Roomful of Roses. Diana Palmer

why I hired you.” He nodded with a grin. “You know how to spread news out. Okay, with what I’ve already got, that’ll fill ’er up.”

      “I’ll take it back to Jess in the darkroom,” she said, and started into the other office.

      “Uh, after you do that, come into my office for a minute, will you?” Edward hesitated.

      Wynn glanced at him, puzzled. He looked strange for an instant. She shrugged and rushed to the back with the film. It was press day, she told herself. Everybody looked strange then.

      She handed the film to Jess with a grin at the harassed look that immediately appeared on his thin, aging face. “Yesterday?” he muttered.

      “Please,” she said, agreeing on the delivery date. “All you have to do is three halftones, though, four columns each—one of the fire and one of the new bridge and one of the pond.”

      “I get to pick them out?” he asked with raised eyebrows.

      “Sure! See how good I am to you?” she asked as she headed toward the door.

      “Good! Here I am with three rush jobs, one to get out by two o’clock, I haven’t made the first negative...” He kept right on muttering, and she dashed back into the newspaper office and closed the door.

      Edward was sitting behind the heavily loaded desk, which contained a much-used manual typewriter, half a dozen daily newspapers from which he pirated leads, and some scratch paper. He pulled off his glasses and whipped out a spotless white handkerchief to clean them with.

      “Well, sit down,” he said impatiently, leaning back with his hands crossed over his ample stomach.

      “What is it?” she asked, getting scared. He looked...really strange.

      “Feel okay?” he asked.

      “Sure.” She eyed him warily. “Why? Do I look like a potential stroke victim?”

      He cleared his throat. “No.”

      “It’s Katy Maude!” she burst out.

      “No,” he said quickly. His shoulders lifted and fell. “Why don’t you keep up on what’s happening in Central America? Then you’d know and I wouldn’t have to stumble all over myself.”

      Her blood actually ran cold. She gripped the arms of the chair hard enough to numb her fingers. “McCabe,” she gasped. “Something’s happened to McCabe!”

      “He’s alive,” he said. “Not badly injured at all.”

      She leaned back with a sigh, feeling herself grow weak. All these years, she’d expected it, until today, and she’d been knocked sideways. “What was it? A sniper?”

      “Something like that.” He tossed an issue of the Atlanta morning daily over to her. “Notice the sidebar.”

      She looked away from the banner headline to the accompanying story. “WAR CORRESPONDENT INJURED.” There was a small, very dark photo of McCabe and she strained her eyes to see if he’d changed much over the long years, but she couldn’t even make out his features. She read the copy. It stated that McCabe had been hurt while covering a story, and there was some speculation as to whether the incident was connected to the deaths of the two French correspondents that had been reported earlier that week. According to the story, McCabe had been roughed up and had a torn ligament in one leg and a trace of concussion, but he was alive.

      “It doesn’t say where he is now,” she murmured.

      “Uh, I was afraid you’d wonder about that. Be kind of hard to miss him, of course,” he mumbled.

      She stared at him. Her mind was only beginning to work again after its shock. “Hard to miss him?”

      “Yes. When you walk in your front door, that is,” Edward volunteered. “Big man...”

      “He’s at my house?” she burst out. “What’s he doing at my house!”

      “Recuperating,” he assured her. “Well, the motel’s closed down for remodeling. Where else could he stay?”

      “With you!”

      “Nope,” he replied calmly. “No spare room.”

      “He could sleep on the couch!”

      “In his condition? Couldn’t ask an injured man to do that,” he said.

      “I could,” she replied coldly. “I can’t have McCabe in the house alone with me. Katy Maude’s not due home for several more weeks, she’s just getting over her heart attack, and she couldn’t take the excitement of constant arguing.”

      “You and Katy don’t argue,” he observed.

      “But McCabe and I do,” she reminded him. “Constantly. On every subject. And Andy will go through the ceiling!”

      “Oh, him,” Edward said, dismissing the other man with a wave of his hand. “Andy’s one of those liberal city fellows. He won’t think a thing about it.”

      “Are we talking about the same Andrew Slone?” she asked. “My fiancé, who went on local television to protest a theater advertisement in the Ashton Daily Bugle because it showed a woman’s bare bosom?”

      Edward looked at her over his glasses. “Hmm. You might have a problem there, sure enough.”

      “You set me up,” she accused. “You invited McCabe here.”

      “Well, he suggested it,” he admitted. “Called to ask if we’d seen the story in the paper, mentioned what bad shape he was in...I knew you wouldn’t mind,” he added with a grin. “After all, he’s your guardian.”

      “Guardian! My tormentor, my inquisitor, my worst enemy, and you’ve put him under my own roof!’ she wailed. “Why didn’t you send him to Katy Maude’s house?”

      “Because there’s no one in it,” Edward said reasonably. “He can hardly walk at all, Wynn,” he reminded her. “How would he get along?”

      “He’s a reporter,” she ground out. “He’s lived on pure nerve for so long that he’d probably survive without water on the desert! Doesn’t his mother live in New York now? Why didn’t he go stay with her?”

      “She left the country when she found out he was coming back from Central America,” Edward laughed. “You know Marie, she’s scared to death to let him get a foothold in her house. He’d have the servants fired and the house remodeled in two days’ time.”

      “Not my house, he wouldn’t,” she muttered. “Marie always did find excuses to hide out from his father and from him.”

      “He’s hurt,” he reminded her. “Poor wounded soldier, and you’d turn him out in the cold!”

      Her full lips pouted at him. “You don’t know McCabe like I do,” she argued.

      “He wants to meet your fiancé,” he continued. “He’s concerned about your future.”

      “He wants to dictate it, that’s why,” she growled, standing. “Well, he won’t get away with it. He’s not going to wrap me around his thumb!”

      “Where are you going?” he called.

      “Off to war,” she called back. “Where’s my elephant gun?”

      “But the paper—”

      “I’ll read it later,” she grumbled.

      “Our paper,” he thundered. “The one we won’t get out if you don’t get in here and help me make it up!”

      “I’m taking my lunch hour late,” she told him. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

      Edward threw up his hands. “An hour. We’re already an hour behind schedule and