Her mouth twisted. And if you believe that, there’s a Lotto ticket with your name on it for sale in that delicatessen right on the next corner.
Jess knew already she wasn’t going to pop in and fork over five dollars for it. Which meant, she acknowledged gloomily, that as much as she wanted to, she didn’t believe. Her luck hadn’t changed. The world hadn’t suddenly turned all rosy and new.
Something’s wrong.
The thought had been taking on form and substance in her mind since the first shock of Tiffany’s confession had begun to fade. It had just coalesced into those two words when an enormous SUV, a black Chevy Suburban with tinted windows that kept her from getting a look at the driver, pulled over to the curb beside her. With her startle reflex now on near-permanent red alert, Jess jumped, nearly coming out of her Christine-selected, slightly too-large pink pumps as she cast a quick, nervous look toward it.
Which immediately turned to a fierce frown as the window lowered and she recognized the driver.
“Pink’s definitely your color,” drawled an all-too-familiar male voice, and through the open window her eyes locked with a pair of mocking blue ones that had just finished giving her a thorough once-over. He was as wicked handsome as ever—more proof that she just wasn’t naturally lucky—with short, thick, light brown (dark blond? She could never make up her mind) hair, a lean, angular face that was deeply tanned from hours spent outdoors, and the kind of gorgeous baby blues that had once made her heart go pitter-pat every time they’d turned in her direction. His features weren’t perfect: his nose was a little too thick, his lips a little too thin, and, at thirty-six, he had a few creases around his eyes and some deeper lines running from his nose to his mouth. All of which, of course, looked good on him. He was six feet two inches tall with the broad-shouldered, hard-sculpted build of the professional football player he had once been. He was Secret Service Agent Mark Ryan, among many other things eye candy extraordinaire, and she hated him. Especially when amusement at her twinkled in his eyes, like it was doing now. “So where’re you hiding the Chihuahua?”
There was no mistaking what he was referring to. It burned her up that he had made the Elle Woods connection, too. Much as she would rather not acknowledge it, she and Mark had always thought alike. On some things, at least, although not necessarily the ones that mattered.
“What do you want?” Her tone was disagreeable. Even now, just looking at him made her heart beat faster, and the realization maddened her. She’d once thought this guy hung the moon. That he was the love of her life. Prince Charming to her Cinderella. As in so many other things, she’d been wrong.
“Thought you might like a ride home.”
“Then you thought wrong.” Baring her teeth at him—she couldn’t really call the thing that stretched her mouth a smile—she walked on.
“Nice ass,” he called after her, earning that part of her anatomy interested glances from two male lawyer types and one bum picking through a sidewalk wastebasket that she happened to be passing just at that moment.
Jess barely missed a step, but inwardly she sizzled. Just as she was meant to, she knew. That comment had been intended to make her mad, to make her turn on him, to make her engage him in conversation.
Hah. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing her rise to the bait. Her chin went up, her shoulders squared, and she took a quick, fortifying breath, but those instinctive physical responses were the only reactions he was going to get.
She simply kept walking.
Ignoring the bleating horns of inconvenienced drivers—a barricade for a road repair project was tying up a second lane, adding to the damage—the Suburban cruised along the curb just behind her. She was so acutely aware of it that she almost ran into a trio of elderly women headed in the opposite direction. And, even more embarrassing, a few strides later on, a tree, one of the planted-in-the-sidewalk variety with which the local movers and shakers hoped to beautify downtown.
Damn it.
“You know you want me.”
The laughter in his voice made her fists clench. Thankfully one was curled around the strap of her shoulder bag and the other clutched the handle of her briefcase, so it was unlikely that he would notice. A few grins directed her way confirmed that their moving audience was still listening in.
“Go away,” she snapped over her shoulder, earning interested stares from an even greater number of passersby as she kept walking.
“You just keep fighting this thing between us, baby. I’m still going to be right here when you give up.”
The interested stares turned into a smattering of snickers. Jess felt her cheeks heat. It was all she could do not to flip him the bird. But she didn’t and was rewarded for her forbearance by the sight of an empty cab nestled in among the traffic cruising toward her along Indiana Avenue, just about half a block from where it intersected with 6th Street, which was directly ahead of her. Oh, joy! Waving to catch the driver’s attention, she took off for the corner.
And almost fell flat on her face as one of her cute little kitten heels caught in a crack in the sidewalk and she ran right out of her too-big left shoe. Stumbling forward, she barely managed to catch herself on another of those ornamental trees seconds before she would have landed on her knees on the pavement. A rolling wave of guffaws from the peanut gallery surrounding her was drowned out by the sudden, sharp blare of what sounded like dozens of car horns. Ahead of her, the cab sailed on through the intersection, blithely oblivious, lost forever.
Was that the way life worked or what? Her life, at least.
Regaining her balance with the help of the tree, Jess now felt like she was being watched by not only Mark but a cast of thousands as well, and she set her teeth.
“Do you need some help, miss?” The speaker was a nice old guy from someplace that wasn’t D.C. A tourist, complete with map, in a brimmed hat and plaid shorts and sandals with socks. His alarmed-looking gray-haired wife clutched his arm.
“No, thanks. I’m fine.” She smiled at them to prove it. They smiled back and moved on.
Thank goodness the crowd that had witnessed her discomfiture was moving on with them. It would be too much to hope that Mark had moved on as well. In fact, she was sure he hadn’t. The giveaway was all those angry car horns blasting through the concrete canyon around her. And the intensifying smell of automobile exhaust, which, trapped in this airless corridor, was no doubt building up to near lethal levels as ticked-off drivers struggled to get around Mark’s stopped car.
To get away from him, she needed her shoe.
Hopping on her one remaining shod foot, hanging onto the smooth gray trunk of the young tree for balance, she turned to look for it.
She found it instantly. The pink pump with its tiny kitten heel, chosen to keep her looking small and feminine for the jury, was moving toward her. Dangling nonchalantly from Mark’s right hand.
“Lose something?” Wearing snug-fitting jeans and a muscle-hugging T-shirt instead of the dark suit that was his—and the Secret Service’s—de facto uniform, he walked toward her with that cocky athlete’s stride that had once had the power to make her pant. Secretly, of course. Certainly he’d never known it, and she wasn’t about to let him in on the news at this late date.
“Give me my shoe.” She held out her hand for it.
Grinning, he stopped in front of her, dropped into a crouch, and grasped her ankle, with, she knew even as she attempted to pull free, the intention of putting her shoe on for her. His hand was as big and warm and strong as she remembered it being, and he had no trouble hanging on despite her attempts to kick free of his grasp. His touch on her bare skin made her breath catch. She barely managed to repress a shiver. Jeez, she’d thought—hoped—prayed—she was over him. But if she wasn’t, he was the last person on earth she ever wanted to find out about it.
“You’re making a scene,” he chided, looking up at her.
A sidelong glance into a few faces in the crowd streaming around them told
her he was right, at least to the degree that a scene was being made, although she might have vehemently disagreed about who was the cause of it. Lips compressing, she quit fighting and let him maneuver her shoe onto her foot.
“Good as new.” With her shoe now more or less firmly returned to duty, he slid a caressing hand up the back of her calf. Outraged, she kicked at him again even as swift arrows of remembered longing shot straight for her solar plexus, and he let go.
“You’re welcome,” he said as her eyes shot sparks at him. Then he stood up.
For a moment Jess found herself staring straight at his wide chest. His T-shirt was navy with a Coors logo, and its short sleeves and thin knit made his brawny arms and the hard definition of his pecs impossible to miss. Mad at herself for noticing, she quickly adjusted her gaze upward. Being almost a foot shorter, even in her delicate heels, was a disadvantage in the glare wars, as she had already learned, to her annoyance. So she did her best to banish hers.
“What part of ‘go away’ did you misunderstand?”
She tried for a falsely sweet smile instead but didn’t get there. Probably because someone in the near-deafening traffic jam just beyond them chose that moment to yell at Mark, “You moron, move your damned car!”
Goaded by the sight of the gridlock that she somehow—foolishly, idiotically, knowing that it was not her fault—felt responsible for, galvanized by the not-so-distant sound of sirens that she had a terrible feeling were headed their way, she abandoned subtle sarcasm for concrete disapproval with a testy, “Would you get back in your car?”
Apparently unabashed by the chaos he had created, he smiled at her, his patented eye-crinkling, you’re-somebody-special smile that used to make her bones melt and her toes curl and now made her regard him with active suspicion.
“Not unless you get in with me.”
She snorted. “In your dreams.”
“Jess. I want to talk to you. And you need a ride. Don’t be an idiot.”
“Yo! Numbnuts! Get your car the hell out of the way!” A roar from a frustrated commuter sent Jess’s blood pressure skyrocketing and her gaze shooting sideways with alarm. Drivers were opening their doors, standing up in the street to look. Trouble was clearly on the way. Her stomach tightened with anxiety. Her pulse sped up. Mark, of course, didn’t so much as bat an eyelash.
Typical Mark. Typical her.
“Are you really going to be this big of a jerk?” Temper sharpened her voice, snapped from her eyes.
“What do you think?” As always, he was imperturbably cool.
She knew the answer, and it annoyed the hell out of her: yes, he was. At least until he got what he wanted.
“Move that car, you SOB!” This enraged howl from an ignored commuter had all the savagery of a war cry, and Jess didn’t even have to look—although she did, and was proven right—to divine the yelling guy was heading their way.
Her eyes, wide now with alarm, shot back to Mark.
“Would you please just go?”
“Not unless you come with me.”
Okay, she didn’t actively hate him, she decided with feverish haste and one eye on the puce-faced, burly guy threading his way toward them through the seething mass of stopped-up traffic. She wasn’t even really all that mad at him anymore. Finding out that the gorgeous hunk of Secret Service agent she’d secretly lusted after for months seemed to have developed a thing for her shy, nondescript, less-than-hot self had clouded her judgment. When circumstances had flung them together, she had tumbled headlong into a blazingly intense love affair that she should have realized from the outset had been far too hot not to burn itself out. Or, rather, explode, which was basically what had happened as they’d gotten to know each other better. She hadn’t been happy to learn that he’d slept with half the beautiful women in Washington, D.C., including Mary Jane Cates, her current boss. He hadn’t liked discovering that she was slightly allergic to marriage and that low-keying her hard-earned career while she settled into domestic bliss with him was just not going to happen. No how, no way.
In other words, it had been a classic case of mutual disillusionment. Just because the breakup had been as hot as the affair didn’t mean that she couldn’t be civil now.
Just as long as she didn’t have to be civil for long.
Honk. Honk.
“Let’s go!” “What’s the holdup?” “I called the cops!” “Whose car is that?”
The chorus of disapproval from the traffic jam was growing louder by the second. Glancing down the street in a tizzy of apprehension, Jess saw that at least a dozen people were now out of their cars looking around for the owner of the idling SUV. Puce-faced guy, who clearly knew, had almost reached the sidewalk, which would put him maybe twenty feet behind the Suburban. Jogging toward them now, he was shaking his fist at Mark and screaming, “You think you’re not gonna move that car, dickhead? Huh? Huh?”
Jess’s eyes widened. Her heart gave a leap.
“Mark—” She looked back at him in alarm.
Mark’s eyes met hers. Without so much as a change of expression, he pulled his wallet out of his pocket, flipped it open, and held it up so that sunlight glinted on his badge. Puce-faced guy stopped, sputtering, in his tracks.
Jess’s eyebrows snapped together disapprovingly. “I can’t believe you’d use your badge like that.”
“What, you want I should shoot him? Seems a little extreme.”
Honk. Honk.
This she did not need. Time to go.
“Jackass,” she called Mark bitterly.
A barely perceptible smile curved his lips. “Does that mean you’re gonna get in the car now?”
“Come on.” She capitulated with bad grace, marching past him toward where the Suburban was idling at the curb, relieved to see that the puce-faced guy was retreating back toward his car. Reaching the Suburban, feeling the laserlike heat of dozens of angry eyes, she tried calling out, “Sorry!” and waving penitently at the inconvenienced multitudes.
Her reward, as she hurried around the front of the SUV, was a thank-you chorus of irate honks, a fuming you suck look thrown over the puce-faced guy’s shoulder, and a smattering of one-fingered salutes thrust high into the air from a number of drivers now disappearing back inside their vehicles.
Way to keep it classy, D.C.
Feeling about two inches tall, she opened the door and climbed into the passenger seat.
CHAPTER SIX
Mark got in beside her, put the Suburban in drive, and pulled away from the curb. Like champagne from a suddenly uncorked bottle, traffic was now free to flow, and flow it did, shooting forward in their wake and then spreading out to fill the available space.
“Where were you headed?” he asked.
“Home,” she said, taking in a whiff of new car smell, and he nodded. A moment later, the Suburban made a left onto D Street and they were lost to the sight of their admirers as they disappeared into the steady stream of traffic.
Jess turned wary eyes on Mark. He flicked a glance at her but didn’t speak. This whole situation would have been much easier to deal with if he hadn’t still had the power to make her pulse speed up on sight, she decided.
Fool.
“If you’ve got something to say, say it.” If there was a hostile edge to her voice, well, he deserved it. The last straw in their relationship—her walking into her new office some three months ago to find her new boss plastered all over him—was a vivid memory she didn’t expect to forget anytime soon. Although she was trying. Sort of.
His lips thinned. “Remember that conversation we had a while back about you keeping a low profile?”
She should have figured that that was what this was about. Maybe her shoulders drooped a fraction. Maybe she was a tad disappointed. Maybe she’d hoped he’d popped into her life for the first time in three months to grovel a little. To ask her forgiveness. To beg her to take him back.
Not that she would have. She might be a fool, but she wasn’t that big a fool. He might
be as drop-dead gorgeous as ever, and she might still have the tiniest little bit of a soft spot for him tucked away somewhere deep inside her heart, but with her head she knew the two of them just weren’t going to work out. A world-class hunk with a list of ex’s as long as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade wasn’t the man for her, as she had explained to him in the semicivil conversation they’d had after she had caught him with her boss, when, among other things, she had told him that they were over, and to please stay away from her. Which, until now, he had seemed perfectly willing to do.
“What about it?” Okay, she was still sounding hostile. And you know what? Hostile directed at Mark felt good, even after all this time. So maybe she was still madder at him than she’d thought.
“You don’t seem to be very good at it.” Where she was hostile, he was mild.
“Meaning?”
“For starters, you were on the six o’clock news tonight. Worldwide, I presume, since I caught it on CNN.”
Glumly Jess remembered the TV cameras pointed at the defense team as they stood on the courthouse steps.
“I can’t help what CNN chooses to put on the air.”
“You can help putting yourself in the middle of what CNN chooses to put on the air.”
“If you’re talking about the news conference after the verdict, I was in the background. Nobody noticed me.”
“Until Pearse Collins pulled you up beside him and introduced you to the press as the lawyer who’d been questioning Tiffany Higgs when she admitted no rape occurred.”
It was all Jess could do not to squirm guiltily in her seat. “I couldn’t help that either.”
“You’ve already been all over TV. Tomorrow your face will be in half the newspapers in the country. You’ll be getting calls from magazines wanting to do stories on the hotshot lady lawyer who won the Phillips case. Maybe the National Enquirer or one of the other tabloids will decide to do a feature. How long do you think it’ll take any of them to figure out who Jessica Dean really is?”
Those ocean blue eyes flicked her way again. There was the briefest of pauses. Since the obvious answer was not long, Jess didn’t say anything. She even tried not to look as mutinous as she felt.
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