“Yes.” She swallowed the tablets and chased them down with a gulp of water.
When she looked up, he was buttoning up a clean white shirt. His gaze slid over her.
Ronnie braced a hand on the mattress and stood up. A virulent attack of light-headedness almost made her sit down again.
“Whoa.” He was at her side, holding on to her arm.
“I’m okay.” She shook him off when he would have helped her. Walking with great care, she made it to the bathroom.
She used the facilities, washed her face with soap and ice-cold water, found some mouthwash in his shaving kit, and rinsed her mouth, then used his brush on her hair. After that she felt marginally better. Looking at herself in the mirror, she thought she looked like a perfect example of the morning after the night before. Her face was pale, with shadows under her eyes. The ends of her hair straggled limply around her face. Her black T-shirt was badly wrinkled. At least her waist pouch, which she still wore, contained a tiny lipstick and powder compact. Unzipping it, she coated her lips with deep raisin, smoothing and thinning the color until it was barely there. She was sweeping the powder puff over her face when he tapped lightly on the door.
“You alive in there?” he asked.
“I’m coming.” Ronnie restored her cosmetics to the waist pouch, zipped it up, and opened the door. He was waiting for her, fully dressed with a red tie looped untied around his neck. From one hand dangled her sandals.
“We need to go. Don’t forget you have to give a speech in just about”—he glanced at his watch—“an hour and a half.”
“Don’t remind me.” She walked up to him and took her sandals from his hand. As she did so, a vivid recollection of how they had been removed from her feet brought her gaze up to his. He was remembering too; she could tell by the sudden hot gleam in his eyes.
“Tom …”
“Later. Right now we have to get you into your room and ready to go to work.”
Before she could reply, he opened the door and stuck his head out, glancing up and down the corridor. Wrapping one hand around her wrist, he pulled her out into the hall, heading at a brisk pace for the stairs. Ronnie’s head throbbed, as she had to almost run to keep up. She clutched her sandals in one hand.
Despite an aching head, dry mouth, queasy stomach, and Jell-O knees, Ronnie realized that she felt happier than she had in a long time. As her gaze fixed on the broad back of the man dragging her ruthlessly after him up three flights of stairs, she also knew why:
Tom.
Chapter
16
“I SEE YOU FETCHED HER BACK to the hotel all right and tight.” Kenny spoke under his breath as he stood beside Tom at the back of the Banning Creek Country Club ballroom, both of them propping themselves up against the cool plaster wall and watching as Ronnie was introduced. The ballroom had been converted for the University Women’s breakfast by the addition of dozens of white-clothed tables and a long, blue-draped dais. The breakfast was sold out; the applause that greeted Ronnie was warm. Tom credited himself for that. His efforts on her behalf were paying off.
“It wasn’t her.” A woman who’d been up nearly all night drinking and carrying on had no business looking as good as Ronnie did this morning, Tom thought as she started to speak.
“What?” Kenny looked at him in surprise. The volume cranked up a notch in his voice.
“I said it wasn’t her. And keep your voice down.” If his words were abrupt, Tom couldn’t help it. Defending the lady’s reputation seemed to have become his mission in life. He knew how Kenny’s thought processes worked. Hell, his own worked the same way, and so did those of every other man he knew. A married woman dancing and drinking at a bar with men other than her husband was a slut. Especially a beautiful, red-haired woman with a body that could stop traffic. He didn’t want Kenny, or anyone else, having those kinds of thoughts about Ronnie. Whether she deserved them or not.
“But …” Kenny was bug-eyed with surprise.
“You hauled me out of bed at two in the morning and sent me off on a wild-goose chase, buddy. It took me an hour to check out every redhead in that bar, and then I worried about it until seven this morning, when I knocked on her door. She answered, Kenny. The ringer on her phone was turned off. She’d been sleeping like a baby in her own bed all night.”
“Sheez, man, I don’t know what to say,” Kenny said by way of an apology. “I thought my information was good.”
“Well, you thought wrong.”
“I am sure sorry.”
Tom’s only reply was a grunt. Ronnie was well under way by this time, still clutching the sides of the podium with both hands, though he’d told her not to at least fifty times, and rehearsed her through gestures she could use to enliven her words instead. While he had managed to get the content of her speeches changed, her style of delivery had improved only marginally, if at all. She was still as wooden as a cigar-store Indian. Oddly enough, Tom found her ineffectiveness as a speaker endearing. It made her seem kind of—vulnerable.
His balls still ached from not giving her what she had been begging for last night. It had been a near-run thing. Even when he’d gotten himself in hand enough to escape into the hotel corridor, he’d almost had second thoughts and turned around and gone back in. But sleeping with Mrs. Lewis R. Honneker IV was neither safe nor smart. If His Honor found out—if anyone found out—there’d be hell to pay. For her as well as for him.
He’d used the time in the hall to clear his head, ease the ache in his groin, and come up with a plan for getting rid of the reporter and photographer camped out in front of her room. In the end, that had been easily done: He had called hotel security and asked that they be escorted out. Oh, not at four A.M., because how could Mrs. Honneker or any of her entourage know the pair was out there at that time unless one or more of them were out themselves? No, he had waited until nearly seven, and pretended he’d just then spotted them in the hall. One call, and the thing was done.
Easy.
What hadn’t been easy was reentering his hotel room after what he judged was a sufficient interval. As he had all but known she would be, Ronnie was dead to the world, all stretched out in his bed, her face buried in his pillow.
No matter how much she chose to protest, the lady had had too much to drink.
She was sleeping on her stomach with the covers kicked off. Given what she was wearing, she had looked almost naked lying there. The only part of her that was decently covered was her rear, and those denim shorts didn’t hide much of that. Looking down at her slender, creamy-skinned body, Tom had felt the lust he thought he’d gotten a firm hold on earlier start to slip its leash.
But in the end he’d done the smart thing, the gentlemanly thing, and bedded down on the floor. This morning there’d been just enough time to get her back into her room, push her into the shower, and make sure she was dressed properly and primed with coffee and answers and able to function before they had to leave for her speech.
He had deliberately left no time for a rehash of what had passed between them during the night, although he knew he was only delaying the inevitable. From the melting looks she’d been sending his way all morning, the lady wasn’t ready to let bygones be bygones. He had thought that, without the effects of booze to fire her up and with the bright light of day putting things in their proper perspective, she might be glad to pretend the whole thing had never happened. No such luck. She was going to want to continue where they had left off, and, smart, careful individual that he was, he was going to have to turn her down.
However much he might want to take the lady to bed, starting a hot, steamy love affair with Ronnie Honneker would rank right up there as one of the stupidest things he had ever done. It would be like lighting the fuse on a stick of dynamite, holding it in your hand, then wondering why the hell your hand got blown off.
She was getting to the part about Mississippi’s children being Mississippi’s future when their eyes met. Despite his best intentions, that glowing
look from clear across a crowded room was enough to make his blood heat. Though his head knew better, the rest of him wanted to sleep with her so badly that the need to do it was almost a physical pain.
He glanced away.
“So who was your company?” he asked Kenny in a growling tone, to distract himself.
Kenny shot him a sideways, defensive glance, reddened, and shrugged without replying.
“Did you happen to give Ann a thought?” Plump, smiling, wholesome Ann was, as far as Tom was concerned, the kind of woman whom the words wife and mother defined.
“It was a one-time thing, okay? It won’t hurt Ann because she won’t know a thing about it.”
“Good reasoning.” Tom’s reply was sardonic.
“It wasn’t anything I planned. She—came on to me, and it just happened.”
That sounded so much like Tom’s own experience of the night before that his annoyance with his partner evaporated. Except of course, he reminded himself, he wasn’t married, and he’d had the good sense to call a halt before he’d boffed somebody who was.
But it could very easily have gone the other way.
Ronnie’s speech ended, and Tom applauded with the rest. Next came the question-and-answer session. He tensed, but she handled everything thrown at her with aplomb. When a pushy woman asked her point-blank what she thought about her husband carrying on with a prostitute, Tom got so nervous he almost jumped out of his skin. What would she say?
“I didn’t like it,” Ronnie said slowly. She wore a summer suit in soft yellow silk, knee-length, conservative. Tom had hauled it out of her closet that morning himself, along with sensible two-inch pumps, which were the very antithesis of the sexy sandals he’d taken off her feet the night before. “I don’t like it. But very few things in this world are perfect. Our marriage certainly isn’t. But we both want it to work, and are committed to making it work. I look on what happened as a challenge that will in the end just make our marriage stronger.”
Bravo! Tom was bowled over. She had taken every word and phrase he had been drumming into her head day after day and used them, by God. While the audience applauded her answer, she looked over their heads at him. He gave her a discreet thumbs-up, and a proud smile.
Considering, he decided he felt kind of like Frankenstein observing the first stirrings of his monster.
After that, there were the interviews, which went well, and then a quick lunch, grabbed on the way to the airport. Ronnie laughed a lot as they ate McDonald’s hamburgers in the car, mostly at Kenny’s and Thea’s quips from the backseat, because Tom wasn’t talking much. Ronnie rode in the front seat beside him, not touching him, not addressing so much as a single remark directly to him, but there. If she had been an eight-hundred-pound gorilla, he couldn’t have been more aware of her presence. Though he steadfastly kept his attention on the road, his peripheral vision couldn’t miss the crossing and uncrossing of her slim legs, the sensuous way she shifted her rear around to get more comfortable in her seat, the quick glances she sent his way.
He turned the air-conditioning up to full-blast, and still he felt as if he were burning up.
“Hey, bud, you’re awful quiet today,” Kenny said, punching his shoulder in good-humored reproof as they pulled into the airport.
“Probably because I was up all night,” Tom growled before he thought. Ronnie’s eyes immediately went wide on his face. Before she could say anything, Tom added hastily, with a silencing glance in her direction, “Kenny sent me on a wild-goose chase in the middle of the night, looking for something he thought got misplaced. He turned out to be wrong, though. The object was just where it was supposed to be all along.”
“Hey, Ronnie, Kenny thought you’d gone out to some bar dancing,” Thea elucidated with an amused gurgle from the backseat. “He sent Tom out after you.”
“Kenny was wrong,” Tom said coolly, while Ronnie managed an amused smile at the absurdity of such a notion. With a flicker of surprise he realized that Thea must have been the “company” in Kenny’s room. How else could she know what had gone on? The funny thing about it was, she had been coming on to Tom like a house afire for the last two weeks. Obviously Thea wasn’t too particular about where she bestowed her favors.
The plane ride home was no better than the car. It was a small turboprop, chartered for campaign use, and the noise of its engines limited the need for polite conversation. Still, in self-defense, Tom put his head back on the headrest and pretended to sleep. But Ronnie sat close enough to him so that her arm brushed his every time she moved. He could hear the silken slither of her pantyhose-clad thighs every time she crossed and uncrossed her legs. He could smell her perfume.
The same damn perfume.
By the time the plane landed, he was so hard he was surprised he could stand up. Walking normally was an effort.
Through some snafu, the limo that was supposed to convey Ronnie safely back to Sedgely had not shown up. The other three had left their own cars at the airport so that they could drive themselves home.
“I’ll give you a ride, Ronnie,” Thea offered as they walked out into the pickup area and it became obvious that Ronnie’s car was nowhere to be seen.
Tom was all for whipping out his cell phone and giving the limo company a blistering directive to get that damned car here now, but he was hampered by the fact that he was carrying both his and Ronnie’s suitcases, and his own briefcase. Kenny was lugging his and Thea’s luggage in a division of labor that said volumes about the state of various relationships, Tom thought, if anyone had noticed and thought about it.
He devoutly hoped no one had and did.
“Thanks, Thea, but Tom can take me home. I want to talk to him anyway,” Ronnie said sunnily. She spoke as if wanting to talk to Tom was the most natural thing in the world, which Tom supposed it was if one didn’t have any idea what the subject of the conversation was likely to be.
“Sure,” he said, because there was no way to put her off without attracting the kind of notice neither one of them needed. Besides, the conversation had to be held sometime. He was a coward for wishing to delay it as long as possible.
The dark clouds gathering in the sky to the west were emblematic of his mood. Ronnie walked beside him to his car, not speaking but happy, he could tell. Her moods were as easy to read as the weather. Though the sky was overcast, it was stiflingly hot and humid. The air was still in anticipation of the coming storm. Even the windsock at the end of one runway hung straight down.
Ronnie waved to Thea as the woman got into a nearby car. Kenny was still walking, heading off to the right. Tom set the suitcases on the pavement behind the car, unlocked the trunk, then opened the driver’s and passenger’s door before putting the key in the ignition and turning on the air-conditioning.
When he finished stowing the luggage in the trunk, Ronnie was already in the car with her door shut.
Feeling like a man on the way to his own execution, he walked around to the driver’s-side door and got in.
Chapter
17
“I CALLED FROM THE HOTEL in Tupelo and canceled the limousine,” Ronnie said as Tom pulled out into the long stream of cars leaving the airport. “So don’t you go yelling at them.”
Despite the fact that she was battling the effects of a slight hangover and very little sleep, she felt ebullient. No longer was she a Stepford wife. She’d broken out, busted loose, and reclaimed her personhood. And, not incidentally, started an affair with Tom.
Tom glanced at her. The lines that surrounded his eyes and bracketed his mouth were more pronounced than usual, she thought, and his face was set in stern lines. With a slight inward smile, she attributed his grim look to lack of sleep.
“Did you?”
His brief reply was the opposite of encouraging. Ronnie frowned at him. The dark clouds that had started in the west now filled the sky. A few fat drops of rain splattered on the windshield.
“You don’t mind driving me home.” It was a statement rather th
an a question. She knew he didn’t mind. The curious intimacy that had sprung up between them that first day had taken root and grown stronger. He was her ally, her friend, her confidant, as well as nearly her lover. She felt as if she could almost read his mind.
Tom glanced at her again, then shook his head to indicate he didn’t mind. More raindrops fell. He turned on the wipers. The swishing sound they made was rhythmic and soothing. The inside of the car was growing cool as the air-conditioning began to kick in.
“It was very gentlemanly of you to pretend like I never went out anywhere last night. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“What is this, your strong, silent side?” Ronnie asked with a trace of amused exasperation after another couple of minutes of silence on his part. “You haven’t said two complete sentences all day.”
“Ronnie …,” he began, and hesitated. The light they were approaching turned red, and he braked. The car stopped. They were the third car in line to turn right off Brandon Road onto Highway 80. The rain was starting to fall in earnest now, huge drops that made the pavement steam as they hit.
“Not that I mind. I think strong, silent men are sexy. Actually I think you’re sexy, whether you’re being strong and silent or not.” She said it humorously, tenderly, and he sent her an unreadable glance. Seizing the opportunity, she undid her lap belt, ducked under her shoulder belt, rose up on one knee, and leaned toward him. Gripping his shoulder with one hand for balance, she slid the other hand behind his neck and bent her head to kiss his mouth. He went very still for a moment. Then he kissed her back. Thoroughly, his lips hard, his tongue exploring her mouth, his hand sliding under her hair to cradle her head.
A horn honked behind them once, twice, impatiently. He gripped her waist and pushed her firmly back into her seat. The car started to move again. They had been holding up traffic as they kissed.
“You should have woken me up last night,” she told him with a tiny smile as she refastened her lap belt.
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