Page 78 of 7 Days and 7 Nights

“What’s wrong?”

Matt let go of her shoulders. “Don’t move," he instructed again. “And don’t turn around. We seem to be on camera.”

Her heart seeming to plunge into the pit of her stomach, Olivia disobeyed. Turning, she looked up at the camera on the far right and realized it had somehow turned and was pointed right at them. Her gaze flew to the TV monitor beneath it, where she could see Matt still framed from head to just below his waist, with her frozen in front of him.

She felt the heat flare up to scorch her cheeks. Good God, she had just attacked Matt Ransom in front of the entire world. She was beyond humiliation. She was finished.

Numb, she watched Matt stride over to the camera and rip the power cord out of the wall.

“How did the camera get pointed this way?” she asked.

“I don’t know."

“You don’t know? How can you not know?”

“I just don’t. During my show it was in its usual position. I never looked again after that.” He smiled tentatively. “I was preoccupied.”

“Don’t you dare make jokes. I may have just shot my career to hell in some futile attempt to force you to admit all women aren’t the same.”

“I think you more than made your point.”

“You think this is funny! I have lost all credibility. Who will ever be able to listen to my advice without picturing me throwing myself at you?”

“It’s not quite that bad, Olivia. Until you turned around, all they could see was the back of a blonde head.”

“Oh, right, like there’s been more than one blonde in this apartment this week.”

“Well, you seemed pretty concerned that I might have you confused with someone else.”

She shot him a withering glance and started to pace. “I don’t believe this!” She stopped pacing to turn on him as the pieces started to fall into place. “You. You set me up.”

“Olivia, be reasonable. There was no way I could know you were planning to corner me and, er, have your way with me.” He didn’t seem particularly concerned that he’d been caught engaging in serious foreplay on camera.

But this just made him all the more manly, didn’t it? And what did it make her?

A prize chump.

"All week I’ve been trying to figure out what you were up to. ‘Relax, Olivia.’ ‘Don’t be so uptight, Livvy.’ ‘What good is success if you can’t enjoy it, Liv?’ As if you cared one bit how I actually felt.”

She did an about-face and paced in the other direction, unable to look him in the eye. What in the world had she been thinking? How had she allowed her anger and frustration to get the best of her? She was totally out of control, and it was all Matt Ransom’s fault.

“You feed me a tiny bit of your real self, little dribs and drabs that make me believe you’re actually reachable and capable of feeling, and what do I do? Turn myself upside down trying to find the rest. I’m the one who should have my head examined.”

Matt plopped down on the sofa and put his feet up on the coffee table. “Olivia, just calm down. There’s got to be a way out of this.”

But she was beyond thought, beyond giving him the remotest benefit of any doubt. Another thirty seconds and a national audience could have watched her bury her face in Matt Ransom’s crotch without any understanding of the reasons why. Hell, she no longer understood the reasons why. She only knew that she had come to trust him in some subliminal way and he had betrayed that trust.

Olivia whirled around to face him. “What did you do, pay someone at the station to reposition the cameras so you could lure me into a compromising position?”

“Lure you? Do you hear what you’re saying, Olivia? Do you think I had any way of knowing what was coming?” He shook his head and spoke calmly, which just incensed her further. “I don’t think you knew what you were going to do before you did it! When did I have the chance to warn the mystery cameraman? Calm down and let’s think this through.”

“Weare not thinking anything, Matt. There is nowehere.”

Then she tuned him out, completely. Like she should have done the day the door clicked shut behind them.

???

Charles Crankower danced a little jig in the empty WTLK control room. The cameras had been disconnected, but it couldn’t have mattered less. He had exactly what he needed, exactly what he’d wanted but hadn’t dared hope for.

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