She caught the amused look Jason exchanged with her mother and wanted to strangle them both. “Okay, I overreacted. I’m an idiot.”
“Sweetie, you’re not an idiot,” her mother said. “But I am capable of buying a few things at the store. How do you think the cupboards have been getting stocked the past few weeks?”
Callie sighed. “I guess I hadn’t even noticed that they were.”
“Because you’ve been working far too hard.” Her mother glanced pointedly at Jason. “And you’re the young man who’s responsible for that, aren’t you?”
Jason stood. “I suppose I am,” he said apologetically, even as Callie scrambled to figure out how her mother could possibly have known. “It’s the nature of the television business, I’m afraid.”
“Well, I don’t know a thing about that, but I do know hard work and long hours take their toll. Just look at her,” her mother said, regarding Jason accusingly. “She’s pale as a ghost.”
Jason grinned. “Now, I think you’re the one to blame for that, Mrs. Smith.”
“It’s Gunderson,” Callie corrected automatically. “Regina Gunderson. Mother, this is Jason Kane.”
“I recognize him from his picture in the paper.”
Callie shot a puzzled look at her. “What picture?”
“The one of the two of you kissing in plain view of God and all the world,” she said. “Neil showed me a copy of it.”
Callie was startled less by the reference to that picture than by the sparkle in her mother’s eyes when she brought it up. She actually seemed amused, rather than appalled, by it. Callie, to the contrary, had no desire to discuss that particular photo ever again.
“Give me the groceries, Mother. As soon as I put them away, we can go to dinner. Jason’s invited both of us to join him.”
Her mother’s cheeks turned pink at that. “Oh, my, I couldn’t possibly go along on your date.”
“Of course you can,” Jason insisted. “Callie told me the two of you had plans to eat out tonight. Since I’m intruding on those, it’s only fair I take you both out.”
Callie caught the startled look her mother sent her way, but Regina turned out to be surprisingly quick on her feet. “Well, when you put it that way, young man, how could I possibly say no? Just let me change. I won’t take but a minute.”
“Absolutely not. You look lovely just as you are,” Jason said.
At the sight of yet more color blooming in her mother’s cheeks, Callie was forced to give Jason high marks. There was no way she’d shatter her mother’s pleasure by suggesting that she was actually being brought along so the man could conduct a little market research on her.
By pinpointing Jason’s ulterior motives so clearly and so readily and comparing them to her ex-husband’s shoddy behavior patterns, Callie realized a sad truth. If her lousy track record in choosing men kept up much longer, she could very well wind up one heck of a cynic about love.
* * *
Based on his first glimpse of Regina Gunderson, combined with Callie’s overwrought reaction to her mother’s absence from the apartment on their arrival, Jason would have predicted a very strained and essentially dull evening. He’d known a lot of women like Callie’s mother back in Virginia—women who were essentially gray in appearance and in personality, women who were mere shadows of the men in their lives.
His own mother had been the exact opposite. She had been like an exotic bird of paradise amid all the traditional, pale Southern flowers. Ambitious, colorful, outspoken, she had been his father’s downfall. Too much woman for a man like Wendall Kane, a man content to run his plumbing business and bask in the reflected glory of his wife’s achievements. He’d realized too late that she would cut him loose when she’d surpassed him in accomplishments. He’d never been the same after she’d left.
And neither had Jason.
Seeing his mother ride roughshod over his father and the way his father’s spirit had slowly seeped out of him after she’d gone had convinced Jason that success was all that mattered. He’d chosen the most competitive career he could think of, one that would command all of his attention, one that would give him power over any woman who happened to cross his path.
And that’s exactly the way it had been with Callie. Something about her threatened to undermine all his hard work to stay unattached and uninvolved.
A few short weeks ago he would never have left his office with so many programming decisions still to be made. He would have stayed as late as it took to view every one of those videos. He would have eaten stale sandwiches and drunk gallons of rank coffee until every magnetic strip on his giant program scheduling board was exactly where he wanted it. He would have thrived on every exhausting minute of it.
Tonight he had seized on Freddie’s chiding comments as the excuse he’d been waiting for to break his vow to stay away from Callie. His eager bolt from his office had been downright pitiful. The flare of excitement he’d felt when he’d seen her after fourteen days of total abstinence told him he was in deep trouble with this woman. She lured him like a siren, straight onto treacherous emotional shoals he’d always vowed to avoid at any cost.
He couldn’t for the life of him figure out why. She was beautiful, no doubt about that. It was what had drawn him to her image on the screen in the first place. But something beyond beauty had captured his attention and kept it, something indefinable and dangerous.
Studying her now, he viewed such thoughts as ludicrous. With professional detachment, he tried to figure out the allure. Her hair was tousled in no particular style. Her makeup had been scrubbed off before she’d left the studio and not replaced with anything more than a sheer dash of pale pink lipstick. For the first time
