Charlie kept going.

“Was she as lousy for you as she was for me?”

Charlie stopped. Don’t do it. Then he turned around and walked back toward Mark.

Mark stood, caught his foot on the leg of his chair and fell over backward to the floor, taking the chair with him.

“I warned you not to do that,” Charlie told him mildly. He looked at Harry. “Didn’t I?”

“Yes,” Harry said, nodding judiciously. “Yes, I’d have to say that you did.” He didn’t look particularly put out that Mark was on the floor.

Mark glared at Charlie from the floor. “It was just a joke.”

Charlie frowned down at him. “Don’t joke about Allie. It annoys me.” He turned to leave and came face-to-face with Karen.

“Just came in for some coffee,” she said brightly, waving her cup at him.

“Fine,” Charlie said. “Step on Mark while you’re getting it.”

This will not do, he told himself on his way back to Allie. This woman is screwing up your head. Keep away from her.

4

Charlie was still scowling when he got back to Allie’s office. Threatening Mark had been stupid. He hated being stupid, although Lord knew he should be used to it by now.

“What’s wrong?” Allie peered at him over a blanket-covered basket on her desk. “You look upset.”

“Not me.”

“You sure?”

Charlie tossed the handbook on the desk, feeling like a fool. “Well, Mark sort of fell over.”

Allie froze. “Fell over?”

Charlie sat down and sipped his coffee. “He’s not hurt. It wasn’t that far to the floor.”

Allie looked severe. “I suppose you had a reason.”

Charlie shrugged. He insulted you, and for some reason I lose my mind every time I think of you. “I didn’t like his looks.”

“Right. What did he say about me?”

That was another problem with Allie. She was too damn sharp. “Don’t be so conceited.”

“He doesn’t know you well enough to insult you. What did he say about me?”

“His very existence insults me. Can we get back to business?”

“I’ll find out anyway.” Allie waited and then opened the folder in front of her. “Okay. Fine. We’ll do business. Any questions so far?”

Charlie gave her the one that had been bugging him since the day before. “Yeah. How did an idiot like Mark get to be a star around here?”

Allie blinked at him. “He’s not an idiot. He’s a good broadcaster. His voice is clear and it makes people feel good. Plus he’s great at PR. He’s good-looking, and his picture’s been plastered all over the city on billboards. He pulls a pretty good female audience.”

Charlie scowled harder, not sure why he cared. “So why isn’t he on TV?”

“He’s really shy.” Allie’s face softened, and Charlie got more annoyed. “I know he comes across as a conceited jerk, but he’s really unsure of himself. He’s never even thought about TV. All those cameras? He’d have a nervous breakdown.”

“Shy,” Charlie snorted.

“Hey, not everybody is as comfortable with himself as you are.” Allie surveyed him. “You’re exactly who you want to be, doing exactly what you want to do. That’s pretty rare. Mark doesn’t have your confidence, so he relies on his good looks to get him through, but he’s still anxious. All the time.”

Charlie focused on the part of her argument he liked the least. “He’s not good-looking.”

“Yes, he is. He looks like Richard Gere before he went gray.”

“Mark’s gray?”

“Richard’s gray. Mark is still tall, dark and handsome, and women swoon.”

Charlie slumped lower in his chair. “He’s medium, dark and dweeby.” He looked at her suspiciously. “Are you still swooning?”

Allie leaned back in her chair. “Nope. I’ve been cured. Thank you very much.”

His spirits rose miraculously. “My pleasure, believe me.”

Allie smiled at him, and Charlie felt himself slipping into lust. Oh, no. He yanked himself back.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” He shook his head. No more Allie. They would work together at the station where it would be almost impossible to make love-he shoved the desk thoughts firmly from his mind-but he was definitely finding another place to live. He’d take her to dinner tonight and let her down easy and then move to a motel. Good plan. He suppressed a sigh of relief at being back in control and returned to the problem of the station. “Who’s on before me?”

“Harry the Howler. The big guy you met in the hall.”

Mark’s companion in the break room. “I think I just met him again. Calm sort of guy.”

Allie nodded. “Exactly. That’s what I keep telling him, but he insists on howling. Which is not your problem. In fact, I don’t see that you have any problems.” She beamed at him, the Positive Career Talk smile.

“I’m taking over for a paranoid gun-nut, and you think I have no problems.”

“Of course not. After Waldo, anybody is a step up. And we’ve been at the bottom of the ratings for so long, you can only go up. Just remember, we’re an easy-listening station, and you can’t go wrong.”

“Well, that’s our first problem. I’m not an easy-listening kind of guy.”

Allie looked exasperated. “You must have known we weren’t hard rock when you signed on.”

Charlie shook his head. “Bill told me I could play what I wanted.”

“Which is?”

“Everything.” Charlie leaned back and tried to sound as if he knew what he was doing. “I like rock, country, rap, jazz… I like it all. The way I figure it, I’ll talk to people and they can call in and talk back and in between I play music I like.”

Allie shrugged. “Well, Bill is a lot of things, but a liar he isn’t. If he said you could do that here, you can do that here. You better go look at our library. I don’t know how much of a variety we have.”

“Well, I’ll just have to give Bill a shopping list.” Charlie shoved the handbook back across the desk to her. “I don’t need this. As long as I don’t do anything to give the FCC heart failure, I’ll be okay.”

“All right. Now, what do you need to get your show started?”

“Nothing.” Charlie leaned back and spread his hands out o embrace the world, back in control again. “I can do it all.”

“Great.” Allie pulled the basket on her desk closer to her. “There’s just one other little thing we have to do tonight.” She reached under the blanket and pulled out a doll’s baby bottle. “Samson needs to be fed every hour. We’re going to have to cover this until two. Grady will do the rest. I’ve already called him, and he’s fine with it.”

“Samson?” Charlie said, totally confused.

“The station puppy.” Allie pulled back the blanket and Charlie peered over the edge.

The tiny dark shape inside looked like an undersize chocolate Twinkie. “That’s a puppy?”

“Well, he’s small right now, but he’s going to get a lot bigger.” Allie tried to nudge the bottle into the puppy’s mouth, but he made no movement to take it.

Another one of Allie’s lost causes. First Mark, then Charlie’s show, and now this puppy. Charlie squinted at the tiny scrap of protoplasm Allie insisted was a dog. “Are you sure it’s not dead?”

He stepped back as Allie’s eyes came up blazing. “This puppy is not going to die.”

“All right.” Charlie had some small experience with animals on the farms he’d worked on during his summer vacations, and all of it told him Samson was doomed, but he wasn’t going to fight Allie on it. “Where’s his mother?”

“He’s the runt. Things didn’t work out between them.” Allie tipped the bottle so the formula ran into the puppy’s mouth without him sucking, and his throat made weak swallowing movements. “See?” she said triumphantly. “He’s going to be fine.”

Charlie sat back and watched Allie work over the puppy, tickling its throat to get it to swallow. Well, if anyone could save an embryo dog, Allie could. He’d only known her twenty-four hours, but he already had a healthy respect for her determination.

“We may have to do this every half hour,” Allie told him. “He’s not getting enough this way. He’s got to learn to suck.”

So now he was a dog nurse, too. Well, he liked dogs. And if this was what Allie wanted… “All right.”

Allie covered the basket again. “He’s going to make it. I know he is.”

At least when the dog died, he’d be there to comfort her.

Platonically.


* * *

Charlie spent the next two hours checking out the tape library and meeting Stewart, the night engineer. Stewart looked like a peeled egg and was not a ball of fire when it came to engineering, but he was something that Charlie found a lot more useful: a talker. After a half hour with Stewart, Charlie knew more about the station than Bill probably did. And the one incontrovertible fact he gleaned was that Allie was universally admired. Mark wasn’t.

“Allie’s good people,” Stewart told him. “She gets things done. Mark is just a…”

“Yuppie scum dweeb?”

“That would cover it,” Stewart agreed.

Cheered by the knowledge that not everyone at WBBB was certifiable, Charlie went back out into the city to find something to say about Tuttle on his first show. Nothing too controversial, he told himself. No waves.

Allie was standing in the lobby with her hands on her hips when he walked in an hour before his show. “Bill was looking for you earlier. You were supposed to meet him at five. Mark apologized for whatever it was he said. Bill says that you are never to strike another employee here again. Also, don’t play liberal garbage on the air. Where have you been?”

Charlie grinned at her. She looked like an aggressive cocker spaniel, her hair swinging like a bright bell around her face, her eyes warm and challenging behind her glasses, which had slipped down her nose, as usual. He resisted the impulse to push them up for her. They weren’t that close. They weren’t ever going to be that close. “I missed you, too,” he told her. “And I didn’t hit Mark. He fell over. What do you know about the city building here?”