The Choice by Alice Ward

Author:Alice Ward [Ward, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alice Ward
Published: 2018-02-03T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Cameron

“I agree,” I said halfheartedly. “It makes perfect sense.”

The woman in front of me could have been asking for me to parade around Independence Hall in the nude and I wouldn’t have cared. A journalist for Philadelphia Woman magazine, she’d been calling me for an interview for months. At first, I’d been apprehensive, as I didn’t have the greatest record on women’s issues. But I’d relaxed the moment I saw her. She was middle-aged, perhaps late forties, but doing her best not to look it. Her white-blonde hair was teased atop her head, her makeup thick in the creases of her forehead, and she smelled like a perfume factory. She looked, in a word, flammable.

But the reason I relaxed was because she chattered like an old grandmother, singsonging everything she said. She’d spent five minutes digging in the bottom of her oversized purse for a pen until I’d finally lent her one. Then, blushing, she told me that she didn’t do interviews very often, and she hoped she didn’t “screw this one up too bad.”

“You don’t say,” I’d said, barely looking at her.

She sat at the very edge of the chair in front of my desk and smiled as she wrote something down in her notebook. When she’d pitched the story, she’d done it under the guise of “letting the female population of the city know about the man behind the three-piece suit.” She’d said that most of her readership was curious and that to them, I was somewhat of a sex symbol — a la JFK. I knew when I was being buttered up, so I relented once I had the time on my schedule.

We’d started out talking about my favorite Philadelphia restaurant, Butcher and Singer, then moved on to my favorite libation, Macallan 25 or a dry martini. I figured there’d be a few more mindless questions, like my favorite color and my favorite ice-cream flavor, and I could look forward to a fluffy little write-up, far from Pulitzer-worthy, a few months from now. “So, you don’t mind?”

I smiled at her, thinking of Cassandra. It had been two days, but those two days had only solidified something in my mind: It was her, at the Grille. She’d been standing right in front of me, close enough to touch, to take. Mask off, her face was even more gorgeous than I’d imagined. Her features were sculptured and poetic like a fine Italianate sculpture, her eyes even bigger and bluer than I’d expected. I’d gotten a raging hard-on the second I’d seen her standing there, as if my body had recognized her even before my mind had.

And she’d denied.

“Of course not,” I said, nodding dumbly at the woman as she continued to scribble. “You go right ahead.”

Well, of course Cassandra had denied. But there was no doubt she’d recognized me. I could see it from the way her eyes widened with recognition, the way her pale cheeks had pinked. She’d been with her friend, and she wasn’t Cassandra to her friend.

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