full twenty minutes, musing on the evening’s surprises. Suddenly, he strode into his office and lifted the phone receiver. He stopped. Why did he want to telephone Allison Wakefield? Nonplussed, he pressed the fingers of his left hand first to his right cheek, then to his temples, and closed his eyes. What the devil was going on?
Annoyed with himself for letting Allison get to him, Jake paced around in his bedroom, stopped, and swore; he needed a haircut. Nobody and nothing could have persuaded him to get one in that bastion of intrigue he’d just left, with a terrorist lurking in every other house, every store, and around any corner. In that environment, he wouldn’t be fool enough to sit in a barber’s chair and expose his throat to a razor. The ring of the phone jarred him. Wondering who would call him at half past eleven at night, he answered it.
“Covington.”
“Come in early tomorrow. I’ve got something for you. Can you make it in by eight o’clock?”
Jake held the receiver at arm’s length and glared at it. “You couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning to tell me? Did you forget I’m on a year’s leave of absence, chief, and that I just got back from a mission this morning?”
“No, I didn’t forget. I need your savvy. I want you to check these plans because if anything goes wrong on this job, Congress will have my head.”
“Eight o’clock,” Jake said and hung up. Right then, he hardly cared whose head came off. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in ten days, and who knew when he’d get another one if he had to worry about keeping Allison Wakefield out of his business?
* * *
Three days later, his job for the chief completed, he prepared for his first book-signing tour.
Rested, after a sound night’s sleep, Jake pulled himself out of bed, got a cup of black coffee, and tried to think. Considering the way he had responded to Allison Wakefield, all the way to the pit of his gut, he’d probably relax with her, slip up, and reveal more than he should. And she was bound to get suspicious if he periodically interrupted his book tour and disappeared for days at a time, as he would if the chief called on him. Any good journalist would want to know why he disappeared and where he went. He promised himself he’d get out of that commitment.
“I’ve rethought it,” he told Allison when he called her at her office later that morning, “and I’d prefer not to be encumbered on this tour. It’ll be tiring enough without having a reporter around to record every breath I take.”
He’d disappointed her, and he couldn’t help it, but when he’d looked down at the audience and had seen her there with her right hand at her throat and her lips a little apart, he hadn’t known what hit him. In his thirty-five years, he didn’t remember having had such a powerful reaction to a woman. He’d gotten through that lecture, though he didn’t remember how. Then she’d walked up to him and held out her hand, and for a moment he’d thought he’d conjured up a vision.
The extent of her frustration came through when she spoke. “If I can’t tour with you,” she bargained in a voice that lacked her previous toughness, “could you give me a list of people to interview who you’d trust to tell me the truth?”
“Your generosity astonishes me,” he said, clearly baffled. “I don’t get it.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” she replied, her tone more confident. “I won’t have any trouble finding people who’ll do you in. If I put an ad in the paper, they’ll come running.”
“That’s blackmail, woman.”
“Tut-tut. Don’t be so harsh. There’s more than one way to ride a horse; you know that. So what do you say? Do I tour with you, or don’t I?”
She sounded tough, and she might be, but something about her reached him, and he didn’t want to hurt her. She inspired in him exactly the opposite response. But he had to protect himself from damage, too. And he didn’t doubt that, if she dug into his private life, she could twist what she found sufficiently to torpedo his dreams of becoming scholar-in-residence at his alma mater.
“Are you equating me with a horse?” he chided. “Your choice of metaphors intrigues me.”
“I didn’t mean... Well, n-no.”
He couldn’t resist a dig. “Don’t apologize, Allison. When you ride, be considerate enough to make it enjoyable.” Oh, if phone lines had mirrors! From her long silence, he knew she’d gone slightly out of joint. Still, he couldn’t help needling her. “It isn’t always what we hear that causes trouble, but how we interpret it. You get my point, I hope.”
“If you’re trying to convince me that six weeks of your company will be unpleasant, don’t squander your energy,” she replied. “And off-color innuendos are wasted on me.”
“Off-color innuendos? I didn’t insinuate anything; I meant what I said. Plain and simple.”
“Like your wink?”
“Like your handshake, lady. Meaningful.” She could hold her own, he saw, as he waited for her reply.
“When do we leave?”
If he hadn’t spent the last thirty minutes talking with her, his answer probably would have been, “We don’t.” But he suspected she’d be good company. And face it, he told himself, you want to know whether that clap of thunder you heard and the lightning fire that roared through you when you first saw her signaled the real thing.
“All right. I’ll give it a shot,” he told her, “but please do your homework. I don’t mind telling you that I’ve had enough of fledgling reporters and their inept questions.”
“This is your first book, but I’ve worked as a reporter for six years. Which one of us is a fledgling?”
A warm flush spread through him, and he couldn’t help laughing; a woman who could hold her own with him was to be prized. And encouraged. “Touché. My publicist will give you my schedule for the next six weeks.” He hung up, and his smile faded. He’d have to make certain that she didn’t tail him on Friday and Saturday nights.
* * *
Jake couldn’t decide whether to rent a car, drive out to Rock Creek Park and spend a couple of hours horseback riding, or call a buddy for a game of tennis. He hadn’t had any useful exercise in ten days. He needed a good workout. “Dunc was always good for an early morning set or two,” he said to himself and telephoned his friend, a freelance journalist who worked at home.
“Jake here. How’s it going, buddy?” he asked Duncan Banks when his friend answered the phone.
“How am I? Man, I need a vacation. I just finished a piece on undertaker scams, and damned near wound up the victim of one of ’em myself. Don’t tell me you want a game. I just told my wife I needed some exercise.”
“I can be ready for a couple of sets in half an hour. How are Justine and Tonya?”
“Still spicing my life. I’ll pick you up in forty-five minutes.”
* * *
“You look as if you’ve been hanging out on a beach,” Duncan told Jake when he opened the door.
“Hardly,”
