“The election is three weeks away.” Rob’s voice boomed in her ear. “Give me six breakfast meetings in that time and you’ll have a deal.”
Honestly, it was more than she’d hoped for. But something—maybe a long repressed memory of dealing with him—warned her not to agree yet.
“Three. Once a week. That’s the best I can do.”
“It’s not enough.”
“It has to be. I open the shop five mornings each week. If I get six hours of sleep a night, I’ve hit the jackpot. I’ll give up one of my mornings to meet with you, but there’s no way in hell you’re getting both of them.”
“Three breakfasts and one lunch.”
It could be worse. With luck, their schedules would conflict and lunch might not even happen. “Agreed. I’ll text you with details of where and when.”
“You can come here.”
“Neutral territory.” Preferably a drive-through, if she could get away with it.
“On one condition. You name the breakfast locations and I choose the lunch.”
“Only if it’s not in Calypso Falls.”
“I can live with that. Let me know where and when. Good talking to you, Jenna.”
She ended the call without bothering to respond.
Chapter Thirteen
Cole hadn’t truly grasped how much he needed to get away until he hit the Calypso Falls town limits and saw the town fading in his rearview mirror. He’d expected to be fighting off twinges of guilt, but instead, he was hit with a blast of pure bliss. For the next twenty-four hours, he could forget about everything except eating, sleeping, and bedding Jenna, all of it in a place where he knew nobody and nobody knew him. He hadn’t felt this free since he’d picked up the last box of his things and walked out of his New York office.
He turned the radio dial away from NPR and back to his pre-election preferred classic rock station. This was a day for singing along with something loud and fast and wailing.
Eric Clapton. Perfect.
Cole made his turn into the parking lot of the bus station where Jenna had insisted he pick her up. Despite the fact that he could have simply driven around the back of the strip mall if she was worried about them being seen together, she had been adamant.
“Call me paranoid, but I don’t want to give my father any more ammunition to use against us,” she had said on the phone. “It’s the bus station or nothing.”
So here he was, singing about Layla as he pulled up to the curb. Poor old Clapton. His life had been a mess when he wrote that song, and the fact that he was in love with the wife of his buddy George Harrison had probably been the worst of it. Cole felt for the guy. Falling for someone you knew you could never have . . . not a good place.
It made for some damned fine music, though.
Jenna popped out of the building in a ridiculously oversized straw hat and sunglasses. Should he tell her that between those and the bright turquoise overnight bag flung over her shoulder, she was probably more noticeable than she would have been had she simply walked out undisguised?
She tossed her bag into the backseat, hopped into the front, and slid down as low as she could. “Get us out of here. I think I saw someone I went to high school with.”
“Not until you fasten your seat belt.”
He didn’t have to see behind her glasses to know she was scowling. It was there in the sudden tightness of her chin. “I will. But I can’t hide and—”
“Nobody is tailing us, Jenna, and this car isn’t moving until I know you’re safe. So if you want us to get moving, sit up and fasten your seat belt.”
“Were you a flight attendant in a previous life?” But after a fast check of the window, she pushed upright. As soon as Cole heard the metallic click, he pulled away from the curb.
Slowly, though. Just to piss her off.
“So you think you saw someone you know?” He knew she wouldn’t like the question. Too bad. This was his revenge for all the times she had teased him.
“Yes. I’m not positive, because, you know.” She tugged on the brim of the hat. “But it still gave me the heebie-jeebies.”
“I never would have noticed.”
“Hey. If you’re going to lose this election, it’s going to be on your own merits, not because I messed things up for you.”
“Oh ye of little faith.” He checked the mirror and turned the corner. “There. We’re out of sight of the station. You can take off your disguise.”
“Not until we’re an hour out of town.”
“Jenna. Don’t you think you’re being a little paranoid?”
“Of course I am. But it’s for a good cause.” She ran a slow hand along his thigh. “Besides, I’ve always wanted to play Undercover Spy being forced to spill state secrets. I figure this counts as getting into character.”
His grip on the wheel tightened. “And my role in this scenario?”
“Why, you’ll be the one making me beg for mercy, of course.”
He swore he could watch his concentration fly out the window.
“Do me a favor?” he asked.
“Anything.”
“No more bedroom talk until we’re at the hotel. Otherwise I’m going to end up driving us off the road, and you’ve had your share of accidents already in this lifetime.”
She sighed. “Someday you men will learn to multitask.”
“What if I said that when it comes to you, I’d rather be sure I can give you every bit of my attention?”
She sat back with a laugh. “I’d say you redeemed yourself amazingly well there, Mr. Dekker.”
“A credit to my gender?”
“Trust me, you already had that nailed.”
He grinned and turned onto Route 96. It was a blue-sky autumn day, the leaves were fully ablaze, the temperature would be perfect for walking, and he was going to spend the afternoon exploring both a nice town and an amazing woman. A guaranteed win. His favorite kind.
“So I think we need a couple of ground rules for this getaway,” Jenna said. “First, no discussing the election. Not only do we talk about that all the time, but the whole purpose of bringing you along was to make sure you get a break from it.”
“I thought I was supposed to force you to divulge state secrets.”
“That, too.”
“What, that’s an afterthought now?”
“Trying to make sure we arrive intact, Sparky.” She lifted his hand from her thigh—when had it landed there?—and placed it on the wheel. “Second, we aren’t to discuss the interview. I’ve gone over everything a bajillion times, I knocked it out of the park in the first round, and I will do much better if I show up relaxed and confident. Which I won’t be if I’m up all night rehearsing my pitch.”
“Ah, so that’s why I’m here. To make sure you’re so relaxed that you don’t have any trouble sleeping.”
“You saw right through me. Think you’re up for the job?”
He was half-tempted to pull off the road and give her a brief preview of his qualifications, but focused on the nonexistent traffic instead. The more he stayed the course now, the faster they would be in Brockport.
“Final rule. No, wait. Number three: there will be ice cream.”
“You have to make that a rule?”
“Ice cream is important to me, Dekker, and all too rare. So yes. It’s a rule.”
“Okay. And the last one?”
“The last one. Well.” She tugged on her seat belt. “That would be that I bring you up-to-date on my parental unit, and then we not mention him again, either.”
He wouldn’t have worried if not for the way her words became more clipped.
“Okay.” Best to ease his way into this one. “I take it you talked to him.”
“Yes. We reached an agreement.”
Cole knew he shouldn’t automatically assum
e the agreement would be unfair to Jenna. He did it anyway.
“And?”
“And, Daddy dearest and I will be having breakfast a couple of times. In return, he will stay away from anything to do with the election.”
Cole twisted in his seat and checked. The hat and glasses made it hard to be sure, but he was pretty certain that she wasn’t happy.
“Jen, you don’t have to do this. Not for me.”
Her silence went on so long that he started to think he’d said something wrong.
“You know,” she said slowly, “if you tell this to any of my sisters I’ll say you’re delusional, but the honest truth is that I think that this is the excuse I was waiting for.”
He reached over and yanked the hat from her head. She yelped and jammed it into place.
“What was that for?”
“To make sure this is the same woman who kicked Robert Elias out of the coffee shop. Twice. Very eloquently, too.”
“Yes, you idiot. But that was different.”
“Obviously.” He checked the rearview. Nothing. “Explain it to me anyway.”
“When he came into the shop, and when he showed up at the debate . . . those were on his terms. His timetable. He caught me by surprise and I don’t deal well with that.”
“Okay.”
“But if I’m setting the time and the place, and I have time to be prepared . . . then the playing field is level.”
That, he could understand.
“Makes sense,” he said cautiously. “But does this mean you want to talk to him?”
“Want to? Not really. More like . . . I don’t know. I guess I feel I need to do this. Not just for you, though yes, if we’re being honest, I would do it to keep him away from you.”
“I told you, you don’t—”
“Yes, I do. Because your willingness to take me on despite my name shouldn’t be repaid with nastiness. And because the election is important to you, which means it’s important to me. And because I think you would make a damned fine mayor and I don’t want the town to have to muddle along with Tadeson for another two years just because my slimeball father mucked things up.”
If he hadn’t had to focus on the road, he would have kissed her. “That’s a pretty generous position from someone who can’t wait to leave the town behind.”
Her shrug was short and tight. “I told you, I don’t have anything against Calypso Falls itself. It’s just that I’ll always be an Elias when I’m there.”
But if that was all . . .
No. That was enough, he knew. At least it was for her. So it had to be enough for him.
“Anyway, the thing is, I am leaving. I’m not sending Robert a change of address card, so if I want to have a chance to grill him in person, this is it.”
“And because you’re officially doing it to help me, you won’t lose face by meeting with him.”
“I’m devious, I know, but yes.”
“You’re not devious, Jenna. You’re human. You’re making the best of a lousy situation, and you’re honest enough to admit to having mixed motives. In my book, that just makes it all the more admirable.”
“Good. My biggest fear in life was that I would die without ever doing something worthy of admiration.”
He would have laughed. But he wasn’t entirely sure she was joking. And given everything she had just admitted, he suspected that she might not be so certain herself.
***
True to his word, as soon as Jenna indicated that the subject of her father was finished, Cole refrained from referring to Rob again. But just because he wasn’t speaking about the man didn’t mean he’d forgotten about him.
Not constantly, of course. There was too much else happening, and all of it was a lot more compelling than a reappearing father. When they arrived in Brockport, Jenna asked to swing past the building where she would be interviewing, simply to orient herself. He teased her that she had broken her own rule and would need punishment, but when they finally made it to the hotel and were alone in the room, it turned out that he was the one who ended up begging for mercy.
Not that he was complaining.
They ventured out for a late lunch in the peak of the afternoon warmth. It was too gorgeous to sit inside—as Jenna pointed out, winter would be around soon enough to make that non-negotiable—so he’d been more than happy with her suggestion of sandwiches in the park along the Erie Canal. They sat on benches and watched the sun glint off the water, then shaded their eyes to squint at the geese starting their southward flight.
Cole tried hard not to think about Jenna’s impending flight. He wasn’t very successful.
They walked along the old towpath and shared a bag of sour cream and onion chips while telling stories about everything and nothing. He learned about her childhood insistence on wearing only purple clothing. She laughed at his admission that when he was a kid, he had played the viola for a year.
“Seriously? I would have thought you were more of a saxophone man.”
Which amazed him because, yes, after the viola he had indeed taken up the sax. Tenor. And had enjoyed it a lot more.
“You lawyers,” she teased. “You always have to have something to do with your mouths.”
It had been so funny and she had grinned up at him so appealingly from the curve of his arm that he had kissed her right there, long and deep, in the middle of a crowd of joggers and bikers and strollers, just because he could. And because he knew that once they went back to Calypso Falls, he couldn’t. Not like this. Not where anyone could see.
They walked hand in hand through the restored Victorian downtown, peeking in store windows, bumping hips, trading bites of ice cream. There had been dinner and more stories and a slow walk back to the hotel, punctuated by kisses beneath streetlights and sweetened by her head on his shoulder. Much as he wanted to get her back to the room, he found himself longing to walk even slower. To freeze this interlude when they could wander and be themselves in public. To soak up every minute of this time together while he had it.
Later that night, after he’d willingly done his part to make sure she was too sated to even think of waking in the night, he held her close and kissed the spot beside her ear. She smiled in her sleep and burrowed in closer, and he was pretty sure that this was about as amazing as life could get.
Which scared the crap out of him.
He’d known Jenna only a few months. They’d been together only a handful of weeks. Yet he knew that he was already closer to her, more tied to her, than he had been to Meredith. Knew, too, that it wasn’t just afterglow making him feel this way. It had been there in the park, when she pretended to read his mind and got a scary number of things right. And it was there in the office, when he watched her frowning over a press release and knew that she was going to tell him precisely what he’d said wrong—and exactly what he had to do to fix it. Most of all, it had been there in the car this afternoon, when she said so matter-of-factly that she would have dealt with her father only for him, if it had been required. That she thought he would be a good mayor. That she wanted him to win because it was important to him.
Meredith hadn’t shared his dreams. That was okay. There was nothing that said a couple needed to be equally invested in every hope. But Meredith hadn’t been willing to support him in them, either. When he had asked her to come with him, when he had suggested they try to keep things going long-distance, she wouldn’t give it a shot. To her, his dreams and wishes were simply the thing that came between them. She couldn’t see beyond that.
Jenna could. And that made her both the most amazing woman he’d known and the most dangerous one as well.
He pulled her tighter and breathed her in. Tomorrow she would walk into that interview building and knock their socks off, he was sure of it. She would get the job. How could she not? And when they called for a reference, as he knew they wou
ld, he would make sure Allison told them exactly how much she would be able to bring to their organization. He would do everything he could to make sure Jenna got her fresh start.
Even though he would much rather be giving her his heart.
***
Jenna walked out of the interview the next morning knowing that she had aced it.
It had been all she could do to keep from laughing out loud when things came to an end. Not that it had been an easy hour. Not at all. Aside from the fact that there were four people firing questions at her, all of them frantically scribbling down something as she gave her answers, the questions themselves had been tough. She’d had to dig deep and think fast and do it all while staying cool, calm, and collected.
Somewhere along the line, though, there was a shift. A moment when it hit her that she was doing this. Handling it. She was taking everything they were throwing at her and tossing it back to them, neat and tidy and pretty. A point when all she wanted to do was lean back and look them in the eye and say Bring it.
She was pretty sure they had sensed it, too. The atmosphere had shifted after that. There were a few jokes, a little laughter, some questions that she knew weren’t from the prepared list but came from genuine interest. The stuffed shirts lost a little of their batting and she caught a glimpse of the humans beneath. They seemed like good people.
She forced herself to remain sedate as she exited the sprawling old building and walked down the driveway to the sidewalk. She’d had Cole drop her off around the corner so there wouldn’t be any chance of him being spotted. Not for his protection this time, but for hers. She didn’t want any questions about her ride.
Still, she almost wished she’d tossed caution to the wind and told him to pick her up out front. Because even though it felt like she was floating above the sidewalk. she couldn’t wait to hop in beside him and give him a long kiss and tell him everything. The way she’d handled the question about her time between jobs. The reaction to her work with the election. The way she had caught the biggest boss grinning at her mention of being a barista, even though he turned it into a cough.
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