“I don’t believe her, and one day she’ll prove me right,” he muttered to himself as the phone rang and interrupted his musings.
“Covington.”
“How are you, son?”
His antenna shot up; why was his mother calling him? “What is it, Mom?”
“Nothing to worry about. The department wanted to know where you are, because they’ve left messages at your hotel that you didn’t answer, and they’d like you to call them soon as you can. You’re not going back to that, are you, son? It was so dangerous.”
“I don’t do undercover work any longer, Mom, but I’m on a leave of absence, and the chief may call me whenever he needs me. I’m a policy analyst now. Remember? Stop worrying.”
“Yes, but you made a lot of enemies in that other job, so you be careful. I’ll be praying for you.”
“Thanks. I’ll try to get down to see you soon. Unless plans change, I should be back in Washington Thursday night.” Just what he needed, another break in his book tour. He dialed the special code number.
“I’ll check back with you later today,” the chief said in response to his question. “Be prepared to spend a couple of days here, briefing a new man.”
“I hear you.” He hung up. With each day that passed, his lifestyle bore more heavily on him, and he became more certain that he wanted a normal life. He had quit the spy business, but he still didn’t own his time.
* * *
Allison hurried down to the hotel’s breakfast room the next morning, hoping to enjoy her coffee at her leisure. She glanced over her notes, searched her mind for any small thing she might have missed, and shook her head in bemusement. Not one sensational thing about Jacob Covington had she uncovered, at least not anything to which she’d sign her name. His raw sexuality wasn’t material for her report. The man’s skill at revealing only what he wanted known was unequaled by any other person she had interviewed. Her sigh of resignation prompted her to consider the implications of her interest in Jake. If she’d already let his sizzling masculinity put dust in her eyes and cotton in her ears, Lord help her professionalism. She had definitely better watch it.
“Hi.”
Her head came up sharply at the sound of his voice. “Hi. You’re early this morning.”
He grinned as if he knew that was one way of disconcerting her. “My antenna said you’d be down here, so I got here as early as possible.” He unzipped his briefcase and handed her a sheet of paper. “Here’s the day’s schedule.”
He had turned off his cell phone to avoid answering it in Allison’s presence, but when he opened his briefcase and saw the flashing red light, he figured his plans were about to change.
He pasted a grin on his face. “Excuse me a second,” he said and headed for the men’s room.
“Tonight?” he asked his chief.
“Yeah. Get here by two this afternoon. Our man is flying out from Ronald Reagan on Delta 4113 at five this afternoon, and I’d like him to have a couple of hours with you. He’ll meet you in the men’s room.”
“Right. I’ll be there.”
He ambled back to Allison, let a frown on his face give her the impression that he’d had a sudden reminder of something important. He’d use any ruse to allay her suspicions about the interruptions in his tour. His work with State was top secret, and the department took every means possible to ensure that he didn’t fall into the clutches of terrorists or kidnappers.
“This is terrible,” he said and meant it. “I have an appointment in Washington this afternoon.” He ran his fingers through his hair in a gesture of frustration. “I’m beginning to wonder if I need a social secretary; it wouldn’t do to—”
“What about your publicist?”
“Not the same thing. I’d like to take the one o’clock shuttle to Washington. Can you make that?”
She rolled her tongue around in her right cheek, and he wondered about her thoughts. A woman with her smarts and experience as a journalist had to question the sudden changes in his schedule.
“I can make it,” she said at last, “but won’t these interruptions prolong this tour?”
Her mind was at work all right, and he’d bet she hadn’t voiced her true thoughts. Quickly, he finessed the situation. “You’re probably right. See you down here at eleven, bags in hand.”
* * *
Jake put his briefcase in the plane’s overhead compartment and extended his hand for Allison’s. She spent a few seconds, evidently making up her mind, before handing him her briefcase. He took the aisle seat and got as comfortable as a man of his height could in a business-class airplane seat.
“What would you do if I held your hand?” he asked her and primed himself for a reprimand. It suited him best to get straight to the point. Besides, he liked to let a woman know what he thought of her and where she stood with him.
She glanced at him, then looked away. “I don’t know.”
So she had her own moments of truth, did she? What could he lose? He folded her left hand in his right one, and when she failed to protest, his heart took off, racing like a thoroughbred out of control. Spooked. He told himself to cool it, that it was nothing, that she was testing him. But he didn’t believe the lie. Unaccustomed to tripping around an issue, he gave life to his thoughts.
“You mean something to me, Allison. You could be important to me. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but—”
She interrupted him, her voice suggesting that she was afraid to hear more. “But in the end, we’ll go our separate ways. More’s the pity, because I have a feeling that you’re an exceptional man.”
Her fingers tightened around his, and she leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes. He stared down at her full, luscious mouth and sucked in his breath as frissons of heat rode roughshod over his nerves. Needing more than he’d probably ever get, he let his thumb graze over the tip of hers, rubbing gently and rhythmically until his action stunned him. He glanced down at her face—peaceful, seemingly unruffled—and wondered if she recognized the symbolism of what he’d just done. If she did, she had to be the world’s best actress.
* * *
Allison locked her lips together and squeezed her eyes tight. She didn’t dare utter a word, and nothing could have made her look at him, open and vulnerable to him as she was, for she knew what he’d see. His callused thumb staked a claim on her, its rhythmic friction filling her head with dreams and her body with desire. Yet she didn’t stop him and didn’t want him to cease. She hadn’t cried in five years, but if he kept up that...
His voice penetrated the haze of her thoughts. “Are you asleep?”
She shook her head, not trusting the voice that would surely betray her.
“Then I’d like to be inside your head. You haven’t moved a muscle in the last fifteen minutes.”
Her eyes flew open as if of their own will, and shivers beset her as she gazed up into his face and read his thoughts and feelings. Open and unsheltered. Eyes stormy and fierce with desire. “You... You’ve been looking at me?”
He released a long, heavy breath and plowed his left hand through his hair. “How could I not? Nothing and no one else in this plane attracts me.”
“Jake—”
He held up his free hand. “I know, I know. We must be circumspect. Heaven forbid we should admit to feeling anything.”
The wheels dropped and the changed sound of the engine told him that they would soon land. He smiled his pleasure and squeezed her fingers. “I don’t know when I’ll wash this hand again.” His left eye winked at her. “Must have magic powers. It’s been snug in yours for the last forty minutes, and I enjoyed it.”
She looked straight ahead. “Me, too,” she said and meant it. She figured she’d knocked him off balance, but hadn’t he done that to her? “What time are we meeting Monday morning?”
“Stay out of mischief, Allison.” His voice, choppy and hoarse, lacked its usual sonority.
“Wouldn’t think of it,” she replied, groping for emotional balance.
After staring at her until someone behind them yelled “Let’s go,” he turned and headed for the exit.
* * *
Just before he stepped into the terminal, he glanced over his shoulder, saw that Allison was preoccupied assisting another passenger, and ducked into the men’s room. He didn’t feel right about slipping away from her without saying goodbye, and especially not after the warmth they’d just shared. But he had a job to do, and he meant to make it up to her if she let him.
They had been back on the tour for two days. His cell phone rang as he headed for the shower that Wednesday morning, and he dreaded answering it. Allison hadn’t treated the slip he gave her in the airport the previous weekend with anything approaching generosity, and if he had to abandon the tour again so soon, she’d ask some questions. And she’d be entitled to answers.
He pushed the button. “Hello.”
“We’ve got word that an unknown operator placed an order for a mother lode of dynamite. We don’t want it delivered. I hope you can come up with a plan. I need it, pronto.”
Jake leaned forward and rested his chin in his palm. This was not what he wanted to hear. “I’m in the midst of a tour.” He wondered why he’d bothered to voice it since the chief knew that. First the department, and now the agency knew his every move, maybe his thoughts, too.
“We know, but this requires priority.”
He canceled his Thursday morning interview and telephoned Allison. “I’ve postponed my remaining interviews for this week and tomorrow’s twelve o’clock book signing because I have to get back to Washington tomorrow night. Unless I let you know otherwise, I should be going to Boston Monday morning as planned.”
“Didn’t the same thing happen last week when you suddenly remembered you had an appointment? I’d give a lot to know why your schedule is uncertain all of a sudden.”
“And you’d pay too dearly, because there’s no mystery involved. I hope I haven’t spoiled your plans, but I’m learning that a six-week book-signing tour can be filled with glitches, changes, and disappointments. You’d better get used to it.”
Dissatisfied with the idea of sitting in his old office trying to put together a plan to foil delivery of a load of explosives, Jake phoned the chief. “Give me the particulars, and I’ll find a quiet place somewhere and work it out. This is a tough one.”
“What sort of place?”
He could tell from the chief’s tone of voice that the idea didn’t please him. “Someplace where I can swim, fish, and get fresh air. Idlewild, for example.”
“I’ll check out the place and get back to you in a few minutes.”
Jake knew his boss would do everything possible to accommodate him. Putting together that kind of foolproof plan would challenge the most shrewd intellect, and although he considered himself sensitive to criminal behavior, guessing a man’s moves could backfire. He needed a clear head.
“No problem,” the chief said when Jake answered his cell phone. “Get it to me as quickly as you can.”
Jake didn’t bother to tell Allison he had changed his destination; time enough for that Monday morning.
Jake phoned Morton’s Hotel in Idlewild and booked a flight to Reed City. Six hours later, he stood in an anteroom off the hotel’s lobby selecting a fishing rod.
“Haven’t seen you around here before,” the woman said as she approached his spot carrying a rod, a reel, and a tin box in which he assumed she stored bait or lures.
“I don’t suppose you have,” he answered, hoping to discourage conversation.
“Staying long?” She threw out her line, and he knew he was watching an expert. Few occasional fishermen could cast with such deftness.
“A couple of days.”
“Not very talkative, are you?”
“I’ve yet to catch a fish when I was talking,” he said, standing in order to cast farther from shore.
“Hmmm. Where you from?”
If the woman hadn’t been at least seventy, he might have answered sharply. He told her part of the truth.
“I just came in from New York.”
Within five minutes, the woman reeled in two pikes. “Well, I’ve got plenty for supper and some to freeze for winter. Stay as long as you like.”
He told her goodbye and left after pulling in a bass, which he presented to the hotel’s cook.
* * *
“It must be him,” Allison heard her aunt Frances say when she answered the phone that Friday night. “Who else could it be? When he stood up, he nearly knocked my eighty-year-old eyeballs out. And he had on his clothes. That one was a real looker. Just didn’t talk much. Closemouthed as a kid in a dentist’s office. Child, if he’s the one—”
“I’d better start spending my weekends up there instead of down here in Washington, D.C., where you see ten women for every man, and most of those are ineligible.”
A lecture was coming, and she’d brought it on herself with her thoughtless comment. Her aunt did not disappoint her.
“The older you get, the fewer men there are, Allison, and the city you’re in hasn’t got a thing to do with it. When you’re twenty, everybody your age is single; when you’re forty, you’re already sifting through has-beens and never-would-have-beens. At age fifty, you’re dreaming. So you watch out.”
After hanging up, Allison phoned Connie. “I’m bored. Want to go to Blues Alley?”
“Did I ever say no? Where’s tall, tan, and terrific tonight?”
“No idea. Meet you there ten minutes to eight.”
* * *
“Would you believe this?” Connie asked her when the band assembled on the stage. “No Buddy Dee and no Mac.”
The manager went to the microphone and addressed the patrons. “We have a real treat for you tonight, folks. Mark Reddaway will show you what the blues are all about, but don’t let the man fool you. Monday morning he’ll be in his office on Connecticut Avenue designing skyscrapers.” He put his hands over his head and applauded. “Give it up for Mark, everybody.”
“They must be kidding,” Connie said when the man, elegant in a gray pin-striped suit and with a twelve-string guitar strapped across his shoulders, began picking and singing “It Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do.”
“Close your mouth, girl,” Allison said as Connie looked as if she’d been stung by a bee. Allison didn’t remember having seen the polished and self-assured woman so attentive to anything other than her work as an engineer. Tall, svelte, and fashion-conscious, Connie was a woman at the top of her field professionally and with a tight grip on the remainder of her world. Allison couldn’t believe the lost look in Connie’s eyes. At least she wasn’t the only woman a man had poleaxed the minute she saw him.
For the remainder of Mark’s performance, Connie, always talkative and with a ready quip, didn’t say one word. The set ended, and Allison watched the man bowing to the prolonged applause and whistles, obviously pleased.
“What...” Connie’s chair was vacant, and when Allison looked toward the stage, she saw Connie standing there shaking hands with Mark Reddaway.
“What was that about?” she asked her friend when Connie returned to the table for the beginning of the second set.
“Uh...tell you later. Do you mind leaving alone? I...uh... I want a chance to get to know Mark. Thanks, friend.”
“Sure. Go for it.” In the five years that she and Connie had been friends,
the woman dated frequently, but hadn’t become attached to anyone. “You think this has possibilities?” she asked Connie.
Connie lowered her gaze in an uncustomary show of diffidence. “I know it has. It... Lord, I hope so.”
At home later, Allison pondered her feelings for Jake and her increasing insecurity in regard to them. She had detected a mystery about the man, a puzzling demeanor that should warn her to steer clear of him, and it did. But then, he would show her how gracious, kind, and considerate he could be, or that wink of his would captivate her, and she’d forget her misgivings.
* * *
Jake completed the plan, faxed it to his chief, and was back in New York Sunday night. He imagined that Allison spent the weekend in Washington and quickly verified it. As he was about to dial her phone number, he received a call from the chief. “This is great. Congratulations on an excellent job. I’d like you here Wednesday morning for at least half a day, so we can discuss it with the secretary.” In his mind’s eye, he could see the chief throw up his hands, palms out, when he said, “Just half a day is all I’m asking.”
He figured that, as far as Allison was concerned, he’d just banged one more nail in his coffin, but this had to do with the welfare of the United States of America. His right shoulder lifted and fell quickly, almost as if by reflex. “I’ll be there.”
After his book signing at Borders Bookstore Tuesday evening, Jake admitted to himself that, at his signings, lectures, and interviews, Allison was a comforting and stabilizing factor, one who always seemed immersed in what he said and did.
Last Chance at Love Page 6