Identity Crisis(16)

‘Wait.’ He grabbed her by the arm, more gently than she would have expected, and swung her around to face him. The look on his face was desperate, a look K. Ryde had seen often. Suddenly, he struggled to hold her gaze. ‘Are you as good as Don says you are?’

For a second her anger flared, but the look on his face was earnest, and she held her tongue. ‘Would I be here if I weren’t?’

He studied her unabashedly for a moment, and she returned the favor.

‘There isn’t time for Don to find someone else.’ He gave a desperate glance around the room and shook his head. ‘I need help now.’

If there had been even the least hint of subterfuge, she would have punched him hard and left. But she’d made a living at reading people. The man was desperate. K. Ryde came to the forefront. She took a deep breath. ‘All right. Tell me what you need.’

Instead of moving behind the desk, he guided her to a sand-colored sofa flanked by a small woodland of tall plants, then he sat down on the edge of a matching chair facing her, hands folded in his lap, leaning forward into her gaze. ‘I need you to be Tess Delaney for me.’

She blinked twice. ‘You what?’

‘I need you to be Tess Delaney.’

A pot of strong coffee and two cans of Diet Pepsi later, neither of them had moved, and Kendra had to admit that, in spite of the nervous riot of unrest raging in her stomach, in spite of the cold sweat breaking on the back of her neck at the very thought of putting herself out there again in such a public way, she was more intrigued than she had been in her whole life.

He looked like a nervous schoolboy about to ask a girl out for the first time, and she had to admit she sort of liked that look on the arrogant face of Garrett Thorne – er – Tess Delaney. ‘What do you think? Can you do it on such short notice?’

She should have told him no. This was so not what she expected Tess to require of her. There were reasons, good reasons for telling him no, not the least of which was that the idea itself was insane. No doubt that’s why it intrigued her. Instead, she found herself saying, almost as though her voice had ignored the rage of nerves and the fears and the bad memories and acted unilaterally, ‘Of course I can do it. Don wouldn’t have called me if I couldn’t.’ What the hell was the matter with her? She didn’t need to impress Garrett Thorne. She didn’t care what he thought about her. She was just about to tell him that, though she could do it, she would have to turn him down.

And then he said, ‘You do have a temper.’

She smiled at the thought that he might be just a little intimidated by her. ‘Kendra Davis has a temper,’ she said. ‘K. Ryde simply does what she has to do to get the job done. If you need me to be Tess Delaney for the Golden Kiss Awards, well, I’m up for the challenge.’ No, she wasn’t! What the hell was she talking about? She should be running away now! She didn’t like Garrett Thorne. Let him deal with his own mess. This was not something she should get involved with. It was too much deception. That she could handle. But it was way too public a situation for her to deal with, way too soon. She couldn’t guarantee how she would react, she couldn’t guarantee if she could keep the past in the past and just do her job. It wasn’t fair to him. It wasn’t fair to Tess. It wasn’t fair to anyone, and besides, the very thought of what would be involved in such a ruse scared the hell out of her.

Just when she was about to back-pedal, just when she was about to extricate herself from a situation that she really wasn’t ready for, he breathed a huge sigh of relief and moved onto the sofa next to her. ‘Good, then we’ll have to get our stories straight. We’ll have to create a life and hobbies and a past and the whole nine yards for Tess, and we’ll both have to know it.’

And he had her. She knew it. Once he’d actually started scheming, once her mind had actually latched on to thoughts of how they could make it work, he had her. She was in. She would be his Tess Delaney. Besides, the past was the past. The only way to shake it off was to move forward. She breathed a sigh of her own and scooted closer on the sofa.

‘No, Garrett, we don’t both have to know it. You’re my date. You can know relatively little about me. And Tess, being the recluse that she is, isn’t likely to give very much away even if she’s up on stage. All you have to do is trust me enough to let me lead the way.’

‘But you don’t know Tess like I do, and there’s so little time.’

She reached out and touched his arm, feeling the tension pass up through his body under her hand. ‘Listen to me, Garrett, the less everyone knows about the Tess you see in your head, the better. It’s really fairly simple. We go to the banquet and, with any luck, we’ll have to do nothing more than smile and nod, maybe have a few microphones shoved in our faces, and I’ll make short, evasive answers. We’ll sit through the meal smiling and nodding, then make our escape at the earliest possible moment.’