Trust Me on This

  Tom was handing Alec back his identification when she turned to tell him to hurry up. “Well, this is interesting,” he said to Alec. He gestured to the brunette. “This little lady has some information too.”

  Alec looked at the little lady appraisingly. “Hold on to her, will you?” he said to Tom. “I think we may have some information of our own.”

  “I want a deal,” Sherée said.

  * * *

  Dennie sat down at the table in a flurry of purple jersey, praying the fourth button would hold or she’d get arrested again. “Sorry,” she said to Bond. “We were up late last night.”

  Bond smiled back into her cleavage. “I heard. I bet that doesn’t happen often.”

  Dennie heard Alec stir beside her and kicked him on the ankle to make him behave. “Only when I get a house,” she said. “I am getting one, right?”

  “Right.” Bond tore his eyes from her breasts with great difficulty and shoved the contract across to Alec.

  “Great deal,” Alec enthused, and signed with a flourish.

  Dennie took the contract and handed it to Bond, leaning closer as she did so. “I want to watch you sign it,” she whispered.

  He straightened a little and shot a smile around the room. Then the smile faded. Dennie followed the direction of his eyes and saw Sherée, somehow detached from Tom, walking as fast as she could toward the lobby doors.

  “Brian?” Dennie said, and leaned closer. “Honey?”

  He turned and looked directly into her cleavage. “I thought I saw somebody I knew,” he said, his eyes moving from Dennie’s breasts to Sherée’s retreat and back to Dennie’s breasts again.

  Oh, hell, Dennie thought, and drew in as deep a breath as she could, filling her lungs all the way to her toes. The fourth button popped, and she said, “Whoops,” and shoved the pen in Bond’s hand. “Sign it, honey.”

  He signed.

  “From now on, you wear turtlenecks,” Alec said.

  An hour later, Dennie’s life was a little simpler. Bond had been taken downtown for further questioning—“Like the next fifteen years,” Alec said—and Sherée had finished explaining her bolt—“I was so nervous, I just needed some fresh air”—and Donald was making his move on Victoria once more, which was vaguely amusing since this time it wasn’t Dennie’s trauma.

  “How clever of you to trick this Bond fellow,” Donald was saying to Victoria. “Although you really should have told me. I could have been a geat help.”

  “You were a great help, Donald,” Victoria said, looking around for someone. “I’m going to miss you.”

  “Nonsense,” Donald said. “I realize now that the argument we had in the elevator was because you were distracted by all of this. You’ll marry me yet, you’ll see.”

  “Actually, she probably won’t,” Alec said, coming to stand beside Dennie. “Aunt Vic is married to her career. Nice try, though, Mr. Compton. Best of luck in the future.”

  Dennie leaned against him a little, and his arm went around her. He’d rescued her, he’d been there when she’d fallen, just as he’d promised.

  For some reason, Dennie wasn’t as grateful about that as she thought she’d be.

  “Nonsense,” Donald was saying. “A woman like Victoria should be married.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Harry growled from behind him. “That’s why I asked her.”

  Dennie felt Alec’s arm drop away from her.

  “Harry?” he said.

  “If you think I’m going to ask for her hand in marriage from you,” Harry snarled at him, “you’re nuts.”

  “Let me get this straight.” Alec looked from Harry to Vic and back again. “You weren’t around for the arrest this morning, which is unheard of, and now you’re marrying my aunt and moving to Columbus?”

  “No,” Harry said. “I’m marrying your aunt and going God knows where. Chicago is yours. I quit.”

  “You quit.” Alec swallowed, and then he looked at Victoria. “You’re going to take Harry onto a college campus with you.”

  “No, I quit too,” Victoria said.

  Dennie patted his shoulder. “Hang in there. Change is good for you.”

  “I thought that was trauma,” Alec said.

  “That too,” Dennie said. “Say congratulations to your nice aunt and new uncle.”

  “Uncle Harry?” Alec said, and Harry said, “Oh, hell.”

  * * *

  Another hour later and the lobby had emptied, Harry and Vic gone to catch a plane and Donald off to console himself with a drink and a sympathetic Sherée, who promised to tell him everything she’d done to save him when she’d turned state’s evidence against Bond.

  Alec was never happier to see people go in his life.

  “I don’t want another morning like this one,” he said, putting his arm around Dennie and trying to steer her toward the elevators. “I think we should go upstairs to bed and start this day over.”

  “I can’t.” Dennie stood still, and Alec had to stop or lose her.

  “Is this the Janice Meredith thing?” he asked. “Because I can fix that.”

  “I don’t want you to fix it,” Dennie said. “Remember that thing you said about catching me until I was ninety-six?”

  “Yes,” Alec said. “And I will.”

  “I don’t want you to,” Dennie said. “I want to catch myself. I need to know I can make it myself. Alone.”

  Alec felt cold. “I was with you until you got to the last word.”

  “Listen, all my life Patience was there for me.” Dennie came closer to him until she was almost touching him, her eyes directly on his. “And then today you were there. But there was a tiny moment, only a couple of minutes, where I had to fight my own battle. And I liked it. I just never got a chance to finish it.” She bit her lip. “I love you, Alec, but I have to do this first. I need to be on my own.”

  “How long?” Alec asked, and his voice cracked as he said it.

  “I don’t know,” Dennie said. “Six months. A year. As long as it takes for me to know that I don’t need you to save me. Then I can come back to you and just need you to love me.”

  He looked so unhappy that she almost relented, but just as she was about to give in, he stepped back. “Okay. How soon do you have to start?”

  “Now,” Dennie said, and he sighed and said, “I figured that. Janice Meredith?”

  Dennie nodded. “She and the police are waiting for me in the manager’s office. And you have to go downtown for the Bond thing anyway, and then you have a plane to catch. I heard Harry tell you so.”

  He said, “I can change the flight,” and she shook her head.

  “I need to get moving on this,” she told him. “I’ll call you when I get settled. I just need the time first.”

  “Right.” Alec sighed and took a business card and a pen from his breast pocket. “This is my home phone,” he said as he wrote, “and the business phone, fax, and e-mail are on the card. Call collect. And call often.”

  He sounded unhappy but resigned, and she took the card from him and said, “I’ll call a lot.” She stretched up and kissed him, and he caught her to him and changed the kiss from a good-bye into a promise, and she didn’t ever want it to stop. “I have to go,” she said when she finally pulled away, and he let her go, but then he called her name when she was halfway across the lobby.

  “Button up,” he said when she turned. “I don’t think Janice Meredith is going to appreciate the effect of those three buttons the way I do.”

  Dennie laughed and buttoned up, and then she watched him walk toward the lobby doors and out of her life. Just for a while, she told herself, but there were no guarantees. Life was what you went after.

  Armed with that thought, she walked into the manager’s office and found Janice Meredith sitting there alone.

  “I sent the police away,” Janice said, still looking at Dennie as if she were roadkill. “But I’m still not giving you the interview.”

  Dennie put her hands on her
hips. “I have a lot of excellent reasons why you should.” And I just put an excellent man on hold so I could tell you them, she added silently. So you’re going to listen, lady.

  Janice relaxed a millimeter into her chair. “I thought you might. You have five minutes.”

  Dennie closed the door behind her and sat down, putting everything she could into her next sentence. “Do you know the story about Margaret Mead? Somebody asked her why her marriages had failed and she said …”

  Chapter 10

  Four months later, Alec Prentice sifted through the last box of documents from the Bond case as the August sun streamed through his office window. His office now, not Harry’s. He was glad about that and not glad. He missed Harry snarling at him. He missed Harry ignoring him while pounding the computer. But mostly he missed Dennie.

  She’d called every day—or he’d called her when she’d stayed in one place long enough to have a number—until last week when the calls had trickled down to three. Then this week, there hadn’t been any at all. She was on the road again, no number for him to call, and the worst part was, this was the week she was deciding which job in New York she was going to take. She’d gotten three offers after the Meredith article had been published, two not-so-good ones and one very good one, which had seemed like a no-brainer to Alec but not to Dennie. There must have been something else.

  Maybe she’d been trying to tell him they were finished. They’d spent only four weekends together. He hadn’t even met Walter yet. You couldn’t build a relationship on that. Well, Alec could, but evidently Dennie couldn’t.

  He checked the last of the documents and was beginning to unload everything from his desk back into the box when he noticed one more paper, stuck half under the folded bottom of the carton.

  It was the fax Aunt Vic had sent him. “Four Fabulous Days! Three Glorious Nights!” Oh, hell, Alec thought. If he’d only known the damn thing was a prediction instead of a come-on, he wouldn’t have …

  The hell he wouldn’t have.

  All right, he needed Dennie and she thought she didn’t need him, but that was wrong. He’d just track her down and—

  I have to do this on my own, she’d said. All right, he wouldn’t track her down. He’d just sit tight and trust her on this. He loved her. She loved him. She’d come through.

  Maybe.

  He shoved the sorted papers off his desk into the box and punched the intercom for his secretary. “All this stuff can be filed, Kath,” he told her. “Whenever you’ve got the time.”

  “I can do it now,” she said cheerfully. “Also you have a call on one.” Her voice grew cheerier. “It’s Dennie.”

  Alec grabbed the phone, and all his altruistic plans went south. “Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been busy,” Dennie said lamely, but even lame, her voice was wonderful. She went on, her voice full of nerves. “A few things came up.”

  “A few things? A few things? You didn’t call for three days.” Alec leaned back in his desk chair and told himself to calm down. “You had me scared to death.”

  “Sorry,” Dennie said, and her voice cracked.

  Something was wrong. His pulse kicked up again. “Don’t ever do that again. Now tell me what’s wrong, and we’ll fix it.”

  “Nothing’s wrong, and I won’t do it again.” Dennie stopped, and Alec gave her as long as he could before he prompted her.

  “So. Which job did you decide to take?”

  “What?”

  “Which job? You had three offers in New York, remember? Which one did you take?”

  “Well, actually, none of them.” Dennie swallowed again. “I sort of jumped.”

  Alec’s heart sank. More job-hunting. Less Dennie. “None of them?”

  “None of them. I didn’t like New York.” She hesitated. “You weren’t there.”

  “Oh.” Alec’s heart rose again. So maybe she’d come to Chicago. He closed his eyes at the thought and started thinking of arguments to convince her. “Good decision.”

  “I thought so.” Dennie’s voice picked up a little more speed and a lot more confidence. “So since the Trib loved the article I sold Chicago Magazine on the database, I called them. I have an interview tomorrow.”

  “The Trib? The Tribune? The Chicago Tribune?”

  “That’s the one.” Dennie sounded unnaturally breezy. “I see them tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” Don’t yell, “Yahoo,” Alec told himself. That would be immature. “So when are you getting in? Can I meet you at the airport?”

  “Uh, no. I told you. I jumped.” He could hear her swallowing over the phone. “I know we never discussed commitment or anything, and I should have talked to you about this, but I couldn’t stand it anymore, and … I’m here, Alec. I know I should have called to see if you wanted—”

  “You’re here?” Alec stood up. “You’re at O’Hare?”

  “No, I really jumped,” Dennie said. “Walter and I are here in the lobby of your building.”

  “My building?” He almost dropped the phone. “This building?”

  “Right. This building,” Dennie said. “But if you don’t want …”

  Alec dropped the phone and headed for the door. He took the six flights of stairs at a run when the elevator turned out to be at somebody else’s floor—somebody else who didn’t have the rest of his life waiting in the lobby—and he hit the ground floor at a run, only to stop in the middle of the lobby, lost. She wasn’t there.

  Then his eyes reached the row of old phone booths in the back. She was biting her lip, leaning a little against the booth, wearing a sleeveless white dress with a big red belt cinched around her waist and dangling red earrings the size of half dollars. He absorbed it all—her lush red lips and glossy dark curls and the fullness of her body above and below the red belt and most of all her eyes, huge with apprehension—all of her hit him like a punch to the solar plexus.

  He went to meet her using everything he had not to run to her.

  “Alec,” she said, and the crack in her voice was there beside him, not over a damned telephone wire, and she was there beside him, not half a continent away, and the lobby was full of people. He took her arm—she was warm and solid and right there with him and he lost his breath for a minute—and hauled her out the front door and around the corner of the building to a side street, and then he pulled her into his arms and kissed the breath out of both of them, falling into her the way he had ever since that first kiss by her hotel door.

  “We have to do something about this distance thing,” he said when they’d both come up for air and he had her plastered up against the building. “I’m not letting go of you again.”

  “You don’t have to take care of me,” Dennie said. “I mean, just because I’m moving here doesn’t mean that I expect to move in with you or anything. I don’t even know if you like dogs, and Walter’s a deal breaker.”

  Alec looked down and saw a surly-looking Yorkie staring back at him. “I love dogs.” He held her tighter, still not quite believing she was there. “I’m crazy about Walter already—” Then the rest of it hit him and he stepped back a little to get a good look at her face. “What do you mean, you’re moving here? I mean, I know you’re moving here because I’m not letting you go anywhere else, but you’re planning on moving here? Even if you don’t get the Trib job?”

  “I’ve moved.” Dennie smiled at him, the smile that always said, I can do this, I think. “I told you. I jumped. Everything I own is either at the airport or being shipped as soon as I give them an address. That’s why Walter’s here.”

  “You’ve moved,” Alec said, dumbfounded.

  “It’s all right,” Dennie said hastily. “I’m not taking anything for granted. If you don’t want—”

  Alec cut her off. “It takes three days to get a marriage license in Illinois. Can you stand living in sin for three days?”

  “Yes,” Dennie said.

  Alec took a deep breath. “Will you marry me in three days?”

&n
bsp; “Yes,” Dennie said, and he pulled her back close and thought, Thank God.

  “I didn’t think I’d ever hear you say it,” he said into her hair as he rocked her back and forth.

  “I always knew you would,” Dennie said against his chest, all her confidence back. “I just wasn’t sure what you’d say when I said it.”

  “Then you haven’t been paying attention.” He pulled back again so he could look at her. “Listen, as long as I’m on a roll, can I smear you with hot fudge and whipped cream on our honeymoon? I never did get to do that.”

  “Yes,” Dennie said, beaming at him in relief. “You can smear me with hot fudge and whipped cream until you’re a hundred. I love you. I couldn’t stand being without you.”

  Walter barked and Dennie looked down. “You have to love him too, Walter. He’s a deal breaker.”

  Walter sighed and laid down with his head on Alec’s shoe.

  Dennie looked back at Alec. “We’re all going to live happily ever after,” she told him. “Trust me on this.”

  And Alec said, “I do.”

  Two weeks later and twelve hundred miles away, Victoria picked up the mail at the end of the dusty dirt drive that led back into the sliver of undevelopable beachfront property she and Harry had bought from Bond after all. They’d gone down to look at it on their honeymoon, just to see what all the fuss had been over, and the sheer raw beauty of the place had left them standing in the middle of nowhere, staring at each other.

  “He should have had pictures,” Harry had said, looking around before he grinned at her. “The dumb cluck didn’t know what he had.”

  “Can he sell land from prison?” Victoria asked, and Harry said, “Are you out of your mind?” Shortly after that, Bond found himself a lot richer, although not as rich as he’d hoped since Harry insisted on giving him a fair market price. Also he was still in prison and would be for a while, Sherée having proved very helpful at the end.

  Victoria stopped halfway down the road and savored the birds and the smell of the ocean before she picked up speed. By the time she was up the gangplank on the Victoria, she was calling Harry’s name.