Jess was thinking about that when she realized he was looking at her intently.
“Back there in the library, you looked at my phone records, didn’t you?”
Gulp.
But there was nothing to do but fess up. “Yes.”
“You know, you have some real trust issues.”
That was so unfair, Jess could only blink at him in disbelief.
“I have trust issues? Well, gee, I wonder why. Let’s see: Someone kills the First Lady in a car crash, which was also meant to kill me; then when they realized I survived, I was attacked in my hospital room; I try to tell people, including you, what ’s going on; you don’t believe me, nobody believes me. I try to tell my boss, and he tries to kill me. I start trusting you, sort of, enough to let you take me to your house, where you promise I’ll be safe, and while I’m there I hear the voice of the person who tried to kill me in the hospital. The person you called in, mind you. Your friend and fellow Secret Service agent. Not being stupid, I run, and you chase me down. I trust you again, sort of, until you start talking to another of your friends about bringing me in, which, we both know, means to be killed. I jump out, and your car blows up. Then I start trusting you again, sort of, because I really don’t have a choice, and I find out, not because you told me but because I checked your phone records, that you have a prior relationship with my boss, the one who tried to kill me. You have an even stronger relationship with the President and his associates, one or several of whom are almost certainly behind the ongoing efforts to try to kill me.” She took a deep breath and glared at him. “So if I have trust issues, is it any wonder why?”
Their eyes met. Then he smiled at her.
“Okay, point taken.”
“
Point taken?
Is that all you can say?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Something else.”
“You’re beautiful?”
Her eyes narrowed at him. That was the second time he had called her beautiful, and it made her feel as vulnerable this time as it had the first.
“Wrong answer.” She stood up abruptly, gathering the remains of her meal and stalking away to dump them in the trash can.
“Jess. I’m teasing.” He shoved back from the table, picked up his garbage, deposited it in the trash, and followed her into the living room, where she was in the process of sinking down on the couch. “Although you are. Beautiful, I mean. Actually, I think I’m developing kind of a thing here for petite girls with big greenish eyes and glasses.”
He stopped walking, leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb, crossed his arms over his chest, and smiled at her. Smiled
dazzlingly
at her.
The look she sent him could have fried an egg in midair.
“If you’re trying to distract me from everything you
didn’t
tell me, you might as well give up,” she said. She was suddenly supremely conscious of her disheveled state, her unstyled hair, her bruised, stitched and makeup-less face, her ill-fitting, ill-matched, sexless clothes, her damned glasses. The problem was that she did not feel beautiful, never had, probably never would, and that, she discovered, was what was really ticking her off. “So you can just cut out the crap, pretty boy, because it isn’t working.”
His eyes widened. His smile widened. He straightened away from the doorjamb to grin at her.
“‘Pretty boy’?” Instead of being stung, as she had intended, he was, she was incensed to see, starting to chuckle. “
‘Pretty boy’?”
“Oh, go away.” She barely managed to control the impulse to chuck something at him. With studied indifference, she turned her attention to the coffee table in front of the couch, where today’s paper lay folded and ready for reading.
“Fine,” he said. She could feel him studying her, but she didn’t look up. She picked up the paper and snapped it open, perusing the headlines, ostentatiously ignoring him. “I didn’t get any sleep last night, and I’m starting to feel a little groggy. I’m going to go take a shower and see if that doesn’t perk me up.”
“Fine.”
“Keep the TV on low if you want to watch it. And don’t answer the door. And stay off the damned computer. And the phone.”
With that, he left her alone. A moment later Jess heard the click of the bathroom door closing. She thumbed through the paper—the front section was almost entirely devoted to coverage of the First Lady, and the luminaries who came in for the funeral, the size of the crowds, and the reactions of ordinary citizens, none of which she could bring herself to read—and listened to the muffled rush of the shower. Her skin tingled in atavistic response. She really, really wanted a shower. A long, steaming hot shower . . .
With Mark in it.
Do not go there,
she chastised herself fiercely.
Scowling, she was scanning the pages for some mention of what had happened to Davenport or Marian—nothing, and no obituaries yet, either, and it would be too soon to even look for anything about Marty Solomon—when she heard the shower shut off. A couple of minutes passed before the bathroom door opened. That sound was followed by the soft pat of bare feet on carpet. Mark was heading for the bedroom. Probably wearing nothing but a towel . . .
She gritted her teeth, staring doggedly at the newsprint in front of her. And never mind that she was no longer taking in a word.
“You want to take a shower, it ’s all yours,” he called.
She heard more footsteps followed by a rustle of plastic—the bag their clothes were in, she was guessing—followed a moment later by a long creak. Then nothing.
Finally, Jess couldn’t stand it anymore. Folding the paper, she got up and went to check on him.
He was in bed, sprawled on his stomach with a white down comforter covering him to the waist. Thanks to the heavy drapes, the room was gloomy-dark, but she could see enough of him to know that his broad, bare shoulders and wide, muscular back and brawny arms were—the only word that came to mind was
fine.
She was already mentally backing out when a snore told her that he was sound asleep.
It was the only bed in the place. Right now, she was tired but not particularly sleepy, certainly not ready for bed. But later, sometime tonight, she had the option of crawling into that supremely comfortable-looking bed with him or grabbing a pillow, scrounging up some kind of cover, and sacking out on the couch.
Couch,
Jess told herself firmly. The other choice was so dumb it bordered on self-destructive.
While Mark slept she took a shower, washed her hair and blew it dry, brushed her teeth, smoothed on ChapStick and a little face cream—thank God for the supplies in her purse—and popped a single pain pill. Mark’s recounting of the First Lady’s troubles made her wary of taking more than she absolutely had to. But the ones she had swallowed earlier were wearing off, and her legs and back were really starting to ache. So she compromised on one and hoped for the best.
By ten o’clock Mark still hadn’t awakened. His snores, ragged but blissful-sounding, continually reminded her that he was sacked out one thin wall away. She was on the couch, dressed for sleeping in one of Mark’s T-shirts, so big on her it hit her at mid-thigh, and a pair of the plain white cotton panties. Having stolen a pillow from the bed and found a quilt folded on the bedroom closet shelf, she had made herself as comfortable as possible.
To keep herself from dwelling on the possibility that the black-ops death squad had discovered their hideaway and was even now creeping up on it with guns drawn, she turned the TV on. Low. So low, in fact, that she had to strain to hear the
CSI
episode that wasn’t really all that interesting anyway. Once she heard footsteps in the hall outside and her heart went haywire and she almost ran for Mark, but whoever it was went into another apartment, and after that silence reigned. Too nervous to turn on a lamp, Jess tried to read selected sections of the paper by the faint light of the TV. The comics, Ann Landers, and sports all provided a welcome distraction from the fear that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in her gut.
She was even starting to get sleepy until she turned a page and found a picture of herself in the paper. Actually, two. One as a little girl. Soaking wet, wrapped in a blanket, and staring big-eyed at the camera. The other as she was now. With contacts, not glasses, taken from her driver’s license.
Death Car Survivor Had Previous Brush with Death,
the headline read.
27
J
ess didn’t have to read the accompanying story to know what it said. Even as the paper fell from her fingers, she felt impossibly familiar waves of grief and pain. It had been so long now—she never thought of it anymore. Never, except maybe in the most secret depths of her deepest dreams. It was a tragedy of her past, long over. Long put behind her.
It could not make her feel this way anymore.
Standing up, she started to head for the bathroom and stubbed her toe hard on the coffee table.
“Ow! Shit! Damn it!” Clutching her injured foot, she hopped a couple of times, then sank back down on the couch, displacing more of the paper, which fluttered to the floor. Cradling her foot in her lap, rocking back and forth as she cursed under her breath now, she glanced down and saw the picture of herself looking up at her. Kicking at it with her uninjured foot, she closed her eyes.
She did not need this on top of everything else.
“Hey. I heard you yell. You all right?” Mark’s voice made her jump. Her eyes flew open, her head jerked around, and she saw him standing there in the doorway, frowning at her, wearing only his boxers, with his gun in his hand. It was an indication of her state of mind that her gaze slid over him exactly once, and she didn’t even flinch from the gun.
“Fine.”
“Are you crying?”
To her horror, Jess realized she was: She could feel the warm, wet slide of tears trickling down her cheeks.
Turning her head away, she swiped at her cheeks with both hands. “No.”
“What the hell?” Padding toward her, he put the gun down on the table at her elbow, then stopped in front of her. By dint of much blinking and sheer force of will, she got the tears under control. With her peripheral vision, she saw a very masculine-looking bare foot and a long, powerful-looking leg. A section of muscular stomach. A sliver of wide chest. A buff arm. “Did something happen?”
She wasn’t quite ready to look at him again yet. “I stubbed my toe, okay?”
“Hard enough to make you cry? Let me see.”
“It ’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”
She heard him sigh. Then he sank down beside her on the couch. Feeling the brush of warm, bare male flesh and realizing she couldn’t order him to scoot over because of the pillow and blanket now piled on the rest of the couch, she looked at him with a forbidding frown. A well-muscled naked shoulder and a sculpted chest filled her vision as he reached for her foot, the one that rested in her lap. His hand slid around her instep, holding her foot still, his fingers long and strong. He leaned closer, peering at her toes.
“No blood. Can you move them?”
She jerked her foot from his grasp, put it on the carpet, and shot him a “back off ” look. “I told you. It ’s fine.”
But he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking down.
“Is that you?”
She already knew what he was reaching for even as he bent forward. The light from the TV played over the rippling muscles of his bare back, and she watched it as if mesmerized, trying her best to hold off the moment she knew was coming. The rustle of the paper being picked up made her grit her teeth and look away. She realized in that split second that he was going to read the article and they were going to talk about it, nothing she could do to stop it at all, and she needed a moment to steel herself.
“It’s too dark in here for me to read anything but the headline,” he said a moment later, and Jess felt a tiny frisson of relief until he continued, “so we can do one of two things: You can tell me what it says, or I can turn on a light and read it for myself.”
The idea of turning on a light, a light that would certainly be visible around the edges of the drapes and through the kitchen blinds and under the door, a light that could possibly lead to the killers that were certainly still hunting them finding them, made her shiver.
He was still holding the paper with the two photos topmost. She couldn’t look at them.
“My father took my sister and me to the beach when we were little.” Since there was clearly no help for it, she gave him the bare bones, her tone expressionless. “We got caught up in an undertow. He came out to try to save us. Courtney—my sister’s name was Courtney—and my father drowned. I managed to make it back to shore.”
For a moment her voice just seemed to hang in the air while the memories—the water closing over her head, her sister’s tiny hands dragging at hers, the punishing waves forcing them apart—hit her.
“Jesus. I’m sorry, baby.” Another rattle as he set the paper down on the coffee table. Then his arm came around her, bringing with it the smell of soap and warm male flesh. Jess felt the solid heaviness of it circling her shoulders, the comforting grip of his hand on her arm, the squeeze of a hug, and tensed. Until she got the memories corralled again, sympathy was the last thing she needed. She had to stay tough, stay strong, force them back. “I remember now. They ran all kinds of stories about you on TV this past week, and one of them said something about that. To tell you the truth, it kind of tore my heart out.”
“It was on . . . TV?” Jess could hardly breathe at the thought of the whole world watching something so personal. He was looking at her. She could feel his gaze on her face, but she couldn’t look back at him. She could only stare straight ahead, braced against the pain she knew would come if she didn’t armor herself against it.
“Yeah.”
Suddenly Jess remembered, while she was in the hospital, Grace saying something about the press wanting to talk to her because she was “the survivor.” With an emphasis, like it had a special significance. And her mother saying, “Grace, don’t worry your sister.” This was what they must have been talking about. Grace, like Sarah and Maddie, the children of Judy’s second husband, hadn’t even been born at the time of the accident, so it wasn’t much more than a curiosity to her, but their mother knew how deeply the tragedy was seared into Jess’s soul.