by Gayle Wilson
“Whitt. Last night,” she said. “It’s a permanent condition these days.” She walked over to the bed, moved his brown leather jacket to one side and sat down. He glanced at his watch and then back at her.
“Long day,” he suggested.
“Most of them are.”
“But you’re enjoying it? Working on the campaign?”
Was she? She believed in Uncle Jim and felt an obligation to do whatever she could to help him achieve his long-held dream, but...was she enjoying it? “Most of the time,” she said.
“I noticed your groupies are still out front.”
“I came in the side. I decided avoidance was the better part of valor.”
“They’ve got officers out there now.”
“Hotel security?”
“New York’s finest.”
“Your doing?”
He laughed. Robin had almost forgotten what a nice sound that was. Which would be a big step in the right direction.
“I don’t have that kind of influence,” Jared said. “I figured McCord did.”
“Or Whitt,” Robin suggested. Maybe Emory had taken what had happened this morning more seriously than she thought.
“Maybe the hotel requested them,” Jared said. “They don’t like anything that disturbs their guests.”
He was right. The increased security might have nothing to do with McCord or the campaign. Her uncle wouldn’t be in New York until after Christmas. And tomorrow was Christmas Eve.
“Have you eaten?” Jared asked.
She tried to think whether she had or not. She had had breakfast with Whitt. She hadn’t managed lunch because she’d been late to her morning meeting after the incident in the street. It had thrown her schedule off all day. She remembered nibbling on a stale doughnut at some time. At the staff meeting?
“Breakfast,” she admitted. “I’m sure about breakfast.”
“Want to grab a bite somewhere?” Jared asked.
It probably wasn’t good for the baby for her to do without food this long, she thought. It would screw up her blood sugar and all that body chemistry stuff. Things she had never worried about in her entire life. Now she probably should.
However, the thought of going back out into that freezing rain wasn’t appealing. Her feet hurt, and she was bone tired. All she wanted to do was to get her nightgown on and curl up under the covers. Of course, with Jared here...
In spite of her tiredness, in spite of the unresolved issues that lay between them, her lips lifted at the thought of stripping off her clothes and hopping into bed with Jared in the room. It might be interesting to see his reaction. Except whatever it was, she was too tired to deal with it tonight.
“Or how about room service?” he said. “There are a couple of things on the menu that look decent. A roast beef sandwich and vegetable soup combo, for one.”
Surprisingly, that did sound good. The room was warm. She could at least take off her shoes and stretch out on the bed.
“Or a shrimp salad? Eggs Benedict?”
The more Jared talked, the hungrier she felt.
“Any of that sound good?” he asked, looking at her over the room service menu he’d picked up from the table beside him.
Better than he could imagine. Even the fact that he was in her room seemed good. Especially after her realization this morning that this pregnancy concerned Jared as much as it did her. After all, there was a child involved. Their child.
He had a right to know about this baby. She couldn’t justify, not even to herself, her continuing reluctance to tell him. Except that she knew exactly how he would react.
“Actually, they all sound pretty good,” she said.
“Then why don’t you put on something more comfortable while I order for us.”
He stood up, menu in hand, and started across the room. When he reached the foot of the bed, he stooped down, balancing on his toes in front of her. He laid the menu beside her before he reached down and lifted her right leg, sliding her shoe off by gripping its heel. He held her stockinged foot in his hand a moment, eyes down, before he set her shoe on the floor.
Then his hands, strong and dark and so skillful, capable of disarming the most deadly instruments of destruction mankind could devise, began to massage the tiredness away. His thumb pushed into her arch, strong deep strokes, and then he kneaded the ball of her foot, soothing the long-day ache.
“Your feet are like ice,” he said. “Those shoes aren’t made for this weather.” He released the foot he’d been working on and picked up the other one, slipping her pump off and placing it on the floor beside its mate. “You aren’t in Texas anymore, Toto.”
He looked up to smile at her, the misquotation deliberate. At what was in his eyes, her heart reacted. Skipped a beat? Maybe not, but it did whatever hearts did when they were confronted with something they wanted very badly.
“I thought that was supposed to be Kansas,” she said softly, fighting the urge to touch his face, which was almost at eye level. She wanted to put her fingers against his jaw and run them across the slight abrasiveness of his whiskers, which she could always feel, even if he had just shaved. Slide her thumb over his lips. Kiss the cut he’d gotten this morning protecting her. Kiss it and make it all well. She wished she could make everything well between them. If only it were that simple.
“Texas. Kansas. Whatever. It’s all fly-over country,” he said, his smile widening. “All the same to us New Yorkers.”
She laughed, recognizing the truth of that. Still smiling, he began to massage the foot he was holding, his fingers finding all the places that hurt. Some she hadn’t even been aware of.
“So what do you want?” he asked.
A dangerous question. Especially now. This was the Jared she could never resist. The man who had nothing to do with death and destruction. The man who would be as gentle with their baby as he was being with her now. Just as caring. And as loving.
She didn’t understand why she couldn’t get past the other. Past his profession. Which was honorable and necessary and even noble. And which scared her so much that her hands trembled if she heard a siren and she didn’t know that he was safe. Then, everything that had happened the day her father had been killed was in her head. She felt the agony of it all over again and knew she couldn’t bear it if the same thing happened to Jared.
“The roast beef sounds good,” she said. There must have been something of what she had been thinking in her voice because his eyes came up, focusing on her face.
“You okay?” he asked softly.
She nodded. Her hands were clasped together in her lap and she kept them there, fingers interlocked, by sheer force of will, to keep them from moving. To keep from touching him.
“You can change in the bathroom while I call,” he suggested.
“Thanks for your very kind permission,” she said dryly, “since it is my bathroom.” She watched him smile at her again.
“You always said I was bossy.”
“I was always right.”
He stood, the muscles in his thighs lifting him in one powerful motion. Looking down on her, he seemed taller than she remembered, more masculine, maybe even stronger. “You were always right about a lot of things,” he said.
Her eyes widened, but before she could read what was in his face, he stepped away, picking up the menu and heading toward the phone with it. “You want the soup, too?” he asked.
Her gaze had followed him, and so she nodded. He turned back toward the telephone, punching in the numbers that would connect him with room service.
She stood up and found her nightgown in the drawer of the chest. Her robe was on the hook behind the bathroom door. It was big and pretty shapeless. Safely unrevealing, not that there was much to reveal, but Jared had known her body so well...
She headed toward the bathroom, his words inside her head, drowning out whatever he was saying to room service. You were always right about a lot of things.
“GOOD?” Jared asked. The q
uestion was redundant, he supposed, considering that there was almost nothing left on the tray Robin was holding across her lap.
She had taken a shower while he’d waited for room service to show up. He had listened to the sound of the water, muffled by the closed door, and remembered the days when they had showered together. Remembering those times hadn’t been the best idea in the world, given their situation.
When Robin finally emerged from the bathroom, dressed in a voluminous terry robe and the same perfumed cloud of steam that had haunted her bathroom this morning, she looked better than she had when she came in. No longer cold. No longer quite so tired.
And she had just eaten a good meal. At least he’d been able to arrange that, he thought. It wasn’t much, but it was probably as much protectiveness as Robin would stand for right now.
“I guess I was hungrier than I realized,” she said.
She put her soup spoon down beside the empty bowl and settled back against the pillows stacked behind her. Jared had eaten in the same chair he’d been sitting in when she came into the room, using the table beside it to set his cup and saucer on.
“Want to tell me about it?” he said.
She didn’t even ask what he meant. The connection between them had always been strong enough that one usually knew what the other was thinking. She was better at it than he was, more sensitive, maybe, because she was a woman, but he could read her well enough to know she was worried.
“There’s not that much to tell. I just don’t like what’s been going on,” she said.
“Are you talking about what happened this morning? If so, I don’t think with the cops on alert—”
“It’s not that,” Robin answered, breaking into his attempted reassurance. “At least, that’s not all of it. This, morning was just...I’m not sure what it was. The tip of the iceberg, maybe. A symptom of the deeper disease.”
“You taking PR lessons to learn to talk like that?” Jared asked, one brow lifting, as he smiled at the hyperbolic language. “I have to tell you that as a cop, what I saw this morning wasn’t the tip of anything. It looked pretty full-blown to me.”
“You don’t think I’m overreacting?”
“In being nervous?”
“In worrying about what those people. might do next.”
“Might do to you?”
“Not really. I don’t mind admitting I was scared out there, but...I’m not their target. Uncle Jim is. Or at least...” She hesitated again. “At least he’s becoming their target.”
“Because of the deal in Nam?”
“For some of them, maybe. But...not entirely. I can’t make what happened there fit with all the sentiments on their placards. I think most of those people are more concerned with what’s going to happen when the millennium arrives.”
“End-of-the-world stuff? How is that connected to McCord?”
“I guess it wasn’t. Until we connected it. Planning the announcement at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Hyping Uncle Jim as the leader for the new millennium. Even tying that to the incident in Vietnam. My saying that what Uncle Jim did there proves he’s willing to make hard decisions in dangerous times. But the message those people are getting is that somehow...”
“He’s connected to the dangerous times,” Jared supplied.
Her eyes came up to his. “Exactly,” she said.
“So drop the millennium theme.”
“I suggested that. Not only did no one else want to do that, they didn’t even see a problem with what we’re doing.”
“Maybe that’s because there isn’t one.”
“Maybe,” she conceded. “You think I’m blowing it out of proportion.” Her voice was flat, and that hadn’t been a question. Apparently Robin was repeating something she had already been told. And hadn’t liked hearing.
“I don’t think you—or the campaign—can know how people are going to interpret something. You aren’t mind readers. There’s nothing wrong with the message the campaign is putting out.”
“Except it’s being...perverted. Instead of seeing James McCord as a new kind of leader for a wonderful future, those people see a future full of terrible threats.”
Jared laughed. “We’ve been hearing the sky’s falling for at least the last two years. The power grid’s going to fail. The banks and the economy will shut down along with the stock market. The defense system. Everybody’s computer will malfunction.”
“That’s not exactly a fabrication,” Robin reminded him.
“It’s also not going to be the end of the world. Not even the world as we know it. Hell, ever since I was a kid some nut’s been prophesying Armageddon. Every skirmish in the Middle East sets off the rumors. The end of the world is coming. We’ve heard it and heard it. Nothing’s happened yet. I think you’re giving the nutcases credit for more influence than they have.”
“Avamore has quite a following.”
“So?”
“I don’t know. He’s using biblical prophecy and Uncle Jim’s positions on international affairs, especially his support for the military, to tie him to the end of the world.”
“Because he’s pro-Israel? Opposed to money going to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Bloc countries instead of to building up our own defense system? A lot of people are opposed to that, but I can promise you it isn’t going to lead to Armageddon.”
“People are saying that if the defense system fails as a result of the millennium bug, the Russians or the Chinese or some terrorist will take that opportunity to launch an attack.”
“Do you honestly believe that?” he asked.
“No, but I think they do.”
“Whatever happens with the computers is going to happen. If the fix hasn’t already been made, it’s too late now. But I don’t think it’s going to be anywhere near the end of the world,” he said, letting her hear his amusement. “If I did, I’d be doing something besides going to work every day. And I’d be somewhere where it’s not so damn cold, for one thing.”
“Really?” she said mockingly. “Like where? I always thought that what you’re doing—and where you’re doing it—is all you ever wanted to do.”
“Maybe. This is where my job is. My friends.”
“Then you don’t really want to change anything.”
“I thought we were talking hypothetical. End of the world. What you’d do differently.”
“You’re admitting you would do some things differently?”
“Everybody would,” Jared said. “If those clowns out front really believed that Armageddon crap they’re preaching, then they wouldn’t be wasting time parading up and down the streets.”
“So what would they be doing?” Robin asked.
The emphasis was subtle, but it was there. She had realized he’d moved the question away from the personal and back to the demonstrators. Maybe she had seen through that maneuver to the indecision that underlay it. He supposed it was pretty obvious.
“We’d be trying to make things right in our lives,” he said.
“What kind of things?”
“Making up with those we’ve hurt. Fixing things with the people we care about. Repairing relationships.”
“Is that what you’d do?”
“Wouldn’t you?” he asked, holding her eyes.
After a few seconds, she nodded. “But I don’t think it ought to take that kind of threat to make people do that.”
Another not-so-subtle reminder? He had told her that he’d come here to talk about their relationship. And then he’d talked about everything but that. Because he wasn’t ready, of course, to say the one thing that could change things between them.
“People can be pretty stubborn when it comes to getting down to the truth,” he admitted. “Doomsday would make you want to.”
“Want to get to the truth?”
“Make sure you were telling it. Living it.”
The silence stretched again. It lasted a long time before Robin finally broke it. “If you’re trying to tell me somethin
g, Jared, I don’t think I’m getting the message.”
“I’m not sure there is one,” he said.
“You said you wanted to talk about us,” she reminded him. “I thought that maybe...”
“You thought something had changed,” he said bluntly.
That was the natural assumption. And something had, of course, but even he wasn’t sure what the change meant. Except what he’d already told her. He didn’t want to be apart from Robin for any of the time he had left.
Reminding her of his mortality wouldn’t be the smartest move he’d ever made. She had recognized a long time ago that his life could end in a heartbeat. It had happened to her father. And she had known, long before Jared did, that it could happen to him.
Up until that morning in the federal building elevator he hadn’t dwelt too much on the possibility. He had thought about it, but until that day, it hadn’t been quite real. Nor had it seemed possible his life could just suddenly be over. Now, for some reason, it did. It seemed both real and possible.
“Maybe some things have changed, but...I’m still not ready to give up my job,” he said, trying to be honest. To put into words what he felt when even he wasn’t sure exactly what that was. “At least...” The words trailed away, and Robin waited through the silence. “It’s just that I realized I’m not ready to give you up, either,” he said. “Not ready to give up on us, I guess.”
This was where she always repeated her condition. She couldn’t live with what he did. He understood all the reasons why. He just couldn’t accept that it had to be one or the other.
She had accused him of selfishness, and he supposed she was right. Because he still wanted both. He wanted to find a way to have the two things he cared most about in the world. His job and Robin. What he couldn’t accept was that having one excluded his having the other. They were both so much a part of who he was. They were who he was, he acknowledged. But he could never make Robin understand that.
“Then nothing, really, has changed,” she said, her voice flat, expressionless again.
“I guess I have,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“When Jeff died, I tried to tell you it was a fluke. That it couldn’t happen to me. You didn’t buy that, but at the time, I really believed what I was saying.”