Eve’s Wedding Knight

Chapter 6

Eve opened her eyes in the hospital’s perpetual twilight and knew at once that she wasn’t alone. From her curled-on-her-side position she let her eyes roam as far as they would, but saw only the stark walls, the bedside cabinet and visitor’s chair, the graying rectangle of a window.

And yet she’d definitely heard something…someone…the stealthy brush of cloth on cloth… the whisper of an exhalation. The nurse, perhaps, coming to check on her yet again? But no, there’d been no footsteps, no sounds of an opening or closing door, no subtle swirls and eddys of air currents stirred by a passing body. Her mother, then, or one of her sisters, unable to stay away, come to sit quietly and wait for her to awaken? The thought made her feel deliciously warm and loved, and at the same time near to weeping.

She turned carefully onto her back and stretched her legs beneath the thin hospital covers, and the dark shape slumped in a chair near the door stirred to instant alertness.

Her heart gave an odd bump. “Jake?” she said on a rising note of surprised laughter. “Is that you?”

The FBI man leaned forward from the waist, arms extended above his head, stretching out stiffness. “Yeah, it’s me.” His voice sounded as if he’d stifled a yawn.

“What on earth are you doing here? When did you come back?” She felt the strangest all-over prickling, the tiniest shower of shivers, almost like goose bumps. It was the most pleasant feeling she’d had in quite a while actually, and it was hard to keep the smile out of her voice, even as she supplied the answer with its grim reminder, “Are you my bodyguard?”

His eyes regarded her from deep in their shadowed sockets. “You could call it that. Keeping an eye on my star witness.”

“I take it you don’t trust Sonny’s ‘All is forgiven’ act?”

She heard a noise that she might have taken for a laugh, except she remembered that Agent Jake Something wasn’t capable of laughter. “Just taking no chances.”

“How long have you been here?” Now that she thought about it, the idea that he’d watched her sleep was disconcerting; she wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or appalled.

His shoulders casually rose and fell. “Couple hours. I got tired of lurking in the hallway. When the nurse wasn’t looking, I ducked in here. Hope you don’t mind.”

To cover the ambiguity of her emotions, she gave a dry snort.

She sat up and twisted half around and began lifting up bedclothes and pillows as she added sardonically, “By the way-Sonny plans to assign me a bodyguard. Isn’t that nice? Dammit, where in the-”

“What’re you looking for?” He rose, a silent, fluid motion that diminished the space between him and her bed by half.

Her heart gave another of those strange little bumps. To distract herself from that she pretended an irritability she didn’t feel. “Isn’t there supposed to be some sort of button to push when you want to crank this thing up?”

He pointed. “That it?”

“Where?-oh yeah, there it is.” And he was close enough to her to evoke memories of how warm his body had felt as he’d carried her into the E.R., and the comforting smell of his bathrobe. Somehow those memories made the space between them seem emptier and the air chillier by comparison. A shiver wafted through her as she added a breathless “Thanks.”

“Where are you going?” He’d perked up like a watchdog catching a whiff of an unauthorized scent when she threw back the covers and swung her bare legs over the side of the bed.

She raised her eyebrows at him, feeling with her feet for the floor. “To the bathroom. You want to check it out first?”

He frowned, ignoring the sarcasm. “Shouldn’t you, uh…you sure you should be out of bed?”

Amusement rippled through her, but she kept her tone lightly sardonic. “You’re really getting caught up in this, aren’t you? Might I remind you that I was not really attacked, and do not actually have a concussion? Except for a minor bump I got when I dropped a Dumpster lid on my own head, and some scrapes and bruises that were the result of my falling out of said Dumpster flat on my, uh, face, I am perfectly fine.” Poised to hop down off the bed, she paused and made a twirling motion with one finger. “Turn around, please.”

Now it was Jake’s eyebrows that arched, then almost comically pulled together in the middle of his forehead as his mouth formed a silent “Oh” of comprehension. Eve thought his discomfiture amusing, even rather sweet, until she heard what he’d muttered under his breath as he turned.

“I beg your pardon?” she demanded, halting with one hand clutching her hospital gown together behind her.

“Nothing I haven’t already seen, and packaged a whole lot prettier,” he repeated, his voice only slightly more audible and with a strange little burr in it that caused an answering vibration deep in her own chest.

So he’d actually noticed? And was that…amusement? Mr. Deadpan? No way…

“Mention that fact again and you’re dead meat, buddy.” And as she pulled the wide, heavy bathroom door closed behind her, she heard a sound that sent a jolt of.wonder through her. I heard that! That was a chuckle-definitely.

Jake had it under firm control, though, by the time Eve emerged from the bathroom. He’d gone to stand by the window and was waiting for her, arms folded on his chest, one ankle crossing the other. He waited until she’d settled herself in bed with the covers chastely arranged across her middle, then said without stirring, “Lady, you pull that in the wrong place, the wrong time, you wind up dead.”

She lifted a hand to touch the bandage around her head, closed her eyes and let a breath out loudly. Impatience tightened his chest and thickened in his throat, but he kept his voice low and even. “I mean it. In undercover ops, you get in the role and you stay there. Every second, every minute, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week-you live it, breathe it, think it, feel it Believe it. Or sooner or later you’re gonna make a mistake. Capish?”

“Yeah.” She sighed and leaned her head back against the pillow. “I’m sorry.” But then her smile flicked on again, like one of those trick birthday candles you can’t blow out. “Undercover ops-how exciting. Like something in a TV script.”

It was only when her eyes slid past him, reflecting the graying darkness beyond the window glass, that he saw the smile and the remark for the valiant subterfuge they were. Saw that the smoke screen of banter and easy flirtation had cleared out and left her face-to-face with the reality of her situation. And the odd thing was, he was sorry; without her smile in it, the room already seemed colder.

Difficult as it was, he clamped down hard on the sympathy he felt for her, clenching his teeth together so that his voice came as a growl. “You’re gonna have to think it, feel it, believe it if you’re gonna make Cisneros believe it.”

Still staring at the window, she mumbled, “When he touches me, I feel like I’m going to throw up.”

Unexpectedly, it was anger, not sympathy, that flared inside him. He made a disbelieving sound and shook his head.

“What?” Her eyes were on him, defiant and wary.

The spark of resentment within him glowed hotter, brighter. It’s none of your business, Redfield, he reminded himself. It’s got nothing to do with you. Keep your distance. But he knew he wasn’t going to. For some reason he couldn’t figure the woman out, and he had to know. Just this one thing. He had to.

With deceptive quietness he said, “Just like that? Yesterday you were going to marry the guy. Before this happened, you were ready to jump his bones, wedding dress and all. Today he makes your stomach turn?”

She stared hard at him for a few moments, then shrugged and looked away. “I guess that’s just the way I am,” she said distantly, leaving him more frustrated than before.

Jeez-women. He thought, Are you all like that? Is it just something you women can do-change your feelings with the snap of your fingers? One day you can pledge to love and cherish a guy forever, and the next day it’s gone-over, finished, kaput?

But of course he wouldn’t ask her that; it wasn’t his place, or his business. And at the same time, something in him wasn’t ready to let it go. After a pause he said casually, “I’m curious. How did you ever hook up with a guy like Sonny, anyway?”

He could see that she wanted to hang on to her pique a while longer. And she tried; leaning back against her pillows and heaving a put-upon sigh, she looked at the ceiling and began with pointed reluctance, “How did I hook up with Sonny…?” But it took about that long for her natural gregariousness to take over, and she broke it off, laughing softly. “It’s funny, really, the way it happened. See, I’d been in Brazil, on a shoot. We were doing a documentary about this tribe, in the rain forest, that had just been discovered in the last fifty years, and now they’re being threatened with extinction because their habitat is being destroyed for lumber and farmland. Can you believe that?” Her eyes sparked with passion and her voice grew husky. “I mean, we spend billions of dollars trying to protect the habitat of some obscure species of bird or rat or tree frog, and here’s a race of human beings who, if they were animals would be on every endangered species list there is.” She stopped, and he could see her working at reining herself in.

“So, anyway, I was back in L.A. doing postproduction on the project-this was last spring-and I got a call from my boss, that’s the head of the production company I work for, saying she wants me to put the Amazon project on the back burner, because they want me to go to Las Vegas, of all places. They’ve got this big new project in the works, a four-parter for one of the cable networks on The New Las Vegas. Huge amounts of money involved. I pretty much hit the ceiling. I mean, the Brazil project meant a lot to me. Plus, I’d just spent six months sweltering in the Amazon jungle, getting slowly eaten to death, and just when we’re getting started with the actual work-the fun stuff, I mean. See-” And she broke off to hitch herself forward, talking with her whole body now, all traces of reluctance and resentment forgotten, enthusiasm shining in her face in spite of her battered features. “Making a documentary’s not like doing a movie or TV show, where you have a script and a shooting schedule to follow. The camera work is just your raw material. I mean, those cinematographers are amazing, especially when it comes to shooting wildlife, but the actual film is made in postproduction-the editing, music, voice-overs. That’s where the real creativity comes in. That’s where…” Once again she throttled back, letting out a breath of exasperation.

“Anyway, I threw a class-A hissy-fit, but to no avail. Basically, I was not given a choice-the Vegas people had specifically asked for me. They’d seen my work. I was who they wanted, or no deal. All very flattering, I suppose. And like I said, lots of money involved. Which is the bottom line, right? I thought about walking, I was so mad-I really did. But then I’d have had to leave my Brazil project behind, and I wasn’t about to do that. So off I went to Vegas, but I was still fuming, and let me tell you, I made sure everybody knew it!

“Anyway, we get to the hotel, right?-this huge casino, ‘Shangri-La’-Sonny’s casino-and we’re all booked into these luxury suites, like royalty. I walk into my room, and I nearly fainted. I mean, it’s filled with orchids and all sorts of tropical plants and birds in cages, and baskets of fruit, and there’s even a recording of rain forest sounds playing on the stereo. And in the middle of it all, I find a note that says, ‘Let me make it up to you.’ And it’s signed, ‘Sonny Cisneros.”’ She stopped with a small shrug and an off-center smile that said, What was I gonna do?

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?”

As he was saying that, he watched her face, fascinated by the conflict so clearly written there. He could see part of her wanted to joke about it-laugh it off-but that part of her knew he was right.

She waited until he’d finished, then cocked her head like that cheeky little bird she reminded him of, and in a light but quiet voice-a compromise, he thought-inquired, “Are you always so depressingly suspicious and pessimistic?”

In a voice just as quiet, he shot back, “Are you always so annoyingly cheery and optimistic?”

Then for a few moments tension crackled in the quietness while their eyes waged their silent tug-of-war. But while Jake recognized the battle of wills, darned if he could figure out what the stakes were. If it was a matter of dominion, or authority-some kind of control thing-she had to know she was outmatched. Maybe in her own world she was the one that got to call the shots, but she was in his world now, and in that world she was vulnerable and clueless as a newborn baby. She wasn’t a stupid woman, she had to know that. So why was she standing there bandaged and bruised and barely decent in that hospital gown, toe-to-toe with a federal agent in full battle armor?

It made no more sense to him than did the way he felt when she leveled those indigo-blue eyes at him and finally answered his question in a low, almost toneless voice. “No, only when things look really hopeless.”

Outmatched she may have been, but he felt in no way victorious.

Instead, he found himself remembering what she’d said, about the idea of Cisneros touching her making her feel sick. They’d talked quite a bit since then, exchanged a few tidbits of personal history, even shared a secret or two. But nothing had been said that would change the fact that sometime soon Eve Waskowitz was going to have to find a way to resume convincingly the role of loving fiancé to a man she now abhorred. He suddenly realized that what he was looking at was a terrified woman. And that what she was doing was simply whistling in the dark.

He felt his belly clench, and something flare white-hot inside him and then go cold and still.

Hopeless? Not if he had anything to say about it.

“What’d the nurse want?” he asked gruffly.

Eve shrugged and turned, clutching her gown together where it mattered most, but giving him an unnerving glimpse of the back he remembered from when he’d undressed her in his bedroom-the creamy smooth skin, the delicate indentations of spine.

“Just routine stuff. They keep a pretty close eye on you, I guess, when you’ve been bumped on the head. She also said breakfast will be here soon, and she wanted to know if I wanted to ‘freshen up’ before visitors start arriving. Which I do,” she added pointedly as she sat on the edge of the bed and leveled a look at him. Her eyes were shadowed and dark, impossible to read, and for the first time he thought she looked her age. “I’m sure you’d like some breakfast yourself-a cup of coffee, at least. Better make your escape while you can.”

“Yeah, I will…” But he went on staring at her, his mind spinning furiously, hating to leave it like that. Hating to leave her, it shocked him to realize. Hating to leave her with that look of hopelessness in her eyes, and the thought of her and Cisneros in bed together twisting a knot in his belly.

He lifted a hand, palm out, and said with a voice full of gravel, “Listen-it’s not hopeless. Okay? I’m workin’ on it. Just…do me a favor, huh? Remember to act injured?” Her only reply was a very small snort.

He opened the door a crack, looked up and down the corridor, waited for his moment, then slipped through the door and closed it gently behind him. As he made his way, scowling, through the awakening hospital, bustling with the routines of morning, with the clank of breakfast trays and the ding of elevators and the swish of footsteps and voices on the intercom, he wondered when his first priority had changed from nailing the bad guy to keeping Eve Waskowitz out of the bad guy’s bed.

Eve’s day progressed in predictable hospital fashion. People popped in and out of her room on various errands, most of them involving indignities to her person. Out of sheer boredom, she dozed until the arrival of breakfast, an excitement relative in its anticipation to Christmas morning. Shortly after that, her mother and sisters arrived, bringing with them her small overnighter. She was so glad to see them, it was hard to remember to act feeble and wan.

“I’m not sure what’s in here,” Summer said as she laid the overnight case on the foot of Eve’s bed. “I think it’s mostly makeup and toiletries. I wanted to bring you something to wear-a nightgown, but it all looked like…you know-honeymoon stuff.”

“Sweetheart, are you in pain?” her mother asked anxiously.

“A bit,” Eve lied in a faint voice. “My head, mostly.”

Her mother’s cool hand touched her cheek. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

“What does the doctor say?” Mirabella demanded, showing her concern in her own pushy way. “Have you seen him yet this morning? Do they know how bad the concussion is? How much longer are they going to keep you here?”

“I don’t know,” Eve said. “A doctor stopped by earlier this morning, just long enough to read my chart and huddle with the nurse for a few minutes. He seemed very busy…” Remembering Jake’s parting words, I’m workin’ on it, she added in a vague tone she hoped would cover all bases, “I think they’re still doing tests…looking at X rays-stuff like that. They have to be sure…”

“Of course,” Summer murmured, stroking her arm. Mirabella subsided, looking not in the least satisfied.

“So-where are the menfolk this morning?” Eve asked brightly, just as her mother was saying, “Have you heard from Sonny this morning?” Before either could answer the other, the phone on the bedside table trilled. Eve stared at it in surprise.

“Well. That’s probably Sonny now,” her mother said.

“Oh-yeah,” said Eve, with what she hoped was a smile. She picked up the phone and ventured a tentative “Hello?”

“Get rid of them,” Jake’s voice growled in her ear. “Sorry to break up the family gathering, but we need to talk. Now. ”