Playing for Time Read online

  Playing for Time

  Book #1 – The Pax Series

  by

  Barbara Bretton

  Praise for USA Today Bestselling Author Barbara Bretton

  "A monumental talent." --Affaire de Coeur

  "Very few romance writers create characters as well-developed as Bretton's. Her books pull you in and don't let you leave until the last word is read." --Booklist (starred review)

  "One of today's best women's fiction authors." --The Romance Reader

  "Barbara Bretton is a master at touching readers' hearts." --Romance Reviews Today

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 1987, 2012 by Barbara Bretton. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Cover and eBook design by Barbara Bretton

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  About This Book

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  A note from the author about this book

  About the Author

  Excerpt from A Soft Place to Fall

  Excerpt from At Last

  Excerpt from Charmed

  Link to Fire's Lady

  Excerpt from I Do, I Do . . . Again

  Excerpt from the Edge of Forever

  Excerpt from Second Harmony

  Excerpt from The Marrying Man

  Link to Midnight Lover

  Excerpt from A Skillet, A Spatula, and a Dream

  A note from the author about this book

  The world was a very different place when I sat down to write Playing for Time. We weren't on the internet. We didn't walk around with iPods and smartphones and GPS devices that can pinpoint an anthill on the other side of the world. The Soviet Union was our biggest international worry and global terrorism had just begun to register as a genuine threat.

  When I sat down to re-read Playing for Time, I was trying to decide whether or not I should update the story to fit today's world. However, it didn't take me long to decide against it. Some of the references will be new to younger readers. Some of the references will bring a smile to the faces of older readers. Some of the references will remind you of just how innocent we were in those pre-9/11 days.

  I think the story stands on its own. Ryder and Joanna would work just as well in today's world but you know the old saying: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." They are happiest in the time and place where I first found them and I hope you'll read Playing for Time and agree.

  Happy reading!

  Chapter One

  Ryder O'Neal swore as he rearranged his right leg on top of the mahogany table in front of his couch. The cast was heavy and hot and it itched like hell, and after six weeks of imprisonment, Ryder was at the end of his rope.

  Alistair Chambers's urbane laughter was just about enough to send him over the edge.

  "Better watch it, Chambers," Ryder said, waving his crutch aloft. "This could be a lethal weapon.'

  The older man folded his slim, impeccably tailored frame into a chair close to the couch.

  "Courting danger is my forte," he said, his voice revealing his British origin. "I am ever fearless." He handed Ryder a glass of Scotch.

  The drink warmed its way down Ryder's throat and mellowed his mood despite himself. "What you are," he said, "is a royal pain in the –"

  "Save your American vulgarisms for someone else," Alistair broke in. "I am impervious to such blatant ploys for sympathy."

  "I don't want sympathy. I want my freedom."

  Alistair made a show of looking around the elegantly appointed apartment. Except for the stacks of notes on the desk and the mass of electronic equipment locked away in the two spare bedrooms, the place was straight out of Architectural Digest. "I see no bars at the windows, my boy, and no shackles upon your wrists."

  Ryder pointed toward the heavy cast on his right leg. "Who needs shackles when the prisoner has a fractured femur?"

  "Six weeks ago you didn't know what a femur was."

  "Six weeks ago I didn't need to know what a femur was."

  "This is right and just punishment for carousing on that godforsaken mountain in Vermont. A more sensible man would have amused himself with diversions of a different nature."

  Ryder drained his drink and put the glass down on the windowsill behind him. "Like that blonde I saw you with after the Summit meeting?" The state of Vermont had recently played host to a US-USSR summit meeting on combating global terrorism, a topic with which both men were well-versed.

  Alistair arched one supremely elegant brow. "Dare I mention the brunette who signed your cast with a rather interesting, if physiologically unlikely, proposition?"

  "That proposition was in Hebrew," Ryder said. "Isn't there one damned language you can't read?"

  "I can decipher double entendres in eighteen modern languages plus Latin and Greek. One never knows when such knowledge will prove useful."

  Ryder stretched and yawned theatrically. "Isn't it time you went back to the hotel?"

  Alistair crossed his left leg over his right and settled back in his chair. "Would you be trying to rid yourself of my company, my boy? And here I was about to ask you to have dinner with me at O'Shaughnessy's."

  O'Shaughnessy's, in Boston, was one of the more popular watering holes of the cloak-and-dagger set and an easy hop in the organization's private jet.

  Heavy-duty bribery was hard for Ryder to ignore when he'd been staring at the same four walls all day, but he'd make a valiant attempt. He turned on the television with the remote control. The theme music from General Hospital filled the room. If that didn't drive Alistair – good-natured snob that he was – out of the apartment, nothing would.

  To Ryder's dismay, Alistair seemed oblivious to the barrage of diaper and soap powder commercials that followed the opening credits. The older man took a long sip of his own drink then fixed Ryder with one of his patented upper-crust looks.

  "Your plebeian pursuits won't drive me away, Ryder, try as you might. I enjoy General Hospital."

  Ryder zapped through the stations until he reached MTV. He grinned as Alistair winced at the onslaught of heavy-metal music. "Do I see you heading for the door, Chambers?"

  Alistair rose from his chair and turned off the TV. He then grabbed the remote from Ryder and stashed it in the pocket of his Harris tweed blazer.

  "Rudeness in one as brilliant as you can be overlooked occasionally," Alistair said. "But I wouldn't push the boundaries of my largesse."

  Ryder sighed and leaned his head against the back of the couch. "Leave me alone, Alistair," he said finally. "I just want out."

  The older man walked over to the bar. "And that, dear boy, is the rub." Ryder watched as he poured two more jiggers of Scotch into heavy Baccarat tumblers. "We simply cannot afford to let you go."

  "No one is irreplaceable. You can do better."

  "Would that we could," Alistair said, handing him a glass. "God knows my l
ife would be simpler with a less demanding resident genius. The fact remains, however, that you are still the best there is."

  "I'm burned out."

  "Hence this wonderful apartment I've presented you with." Alistair spread his arms wide. "Your personal refuge while you recover your enthusiasm."

  Ryder wasn't certain his enthusiasm was recoverable.

  The prestigious old Carillon Arms with its vaulted ceilings and marble floors was a Manhattan status symbol. The building was going co-op, and apartments were at a premium since few vacancies existed. Many of the tenants had been there forty or fifty years and, thanks to New York City laws, were protected from eviction but not, unfortunately, from harassment by landlords eager to turn a whopping profit. Some of the stories of harassment Rosie Callahan, a longtime resident, had told Ryder belied the tasteful Carillon exterior.

  But then Ryder knew all about false exteriors. You couldn't be in his line of work and not know that things were rarely as they seemed.

  Alistair, and the organization, had been exceedingly generous in acquiring one of the pricey apartments for Ryder as a get-well present – a get-well present that came with more than a few strings attached.

  "You don't play fair, Chambers." He glared over at his friend and mentor.

  "I know. That's the simple beauty of my strategy."

  "If I didn't have this damned cast on my leg you'd be in big trouble."

  Alistair strengthened the left cuff of his Brooks Brothers shirt. "I tremble even as I think of your wrath."

  Ryder's normal good humor was beginning to surface despite himself. "You know what you can do with your British reserve?"

  Alistair's blue eyes twinkled. "I already have, my boy. Many times."

  Ryder motioned toward the opulent apartment with its cavernous hall and many bedrooms. "You realize even this won't change my mind, don't you?" I'm through. Out. Officially retired." Never mind the fact that he'd been spending his idle hours working on a prototype for a device to detect plastic explosives. Chambers didn't need to know everything.

  Alistair finished his second Scotch and put the glass down on the highly polished end table. "You're on a leave of absence."

  "The hell I am."

  "You always say that." Alistair's stiff-upper-lip demeanor usually amused Ryder. Today it made him crazy. "After each and every job, you say that. I just ignore you."

  "You'd better stop ignoring me." Ryder's voice was filled with not-so-righteous anger. "I didn't bargain on a busted leg as part of the deal."

  "Oh, come now. You sound as if you were injured in the line of duty. I have no sympathy for a man who breaks his leg getting off a ski lift."

  Ryder chose to ignore the dig.

  "You are but thirty-four, Ryder. Certainly you have a few good years left."

  Ryder considered the work he'd been doing the past fifteen years. "It's a miracle I made it this far. Why press my luck?"

  "Because you'd go slowly mad if you stayed home counting your money." Alistair stood up and walked over to the window overlooking Central Park. "Because it's in your blood just as it's in mine, and you'll never be free of it."

  "You always were an optimistic sort." He tried to ignore the uneasy feeling the other man's words brought to life. Memories of the colleagues lost over the years to madmen and geniuses were the most powerful tool in Alistair's arsenal. "I'll check into the Betty Ford Clinic. Maybe they can find a cure."

  "There is no cure," Alistair said. "Danger is addictive. Once you get a taste of it, you're hooked."

  "I can give it up."

  Alistair's expression as a painful mixture of affection and disbelief. "We all want to," he said. "Damned few of us can pull it off."

  For the second time in as many days, Ryder thought of Valerie Parker and the life he might have had with her if his ambition hadn't come first, last and always. She was now someone's wife and someone's mother, contentedly hidden away in English suburbia, with Ryder O'Neal a distant, unhappy memory.

  And yet lately Valerie had been popping into his head at odd hours, causing Ryder, never an introspective man, to take a step backward into his past and face the fact that in this one thing, he had failed and failed badly.

  He carried no torch for her; in fact, he wondered if he'd ever really loved her at all. Certainly no man who loved could ever have been so callous, so unfeeling as he had been years ago.

  No. Valerie was now a symbol for something that went far beyond his shortcomings of the heart; she represented the part of Ryder that had been ignored during his fifteen years of duty with PAX.

  "Does that invitation to O'Shaughnessy's still hold?" he asked.

  "All it takes is one phone call and we're off."

  Ryder grabbed for his crutches and pulled himself up from the couch.

  "Then make the call," Ryder said, "and let's get the hell out of here."

  He'd had a glimpse into his future and he didn't like what he saw.

  Not one damned bit.

  #

  On the ninth floor of the Carillon, it was the present that was the problem.

  "For heaven's sake, Holland, will you put that stuff down?" Joanna Stratton grabbed the tube of undereye concealer from her best friend and stashed it in the pocket of her grey trousers. "You've used enough to camouflage the Sixth Fleet."

  "The Sixth Fleet, maybe, but not these circles under my eyes." Holland pulled another tube of cover-up cream out of Joanna's enormous makeup kit. "I'm bringing in the reinforcements."

  Joanna watched Holland add a third layer of Alabaster 1A. "Who's supposed to be the expert around here anyway? I thought the idea was to look natural." She groaned as Holland blended the light concealer with the darker foundation. "You should have told me you were auditioning for the Kabuki theater."

  "I'll ignore the insult if you'll tell me how to cover the dark circles so I don't end up looking like a raccoon." Holland pointed toward the life mask Joanna had done of her a few days ago. "Even that thing had circles under the eyes."

  Joanna pulled the makeup kit away from her friend. "Sorry, pal. Trade secret."

  "Do you accept bribes?"

  "Only if they include dinner at Tavern on the Green and my own Porsche."

  "Europe must have agreed with you, darling. Gone only three months and you've become positively autocratic."

  "And you've become positively neurotic." Joanna moved aside Holland's life mask and one of Rosie Callahan, her next-door neighbor, and perched on the windowsill next to her mother's antique rolltop desk. Cynthia was in Greece getting to know the latest man in her life and Joanna was availing herself of her mother's rare generosity and vacationing at her Manhattan apartment.

  "What on earth is the matter with you?" Joanna asked. "You've been acting strange all morning."

  "It's pretty obvious, isn't it?" Holland leaned forward to check the faint laugh lines at the corners of her mouth. "I'm forty-two years old and I'm beginning to look it."

  Joanna, a professional makeup artist of some renown, understood beauty and its relationship to aging the way few others did. It was her business to understand the subtle pulls and tugs made by gravity and time and how best to hide them.

  When she looked at Holland, she saw a beautiful woman who looked exactly what she was: a woman, not a girl.

  "What's wrong with being forty-two?" She named forty-something actresses whose careers were definitely in high gear.

  "They're the exception, honey, not the rule. It's a tough world out there, and the older you get, the tougher it gets to survive."

  "No wonder you've been troweling on the makeup like camouflage paint. You're preparing for war."

  "Laugh all you want. Ten years from now you won't think it's so funny." Holland waved a wand of mascara in her direction. "Just don't come crying to me when you find your first laugh line."

  Thirty-two-year-old Joanna bent down so the uncompromising morning sun caught her full face. She pointed toward a few fine lines at the outer corners of her blue-gree
n eyes and the faintest of creases on her forehead.

  "Battle scars." She watched Holland's face, "I've had them since I was nineteen." They were vivid reminders of exactly what could happen to a woman when she let herself believe in happily-ever-after.

  "You're gorgeous," Holland said matter-of-factly. "You can afford to have a wrinkle or two. It's the rest of us mere mortals who have a problem." She smoothed the furrows on her forehead with an index finger. "Don't you have any potions in your bag of tricks that could make me look ten years younger?"

  "Actually I'm looking for a way to add wrinkles."

  Holland's expression was priceless. "I'm calling Bellevue."

  "You surprise me, Holland. I thought you'd call Saks for industrial strength face cream."

  "Be serious. Wrinkles are no laughing matter."

  "I am serious. Benny Ryan wants me to do some special effects for a commercial he's shooting next week." Although Joanna was technically on a sabbatical, that didn't keep the offers from pouring in. Saying no hadn't been a problem until Benny's call came in the day before. Disguising a young man as his older self was too fascinating a proposal to ignore.

  When it came to disguises, Joanna Stratton was in her element. The more successful she became at creating masks for others, the better the mask she created for herself. In fact, some of her best work was seen every day in the smooth and lovely face she presented to the world.

  The struggle to piece her life together after the sudden, violent end of her teenage marriage didn't show. The years of study and apprenticeship, the insecurity and loneliness that were her birthright the same as her beauty – none of these were visible. Not even to her closest friend.

  The nomadic life of a free-lance theatrical makeup artist – disguises, a specialty – suited Joanna perfectly. By never staying too long in one place she never ran the risk of growing seriously attached to anything or anyone.

  And if lately she'd begun to feel the need for something more tugging and pulling at her coat strings – well, she had only to look at her much-married mother to know how slim her own chances really were for the little cottage with the white picket fence.