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Authors: Lisa Unger

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BOOK: Angel Fire
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She wondered what line he would use:
“In town on business or
pleasure?” “What kind of man would keep a woman like you waiting?”
She’d heard them all. When he seated himself beside her, he surprised her.

“I could drown in those eyes of yours,” he said without looking at her. A slight Italian accent tinged his words. Of course. Only European men were so smooth. American men were clumsy, arrogant.

“Thank you,” she answered.

“Can I buy you a drink?”

Within the hour they were in his suite, decorated in predictable Southwest decor; it straddled the line between opulence and hotel tackiness uncomfortably. With three straight vodkas under her belt, Lydia felt the welcome lightness that accompanied these moments. He had turned the lights down low and they danced slowly to a Mexican ballad on a stereo system piped into the room. The smell of his cologne was intoxicating. His large hands on the small of her back made her feel safe and wanted, though she didn’t know him at all. When she closed her eyes, he was the right build so that she could imagine he was Jeffrey.

She hated herself a little in these moments, like a junkie going back to the needle. This pursuit was empty, she knew. The effort to satisfy the desire never met the gaping need within her. Here, she could have closeness without the risk of love, she could take without giving, she could have something she wasn’t afraid to lose. She’d always had an intellectual perspective on her flaws and it never made any difference when she tried to change.

He looked into her eyes as one hand traced the smooth skin on her arm and the other delicately took down the zipper on the back of her dress. “It is all right?” he asked softly.

“Yes.”

She helped him slip off his sweater. He was beautiful.
Apollo
,
she called him in her mind. Paolo was his name, she remembered vaguely. He kissed the straps of her dress away and the garment fell to the floor. As he gently cupped her breasts in his hands, kissing them, she undid his pants and reached inside, feeling him hard for her. He groaned at her touch and kissed her mouth with such passion it startled her. He pulled her leg up and she wrapped it around his, moving herself against him. Then he lifted her and carried her to the bed. She leaned on her elbows and watched him step out of pants and black silk boxers. “Very nice,” she said, smiling.

He pulled off her white lace panties with a boyish smile. “You are also ‘very nice,’ as you say. Beautiful, perfect.”

She laughed, thinking the less he spoke, the better. He lay beside her and traced the center line of her body with a delicate touch. She quivered, ticklish, aroused. And then she was on top of him. She kissed him as she moved her hips in slow, luscious circles. He held her tightly at her hips, pulling himself deeper and deeper into her. She watched his face as he surrendered to his pleasure, moaning. She loved that moment of true yearning; she knew it so well in her own heart. To see it in another made her feel less alone.

It was close to midnight as she pulled her clothes back on. He slept soundly, snoring lightly, sweetly, like a child. She glanced back at him. He was lovely. As she closed the door and walked down the hall, she wrapped her arms around herself as if to protect her heart against the ache that was already setting in. The feeling she would go to the ends of the earth to avoid, the hole in her insides where the wind blew through, was creeping up on her, pulling at her with black ghost-fingers.

In her car in the parking lot, she wept, deep, true tears that
welled from some secret place inside her. Tears she couldn’t understand, and couldn’t escape.

W
hen Jeffrey’s phone rang at four
A.M.
, he knew it was her before he picked up.

“Where are you?” he answered.

“Santa Fe.”

“Do you know I’ve been trying to reach you?”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Right.” He cleared his throat. She heard him struggling not to sound the combination of relieved and angry that he was. “Well, what are you doing?”

“I came to hide out for a while but I’ve run into something down here. Will you come?”

“You want me to drop everything and come to New Mexico?”

“Are you working on something big? Something no one else can handle?”

“Not really.”

“We both know you don’t have a life,” she teased.

He laughed. He could use a vacation. And he did want to see her. “I’ll call you with my flight information tomorrow. You can pick me up at the airport.”

chapter seven

J
effrey fought the urge to turn around and bolt from the gangway that led to United Airlines flight number 133 to Albuquerque. It was the same irrational feeling of impending doom that always assailed him when he boarded a plane. He tried without success to control his adrenalinized fear response, the dry mouth and sweating palms, the shallow breathing. Lydia thought it was the funniest thing in the world that someone who had faced down some of the most dangerous, desperate men in the country without a notable rise in his heart rate, experienced abject terror at getting on a plane. “It’s safer than getting into a car,” she’d said. And he knew this intellectually. But you had control over a car. If the engine failed on your car, you didn’t plummet thirty-five thousand feet into the ocean. But he kept moving up the narrow aisle, stowed his carry-on in the overhead bin, and squeezed his big frame into the tiny window seat. He liked the window seat because he wanted to be able to see if there was a problem, like black smoke coming from the engine, or maybe an errant bolt of lightning in a cloudless sky. Then, of course, there was the possibility of in-air collisions because of the increasing number of planes in the sky, and pilots who spoke different native languages from the air traffic controllers. To say nothing of the potential for drug addiction and alcoholism among the pilots, airplane mechanics,
and air traffic controllers. Really, anything could go wrong at any moment. “You know too much about this shit,” Lydia had commented. “Ignorance is bliss. Besides, you walked away from a bullet fired into you at point-blank range. You’re charmed.”

The thought of the night he was shot about a year ago always filled him with yearning for Lydia.

He took a bullet, the only one of his career, in the shoulder during the apprehension of a child-killer he and his partners had been hunting for a year with the New York City Police Department. The chase led them to the rooftops of the projects in the South Bronx on a moonless rainy night. Younger and faster than most of the men working the case that night, Jeffrey found himself alone on the building-top, gun drawn, the rest of the team a good minute behind him, running up fifteen flights of stairs. The faces of the murdered and missing boys were burned into Jeffrey’s mind, and he was more than determined to bring their tormentor to justice. The rooftop was a black field of shadows, doorways, and ventilation shafts, any one of them a place to hide. The street noise, even twenty floors up, made it impossible to hear the labored breathing or the shuffle of footsteps that might give Jeffrey the advantage of knowing where the perp hid. Jeffrey’s mistake, of course, was that he wasn’t afraid at all. Had he been, he would have been more cautious. Instead he rounded a corner too quickly and came face-to-face with the criminal, who fired a round at him. Luckily the bastard was a bad shot, and instead of getting Jeffrey in the head, the bullet passed through his right shoulder, just to the right of his protective Kevlar vest. The other men on the team took the killer down.

He didn’t remember much else until he awoke hours later in a hospital bed, feeling heavily drugged and vaguely aware of a dull pain in his shoulder. It took him a second to remember what had
happened and where he was. The room was dim and the heart monitor beeped steadily. Lydia must have been standing there in the doorway for a moment before he turned his head and saw her. He remembered thinking that he was dreaming. The lights behind her glowed like a halo around her head. She looked so beautiful and strong, her long black hair spilling over her shoulders, her white T-shirt clinging to her breasts. He smiled dreamily, wanting to take her into his arms.

Suddenly she seemed to lose her strength and leaned against the doorjamb, closing her eyes. When she opened them again, tears spilled down her pale skin. In all the years he had known her, he hadn’t seen her cry since the death of her mother. Now she looked frightened and helpless, like the child he remembered. He struggled to sit upright.

“Lydia, I’m fine.”

She walked into the room and sat in the chair by his bed. She took his good hand tightly and pulled it to her face. She held it there with her eyes squeezed shut, as if she were praying. They both knew she crossed the line that moment. He had realized as he lay there, his throat dry with emotion, that he had crossed it long ago.

He was moved to silence by her tears. He wanted to beg her to stop before his heart broke but, at the same time, her tears were answering a question he had never asked of her. He had always known that she cared for him deeply and, in a way, relied on him. He knew he was the only one she truly allowed into her life. But he was never sure where her feelings began or ended. She had always maintained a protective distance from him, appearing and then disappearing from his day-to-day life. As she sat by his bedside, bathing his hand with her tears, she closed that distance.

She had said to him once, “Never love anything so much that if fate snatches it away, your whole world turns black.”

He knew it was too late for that now—for both of them.

“Lydia, I’m okay,” he repeated softly. He lay very still, afraid to move his hand, afraid she’d let it go.

She searched his face to see if he was lying. Then she nodded and sat back in the chair, keeping her hold on his hand. He watched as she struggled to recover herself. Her skin was flushed, she stared away from him. Anyone else would have thought her face lacked emotion, her small features were taut and still. But her gray eyes told the tale to him alone.

“Don’t you ever die on me, Jeffrey. Don’t you ever,” she whispered.

She seemed not to be able to stop the quiet, choking sobs that shook her shoulders. He would almost rather take another bullet than ever hear that sound again.

“Lydia,” he began, the words he had wanted to say for years on the tip of his tongue.

She stopped him. “Don’t, Jeffrey,” she said gently.

He let it go, too afraid to go forward. They sat in silence, hand in hand, until he drifted off to sleep.

She stayed with him in his midtown apartment for almost a month. She cleaned, she cooked, she nursed him with a tenderness he wouldn’t have believed of her. Not that she was a cold woman. But getting close to her was like trying to get a bird to eat out of your hand. You had to hold that bread crumb out consistently and for a good long time before you earned enough trust to approach without generating a flight response. She slept in his guest room, though she had her own apartment in New York City overlooking Central Park West. She stayed until he became restless to go back to work and she was satisfied that he was well.

Then Lydia left, went off to Europe to find out if Esmy von Buren was really killing her own children as her former mother-in-law suspected. Jeffrey didn’t try to make her stay, just kissed her lightly on the mouth.

“I’ll always be here, Lydia.”

“So will I.” And she flashed him a rare smile.

He strapped himself in now, and was glad to see that the door had closed but no one was sitting beside him, even though he probably would not at any point “take off his seat belt and move freely about the cabin” as the pilot would blithely suggest. Didn’t people know about wind shears?

The plane began taxiing down the runway, picking up speed. He wondered, as he had wondered a thousand times, what would have happened if he had pushed her that night in the hospital. It might have taken only the slightest nudge. Perhaps she would have opened to him like a hothouse orchid. Or perhaps she would have shattered into a thousand pieces, like a carelessly handled porcelain doll.

But as it was, since their month of living together almost a year ago, she’d put more distance between them than ever. At the height of the FBI investigation of Esmy von Buren, which Lydia had been responsible for getting started, she called him almost every day, but they spoke only about the case. He’d seen her only a handful of times when she returned to New York for Esmy’s trial. Then, two months ago, with Esmy tried and convicted of three counts of murder and Lydia’s article turned in to
New York
magazine, Lydia took off. She left a message on his home machine, though she could have easily reached him on his cell phone.

“I need a rest after this case. Christ, I’m exhausted. I’ll call you. Take care of that shoulder.”

The plane was racing down the runway, doubling its speed
by the second and making his adrenaline pump. He let his head be pushed back by the force of takeoff and closed his eyes as he felt the wheels leave the ground. Why had she stopped him when they were so close? The last safe moment had passed between them—there was no real pretending to each other that their relationship ended with friendship. But he would rather see her preserved in the environment she created for herself than watch their relationship crumble if he came too close. So he endured the painful distances and the torturous closeness. He would continue, he knew, to come when she called.

chapter eight

T
he Church of the Holy Name was dimly lit by the fading sun as Lydia entered. Awed by the hush of the sacred room, at once she felt like a child and an intruder. She consciously pushed the vivid images of her dream from her mind. Still she felt a flutter of nerves in her stomach. She kept expecting to see her mother.
Why did you come here now?
she asked herself, as if something outside her had made the choice to stop suddenly on her way to the airport.

As she walked cautiously down the center aisle toward the altar, the old, immaculately polished wood floors groaned loudly beneath her lizard-skin boots.

BOOK: Angel Fire
10.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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