Against the Wind (6 page)

Not that there was even that much to be embarrassed
about. No one would have noticed, if it weren’t for her mother’s constant, seemingly sadistic delight in calling attention to it. Maddy leaned down and peered at her reflection in the mirror that was set too low for her height. Long, long dark brown hair, still in schoolgirl braids to keep it under control while she swam, a pale, pointed face, white teeth only recently freed from braces, large brown eyes still chained to glasses that she was too vain to wear. Not a sex symbol, certainly. And the endless arms and legs, the flat, bony body with its two embarrassing lumps didn’t help matters. With a sigh she grabbed her oversized prescription sunglasses and plumped them down on her small, slightly tilted and definitely freckled nose. It was a lucky thing she wasn’t going to run into anyone more threatening than the gardener at that early hour.

Even Georgia, their cook that year, wasn’t up. Maddy moved through the dark, silent kitchen like a ghost, straight out into the early-morning light, pausing long enough to shed the shirt and the glasses before diving into the cool clear water of the swimming pool. The chilly chlorinated smell surrounded her, waking her up completely, and dutifully she swam her laps, breast stroke, crawl, then flipping over on her back to float peacefully, alone in the world. Sometime, she promised herself, she’d live by the ocean and be able to swim in chlorine-free water every morning.

The house was still dark and silent by the time she climbed out of the pool and began to dry herself off. It was after six by then. Georgia wouldn’t make her appearance for another hour. Maddy had developed a taste for coffee during the last year, fostered by Stephen’s indulgence, and it had now taken the place of her early-morning Coke. She’d have to rummage through Georgia’s sacrosanct
appliances and make her own, risking the cook’s formidable wrath.

The smell of coffee assailed her nostrils as she reached the open french doors that led to the huge old kitchen. “Georgia, you saint!” Maddy cried as she swept into the kitchen, sans shirt and glasses, with only the too-small bathing suit clinging wetly to her body. “I was dying for some coffee. …” Her voice trailed off in sudden horror as she realized it wasn’t Georgia standing at the sink, a cup of coffee in his large hand.

“You’re not Georgia,” she said lamely, standing dead still, too astounded to do more than gape. And then she rapidly did a great deal, pulling Stephen’s shirt around her and plopping the dark glasses on her nose. Even through the darkness the prescription sharpened her gaze enough to get a good look at him.

“No, I’m not,” he said calmly enough, his voice a deep, rasping rumble. “I’m Jake Murphy, one of your father’s Secret Service men. And I presume you’re Madelyn? I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t scare me,” she said slowly. “I just wasn’t expecting anyone.” Not anyone like you, she added to herself. “And only my mother calls me Madelyn. I’m Maddy.”

He smiled then, a strangely sweet smile in a wary, secretive face. “Good morning then, Maddy. Would you like some coffee?”

If his presence had bemused her, his smile devastated her. “I’d love some.” She stood there and watched as he reached for a cup and proceeded to pour her some.

At that point most of her romantic fantasies had concerned both long-haired rock singers and Eric Thompson, her best friend’s older brother. The man standing in the dawn light by her parents’ kitchen sink was cut from
a different stamp. He was wearing a suit, of all things, a dark, conservative suit with a white shirt and a dark tie knotted loosely at this throat. His hair was short, army-length, and his hazel eyes had a distant, wary look to them when he wasn’t smiling at her. That smile had been a revelation on his dark, narrow face. When he was still the skin seemed too taut across the high cheekbones, the strong blade of a nose, the firm chin. When he wasn’t looking at her he looked driven, haunted, and frighteningly romantic. When he looked back at her, smiling that gentle, reassuring smile, Maddy melted.

He was even tall. Eric Thompson was just her height, and she had once made the mistake of wearing heels when she went to visit his sister Vickie. Eric had taken one look at the tall skinny amazon towering over him and beat a hasty retreat. She wouldn’t have to worry about spike heels with Jake Murphy, she thought with absent delight. His body was narrow, lean, and whipcord tough, even beneath the conservative suit. Eric was bulging with muscles, and yet Maddy had little doubt that Jake Murphy could dispose of him with one hand tied behind his back. It was a lovely, instantaneous fantasy, the two of them fighting over her. When in actuality neither of them could care less, she reminded herself dismally, pulling the enveloping white shirt tighter around her damp body.

He held out the coffee, and in her rush to get it she stubbed her toe on the kitchen table. “Sugar!” she snapped, limping the last few steps.

“Was that a curse or a request?” Jake asked, the smile still hovering over what was in repose a grim mouth.

“A curse,” Maddy said, leaning against the sink and massaging her foot. “I drink my coffee black.”

“Maybe if you didn’t wear sunglasses in the dark you wouldn’t bump into things,” he offered gently.

Maddy shook her head. “If I weren’t wearing these I wouldn’t see anything at all. They’re prescription—I left my regular ones up in my room.”

“Well, there’s nothing to see right now, so you may as well humor me.” Before Maddy could divine his attention he’d reached out and removed the sunglasses from her nose. “That’s much better. Such pretty brown eyes shouldn’t be hidden.”

The compliment was gentle, almost absentminded, and her immediate reaction startled even her. She struggled for something to say. “I thought Secret Service men always wore sunglasses,” she said, blinking in the sudden light. He was even more overwhelming up close, without the shadow of her glasses between them.

Jake grinned. “We do. Maybe that’s why I hate to see them when I’m not working.”

“You’re not working now?” It was an impossibly inane thing to say, she told herself mournfully, but she was desperate to keep up the conversation. If she didn’t she’d have to go back up stairs, alone, away from this gloriously mysterious creature who’d turned up in her parents’ kitchen.

He shook his head. “Not until your father gets up.”

“Are you staying here? In the house, I mean?”

“Actually I’m staying in the pool house.”

“Oh, my gosh, did I wake you?”

“I didn’t know anyone still said gosh and sugar when they swore,” Jake said in a wry voice. “How old are you, Maddy? I should know but I’ve forgotten.”

“Seventeen,” she lied.

His eyes narrowed for a moment. “I should tell you that I have an instinct for when someone lies. Also a good memory when it’s prodded. You won’t be seventeen till August.”

“Close enough,” she said.

“Close enough,” he agreed, taking a drink of his coffee.

“How old are you?”

“A hundred years older than you,” he said with a distant smile. “Twenty-six.”

Maddy did a rapid calculation in her head. “That’s only nine years older than me.”

“Ten. You’re sixteen, remember?”

“Nine and a half,” she said. “Have you always been in the Secret Service?”

Wrong question. His face closed up, the light went out of his hazel eyes, and his mouth showed its full potential for grimness. “I was in Vietnam for two years.”

Maddy’s recoil was instinctive. Most of her father’s political career had been built on opposition to that and any other war, and Maddy’s revulsion was deeply ingrained. She could feel those empty hazel eyes watching her reaction, and she quickly swallowed a sip of the scalding coffee. “Good coffee,” she manged in a croak.

Jake Murphy stared at her for a long, silent moment and then his mouth relaxed, his eyes warmed, and the tension left his body. “Thanks,” he said, and Maddy knew he wasn’t talking about the coffee.

She looked at him, less than a foot of counter space between them, and she had the sudden overwhelming longing to reach out and cradle that head against her, to kiss that bitter mouth that could smile so sweetly at her. She looked at him and fell in love, with all the passion a shy sixteen-year-old possessed. She smiled up at him dizzily. “You’re welcome,” she murmured.

He must have known. Those hazel eyes of John Thomas Murphy could see through any frail human emotion, and a sixteen-going-on-seventeen-year-old wasn’t adept at hiding the sudden onrush of fragile passion. But
he smiled back at her, a sweet, secret smile between the two of them, and Maddy told herself a bond was sealed. She had met her fate, and if he didn’t quite recognize it yet, he would sooner or later. And suddenly the campaign summer seemed quite glorious to look forward to.

“You wish any coffee, lady?” Was it Ramon with the soulful eyes and the killer T-shirt, or Luis? She could only guess.

“No, thank you, Ramon,” she said with a shake of her head, and was rewarded with a beatific smile that revealed shattered front teeth. When the time came he might very well prove an ally. He was young and innocent enough not to like what Jake Murphy was doing to her.

His next words confirmed that impression. “Don’t worry about Murphy. He is a fair man. He will take you to El Patrón when he thinks the time is right. You can trust him,
señorita.”

Why was everyone telling her to trust him? She had little choice in the matter, but if she had it would be the last thing she would do. “Ramon, I need to see my father,” she said softly, urgently.

“Don’t let the
gringa
talk you into anything,
amigo,”
Luis of the Mickey Mouse T-shirt snarled from across the room. “You know what Murphy would say if you went against his orders. And she wouldn’t care. All she
cares about is herself.” Luis spat to emphasize his point. It would make little difference on the filthy floor.

A wary look came into Ramon’s deep brown eyes, and the concerned smile wavered. “All in good time,
señorita,”
he said, moving away. “All in good time.”

Everyone had known of Maddy’s adolescent passion for her father’s Secret Service man. There was no way she could hide it. When it came to a choice between being circumspect and being in Jake’s mesmerizing company, she had to pick the latter, despite her mother’s caustic comments.

“If I’d known Jake Murphy was all it would take to get you interested in your father’s campaign, I would have done something about it long ago,” Helen had drawled. Of course she had chosen a small cocktail party, with Jake in hearing range, to make that particular announcement, and Maddy had fled to her room in mortified tears.

But even that embarrassment and her mother’s subsequent attempts at ridiculing humor didn’t stop her starry-eyed crush. Jake’s gentle forbearance only served to encourage her, so that by August every waking moment and most dreaming ones were completely absorbed in Jake. He’d always known just how to treat her—a combination of little sister, innocent young girl, his boss’s daughter, and a trace of something dangerously flattering. It had done wonders for her self-esteem, and for the first time in her life that she could remember she was truly happy. Until that hideous night of her birthday, when all her dreams went crashing down and the even tenor of her life was shattered.

It was only a few days before the convention, the convention that everyone said held the keys to Samuel Eddison Lambert’s presidential ambitions. He stood more
than a good chance against his opponent, a conservative younger man with a good record on domestic issues, and he held up even better against the opposite party’s choice of July. Sam Lambert was only a few steps away from the White House, and the tension in the house in McLean was high.

That there were other reasons for that tension, that something more than a straightforward campaign was going on, was kept from Maddy. She’d heard the arguments late at night, seen the sober emergency meetings of dark-suited men in her father’s study, but none of that was terribly unusual. Her parents had always fought, and her father had always had advisors. If everyone was beginning to look a little grim around the edges, then Maddy attributed it to the greater stakes at hand.

It was the night of her seventeenth birthday party. Helen had arranged a party and dance at the local country club. She had even outdone herself and snagged Eric Thompson as an escort for her lanky daughter. Sam and Helen would make an appearance after dinner, but no one could expect them to spare much time, with the convention only a few days away. Certainly not Maddy.

The giddy thought of Eric Thompson was enough to put even Jake Murphy out of her head. She spent days looking for the perfect pair of flat sandals so that she wouldn’t tower over him, her flowery summer dress floated around her narrow hips and hugged her small breasts in what could only be called an enticing manner, and her waist-length hair she left long and shining, with only a silver comb holding it back from her tanned, hopeful face. She’d have to make it through the night blind. There was no way she was going to wreck her outfit with her oversized glasses. Maybe she’d listen to her mother’s constant suggestions and get contact lenses. It had only
been stubbornness that had stopped her so far. Leaning forward, she peered nearsightedly at her reflection in the mirror.

“You’re very pretty.” His voice, like water rippling over stones, came from the door of her bedroom, and she looked up, startled, into Jake’s hazel eyes.

He was leaning against the door, clad as always in that regulation suit that seemed to fit his tall body so much better than the other anonymous clones who surrounded her father. She smiled up at him, half pleased, half vulnerable. “I’m too tall,” she said, grimacing.

“No, you’re not.”

“And I’m too skinny.” She ran a disgusted hand down her narrow shape.

“No, you’re not.”

“And my mouth is too big.”

There was a peculiar silence, as his eyes fell to her mouth, and to Maddy’s fanciful mind his glance seemed to caress the trembling contours. But that may have been the fault of her nearsightedness. “No, it’s not,” he said finally, straightening up and starting toward her. “It’s just the right size.”