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“What?”

“Always feeling the need to say something.”

“That’s not true.”

“See?”

She made a face. “Very funny.”

“Yeah, I’m a regular comedian. People tell me that all the time. That I’m a comedian and a tease.”

He didn’t even crack a smile, but she laughed. Giggled actually, rolling onto her back and flinging her arms over her head. He hadn’t been around laughter much, not since he’d been an adult. Her laughter was as enticing as her voice, genuine and spontaneous. He liked the sound of it.

“Thanks, Bondurant,” she said. “After the day I’ve had, I needed a good laugh. Although I should be used to it by now.”

“What?” he asked.

“Getting sacked. This isn’t the first time.”

“Was Daily the first to fire you?”

She cocked her head inquisitively.

“He told me.”

“Oh, well, that was good of him,” she said, meaning exactly the opposite.

“Idle conversation.”

“Yeah, right. While enlightening you on my turbulent professional history, did he happen to mention why he had fired me?”

He shook his head. He was lying. Daily had told him the story with a great deal of elaboration. But he couldn’t get enough of her voice, even though a steady diet of it was jeopardizing his resolve to keep his hands off her. When running for your life, a romantic interlude isn’t in the program.

“Well,” she began, smiling at the memory, “Daily and I didn’t start out as friends. He gave me my first job in TV news. Of course, I thought I knew everything there was to know about broadcast journalism, so from the get-go I resented even constructive criticism. Daily thought I was an airhead who had nothing to contribute to the profession.

“Not long after he hired me, he started looking for reasons to fire me. But he was shackled by FCC, and EEO, and a whole alphabet soup of hiring and firing regulations. But Daily got a break. I self-destructed.”

She’d been first on the scene at a county courthouse where a gunman had opened fire inside a courtroom. Based on the testimony of a woman who’d narrowly escaped a hail of bullets, Barrie reported that dozens of people had been wounded.

“In the ‘bloody melee.’ I think that was my exact wording.”

Then, on live television, she reported that the shooting was taking place in Judge Green’s court. “That made it even more of a story because it was rumored that he was under consideration for a seat on the Supreme Court. On camera I speculated on whether the shooting was politically motivated. Was Judge Green the target of an opposing radical, or was this retribution for an unpopular ruling? Had he survived, or was he wounded?”

As it turned out, Judge Green was on the golf course when a caddie came to tell him of the unfolding story. The incident had occurred in another court, and the only thing wounded was the ceiling light fixture, which had been shot out during the struggle between the bailiff and a man who’d brought his deer rifle to court to use as evidence in a civil suit involving poaching.

“My eyewitness was later identified as the mentally challenged woman who refilled iced tea and water glasses in the basement cafeteria. As far as anyone knew, she had never been above the first floor of the building.

“Sealing my fate was the fact that my special report had interrupted The Young and the Restless. Judge Green’s wife never missed an episode. When she heard my report, she ran from the house, fell over a sprinkler head in their yard, and broke her right wrist. Other viewers were incensed over the program interruption, especially when they learned that there had been no drama at the courthouse, certainly none to rival the soap opera script. They melted the switchboard with irate calls.

“My credibility was shot to hell. The station’s as well. The newsroom suffered the scorn of our competitors. And just in case somebody missed it, the TV critics in the local newspapers used it as fodder for days. Daily was taken to the woodshed and thrashed by the station’s management for hiring me. It’s a wonder he kept his job. He fired me in a heartbeat. The only one who benefitted was Judge Green, who is now a Supreme Court justice.”

“An unpopular one.”

“Which is another point in my loss column. More than one pundit ed

itorialized that if not for the sympathy Judge Green garnered as a result of my fiasco, his nomination would never have been approved. The American people have me to thank for sticking them with an ineffectual Supreme Court justice. Daily holds to that theory, by the way.”

“With all that between you, how’d you get to be friends?”