Kris Longknife: Defender (7 page)

They
arrived to discover they had the place to themselves. The owner who also acted as the receptionist gave them just a bit of an eye but then offered them their choice of seating.

They chose a quiet corner. They sat with their backs to the rest of the dining room and enjoyed a lovely view of the ocean. The moon was already coming up, huge and orange in the sea air.

While they savored the view, two more couples arrived. The guys were in shorts and shirts like Jack. The women were in muumuus. All showed wet from having sat on the sand. Kris and Jack shared smiles with each other, but the two couples settled in different quiet corners, so they didn’t get to smile at them.

The waitress finally arrived; she wore a dress flowered like Kris’s muumuu, but cut tight into a sheath to show off her curves. She offered them a choice of fish or fish. She named both types, but they meant nothing to Kris. For a moment, the three stared at each other. Then Jack led off.

“Is one of them white fish and the other dark fish?”

The waitress stared blankly and renamed the fish. Apparently, if you were from here, you knew your fish.

“Okay, this is what we’ll do,” Jack said. “I will take one of them. Please serve the lady the other.” That satisfied the waitress, and she bounced off.

“Enjoying the view,” Kris whispered.

“I’m wondering why they didn’t provide one of those for your closet.”

Kris started to say something about how she had nothing to fill out the top but swallowed it. Jack said so very many nice things about her. Why should she repeat all her negatives? Especially since he wouldn’t agree with her.
The big liar.

She changed the subject. “So what are we going to do if I hate the fish I get?”

“You will switch with me.”

“And if you hate the fish I got?”

“I will be a gentleman and eat it so my lady can enjoy herself.”

Kris considered that. Jack had an all-encompassing definition of chivalry. “And if I don’t like either of them?”

“Don’t be such a pessimist. We’re surrounded by a lovely view. Notice how the moon is causing the waves to glow. We’re not on duty. No one’s trying to kill us. Have faith. We’ll love both fish and end up feeding tidbits to each other from our plates.”

Kris considered that. “Okay. You carrying?”

Jack scowled. “Yes. You?”

“Yes,” Kris answered. “But I left the spider-silk bodysuit off when I put on the muumuu.”

“So you and I are half on vacation.”

“Well, that’s more than I’ve been since college. Even there, most of my summer vacations were spent covering campaign gigs for Father.”

“You enjoy them?”

“Usually.”

“I loved my work at summer camps. I badly needed the money to help me through the school year. I enjoyed mountains, the hiking and fishing and the kids. Most of them.”

“Let me guess, the rich, spoiled brats weren’t in the ‘most of them.’”

“Sadly yes, but let’s not go there.”

“Gladly. They were a pain in my butt, too. Trust me, the Great Billy Longknife, Man of the People, would not have one of his kids misbehaving in public or otherwise.”

“But the other rich kids . . . ?” Jack left the question hanging.

Kris refused to rise to the bait. “So, you earned money summers to pay for college. What kind of college scholarship did you have? Let me guess. You’re big. It could have been football.”

Jack silently shook his head.

“You’re tall and fast. Basketball?”

This time Jack grinned as he shook his head.

“Soccer? Father played soccer in college.”

Again Jack shook his head, now grinning from ear to ear.

“Baseball? Boxing? Wrestling? Swimming?”

“I would have accepted a swimming scholarship if I’d been offered one.”

“Okay, you win. I give up. After five years of you constantly at my elbow, telling me when and where I can pee, I don’t know what sports scholarship you had in college.”

“I do not tell you when you can go pee,” Jack said.

“Scholarship? Scholarship? What scholarship?”

“Golfing,” Jack said.

“Golfing!”

The conversation had to be put on hold. The owner dropped by their table to apologize for the delay in their meal. “I know we rang the dinner bell, and I know we promised you that you could eat from six on, but our guests are usually much later. Our chef only does two specials a night and we don’t want them to be cold for our later guests, so, I’m afraid you are having to wait much longer than anyone would expect. Could I offer you some drinks on the house?”

Jack raised an eyebrow to Kris.

She took a deep breath. “As Granny Rita told you, we are unfamiliar with much of what you have to offer. I do not drink alcoholic beverages. Do you have tea or something like it?”

“We have several teas. Would you like yours cold or hot?”

“Cold,” Kris said.

“Cold tea for me, too,” Jack said.

The owner left to apologize to the other tables. He did touch base with the waitress, and two tall, cold teas arrived.

“Jack, you don’t have to take this gentleman stuff to the max. I don’t mind if you have a beer.”

“I am having the most important conversation of my life with the woman I most love in the galaxy. I’m drinking tea, so I’ll have my wits about me.”

“You’ll need them,” Kris said. “Golf. You said you played golf in college. There can’t be a lot of money in golf scholarships.”

“No, there isn’t. But by my junior year, I was head of my class in criminology, and there was a bit of scholarship money for that, thanks to your father. Two small scholarships, odd jobs, I pieced it all together.”

“You still haven’t said why you chose golf,” Kris insisted.

“How many men do you know with a football knee, or tennis elbow, which, I must say, can come from basketball or even swimming, not to mention baseball injuries? Besides, baseball was out of the question. I wanted to be a cop. Not a donut-gobbling cop but one of the best. Golf gave me a good eye. By my junior year, I was shooting match level with both pistol and rifle. Also, you do a lot of walking that is good for you but won’t break anything.”

Kris began to giggle. She had a hard time believing it, but apparently, Longknifes could giggle. The giggle caught hold, and she found she couldn’t stop.

“What’s so funny?” Jack asked. When the giggling showed no chance of letting up and allowing Kris to answer his question, he leaned back, not at all patiently.

Kris tried to stop and couldn’t. “I’m trying,” she got out through the giggles. “Really, I’m trying to stop.”

Maybe Jack’s glare got a bit more patient.

Kris couldn’t remember ever having the giggles before in her life. If you’d asked her yesterday, she would have sworn she couldn’t giggle. She tried taking a drink of water, thinking to drown her giggles.

Bad idea. The water went down the wrong way, and she traded giggling for choking.

“Honey, are you okay?” Now Jack showed real concern.

Kris stuffed her cloth napkin into her mouth. Now she had no air to giggle or cough.

The owner showed up at the table. “Is there anything wrong?”

Jack looked helpless for the first time since Kris met him.

Kris managed to gasp in a breath. She forced herself to hold it while shaking her head and waving the owner off.

Cautiously, she took a second, then a third breath.

“Honey, it was delightful to hear you laughing like that,” Jack said, “but please don’t do that again.”

“Trust me, I won’t.”

For a long minute, Kris and Jack sat silently, her watching the eternal sea, now glowing with its own light. Him watching her, as she couldn’t help but notice out of the corner of her eye.

“I really scared you?” she finally said.

“Bad as that damn crash, or that bomb. Imagine all the paperwork I’d have to fill out. And the ribbing I’d take. My primary drowned herself on a water glass.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

“Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. That’s the way we handle being pissing scared, remember? We crack jokes.”

“Let’s come up with another approach for our courtship.”

“Courtship? Honestly?”

“Honestly, Jack. I love you. I don’t know if I love you as much as you love me, but I sure don’t want to get into a contest on the matter.”

“Good idea. I don’t think all the boffins on the
Wasp
could come up with a meter to measure love.”

“Not even Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum?”

“Now who’s cracking jokes?” Jack said.

“Good point. Okay, let’s see if I can explain to you what I found so funny.”

“You can stop anytime you feel the giggles coming on.”

“Oh, I will,” Kris said, and took in a large breath. “You chose golf, even though there was less money in it because it was the safest route to where you wanted to go.”

“Yes.”

“You were in training to be my security chief even before you entered college.”

Jack looked at Kris in utter silence. Then snorted. “By God, you’re right.”

“You bet I am. You’ve been training yourself to look for and follow the safest path since when you were a teenager. I wonder why?”

Jack took a while to try an answer to that.

“My dad was a construction worker,” he finally said. “An accident-prone construction worker. Your dad’s regulations protect people that get hurt on the job, but after you’ve been on workers comp a couple of times, even the union isn’t so interested in referring you to a job. He still got work, but little stuff, short stuff, stuff that no one could get hurt on. Pay sucked.”

“I’m sorry,” Kris said. She licked a finger and made a mark in the air. “Put that down as one question I should not have asked.”

“You had no way of knowing, honey. Your life is an open book, complete with pictures. Most of us live our lives in quiet desperation.”

“And my desperation gets me all over the news.”

“You’re talking shop.”

“Change the topic to something else,” Kris suggested.

“Well, the later diners are arriving. Turn around. You’ll get quite a view.”

The scene could have qualified for a review or floor show in many places. The female half of the couples were arriving in shorts, the shortest shorts in Kris’s closet. The tank tops hardly qualified for the name. They stopped well short of what they were supposed to cover. The men had on the shortest shorts, too, and many hadn’t bothered with a shirt.

“I guess now we know what ‘Total Nudity Not Allowed’ means,” Kris said, turning back to her view of the ocean.

“Twelve guesses why they’re late, and the first eleven don’t count,” Jack said.

“I can’t figure out whether I feel scandalized or regret that we aren’t late with them. Not that I’d step out of our cabin in that outfit.”

“You mean it?” Jack asked.

“I really am enjoying talking to you, Jack. Getting to know you.”

“Me too.”

Dinner arrived. They were served first, at least. The fish was . . . interesting. Different from anything Kris had ever tasted. Hers had a nutty texture although whether that was from the sauce or the fish, she wasn’t sure. After her first taste, she offered Jack one. Kris had seen couples feeding each other from their plates and often wished she had someone she could do it with.

Now she did. Her best guess was she ate half of Jack’s and he ate half of hers. The fish came with a wild rice that could have been from Wardhaven and a mix of sautéed vegetables, half of which were familiar and half strange.

The medley was delicious.

They were about done. They might have been done if they hadn’t been talking so much when, an hour after the dinner bell rang, the second installment of the floor show arrived.

Jack announced it by saying “Don’t look.”

So, of course, Kris did. Only then did Jack turn in his seat and clearly enjoy the show.

Here was the string-bikini brigade. Most of the young women hadn’t even bothered with the top. The guys were also in string things. Most of them covered the essentials, but a few had a critical portion of their anatomy peeking out around the edge.

“And my Granny Rita sent me to this . . .”

“Den of delights,” Jack finished.

Kris turned back to her not-quite-finished dinner. Jack timed his turn perfectly with hers.

“Now we know what ‘Total Nudity Not Allowed’ means,” Jack said.

“I hope.”

“Would you like dessert?” the waitress asked. “We have a chocolate delight that you can not pass up, and for you, it is straight from the oven.”

“Kris?” Jack asked, tossing the call in her lap.

“What do you want to bet me that our new dinner guests had dessert before dinner?” Kris asked Jack. He chuckled but said nothing. “I’m gonna have dessert with my dinner.”

“Two of them,” Jack said.

Kris risked another glance over her shoulder. She’d never seen that many bare breasts since the gym shower in high school. No, there there’d been other girls like her who were still waiting for something to show up on their chests. Here there wasn’t a flat chest in the dinning room. Yes, some were nice and small, but not flat. Some of the guys had more top hamper than Kris.

She turned back to Jack. “How come you’re not married? I don’t mean to one of those hussies, as Mother would call them, but to a good girl. A girl like a good gentleman deserves?”

Kris paused. Then realized the directness of her question might be going someplace Jack didn’t want to. “Excuse me. That’s too forward. You don’t have to answer if I’m out of line.”

Jack’s face had become a mask. He turned his eyes to the ocean and quite a few waves came in and went out before he said anything. “Yes, Kris, you are forward, but that’s something I like about you. You don’t beat around the bush. You’re more likely to take a chain saw to it.”

“Or C-16,” Kris added.

“There have been two girls in my life. One in high school and the other in college. Once I became a cop, and then was invited into the Secret Service, there hasn’t been a lot of time for a girl, except for you. And you are, or were, or whatever, off-limits.”

Kris folded her hands on the table and waited. She knew Jack was letting her into something sacred. However much time he needed, he would not find her impatient.