Eve’s Wedding Knight

by Kathleen Creighton

  Even so-and whether out of suspicion or genuine interest she couldn’t be certain-Sonny insisted on accompanying her to her first therapy session. At least, thanks to the bugs, she knew Sonny’s presence wouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

  She did her best to throttle back her anticipation. After all, she told herself, Jake might not even be there. To avert suspicion, the therapy sessions were scheduled for three times a week, because that was what would be expected for her type of “injury,” not because there was any real need for her to check in that often. Would Jake come himself unless there was something he needed to talk to her about? And it had only been a few days since she’d seen him. She told herself he wouldn’t be there. Of course he wouldn’t. She’d gotten all worked up-not to mention prettied up-for nothing.

  So it came as something of a shock to her when she walked into the Body Shop and there was Jake in sweatpants and tank top, pounding the daylights out of a punching bag.

  Not like it was anything that obvious. She was checking in at the lobby desk, which was situated behind a curving counter in front of a wall of glass overlooking the main workout room, the purpose of which, she assumed, was to give visitors a view of the club’s sumptuous facilities so that they’d be enticed to join. While the beefy young man on duty at the desk was on the phone, Eve watched an interesting assortment of sweaty people of varying ages, genders and degrees of fitness pumping away on stationary bicycles, stairchmbers, rowing machines and Nautilus equipment.

  The area in the back of the room was devoted to free weights. These were serious bodybuilders, she assumed from the look of them-brawny guys with bulging biceps, massive deltoids and necks with a greater circumference than their heads. Most of them wore headbands to keep the sweat out of their eyes, and some wore hand protectors and heavy support belts. All of them wore looks of grim concentration, if not intense pain.

  “Serious stuff,” Eve said to Sonny, nodding toward the weight lifters. Sonny, who had declined the attendant’s invitation to pay the fee and join the fun, merely grunted and resumed his pacing. Not that Sonny was in terrible shape, but as far as he was concerned, that physical stuff was for the Rickys and Sergeis of this world. He preferred more subtle methods of power and control.

  So, since the attendant was still occupied, Eve went back to watching the club’s patrons. Through large glass windows on one side of the main exercise room, she could see aerobics classes in progress. In one, a dozen or so senior citizens in sweats gamely flapped and stretched and marched and swiveled at the exhortations of a fiftyish woman wearing a fuchsia leotard and purple tights. In the room next door, a younger group wriggled and pounded energetically on and off stairsteps to the beat of a dance tune only they could hear. And farther back along that same wall, partially obscured by the huffing puffing weight lifters, a tall, lean man in gray sweats and a white tank-style undershirt was attacking a massive punching bag with the single-minded fury of an enraged bull.

  “My goodness,” Eve murmured under her breath. She wasn’t even into boxing; she hated violence-she’d seen too much of its end product. But for some reason she couldn’t take her eyes off the man at the bag, and watching him, unaccountably felt her heartbeat quicken and her breath grow thick in her chest. This was violence, yes, but it seemed more like an imperative of nature than a product of mankind’s folly-like a grizzly bear pummeling a tree trunk, or a bull elk’s charge; primitive and exciting; a bit frightening, but in a way, soul stirring, too.

  The man paused, steadying the bag with a glove while he wiped sweat with a forearm. Then he lifted his head and looked straight at her; even from that distance she could see his eyes glowing black as coals beneath the furrowed brow. Her breath gushed from her as if one of those gloved hands had just made contact with her solar plexus. She thought, My God-it’s Jake.

  “Miss? Uh, ma’am?” The attendant was talking to her. “Okay, if you want to go on back, your therapist is gonna meet you. Go through there-that’s the ladies’ locker room, you can change in there-then go on through. You’ll go past the pool and you’ll see the doors marked Steam Room, Whirlpool, and so on. She says she’ll meet you there-at the whirlpool.”

  Eve nodded. She was still trying to recover her breath. She started for the door the attendant had indicated, to the right of a large arrow and the sign Ladies.

  “Wait,” Sonny blustered. “I wanna meet this therapist.”

  The attendant said, “Sir, if you’d care to wait till she’s done, if you could just have a seat… Or else you can come back for her-whichever you prefer. Should be ‘bout half an hour.”

  “How about if I bring-?” She looked at the attendant.

  “Name’s Marcie,” he supplied.

  “Okay, I’ll have her come out afterward so you can meet her. Is that all right?”

  “Just want to make sure she knows what she’s doing,” Sonny said gruffly. “Don’t want some quack messing around with my girl.” He stroked her arm, then leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Go on-get it over with. I’ll be waiting.”

  Eve whispered, “Okay,” breathless as a child. She picked up her bag and walked through the swinging door, and instantly was slapped in the face by the humidity and swamped by the unmistakable smells of the gym-sweat and steam and disinfectant and oil of wintergreen. Her knees felt weak, as though she’d just had a bad fright, or narrowly avoided an accident.

  She placed her bag on a bench in front of an empty locker and undressed quickly, putting on the one-piece bathing suit she’d just bought, and her new warm-ups over that. And all the while her heart was pounding, and her mind kept replaying the words, Oh my God…my God-it’s Jake.

  Chapter 11

  He came in while she was in the whirlpool bath, still sweating from his workout, with a towel looped around his neck and his hair standing out from his head in a bristle of wet spikes. He spoke in an undertone to the FBI agent posing as Marcie the physical therapist, who nodded and left the room.

  Eve observed this from under cover of her lashes as she lay in the tub, half-reclining in the warm, churning water with her head back and her neck supported by a specially designed cushion, pretending drowsy indifference while her heart mocked her with its thundering tattoo. She watched him approach the tub with a rocking, unhurried gait, his eyes pinioning her, studying her with a curious combination of self confidence and wariness, like a seasoned fighter taking a new opponent’s measure. And even though she knew most of her body would be invisible to him in the swirling water, under that dark, unyielding gaze she felt utterly and completely naked.

  With her pulse throbbing at the base of her throat, she waited, hoping to let him speak first. But when it became apparent that he wasn’t going to, and when she couldn’t stand the terrible feeling of vulnerability another minute, she curved her lips into a languid smile, forced her voice low in her throat and purred, “I wasn’t sure you were coming.”

  He made a short, ambiguous sound. “You knew I’d be here.” And he moved closer, towering over her so that in order to see him she had no choice but to open her eyes.

  Oh, but her eyelids felt heavy…and the rest of her body, too, weighed down by a strange lassitude that had nothing to do with the warmth and the water.

  Strange, too, that in the midst of all that water and humidity her throat felt dry as dust; and when she swallowed, the thirst was carried deep into her belly and from there to every part of her. When she stared at Jake’s chest, hair shadowed and glistening with sweat, she felt as if she were beholding the only source of relief for that thirst in a cruel and barren desert. When she gazed at his hands, even knowing that moments ago those same hands had been engaged in brutally pounding a bag of sawdust, her body felt the water’s gentle caress only as a taunting, teasing simulation of their touch. She felt heavy and ripe at her core, like a fruit ready to fall of its own weight; and at the same time as if she would shiver into a million pieces and blow away if he touched her.

  “Weird…” she murmured,
closing her eyes.

  “What is?”

  His voice is like…molasses, she thought. Blackstrap molasses… rich and thick and not too sweet…kind of a bite to it.

  “This…the water…it feels weird.”

  Jake growled, “I thought you liked hot tubs.” And he couldn’t look at her a moment longer, lying there spread out before him like a banquet, and he the beggar standing outside the hall with his face pressed up against the window.

  Turning one shoulder to her, he leaned his backside against the tub and buried his face in the towel he’d thrown around his neck after his workout. But it did no good. He could still see her-almost more vivid in his mind’s eye than the lush reality-the outlines of her body undulating beneath the swirling water, moisture beading on her chest and throat, face dewy and pink from the heat, lips parted, breath suspended… as if, he thought, in the very next moment she expected to be kissed…

  “I’m curious.” He cleared his throat. “How in the hell did you manage to bug a Jacuzzi?”

  She laughed-a blood-stirring chuckle. “That was easy, actually. I put it in the boom box. Had it sitting there on the deck beside me. I played your tape.”

  “I heard. Heard you singing, too.” He said it harshly, and she looked momentarily startled. Then her face hardened almost imperceptibly, as if she’d donned a transparent mask.

  “Heard about your Thanksgiving plans,” he said, and she shifted as if the water had suddenly become uncomfortable to her. “So, you’re going to your sister’s?”

  She shrugged and said without expression, “I tried to get out of it, but…Sonny wants to go.”

  For a moment Jake didn’t trust himself to speak. Then, very quietly, he said, “What the hell were you thinking?”

  Her head snapped toward him, too quickly for muscles that had been immobilized for most of the past several weeks. He saw her wince and grab at the back of her neck, then gingerly rotate her head as she flashed at him, “Look, I don’t want him anywhere near Summer and her kids, okay? Not after what he tried to do to them. I don’t want him anywhere near any of my family.”

  A dozen angry replies to that zapped through his mind. He squelched them, and instead found himself moving around to the head of the tub, slipping his hands under her head. He began to massage the muscles of her neck with his fingertips, and heard her give a gasp, then a sigh…saw her lashes settle onto sweat-spangled cheeks…felt her head grow heavy in his hands.

  He found that there was something relaxing about it for him, too. Something about the touching…as if her warmth and weight and textures measured on the nerve endings of his fingers had opened doors and allowed those messages of pleasure and contentment to pour into the corners of his body, soul and mind.

  After a while, without altering the rhythm and pressure of his fingers, he said quietly, “You know it’s what has to happen. We have to allow Cisneros to play his hand. It’s the only way we’re ever going to end this. The only way.”

  Her voice was soft and slurred. “I thought-if I can get something on him, or if you get something from the bugs-”

  “Never happen. The man’s too careful-and too smart. Lady, we’ve got state-of-the art equipment at our disposal-hell, some of it sounds like science fiction even to me. If it was possible to nail Cisneros with electronic surveillance, we’d have had him put away years ago.”

  Her lashes flew upward. He felt her neck muscles tighten in his hands, but instead of pulling away from him she tilted her head back in order to look at him. “Then why did you have me do this? The…collar. The bugs. What’s the point, if it’s not-”

  Jake was shaking his head. “Unless you wanted to reveal the fact of what you heard, which would make your life not worth…doo-doo, you had no choice but to go back to him. That being the case, we figured we’d keep an eye on him through you, he’d eventually make his play to go after those records Hal Robey stole from him, and that’s when we’d be there to nail him.” He let out a breath. “You know what the collar’s for.”

  “And the bugs?” Her upside-down gaze was unflinching. Her pulse hammered against the pads of his fingers.

  He cleared his throat, but the words came in a growl anyway. “We couldn’t let you go in there unprotected. Had to have some way to keep an eye on you-or ear, rather.”

  “All this time I’ve been bugging myself?” She jerked in his hands, and he braced himself. Then he realized she was laughing. “Oh, man. And I was really getting into it, too. Little Miss Espionage.” She sighed.

  Her eyes had started to close when he rasped, “Don’t sell yourself short, Waskowitz.” And they flew open again, and her head jerked back and he found that instead of massaging her neck muscles, his fingers were stroking the taut arch of her throat, the wet-velvet undercurve of her chin. “For this to work, we need you there, and we need you safe. You’ve got to quit doing things to arouse his suspicions. Capish?” Her head moved slowly in the cradle of his hands. Her lips parted.

  And suddenly he couldn’t feel his own feet. He felt like one gigantic throbbing pulse. “If he doesn’t want you to go to a health club, if he wants to set you up with a private therapist, don’t worry about it.” His voice seemed to come from a great, echoing distance. His jaws felt rigid as wire. “We’re flexible, we’ll find another way to contact you. Let us do our job. Yours is to go along with him. Play his game. Keep him happy.”

  Her rueful laughter bumped against his fingers. Electric charges ran up his arms and into his chest. “I don’t think he’s very happy right now. I just wish…” The laughter ended, and then she whispered, “I just want it to be over.”

  He held her still, her face framed upside down in his hands, and stared down…down into her eyes. She gazed steadily back at him for a long, unmeasurable time…just time enough, it seemed, for him to play back over all the moments of his life from the very first until this one…the very moment when it seemed almost inevitable that he would kiss her.

  Time enough to relive all the missteps and wrong turns he’d taken, all the blind alleys and deep waters he’d stumbled into. Time to review his failures and broken dreams and the reasons for them. To remember who he was, and why for him, some things, no matter how much he wanted them, simply were not possible.

  “You’re a civilian. You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” he said in that cracked and gravelly voice he was learning to accept as his own. “If you want to call it off-”

  “No! No…” Her lashes drifted down as if she felt utterly exhausted, and she said in a soft, dead voice, “This is the only way. I know that. I want to finish it.”

  “All right then.” Exhaling through his nose, Jake pulled his hands away from her neck and straightened slowly. He felt stiff and achy in every joint. “You’ll go to your sister’s for Thanksgiving?” He waited for her nod. “Okay. Unless something comes up in the meantime, that’ll be our next meeting.”

  She lifted her head and her eyes followed him as he came around to the front of the tub. “You’ll be there?”

  He almost smiled, but in the end just snorted again instead. “Do you seriously think we’re gonna let Cisneros anywhere near your sister unless we’re within shouting distance? Of course we’ll be there.”

  “But bow-it’s clear out in the country, there’s going to be people all over the place-”

  “Waskowitz-” he squinted up his eyes in an exasperated grimace “-let us worry about that, okay? That’s our job.” He walked to the door and paused with his hand on the knob. ‘“We’ll think of something. Or you will. If you do, just…talk into a bug. We’ll hear you. And if we come up with a plan, we’ll give you the signal. Which is…?”

  She bobbed her head impatiently. “The appointment’s been changed. I know, I know.” She suddenly looked overheated and cross. “Okay, so…I guess I’ll see you on Thanksgiving.

  “Oh-do me a favor, will you?” She stopped him as he was going out the door. “If you see Marcie out there, ask her to come get me out of thi
s…blinkin’ tub? I’m starting to prune.”

  “Will do,” said Jake solemnly. He closed the door and leaned against it for a moment, eyes closed, breathing hard. If he hadn’t been in so much pain, he probably would have laughed.

  Somehow the weeks passed. Not that there was any lack of things for Eve to do-as Sonny had pointed out to her more than once, and with exasperation, Hilton Head was a veritable playground, at least for the privileged. But golf and tennis, two of the island’s principal attractions, were obviously not available to her, and if the truth were told, wouldn’t have appealed to her even if she hadn’t been wearing a neck brace.

  It was also true that the recent surge of development had produced a plethora of shopping and dining pleasures, ranging from touristy T-shirt and souvenir shops and every kind of fast food known to mankind, to the finest champagne, candlelight and caviar restaurants and upscale malls anchored by the likes of Saks Fifth Avenue. Plus, just across the bridge on the mainland were the new factory outlet malls-small cities of stores that could swallow up shopping enthusiasts for days at a time. But Eve had never considered either food or shopping to be forms of recreation; she shopped when she needed something and ate when she was hungry. These days, thanks to Sonny’s attentiveness to her every need, she seldom fell into either of those categories, and as a result, was losing weight at a rate that would have alarmed her, had she not been too miserable to notice.

  She spent her days walking the beaches in search of shells and sand dollars, strolling the miles of equestrian and bicycle trails through resorts and golf courses, staking out man-made ponds and lagoons in hopes of spotting one of the alligators that gave a whole new meaning to the term “water hazard.” Sometimes she wandered into one of the few remaining pockets of undeveloped land, where modest and ramshackle frame houses squatted stubbornly beneath century-old live oaks on real estate grown valuable almost beyond the comprehension of the people who lived there-for these were people who did not measure the worth of their land in money.