Full Circle (36 page)

“I've heard that before.” She wheeled to face him then, and there were tears in her eyes too. “My mother spent seventeen years listening to bullshit like that, Drew.”

“I'm not giving you bullshit, Tan. I just need time. This is very difficult for all of us.”

“Fine.” She picked up her bag and coat from a chair. “Then call me when you've recovered from it. I think I'd enjoy you more then.” But before she reached the door, he grabbed her arm.

“Don't do this to me. Please…”

“Why not? Eileen is in town. Just give her a call. She'll keep you company tonight.” Tana smiled at him sardonically to hide the hurt. “You can sleep on the couch … together, if you like.” She yanked open the door and he looked as though he were going to cry.

“I love you, Tan.” But as she heard the words, she wanted to sit down and cry. And suddenly she turned to him and her energy seemed to drain as she looked at him.

“Don't do this to me, Drew. It's not fair. You're not free … you have no right to…” But she had opened the door to her heart just wide enough for him to slip into it again. Wordlessly, he pulled her into his arms, and kissed her hard, and she felt everything inside her melt. And when he pulled away from her, she looked at him. “That doesn't solve anything.”

“No.” He sounded calmer now. “But time will. Just give me a chance. I swear to you, you won't regret it.” And then he said the words that frightened her most. “I want to marry you one day, Tan.” She wanted to tell him to stop, to move the film back to before he had said those words, but it didn't matter anyway, the girls came running in, laughing and shouting and ready to play with him and he looked over their heads at her and whispered two words to her, “please stay.” She hesitated. She knew she should go back, and she wanted to. She didn't belong here with them. He had just spent the night with the woman he was married to, and they had had Christmas with their two girls. Where did Tana belong in all this? And yet when she looked at him, she didn't want to leave. She wanted to be part of it, to be his, to belong to him and the girls, even if he never married her. She didn't really want that anyway. She just wanted to be with him, the way they had been since they first met, and slowly she put down her bag and coat and looked at him, and he smiled at her, and her insides turned to mush, and Julie hugged her around the waist while Elizabeth grinned at her.

“Where were you going, Tan?” Elizabeth was curious, she seemed fascinated by everything that Tana did and said.

“Nowhere.” She smiled at the pretty adolescent child. “Now, what would you girls like to do?” The two girls laughed and teased and Drew chased them around the room. She had never seen him as happy as this, and later that afternoon they went to the movies, and ate buckets of popcorn, then he took them to the La Brea Tar Pits, and to Perino's for dinner that night, and when they finally came home all four of them were ready to fall into bed. Julie fell asleep in Drew's arms, and Elizabeth made it into bed before falling asleep, too, and Tana and Drew sat in front of a fire in the living room, whispering, as he gently touched the golden hair he loved.

“I'm glad you stayed, sweetheart … I didn't want you to go.…”

“I'm glad I stayed too.” She smiled at him, feeling vulnerable and young, which didn't make sense for a woman her age, at least not to her. She imagined that she should be more mature than that by now, less sensitive. But she was more sensitive to him than she had ever been to any man. “Promise it won't happen again.…” Her voice drifted off and he looked at her with a tender smile.

“Baby, I promise you.”

T
he spring Tana and Drew shared was so idyllic it was almost like a fairy tale. Drew flew up roughly three times a week, she went to L.A. every weekend. They went to parties, sailed on the Bay, met each other's friends. She even introduced him to Harry and Ave, and the two men had gotten along splendidly. And Harry gave her the okay when he took her out to celebrate the following week.

“You know, kid, I think you finally did good for yourself.” She made a face and he laughed. “I mean it. I mean, look at the guys you used to drag around. Remember Yael McBee?”

“Harry!” She threw her napkin at him in the restaurant and they both laughed. “How can you compare Drew to him? Besides, I was twenty-five years old. I'm almost thirty-one now.”

“That's no excuse. You're no smarter than you used to be.”

“The hell I'm not. You just said yourself…”

“Never mind what I said, you jerk. Now, are you going to give me some peace of mind and marry the guy?”

“No.” She laughed, and she said it too fast, and Harry, looking at her, saw something he had never seen before. He had been looking for it for years, and suddenly there it was. He saw it as clearly as he saw the big green eyes, a kind of vulnerable, sheepish look she had never worn before for anyone.

“Holy shit, it's serious, isn't it, Tan? You're going to marry him, aren't you?”

“He hasn't asked.” She sounded so demure that he roared.

“My God, you will! Wait till I tell Ave!”

“Harry, calm down.” She patted his arm. “He isn't even divorced yet.” But it didn't worry her. She knew how hard he was working on it. He told her every week about his meetings with his lawyer, his conversations with Eileen to speed things up, and he was going East to see the girls for Easter week, and hopefully she'd sign the settlement papers then, if they were drawn up in time.

“He's working on it, isn't he?” Harry looked momentarily concerned, but he had to admit, he liked the guy. It was almost impossible not to like Drew Lands. He was easygoing, intelligent, and it was easy to see he was crazy about Tan.

“Of course he is.”

“Then relax, you'll be married six months from now, and nine months after that, you'll have a baby in your arms. Count on it.” He looked thrilled and Tana sat back and laughed at him.

“Boy, do you have a wild imagination, Winslow. In the first place, he hasn't asked me to marry him yet, at least not seriously. And in the second place, he's had a vasectomy.”

“So he'll have it reversed. Big deal. I know plenty of guys who've done that.” But it made him a little nervous thinking about it.

“Is that all you think about? Getting people pregnant?”

“No,” he smiled innocently, “just my wife.”

She laughed and they finished the meal, and they both went back to their offices. She had an enormous case coming up, probably the biggest of her career. There were three murder defendants involved in the most gruesome series of murders committed in the state in recent years, and there were three defense attorneys and two prosecutors and she was in charge of the case for the D.A. There was going to be a lot of press involved and she had to really know her stuff, which was why she wasn't going East with Drew when he went to see the girls over the Easter holiday. It was probably just as well she didn't anyway. Drew would be a nervous wreck getting the papers signed, and she had the case on her mind. It made more sense to stay home and do her work than to sit around in hotel rooms waiting for him.

He came up to San Francisco to spend the weekend with her before he left, and they lay on the rug in front of the fire for hours on his last night, talking, thinking aloud, saying almost anything that came to mind, and she realized again how deeply she was falling in love with him.

“Would you ever consider marriage, Tan?” He looked pensively at her and she smiled in the firelight. She looked exquisite in the soft glow, her delicate features seeming to be carved in a pale peach marble, her eyes dancing like emeralds.

“I never have before.” She touched his lips with her fingertips and he kissed her hands and then her mouth.

“Do you think you could be happy with me, Tan?”

“Is that a proposal, sir?” He seemed to be beating around the bush and she smiled at him. “You don't have to marry me, you know, I'm happy like this.”

“You are, aren't you?” He looked at her strangely and she nodded her head.

“Aren't you?”

“Not entirely.” His hair looked even more silvery, his eyes a bright topaz blue, and she never again wanted to love any man but him. “I want more than this, Tan … I want you all the time.…”

“So do I.…” She whispered the words to him, and he took her in his arms and made love to her ever so gently in front of the fire, and afterwards he lay for a long, long time and looked at her, and then finally he spoke, his mouth nestled in her hair, his hands still stroking the body he loved so much.

“Will you marry me when I'm free?”

“Yes.” She said the word almost breathlessly. She had never said it to anyone, but she meant it now, and suddenly she understood what people felt when they promised … for better or worse … until death do us part. She never wanted to be without him again, and when she took him to the airport the next day, she was still a little overwhelmed by what she felt, and she looked at him searchingly. “Did you mean what you said last night, Drew?”

“How can you ask me something like that?” He looked horrified, and instantly crushed her against his chest as they stood in the terminal. “Of course I did.”

She grinned at him, looking more like his thirteen-year-old child than the Assistant D.A. “I guess that means we're engaged then, huh?” And suddenly he laughed, and he felt as happy as a boy as he looked at her.

“It sure does. I'll have to see what kind of ring I can find in Washington.”

“Never mind that. Just come back safe and sound.” It was going to be an endless ten days of waiting for him. And the only thing that would help was her enormous case.

He called her two and three times a day for the first few days, and told her everything he did from morning till night, but when things began to get rough with Eileen, he called once a day and she could hear how uptight he was, but they had started jury selection by then, and she was totally engrossed in that, and by the time he got back to Los Angeles, she realized that they hadn't spoken to each other in more than two days. He had stayed longer than he had expected to, but it was for a “worthy cause,” he said, and she agreed with him, and she could barely think straight anymore by then. She was too worried about the jury that was being picked, and the tack the defense was going to take, the evidence that had just turned up, the judge to whom they had been assigned. She had plenty on her mind, and one of Drew's rare litigation situations had occurred. Almost everything he did settled before it went to court, and this was a rare exception for him, and it kept him away from her for almost another week, and when they both finally met, they almost felt like strangers again. He teased her about it, asked if she had fallen in love with anyone else, and made passionate love to her all night long.

“I want you to be so bleary eyed all day in court that everyone wonders what the hell went on last night.” And he got his wish. She was half asleep and she couldn't get him out of her mind she was so hungry for him. She never seemed to get enough of him anymore, and all through the trial, she was lonely for him, but it was too important to screw up and she kept her nose to the grindstone constantly. It went on till late May, and finally, in the first week in June, the verdict came in. It went just the way she had wanted it to, and the press gave her high praise as usual. Over the years, she had earned a reputation for being rigid, tough, conservative, merciless in court, and brilliant at the cases she tried. They were nice reviews to have, and it often made Harry smile when he read about her.

“I'd never recognize the liberal I knew and loved in this, Tan.” He grinned broadly at her.

“We all have to grow up sometime, don't we? I'm thirty-one this year.”

“That's no excuse to be as tough as you are.”

“I'm not tough, Harry, I'm good.” And she was right, but he knew it too. “Those people killed nine women and a child. You can't let people get away with something like that. Our whole society will fall apart. Someone has to do what I do.”

“I'm glad it's you and not me, Tan.” He patted her hand. “I'd lie awake at night, worrying that they'd get me eventually.” He hated even saying it, and he worried about it sometimes for her, but it didn't seem to bother her at all. “By the way, how's Drew?”

“Fine. He's going to New York on business next week, and he's bringing the girls back with him.”

“When are you getting married?”

“Relax.” She smiled. “We haven't even talked about it since I started this case. In fact, I've hardly talked to him.” And when she told him about her success before it hit the press, he sounded strange.

“That's nice.”

“Well, don't get too excited. It might be bad for your heart.”

He laughed at her. “All right, all right, I'm sorry. I had something else on my mind.”

“What?”

“Nothing important.” But he was that way until he left, and he sounded worse from the East, and when he got back to Los Angeles, he didn't call her at all. She almost wondered if something was wrong, or if she should fly down to surprise him and get everything on the right track again. All they needed was a little time alone to sort things out, they'd both been working too hard, and she knew all the signs. She looked at her watch late one night, trying to decide if she should catch the last plane down, and decided to call him instead. She could always go down the next day, and they had a lot of catching up to do after her two months of grueling work. She dialed the phone number she knew by heart, heard it ring three times, and smiled when it was picked up, but not for long. A woman's voice answered it.