“Wear what you have on. You can wash it out when you come in.”
“Maybe.”
Nealy realized Button had disappeared, and she rushed through the open door into the adjoining room, then stopped as she saw Mat standing on the other side of the king-sized bed with his head buried in the T-shirt he was pulling off. Why couldn’t he keep his clothes on?
He had exactly the sort of chest that she’d always found most attractive. Broad at the shoulder, narrow at the waist. A little dark hair. Muscles that were well defined but not bulky. She was very much enjoying the sight until she realized he was watching her.
The corner of his mouth kicked up. “See anything you like?”
She searched her mind to find a plausible excuse for staring at him. “Didn’t you just put that shirt on after your shower?”
“It got greasy when I was checking out Mabel. And why do you care?”
“Because . . . we all seem to be running out of clothes.”
“You can do our laundry tomorrow.”
“Me?” She’d never done laundry in her life. “Not part of my job description. I’m the nanny. Remember?”
“Da!”
He winced, then frowned down at the baby, who had a death grip on his jeans.
“She’s too young to know what that word means,” Nealy said. “Why don’t you just pick her up? I’m sure if you showed her a little attention, she’d be content to go off and play.”
“Forget it.”
“Try playing hard to get, Button. Men don’t like it when you’re too obvious. At least that’s what I’ve heard.”
“No personal experience?”
She made a noncommittal murmur, braced herself, then leaned down to pick Button up. But the baby wanted Mat, and as Nealy rose, she lunged toward him and grabbed his shirt, throwing Nealy off balance. “Oops. Sorry.”
He caught her automatically, and his chest felt warm against her side. She’d spent so many years suppressing her sexual feelings that denial had become automatic, but this contact was a shock treatment, reminding her she was still a woman.
He didn’t move away. Instead, a slow smile caught the edges of his mouth and traveled right up into those gray eyes. “I thought you didn’t believe in being obvious.”
Was he coming on to her? No one ever came on to Cornelia Case. When she’d been in college, she’d had to ask boys out herself because they were too intimidated to approach the daughter of the Vice President. And they were definitely too intimidated by all the Secret Service hovering around to try to get her into bed. Even so, she was certain she could have managed a few sexual encounters here and there, but she hadn’t done it.
From her earliest years, she’d been raised with the constant reminder that the smallest misstep on her part would bring disgrace to her father. Eventually, her caution had become so ingrained that she lived a shadow life, suppressing her natural curiosity, her sense of adventure, her sexuality, suppressing so much that would have helped her figure out who she was. When she’d met Dennis, she’d been a virgin.
For once, the memory of Dennis didn’t bring her pain. Maybe time was finally starting to do its healing job, or maybe she was simply too distracted by the man standing before her.
The baby lunged again. Mat shifted his weight against Nealy, then looked at her oddly.
“I—I’ll take her down to the pool,” she said.
His reply was slow in coming. “You do that.”
Button howled as Nealy carried her from the room.
Nealy spent the next few hours sitting at the side of the baby pool worrying about Button getting a sunburn or drowning. Since the pool sat in the shade and the only time the baby was more than a few feet away occurred when Lucy took her in the big pool, she knew she was being foolish. Some of her fretting might be a defense to keep from thinking too much about Mat.
Maybe the freedom of not being herself was affecting her in more ways than she’d imagined. Who was this Nell Kelly person? In addition to having an active libido, she didn’t seem to care much about offending people. Nealy smiled. She liked everything about Nell except her fascination with Mat Jorik’s body.
She told herself it wasn’t unreasonable to be thinking about sex. She might be repressed, but she was still human, and Mat was so different from the men she knew. Too assertive in his dealings with women to be politically correct. All hard muscle and square jaw, broad hands and blunt-tipped fingers. She loved the way he smelled of soap, shaving cream, and skin. He was big and brawny, and she liked his teeth.
His teeth? Oh, God, she was losing her mind. With a groan, she turned her attention to helping Button pour water into Styrofoam cups without drinking it.
Lucy eventually got bored and decided to go up to the room to watch TV. Before she left, she told Nealy she was a moron for not knowing that Button needed a bottle, and she took her little sister with her.
Nealy sighed and settled back on the lounge, determined not to think about Lucy, Button, or Mat Jorik, but that only led to worrying about money. Steelworkers made good salaries, but this was proving to be an expensive trip. Could Mat handle the repairs for Mabel on top of the other trip expenses? And did she really want to spend the rest of her grand adventure in two pairs of shorts, a couple of tops, and a change of underwear?
She had to have money, and Terry Ackerman was the only person she could trust to get it for her without turning her in. She made her way to a pay phone and called him.
* * *
FBI Special Agent Antonia “Toni” DeLucca pulled out of the parking lot of the truck stop near Mc-Connellsburg, Pennsylvania, where Jimmy Briggs had stolen the Chevy Corsica. She and her partner had questioned employees and truckers, but no one had seen anything. In a few hours, they’d come back to talk to the workers on the next shift.
She gazed across the seat of the government-issued Taurus at her new partner and wondered how she’d ended up with someone named Jason. Secret Service Special Agent Jason Williams. Nobody over the age of thirty had the first name of Jason. And maybe that was what irritated her the most because Jason Williams wouldn’t see thirty for another four years, while Toni had passed it more than a decade and a half ago.
When Toni had entered the Bureau in the late seventies, she had been one of only two hundred female agents. More than twenty years later, she’d managed to survive the gender wars by being tougher and smarter than everybody she’d started out with. She’d considered it her duty to rise through the ranks, only to discover that what she loved most was working as a field agent. Three years ago she’d gone back to doing just that, and she’d never been happier.
Late last night she’d been ordered to report to the resident agency in Harrisburg, which was too small to have a field office, and at the early morning briefing, she and the other agents who’d been called in had learned of Cornelia Case’s disappearance. As concerned as she was about what had happened to the nation’s First Lady, she was excited to be part of an elite task force of agents assigned to find her. Unfortunately, she’d been given a new partner—one who wasn’t even with the Bureau. And, although she’d worked with the Service before, the agents had been seasoned veterans, not twenty-six-year-olds named Jason.
He had that scrubbed-up white bread look of a lot of Secret Service agents. Short light brown hair, symmetrical features, and what looked like a tiny zit on his chin. How could they have given her a partner who still got zits?
They’d also given her a partner who didn’t have to battle his weight or worry about wrinkles. A partner with no gray in his hair. She didn’t have to look in the rear-view mirror to know how much of it threaded her own short dark hair. Still, her olive skin was relatively unlined, and even though her shape was curvier than she’d like, she was still fit.
So far, she and the kid hadn’t said more to each other than they needed to, but now Toni decided it was time to put her new partner through his paces.
“So tell me something, kid. Whose butt did you have to kiss for
this assignment?”
“Nobody’s.”
“Yeah, tell me another one.”
He shrugged.
She was Italian, and she hated being put off with white bread shrugs. The kid sank another rung lower in her estimation. “Interesting. All you had to do was show up, and they decided to put you on an elite task force. Aren’t you the lucky one? In the Bureau, we have to work for assignments like these.”
He turned to her and smiled. “I was handed this assignment because I’m very good at what I do.”
“They gave me a real live hotshot,” she drawled. “Isn’t this my lucky day?”
He frowned, so she knew that she’d scored. Her satisfaction faded, however, as she realized the frown wasn’t a sign of irritation but deep thought.
“How bad do you want this?” he asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“How bad do you want to find Aurora?”
Aurora was the Service’s code name for Cornelia Case. The members of a president’s family always had code names that started with the same letter. Dennis Case had been Arrow.
She took her time deciding how to answer. “I wouldn’t mind having it on my record.”
“Not good enough. And not honest, either. The word is, you’re the one who’s a hotshot.”
“Is that so? What else have you heard?”
“That you’re arrogant, hard to work with, and one of the best field agents in the Bureau.”
“Snoopy little shit, aren’t you?” She decided to turn the tables on him. “I don’t like failure. And I don’t like scrubbed-up kids who think just going through the motions means they’ve done their job.”
“Then we’ve got something in common.”
“I doubt it. Your career’s so new it doesn’t matter whether you’re the one who finds Aurora.”
“It matters to me. Setting aside the fact that it’s hard to stomach the idea of losing the First Lady, I’m ambitious.”
“Yeah? How ambitious?”
“Ambitious enough to know that finding Aurora gets me noticed by the director, the Secretary, even the President.”
She gazed at his earnest, unlined face. “Lots of people are ambitious, hotshot. It’s doing the work that’s hard.”
His eyes skimmed from her graying hair to her slightly overweight body. “Oh, I don’t think I’ll have too much trouble keeping up with you.”
He’d thrown down the gauntlet, and she smiled. “Yeah? Well, we’ll see about that, little boy. We’ll see which one of us knows the most about how to find a missing First Lady.”
Both girls were cranky, so Nealy ordered room service for them and pretended she wasn’t annoyed with Mat for not returning. Lucy watched a movie, then fell asleep with Button curled beside her. Nealy showered, strapped the detestable padding around her middle, and slipped into her nightgown.
When she came out of the bathroom, she was startled to see Mat standing in the open doorway between their rooms. He was barefoot and his T-shirt hung out of the denim shorts he’d changed into earlier. His body seemed even larger silhouetted against the light, and despite the two girls sleeping on the bed, she felt as if they were very much alone.
She spoke softly, her tone light. “So you decided not to abandon us after all?”
“I want to talk to you.”
His low, harsh tone made her uneasy. “I’m tired. Let’s talk tomorrow.”
“We’re going to talk right now.” He jerked his head toward his room. She thought about refusing, but something in his expression told her it would be a waste of breath.
He shut the door behind them, and his eyes were wintry. “I don’t like being lied to.” Although he hadn’t touched her, she realized she was backed against the wall. “What do you—”
Her words got lost as he caught the hem of her nightgown and pulled it up. She tried to jerk away, but he clasped her arm.
“Stop it!”
He stared down at her, taking in the pillow tied to her waist and the lavender lace panties just below.
She struggled, pushing against his chest, but he was too strong for her. “Let me go.”
He’d seen what he wanted, and he slowly released her.
The fabric slid back down over her legs. She tried to push past him, but that big solid body was in the way.
His eyes bored through her. “You haven’t told me the truth about anything.”
He knew her pregnancy was phony, but did he know who she was? She tried to swallow her panic. “I—I told you I wasn’t endangering you or the girls. That’s all that counts.”
“Not in my book.”
“We can talk about this in the morning.”
“You’re not going anywhere.” He caught her shoulder and pushed her into the chair.
In all her life, no one had ever manhandled her, and she was so astonished she sputtered. “That was uncalled for!”
He splayed one hand on each arm of the chair, caging her. A cold finger ran down her spine as she gazed up into those hard eyes. This man had rough edges that she couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
“Play time’s over, princess. Let’s start with your real name.”
Her name? He didn’t know who she was! She gulped for air. “Don’t call me that,” she managed. “And Kelly is my real name. My maiden name.” She’d been thinking on her feet all her life, and she struggled to put a story together. “There’s no reason for you to know my married name.”
“You’re married?”
“I’m . . . divorced, but my ex-husband won’t accept it. His family is very powerful, quite wealthy. I—I need some time to . . . to—” What? Her mind went blank. She regarded him haughtily. “My personal life is none of your business.”
“You made it my business.”
He straightened so she was no longer caged, but he didn’t move away. She struggled to sound reasonable. “It’s complicated. I needed to disappear for a while, that’s all. There might be some . . . detectives chasing me, so I decided to disguise myself as a pregnant woman to throw them off.” She couldn’t let him push her around any longer, and she glared at him. “Stop looming over me. I don’t like it.”
“Good.” He didn’t move, and as she gazed at that tough, grim mouth she realized how fond she’d grown of his smile. He didn’t use it a lot, but when he did, it melted her bones.
She knew scores of military men, so she understood the value of a retaliatory strike. “You’re going to be nasty about this, aren’t you? Even though it has nothing to do with you. You physically attacked me!”
“I didn’t attack you.” He scowled, but he backed off half a step.
“Why didn’t you just ask me if I was really pregnant? And how did you know, by the way?”
“You fell against me, remember? Right after we got here when you were holding the Demon. Pregnant women’s bellies don’t feel like pillows.”
“Oh.” She remembered how strangely he’d looked at her. At the time, she’d thought he was reacting to the sexual chemistry she’d felt percolating between them, but apparently the percolation was only working one way. She rose. “Your behavior is inexcusable and boorish!”
“Boorish? You do have some vocabulary, princess. What comes next? Off with his head?” He rested the heel of one hand against the wall, about a foot from her head. “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re alone in a motel room with a man you don’t know real well.”
His words were an implied threat, but she wasn’t afraid. Mat might be stubborn and crotchety. He might not have any soft edges, and he certainly wasn’t in touch with his feminine side, but she couldn’t imagine him physically hurting her.
She regarded him levelly. “Back off. You need me a lot more than I need you.” That wasn’t true, but he didn’t know it. “Starting right now, I don’t want any more questions about my past. I’m not involved in anything illegal, and I’ve said it doesn’t concern you. You’ll just have to accept that.”
“Or what? You’ll take awa
y all my castles?”
“And marry you off to the ugliest lady in the kingdom.”
She’d hoped to make him smile, but he looked as grouchy as a bear being poked with a stick. “Take off that damned pillow. It looks stupid.”
“Go pound your chest and eat a banana.” Oh, God, she was playing with fire, and she didn’t even care.
He went completely still. “What did you say?”
“Uhmm . . . nothing. A slight case of Tourette’s. It comes and goes.”
He almost smiled. “You don’t scare easily do you?”
“Well . . . you are acting a bit like an ape.”
“As opposed to your civilized rich boy ex-husband who’s hunting you down with a team of detectives?”
“On the positive side, he . . . uh . . . hates bananas.”
“You’re making this up. Every bit of it. There isn’t any ex-husband.”
She lifted her chin. “Then how did I get pregnant? Answer that one, wise guy.”
The corner of his mouth quirked, and he shook his head. “All right. I give up. We’ll play this your way for a while.”
“Thank you.”
“Except for one thing . . . I have to know the truth about whether or not you’re still married.”
This time it wasn’t hard for her to meet his eyes. “No. I promise you. I’m not married.”
He nodded, and she saw that he believed her. “All right. But I don’t want to see that damned pillow around your waist ever again. I’m serious about this. Traveling with Sandy’s kids and me is all the camouflage you’re going to get. Understand?”
She realized she wasn’t going to be able to fight him on this, but would the presence of two children be enough to hide her identity? “What am I going to say to Lucy?”
“Tell her you gave birth during the night, then sold the baby to a band of gypsies because it reminded you of her.”
“I will not.”
“Then tell her the truth. She can handle it.”
She shrugged, something he could interpret any way he chose.
Silence fell between them. She heard a door thud across the hall, the clatter of a room service cart, and she suddenly felt awkward.
He smiled. “At least now I don’t feel like such a pervert.”
First Lady Page 11