Authors: Barbara Delinsky
“I could use your support.”
With a deftness she was later to marvel at, he had taken the offensive skillfully, turning the difference between them into something both positive and powerful. The turmoil of the dilemma whirled about in her brain. For long moments she looked at the sincerity of his features, the character portrayed therein, the dedication of which his earlier words had hinted.
“I … really don’t want to go … to Washington.” She hedged feebly.
“What have you got against Washington?” he asked, puzzled for not the first time. Squirming under his close scrutiny, she finally chose to ignore his question.
“Wouldn’t it be possible for me to make some kind of contribution right here from Hartford?” It was no longer a question of whether she would work with Drew, though she was totally unaware of having consciously made that decision. Rather, the issue now was where the two would collaborate.
“That would be difficult, Daran.” He stood not two feet from her, speaking directly and honestly. “As it is—” a raised brow glittered beneath the sun which, in turn, sparkled off the water “—my office has had one hell of a time squeezing some basic information out of you.” The gently accusatory glance he sent her hit its mark; suddenly she felt guilty at having ignored so blatantly the requests of one Stanley Morrow.
“I apologize for that,” she offered softly, hoping to suggest that she would be more helpful in the future. But Drew’s mind had not strayed far from the track. Now his words grew more urgent.
“Summer will be here soon. The bulk of the hearings will be held during that time. Surely you could spare some time—if you were truly interested in the cause.”
His implication was obvious, as was the inevitability of her protest. “Of course I’m interested!” she bit back. “You know that! If it hadn’t been for my interest, I would never have put myself in the position of having to deal with the political establishment in
any
form.” The flashing of gold in her eyes gave added impetus to the thought that possessed her. It was the same cynicism back to haunt her again.
“Then come to Washington!” he urged her once more, deliberately bypassing that note of bitterness to move onward.
“I can’t…”
Instinctively he felt that there was a very personal reason behind her refusal. He was also acutely aware of the hint of fear that hovered in her vision. Another tack entirely seemed in order.
“It’s your responsibility, Daran. You’ve been very vocal for the past few weeks. Here’s your chance to put your money where your mouth is, so to speak. Or is it all a bluff—an ego-driven bluff?”
“No!” Furious now, she snapped back at him with every ounce of her determination. “It’s no bluff. Your bill is diluted. It needs … something…”
His own response, coming in a low, rich croon, was no less insistent. “It needs
you
. If you want to change things, you’d better get off that pretty little butt of yours and
do it
. Either that, or keep your mouth shut.”
As it happened, she did both. Turning in a huff, she stomped her way back to the cabin for a brief farewell to the governor, then, still without a word to Drew, ensconced herself in his car for the drive back to her house. The occasional speculative glances he sent her way were never seen, so blinded was she with her own plight. She even missed the smugness of the smile that gradually found its way to his well-formed lips as she transferred to her own car at the house and preceded out the driveway and onto the main road. It was only when she looked behind through her rearview mirror and found that he had turned off the highway, that she realized she had never said good-bye.
CHAPTER 5
Washington was beautiful at the start of June, all green and rich and warm, very warm. Tree-lined streets struck their lush-boughed canopy over the comings and goings of the city, its cultured verdance accented with an abundance of color, from the purple lilacs and the white azaleas, to the more vibrant red roses, pink tulips, and golden daffodils. The bumblebees winged from bud to bud, much as did the governmental players scooting from place to place as the pace of the Congressional session began to pick up.
From the cool comfort of her perch, high in the air-conditioned suite that had been graciously provided for her, Daran watched it all. Her admiring eye touched on granite-corded avenues, their structures scrubbed and fresh and proud. Her mind shared that pride in this, her nation’s capital. Had she been a visitor from a foreign land, she could have been no more impressed. As a child she had been to the city several times. Yet now, through the gaze of the adult she had become, it held much more.
Recollection of the past few weeks—and how she had finally come to be here—slowly filtered back to her. She hadn’t seen Drew since the morning they had breakfasted with his father, then had quarreled themselves later. There had never been a formal acknowledgment that she would accede to his request to come to Washington. Yet, when the calls began to come in from the senator’s aides, and particularly and with regularity from John Hollings regarding the specifics of her stay, she silently acquiesced. Actually the arrangements that had been worked out were ideal. For the major parts of June and July, August if necessary, she would spend Tuesdays through Thursdays in Washington, working with Drew and his aides on formulation of the Rights of Minors Act. All other work in which she was involved—her patients, her writing, and, most importantly, the Child Advocacy Project—had been scheduled for time on Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays, when she would be in Connecticut. Somewhere in between would be sandwiched the leisure to work in her garden, to sun, to explore the state which she had never seen in summer before.
Turning, her fancy caught on the small but exquisite arrangement of cut flowers that had been delivered soon after her arrival. “Welcome to my world. A.S.C.” the note had read, very simply, very thoughtfully. Now she wondered exactly how she had come to be in his world. Originally her decision had been based on the argument he had made so potently to her that day by the shore of the lake. It was her civic responsibility. Given the opportunity and the strength of her feelings for her Child Advocacy Project and Drew’s own Rights of Minors Act, she could not have refused.
But there was more to it than that. After long hours of self-examination, Daran realized how deeply she had been affected by the discussion between father and son on that same, fateful day. The excitement was hard to forget. To be included in it as an active participant was something she could never have passed up. In the end, however, there was one major determinant in her change of mind.
Drew. Even barring deep analysis of her feelings toward the man, she found herself drawn by the charisma which drew so many others to his side. An enigma to her in many ways, he succeeded in fascinating her to the exclusion of all the notions that had preceded him. There was the same wariness of the process and its major actors, the Congress and its laws, which had possessed her since the days she had been so torn apart by Bill Longley, and there was always the possibility that the fates would, at some point, conspire to throw her into the same room as that man who was once her husband. Yet the aura of power which Drew Charles exuded, the implicit cloak of immunity which had accompanied his personal interest in her, was enough for her, for the time being at least, to ignore the other. Though she could not yet explain it herself, she found herself looking forward to working with Drew.
A resigned smile curved her lips at the thought of how well Drew had handled her. From the start he had sensed her resistance to him, his image, and his government establishment. The breakthrough had been on a personal level, allowing her glimpses—all impressive—of the man himself, before subjecting her to the senator in action. Now she was finally to see the latter—and her feelings were mixed.
The soft ring of the phone jarred her concentration. She walked the short distance to the small glass coffee table and answered the phone. The voice at the other end was the now familiar one of John Hollings, checking to make sure that the accommodations were satisfactory, forewarning her that one of the other legislative aides, a young woman named Laura Speranzo, would be up with a folder of the latest information on the Rights of Minors Act, and, finally, announcing that Drew would himself be by to see her sometime around seven.
Replacing the receiver, she glanced at her watch. Barely five o’clock—what was she to do with herself for the next two hours? And precisely what did he want to see her about? Her instructions had been explicit; she was expected at his office the following morning. What now?
There was no time to ponder as the light knock at the door of her suite diverted her attention. It was, on the button, the aide whom John had mentioned. An attractive woman of no more than twenty-six years, she introduced herself as the senator’s assistant on matters regarding the Judiciary Committee, of which he was a member, and, more specifically, the Civil Liberties Subcommittee, of which he was the chairman, and before which the Rights of Minors Act was to have its preliminary hearing. After depositing several piles of folders and miscellaneous papers on the coffee table, the young woman excused herself with a promise of seeing her in the morning, then left. For the first time, Daran speculated on those others with whom she would be working. Up until now, her role had been in a vacuum. Tomorrow would change that.
The time flew by as she slowly plodded through the material that the aide had delivered. There was background research on attempts at such a bill and its failure in the past. There were analyses as to the causes of those failures, then state-by-state analyses of the positions of the various senators on the bill as proposed by Drew. There were memoranda and amendments, pros and cons on each issue touched on in the bill, included among which was the detailed paper she had submitted shortly after she had seen Drew that last time. Even that had been exciting to her, far from the drudgery she might have imagined. For not only did she have the opportunity to state her own views, but then there was the chance to rebut them herself. It had been an informative exercise, raising more than one question in her mind concerning those positions which she had, hitherto, postulated.
The immersion in these printed materials served to take her mind from the impending meeting with Drew. For, despite the reasons she had previously given herself for finally agreeing to come to Washington, there was one which she had steadfastly chosen to ignore. Now, however, such treatment was impossible. An anticipatory tingle ran down her spine as a sound in the hall passed her door, then moved on.
Drew Charles was a phenomenally attractive man. Like it or not, he excited her physically, as he did in those other ways she had already acknowledged. He made her feel like a woman, something she had fought against for the past five years but which now a distinct part of her craved. But Washington was full of attractive and available women. Hadn’t the young woman who had stopped by earlier been a prime example? Laura Speranzo was a legislative aide of Drew’s; did he see her off-hours as well? Brushing aside the thought as both irrelevant and inappropriate, she looked at her watch. Seven-thirty, already! Her own absorption had failed to note his tardiness.
In a moment’s return to the past, tardiness seemed the norm. Bill had kept her waiting, time and again, when some other political appointment had been more important than the time and patience of the wife who waited at home. Bitterness surged through her in hindsight, some of it lingering to tinge the fresh outlook of the present. When a strong pair of knuckles finally hit the door at a quarter past eight, her mood was taut. Geared for a fight, unjustifiable as it would have been, she opened the door. Amazement replaced her testiness in the instant. Only later would she realize that he had pulled it on her again, changing the subject, as it were, when she was prepared to let him have a piece of her mind. Now she stood mute as her widened amber eyes took in the vision before her.
Where she had expected the stately and composed senator from Connecticut, neat, cool, and handsome, she found a very handsome man who looked as if he had just lost a race with time. Tie loosened, top button of his shirt undone, hair casually askew, jacket thrown carelessly over his arm, his panting and sweating suggested some major exertion in transit to her door. And his eyes—his eyes were full of a fury that held her speechless. It was in this state that she watched him stalk into the room, head directly for the bar at its far side, and fix himself a light drink.
“Damn it! We were supposed to adjourn at six; I had Wright’s word on that.
Two more hours
they ran, just so Higgins and Axel rod could trade barbs. If it hadn’t been for my own interest in that fool trade reinvestment program, I would have gotten up and left, like so many of my colleagues did. If it weren’t for the tobacco industry at home…” His voice trailed off as he looked directly at Daran, whose back was flush against the closed door of the suite. “I’m sorry, Daran. I had no intention of keeping you waiting.” Obviously he had run most of the way from the Senate floor to her hotel, a distance of quite a few city blocks.
“Don’t worry about it.” She smiled softly, all irritation she had felt moments earlier spending itself. “I’ve had plenty to keep me busy.” A slender hand gestured toward the papers strewn on the table. “One of your aides dropped them off a little while ago.” Her subconscious banter had been intended to provide him those few extra moments to relax. He took even longer, staring at her as the ice in his tumbler melted beneath the warmth of the large hand that surrounded it. Finally he smiled widely, a sign of sure recovery.
“How have you been?” The rich melody of his voice caressed her as did the eyes that now skimmed the lightweight cotton wraparound dress she wore, the lengths of her tanned legs, the slim-strapped high-heeled open-toed sandals, returning at long last to her face, flushed now, as though she had run the distance herself.
“I’m fine.” The softness of her voice belied the inexplicable excitement she felt.