They made love without explaining anything to each other.
When Devereaux awoke in the morning, she was already out of bed. The fireplace was lit and she stood naked at the window on the far side of the room, watching more snow fall upon the snow that had fallen all night.
“I can’t get down today,” she said. “I’ll have to stay.”
He smiled then and realized, with a sudden, sharp pain, that he had fallen in love with her.
“This is like home in a way,” Rita said, putting her hand in his. “The hills along the Mississippi near Eau Claire. The old river and the old towns. Quiet, like this. Maybe you’ll see it someday.”
She looked into his gray eyes and saw that they were shining.
He placed his finger on her lips.
Do not speak; do not make promises, he thought.
She wondered if he had tears in his eyes.
I love you, Rita, he thought with sadness. But make no promises to me, in truth or in lies.
They cannot be kept.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
An award-winning novelist and reporter, Bill Granger was raised in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. He began his extraordinary career in 1963 when, while still in college, he joined the staff of United Press International. He later worked for the Chicago Tribune, writing about crime, cops, and politics, and covering such events as the race riots of the late 1960s and the 1968 Democratic Convention. In 1969, he joined the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times, where he won an Associated Press award for his story of a participant in the My Lai Massacre. He also wrote a series of stories on Northern Ireland for Newsday—and unwittingly added to a wealth of information and experiences that would form the foundations of future spy thrillers and mystery novels. By 1978, Bill Granger had contributed articles to Time, the New Republic, and other magazines; and become a daily columnist, television critic, and teacher of journalism at Columbia College in Chicago.
He began his literary career in 1979 with Code Name November (originally published as The November Man,) the book that became an international sensation and introduced the cool American spy who later gave rise to a whole series. His second novel, Public Murders, a Chicago police procedural, won the Edgar® Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1981.
In all, Bill Granger published thirteen November Man novels, three nonfiction books, and nine novels. In 1980, he began weekly columns in the Chicago Tribune on everyday life (he was voted best Illinois columnist by UPI), which were collected in the book Chicago Pieces. His books have been translated into ten languages.
Bill Granger passed away in 2012.