“Hungry?” Maxim asks. “Food?”
“Yes, please.”
After we buy a picnic basket stuffed with wine and cheese and fruit and sandwiches, we walk our bikes down to a riverbank. He spreads the blanket and I lay out our lunch. The sun is high, the weather mild, the air fresh, and the company? Maxim is the only person I want to be here with right now.
“Any more on your politician back home?” he asks, the strong length of him stretched out. He’s propped on one elbow, popping grapes into his mouth.
“When I got back to the hostel this morning, Mena had emailed me some things to look over.” I take a sip of wine from a disposable cup. “The pay is almost non-existent, of course, but it would be great experience. Nighthorse is the real deal. The things he wants to do for Natives in Oklahoma are exactly what I would love to see happen everywhere. I’m impressed.”
“Think you’ll do it?”
“I told her I want to if he’s interested.”
“Oh, he will be. How could he not be?”
“We’ll see.” I shrug. “I’m with you. I can’t stand most politicians. They’re the main ones who lied to Natives. Tricked us. Betrayed us. Our own senator slipped that pipeline in at the eleventh hour for Warren Cade.”
Maxim makes a strangled sound, and when I look over at him, he’s coughing.
“You okay? Wine go down the wrong way?”
“Uh, something like that.” He stares into his cup. “Sorry. You were saying something about—”
“Warren Cade, yeah. He’s such an asshole.” I take a deep breath to counter the fury that rises every time I think about that heartless man. “But of course, he’d look after his own interests. Senator Middleton was supposed to be looking after ours. I’m going to learn this system inside and out and put leaders in place who will look after what’s best for the people.”
“Who determines best, though?” Maxim crumbles a crust of bread on his napkin. “Some would argue what Middleton did created new jobs for his constituents, and that was right.”
He holds up his hands defensively when I aim a baleful look at him. “Hey, just playing devil’s advocate. Don’t shoot me.”
“I know that pipeline created jobs, but it also broke promises the government made to my people. Again. It endangers the water supply for an entire community. And you know what? They declare buildings historically protected so businesses can’t destroy them with new offices or whatever they determine means progress. That’s because someone says the value of that thing is worth more than the revenue destroying it would create. Yet every time something of ours has been declared sacred, it’s desecrated as soon as protecting it inconveniences someone in power.”
“So you want the power.”
“I want to spread it. Create it. Put it where it will be used better,” I say, indignation riding the blood in my veins. “Yes, there’s usually more than one ‘right.’ Right is relative sometimes. Not life or death, or cruelty or those absolutes. All you can do is fight for the right you believe in. There aren’t enough people fighting for my people’s ‘rights.’ What is right for us and the basic rights it seems are so quickly afforded to everyone but us. That’s what I plan to spend my life fighting for.”
He smiles, and it’s almost sad.
“What?” I ask. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking,” he says, pushing my shoulder gently until I fall back on the blanket, and he hovers over me, “that you are going to be so damn incredible.” Our eyes catch and his smile fades. “And I wish I could to be around to see it.”
He told me. I knew this wasn’t permanent. He said no attachments and that he would walk away, but the finality in his words hurts so much.
“You’ll be off on your expeditions, huh?” I ask, reaching up to push back the dark hair falling in his eyes. “Saving Mother Earth?”
“Something like that.” He runs his thumb over my bottom lip. “Antarctica. Then I’m going to the Amazon. You know twenty percent of the world’s oxygen comes from the Amazon?”
“No shit. You learn something new every day.”
“You can if you wanna,” he laughs. “Then possibly the Maldives, which within just a few decades may be uninhabitable.”
“Wait, like the islands? Like great vacay Maldives?”
“They’re only six feet above sea level. By the middle of this century, parts of it and even parts of Hawaii may be under water.”
“You’re serious?”
“Of course I’m serious. The shame is that by the time people start believing how serious this really is, it’ll be too late.”
“How did you get into this? Why is it so important to you?”
“Let’s just say I grew up thinking a lot about our natural resources,” he says with an ironic smile that tells me absolutely nothing. “And didn’t always like what I found.”
“So you’re off to save the planet.”
“And don’t forget I want to make a lot of money.”
“Capitalist,” I whisper, straining up to kiss his neck.
“Crusader,” he whispers his retort over my shoulder, licking and sucking my collarbone.
“We’re going in completely different directions, aren’t we?” I hate the pathetic sound of my own voice—the way my heart constricts at the thought of him in the wilds of Antarctica and the Amazon while I toil on behalf of the future Senator Nighthorse in Oklahoma.
“Yeah, we are.” He tugs on my hand and pulls us to a sitting position on the blanket, seating me between his knees with my back to his chest. “Let me show you where I’ll be.”
“What?” I peer at him over my shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“Gimme your hands,” he says, his voice resonating in my back. His arms bracket me as he reaches for my hands, holding them out in front of us.
“Let’s go back to the days when the world was flat for a second.” He places my hands side by side, palm up. “I don’t have a globe, so we’ll make a map. Here’s the good old US of A.” With his index finger, he sketches what roughly looks like the shape of the United States at the far edge of my left palm. “You’ll be there in Oklahoma.”
He draws a line down and across to the far lower quadrant of my right palm and stops at my wrist. “I’ll be all the way down here in Antarctica.”
He moves up a little, leaving tiny needles of sensation across my skin with every touch. “The team will leave from here to get there.”
“Where is that?” I ask, my throat closing up and my eyes stinging.
“New Zealand. It’s closest.”
“I always think of New Zealand as hot, not that close to the coldest place in the world.”
“That’s one of the fascinating things about it,” he says, the excitement piquing in his voice. “There’s this point where tropical and arctic merge. Antarctica is this study of paradoxes. An icy desert. Two things that never should have been together.” He kisses my neck, his breath feathering my hair with the words. “But they fit. Make sense. Belong.”
Like us.
I don’t say it, but I feel it.
He closes my hands on the map he sketched into my palms, holding them together and pulling me tighter to his chest.
“Now you’ve got the whole world in your hands.” He laughs into my hair. “I know. Corny, right?”
“No. Not corny.”
Sweet.
I open my hands again, studying the path he drew from the upper corner of my left palm to the lowest corner of my right. We’ll be at extreme points on the Earth. As far apart as two people could be.
If I was smart, I’d begin putting distance between us now, preparing my heart for his absence. For his ultimate, inevitable departure. But I’m not as smart as I thought I was. I turn to face him, wrap my arms around his neck, and push until he’s on his back and I’m straddling his hips with my thighs. I slide my hands into the luxury of his hair. With every kiss I brush my palms over it, erasing every mile that soon will separate us. We don’t
have long, but right now, I have this.
21
Maxim
I miss Lennix already.
I should be reviewing my notes for the team meeting in London, but what am I doing? Looking through pictures of us . . . of her at the tulip fields yesterday.
This is why. This is why the fuck I don’t do relationships. I have goals. All the things my father thinks I can’t do without him and the Cade name, I’ll do. Yet here I am, embarking on the most treacherous, important trip of my life and I’m grinning like an idiot at pictures of Lennix in a tulip field. The wind whipped through her hair like it did the first day I met her, but her eyes aren’t stormy or teary like they were at the protest. They smile at me, that indefinable gray. There’s a sea of color behind her, countless beautiful flowers, and she puts them all to shame.
“She really is gorgeous,” David murmurs from the seat next to me.
I darken my phone screen and snap my head around to glare at him. “Don’t even think about it.”
“Dude, I’m screwing her best friend. Seriously?”
“I don’t care if you . . . wait. What? You and Kimba?”
“Where have you been all week? Yeah, I tapped that on day two. You didn’t notice because you were too busy falling in love.”
“Am not.” I frown down at the dark screen.
“Oh, so you’re just tapping that ass, too?”
My fingers curl reflexively with the urge to strangle him for talking about Lennix and what we’ve shared like that. “You don’t know shit,” I say as casually as I can manage. “We’re all on vacation. Whatever.”
“Yeah, Kimba and I were totally upfront. Just a holiday lay. I mean, a damn good one. Did I mention her ass?”
“You don’t have to, thanks.”
“But when she leaves in a couple of days, I’m cool. That’s it. Can you say the same about Lennix?”
It feels like there’s an uprising at the cellular level in my body at the thought of leaving her forever. At the thought of reducing what we’ve shared to a holiday lay. I’m a learner, a researcher, a student. I don’t ignore facts because I don’t like what I find. Maybe that’s why I haven’t allowed myself to examine my visceral reaction to Lennix from the first moment I saw her. Seeing her again felt like a miracle. Am I really going to let her go for good?
“It’s probably good you do stay focused, though,” David says. “About a dozen things could go really wrong on this trip, man. And every one of them could kill us.”
“That’s pretty bleak. We’ll be fine. We’ve prepared as much as we possibly can.”
Hadn’t Shackleton prepared? And Douglas Mawson? They were not only both brilliant scientists, but also exceptional tacticians. Sheer will and the force of their leadership got them out of the worst conditions when things went wrong on their Antarctic expeditions. Both ended up stranded. Men died.
“We’re lucky to have Grim,” David continues, scanning the manual Brock Grimsby assembled for us. The guy is a former Navy SEAL. He devised the fitness regimen we’ve followed the last six months of preparation.
“Damn lucky,” I agree.
“He’s good, but even he can’t beat a blizzard alone. Every one of us needs to know this shit inside and out.”
He’s right. Shackleton lost his ship The Endurance. He stood on the Arctic’s icy banks with the men he had left and watched it sink. I can’t afford distractions. As much as I would enjoy losing myself in that spill of black hair and that angel’s body, we leave for the Antarctic next week. I have to be ready to pull my weight.
When I get back to Amsterdam, I’ll have one more day with Lennix. Then I’ll walk away like I said I would. After that, who knows what will happen? All I know is it can’t happen now.
Determinedly, I take out my notes to review our emergency plan and put my phone away.
22
Lennix
One. More. Day.
That’s all we have left. Once Maxim returns from London tomorrow afternoon, we’ll actually have less than a day before I fly back to the States.
“These are nice,” Vivienne says. “What do you think?”
I crawl out of my own head to see what Vivienne is considering. We’ve been exploring Amsterdam’s famous floating flower market, bursting with narcissus, carnations, violets, orchids, and any number of buds that saturate every inch of this morning with color.
And tulips. Like the ones Maxim and I picked yesterday. What a perfect day that was with him. For how long after I leave will everything come back to him?
“That bad?” Vivienne frowns at the flowers bundled by their necks in her hand. “I thought they were—”
“They’re beautiful,” I say. “Sorry. Really so pretty.”
“Agreed,” Kimba says. “Get seeds for those. Make sure they’re packaged and okay for export before you buy them.”
“Right,” Vivienne says, nodding at the advice. “Forgot about that.”
“You didn’t tell us much about your day in the tulips,” Kimba says while Vivienne completes the transaction for the flowers and seeds.
“Oh.” I adjust the oversized bag on my shoulder and smile, I’m sure unnaturally. “It was great. Fine. Fun.”
Kimba and Vivienne exchange a meaningful glance before looking back to me.
“Okay, Lenn,” Kimba says. “We need to talk.”
We exit the greenhouse suspended on water and step back onto the street. Glimpses of the Singel canal brighten our view and the plethora of flowers make the air heavy with fragrance.
“We really like Maxim,” Vivienne says.
“He’s great,” Kimba adds. “And fine as hell. That goes without saying, but I just said it.”
We share a laugh, and I hold my breath for the lecture I feel coming on.
“But,” Kimba continues, “we all know he said it was just this week.”
“And it was no strings,” Vivienne says. “No attachments.”
“I’m well aware,” I reply stiffly. “This is under control.”
“Oh, honey, if you actually believe you have this under control,” Kimba says wryly, “it’s is even worse than we thought.”
“Guys, my eyes are wide open.”
“So is your heart.” Vivienne grabs my elbow so we stop in the street. “He’s your first, Lenn. And he’s gorgeous and fantastic in bed and a freaking PhD.”
“And he looks at you like the sun rises and sets on your vagina,” Kimba mutters, stopped on the other side of me. “A man looks at you like that, fucks you like that, it’s hard not to get ideas, even when they tell you straight up ‘don’t get ideas.’ You hit the V-card lottery, boo.”
“I’m not a child. Just because I was a virgin—”
“Four days ago,” Vivienne interjects drolly.
“Doesn’t mean I’m some pitiful little girl who’ll be all clingy when Maxim and I go our separate ways.” I say it even though my heart mocks me that I might be exactly that when I lose him. God, lose him? I don’t have him. He’s not mine. We’re nothing. I feed myself the mantra that was supposed to protect my heart, to keep it safe and separate from the way Maxim makes my body feel. I can barely admit to myself, much less to my friends, that it’s not working.
“We’ll be the ones mopping up the tears,” Vivienne says, taking my hand. “And we won’t mind ’cause you’ve done it for both of us more than once.”
“A lot more than once.” Kimba takes my other hand. “So we know how bad it hurts, and we just don’t want to see you go through that.”
“Especially with this amazing opportunity on the horizon,” Vivienne says. “I mean, working for a Native American candidate running for the Senate? Could it be any more tailor-made for you? You need your head screwed on right to make the most of it.”
“I know.” I squeeze their hands, drawing strength and sensibility from the contact. “You’re right. Maybe I’m feeling . . . more than I should for Maxim. And he did tell me it was just this week and that he would walk away.”
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But every look, every touch, every time I’m with him, I see stay in his eyes. We agreed it was only for this week, but when he kisses me, it feels like it could be forever. Like we could make a world for ourselves, even though our paths are taking us to different corners of the globe.
I don’t tell my friends that because they’re already worried something might happen to my heart. I can’t tell them something probably already has.
“You’ve been heard,” I say, turning a grateful grin on them both. “Duly noted. I get it. This week. No more. No heartbreak. Now didn’t we say we’d do some damage at Leidsestraat? I got guilders burning a hole in my pocket. Let’s shop!”
We’re obsessing over a pair of earrings when my phone rings.
“Auntie, hey!” I answer Mena.
“Lennix, I have some news.”
I step away from the counter where Vivienne and Kimba sort through the array of jewelry. My heartbeat picks up.
The job?
“Okay. What gives?” I ask, not even trying to keep the excitement from my voice.
“You got it!”
“Oh, my gosh.” I press my hand to my chest, but it’s no use trying to calm down. My heart is banging at my ribs like a drumline. “Seriously?”
“Seriously!” Mena laughs. “One catch.”
“A catch? What is it?”
“Well, he wants you to come right away.”
“Yeah, I fly back home Friday.”
“He’d like you here on Friday. Can you fly back tonight?”
“Wow. Why so quickly?”
“He’d, um, like to tell you himself,” Mena says, her voice pitched lower. “He’s here with me. Would you speak to him?”
“Now?” I squeak. “He’s there with you now?”
“It’s a special situation, Lenn,” she says, her voice sobering. “Or he wouldn’t ask. Talk to him.”
“Okay,” I say after a brief pause. “Put him on.”
The Kingmaker Page 14