The Spy Who Kissed Me

by Pauline Baird Jones

  “We’ve really got to start meeting like this,” I said, while the Fox News cameras rolled.

  “What the hell were you doing this time?” he asked, stroking the grass from my tangled hair.

  “Playing back up for Lee Greenwood?” I answered, brushing the grass from his stocking cap.

  He shook his head, grinned, then lifted me off my feet and spun us both in a circle as the fireworks finale lit up in the sky over our heads.

  The lady and the spy, together again and on Fox News. Surely I could count on them to edit in the fade to the commercial so my mother wouldn’t see the clinch?

  Then Kel kissed me and I found I didn’t care who saw what.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The media tried for straight, serious coverage of the pig in the park. There were long shots of the rally with its air of frenzied patriotism, the lights, the shouts, the flags, the people, while blank-faced journalists outlined the events leading up to the mass assassination attempt. Some scud studs even showed up. It wasn’t their fault the copy read like something from National Lampoon.

  And when they detailed the Federal agents moving into position barely before the terrorists, their poker-faced delivery only heightened the ludicrousness of the good and the bad lying in the cold practically side by side during the long wait for their differing calls to action.

  Lee Greenwood came across well, singing and helping to restore calm in the panic that followed, but the strobe lights, the fireworks, the smoke bombs, and Mrs. Macpherson’s knickers from a variety of camera angles, couldn’t play seriously no matter how hard they tried. There was rather a nice shot of me whacking Dag. I cut that one out. And the one of Kel and I kissing.

  The confusing plot and counter plot between Dag and Flynn, with its soap opera overtones was, in the end, too complicated for television sound bites. Flynn’s evangelical persona, combined with his attempts to “free” the American people from Congressional pork-lock, turned him over night into a folk hero. Instead of ending as near martyrs, Congress ended up with Congressional pie in the face.

  A major publisher put up Flynn’s bail as an advance against his story and he’d signed the made-for-TV movie rights before the ink could dry on his book contract. Talk show hosts were clamoring for him. Tee shirts, posters, buttons, and bumper stickers with his face popped up everywhere.

  There was some criticism, most of it from Congress, directed at the CIA for letting the assassination attempt get so far advanced before stopping it. The rest of the criticism was directed at the CIA for stopping it too soon.

  It didn’t help that Congress had voted several years earlier to stop funding on an anti-artillery device that would not only have stopped the plot altogether, but saved lives in the Gulf. In the end, no committees were convened to investigate.

  Dag and Muir fared less well with the public. Justice had to be served, so justice used them for scapegoats. The role suited them. They looked like criminals, which made it easy for the public to revile them. We worried about the effect on the children, but they took it in stride. Dom made some money selling autographs of his infamous relatives.

  It was a blessing in disguise that Congress had someone upon whom to vent their spleen, since it looked like it was going to be impossible to find an impartial jury to try Flynn.

  Somewhere during the nine-day wonder of it all, Kel went back to work saving the world. I went back to my roach, but it didn’t satisfy me. I’d acquired a taste for excitement. A taste for the spy who kissed me.

  I watched my bruises and wounds heal without acknowledging that I was in a holding pattern, waiting and wondering what the spy would do next, now that the fat lady had not only sung, but flashed her knickers to the world.

  At first I accepted that he’d be busy. The world was a big place with lots of bad guys to defeat. Then one morning, I woke up and found my bodyguards gone, an empty space with a grease spot the only sign of their recent occupation. I felt bereft. I’d become accustomed to their expressionless faces.

  Even worse, it forced me to face the fact that deep down my principles and my hormones were fighting each other in a battle that didn’t look like happening. Had that last, blazing kiss been a good-bye?

  When the fax machine started printing, I feared the worst. I rolled my chair over and watched as boldly scrawled words gradually appeared. He had a new assignment, foreign and would be out of the country for a time, but he’d call me when he got back.

  And if I believed that, I’ll bet he had a bridge he could sell me.

  It wasn’t like I’d expected anything permanent from him. We were worlds apart, in excitement and experience, but the least he could have done is offer to have a flaming, passionate affair with me. He had no right to assume I’d turn him down and then leave without giving me the chance to tell him all the carefully thought out reasons why it would never work between us. I was so mad, if he’d shown up and I might have insisted on an affair just to prove him wrong.

  But he didn’t. If I hadn’t had the picture of us from the paper, I might have wondered if I’d imagined the whole, incredible adventure.

  When I called Marion to tell her my book was ready for her red pencil, she sensed I was a little depressed.

  “I think you need to get away for a bit. Why don’t you catch up with your tour?”

  “My tour? The one you wanted me to go on six months ago?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You sent me my tour on without me?” I knew that sounded wrong, but I didn’t know how to make it sound right.

  Marion sighed hugely. “Of course not. It was a package deal, several children’s authors were going.” I could hear her flipping through some pages. “Actually, this might be good. This movie producer called. He wants to meet with you about animating Cochran. You could meet him in Vegas.”

  “I’m not sure I want to meet someone who wants to animate a roach. Especially in Vegas.”

  She ignored that. “They’re in Toledo right now. If you left in the morning you can just make the story hour at the library.”

  Didn’t that sound like fun? I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to stay. What if Kel came back? I didn’t want him to think I expected him to show up. I had my pride. Or what passed for pride. What the heck. Suddenly a bunch of kids looked easier to face than my own thoughts and the echoing silence of an apartment devoid of Kel, while being cluttered with memories of him.

  * * * *

  I caught up with my fellow authors in Toledo, Ohio, and came to wish I’d missed them. I’d forgotten that the teacher from the convention and my “main man, Michael” lived in Toledo. When I left the next day for Omaha, I think I was engaged to the dysfunctional fourteen year old. With my fellow authors, people who were nearly as boring as I was, I hop-scotched across the country, signing roach butts in such diverse places as Poughkeepsie and Salt Lake City. Everywhere I went, Flynn was just ahead of me, only on a better class of talk show and minus the roach tushies. It took me two weeks to get to Las Vegas for my meeting with the roach animator.

  It seemed much longer.

  I was walking down the breezeway at the airport when I heard my name being called as someone who needed to pick up a courtesy telephone. I eyed it suspiciously. Courtesy and telephone were a contradiction in terms. When they called my name again, I gave in.

  “Hello?” No answer. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Bel,” Kel said from just above my right ear.

  I jumped and dropped the telephone.

  “I told you not to do that!” I think my adrenal gland was out of practice, because my heart tried to pound itself right out of my chest. I turned, glad for the wall to support suddenly wobbly knees.

  He grinned. “Have a good flight?”

  I collected my dignity and my cool, trying to appear casually surprised, like we weren’t two people who’d exchanged a volatile kiss on Fox News when last we met.

  “The usual. What brings you to Las Vegas?”

  “I came to see you.�
��

  “Oh.” I swallowed. “How did you know I’d be here?”

  “We still have our ways.” His blue eyes were lit with laughter and something else. He stepped closer.

  There was no place for me to retreat with a wall at my back. Had he planned it that way? It was hard to think cool with my hormones fanning up a fire. Still fighting a rear guard defensive action, I arched my brows, taking care not to look at him as I trailed a finger down the side of the telephone. “I thought it was all over now.”

  “It is. Did you get my fax?” I nodded, my eyes narrowing as I remembered his fax. He didn’t seem to notice. “I got shipped out of the country the next day. I’ve been bouncing around the Middle East for the last month.”

  “I’ve been bouncing around the Mid West.” It seemed to symbolize our vast differences. Our vast, irreconcilable differences. He was a spy. I was a Baptist. Our twains didn’t know how to meet. Well, mine didn’t.

  “I know. I’ve been keeping tabs on you.” He stroked my arm, sending shivers up it.

  “You really do have your ways, don’t you?” Wonderful ways. “Kel…”

  He put a finger over my lips, halting my words, then traced their outline. “I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you, too,” I admitted, without enthusiasm. His smile widened. “But it doesn’t really matter, you know. There’s no way anything could….I don’t…you, me—we’re too different. You’re a spy and I’m—”

  “Amazing. You’re amazing, Bel.” He took my hand and kissed the palm, then said in a rush, “I’ve never known, never met anyone like you. I was going to ask you to move in, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it to you. I knew you deserved better than that, so I didn’t complain when I got sent to the Mid East.”

  My head was spinning from his words. My heart was spinning from his smell, the look in his eyes and the feel of him seeped like honey through my veins. My veins had missed him. All of me had missed him. It had been so long. Too long.

  “Kel…”

  I think he heard the denial mixed with longing in my voice.

  “You can’t run away from this. From us. I know. I tried. I thought a little distance would clear my head. But all that time away, all I could think about was you and how much I missed you.”

  “This is crazy,” I whispered. My hands crept around his warm, strong neck. Now his heart beat against mine. So strong, so steady. For me?

  “Maybe it is crazy, but I don’t care. All I know is, I want to come home to you. Tonight. Tomorrow night. Every night. You’re my other half. I need you.”

  It was as if his words released the dam in my heart, letting the delight, the love I’d felt but been afraid to admit, even to myself. It rushed through me like a storm. “I love you, too. I didn’t want to, but I do.”

  I think I started to cry, because he got a little blurry, but I was laughing, too. I touched him, his face, his hair, like I’d done in my imagination, but didn’t have the right to do in real life.

  He erased the minuscule distance between our mouths, covering mine with a deep hunger that swept away any doubt that might have lingered. He loved me. I could feel it. I could taste it. It was wonderful, even without the fireworks and cameras and danger. I felt it all the way to my toenails. And I’d just trimmed them, too. There were no cameras to record the moment, but we weren’t without an audience.

  “Hey, you two look like you could use my services,” a brash voice intruded upon our mutual delight.

  We turned toward him. Some kind of shoeshine guy stood there, lean and scrungy, with an ingratiating smile.

  “I’m wearing tennis shoes,” I pointed out, still dazed with new love.

  “I’ve already been shined.” Kel sounded dazed, too.

  “Not the shoes, dude!” He turned his kit around so we could read the other side. It said: “Marriages performed. Shoe shine extra.”

  I had to read it several times, before it computed.

  “No,” I said, then with more force, “no way!”

  I looked at Kel. He grinned, his brows arched in hope.

  “No,” I repeated, but even I could tell it sounded like yes.

  EPILOGUE

  One year later.

  The pig, the howitzer, was still sitting on the slab of cement, only partly obscuring the wheel marks from my first, wild night with Kelvin Kapone with a K. Even if it had been brought here for a nefarious purpose, it was able to serve its ostensible purpose as a memorial to the National Guard unit, so they left it where it was—though they spiked the barrel soon after the “incident.”

  I had an odd fascination with it that I couldn’t explain to myself, let alone anyone else. I didn’t come to the park as often because Dom asked for—and got—custody of Addison. I think Rosemary hoped I’d just say no but she had stolen my date, even if I no longer wanted him. Revenge is a dish, no matter what temperature it’s served.

  When I did come to the park, I made sure I sat where I could see the pig. It’s not everyone who could claim a howitzer changed the course of their life.

  I made my way to my usual bench and settled down, letting my pensive thoughts sift through everything that had happened over the last year, right up to my marriage by shoe shine guy. It had left my mother on the horns of a dilemma. While she understood the need for someone of my age to strike while the marriage iron was hot, it wasn’t possible for her to brag about it to her friends. It helped that no one was interested in my wedding, with Flynn and the pissed off Congress dominating any news cycles left over from scud studs.

  And there was her wedding to Steve, Jerome’s dad, and Rosemary’s wedding to Mike, to make up for the deficiencies of ours. Kel asked me if it bothered me, but the only thing that bothered me about our wedding was interrupting our honeymoon so I could talk to the guy who wanted to animate Cochran.

  He’s still working on it, by the way. It’s not as easy as he thought to animate a roach. I could have told him that, but the guy did mess with my honeymoon.

  Kel gave up the spy business and started a security company. I gave up the band. Kel said he was over the whole kissing the guys thing but he still gets a bit weird when the guys cluster around after church. They do it less often, now that they are all in college.

  I still do Cochran books, but I also finished my romance novel and sold it. Some people were so wrong about my ability to be romantic. The ex-spy who loved me helped with the research. His attention to detail is impressive. I’m not sorry I signed on for the lifetime course.

  The bench creaked as the ex-spy in question sat down next to me. I was glad we hadn’t stopped meeting like this. My shiver was not on account of the cold. The guy could still curl my toes with a look.

  “I knew I’d find you here.” His arm slid around my shoulders and he tugged me into warm contact with him.

  “Our mothers were packing for our first anniversary guilt trip. It seemed a good time to take a walk.” It helped that his mother couldn’t get over the way we got married either. They wanted us to renew our vows in church, but I was dragging my feet. I couldn’t remember if I’d told Kel that Reverend Hilliard asked me out, too. Whoever said Sunday was a day of rest hadn’t walked a mile in my shoes. I spent my Sundays keeping them as far apart as possible, helped by fact Mrs. M was firmly ensconced behind the organ. She didn’t like my flourishes by New Orleans any more than my mother did.

  “Relieving past glory?”

  He wasn’t too proud to admit that I helped solve the mystery of the pig in the park. How could I not be mad about the ex-spy?

  “It was quite the adventure,” I said. And while our next adventure hadn’t started here, it had kind of begun here. Maybe that’s why I’d come today. I shifted so I could see his face.

  “So, Kelvin Kapone with a K.” For a former grade school teacher who feared children almost as much as her mother, I felt strangely calm.

  He looked at me like I was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen and my insides dissolved just like they always d
id when he looked at me like that.

  “What Isabel Kapone with a K?” He traced my lower lip with a chilly index finger.

  His grip tightened, as if he was afraid I was about to bolt. It wasn’t something I could run away from, but he didn’t know that yet.

  “So, you know how our mothers have been nagging us to start a family?”

  He got this hopeful look. “I like trying to have a family.” He gave me lecherous look. “I like it a lot.”

  “I had noticed,” I said, my own look far from demure. “It appears all your hard work has paid off.”

  It took him sixty whole seconds to get it. His face lit up and he swept me up and spun me in a circle. Just like in the movies, only without the slow motion. When he set me on my feet again, he said with obvious male pride, “I’m going to be a dad.”

  That’s when it hit me. I was going to be a “my mother.” My stomach dropped, like I was on a roller coaster. Before I could get a serious case of hyperventilation going, Kel wrapped both arms around me.

  “You’ll be great,” he said, his lips against my cheek. As always he gave me delusions of competence. He turned me around, so my back was tucked against the solid warmth of his front. His hand slid down to settle on my stomach over the spot where our baby was growing. I put mine on top of his and felt my insides fill up with wonder and even a touch of awe. And a teensy touch of panic.

  “It’s a good thing I’ll have a highly trained, former federal agent assisting me.”

  He kissed the side of my neck, then leaned his forehead on my shoulder and sighed.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “I have this sudden urge to apologize to my mother,” he admitted, rubbing his chest like it hurt.

  I straightened and turned to face him. “I thought it was just me.”

  With unspoken, but mutual consent, we turned toward home.

  “Do you think we’ll get over it?” I asked. If I started apologizing to my mother who knew what impact it would have on our relationship—not to mention the space-time continuum.

  He grinned at me, bringing his dimple into play and I felt strong enough to resist all urges that didn’t involve him in a prone position. We may have started walking faster.