“All right,” Mark agreed. “Tell me, what made you start entering beauty pageants?”
It wasn’t the subject Carly would have chosen, but she could live with it. “Not ‘what,’” she replied. “‘Who.’ It was my mother. She started entering me in contests when I was four and, except for a few years when I was in an awkward stage, she kept it up until I was old enough to go to college.”
“And then you won the Miss United States title?”
Carly nodded, smiling slightly as she recalled those exciting days. “You’d have thought Mom was the winner, she was so pleased. She called everybody we knew.”
Mark was cutting his steak. “She must miss you a lot.”
Carly bent her head, smoothing the napkin in her lap. “She died of cancer a couple of weeks after the pageant.”
When Carly lifted a hand back to the table, Mark’s was waiting to enfold it. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
His sympathy brought quick, stinging tears to her eyes. “It could have been worse,” Carly managed to say. “Everything happened almost instantaneously. She didn’t suffer much.”
Mark only nodded, his eyes caressing Carly in a way that eased the pain of remembering.
“How old is Nathan?” she asked, and the words came out a little awkwardly.
Mark’s voice was hoarse when he answered. “He’s ten,” he replied, opening his wallet and taking out a photo.
Nathan Holbrook was handsome, like his father, with brown hair and eyes, and he was dressed in a baseball uniform and was holding a bat, ready to swing.
Carly smiled and handed the picture back. “It must be difficult living so far away from him,” she commented.
Mark nodded, and Carly noticed that he averted his eyes for a moment.
“Is something wrong?” she asked softly.
“Nothing I want to trouble you with,” Mark responded, putting away his wallet. “Sure you don’t want to go take in a movie?”
Carly thought of the pile of letters she had yet to read. She gave her head a regretful shake. “Maybe some other time. Right now I’m under a lot of pressure to show Allison and the powers-that-be that I can handle this job.”
They finished their meal, then Mark settled the bill with a credit card. He held her hand as they walked to his car, which was parked in a private lot beneath the newspaper building.
Barely fifteen minutes later, they were in front of Janet’s door. Mark bent his head and gave Carly a kiss that, for all its innocuousness, made her nerve endings vibrate.
“Good night,” he murmured, while Carly was still trying to get her bearings. A moment after that, he disappeared into the elevator.
“Well?” Janet demanded the second Carly let herself into the apartment.
Carly smiled and shook her head. “It was love at first sight,” she responded sweetly. “We’re getting married tonight, flying to Rio tomorrow and starting our family the day after.”
Janet bounded off the couch and followed Carly as she went through the bedroom and stood outside the bathroom door while she exchanged the jumpsuit for an oversize T-shirt. “Details!” she cried. “Give me details!”
Carly came out of the bathroom, carrying the jumpsuit, and hung it back in the closet. “Mark and I are all wrong for each other,” she said.
“How do you figure that?”
Turning away from the closet, Carly shrugged. “The guy sends out mixed messages. He’s very attractive, but he’s bristly, too. And he’s got some very old-fashioned ideas about women.”
Janet looked disappointed for a moment, then brightened. “If you’re not going to see Mark anymore, how about fixing me up with him?”
Carly was surprised at the strong reaction the suggestion produced in her. She marched across Janet’s living room, took her briefcase from the breakfast bar and set it down on the Formica-topped table with a thump. “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to see him again,” she said, snapping the catches and pulling out a stack of letters.
After tossing her friend a smug little smile, Janet said good-night and went off to bed. Carly looked with longing at the fold-out sofa, then made herself a cup of tea and set to work.
Although there was no sign of Emmeline when Carly arrived at work the next morning, suppressing almost continuous yawns and hoping the dark circles under her eyes weren’t too pronounced, a memo had been taped to her computer screen.
Staff meeting, the message read. Nine-thirty, conference room.
Carly glanced at her watch, sat down at her desk and began reading letters again. It was almost a relief when the time came to leave her small office for the meeting.
The long conference room table was encircled by people, and they all seemed to be talking at the same time. An enormous pot of coffee chortled on a table in the corner, and a blue haze of cigarette smoke lapped at the walls like an intangible tide. Carly poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down in the only empty chair in the room, shaking her head when a secretary came by with a box full of assorted pastries.
Through the sea of smoke, she saw Mark sitting directly across from her. He grinned and tilted his head slightly to one side in a way that was vaguely indulgent.
Mixed messages again, Carly thought, responding with a tight little smile.
The managing editor, a slender, white-haired man with the sleeves of his shirt rolled back to his elbows and suspenders holding up his pants, called the meeting to order.
Carly listened intently as he went over the objectives of the newspaper and gave out assignments.
The best one, a piece on crack houses for the Sunday edition, went to Mark, and Carly felt a sting of envy. While he was out in the field, grappling with real life, she would be tucked away in her tiny office, reading letters from the forlorn.
Mark sat back in his chair, not drinking coffee or eating doughnuts or smoking like the others, his eyes fixed on Carly. She was relieved when the meeting finally ended.
“So,” boomed Mr. Clark, the managing editor, just as Carly was pushing back her chair to leave, “how do you like writing the advice column?”
Carly glanced uncomfortably at Mark, who had lingered to open a nearby window. Now’s a nice time to think of that, she reflected to herself, and Mark looked back at her as though she’d spoken aloud.
She remembered Mr. Clark and his affable question. “I haven’t actually written anything yet,” she answered diplomatically. “I’m still wading through the letters.”
Mark was standing beside the table again, his hands resting on the back of a chair. “You’re aware, of course,” he put in, “that Ms. Barnett doesn’t have any real qualifications for that job?”
Carly
