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Heart of the Matter

By Marta Perry

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HEART OF THE MATTER
Chapter One

Amanda Bodine raced around the corner into the newsroom and skidded to a halt. Her usually neat, workman-like desk bloomed with a small garden of flowers. Above it floated a balloon bouquet with a streamer that fairly shouted its message. Happy Birthday. Her heart plummeted to the pit of her stomach.
She glanced at her watch. Two minutes until the editorial meeting. If she could just get everything out of sight....
“Ms. Bodine.” The baritone voice dripped with sarcasm, and she didn’t have to turn around to identify the speaker—Ross Lockhart, managing editor of the Charleston Bugle. “It seems your personal life is intruding into the office. Again.”
“I’m sorry.” She forced herself to turn and face the man. Drat it, she never had trouble standing up for herself in any other circumstances. Why did her grit turn to jelly in the presence of Ross Lockhart?
Because if you get in his way, he’ll mow you down like a blade of grass, her mind promptly responded.
“Get rid of it. Please.” The addition of the word didn’t do a thing to mitigate the fact that it was an order. “Editorial meeting, people.” He raised his voice. “Conference room, now.”
A rustle of something that might have been annoyance swept through the newsroom, but no one actually spoke up. No one would. They were all too aware that hot shot journalist Ross Lockhart had been brought in by the Bugle’s irascible owner and publisher, Cyrus Mayhew, to ginger things up, as he put it. Lockhart seemed to consider that a mandate to fire anyone who didn’t meet his exacting standards.
Lockhart stalked away in the direction of the conference room before she found it necessary to say another word to him. Good. She had just come from a birthday lunch at her favorite waterfront restaurant with her twin sister and her cousins, all of whom had unanimously urged her to stand up to the man, for goodness’ sake!
That was all very well for them to say. Their careers didn’t depend on his goodwill.
She moved two baskets of roses and daisies to the floor behind her desk and grabbed a notebook to join the exodus from the newsroom.
“Happy birthday, sugar.” Jim Redfern, the grizzled city desk editor, threw an arm around her shoulders in a comradely hug. “Too bad you have to spend it in another meeting.” His voice lowered. “Sittin’ around a table doesn’t get a paper out. You’d think the man would realize that.”
“He realizes Cyrus expects him to turn us into number one, that’s what.”
Jim snorted. “Not going to happen in my lifetime.”
Nor in hers, probably. Everyone knew that the venerable Post and Courier, the oldest newspaper in the South, was Charleston’s premier paper. The best the Bugle could hope for was to break a surprise story once in a blue moon.
And keep ‘em honest, as Cyrus was prone to say. Everyone who worked at the paper had been treated to his lecture on the importance of competition in the news.
He’d probably like to believe his staff shared that passion.
Entering the high-ceilinged, wood-paneled conference room, Amanda glanced around the table, assessing her colleagues. Cyrus’s hope seemed unlikely to be fulfilled. His staffers were either just starting out, hoping this experience would lead to a more important job down the road, or they were old-timers like Jim, put out to pasture by other, more prestigious papers.
Except for Ross Lockhart, the exception to the rule—smart as a whip, newspaper-savvy, and ambitious. Above all, ambitious.
Lockhart took his place at the head of the long rectangular table, frowning as usual when he looked at them. He probably found them a pretty unprepossessing bunch compared to the company he’d kept at the Washington, DC, daily where he’d worked before a public scandal had nearly ruined his career.
She sat up a bit straighter. Maybe they weren’t the brightest tools in the tool chest, as her daddy might say, but at least they hadn’t fabricated a front page story, as Lockhart had been accused of doing. And it must have been true, since the paper had made a public apology to the congressman concerned and promptly fired Ross Lockhart.
Lockhart’s piercing gray gaze met hers almost as if he’d heard her thoughts, and her throat went dry. Juliet Morrow, the society editor, romantically claimed he had a lean and hungry look, like some crusader of old. The contrast between the steel gray of his eyes and the true blue-black of his hair, the angular lines of his face, the slash of a mouth—well, maybe she could see what Juliet meant.
But the look he’d turned on her was more that of the wolf, eyeing Little Red Riding Hood. She was already sitting near the end of the table. It was impossible to get any farther away from him. Only the obituary writer was lower on the totem pole that she was. She held her breath until his gaze moved on.
He began assigning the stories for the next news cycle. Knowing perfectly well he wouldn’t have anything remotely important for her, she fixed her gaze on a framed Bugle front page that announced VE day and let her thoughts flicker again to that birthday lunch.
She and her twin were thirty today. Annabel was well and truly launched on the work that was her passion. The others around the table, more or less the same age, were all either soaring ahead in careers or busy with husband and family. Or both. Only she was entering her thirties stuck in a job where her prospects grew dimmer every time her boss looked her way.
Which he did at that moment. She stiffened. Was there another dog show coming to town that needed her writing talents?
“Bodine.” His tone had turned musing. “Seems to me I’ve heard that name lately. Something connected to the military, wasn’t it?”
Panic gripped her throat so tightly she couldn’t make a sound. Was this the way it would come out—the secret the family struggled to keep in order to protect her grandmother? Right here in the newsroom, in front of everyone, blurted out by a man who had no reason to care who it hurt?
The others at the table were looking at her, their quizzical gazes pressing her for a response. Finally Jim cleared his throat.
“Somethin’ about the Coast Guard, maybe? Bodines tend to serve there.” He said the words with the familiar air of someone who knew everything there was to know about old Charleston families...all the things their boss couldn’t possibly know.
Lockhart’s gaze slashed toward him with an air of clashing swords. Then he shrugged, glancing down at the clipboard in front of him. “Probably so. All right, people, let’s get to work.”
With a sense of disaster narrowly averted, Amanda followed the others toward the door. Two steps from freedom, Ross Lockhart put out a hand to stop her. “One moment, Ms. Bodine.”
She stiffened, turning to face him. Maybe her relief had come too soon.
He leaned back in the chair, eyeing her. She held her breath. If he asked her outright about Ned Bodine, the great-uncle the community had branded a coward, what could she say?
Finally his gaze shifted to the sheaf of papers in front of him. “Mr. Mayhew wants to run a series of articles on the Coast Guard—the functions of the base, its importance to the local economy, maybe some human interest profiles. It seems your family connections might be a help to us in that.”
Excitement rippled through her. A real story, finally. “Yes, of course.” She was so excited that she nearly tripped over the words. “My father, my brother and my cousins are still on active duty, several stationed right here in Charleston. I’d love to write about—“
He cut her off her enthusiasm with a single cut of his hand. “These will be in-depth pieces. I wasn’t suggesting you write them.”
Disappointment had a sharp enough edge to make her speak up. “Why not? I’m the most qualified person in the newsroom on that Coast Guard.”
“Knowing something about a subject doesn’t mean you’re the best person to write the articles.” His tone suggested she should know that. “In fact, I’m taking these on myself. Your role is to get me access and set up the interviews.”
Something anyone with a phone could do, in other words. Naturally he wouldn’t let her actually write anything. In Ross Lockhart’s eyes, she was nothing but a sweet Southern belle filling in time until marriage by pretending to be a reporter.
Her jaw tightened until she felt it might crack. She could speak her mind, of course. And then she’d go right out the door onto the street behind the other eight people he’d fired.
Finally she swallowed. “I can take care of that.”
“Good.” He shuffled through his papers, leaving her to wonder if she should go or stay. Then, rising, he held out a half-sheet of paper to her. “Get this in for tomorrow’s news cycle.”
He strode out the door, on to bigger and better things, no doubt. She glanced down at her latest assignment and sucked in an irritated breath.
At least it was a change from a dog show. This time it was a cat show.
#
Amanda Bodine wasn’t quite the person he’d originally thought her. Ross paused at his office door, scanning the newsroom until his gaze lit on her.
Oh, she looked the part, with her chic, glossy brown hair and her trick of looking up at you with those big green eyes from underneath her thick eyelashes. A stereotypical Southern belle, he’d thought—pretty, sweet, and brainless. But she wasn’t quite that.
The charm was there, yes, and turned on generously for everyone but him. At the moment she was chatting with the kid from the mailroom, seeming as interested in him as she’d be if Cyrus Mayhew himself walked up to her.
Everyone’s friend--that was Amanda. Even a crusty old reporter like Jim would pause by her chair, resting his hand on her shoulder long enough to exchange a quip before heading for his desk.
Amanda was a lightweight, he reminded himself. She didn’t belong here. Even if she wasn’t quite as shallow as he’d first thought, she didn’t have the toughness it took to make a good reporter. Just ask him. He knew exactly how much that cost.
Sooner or later Amanda would take her sweet Southern charm and her big green eyes, marry someone suitable, retreat into her comfortable Charleston lifestyle, and produce babies who looked just like her.
No, she didn’t belong in a newsroom. He threaded his way purposefully through the desks toward her. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t be useful. Amanda could give him entree into a world he’d have trouble penetrating on his own. And that wasn’t exactly using her. She was an employee of the paper, after all.
The irritating meter inside his mind that identified falsehood let out a loud buzz. That was an asset when interviewing the many people who didn’t want to tell the truth to a reporter. Not so helpful when it turned on him that way.
Well, okay. He was using her. He’d use anyone, try anything, that would get him back to the life where he belonged.
You don’t have to trick her. You could tell her about the anonymous tip. Ask for her help.
The voice of his conscience sounded remarkably like that of his grandmother. She’d died when he was a teenager, but the Christian standards she’d set for him still cropped up at inconvenient moments. For an instant he wavered.
Then his resolve hardened. He’d tried being the Boy Scout before, living by his grandmother’s ideals, and look where it had gotten him.
Clinging to the remnants of his career with his fingernails, that’s where. If Cyrus Mayhew hadn’t been willing to give him a chance, the only newspaper job he’d have landed was delivering them. In Alaska.
So he’d do what he had to. He frowned. The called-in story tip had been annoyingly vague, as they so often were, but it had promised a scandal, fat and juicy, involving the Coast Guard base and kickbacks paid by local companies for contracts. A big story—the kind of story that, properly handled, could get him back on top again.
And Amanda Bodine, with her Coast Guard family, was just what he needed.
He stalked up to her desk, noting that just the sight of him was enough to send the mailroom kid fleeing. Amanda had a bit more control than that, but she clearly didn’t welcome his visit either.
“Ms. Bodine.” The balloons were gone from her desk. “Have you set up an initial meeting for me yet?”
“I...um, yes.” A faint hint of pink stained her cheeks. “I spoke with my father. He’d be pleased to talk with you.”
“Good.” He’d done a little digging himself. Talking to Brett Bodine would be starting at the top. He was one of the head honchos at the local Coast Guard base. “When can we meet?”
Her flush deepened, and he watched, fascinated. When was the last time he’d met a woman who could blush?
“Actually, I’m on my way to a family get-together when I leave work. My daddy suggested you come along and have some supper with us. You can talk to him, and my cousins will be there...” Her voice petered out.
“I assume this is a birthday party for you.” He lifted an eyebrow, remembering the birthday balloons and flowers. Clearly Amanda had some admirers.
“And my sister, Annabel. We’re twins. Since our birthday is in the summer, we’ve always had a picnic at the beach.” She clamped her mouth shut suddenly, maybe remembering who she was telling.
“It sounds charming.”
Her gaze narrowed, as if she suspected sarcasm. “I explained to him that this was business, not social. If you’d rather meet at his office, I can tell him that.”
The idea of taking him to a family gathering clearly made her uncomfortable, but it appealed to him. Get people in a casual setting where they felt safe, and they’d often let slip more than they would in a formal interview.
“No, this sounds good,” he said briskly. “Give me directions, and I’ll be there.”
“It’s at my grandmother’s beach house over on Sullivan’s Island.” She kept dismay out of her voice, but her mouth had tensed and her hands tightened on the edge of her desk.
“Directions,” he said again.
Soft lips pressed together for an instant. “I’ll be coming back into the city afterward anyway, if you want to ride over with me instead of trying to find it on your own.”
Her brand of Southern courtesy compelled the offer, he supposed, but he was quick to take advantage. A few moments alone in the car with her would give him a chance to get background on the people he’d be meeting.
“Fine,” he said promptly. “Are you ready?”
Again the tension showed in her face, but she managed to smile. “Just let me close a few files.” She flicked a glance at his shirt and tie. “But you’ll want to wear something more casual at the beach.”
“I keep a change of clothes in my office.” He turned, eager to get on with it. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot in fifteen minutes.”
He strode toward his office, nodding at the few staffers who ventured to say goodnight to him. Most just hurried past, heads down, as if eager to escape his notice. It didn’t work. He noticed, just as he’d noticed Amanda’s reluctance.
She was both too polite and too worried about her job to argue with him. Even if she had, he’d have been perfectly capable of overrunning her objections.
Amanda didn’t want him on her home ground, but that was too bad. Because the Bodines were going to help him get back to his native turf, and no other considerations would stand in his way.
#
Amanda had been treated to a sample of Ross’s interview style on the trip over to the island, and she didn’t much care for being on the receiving end. She pulled on shorts and tee shirt in the small room under the eaves that the girl cousins always shared at the beach house.
She glanced in the mirror, frowning at the transformation from city professional to island girl. Somehow she felt safer if Ross only saw her when she was wearing her professional armor.
She pressed her fingertips against the dressing table that still wore the pink and white checked skirt her grandmother had put on it years ago. Not that Miz Callie was a pink and frilly kind of person, but she’d wanted the girl cousins to feel that this room was theirs.
Dealing with Ross in the office was hard enough. Amanda still rankled over his quick dismissal of her ability to write the articles on the Coast Guard. Who was better equipped to write it—someone who’d lived with it her whole life or an outsider who didn’t have a clue?
She wrinkled her nose at the image in the mirror. Ross had the answer to that, and he was the boss. He’d decided that her family was his way into the story, and if his aggressive, almost abrasive questioning in the car had been a sample of his style, they were in for some rough waters.
She headed for the stairs, the comparison lightening her mood. Daddy was used to rough waters. He could handle the likes of Ross with one hand tied behind his back.
And speaking of handling him, she’d left her boss alone with her grandmother. Goodness only knew what they were making of each other.
The elation she always felt at the beach house had her almost skipping down the familiar stairs. Catching Ross’s gaze on her, she slowed to a more sedate pace as she reached the livingroom.
He was sitting in the shabby, over-stuffed chair near the wall of windows that faced the beach and the ocean. Her heart clutched. That had been Granddad’s special seat after his first stroke had stolen away most of his mobility. He’d never tired of looking out at the sea.
“Is my grandmother takin’ good care of you?” The tall glass of sweet tea at his elbow looked untouched.
“She is. She had to run back to the kitchen to deal with something.” As if becoming aware of the glass, he lifted it and touched it to his lips.
She couldn’t help but grin. “Obviously you aren’t used to iced tea that’s sweet enough to make your back teeth ache. Come on. We’ll find the others. Someone will have brought a cooler of soda.”
He put the sweet tea down quickly and stood, his gaze sweeping over her. She usually felt he didn’t see her at all. This gaze was far more personal. Too much so.
Her chin lifted. “Something wrong?” She edged the words with ice.
“No.” He made an instinctive move back. “You just look different. From the office, that is.”
“We’re not in the office,” she pointed out. If she could make him feel a tad uncomfortable, so much the better. She needed to keep a professional distance between them, no matter where they were.
“We’re not,” he agreed. His fingers brushed her bare arm, and the unexpected familiarity of the gesture set her nerve endings tingling.
He nodded toward the kitchen. “We were going in search of a soda,” he reminded her.
“Right, yes.” She took a breath. She would not let the man dismantle her confidence in herself. “This way.”
But as she started for the kitchen, he stopped her with another touch. This time his hand lingered on her wrist, warming the skin. “In this setting, it’s going to sound odd if you call me Mr. Lockhart. Let’s switch to first names. Amanda,” he added, smiling.
She nodded. What could she do but agree? But she’d been right. His smile really did make him look like the Big Bad Wolf.
She led the way into the kitchen, trying to ignore her awareness of him, hard on her heels.
The kitchen was a scene of contained chaos, as it always was when the whole family gathered at the beach house. Her mamma and one of her aunts talked a mile a minute while they chopped veggies for a salad, her sister Annabel and cousin Georgia arranged nibbles on a huge tray, and Miz Callie, swathed in an apron that nearly swallowed her five foot nothing figure, peered anxiously at the contents of a huge kettle—pulled pork barbecue, judging by the aroma.
“Did y’all meet my boss, Ross Lockhart?”
“We introduced ourselves, sugar.” Mamma stopped chopping long enough to plant a kiss on her cheek. “You comin’ to help us?”
Miz Callie clattered the lid back onto the pot. “She’d best introduce her friend to the men first. I don’t suppose he wants to be stuck in the kitchen.”
“I’m afraid my cooking skills wouldn’t be up to your standards, Mrs. Bodine,” Ross said quickly. “It smells way too good in here.”
Miz Callie dimpled up at him, always charmed by a compliment to her cooking. “The proof is in the eating, you know. You let Amanda get you settled with someone to talk to, and later on we’ll get better acquainted.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
Amanda gave him a sharp glance, ready to do battle if he was being condescending to her grandmother. But his expression had actually softened, and his head was tilted deferentially toward Miz Callie.
Well. So something could pierce that abrasive shield he wore. That was a surprise.
Still, it would be just as well to keep him from any lengthy tête-à-têtes with her grandmother. Miz Callie’s latest project tended to be the only thing on her mind these days, and they surely didn’t need to let Ross Lockhart in on the skeleton in the Bodine family closet.
“This way.” She put a hand on the glass door and slid it back. “Anybody who’s not in the kitchen is probably down on the beach.”
Ross followed her onto the deck that ran the length of the house and paused, one hand on the railing. “Beautiful view.”
“It is that.” She lifted her face to the breeze that freshened the hot summer air. “On a clear day you feel as if you can see all the way across the Atlantic.”
He turned his back on the ocean to have a look at the beach house sprawled comfortably on the dunes, its tan shingles blending into sand and sea oats. “Has your family had the place long?” The speculative note in his voice suggested he was estimating the cost.
“For generations.” She clipped off the words. They couldn’t afford to build a house on the beach at today’s prices, but that was none of Ross Lockhart’s business. “My great-grandfather bought this piece of property back when there was no bridge to the mainland and nothing much on the island but Fort Moultrie and a few fishing shacks.”
“Very nice.” He glanced toward the kitchen, and she realized he was looking at Miz Callie with that softened glance. “Did I understand your grandmother lives here year-round?”
“That’s her plan. The family’s been trying to talk her out of it, but once Miz Callie makes up her mind, you may as well save your breath to cool your porridge, as she’d say.”
His lips curved. “I had a grandmother like that, too. A force to be reckoned with.”
“Had?” She reacted automatically to the past tense.
“She died when I was a teenager.” He turned to her, closer than she’d realized. Her breath hitched in her throat. “You’re lucky to have your grandmother still. Very lucky.”
The intensity in his low voice set up an answering vibration in her. For a moment they seemed linked by that shared emotion.
Then she caught herself and took a careful step back. This is your boss, remember? You don’t even like him.
But she couldn’t deny that, just for a moment, he’d shown her a side of himself that she’d liked very much.

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