If Winter Comes Read Free

preamble, his voice deep and
slow and cutting. “My phone rang off the hook all day and I had to get on the
damned evening news to get the noose off my neck.”
     
    “I’m sorry,” she began
automatically, “but it wasn’t my…”
     
    “The next time, check
your facts with me before you run back and print some pack of lies!” he
growled, his deep voice reverberating like thunder. “What the hell do you
people do with news down there, make it up as you go along?”
     
    She licked her lips
nervously. She wasn’t usually intimidated this easily. Being attacked went with
the job, and most of the time she handled it well, diplomatically. But it
wasn’t easy to be diplomatic with a steamroller, and that was what Moreland
brought to mind.
     
    “It was the…” she began
again.
     
    “Why don’t you go back
to journalism school and learn how to verify information?” he growled. “My God,
children are taking over the world!” His eyes narrowed dangerously. “I’ll
expect not only a retraction, but an apology.”
     
    “Mr. Moreland, I’m
really sorry….” she whispered unsteadily, feeling about two inches high.
     
    He poured himself a
drink—Scotch, she noticed—with incredibly steady hands, his face like granite,
and she wondered idly if anything ever rattled him. He would have made a
fantastic racing driver or doctor, she thought suddenly, with those steady
hands and nerves.
     
    “I didn’t go to Ed Hart
this time,” he said, tossing the publisher’s name at her. He speared her with
those demon eyes. “But if it ever happens again, I’ll have your job.”
     
    He walked away without
another word, and she wanted to stand there and cry. The party had been ruined
for her. Being blamed for a mistake was fine, if it was hers. But to get stuck
with somebody else’s, and not be given a chance to defend herself, now, that
hurt.
     
    She took a long sip of
her drink and set it back on the bar, moving slowly, quietly, toward the
ladies’ room. Tears were welling in her eyes, and she didn’t want the
humiliation of shedding them in public.
     
    She darted into the
empty bathroom, locked the door, and leaned back against the wall, her eyes
unseeing on the spacious, fully carpeted room with its lush champagne and gold
decor. Tears ran silently down her cheeks. Why Moreland could affect her like
that, she didn’t know. But he seemed to have some inexplicable power to reduce
her to the level of a wounded child.
     
    She wiped at the tears
with an impatient hand. This was ridiculous, she told herself. She couldn’t
afford to let people or things get to her like this. Hard knocks went with the
job, and it was either get used to a little rough treatment or spend the rest
of her life in tears. She’d have to toughen up. Her father had told her that at
the beginning, the day she announced that she’d entered journalism school at
the university.
     
    She found a washcloth
and tried to erase the telltale marks from her flushed young face. When she
finished, her eyes were still red-rimmed, but all traces of tears were gone.
She straightened her dress and ran a comb through her long, gently waving hair.
Her pale green eyes surveyed the result coolly. It wasn’t a pretty face, but
her eyes were big and arresting, and her face had a softly vulnerable look
about it.
     
    She turned, adjusting
the V-neckline of her dress with cold, nervous hands. She’d rather have been
shot than go through that door, but there was no way around it. Running away
solved nothing. She’d learned that much, at least, in twenty-three years.
     
    As she went back into
the spacious living room, ironically, the first person she saw was Bryan
Moreland. He stared over a shorter man’s head at her, and his narrow dark eyes
caught hers at once. She raised her chin proudly and gave him her best south
Georgia glare.
     
    Amazingly, as she
watched, a slow, faint smile turned up his chiseled lips as if that silent show
of rebellion amused