“Grab a sweater,” he said. “If I get going too fast with the top down, you’ll get cold.”
“If you drive too fast?”
That nearly won him a smile. Josh felt the pressure inside his chest ease. He could do this for her. He could help. “Okay, because I drive too fast, you’ll get cold, even with the heat cranked up.”
“You turn the heat on? So you can put the top down?”
He strove for impatience, a touch of arrogance, knowing he couldn’t afford to be too kind. She would know he was up to something. “You’ve never owned a convertible, have you?”
“No.”
“It’s a damned shame.” He shook his head. “Every woman should own a convertible, at least once in her life.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“And you’ll understand why before we’re through,” he assured her. “Grab a sweater. And some shoes.”
“Josh, I was ready for bed. These are my pajamas.”
Closing his eyes, he nearly sliced off his thumb, instead of the tomato. He didn’t need to know she was standing there in her pajamas, didn’t need to imagine her climbing into a bed.
“They’ll do,” he claimed, “If you were rich, you’d have paid ten times more for them and worn them to fancy parties. Grab a sweater, Amanda. Dinner’s almost ready. We need to get going.”
“Josh—”
“I won’t give up.” He turned back to her. “You know that about me. I never give up.”
She crossed her arms in front of her and frowned. “Like a two-year-old, right?”
He ignored that. “Scared to be alone with me, Amanda?”
“No,” she insisted.
“Then come on. We have places to go. Things to see.”
She looked tired, he thought. So tired. But he doubted she’d be able to sleep, even if he was willing to leave her here alone, which he wasn’t.
Miraculously she abandoned all protests, grabbed her things, took one long, lingering look around her house, then followed him into the night.
“Can you believe it?” he said, showing off the car. “Looked like a rusty old can when I found it. Took me six years to get it into this kind of shape.”
“I have trouble believing your attention span could last six minutes, much less six years,” she quipped.
Josh glared at her and opened the passenger door, helping her inside. “This is a masterpiece,” he protested. “A precision-tuned piece of art.”
“I get it,” she claimed. “This is about Bond.”
“Bond?”
“James Bond,” she answered. “I’m sure when you were a little boy, you had serious James Bond fantasies.”
He winked at her. “It’s no fantasy, Amanda. I am a spy.”
And he was. The agency for which he worked was technically a part of the Commerce Department, housed in an incredibly bland-looking, four-story brick building in Georgetown under the name Linguistic Services, Inc. If anyone asked, he was a translator, and his office did indeed house experts fluent in more than a dozen languages who hired themselves out to high-ranking diplomats and Americans doing business abroad. But it was all a cover for a top secret counter-terrorism organization called Division One.
For the longest time, he’d loved his job, been in perfect control. But not anymore. Not with her.
Josh cranked the engine and sped off toward the Washington Beltway, across the Potomac and into Maryland, then south, to the bay. Amanda sat beside him as he bragged about the car’s sound system, then tuned in his favorite rock station. The announcer made some silly quip about the station playing “oldies.”
“Old? Can you believe this?” he complained. “Rock and roll will never be old.”
“This stuff was actually popular when you were a kid?” she said innocently.
“A kid?” He nearly choked. “I’m thirty. Thirty is not old.”
“Don’t worry, Josh. To be old, you have to grow up first. You’re in no danger.”
She laughed a bit, and even if she was putting him down, it was worth it. Josh glanced over to find her hunched down against her seat, her sweater pulled tight around her, her hair fluttering in the wind. She tilted her head back to look at the stars. He felt a little better about kidnapping her this way.
“Still cold? I’ll put the top up if you like,” he offered.
“No. You know you’ve got me hooked now.”
He’d counted on that—the cool air rushing at her, the car shooting through the blackness, the music loud and evoking all sorts of memories, the sky spread out like a blanket of diamonds overhead. There was something incredibly soothing about driving too fast in the dark with the top down.
It was nearly an hour later before he said, “So…want to tell me about the hearing?”
“What’s left that you don’t already know?”
He did know almost everything. He’d been beside her a year ago when she’d been questioned as if she was a criminal and her house had been searched. Days later, Josh had been back with more devastating news. They’d found her fiancé’s partner in crime—Martin Tanner—Josh and Amanda’s boss at Division One. She’d been Tanner’s secretary, which only fueled speculation that she was somehow involved. Two men closest to her, Josh thought, both of them liars, traitors. She probably despised all men right now.
Josh frowned. She hadn’t particularly liked him before any of this mess. As she’d so often pointed out to him, she wasn’t his kind of woman; he wasn’t her kind of man. Which should have made it easy for him to forget all about her, something he’d never quite managed to do. If there was a shred of decency left inside him, he would leave her to find some nice, sweet, utterly safe man who’d make her his wife and be the father of her children. Someone who’d buy her a brick house in the suburbs and a damned minivan and a membership at the country club. Someone who could offer her an absolutely ordinary life, the kind he was sure she craved.
She would find someone else. He would have to sit right here and watch. He would stay quiet and smile politely, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, while she came to belong to some other man, some eminently more suitable man.
The hell he would.
He couldn’t leave her alone right now, and he couldn’t stop wanting her. So something was going to happen between them. It was inevitable. He’d made himself a deal—he’d stayed away, given her time to put her life back together, to find someone else, to be happy, and she hadn’t done it. She was every bit as alone and unhappy today as she had been a year ago, and Josh was sick of it.
He could help her now. He could show her how to enjoy life again. First they had to get past the hard stuff.
“I never believed you were a part of it, Amanda. Not from the very beginning.”
“Really?” she said, pinning him with a disbelieving stare.
“I was just doing my job,” Josh insisted. “I tried—”
He broke off. He’d tried to go as easy as he could. But a man had died. A friend of theirs. He had a duty to uphold. Despite what she thought of him, it was a duty he didn’t take lightly. He wouldn’t disregard it, no matter what he might feel for one devastated woman caught up in the middle of it.
But he didn’t want to argue, and he wasn’t here to defend his conduct in the investigation. He settled for adding, “I’m sorry if I made it harder for you because it was me asking all those questions.”
She brushed off his apology. “It wasn’t your fault, Josh. None of it.”
“It wasn’t yours, either,” he insisted. “The Board of Inquiry just made it official. They cleared you today. The whole mess is over. It’s time to put it behind you.”
Josh was going to help.
Tonight, he would tell her he wanted to be her friend. She would probably laugh in his face, but he’d do it anyway. He would keep coming back until she believed him, until she trusted him just a little bit, and somehow he’d find a way to keep his hands off her. First he had to get her to talk to him.
“
You can tell me about Rob,” Josh said, gritting his teeth at the thought of her ex-fiancé.
“Josh, I try not to think about him at all or about how stupid I was—”
“It wasn’t you, Amanda—”
“—because I loved him,” she rushed on, color blooming in her cheeks and shame in her eyes, as if she’d confessed the worst kind of sin.
Josh frowned. He reached for her hand and held it. “I know. Took me a while but I finally figured that out.”
He remembered every moment of that night he’d finally understood she did indeed love her fiancé. A night he’d reached for her and kissed her, thinking of nothing but what he needed, what he wanted. And he thought it was the ultimate irony that he, who’d so carelessly worked his way through woman after woman and scarcely ever been denied anyone he wanted, should find himself falling for her this way, wanting her now, at the worst possible time.
“Did you?” She hunkered down in her seat against the rush of the wind. “I loved him, Josh. Do you even know what that means? I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with him. I thought I was being so careful, that I’d made a good choice. I respected him. I thought he was kind and understanding and gentle and patient, and that we wanted the same things out of life. And it was a lie. Every bit of it was a lie.”
“He used you.” Josh’s hands clenched into fists on the steering wheel.
“That doesn’t make it any easier.”
And there was nothing Josh could say to that. They drove in silence. At nearly three in the morning he pulled into a little beach community in Maryland near Point Lookout, which jutted out into the widest part of Chesapeake Bay. At a deserted parking lot near a deserted beach he pulled a blanket from the trunk, grabbed the sandwiches he’d made and took off onto the soft, brown sand.
Reluctantly Amanda followed.
“We’re going to picnic on the beach in the middle of the night?”
“You have no sense of adventure,” he complained as he spread out the blanket and started digging into the cooler he’d packed.
“I’m not hungry, Josh.”
“Really? When was the last time you ate?”
She considered that for a moment. He could tell the minute she remembered her last meal. She sat down beside him, and they ate. Josh listened to the wind, watched the play of light from the moon on the darkness of the water, the specks of light in the distance from the boats and houses along the shoreline. When he finally turned to her, he was pleased to note that she had eaten her entire sandwich.
“Not hungry, huh?”
“Okay. You were right. You always have to be right, don’t you? And you have this annoying habit of always getting what you want.”
“Not always,” he said, trying to force a lightness to the words that he didn’t feel.
“Josh, what are you trying to do tonight? Why did you bring me here?”
There was no stalling any longer. Staring off into the distance, he said, “Is it so hard to believe I want to help you? That I want to be your friend?”
“Yes. Josh, please, just take me home and leave me alone.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t.”
“And what about me? What about what I want? What I need?” She glared at him. “God, this is just like you. So caught up in what you want, or what you think you want, that you don’t give a damn about anyone else.”
“That’s not true.” He took her stubborn chin in his hand, forcing her to look at him. “You taught me that lesson, and I promise, I learned it well.”
She turned her head away. “Don’t.”
“I’m sorry I hurt you,” he said. “That I made you uncomfortable that night. I just didn’t understand, Amanda. I haven’t had a lot of experience with women like you. But I’m sorry, and I honestly and truly want to help you now, if you’ll just let me.”
“Don’t, Josh. Please, don’t. If that’s honestly what this is about—helping me—I appreciate it. Really, I do. But don’t.”
He shook his head and went right on, just like she said he always did. “I know what you think of me.”
“Do you?”
“Selfish? Conceited? Irresponsible? Immature? You can stop me anytime, Amanda.”
“But you’re doing so well,” she said.
He could smile, even then. “I know I’m not your favorite person. Not going to stop me there, either?”
She shook her head back and forth.
“Let me help you through this, Amanda.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s been a bad day, and I’m here. Because I care about you. I promise you, I am capable of caring about a woman in a way that has nothing to do with sex.”
“That’s truly admirable, Josh.”
He laughed out loud, because he loved sparring with her, loved the way she cut him to the quick. “Look, the truth is I heard about the hearing today. I heard it was a little rough, and I was worried about you. That’s it. I thought you’d need a friend. We could be friends, Amanda. If you could forgive me.”
“Forgive you?”
“For that kiss.”
She scrunched up her face and covered it with both her hands. “I don’t want to talk about kissing you.”
Josh watched as her hair fell in a dark curtain that hid her face, and he itched to take his hand and smooth it back into place. He’d always suspected she thought of that kiss as some heinous crime, and he supposed to her it was. So often when she looked at him, he saw the guilt in her eyes, guilt that was rightfully his. They could settle that tonight, too.
He’d spent months wanting a taste of her—wanting much more than that in fact. And one night, at a party for a retiring colleague, not long before her fiancé died, he’d found her outside on a quiet terrace in the moonlight, looking more beautiful than he’d ever seen her. She seemed quiet and maybe a little sad. He’d tried to cheer her up, had flirted outrageously with her and once he’d coaxed a smile across her pretty face, he’d simply leaned down and taken that kiss.
Just one.
One too brief taste of her, and as stupid as it sounded, he could have sworn the ground moved beneath his feet that night, that the entire Earth shook with the force of one frustratingly brief kiss.
He’d been stunned.
She’d been horrified.
She’d never taken anything he’d said to her seriously, complaining that he flirted with every woman he met, and he supposed he did. He liked women, liked teasing them, liked making them smile, and he’d never quite seen the crime in that.
Amanda had always dismissed him totally as nothing but a flirt, and after that kiss, she thought he was pure scum. Because, as he’d discovered too late and much to his surprise, she was a woman to whom fidelity and loyalty were much more than obscure concepts.
She’d pulled away from him almost instantly, her eyes blazing and the color high in her cheeks, and told him she was engaged, that it might not mean anything to him, but it certainly did to her. And then she’d brought up fidelity, offering to define the term for him, just in case it wasn’t even in his vocabulary.
He understood the concept; he’d just never found a woman who lived it. He hadn’t understood at all, until it was too late, just how different she was. He’d thought women like her simply didn’t exist anymore, that they were simply a myth.
She took her vows quite seriously, and she’d promised herself to Rob Jansen, which meant she didn’t do anything with another man. And she saw kissing Josh as an absolute crime.
“You didn’t kiss me. I kissed you. Once. A year ago. It was just one little kiss, Amanda,” he said carefully, his tone purposely light, because he didn’t think she’d believe him if he told her how much it had meant to him.
She still looked horrified by what she’d done.
“Do you have any idea how many women I’ve kissed?” he tried, figuring she’d damn him for that remark as well, but he’d rather have her angry at him th
an feeling guilty about her own actions, which really amounted to nothing but waiting maybe a half a second before she pushed him away from her. And maybe enjoying the kiss itself. He did think she enjoyed it, which would have made it even worse in her eyes. She hadn’t known then that Rob Jansen was an absolute jerk, that he’d done nothing but use her, but Josh had never liked the man and had always thought he was absolutely wrong for Amanda.
It in no way excused the way Josh had grabbed her and kissed her, but there it was. He’d done it. He couldn’t take it back now, just like he couldn’t change the kind of man he’d been in the past.
“Engaged women, Josh? Just how many of them have you kissed?” she asked. “What am I saying? You wouldn’t stop with a kiss.”
“No, I seldom do,” he admitted, digging himself even deeper. Grimly, he took it from her, accepted it. Because he deserved it for the way he’d chosen to live his life and for what little he’d shown her of himself.
But because he wanted a chance with her, he mounted a paltry defense. “Before,” he admitted. “I can’t say I haven’t done that. But it was before—”
“Before what?” she asked.
The best answer he could come up with was before you. It wasn’t something he could tell her right now, wasn’t something he was ready to examine in great detail himself. But he was afraid the answer was most definitely about her. Before he saw himself through her eyes. She thought he was careless with women, that he was selfish and indulged himself like a child. She thought there was something very wrong with the way he lived his life.
He’d been amused for the briefest of times by her whole attitude, and then he’d thought about trying to explain his life to her or the women he saw. They were so unlike her. They didn’t want a long-lasting relationship any more than he did. They lived for the moment, and they didn’t truly care about him, only the pleasure their time with him would bring.
Cinderella and the Spy Page 2
