He looked out at the ocean. “You just left. Without even meeting Rosalind. Without even saying good-bye.”
The silence stretched until it became taut. Tiny waves lapped at the sand. Imogen’s fingers brushed Benton’s tentatively. Stayed there when he didn’t pull away. Her voice was low, hard to understand. Confused. Shocked. She said, “You wrote a knock-knock joke? For me?”
He turned to her and saw that she was crying. Hard. “Yeah. A really, really bad one.”
She started to cry harder. “Will you tell me?”
He reached out and cupped her cheek in his hand and said, “No.”
“No?”
“I’m not in the mood for jokes. Right now I want to be serious.” He extended his arms around the table toward her and she fell into them. He pulled her into his lap and held her against his chest. “Imogen, are you going to run away from me every time you get scared? Every time you have to take an emotional risk?”
“Probably,” she said, sobbing.
He held her tighter. “Do you think you could wait until my knee heals completely before you run away again? You know, from where you shot me? Otherwise I won’t stand a chance of catching up.”
She laughed through her tears. “Probably.”
“What happened to the Imogen Page who was not afraid of getting hurt? The one who propositioned me on the balcony of my beach house?”
Imogen shrugged, moved her eyes to her lap.
“The one who told me to call 1-800-Jerkoff?”
Imogen’s eyes were still down, but Benton thought he caught a hint of a smile.
“The one who put me under arrest the first day we met?”
Imogen looked up. “You know, you’re still under arrest. I never said you weren’t under arrest anymore.”
“Aha! You admit it.”
“What?”
“That you are the same woman.”
Imogen’s eyes, bright from crying, searched his face. “You really want this, don’t you?”
“Yes. And I will do whatever it takes to make it work.”
She tucked her hair behind her ear and gave a nod. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I owe you two dates. That’s what we agreed on in Boston. Or now, one.”
“What do you mean one?”
“Well, we sort of just had a date. So one more.”
“That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I said date. Psychopaths and SWAT teams and KFC.”
“I don’t know. I thought it was fun. Exciting.”
Benton shook his head. “You would.” Then said, “If you thought that was exciting, just wait until our next date.”
“Okay, hot shot. When?”
“Are you doing anything right now?”
They were too occupied to grab the phone an hour later when Lex called to report that the helicopter carrying Cal Harwood to Honolulu had issued an SOS halfway through its flight and plunged precipitously into the shark-infested waters of Kauai Channel. The coast guard found no survivors.
EPILOGUE
“She knocked my socks off,” says Arbor
By Storm Lark
Special to the Review-Journal
Serial wedding?
Even the staff of the Fontana Lounge at the Bellagio was kept in the dark about the names of the people throwing Saturday’s blowout engagement party and their supersecret musical guest until the last minute. In fact, my spies tell me that when Tom Jones showed up for his sound check, one of the waitresses fainted and almost toppled the champagne fountain.
The lucky couple turned out to be Benton Arbor, multimillionaire head of Arbor Motors, and Imogen Page, the FBI agent who cracked the Loverboy case here this past winter. Arbor has homes in NYC, L.A., and Detroit, but the pair plan to make Las Vegas their base. Rumor has it that instead of a diamond engagement ring,
Arbor proposed with a case of double-bond paper with the words Imogen Page Investigations engraved on it. A hundred and fifty of their closest friends from around the globe—including one goldfish—joined them at the Bellagio bash, which showed no signs of stopping until well after dawn. No date has been made public for the wedding, but Tom Jones, who is a favorite of both Arbor and Page, said privately that he has been asked to stay “on call” throughout the summer.
Ha, ha! Tom Jones and everything. What a riot. They were having fun now, but they would be missing him soon. Missing him and thinking about him ALL the time. That he was sure of.
His next plan was going to blow them away totally. He was still testing it, fine-tuning it, but even still it was better than anything anyone else had ever done. It was going to make him superfamous.
He hit QUIT and pushed his chair away from the bank of monitors in the Internet café. It was sultry in there, despite the fan, and he couldn’t wait to get outside. The pimple-faced boy at the cashier’s counter gave him a long look as he paid and a longer one as he leaned over to pick up his package. He was getting used to having people look at him that way. It had been strange at first, but it was really growing on him.
Growing. Ha, ha!
He strolled to the post office. Everywhere he looked around him, everyone was happy. He was too. He never felt silly anymore. Now he just felt happy. Happy ALL the time.
He filled in the customs forms and slid them, with the box, across to the man in the light blue shirt behind the counter. He sure hoped Imogen liked this present. She’d never written to thank him for the last one.
Of course, she didn’t know where he was—
The post office man stroked his mustache as he read the forms over. He shook his head. “You forget one,” the man said, pointing a bitten nail at one of the boxes on the form. “You forgot the condense.”
He figured out what the man was saying. Contents. He slipped the man a smile. “Silly me. Sorry.” He took the form and wrote, PIECE OF MIND. “How is that?”
“Just fine,” the man told him. Gave him an appreciative once-over. Added formally, “As are you, ma’am.”
—or what he was.
“What is your name, handsome?” Cal, now short for Calista, asked with a flirtatious glance.
“Eduardo.”
Calista rested a long red fingernail on the back of Eduardo’s hand. “Someone should deal with that saucy tongue of yours, Eduardo.”
“What about you, ma’am? Say, tonight?”
“Why, Eduardo, I can’t tell you how happy that would make me,” Calista said. Thought: Well, that’s my Christmas shopping done.
The End
Not!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MICHELE JAFFE holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. She is the author of The Stargazer and The Water Nymph as well as Lady Killer, Secret Admirer, and Bad Girl. She lives in Las Vegas. Please visit her website at www.michelejaffe.com.
ALSO BY MICHELE JAFFE
Published by Ballantine Books
SECRET ADMIRER
LADY KILLER
BAD GIRL
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2004 by Michele Jaffe
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Control Number: 2004091980
e-ISBN 0-345-47918-1
v1.0
Bad Girl and Loverboy Page 77
