Ronnie blinked once, twice, as his words penetrated. “They burn a little, but I can see. I think they’re all right.” At the thought of how easily she could have been blinded, a wave of nausea hit her. “Oh, God, I’m going to be sick.”
She stumbled into the nearest stall, dropped to her knees, and emptied her stomach into the bowl. When she was done, she managed to get shakily to her feet and turned to find Quinlan watching her from the stall’s doorway.
“Sit,” he directed when she swayed. Ronnie sank down on the open seat, leaning forward, crossing her arms on her knees and cradling her head there.
“Stay put.” He left her for a moment, then returned, hunkering down in front of her.
“Here.”
The paper towel he handed her was wet and cold. Ronnie wiped her face. The nausea receded, leaving her with a hideous taste in her mouth. She needed a drink of water badly.
“Better?” Quinlan asked when she lifted her head. With him crouching on the floor in front of her, their eyes were on a level. His were blue, she saw as their gazes met, a deep grayed blue with a darker ring around the iris and the beginnings of crow’s feet at the corners. His brows and lashes were thick, dark brown tipped with gold. His nose was straight, his lips a little thin but well cut and firm. The lean angularity of his face gave him an austere look. No sins of the flesh for him, she thought. He looked like the type who ate, drank, and did everything else in moderation, and scorned those who were less disciplined.
“I’m okay,” she said, not quite certain it was the truth, and stood up, one hand on the wall of the stall for support. He stood, too, directly in front of her, frowning when she seemed less than steady on her feet.
“If I were you, I’d give it a minute.”
“I need a drink of water.”
He moved back out of her way to allow her to exit the stall. As long as she had the wall for support, she managed, but when she let go to traverse the few steps to the sink, she tottered sideways. She couldn’t believe she was so unsteady on her feet. That, the nausea, and the icy cold feeling that was snaking along her limbs, combined to put her in a state that, despite her brave words, was still very far from being “okay.”
He caught her elbow before she completely lost her balance, then wrapped his arm around her waist. Supporting her over to the sink, he turned on the cold tap. She bent to cup her hand under the flow and rinse out her mouth, then take a drink. After a moment she felt strong enough to sluice her face with both hands.
“I’m sorry,” she managed as he passed her a dry paper towel. Straightening, she met his gaze in the mirror. He stood behind her, one arm around her waist, obviously on guard in case she should start to lose her balance again. As she dried her face, he watched with a frown. Seen as a backdrop for her own slenderness, he looked unexpectedly big and broad-shouldered. Though she was wearing three-inch heels, he still topped her by several inches. His arm encircled her waist from behind. His hand looked large and brown and masculine as it lay flat against the purple linen covering her stomach.
With a brief flicker of feminine awareness, she registered that he was a very attractive man.
“For what? Getting paint thrown on you? It sure as fire wasn’t your fault.” Through the mirror, his gaze ran over her. His voice dripped of the South like a hot biscuit overloaded with honey.
“I don’t think playing nursemaid ordinarily falls under a political consultant’s job description.” Her voice was rueful.
“We’re an adaptable bunch.” His eyes crinkled at the corners, and he smiled at her through the mirror. “Whatever it takes to get the job done.”
“I can’t believe I threw up.”
“It’s the shock. I don’t think you’re hurt much, though. Not physically.”
That was what she thought herself. Ronnie took a deep breath, willed herself to get a grip, and leaned forward to examine her face in the mirror. As he felt her weight shift solidly onto her own two feet, his arm fell away from her waist and he took a step backward.
Though her eyelids were slightly swollen, the eyes themselves weren’t injured, Ronnie decided, noting the normal size of her pupils and the rapidly returning clarity of her vision. But if she wasn’t hurt, she certainly was a mess. The front third of her hair was soaking wet, tucked behind her ears and dripping onto her shoulders, and her bangs stood up around her forehead like a cockatoo’s crest. Bright red paint still streaked her hair, smeared her ears and neck, speckled her arms, spotted her dress. Her face was utterly white except where her mascara had smudged. Her brown eyes were bloodshot and watery, her full mouth blurry-looking and unsteady. Blush, powder, lipstick, eye pencil—all had vanished. Her dress, a lovely Anna Sui original in delicate Irish linen, was ruined. Red splotches that looked like obscene giant poppies dotted the purple cloth; fine splatters of paint, drying now, ran clear down the length of her legs and across the toes of her high-heeled beige sandals.
Nothing she had on, with the exception of her underwear, had escaped the paint.
“Oh, my pearls!” Horrified as her gaze touched on them, Ronnie lifted a hand to the expensive choker that Lewis had given her shortly after they had married. “They have paint all over them! They’ll be ruined!”
She found the clasp, but could not release it. Her arms felt heavy as lead when she raised them. Her fingers were clumsy.
“Hold still.” Moving close behind her, he pushed her hair aside and dealt with the clasp himself, his fingers warm as they brushed the nape of her neck. As the pearls slid free, she reached for them, meaning to hold the choker under the gushing water. He shook his head at her and did it himself.
“You’d better check your earrings,” he said.
Thus prompted, Ronnie saw that the pearls in her ears were striped with red. She tried to remove them, but her fingers could not seem to grasp the tiny clasps.
“Could you help me, please?” she asked. He glanced at her through the mirror, saw her difficulty, and set the pearl necklace on the sink ledge. This time his fingers were cold from running water as he deftly freed the pearls from her ears.
“Don’t drop them down the sink,” she cautioned. “They’re real.”
“I don’t doubt it.” His voice was dry. Holding her earrings in his fist so that they could not fall into the sink but water could pass through his fingers, he looked at her through the mirror. “You’ve got paint in your ear.”
Ronnie turned her head, examining the ear he indicated. He was right. Wetting a paper towel, she wiped out that ear and then the other, determined not to give in to the weakness that made her knees feel like jelly. She then went to work on the streaks in her hair.
The red smears on the paper towel looked like blood, she thought as she exchanged one paper towel for another. Thank God it wasn’t. She’d been lucky, she thought; the woman had only come after her with paint, not a gun.
Not for the first time, Ronnie wondered if the cost of getting everything she had ever wanted was too high.
She’d aimed to marry well, and she had She’d aimed to be rich, and she was. She’d aimed to be well known, in the public eye, a personage rather than a nonentity. All those girlhood dreams had come true.
But none of it was as wonderful in reality as it had been in her fantasies, in her plans. She’d gotten what she wanted, all right—but it didn’t feel as good as she had imagined it would.
Today it didn’t feel good at all.
At the center of her charmed life, there was a gnawing emptiness. The realization made Ronnie feel sick all over again. “I can’t go back out there,” Ronnie said, staring at herself in the mirror, her fingers curling around the rim of the sink. The used paper towel fell from her nerveless fingers. “I can’t.”
“I’d say your engagements were just effectively canceled for the rest of the day.” Quinlan removed the earrings from the stream of water and wrapped them and the necklace in a paper towel. “We need to get you checked out by a doctor, for one thing.”
“Oh
, God, it’s going to be in all the papers,” Ronnie said, shivering as she thought of the headlines that were sure to result. It wasn’t her fault, none of it was her fault, but nevertheless she was going to be made to look bad, she knew. They always made her look bad: newspapers, TV, magazines, whatever. The second Mrs. Honneker, they called her. There was always the hint of a sneer.
Quinlan started to reply, but whatever he had been going to say was lost as the door to the rest room burst open.
“Ronnie!” Thea stood poised on the threshold for an instant, backlighted by the brilliant sunshine outside. Her gaze found Ronnie, and she darted into the small rest room, followed by what seemed like a veritable army of people: Rose, a trio of state troopers, fair officials with their orange badges, and five or six others.
Turning to face them, Ronnie felt her heart start to pound. They were crowding around her; who were all these people?
“Oh, God, we didn’t know where you’d gotten to! Are you okay?” Thea clutched her arm, anxiously looking her up and down. Ronnie took a deep, calming breath and started to answer in the affirmative.
A camera flash went off in Ronnie’s face before she could get out so much as a word. Reporters. Of course. They were like buzzards, drawn by instinct to the scene of carnage. Where the scavenger birds scented death and decay, the scavenger press scented the possibility of lurid headlines.
“Oh, no!” She threw up an arm to shield herself from the flashing lights in an almost exact reenactment of the gesture she had used to block the paint thrower’s aim. The irony of that was not lost on her.
In both cases she was defending herself from assault.
“Mrs. Honneker, can you tell us …”
The rest of the question was lost to Ronnie as they all crowded closer, pushing her back against the sink. The hard enamel dug into her spine. Her stomach churned anew; her knees threatened to give way. Flashbulbs exploded around her like bottle rockets on the Fourth of July. Words bombarded her from all sides, so many she could hardly make sense of them. She felt like an animal at bay.
“Ronnie, oh my God, I can’t believe what happened, should I call an ambulance?” Thea touched Ronnie’s dress just above her hipbone, then drew her hand back and stared at the red paint on her fingertip, her expression horrified.
“No,” Ronnie said, dry-mouthed. “I’m all right.”
Cameras continued to flash. The questions being hurled at her were growing louder.
“Mrs. Honneker, we’re so sorry.…” A fair official pressed close to apologize. Behind him, a strobe light was being set up and turned on. Blinking, Ronnie threw up a hand, temporarily blinded by its brilliance. “Oh, please.…”
“Leave her alone,” Thea said, turning protectively to face the cameras.
“Mrs. Honneker, about the incident …” Another reporter. Another camera. Ronnie shook her head. All she wanted to do was escape, but there was no place for her to go. She was backed against the sink, surrounded, trapped.
“I can’t—”
“Please leave her alone,” Thea repeated, louder this time in an effort to be heard over the din, turning with Ronnie to face this new attack.
“Was it paint?”
“What do you think was the significance of the color? Do you think the fact that your assailant used red paint means anything?”
“Did you know her?”
Questions pelted Ronnie from all sides. She felt as if she were being publicly stripped. They all knew what had happened, or would soon find out, and they would print sensational stories punched up by the word whore.
She couldn’t bear it. Her mouth trembled. It took every bit of willpower she could summon to make it stop.
The hideous thing was, none of it was her fault. None.
“All right, that’s it.” The words crackled with authority. The slurred southern voice was suddenly hard and crisp. “Mrs. Honneker has nothing to say right now. All your questions will be answered at the appropriate time.”
Quinlan, who had been jostled to one side of the rest room by the arrival of the throng, was now taking charge. He shouldered in front of her, dislodging the circle of importunate questioners with hard words, looks, and a couple of shoves. With relief, Ronnie realized that the reporters were backing off some. Where they had ignored Thea’s protests, and her own, they seemed to respect Quinlan’s. Because he was a man? Ronnie neither knew nor cared. All that mattered was that he was getting the job done.
Of course, she reminded herself, he worked for her now, for the campaign. Instead of being annoyed at his advent, as she had been less than half an hour before, she felt a wave of thankfulness.
“No TV!” Quinlan’s back tensed. His voice was sharp.
Sneaking a peek over his shoulder, Ronnie saw local TV newswoman Christine Gwen barreling through the door with a cameraman on her heels. Blond, thirty-something Christine was the barracuda of Jackson TV news. Whenever possible, she liked to draw blood.
“Who the hell are you?” Christine asked, glaring at him even as she directed her cameraman where to set up. Then she paused, her tone and expression changing in an instant. “You’re Tom Quinlan, aren’t you? Are you working for Senator Honneker now?”
There was an immediate buzz from the other reporters, and more flashing cameras. Quinlan shook his head, refusing to answer. Ronnie made herself very small behind his sheltering back.
“Clear this place out, will you?” Quinlan addressed this crisp request to one of the state troopers, who nodded.
“It’s a public rest room,” Christine protested even as the troopers started trying to shoo people outside.
“I know that, ma’am, but we’re going to have to ask you to leave,” one of the officers said, moving toward her. “All of you.”
“You ever hear of freedom of the press?” a reporter demanded as he dodged around the officer to take another picture. Ronnie didn’t think he got what he was after; Quinlan’s body effectively blocked her from view.
Another reporter chimed in: “You can’t make us leave! The public has a right to know!”
“Are you getting this on camera, Bill?” Christine sounded shrill. Her cameraman apparently made some gesture to answer the question in the affirmative, because Quinlan gave an ugly-sounding mutter under his breath and turned to Ronnie.
“This isn’t working. Our best bet is to make a run for it.” The words were meant for her ears only. As he spoke, Quinlan slid out of his suit coat and draped it over Ronnie’s head. Knowing that it was meant to shield her from the cameras, she hugged it close, huddling inside it.
She could picture her face, white and shocked and streaked with paint, on every evening newscast in the state.
“Mrs. Honneker, can you tell us what the woman shouted as she threw the paint?” a reporter yelled from somewhere near the door.
“ ‘Whore,’ ” another reporter answered the first. There was a sudden, almost embarrassed silence. Ronnie died a little inside. The stories were going to be ugly; they would hurt the campaign.
Lewis would blame her.
“We don’t know for certain that’s what she said,” Thea protested, but her voice sounded lame, and no one appeared to take much notice.
“I heard,” Rose volunteered. “That’s what she said, all right: whore.”
“You were an eyewitness?” The print reporters wrote furiously while Christine turned to the camera, scorning the policeman who was trying to get her to leave.
“Are you up to running?” Quinlan asked, his head bent close to Ronnie’s. He had turned to face her while the crowd’s attention was distracted. Ronnie glanced up at him from beneath the sheltering folds of his coat. Her knees were weak, her chest felt tight, and she wanted to throw up again. Under normal conditions she would have looked for the nearest place to lie down. But these conditions were far from normal, and there was nothing she wouldn’t do to get away from the press. If running was what it took, she would run.
She nodded.
“Come on,
then,” he said. Wrapping an arm around her shoulders, he pulled her through the crowd as she huddled under his coat, out of reach of the cameras. Sheer surprise and a few strategic straight-arm shoves got them out the rest-room door unmolested.
When the wall of light and heat that was the day hit them, they ran. Moments later the pack was in full cry on their heels.
Chapter
5
“MR. QUINLAN. Thank you.”
“Miz Honneker, you’re welcome.”
He turned his head and smiled at her, the skin around his eyes crinkling. Ronnie smiled back.
They were in Quinlan’s car, a late-model Buick Regal with a cream exterior and tan velour upholstery, speeding away from the fairgrounds. The road they were on was picturesque, with verdant farmland stretching to meet shimmering blue sky on either side, but they were speeding east, not west, as they should have been to reach Jackson.
“There’s something you should know, though: If you’re taking me home, you’re headed in the wrong direction.”
“I’m not taking you home.”
“You’re not?” At this, Ronnie lifted her head from where it had been resting wearily against the seatback to look at him with raised eyebrows. A small pile of discarded red-streaked wet-wipes rested in the open storage area of the console between them. Quinlan traveled with a box of wet-wipes in his glove compartment, and Ronnie had used the first few minutes of the ride to scrub away as much of the paint remaining on her as she could.
“Nope.”
“Why not?” Sudden visions of kidnapping and worse danced lightning-quick through her head, only to be dismissed. Though in real-world time she had only been acquainted with him for little more than an hour, and she knew nothing about him except for his name and what he did for a living, she discovered that she trusted him completely. He had rescued her, cared for her, protected her when she was vulnerable. The experience had forged a bond between them that Ronnie imagined was probably much like that felt by soldiers who had gone through a battle together.
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