LITMIR.BIZ

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end.

      To all but one or two of the women he’d known, sex was bait. The female of the species was programmed by nature to latch onto the richest mate available. His old man had drummed that lesson into his head before he’d cleaned out the cash drawer where he worked and disappeared, leaving behind a bitter wife and an angry twelve-year-old son.

      Lyon hadn’t learned much from his father, but he’d heard that little homily repeated too often ever to forget it.

      Cautious by nature, he’d learned to be even more cautious, both in his work and in his relationships with women. Not all women were dishonest. Not all of them were looking for commitment, but enough of them were so that he didn’t care to take chances.

      To a man, sex was relief. A basic requirement, like food and water and a couple of hours sleep out of every twenty-four or thirty-six hours, conditions permitting. For a man in his position, it didn’t pay to think beyond that.

      Back on the highway, Lyon tuned to a country music station and set his mind on automatic. There were too many things it didn’t pay to think about. Not yet. Not until he was fully recovered, had a few answers and was ready to go back and deal with them.

      He spotted the patrol car in plenty of time to ease his speed back to a safe and legal seventy. Not that he was afraid of getting pulled over. His ID, if he cared to use it, would get him past any branch of law enforcement. It was more a matter of common sense.

      A matter of survival.

      Common sense told him that a man in his condition had no business being on the highway at all. A well-honed sense of survival—which, admittedly had taken a beaten lately—told him that driving like a bat out of Daytona wasn’t particularly smart, either. Especially as he’d quit cold turkey taking painkillers and muscle relaxants three days ago. As a result, he was hurting. As a result of something else, although probably not the pills, he was jittery.

      The smoky lost interest. Lyon breathed a sigh of relief. Near the Virginia-North Carolina border he pulled into the visitors’ center, parked and scanned the immediate surroundings out of habit. It was called situation awareness.

      He took his time getting out of the pickup, not that he had an option. By the time he’d done three slow laps around the parking area, his muscles had loosened up enough so that he barely limped, even without the cane.

      Mind over matter. His body might have been screwed over pretty thoroughly, but his mind was still in first-class working order.

      Although there’d been some argument over that when he’d signed himself out of the hospital.

      Following the road map, he left the interstate at Roanoke Rapids and took an east-southeasterly course, using two lanes and what was euphemistically called “other roads.” There was no deadline. He had three months before he had to make up his mind whether to put in for early retirement or go back on line.

      At least where he was headed there wouldn’t be any reporters. Or any drug-runners, terrorists, or survivalists, any one of which was bad enough. When the territories started overlapping, things got spooky.

      And when there was a leak from somewhere in the chain of command, things got even spookier. The wrong people started dying.

      

      “How’d you want your burger, hon? We can’t fry ‘em rare no more, gov’ment rules. We got sweet onions up from Georgia, though. A thick slice, and even shoe leather’d taste good.”

      Lyon ordered two burgers, well-done with extra onion, extra cheese and a quart of coffee. When the waitress leaned across in front of him to realign the salt and pepper shakers, offering him a front-row seat in her balcony if he was interested, he said, “To go, please. And could you give me directions to—”

      “Any old where, darlin’, you name it. You here for the huntin’ or the fishin’? I could show you some real good places.”

      “Yeah, both,” he muttered. I’ll just bet you could, sugar, and I’d probably enjoy them all, but not today, thanks. “Could you point me in the direction of the nearest hardware store, supermarket and the local tax office?”

      

      Jasmine was depressed. All the way across the country she’d been pumping up her expectations. She’d managed to keep them high during the long drive from the airport to the nursing home, but there they’d collapsed like a wet souffle.

      Her grandmother didn’t know her. Her only living relative, whom she hadn’t seen since she’d moved with her mother from Oklahoma to California eighteen and a half years ago, didn’t know her from Adam.

      Make that Eve.

      And the worst part of it was, Hattie Clancy wasn’t interested in knowing her. She was sweet and polite and a little vague—well, a lot vague, actually—but Jasmine could tell right off that she was more interested in playing cards with her friends and watching her favorite soaps and game shows than she was in getting to know the granddaughter who had flown all the way from the West Coast to see her.

      Jasmine told herself it was probably for the best. Why get attached to someone who lives thousands of miles away, someone who’s old and might die—someone who’s probably set in her ways and wouldn’t be interested in moving to L.A., even if Jasmine could afford to move her there?

      All the same, it would have been nice...

      She shook off the sense of depression. It hadn’t been a total waste. She’d met her only living relative, after all. Now when she sent snapshots and letters and greeting cards, she’d have a face to attach to the name and address she’d found among her father’s papers after he’d died.

      Having barely known the man before he turned up one day on her doorstep, sick and broke, she’d been surprised to learn that his mother—her own grandmother—was still living, much less living in North Carolina. She would have thought Oklahoma if she’d thought at all, because that’s where her parents had parted company.

      Jasmine had written to Hattie Clancy immediately. She hadn’t heard back, but she’d continued to write. For an actress who was unemployed more often than not, she’d been too busy trying to pay off her father’s medical bills, along with her own living expenses, to have much free time, but she’d made time to send cards and brief notes, and sometimes a clipping when she happened to land a part and her name was mentioned in a review.

      Which was practically never.

      To make ends meet she’d done a few commercials and taken a fill-in job in a dress shop. It paid minimum wage, plus a tiny discount on clothes she couldn’t afford to buy anyway.

      And now she’d spent money she didn’t have to fly east to see a grandmother who didn’t know her and didn’t seem particularly interested in getting acquainted. She might as well have stayed home. It had been a total waste of time and money.

      No, it hadn’t. She’d earned herself a vacation. The last one had been—

      Yes, well...that was another reason she’d needed to get away. Her last vacation had been with Eric. A week after they’d come back from Tahoe, Eric had started seeing her best friend. Jasmine had made excuses for him at first. She was good at that.

      What was that popular song? Cleopatra, Queen of Denial?

      Boy, was she ever. Her friends said she was easygoing. Laid-back. Which meant more or less the same thing—that she didn’t blow her stack at the least little thing, which was a definite advantage in the dog-eat-dog world of acting.

      All the same, she hadn’t felt very laid-back when Cynthia had breezed into the shop one day last week and said, “Guess what! Eric and I are getting married. You’ve got to be our maid of honor, you’ve simply got to! After all, if you hadn’t introduced us, it never would have happened.”

      Right. Smartest thing she ever did. Introduce the man she was in love with to her best friend, who was blond and beautiful and had a continuing, if minor, role in Wilde’s Children.

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