by Mary McBride
“Well, unlike you, Ms. Callifano, I didn't have it pulsing through my veins practically from birth.”
“We took a cab home, didn't we?”
He nodded, leaning back and crossing his arms, a little glint in his eyes. “Yes, we did. And if memory serves, one of us puked in the back seat.”
“I did not,” she said indignantly, even as she was remembering her complete humiliation and Bobby's sweet, if somewhat wobbling, concern when he carried her upstairs to their apartment. She remembered the next morning, too—oh, boy, did she remember—when they'd awakened absolutely ravenous for each other in spite of their hangovers. If Bobby was remembering that as well, his expression didn't give him away.
“May I take your order?” The waiter was a lanky young man with his long hair pulled back by a rubber band.
“Is the cannelloni made with a white sauce?” Angela asked.
“I don't know. I can go in the kitchen and ask, if you want.”
“Well, if you—”
“She'll have the cannelloni,” Bobby said, cutting her off. “And I'll have the spaghetti and house dressing on my salad.”
“Yes, sir.” The waiter looked back at Angela. “House dressing for you, too, ma'am?”
“Is it Italian?”
He nodded, his pen poised over his order book.
“Creamy or vinaigrette?” Angela asked.
“She'll have the house dressing,” Bobby said.
“Yes, sir.”
Then, before she could say it, Bobby told the waiter,
“On the side.”
They'd done this dance a hundred times before, but this time it amused her more than it annoyed her. Bobby, too, seemed to find it pretty funny as opposed to his usual teeth-gnashing, eye-rolling irritation.
“I guess I haven't changed,” she said, a bit sheepishly, meeting his gaze across the table.
“I never wanted you to, Miss Prim,” he said softly. Then, before he could say anything else, something or someone caught his attention across the room. “Stay here and keep an eye on the professor, Ange. I'll be right back.”
She watched him weave quickly and gracefully through tables and chairs until he disappeared out the restaurant's front door. Five minutes later, she was drizzling creamy Italian dressing on her salad when he resumed his seat across from her.
“That was Doug,” he said.
His tone was so somber and his face so grim that Angela immediately set down the little cup of dressing and leaned forward attentively. “What's up?”
“Another threat arrived in Washington.”
“Oh, brother.” She instinctively glanced at Mrs. Riordan's booth to make sure nothing was amiss. “Just like all the others?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Except for one little detail.”
“What?”
“This one was postmarked Hassenfeld.”
13
Daisy sensed that something was wrong when Robert returned to his table looking rather like a pallbearer and then barely touched his dinner because he spent the whole time glaring at waiters and busboys and arriving diners. She suspected that it was bad news that had altered his behavior, and she was sure that bad news, whatever it was, was somehow related to her. She was doing her best to forget it, though.
Earlier in the day, while enjoying a plate of his delicious scrambled eggs, she and Robert had agreed to maintain the Secret Service's secret and to go along with this charade.
“So, are you going to blow my cover?” he'd asked her.
“I think not,” she'd replied. She could have added that part of the reason was that she enjoyed his company, that she got so terribly tired of people always deferring to her, bowing, scraping, never talking back.
Let the old lady have whatever she wants.
In truth, she hadn't wanted anything—even to live— until these past few days. But now…
What a grand time she was having. In her crusade as matchmaker, she'd insisted on separate tables so the Hollands could be alone, but it had turned out to benefit her, as well. She was thoroughly enjoying every moment of sharing this rather dim and quite intimate booth with Gerald, sipping a glass of the excellent Bordeaux he had chosen, looking at his handsome face, and listening as he regaled her with anecdotes of his students and colleagues, many of whom Daisy was acquainted with herself from their tenure in the capital. Normally a stickler when it came to details, she found it didn't really bother her that now and then Gerald got his facts and dates a bit mixed up. Like Charles, Gerald was a busy man, brimming with ideas, and far more concerned with the overall picture than with each petty and insignificant detail.
He called her Margaret. That alone raised him high in her esteem. The white carnation against his tweed lapel was another factor in his favor. A boutonniere was quietly masculine, to Daisy's way of thinking. Dapper. Natty. Extinct words and bygone traits of charmers like Cary Grant or Fred Astaire. Her Charles had always worn a red carnation. The florists between Saint Louis and Chicago had run out of them three years ago during his memorial services, she'd been told.
Above the snow-white flower on his shoulder, Gerald's hair shone silver in the candlelight. His nails were clean and clipped and beautifully buffed. His eyes were a perfect blue. If he just wouldn't keep removing his glasses and going at them so laboriously with his handkerchief.
Well, no one was perfect, but she was perfectly happy to sit across from him this evening and to savor the masculine companionship she didn't even realize she had missed. She really ought to thank Muriel for the introduction. Well, perhaps that was going a bit far. If Daisy ever expressed gratitude, Muriel might just have a stroke or something.
“Would you care for dessert, Margaret?” he asked.
She was tempted to say yes, to linger here in the candlelight over melting vanilla ice cream and cup after cup of coffee, listening intently, gazing across the table, simply appreciating this man and his surprising presence in her life. But then she reminded herself that the movie was for the Hollands’ benefit, so the tense young couple could hold hands in a darkened theater, and that her life was comprised of a sensible seventy-six years and she had no business whatsoever behaving like a flighty, moonstruck girl. Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, indeed.
“I think not, Gerald.” She peered at her watch. “If we don't leave very soon, we'll miss the beginning of the movie, and then there wouldn't be much point in seeing it, would there?”
“You're absolutely right.” He signaled the waiter for the check, then plucked off his glasses once more, pulled out his handkerchief, and had himself another good and thorough polish.
“Must you?” Daisy heard herself say testily.
Gerald fixed her with his deep blue, currently unadorned eyes. “Yes, Margaret. I must. The better to see you, my dear.”
She felt something comparable to a blush steal across her cheeks as she clucked her tongue softly. The silly old fool.
Bobby swung the Caddy into a No Parking space directly in front of the ticket booth and then killed the engine, knowing Doug would see to it that the local cops turned a blind eye to the violation.
“You can't park here, Robert,” Mrs. Riordan announced from the back seat.
“I just did, ma'am.”
Beside him, he could hear a tiny hitch in Angela's breath.
Behind him, there was ice in Mrs. Riordan's voice when she said, “I'd like to speak to you in private, young man.” Then her voice defrosted a bit when she added, “I'll only be a moment, Gerald.” No sooner had she spoken than she was out of the car, marching a bit stiffly— the unaccustomed exercise this morning had probably taken a toll on her—several yards down the sidewalk while she motioned Bobby to follow her.
“The professor and I will get out here, and then I'd like you to park the car elsewhere,” she said.
“Parking close to the door is best for security reasons, Mrs. Riordan.”
“I understand that, Robert. However, I'd still like you to park elsewhere.”
/>
“Ma'am…”
“Don't argue with me.”
“Ma'am…”
She snagged the lapel of his suit coat, pulling him closer with suprising strength. “I feel foolish enough on this so-called date, Robert, being chaperoned by a parade of armed guards. I'd rather not advertise it to the population of three counties. Is that clear? Now move the goddamn car.”
Doug sauntered up. “Is there a problem here, Mrs. Riordan?” he asked, looking from the president's mother to Bobby and then back again at Crazy Daisy's irate face and the hand clenching Bobby's lapel.
Just as Bobby was shaking his head, Mrs. Riordan snarled at the special agent in charge, “My butler and I are having a slight disagreement about parking. I'd like him to move my car out into the lot. Now.”
In his inimitable, unflappable, down-home Texas fashion, Doug rubbed his jaw a moment and stared at his boot tips before he said, “Sounds reasonable to me. If you and your gentleman friend would like to get out here, ma'am, we'll see that the car gets safely parked out on the lot.”
Without blowing his cover, there wasn't much Bobby could do except roll his eyes and refrain from swearing. Doug's orders from Washington were clear. Don't upset the old lady. Fine. Great. We'll just get her killed instead.
“Thank you, Agent… um…”
“Coulter, ma'am. Special Agent in Charge Douglas Coulter.”
“Yes. Well, thank you.” Mrs. Riordan eased her grip on Bobby's lapel, smoothed the gray fabric, then gave him a conqueror's smile. “We'll meet you in the lobby, Robert, after you park the car.”
Fine. Great. He couldn't do much but follow orders, could he? If Doug thought making her happy was more important than securing her car, what could Bobby the Butler do? Earlier, after hearing about the origin of the latest threat, he'd done his damnedest to get Mrs. Riordan to give up this movie idea, escorting her out of the restaurant and practically telling her flat-out that he had serious concerns for her security. She'd clucked her tongue at him, though, and promptly traded his arm for the professor's.
After he locked Daisy's big Caddy, he dodged through parked cars toward the multiplex cinema, idly reading the names of the current attractions. He stopped dead in his tracks when he read, “Rod Bishop in Deadly Dilemma.” Then he muttered a choice expletive before continuing toward the building, where he located Daisy and company in the crowded lobby, not too far from where Doug sat on a bench, eating popcorn and pretending to read a newspaper.
Angela handed him a ticket. He couldn't figure out the expression on her face until Mrs. Riordan announced cheerfully, “We've chosen to see Deadly Dilemma, Robert.” Ah. The expression was guilt, then, and plenty of it.
“Great,” he said, trying to sound enthusiastic rather than suicidal.
“Popcorn, anyone?” Gerrard asked. “Anyone care for a beverage?”
Bobby nearly asked for a large hemlock. Then, when no one took the professor up on his offer, Gerrard gestured toward the guy who was tearing tickets. “Shall we go?”
“I'm sorry about this, Bobby,” Angela whispered as they followed behind Mrs. Riordan and the professor. “I know how you hate these kind of movies.”
His teeth were clenched so tight he could hardly speak. “No problem.”
Bobby didn't even last ten minutes.
While the opening credits rolled, he busied himself picking imaginary lint from his pant legs and sleeves. In the dark, for heaven's sake! Then he fidgeted with his shoulder holster underneath his jacket and loosened his tie. The rest of the time was spent hunkering down in his aisle seat, crossing his arms, crossing his legs, uncrossing everything, and continually shoving Angela's arm off their shared armrest.
She knew this would happen, dammit, but what could she do? The president's mother had insisted on seeing the film starring “that attractive young man.” Angela knew how Bobby hated movies like these, where the principal characters were cops who handled semiautomatic weapons with blithe indifference to life and limb, where the word “perp” was used ad nauseam, and where procedural lapses were frequent and dire enough to make any law enforcement professional shudder.
Her father, bless his heart, adored action movies like these and always quietly chuckled his way through the stupid jargon and gross inaccuracies.
Not Bobby. He glowered at the screen as if everything that appeared on it was a personal affront aimed directly at him. Tonight he was particularly obnoxious, making crude comments, barely under his breath, that drew glares of disapproval from people in seats nearby, and that finally forced Mrs. Riordan to whip her head around and fiercely shush him.
Bobby stewed another thirty seconds, gnawing on a cuticle, then leaned toward Angela and growled, “I'm outta here.”
Good riddance.
At last she was able to focus on the screen, on Rod's face with its lovely ice blue eyes and the sexy stubble on his jawline. This was the same movie that had premiered in L.A. just a few days ago, but it seemed entirely different now. Perhaps because her arm wasn't linked through Rod's, or her hand warmly clasped in his and their shoulders touching while they whispered back and forth, then finally sobbed in silly unison.
Doug slipped silently into the seat beside her, taking Bobby's post. “Any good?” he whispered.
“It's okay,” she said, unable to take her eyes off the screen. Several rows away, a woman sighed audibly as the camera dollied up and paused lovingly on Rod's face. Funny, it looked rather plastic to her now, Angela thought, and far too pretty. Expressive as it was, compared to Bobby's face, Rod's didn't have much character. She'd noticed that a few times during the past few months, but she'd chosen to ignore it.
“Popcorn?” Doug angled his big paper bucket her way.
“No, thanks.”
She was thinking that when she'd met Rod, she hadn't seen Bobby in seven or eight months, so perhaps his features had blurred a bit in her memory. But that couldn't be. She'd never forget a thing about her husband. Not a single scar or a swirl of hair or all the varied textures of his skin. It was Rod who seemed the blur at the moment, even though she was staring right at him on the screen.
Now, instead of paying attention to the twists and turns of the movie, she started thinking about the patterns of Bobby's scars, beginning with the pale crescent on his shoulder where his mother's belt had taken a bite out of him. There was the nasty one on his shin from a losing battle with barbed wire when he was a kid. His knuckles had a history all their own of the numerous times he'd had to defend his mother's honor, his brother's hide, or his own illicit parentage.
All Rod had was a smashed thumb, a souvenir of his years in carpentry, that his studio had hired a plastic surgeon to repair.
Suddenly it seemed as if she were looking at a complete stranger on the screen. A complete stranger whom she was seriously considering marrying. My God. Was she nuts?
“I'll be right back,” she whispered to Doug, who grunted his acknowledgment, turned his legs sideways, and protected his bucket of popcorn as Angela slipped past him into the aisle.
She emerged from the darkened theater blinking, fully expecting to find Bobby sitting on one of the solitary benches in the lobby, still wearing a look of supreme disgust while he fumed inwardly about the liberties Hollywood took with details of law enforcement. Bobby. How she loved him. Another moment, she thought, and she'd be kissing away all that righteous, macho indignation. Maybe this was her fate—to be wildly and permanently in love with a man whose only way of showing pain was through the scars on his body.
He wasn't sitting on one of the benches, though, or standing post by the theater's main door. And when she finally saw him on the far side of the lobby, he wasn't alone. Judging from the sleazy smile on Tricia Yates's face as she gazed up at him, he wasn't planning to be alone later, either.
The moment Bobby realized what an unbelievable asshole he was being was when Agent Tricia Yates smiled and whispered, “I bet the old lady's Cadillac has a really big back seat.”
Up u
ntil that moment, he'd been just a depressed guy walking around a theater lobby, trying to be vigilant He didn't even know what he'd said to the brunette to make her think he was coming on to her. Whatever it was, though, he regretted it. Big-time.
He stepped back from her hot, buff little body and raked his fingers through his hair. “That was way out of line, Tricia. Let's just forget it, okay? We've got a job to do here.”
“Maybe later,” she said, readjusting her come-hither smile and her shoulder holster at the same time. “Maybe sometime when we're both not trying to keep one eye out for shooters.”
Not to mention keeping an eye out for his wife, he thought. “I'm going to step outside for a little fresh air. You want to take over here for a couple minutes?”
“Sure. No problem.”
Bobby blasted out a side door and walked around the parking lot for a while, checking out the Cadillac, trying to get his head back in the job. What had he always told Billy? “The job comes first, bro, and don't you ever forget that.”
Billy had grinned. “What's second?”
“Nothing.”
He'd meant that. He'd lived that until this past year. Jesus. Billy was probably looking down on him now and shaking his head as he watched his brother floundering around a parking lot while his wife was ogling Harry Hollywood on the silver screen and another agent was lying in wait for him in the lobby.
What a mess. Billy had probably laughed his heavenly ass off at the tattoo, too. Bobby looked up at the star-sprinkled autumn sky, feeling his throat clog as he located the three-starred belt of Orion, the Hunter, figuring that if Billy was up there, that's the vantage point he'd choose.
“I'm screwing up here, kid,” he whispered roughly before he turned to go back inside the theater, where he stood in the back, in the dark, on post, only occasionally letting his gaze idle on his wife as she watched her lover on the screen.
When the movie was over, Bobby preceded them into the lobby. Mrs. Riordan emerged, clinging to Gerald Gerrard's arm, while Doug ambled along behind them, looking for a place to stash his empty popcorn bucket.