Love and Fire by Katie Ingersoll Page A

work.” 
    Tammy
watched him eat, as she sipped her coffee.  Her art obviously wasn’t on board. 
His hoping to see it indicated he wanted to see her beyond the cruise.  The
thought made her uneasy.  She didn’t even know where he lived. 
    “Where
do you live?” 
    “I
have a condo in New York.”  He laughed suddenly.  “I don’t know where you live
either!” 
    “Orange,
Virginia.” 
    “Is
that near Shenandoah?  I went hiking there once.” 
    Tammy
smiled thoughtfully.  “Yes, it’s fairly close.” 
    “Wow,
it’s pretty in that area.  You must love the fact that you have that view every
day.” 
    “I
do, but the small town gossip has me thinking I should move somewhere else. 
Gleason, my husband, drove nearly an hour every day to teach at the University of
Virginia.” 
    “You
should stop calling him that.” 
    “What? 
My husband?” 
    Jake
nodded. 
    “Technically
he still is.  What’s the matter?  Does it make you jealous?”  She tried to
tease, forcing a smile. 
    “Yes.” 
His matter of fact tone and the seriousness of his face, wiped the smile from
hers.  “He doesn’t deserve to be called your husband.” 
    “Were
you ever married?” 
    “No,
but I was engaged once.”  He tossed his napkin on the table and leaned back in
the chair.  “Her name was Paola.”  He said quietly. 
    “It
didn’t work out?” 
    “Obviously
not.  It was my fault really.  She wasn’t much younger than myself.  She was a
beautiful woman from Spain that was working for the first publishing company
that I had just quit.  I met her when I came into the office to finalize the
dissolution of my contract.” 
    Tammy
could sense that what he was telling her was something that needed telling.  It
was cathartic, and she was determined to not interrupt.
    “Anyway,
we hit it off from the start.  It was whirlwind really.  Unfortunately, I just
wasn’t ready for something that serious, and she was too ready .  I
should have seen the signs that something was very wrong.  I just thought she
was becoming too clingy and needy.  I thought if I just ignored it, maybe I
could somehow break her from it by distancing myself from her.  Now that was a
real trick since we were living together.” 
    He
stopped and sighed, turning his head away from Tammy and looking somewhere in
the distance.  She knew he wasn’t seeing his current surroundings, he had gone
back in time right before her eyes. 
    “I
started cheating on her with whatever young thing that caught my attention.  I
was coming home blasted, smelling like perfume.  She just took it and continued
to get worse and worse.  I honestly just thought she was crazy.  What I didn’t
expect was a call from the NYPD, while I was in bed with another woman, that
they were scraping her body off of the street.” 
    Jake
turned back to her.  His normally chocolate colored eyes looked black and far
away.  His skin had paled.  “I off course had to come and identify her.  She
had jumped from the roof of our high rise.  I almost couldn’t recognize her
enough to give a positive identification.”  He finished in a whisper. 
    Tammy
felt sick.  She couldn’t imagine the horror of such a thing.  She reached a
hand out to him and he gripped it tightly.  “Your first book wasn’t horror was
it?” 
    He
shook his head slowly and looked at her with wonder.  “How could you possibly know that?  I wrote my first book under a pseudonym.” 
    “You
pulled the horror from your own personal arsenal of demons.” 
    “My
first novel, since I was known in the modeling world, was written under a fake
name because I wrote about the treachery of the modeling world!” 
    It
all rang a bell for her.  “Wait!  You wrote Dark Dancer for the Lens ?” 
    He
smiled ruefully.  “ Dark Dancer for the Lens: The side of modeling that the
camera doesn’t capture.  Yes.  My name for the book was…”
    “J.
A. Blackstone.”  She