by Carole Buck
“But I’m your accomplice now, remember?”
Chris nearly choked.
“Yeah,” Tom conceded, his brow furrowing. “I remember.”
“You don’t tie up your accomplices, Tom. That’s a rule, too. Trust me.”
“Oh...‘kay.”
“Thank you. Now go take a break. Have another slice of pizza.”
A moment later, Tom Spivey was out the door. A moment after that, Lucy was kneeling beside Chris, undoing his bonds.
“Are you sure you should be doing this?” he asked. Her proximity—to say nothing of the brush of her fingers—was playing merry hell with his pulse. “I’m not one of their accomplices.”
She flashed him a feisty smile. His breathing pattern snarled. “You can be mine, okay?”
“Uh...” He swallowed. “Sure.”
“Were you really worried about me?”
“Is this a trick question?”
Although she flashed another smile, he saw a hint of warning in her eyes. “I can take care of myself, Chris.”
“I know that,” he said after a few seconds. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel the need to worry. Or...the instinct to protect you.”
Lucy went still. Her gaze slid away from his. “Is that why you tried to make Butch let me go?”
His right hand was free. He lifted it and touched her cheek. He felt a small tremor of reaction go through her at the contact.
“Do you want me to apologize if it was?” He forced himself to lower his hand.
She moistened her lips. “No,” she said throatily. “I don’t.”
Chris began undoing the restraints on his left hand. “Was that the other reason you insisted on staying with me?” he asked carefully. “Besides your feeling this is all your fault, I mean? Did you want me to understand you can take care of yourself?”
He raised his eyes to hers as he spoke. She sustained his gaze steadily for several moments, then said, “Something like that. Yes.”
His left hand came free. He rubbed one wrist, then the other. The impulse to pursue this subject was strong. But so was the memory of how he’d berated himself during Lucy’s absence.
Upbeat and encouraging conversation, he ordered. No more cans of worms until this is over. Long over.
“Would you like to tell me about the new escape plan?” he inquired dryly.
Her entire demeanor changed. Her face lit up with mirth. Her eyes fizzed. For a crazy instant, he found himself flashing back on their wedding night. She’d worn the same intoxicating—and intoxicated?—expression then.
Oh, Lucy, he thought. Maybe you were as drunk on our love as I was.
“Well,” she began, hooking a lock of hair behind her left ear. “Their original escape plan had to be trashed, because Tom told me all about it while I was sitting in a stall in the ladies’ room.”
“He was in the ladies’ room with you.” Chris kept his tone neutral.
Lucy gestured his concern aside. “He was more embarrassed than I was. Butch insisted he go in and guard me, because there’s a window in there. I was actually kind of flattered.”
“Flattered?”
“That Butch would think I could get my size-twelve hips through what’s barely a size-six opening.”
“Ah.”
“Anyway. Dick charged in as Tom was finishing up spilling the escape plan and threw a hissy fit. The theme of it being that everything was ruined because I’d tell the police and they’d be captured.”
Chris decided to let the issue of Dick’s entrance into the ladies’ room pass. He cocked his head and asked, “Would you?”
“What? Tell the police their escape plans?”
“Mmm.”
Lucy smiled ruefully. “I didn’t really listen to much of what Tom had to say.”
He had to laugh. “I can’t imagine why.”
“I think I’m afraid he’s going to start making sense to me, you know?”
“God forbid!”
“In any case, the Spivey brothers started fighting.”
“Again.”
“Exactly. But this was really bad. I had the feeling things might get seriously out of hand. So I tried to figure out a way of defusing things.”
Chris narrowed his eyes, contemplating the truly lunatic scenario that had just popped into his head. “Don’t tell me,” he said slowly. “You came out of the bathroom stall, reminded Tom and Dick they just happened to be in the presence of the office manager of Gulliver’s Travels and offered to book them the escape plan of a lifetime.”
Lucy dimpled. “More or less, yes.”
“Seriously?”
“What do you think?”
The temptation to tease was overwhelming. “Well, we have established that you’re an incredibly soft touch.”
“Chris!”
“And there is the possibility of Stockholm syndrome.”
“Stockholm syn—? You mean where hostages start identifying with their captors? Oh, please!”
“You did say Tom Spivey was starting-to make sense to you.”
“I said I was afraid he was going to start making sense to me!” Lucy frowned at him. He fought to keep his face straight. He failed. She took a swat at him. “Oh, you!”
He held up his hands in mock surrender, relishing having the freedom to move them again. “Okay, okay. So you didn’t really book the, uh, getaway of a lifetime for our favorite trio of criminals. What, exactly, did you do?”
“Pretended to book the you-know-what for you-know who. I even printed out itineraries and tickets. But I transposed all the reservations codes, so nothing actually got entered in the system.”
“In other words, you set them up.”
“You could use those words, I suppose.”
“You probably—what? Conned them into thinking they’ll be flying the Concorde and staying at the Con-naught?”
“Private Learjet and the Caesar’s Palace in Vegas.”
“Now, I’m starting to feel sorry for them!”
She smiled provocatively. “There’s more.”
“I shudder to think.”
“You remember the computer whiz kid I talked about when we were at the hotel bar?”
It took him a second to dredge up the name. “Wayne Dweck. The one with the crush on, uh...Tiffington Tally-something.”
“Tiffany Tarrington Toulouse.” A look of wonderment shimmered through Lucy’s lovely eyes. “You...you really listened to me, didn’t you?”
The urge to touch assailed him. He battled it down. “I hope I’m learning to.”
Her mouth trembled. For a second or so, he thought she might utter the question he knew had to be asked and answered if there was to be any chance of their reconciling. But she backed off, lowering her gaze.
“Tell me the ‘more,’ Lucy,” he prompted gently, accepting her decision.
She inhaled deeply, her breasts rising with the breath. She expelled the air in a steady stream, then looked at him once again.
“Well,” she began, clearly striving to recapture the bantering tone she’d been using, “Wayne’s installed an E-mail encryption system at his workstation. I just happened to pick that workstation when I sat down to program the great escape. And in between making pretend plane and hotel reservations, I messaged everyone on Wayne’s E-mail list for help.”
“In code.” She was incredible, he thought. Absolutely... incredible.
“It was the only way I could think of. I had to type in the message with Tom and Dick peering over my shoulder. The way Wayne has his system set up, the sender can post the entry on his or her screen in plaintext or scrambled, depending on which function key is struck.”
“And you struck scrambled.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And then you sent your ‘help’ message to—what?—hundreds of people?”
“Thousands, maybe. Millions, even. Wayne’s deeply committed to being a citizen of cyberspace.”
“What was the message?”
“�
�Help. Being held hostage in Gulliver’s Travels, Atlanta”’
Emotion started to build within Chris. He struggled to keep it in check. “Short and to the point.”
“I thought I’d better keep it simple.” Lucy grimaced. “The only problem is, the person on the other end has to have the key to break the code.”
“Do you think Wayne’s on his own E-mail list?” He couldn’t take his eyes off his ex-wife. He was mesmerized by her.
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
Chris’s mind reached back and snagged something Lucy had said a minute ago. “You did this with Tom and Dick breathing down your neck?”
She shrugged off any suggestion of risk. “I could have typed in a plaintext petition to the director of the FBI, for all they would have noticed.”
“And what about Butch?”
“Remember his story about how he got captured during a burglary?”
“Vividly.”
“Well ...” The fizz returned to her eyes, the feisty smile to her lips. “... one of our other travel agents happens to have this fiendishly complicated game with death beams, invading aliens and the scum of the universe installed on his computer.”
“Which you just happened to boot up when Butch was looking.”
She nodded demurely. “What do you think?”
What did he think?
The emotion within Chris reached critical mass. All his pledges of self-restraint went by the boards. He lifted his hands and caged Lucy’s face, sliding his fingers back through her hair.
“I think you’re the most amazing woman it’s ever been my privilege to know,” he said huskily. “I still love you, sweetheart. I never stopped.”
And then he kissed her.
Ten
It was auld lang syne and a whole lot more.
Sense memory overwhelmed Lucy. Appetites whetted by her dream clamored avidly for satiation. Desire sang through her blood and sizzled along the synapses of her brain. She shivered in voluptuous response to the man with whom she’d once resolved to live happily ever after.
The taste of his lips...
The feel of his hands...
The primal scent of his flesh...
She didn’t submit to the kiss. She didn’t succumb or surrender to it, either. For a few mad moments, she enlisted in it as an equal, giving as ardently as she received.
And then sanity—emotional sobriety—returned.
“No!” she cried, breaking free of her ex-husband’s embrace and pushing him away. “Leave me alone!”
The throbbing emptiness between her thighs and the terrible ache in her heart made a mockery of her words, but Lucy told herself they didn’t matter. She staggered to her feet, rubbing her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Lucy.” Chris got to his feet, as well, his face pale and intent. He reached out for her.
“Don’t touch me!” She warded him off with a gesture.
“Sweetheart, please—”
“And don’t call me that!” She was shaking like the victim of a raging fever. Her eyes stung. She was desperately afraid that she was going to start to weep. “How could you? How could you do that?”
“I had to, Lucy. I couldn’t stop myself.”
“You should have!”
“I should have done a lot of things.” His tone was stark.
She glared at him, still fighting off tears.
Ask him, something deep within her suddenly urged. You’ll be a prisoner of what happened for the rest of your life if you don’t.
“Ask me, Lucy,” he said, seeming to read her mind. “Please. After all these years. After all the pain. Ask me.”
She knew she had to.
“Did you sleep with Irene Houghton after we were married?”
She saw his hazel eyes flicker at her phrasing. Then she saw him shake his head. A lock of sandy-brown hair fell forward onto his brow. He shoved it back into place with a brusque movement.
“No,” he answered, sustaining her gaze levelly. “I didn’t. I swear to you, Lucy. If I’ve earned back even a shred of your trust during the time we’ve been locked up in here...please. Believe me. I didn’t. ”
“I saw you kissing her.” She saw it again in her mind’s eye as she spoke. Christopher Dodson Banks and Irene Houghton. Her husband and the woman who had seemed to personify everything she wasn’t.
His face tightened, the angles of his handsome features growing more acute, the lines that bracketed his flexible mouth deepening. “I know you did,” he told her quietly. “You were supposed to.”
Lucy took an involuntary step backward, raising a shaking hand to trembling lips. This was a cruelty she hadn’t anticipated. Was he actually saying that he’d done it on purpose?
“I was...s-supposed...to?” She could barely get the words out.
“The receptionist at the firm buzzed me when you arrived. I knew you were heading toward my office. I wanted you to see.”
“Why?”
Chris took a deep breath, like a parachutist preparing for an odds-defying plunge. Then he said, with almost no inflection, “It was the only way I could think of to get your attention.”
A wild laugh bubbled up Lucy’s throat. She chocked it back, knowing that hysteria would not be far behind if she let it out.
“Why not put up a billboard?” she demanded scathingly. “Or scream at me? Or...or...” Anguish gripped her. “... stab me in the heart?”
She saw shame in his compelling eyes. And pain that seemed to match her own. What she didn’t see was an inclination to retreat from the truth. She’d asked, and Chris was obviously intent on answering in full.
She didn’t know if she could bear it.
“I was jealous, Lucy.”
It took her a moment to process this unadorned assertion. Her mind seemed determined to reject it.
“Jealous?” she finally repeated. She shook her head. It made no sense! She’d been faithful to Chris in thought, word and deed. How could he possibly have suspected otherwise ? “Of what, Chris? Of who?”
“Just about everybody in your life.”
“Wh-what?·”
“When we came back from our honeymoon, it seemed like you and me against the world. Less than six months later, making time for me—for us-was barely on your to-do list.”
“That’s not fair!”
But even as she made the protest, Lucy was assailed by a wave of guilt. She’d reordered her entire pattern of existence following her marriage, without even thinking about the implications of what she was doing. She’d let her marital identity supersede her single one in every way that counted. Being Mrs. Christopher Dodson Banks—pleasing her husband, fitting into his world—had been all she cared about. The dreams she’d had of doing by herself, to herself, for herself, had been transmuted.
Then, late one April afternoon, she’d found herself mooning around their apartment like a lovesick adolescent girl as the watch on her wrist tick-tick-ticked its way past the hour at which Chris had vaguely promised he’d call her from work, and she’d felt a jolt of panic. What’s going on here? she’d asked herself, shaken by her behavior. I haven’t done this praying-for-the-phone-to-ring ritual since... since...since...
Well, in point of fact, she’d never done it! And she’d always felt vaguely sorry for the members of her gender who did.
Chris had rung shortly thereafter with a terse message that they’d have to forgo the evening out they’d discussed, because he had to work late. She’d tried to engage him in a conversation, but he’d begged off.
The following day, she’d lunched with Elizabeth Banks at an uncomfortably la-di-da restaurant. Chris’s mother had started quizzing her about where she got her hair done, where she bought her clothes and why she seemed so disinterested in an upcoming gala for a charity with which the Banks family had long been associated. Lucy had left the tête-à-tête feeling unattractive, inadequate, and more than a little angry. Not so much with the older woman as with herself.
What’s
going on here? she’d demanded once again.
Acting on impulse, she’d headed back to her home neighborhood and stopped in at Falco’s Pizzeria. Her brothers and father had treated her as though they hadn’t seen her for ten years. So, too, had a number of the restaurant’s regular customers. In the midst of their fussing, Tina Roberts had dropped by and made some not-so-veiled allusions about what happened to girls who married up and out and forgot who they really, truly were.
She’d tried to talk about what had happened to Chris that night. He’d looked at her as though she were speaking to him in Swahili. She’d pressed the issue. He’d distracted her with kisses. And caresses. And before she realized what was happening, they’d been sprawled on the living room sofa...
He’d taken her to ecstasy and back. But in the quivering aftermath of physical fulfillment, she’d felt as though she’d been on the receiving end of a “Yeah, yeah, I hear what you’re tellin’ me, babe” brush-off. Old insecurities—and more than a few nasty new ones—had raised their ugly heads.
She’d picked a fight with Chris the next morning about absolutely nothing. Or, rather, she’d tried to. Her cool and self-possessed husband hadn’t risen to a single piece of bait. It had been infuriating.
Lucia Annette Falco had reasserted herself shortly thereafter.
“Fair or not,” Chris said flatly, responding to her previous words, “it’s what I felt. You were there for Vinnie after he broke his collarbone. You were there for Mikey and Joey when they needed their egos pumped up. You were there for your uncle Aldo after his wife ran off with that dance instructor. You were there for those girls you started tutoring in math on Thursday nights at the Y, and for the old folks at that nursing home you visited on alternate—”
“They needed me, Chris!” she burst out.
“And I didn’t?”
His tone hit her like a karate chop to the windpipe, temporarily depriving her of the ability to breathe. Lucy gulped once. Twice.
Ten years ago, she would have said no, he hadn’t. She would have said the same ten minutes—ten secands!—ago, as well. But now...
She’d always perceived Chris as being strong and sure and self-sufficient. He wasn’t overtly arrogant, yet confidence seemed the hallmark of everything he did, And it was an inner confidence. It didn’t rely on external validation. He knew who and what he was.