Page 2 of Prime Time

“Comin’ up.”

Andy didn’t even hear Gabe’s reply to Lyon Ratliff’s order. She was too taken with the man who had given it. He wasn’t at all what she had expected. She had pictured him as older, well into middle age, probably because General Ratliff was in his eighties. Apparently his son had been born after the war. She estimated Lyon Ratliff’s age at around thirty-five.

Thick, dark hair lay in sculpted strands around his head. It was threaded at the temples with silver. Two sleek, dark brows arched over eyes whose color she couldn’t determine from that distance. Her eyes followed the length of the Roman nose, which reminded her of actors who play in Biblical films, to the sensual mouth, which reminded her of actors who play in another type of film.

“Is that Ratliff beef you’re frying up for me on that grill?” he asked Gabe.

Again Andy was intrigued by his voice. It was resonant, but quiet, as if you might miss something of great importance if you didn’t listen very closely. The hoarse quality lent a sexy undertone to everything he said. Definitely more like the second type of actor than the first.

“You bet,” Gabe said. “Best beef a body can buy.”

Lyon’s dark head tilted back slightly, and he chuckled. He was lowering his head and reaching for the glass of icewater Gabe had set before him when his eyes accidentally slid over her. Momentum earned them a few inches past her before they braked, reversed, and backed up slowly.

Andy could log the journey those gray eyes—yes, they were gray—took over her face. They started with her own eyes, and she read in his the expected surprise. It was the usual reaction of anyone who was looking into her eyes for the first time. They were a captivating tawny-brown, surrounded by thick, dark lashes.

The gray eyes lifted to her hair. Did the ponytail held in place on the nape of her neck by a tortoise shell clasp make her look too young? Or, God forbid, did she look like a thirty-year-old trying to look young?

Don’t get paranoid, Andy, she warned herself. She knew her caramel-colored hair with its golden streaks was attractive. But the beads of perspiration along her hairline? Could he detect that? Even though Gabe’s twenty-year-old sign in the window boasted Refrigerated Air Inside, Andy was aware of a sheen of perspiration glossing her entire body. Indeed, she was suddenly acutely aware of every pore of her body, every nerve. It was as though she had been slit open for dissection, and Lyon Ratliff was a scientist who was taking his time about examining this particular specimen.

When his eyes moved to her mouth, she looked away. She reached for her glass and almost let it slip through her fingers before taking a drink. Then she was afraid that rather than diverting his attention from her lips, she had only attracted more attention to them.

What was the matter with her? She had a job to do. For three days she had been stalking this man, asking leading questions about him and his father, gathering whatever crumbs of information were thrown to her, enduring rude dismissals. For hours she had sat in that tacky beauty salon and listened to all the local gossip, hoping for the mention of his name, and all the while refusing, kindly but firmly, to have her hair permed “just to give it body.” The only thing she learned there was that Lyon had had to miss the last country club dance because his daddy had taken a turn for the worse, and that new plants had been ordered for his ranch house, and that the resident manicurist had been trained by the Marquis de Sade.

Now, here he was, sitting a few feet from her, and she was sweaty and tongue-tied for the first time in her life. Where was all her cool confidence? The sheer bullheadedness that always kept her from taking no for an answer had deserted her. The objectivity that distinguished her was swamped by sexual awareness of a man. She had met kings and prime ministers and presidents, including two presidents of the United States, and she hadn’t been intimidated by one of them. Now, this … this cowboy strolls into a greasy spoon of a diner, and I’m all aflutter.

Stubbornly trying to restore her control, she raised her chin and looked at him defiantly. His eyes could have been twin boulders that rolled over her and crushed her bravery. His jaw was tilted at an arrogant angle. He could have spoken aloud, and she couldn’t have gotten the message any clearer.

Yes, I’ve heard of the equality of the sexes, and I think it’s fine in its way. But right now I’m looking at you and thinking of you only as a sex object, and there’s not one damn thing you can do about it.

Well, there was one thing she could do. She could stop him from thinking what he was thinking. She’d inform him in a calm, professional manner who she was and why she was here … just as soon as he finished his cheeseburger, she decided, as Gabe set the heaping plate in front of him.

Andy studied Gabe’s dusty-g

reasy menu, which had been updated through the years by ineffectually painting over the old prices to paint on the new. She suffered another glass of the oversweetened tea. She watched as a mother wiped the catsup off her little boy’s mouth, then watched as another red smear replaced the first one when a whole french fry disappeared into his mouth. She fidgeted with the wire rack in front of her that contained three varieties of steak sauce. She pulled four paper napkins from the dispenser and blotted up the puddle her tea glass seemed bent on replenishing.

Finally she glanced toward the end of the counter and saw that Lyon had eaten most of his meal. He was sipping a cup of coffee, his long, slender, strong-looking fingers wrapped possessively around the mug. His absorption with the midday traffic outside the wide windows ended just as she slipped off the high stool, and he looked at her. She smiled and wished it didn’t feel like a girlish, flirtatious, wobbly facsimile of one.

“Hello,” she said, managing to walk over, despite shaky knees, to stand beside his stool.

His eyes made a slow and thorough appraisal. He looked at her with barely suppressed amusement and an air of sexual assessment not even moderately suppressed. Was he that accustomed to strange women approaching him in cafés? “Hi.”

So, he was going to make it difficult, give her no leadins. Okay, Mr. Ratliff. She took a deep breath and said, “I’m Andrea Malone.”

Andy couldn’t have guessed that his facial expression could change so rapidly and so drastically, or that the eyes beneath those dark brows could harden and freeze over so quickly. He stared coldly at her for a long time, then presented her with a back view of his broad shoulders as he turned away. As though she didn’t exist, he insouciantly took a sip of his coffee.

She glanced at Gabe, who was ostensibly concentrating on filling a salt shaker but whose ears she imagined were peaked with avid listening. She moistened her lips with her tongue. “I said I’m—”

“I know who you are, Ms. Malone,” he said with a condescending sneer. “You’re from Nashville. Telex Cable Television Company.”

“Then you read the return address even though you didn’t deign to open my letters before sending them back. Is that right?” she asked, in what she hoped was a haughty challenge.

“That’s right.” He took another drink of coffee. His indifference was irritating. She had an intense desire to take the coffee mug from his hand—if that were physically possible—and hurl it across the room, just to get his attention. However, she predicted that such an impulse could result in bodily harm. He seemed to radiate a strength of body and will, and she didn’t want to trifle with either if at all possible. She was stubborn, but she wasn’t stupid. “Mr. Ratliff, you know—”

“I know what you want. The answer is no. I believe I told you that after receiving your first letter several months ago. That one I did answer. Obviously you don’t remember the contents of that letter. It said, in essence, for you to save your breath, your strength, your time, your money, and”—he raked her with cynical eyes—“your new clothes. I’d never consent to letting you interview my father for that television program. My sentiments are the same today as they were then.” Rudely he turned his back on her again.

She had thought her new jeans and western boots would blend into the local scenery. Was she that conspicuous? All right. She had made one blunder. Perhaps all her sneaking around the past few days had been unprofessional, but she wasn’t going to give up now. She squared her shoulders, unknowingly stretching the western-cut cotton shirt over her breasts. “You haven’t even listened to what I propose, Mr. Ratliff. I—”

“I don’t want to hear it.” His head swung around to her again and his eyes unintentionally encountered her breasts on a level that was disadvantageous to them both. She stood perfectly still, as though to move would admit to the untenability of the situation. After a considerable time he raised his eyes, and she caught her breath at the fierceness of his look.

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