The Way Back Read online

  “Well, I can solve that problem for you. I’m a writer. I majored in journalism. I wrote magazine columns and I blogged long before I started hosting a television show. Maybe what you need is someone who can bring a certain skill set to the table.”

  “I’m not telling my story.”

  “Don’t say that. At least not yet. Think about it over night. I’ll come back in the morning and we’ll talk about this like reasonable people. You can be reasonable, can’t you?”

  “You clearly don’t know much about me, if you can ask that.”

  This made her laugh. In fact, his comment made her nearly double over with laughter. He was obviously dealing with a slightly hysterical editor-slash-writer. Terrific.

  “Oh, I know about you,” she said, pulling herself together. “I know of you very well.”

  And there it was. That look he’d seen before in the eyes of women. Women who had idolized him or fantasized about him. Women who thought they loved him even though they had never even met him and knew jack about him. Women who felt as if he’d cheated on them, too.

  Yes, Gabby’s look of betrayal wasn’t the first one he’d witnessed. But hell, he didn’t have to see it in his own house.

  “Get out. Take the check and don’t come back.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she took the slip of paper and flicked it into the fireplace. They both watched a flame lick up and obliterate it.

  “I’ve got more checks.”

  “I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  He met her eyes again and saw it. A determination he wasn’t easily going to squash. But squash it he would. Because he wasn’t telling his story. To anyone.

  “You can show yourself out.” With that he dismissed her and went back to his leather recliner and his book. He held off putting on the reading glasses until she walked past him. A few seconds later he heard the door close behind her.

  Gone. For now.

  Gabby Haines. With the long dark hair that swirled around her shoulders. A sudden image of his fingers digging into her thick hair stirred something inside him and had him shifting in his chair.

  Man, it had definitely been too long if he was getting turned on by some half-crazed New York editor who would probably make his life hell for the next few days until she ultimately gave up.

  At least the next few days weren’t going to be boring.

  * * *

  JAMISON. HUNTER.

  She felt as though she’d met Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and George Clooney all rolled into one perfect fantasy. She took a deep breath. She was supposed to be cool about this. She was a professional. She wasn’t supposed to regress to teenage behavior, but…wow. Jamison Hunter.

  And they had talked. Okay, mostly he’d dictated and postured. Then she’d gone crazy lady on his ass.

  What had she been thinking?

  She hadn’t. That was the problem. She’d taken one look at the check and thought about returning to New York and her tiny cubicle, mission not accomplished. She imagined standing in Melissa’s office admitting she’d failed. The awareness of how far she had fallen had hit her again and…she sort of snapped. She couldn’t go down without a fight.

  That idea she’d had on the long drive—offering to ghost write Jamison’s story—was a good one. Maybe fate had sent him into her life for this very reason. Maybe she was supposed to do more than get a promise from him. Maybe what she really needed to do was tell his story. Write about his life and his downfall and finally give answers to all the questions everyone had about him. She didn’t have to be the enemy. She didn’t have to be some two-bit employee of a publishing company who wanted to use his story to make money.

  Instead she could help him bring his side of the story to life. They could empathize with each other. Bond over tragedy. After all, she knew what it was like to be on top and have everything taken away. Not on his scale certainly, but on her own.

  Unfortunately he didn’t see things as clearly as she did. She would have to work on that. But she wasn’t backing down.

  Standing on the other side of the door separated from the fireplace’s warmth, she quickly took a chill. He was right. Business suits and heels weren’t the best for a Maine island spring. Luckily she had thrown some jeans into her bag. Melissa had given her a few days to work her magic and Gabby planned to do it wearing comfortable clothes.

  The question was how long would Melissa give Gabby if Hunter did agree to allow her to help him write his story. Would Melissa even go for the idea? No point worrying about it now. First Gabby needed his consent, then she would work on her boss.

  For now it was best to head into town and to her room for the night.

  She thought about the mountain of stairs she’d climbed and cringed at how heavily she’d been breathing when he opened the door and she’d gotten her first look at him up close. But that was fine because it was all part of the master plan.

  Step one: start new career.

  Step two: get in shape.

  Step three…

  Well, the first two steps were fairly significant. Step three could wait.

  Turning, she considered the long and winding wooden stairs which zigged right and zagged left over the jagged landscape. The light above the door gave her some guidance, but there was no railing to hang on to—nothing to stop her fall, should she stumble on the uneven surfaces. Coming up, she’d been fueled with fear, adrenaline, excitement and determination.

  Going down was going to be a little harder.

  Cursing even the low heels, she took her first cautious step. Only thirty-nine more to go.

  What had taken her minutes to climb felt like forever to descend. Shaking with tension and cold and still reeling from the major life event of meeting an idol, Gabby finally reached the road again. She wanted to weep.

  She got in her car and jacked up the heat waiting for the engine to respond to her desire to be warm. Rubbing her hands together she laughed to herself. She’d done it. She had a plan now. She wasn’t going to sit back and passively take orders doing a job she didn’t really want. She was going to remake herself. A writer. It was perfect.

  All she had to do now was wear him down. Win him over with her charm and personality until he trusted her. Trust would lead to comfort and comfort would lead to his story.

  Charm and personality. Two things she used to have plenty of. Surely she could drudge them up again.

  One thing was for sure, she needed to get over this crazy starstruck feeling. Seeing him in person had been like fire bolt to her system. It had taken her ten seconds to remember her name and why she’d come. He might be halfway between forty and fifty, but, damn, he still looked good.

  She’d met semi-famous people when she’d been the host of Wake Up Philadelphia. There had been the mayor of the city, the governor of the state, sports figures, local actors and performers who had made good. She’d interviewed Kevin Bacon for Pete’s sake. Once you knew him, you were basically connected to everyone else in Hollywood. It was a known fact.

  Jamison Hunter wasn’t any of those people, though. He was more. At least to her. Growing up without her father during her teenage years, it wasn’t hard to understand how she had formed such an attachment to a media figure—especially one who had seemed so perfect. A girl had to look for heroes where she could find them.

  Of course, she hadn’t been some silly twelve-year-old when Colonel Jamison Hunter first captured the world’s attention. No, she’d been twenty-three, engaged and starting her career. She’d had the world in her hands and had believed her father’s abandonment hadn’t made a single dent in her perspective or her life choices. Maybe she wasn’t the most romantic person, and wasn’t overly sentimental. However, she had committed herself to a relationship. That was an achievement. Something to be proud of.

  She really hadn’t had a reason to fall into a crush with an image on the TV screen. Something about him had captivated her.

  Air Force Colonel. Astronaut. American hero.

>   It was a story everyone knew. As embedded into the American psyche as Apollo 13, the Challenger tragedy and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. Colonel Hunter had commanded a space-shuttle mission to help with repairs on the international space station. Once there, the crew of the station informed him the situation was more critical than first realized. In fact, they feared an imminent explosion would not only take out the station but the shuttle docked to it, as well.

  In an unprecedented move originally not sanctioned by NASA, Hunter did the unthinkable with an unplanned, untethered, space walk. He set out to make the repairs, knowing if he didn’t find and fix the problem, the lives of his crew and those on the station would be lost.

  Gabby never understood all the specifics of what he’d done. Reporters explained the science, the possible complications and ultimately the risk he took, but none of it mattered to her. All she cared about was after he’d taken that brave action and was safely on American soil and she watched him being interviewed time and time again, she felt safe.

  The world was a safer place because Jamison Hunter was in it.

  Gabby wasn’t alone in her hero worship of him. It seemed everyone had all come together to place him on a pedestal. It was one of the reasons he’d fallen so hard and so far when the scandal broke.

  A sunny day in Florida. A motel not too far from Cape Canaveral. A picture of Jamison Hunter standing in the doorway of the room with a woman wearing only a sheet. Next to them stood his wife with a look of sheer horror on her face. His deception had crushed the world. It had devastated Gabby. How could a man capable of such honorable and heroic actions cheat on his wife? And if he could cheat on his beautiful, accomplished wife, what chance did an average woman have of preventing much less heroic men from doing the same? Gabby couldn’t stop asking herself that question and becoming deeply suspicious of her own fiancé as a result. In retrospect that suspicion was a good thing…and warranted.

  Finding her fiancé in bed with her half-sister might not have happened if she hadn’t started looking for signs.

  Gabby owed Jamison Hunter for saving her from a marriage with a cheating scumbag—something for which she was eternally grateful. But she also blamed Jamison for her inability to make any other relationship in the past ten years since Brad work.

  “Stop it, Gabby.”

  The sound of her voice startled her. She needed the reminder though. She wasn’t here to contemplate her life and dwell on her failures. She was moving on with her life. Fresh start, et cetera.

  The drive into what the residents of Hawk Island considered town was short. The car had finally heated up, but still Gabby shuddered against the chill. It was late, she hadn’t eaten since lunch and her stomach was grumbling so loudly she didn’t think she could wait until the B and B’s breakfast.

  Of course she should. She had more than enough stores of fat on her body to hold her through the night. But the rational side of her brain reminded her starving wasn’t a healthy method of weight loss. She needed to fuel her body at regular intervals to keep her metabolism up.

  There weren’t many options, though. The town consisted of four or five mom-and-pop shops—currently closed for the night—ranging from a small grocery, liquor and hardware stores to an antique toy place and an exclusive clothing boutique. Obviously those last two were targeted to the tourists who were starting to discover the charm of an island situated off the coast of Maine.

  No fast food. No twenty-four-hour grocery stores. Everything was locked up and dark.

  She spied one place that still had the lights on. Pulling up, Gabby peered through the window, which was painted with the name Adel’s. She could see booths lined up along the window and a counter with stools suggesting this was a diner. Food. According to the sign that dangled from the doorknob she had seven minutes to get some.

  Hopping out of her car and sprinting as fast as she could, Gabby reached for the door and heard the satisfying ring of a bell overhead.

  “Oy, you’ve got to be kidding.” The tall girl behind the counter stopped wiping the surface in front of her and scowled.

  “The sign says you’re still open.”

  “For only seven more minutes.”

  At first the Gabby didn’t understand the woman, then she realized what had sounded like meenoots, was actually the word minutes. “I’ll be quick.”

  “You’ll make a mess.”

  “No, I swear I’ll order only a salad.”

  The girl huffed and rolled her eyes. “Sit.”

  Gabby didn’t have to be told twice. She plopped her butt on a round stool and tried to appear super hungry so the server would understand that she wouldn’t have come in here unless she was really desperate.

  “Adel, there is someone here who wants food.”

  An older woman pushed her way through a swinging door, carrying a tub of what appeared to be clean coffee cups.

  “Oh, crap.”

  Gabby shifted. “I’m sure you all don’t mean it but I’m starting to feel a little unwelcome.”

  Adel plunked down the tub with a rattle. “No, sign says we’re open until nine, so I guess we’re going to have to feed you. Coffee?”

  “Please.” She saw the young girl pour what was no doubt multiple-hours-old coffee dregs into a cup, but Gabby didn’t mind. It was piping hot.

  She shivered as the heat transferred from the cream-colored ceramic to her hands. It had been spring in New York when she left this morning. She was sure of it. She took a tentative sip. It was as foul as she expected but it warmed her throat all the way down.

  “What do you want?”

  This was easy. She’d already committed herself to a salad so there would be no reason to look at the menu and tempt herself with any of the other offerings. Willpower, Gabby. Willpower.

  “House salad, oil and vinegar dressing is fine.” Then she caught herself. “On the side. I need the dressing on the side.”

  “Oy.” The girl rolled her eyes. “One of those. On the side this, on the side that. If you want it all on the side to put together yourself, go buy groceries and do it at home.”

  Said the girl with the long legs, tiny torso and high cheekbones. She was gorgeous—model thin with long, straight brown hair that looked as though it might actually touch her bottom.

  Gabby naturally hated her on sight.

  “Zhanna, give it a break.” Adel finished stacking the cups under the counter and stared at Gabby for a moment. “You look hungry. You sure a salad is going to be enough to hold you?”

  “Absolutely.” Not. But this is what happened when you let yourself get careless. When you enjoyed food instead of counting calories. When you didn’t accept you were thirty-three and not twenty-three and couldn’t shed five pounds in a weekend. When your metabolism worked against you, but no one let on there was a problem until it ended up costing you your job.

  A woman had to pay the price.

  Gabby felt her price might have been slightly steeper than any another woman’s, but those were the breaks. Especially in television.

  “A salad is fine,” she said.

  “Right.” Adel exited through the swinging door and Gabby was left with the decidedly unfriendly Zhanna. If she was staying on the island for a while, it would probably help to make an effort to get to know the locals.

  “Zhanna, that’s a beautiful name. Where are you from?”

  Zhanna stared at Gabby as though trying to discover her true intention in asking. She must have concluded it was no more than mild curiosity because she answered, “Russia.”

  The way the R rolled off her tongue was dramatic and Gabby couldn’t help but be a little impressed. She was just chubby Gabby from Philadelphia. While this girl was the exotic Zhanna from Russia. That comparison made Gabby wish she had more of an accent. “How did you find yourself here?”

  “How did you?”

  Not exactly a conversationalist, this Zhanna. “I took the ferry.”

  “Me, too.”

  Small ta
lk over. Okay. Clearly, this local wasn’t someone Gabby was going to win over. After a few minutes of silence, the kitchen door swung open again. Adel set the large plate of green stuff in front of her.

  Gabby wished she could be more excited about it, but veggies had never really done it for her. Still, she needed to fill her stomach, so she started eating. Halfway through she was actually starting to feel better. Then Adel came out of the kitchen carrying a slice of pie.

  Hot apple pie if the smell and tendrils of steam emerging from it were any indicators. To compound the evil temptation she scooped up some vanilla bean ice cream—the easy-to-detect brown bean flecks suggested it might be homemade—and plopped it on top.

  “Figured you ate the salad, you might as well have a little pie.”

  Don’t do it, Gabby told herself. Do not eat that pie. Being forced to eat the pastries, the gourmet cupcakes and all those delightful things the local chefs who were featured on the show’s kitchen segments had ended up killing her career.

  Gabby didn’t think she wanted to ever return to television to expose herself to that scrutiny again, but she couldn’t shake the feeling she had been responsible for destroying her life and not the show’s executives.

  “It’s not going to kill you,” Adel said as she simultaneously slid the pie in front of Gabby while she cleared the salad plate. “It’s pie. Not poison.”

  “You don’t understand,” Gabby said wearily. “I’m trying to change my life.”

  “Really?” Zhanna asked, leaning on the counter. “Your life? Why do you need the changing of it?”

  Oh, sure, Zhanna couldn’t talk about making her way from Russia to Maine, but Gabby was supposed to come clean with all of her secrets. The odd thing was, late at night, alone in a café with a girl who rolled her R’s and a woman who looked as though she knew what a lifetime of hard work meant, Gabby found herself wanting to confess.

  “I got fired from a morning talk show because I put on too much weight and I’m getting too old.”

  “Bastards,” Adel hissed. “A woman’s always got to be young, thin and beautiful. Is that it?”

  “For men,” Zhanna said. “Yes. Go on.”