Jake said dryly, “So naturally you fell in love with him.”
She didn’t answer; she was staring out the window again. After a moment she shifted as if the bed had sand in it. “I’m trying hard to be honest with myself about it, but hindsight doesn’t make it easy.” There was another pause, and when she went on it was as if she were measuring each word before delivering it. “I know he dazzled me. Las Vegas is an easy place to be dazzled in, believe me. Nothing is real-it’s all this great big fantasy. It was just… so easy to buy into the fantasy of falling in love…” She sat silently, her slumped shoulders giving her a forlorn look. “Actually, it probably had more to do with-” She broke it off to slide him a sideways look and a wry smile. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“Yeah,” he said evenly, “I do.”
“I mean, you just asked me how I got hooked up with Sonny. You probably don’t want to hear my whole life story.”
“I said I did-this part of it, anyway.” He rather imagined this woman’s life story would take a long time to tell and probably be well worth the time spent, but he didn’t say so. “Go on-it had more to do with…?”
“Timing,” she said on an exhalation, and gave him another of her off-center smiles. “The infamous biological clock. Lately it seems like all I do is go to weddings and christenings-other people’s. First, my sister Mirabella has a baby and gets married-yes, in that order-after we’d all given up hope. Then her best friend, Charly, comes out from California to be her maid of honor, meets the best man and she’s a goner. So off I go to the rain forest where I’m surrounded by burgeoning nature for a solid six months, and when I come out, everybody’s pregnant. And it just occurred to me that I was in my forties, had never even been in love-” her smile broadened and her eyes gleamed, and Jake inexplicably felt that peculiar sensation of thirst at the back of his throat “-although I’ve been in lust a few times. And in love with the idea of being in love, I suppose. But never really in love. And I realized that if it was ever going to happen to me, it had better happen pretty damn soon, or what was the point? I guess I just wanted it badly enough that I convinced myself the fantasy was real.”
He had nothing to say to that, and left unanswered and hanging in the silence, the words took on a greater poignancy than perhaps she’d meant them to have. Jake didn’t know for sure; he couldn’t know, because he couldn’t allow himself to look at her. He didn’t want to see her vulnerability just then. Afraid that if he did, he might let himself start to care.,
He was leaning against the wall at the edge of the window, gazing along his shoulder at the uninspiring view of a welllighted but almost empty parking lot, shrouded now in fog, when she suddenly said, “Hey, Jake.”
He shifted his gaze back to her without changing his stance, and found that she was regarding him with her head slightly tilted and a bright, inquisitive gleam in the eye on the undamaged side of her face. He noticed that her eyes, although blue, were actually quite dark, and that her short, blond hair had gotten caught up in the bandage that was wrapped around her head so that it formed a comical little rooster tail. She made him think of a bird, one of the ones that used to come to the feeder his wife, Sharon, had kept in the backyard of their house in Virginia, way back when he’d still been in training at Quantico. A little gray bird with a yellowish topknot, big black eyes and a cheeky disposition-a titmouse, that was it. She reminded him of a titmouse.
“Yeah?” he prompted. And why was it that whenever he was in her company he kept having to fight an urge to smile?
“What about you? Are you married?”
He jerked his eyes away from her and looked down at his feet, while his arms folded of their own volition into a defensive position across his chest. The question had caught him off guard, but at least it had neatly disposed of the smile impulse. “Nah-” he said with a shrug and what he hoped was finality, “guess I don’t have what it takes.”
“Ever been?”
Cheeky-he should have known she wouldn’t leave it there. What surprised him more than the question was the fact that he found himself answering it. “Yeah, I was married. Once.”
Her head tilted even more, and her eyes regarded him with a directness that was almost hypnotic. “What happened?”
“She woke up one morning and told me she didn’t want to be married to me anymore. That she deserved a chance to be happy. I agreed with her. So we got a divorce.”
“Just like that? One day you were happy and clueless, the next day over, finished, kaput?”
He grunted, half in surprise, half in acknowledgment of the hit she wasn’t even aware of-an unspoken touché-and said sardonically, “Well, I doubt if it was that simple.”
“How long were you married?”
“Fifteen years.” Eve whistled. He glanced at her, but saw only sympathy in her eyes-and that mesmerizing inquisitiveness. He shrugged and added, “We got married right out of college. But I’d known her since high school.”
“Any kids?”
He shook his head. And though she hadn’t asked, he found himself explaining as if she had. “She… couldn’t.”
There was the sound of a softly indrawn breath. “That must have been hard.”
He hated sympathy. He held her eyes for several seconds, waiting for a rush of resentment that never came, and finally said, “It was, for her.”
“Not you?”
He shrugged. “I was pretty wrapped up in my job.”
“And… she had-?”
Again he paused, then said slowly, “Oh, yeah, she worked. In an office. Nothing she was very excited about. Nothing you could call a career.”
“So,” Eve murmured, “she just had… you. And you had-”
“My job.” He shifted restlessly and said with a sardonic snort, “And thank you, Dr. Brothers, for pointing that out.”
Her lips parted and a look of dismay darkened her eyes, and he realized too late that there’d been nothing but compassion in them before. The knowledge added to the burden of his guilt and made him feel even lousier than he already did-not angry, certainly not with her, not resentful, just…bad. As if a blanket of melancholy had settled around his shoulders.
“I didn’t mean-” she began.
But he stopped her there, shaking off the mood of introspection and silencing her with the same swift motion. Swearing with sibilant vehemence under his breath, he dove into the bathroom and pulled the door closed just as the outer door clicked open to admit a hideously cheerful voice trilling, “Well, are we wide-awake already this morning?”
And there he lurked-feeling about as foolish as he ever had in his life and asking himself whether this was any way for an experienced agent of federal law enforcement to be spending his time, for what seemed like hours. It was, in fact, by his own watch, scarcely five minutes before there came a soft knock on the bathroom door. After a barely respectable pause, it opened, and there stood Eve in her short hospital gown, rooster tail waving jauntily above her bandages, one finger to her lips.
“You can come out now,” she said in a hoarse and exaggerated whisper. “The big bad nursie is all gone.”
Damnation, how was it possible, annoyed as he was with her, that he could still feel that bumpy, deep-down urge to laugh?
He limited himself instead to the small satisfaction of explaining to her, in his driest, most professional manner, about the realities of hospital gossip. “How would it look,” he said coldly, “if it got back to your… fiancé… through hospital personnel that a man was keeping company with you in your room?”