Rebecca York (8 page)

She chopped off that thought as the hostess came hurrying toward her.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm meeting someone here." Looking around, she spotted Jordan Walker sitting at a corner table sipping from a tall glass. He looked preoccupied.

But he glanced up as though he knew she'd entered the door. Well, why not? He was waiting for her, wasn't he?

Crossing the handmade tile foyer, she walked up a step into the partitioned dining area.

The intensity of his stare made her heart start to pound—the way it had in her dream.

No. Not the damn dream again.

She didn't need fantasies from her subconscious to make her nervous. The piercing look in the man's dark eyes was quite enough. Still, she'd taken his invitation as a challenge—that she could have a meal with him without experiencing any of the feelings she'd found both frightening and exhilarating.

'Thank you for coming," he said as she pulled out the chair opposite him. He was coatless, and she supposed his blue Oxford cloth shirt was meant to indicate that the meeting was casual. But the tight lines of his face told her otherwise.

She'd taken the Red Line straight from work, then walked from Dupont Circle. Now she felt overdressed in her navy suit and burgundy silk blouse. But she kept the jacket on as though it could serve as a barrier between them.

"What did you want to talk about?" she said.

"Let's order first."

Letting him set the pace of the meeting, Lindsay scanned the menu. Before she could make a selection, the waitress asked if she wanted a drink.

She glanced at Jordan's tall glass of iced tea, then ordered the same before going back to the menu. Any other time the Northern Italian specialties would have tempted her appetite. This evening she wasn't sure she could choke down more than a bowl of soup.

"The Italian bread soup is good," Walker said.

Her head jerked up,

"What's wrong?" He looked at her, then around the almost empty room.

"Nothing's wrong."

"Something."

"I was thinking about soup—just as you mentioned it."

"Maybe because we were both looking at the appetizers."

She nodded, then turned back to the selections as the waitress set down her drink.

At the corner of her vision she could see her dinner partner's fingers curved over the edge of the menu he held. At the party he'd touched her with that hand. The pressure of his skin against hers had created sensations within her that she'd never experienced before. What if she reached out and laid her fingers against his flesh? Would it happen again? Or had her memory blown the incident completely out of proportion?

When the waiter came over, she ordered an appetizer portion of homemade mushroom ravioli and a tomato-and-mozzarella salad.

"That's all you're having?" Walker asked.

"I'm not very hungry."

He ordered the bread soup and the mixed Italian grill.

"What business do you think we need to talk about?" she asked when they were alone again.

He lowered his voice and leaned forward across the table. "Bridgewater heads the Armed Services Committee."

"Yes."

"I was wondering if he's gotten any recent updates from Fort Detrick," he said in an even lower tone.

"You mean where they store the chemical and biological warfare agents?" she asked in a similar voice, wanting to make certain they were both on the same page.

"Not just store. Test."

"Okay."

"You'd know about it if Bridgewater had received a report on something new they were doing? Or an old project that's back on line. Maybe moved to another facility."

The recent conversation with Sid Becker leaped into her mind. He'd been asking about something similar.

"Like where?" she hazarded.

He shrugged. "I'm trying to check out a tip from a confidential source. I was hoping you could help."

She felt like they were sitting across a poker table, not a dining table. He was doing the same thing she'd done with Bridgewater—asking a question, but asking cautiously. And she was being just as circumspect.

"You want me to do your dirty work for you?"

"Unfortunately, the source is dead. I tried to call him this morning. His office told me that he'd died of heart failure. Which is odd, considering that he was a relatively young man."

The information made her scalp tingle. Before she could ask for more details, the waiter appeared with the salad and the soup.

She sat staring at the fat white slabs of mozzarella lying on top of tomato rounds, the red-and-white composition arranged on green romaine leaves suddenly astonishingly unappealing.

Walker hadn't touched his soup. He was looking down at the table—no, looking at her hand where it rested next to her plate. Lord, had he been thinking about touching her— the way she had?

"What's your motivation for telling me any of that?" she whispered.

"When I called my source this morning, I was transferred somewhere else. I'm pretty sure there's a trace on his phone."

"Are you trying to scare me?"

"No."

Was that a lie? Unbidden, the thought popped into her mind that there was a way to find out. Before she could stop herself, she reached across the table and laid her fingers over his, knowing in that moment that this was why she had really agreed to meet him.

She had come back for more of what had passed between them—fearing she would never get it and fearing at the same time that she would.

She felt the warmth of his skin. But that simple sensation was buried below the swirl of awareness that enveloped her.

The breath froze in her lungs as she grappled with confusion, elation, terror, and a sexual pull like nothing she had ever imagined in her life.

It was more than she had bargained for. Although she had initiated the contact, she sought to jerk away.

He was too fast for her—and too determined. His hand turned upward, closing around hers in a grip that was firm and possessive.

She saw his lips move. Maybe he mouthed the word "Don't."

She wasn't sure whether he had really given voice to the protest or even if she was capable of hearing over the ringing in her ears.

At the party the experience had been fleeting. And the surprise had added to the electric jolt of the connection. This time, as he forced her to prolong the physical link between them, the sensations fluttered, peaked, settled down to a buzzing in her body and in her brain that was as much physical as mental.

The sexual arousal was a steady background hum, transmitting itself along her nerve endings. Yet it was only part of the mix. Because even more overwhelming than the sexual component was the knowledge that it was happening to him as well.

She knew it, not just from the way his pupils had dilated. She knew it from the disjointed thoughts and emotions pouring off him like rain streaming down a windowpane.

An image flashed in her thoughts. She saw him dragging her out of her chair, pulling her into his arms, molding the length of his body to hers, so that she could feel the pressure of his erection against her.

The vivid picture was from his mind. A glimpse into the man's most private sexual thoughts. It was what he wanted to do. Here. Now. Yet the two of them remained where they were, sitting at the restaurant table—their hands the only point of contact.

Granite Wall. Along with the sexual image, a strange name leaped into her mind, burned itself into her brain.

She had never heard of it before. But she knew it was important.

The contact snapped, and she realized Walker had lifted his hand from hers. But this time she didn't turn and run. This time they sat breathing hard, staring at each other across three feet of white tablecloth.

"What's wrong with Bridgewater?" he said, his voice gravelly.

"What do you mean, what's wrong with Bridgewater?" she demanded, feeling her skin go cold.

"He was acting strange when he came back from Florida. You're worried about it."

"How do you know that?"

"You know how I know."

He had spoken the truth, a truth she didn't want to acknowledge.

"And what about Granite Wall?" she asked, trying to hold her voice steady.

It was his turn to blanch. "You picked up that name ... from me?"

"Yes. You read it in a report, right?"

He nodded, then glanced around the restaurant. She did the same, relieved that no one was nearby. But still, they weren't alone.

JORDAN ran a hand through his dark hair. He wanted to get Lindsay out of here—where they could be alone. But he forced himself to sit quietly across the table from her.

She looked away, not meeting his eyes, and he knew she was deliberately distancing herself from what had happened between them moments ago. Whatever it was. All he knew was that touching her again had left them both dazed and shaken and vulnerable.

Under the table he clasped his hands, squeezing until the pressure was near to pain.

They were both balanced on a knife edge of tension, and he realized that he was going to lose her.

Unless he was the one who stuck his neck out.

On some deep self-protective level, he wanted to pretend that nothing extraordinary had happened. But he felt desperation rising inside him.

He simply didn't know what he would do if she walked away. That truth made him reckless enough to moisten his dry lips and say, "Have you ever thought that you were different from everybody else?"

She had been sitting hunched over, her face averted. The question made her sit up straighter and focus on him again with an unnerving intensity, almost as jarring as the experience of touching her.

He needed some sign from her. She seemed to understand, because she gave him the smallest nod.

He swallowed hard and went on. "Have you watched the men and women around you pair up, and known that you were cut off from that kind of ..." He wanted to say intimacy. But the word felt too loaded. So he settled for "sharing."

"Yes," she whispered, and he was sure she hated uttering the admission.

That one syllable and the way she spoke it gave him the guts to go on with a conversation that was so outside his experience that he was astonished at his own question.

"Have you ever felt like there was a buzz in your head? That you were being bombarded by radio signals that you couldn't quite tune in?"

The effect of his words on Lindsay was startling. Her face went from wary to shocked, to hopeful, then back to wary again.

"Are you talking about yourself?" she whispered.

"Can you identify with the description?" he pressed.

When she gave him another almost imperceptible nod, he felt a little thrill of something close to victory.

"And then you touch a stranger—and suddenly ..." He shrugged, let the sentence trail off, watching her eyes, seeing that she was following his unspoken logic. Something monumental had happened to them.

At Senator Conroy's party. And today. Well, perhaps not monumental in the grand scheme of wars and tidal waves, he corrected himself.

But in the small scheme of his life, it felt near to cataclysmic.

"Of course, you could get up and walk away from me," he added, his chest tightening painfully as he offered the suggestion. "Is that what you want to do?"

"No."

"Then let's try to figure out what the hell is happening. And why."

"If you're willing to tell me what someone named Todd Hamilton has to do with any of this."

"Jesus! You got that out of my head, too?"

It was her turn to shrug.

"Another dead man."

He heard her indrawn breath.

"We have to talk about it."

They sat staring at each other, and he knew that talking was the least of what he wanted.

He heard himself say, "Come up to my apartment after dinner."

"Why?"

"The papers you want to see are there," he answered, thinking they both knew that was only an excuse.

LINDSAY'S MOUTH WAS so dry, she could barely talk, but she managed to answer, "If I do, I take a cab and meet you there."

"So you won't feel trapped?"

"Exactly."

To defuse the tension crackling back and forth between them, she asked. 'Tell me about Jordan Walker."

"Like what?"

"Where did you grow up?"

"New London, Connecticut. My dad worked in the Gro-ton shipyards. What about you?"

"Darien."

"So we're both from the same state," he murmured, although he'd already known the answer to his question.

"Coincidence."

"I stopped believing in coincidence when I was doing one of my first stories—on income tax evasion. The wise guy at the center of the piece turned out to be connected to another story—where a woman lawyer tried to poison her husband. When that didn't work, she hired the wise guy as a hit man. He was recommended by one of her tax evasion clients."

"You mean the Martha Blaine case?"

"Yeah."

Before she could switch the subject away from herself, he asked, "How was your childhood?"

She gestured helplessly with her hand. "You want me to tell you I didn't know how to fit in? That I didn't have many friends? That I focused on schoolwork rather than social activities."

"Is that true?"

"Yes," she whispered.

"And your greatest pleasure was losing yourself in a book—pretending that you were living someone else's life—someone with warm, close relationships?"

"Are you reading my mind again?" she whispered.

"No. I'm describing myself. It seems that we're a lot alike—even if we come from different social classes."

"What? You asked where I grew up. But you already knew because you investigated me?"

"Just a Google search."

"I should have done that with you!"

"But you were trying to pretend you weren't interested."

"Yes," she admitted, then tipped her head to one side as she studied him. "I don't need to do a background check to see you're self-confident. In charge. You get people to say things to you that they wouldn't tell their mothers."

"Yeah. I taught myself to be pushy because I knew I could make a damn good in-your-face investigative reporter. If I only had the balls to do it."