Protect Me, Love

by Alice Orr

  “I’m really hungry,” Delia had said as her excuse for rushing Nick along.

  Of course, that meant she actually had to eat some of the very thick ham and Swiss on rye, which had been her order at the deli. The sandwich was delicious and made her wish she had time to savor it. She also couldn’t help thinking about how much she would enjoy taking full advantage of yet again being in a hotel room alone with Nick. She caught him gazing at her, between bites of his corned beef, with a look in his eyes that told her he might be pondering that same advantage. This was the signal for her to press forward with her plan. She’d already rehearsed what she was going to say a dozen times in her head.

  “Nick, I’m afraid I have a very big favor to ask of you,” she began.

  “What’s that?” he asked, wiping his mouth with one of the coarse paper napkins from the deli.

  “I left something at my apartment, something I can’t get along without.” She rushed on before she could lose her nerve. She’d told many untruths since going into hiding. It was much more difficult to lie to him now, especially since just this morning she’d pledged to be truthful with him from now on. “I take medication,” she said. “For my stomach.”

  “I didn’t know that.” He looked skeptical.

  “I don’t like to talk about it,” she said, “but if I don’t get my pills I’ll be very sick. I’d go get them myself, but—”

  “No,” he interrupted, raising his hand as if to stop her. “I’ll go. You stay here and rest.”

  “I’d actually like to take a bath,” she said, not proud of herself for how good she was at making her story even more believable.

  Still, she had to let him finish his sandwich. She was subjected to further maddening moments while he bundled himself into an extra sweater and wound a long scarf around his neck in preparation for reentering the blizzard that continued to rage outside. Nick was on his way out the door at last when he turned toward her.

  “Don’t let anybody in,” he said. “Absolutely nobody till I get back. Will you promise me that?”

  “I promise,” she said, feeling yet another lie stick in her throat.

  He pulled a gun from his pocket and pressed it into her hand. She opened her mouth to protest, then shut it again. As much as she hated guns, she’d be wise to go armed on the trip she had in store for herself tonight.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nick was gone at last. Delia could hardly believe she’d finally gotten him out the door. Now she missed him. The hotel room, though fairly small, felt empty and echoing. She bundled herself up quickly—extra socks, a second sweater, her heavy boots—and left only ten minutes or so behind Nick, but not by the front entrance. He might have asked the desk clerk to watch out for her. Nick was definitely protective enough to do that. Delia wondered if he would hover over her quite so closely if it wasn’t his job to do so.

  Ordinarily, she might have found such attentiveness suffocating. Yet Nick’s attentions made her feel warm and peaceful, as if she’d been tucked up inside a thick, soft blanket that kept her from bumping against the hard edges and sharp corners of life. She’d had enough experience with such collisions to make a little swaddling very welcome. Unfortunately, for the moment she’d chosen to slip out from beneath the blanket of Nick’s protection. She was on her own.

  Delia crept down the narrow back stairs of the small hotel and let herself out through the heavy, steel fire door that clamped shut fast and locked tight with a click behind her. The alleyway was dimly lit and cold, with snow sifting down from the strip of open sky between the buildings several stories above her head. Covered trash cans lined the scarred brick walls and were already crowned by inches of white. A single bulb in a metal cage over the doorway did little to disperse the gloom. Delia shivered, though the layers of clothing she was wearing didn’t really let in much cold. She hastened down the alleyway, relieved that there were no tracks other than her own in the snow. She couldn’t imagine even the most enterprising street criminals out plying their nefarious trade on a night like this, but there was no such thing as being too cautious in New York City.

  The thought reminded her that she was embarking upon a mission that was anything but cautious. A woman alone traipsing around the waterfront after dark could be a target for all kinds of danger no matter what the weather. She pulled her cap down around her face. Any signs of her femaleness were muffled under the bulk of sweaters and her long, shapeless coat. The cap plus a scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face completed the camouflage. Luckily, when she left the alley for the thoroughfare, nobody was paying much attention to her anyway as they trudged along through the storm.

  Delia turned her thoughts and planning toward what came next—how she would get from here to the Seaport. Most seasoned New Yorkers were in the habit of mapping out their mode of transportation before going anywhere. They would weigh one alternative against the other—taxi, car service, bus, subway. The decision often depended on the destination and the relative safety and speed of the route traveled to get there. Tonight, Delia’s decision would be determined by the elemeats. A taxi would be impossible to find. Car service would take too long getting here. Besides, street level traffic had to be in a state of nearly terminal gridlock as the snow piled up and the roadbed became more and more slippery. There was a bus straight down Broadway to Lower Manhattan but no bus lane to facilitate progress through the snarl of vehicles. She was too far away to walk it, either. Subway was the inevitable solution.

  Delia slogged toward the corner. She’d have to consult the map below ground on the wall next to the token booth. She didn’t travel this way often enough to have memorized the train routes. She knew buses better because they were her preferred form of public transport. Her years of paranoia made her feel safer in a vehicle where she could see out the windows into the surrounding world. She also liked the fact that, unlike on a subway, she could jump off a bus at any corner. Still, the underground had to be her choice tonight. She shivered again at the thought of how unfamiliar she was with her destination. She knew very well that the surest way to get yourself into trouble in the city was to stop using your head. Going into strange territory after dark was definitely not a wise move. For Delia, however, this evening’s journey was not about using her head as much as it was about following her heart. She hunched her face into the folds of her scarf and hurried toward the subway entrance.

  NICK DIDN’T LIKE leaving Delia alone, but he could tell she was trying to get rid of him. He guessed she needed some time on her own. He could understand why she might want to slow her world down for a while right about now. He would have preferred to hold her in his arms as she slept or, better yet, to take that bath she’d mentioned with her. The thought of water glistening across the perfect roundness of Delia’s breasts and her sleek thigh lifting out of a foam of bath bubbles made him all but groan right here in the hallway outside her apartment door. He’d have run out into the stormy night and searched the city up and down for bubble bath if that would make this fantasy come true.

  Nick cleared his throat and adjusted his jeans to accommodate the sudden snugness in the area of his zipper. He couldn’t escape the fantasies of her that flitted regularly across his mind. She was even more beautiful than five years ago, when she’d been on the skinny side, lovely but spare in the flesh department. She’d acquired just enough of that flesh since then. She was a provocative and appealing girl five years ago. Last night, when he slipped her nightgown from her shoulders, he’d discovered a voluptuous woman.

  He could see her now, and feel her, too, the way she moved in his arms. Her hips rolled in a rhythm so sensuous he’d been lured along as her partner in a dance of love. Everywhere he touched her, she responded like a rapturous instrument beneath his fingers, playing exquisite music just for him. He’d been attracted to her five years ago as Rebecca Lester, though his code of professional ethics had kept him from doing anything about it. He’d wanted her then but with a much paler passion than what had set
him burning last night. Delia was fully a woman now. She knew what a man needed and also what she needed herself. Yet he sensed she hadn’t learned these things in the arms of other men. He sensed she’d been very alone for a very long time. The intensity of her hunger told him that. He wished he could be satisfying that hunger for both of them right now.

  Nick did groan this time. If he didn’t stop tormenting himself with such thoughts, he’d be running back to the Tivoli before he had a chance to accomplish what he’d come here to do. He reminded himself of how much Delia said she needed those pills from her medicine cabinet and did his best to return his attention to her apartment door. The slip of paper was still there, exactly where he’d left it. That meant no one had been here. Nobody had pulled on the door, anyway.

  Nick let himself in using the key Delia had given him and was immediately assailed by the scent of evergreen. He experienced a small twinge in the area of his heart. He might have switched on the lights for a better view of the blue spruce, but he’d already decided to maintain a low profile while he was here. A flashlight would be the best way to do that. He had to content himself with a glance at the tall, tapering silhouette against the glimmer of streetlight filtering past the window blinds. Even that brief glimpse made him think of colored lights reflecting in the windowpane—colored lights dancing over Delia’s soft skin…. Nick shook himself hard enough to make those lights wink off in his imagination. He flicked on the flashlight in his hand instead and trained the beam onto the floor and away from the windows as he headed for the bathroom. He resolved to wrap a tighter rein around his fantasies, but he doubted even his willpower was that strong.

  A few minutes later he was letting himself out of Delia’s apartment with her pill bottles tucked into his jacket pocket. His mind was still on those fantasies he’d been having only moments before. He was pondering what their power might be indicating about his feelings for Delia and what he should do in response to those feelings. Usually, Nick didn’t do a lot of pondering. He was more of a straightforward, action kind of guy. These uncharacteristic, deeper thoughts took up most of his attention as he bent to secure yet another small strip of paper between the lower section of the door frame and the door. All he felt was the first edge of the blow. Then everything went black.

  DELIA WAS RUNNING late for her rendezvous on the waterfront. Unfortunately, actually running was out of the question. Otherwise she’d have been racing down John Street as fast as her feet could carry her. Even on an ordinary night, this part of Lower Manhattan was all but deserted after workday hours. Tonight, the falling snow added to the emptiness. The buildings here were tall with gray stone facades, and the street was narrow. The streetlights were on, but mostly they illuminated the halo of blowing snow immediately circling each lamp. The rest of the street was as gray as the fronts of the buildings. All sound was muffled, including the whistle of the wind up from the riverfront a few blocks ahead. Delia could feel that wind, even if she couldn’t hear it, slapping against the narrow strip of her face that remained exposed. She pulled her scarf up higher till only her eyes were visible and did her best to hurry on.

  She thought she’d become accustomed to isolation in these five, solitary years, but that was nothing compared with how alone she felt right now. She might have been a space explorer stranded on some bleak, white moonscape with gray phantom shapes rising on either side. She considered backtracking to Fulton Street, which might be less deserted, but she was already past the hour when she was supposed to meet whoever had written her that card. She couldn’t allow herself to think of that person as her father, though her heart ached to do so. She wanted more than anything for her father to be alive. She’d forced herself to shut out the thought of him all these years. Now it came rushing back, springing tears to her eyes. She dabbed at them with her gloved hands, afraid they might freeze. That would be all she needed tonight, to have her eyes suddenly iced shut in addition to the rest of what she had to deal with. The absurdity of that image threatened to drive a burst of hysterical laughter from her throat. She gulped to keep it there and slogged on.

  The snow was deepening and drifted. No shoveling had been done yet. Offices in the vicinity had probably let their workers go home early. The walkways would have been less buried then, no need to shovel till the snow stopped or at least till very early the next morning, before everything opened up again. Delia pressed on, her body bent against the chill of the wind, lifting her feet with each difficult step as if she were walking through a knee-high desert of snow. Actually, she was doing exactly that. Another image to add to the general creepiness of this experience. Thank heaven, she could finally see the comparative breadth and brightness of Pearl Street just ahead. She hurried toward it, like a bedouin toward an oasis.

  Delia had visited South Street Seaport several times in her solitary explorations of the city. On a normal evening this area east of the cobbled gateway at the junction of Pearl and Fulton streets would have been an exception to the general desertion of nighttime Lower Manhattan. The street would be occupied by diners from the restaurants, revelers from the taverns and cocktail lounges, strollers browsing the shops and gazing up at the spotlit masts of the Seaport Museum’s antique sailing ships moored along its piers. Christmas was an especially festive time in this part of town. Caroilers costumed in memory of the nineteenth century Age of Sail performed on street corners. Father Christmas might even appear among them or the Ghost of Christmas Past. The shops were done up at their yuletide best. Brightly lit Christmas trees perched high up in the crow’s nests of the museum ships. Delia had come down here last year at this time and found it all delightful.

  There were no carollers tonight, no revelers or strollers or browsers, no Father Christmas, either, though she could readily imagine a ghost of some kind or other materializing out of the gloom. Still, there were more lights here and the thoroughfare was wide, closed to traffic had there been any. Along this broad, open stretch, the snow had drifted away from the center of the street and up against the buildings on either side. Delia found that more shallow center track and was able to pick up her pace some. She had no competition for her position on the pathway. The shops were all closed, and the restaurant windows were empty. Not even a stray, stalwart tourist was out here to brave the wrath of winter. Delia couldn’t help suspecting more strongly than ever that she was on a fool’s errand.

  She glanced up for reassurance toward the rigging of the Peking, the crown jewel of the Seaport’s permanently docked sailing fleet. If the lit-up trees were there, their sparkle was lost behind the blizzard, which roiled even more thickly here at the edge of the East River where it began to widen into New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. Delia sighed. She could have used that glimmer of holiday cheer right now as her heart threatened to waver from its determination to follow the instructions on the Christmas card crumpled into the inside pocket of her coat. She’d turned left from Fulton onto South Street, and there was still no one in sight, nobody up the block to Beekman or past it, nobody under the FDR Drive, which vaulted on its massive steel framework high above South Street. Delia could see well enough even in this dimmed light to know that she was alone here.

  She might have pulled out the card and read it again, but that wasn’t necessary. She’d committed its message to memory. She was in the right place, but she wasn’t here at the right time. Or maybe the sender of the card had been put off by the weather, or thought Delia would be, and decided not to come. Whatever the reason, Delia appeared to have made this trek for nothing. Under other circumstances, she might have stopped to note that she’d meanwhile had the unique experience of snowbound Lower Manhattan and that what lay around her right now really was a beautiful sight. Unfortunately, she wasn’t in the proper frame of mind to be receptive to that beauty at the moment. She was mostly frustrated and suddenly aware, with a growing acuteness, of how cold she was becoming.

  “Damn,” she muttered, and stamped her foot, both to punctuate that frustration a
nd against the numbness creeping upward from her toes.

  All of a sudden she remembered Nick. She was almost shocked to realize that she actually had not thought of him more than a few times since she’d left the Tivoli and not at all since exiting the subway at the World Trade Center. Up to that point he’d been solidly planted in her thoughts for what felt like an extremely long time. Her fixation on her waterfront destination and quest had driven even handsome, fascinating, maddeningly compelling Nick Avery from her nearobsessed mind. He was very likely back at the Tivoli by now, or certainly close to arriving there. He’d be terribly worried to find her gone.

  Delia peered through the snow searching for a pay phone and spotted one near the corner of Beekman Street. She hurried toward it, pulling off a glove to rummage in her coat pocket for a quarter. She was in the habit of keeping phone change there along with a spare subway token or two. Her fingers had numbed considerably. They weren’t as adept as usual at telling the shape and size of one kind of coin from the other. It took her the full distance to the phone to fish out the quarter she needed. She was intent upon not allowing her cold, clumsy fingers to drop it when she spotted a stooped figure emerging from the gloom across South Street under the FDR Drive. Whoever it was hesitated, still too far away and obscured by the veil of falling snow for Delia to make out anything other than that this person wasn’t very tall. Her father hadn’t been very tall, either.

  Delia’s heart skipped into her throat. “Daddy,” she cried out. “It’s me. Topsy. I’m here.”