

  Emma bristled at the accusation. “Why would you say something like that?”

  “I know you, sweetie. Ford Hamilton has you running scared. I picked up on that the minute you skedaddled out of town.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I came back because I had a case going to trial here.”

  “If you say so,” Lauren said skeptically. “So, has Ford been to Denver?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “Thought so. How did that go?”

  “He was here for one night. I told him it wouldn’t work and he went back. End of story.”

  “He took no for an answer?” Lauren sounded disappointed.

  “Actually I didn’t give him much choice.”

  “He hasn’t called once?” Lauren asked.

  “He’s called,” Emma admitted. “I haven’t taken the calls.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “Because it’s pointless.”

  “Why is it pointless?”

  “He’s there. I’m here. He’s a journalist. I don’t trust journalists. The list of reasons goes on and on.”

  “You could be there in Winding River with him,” Lauren suggested. “As for the whole journalist thing, that has never made any sense to me. I know it has something to do with something Kit did right before the divorce, but you surely can’t blame Ford for that.”