He led her out through the bonsai trees and into the warm Washington, DC evening. The light was fading toward sunset, turning all of the monuments from shining white marble to a magnificent red gold.
“My favorite time of evening,” Herman whispered.
“Mine, too,” she whispered back because whispering seemed the thing to do.
Thank goodness for Toni. At the moment it felt as if the lab’s leash wasn’t for keeping Toni close by, but rather for anchoring Nadia to the earth. Maybe sensing her confused emotions, Toni stayed close enough that her own knee brushed against Toni’s flank at each step.
Herman distracted her with bits and pieces of horticultural history as they progressed through a corner of the park and out the far side.
In fact, he distracted her so thoroughly that she didn’t see where he was leading her until it was too late. She’d kept an eye on the flows of people, but not on—
“Nadia!” Her mother cried in joyous surprise.
Or perhaps it was shock. Nadia was probably the only person to use her brother-in-law’s phone app to make sure that she didn’t find one of the family trucks. Some parked in regular spots, but most of them roved to different neighborhoods each night and the app would tell you where. People came from all over for their Food Truck India fix.
Nadia was going to kill Herman for bringing her here. Actually, that seemed tactically foolish as she’d only this afternoon decided that she was going to sleep with Herman.
She could always just shoot herself.
No, that wouldn’t work either. Who would take care of Toni?
7
“You know each other?” Herman looked up at the woman in the food truck.
The colorful sari was a distraction. But once he looked past it, he realized that he was looking at an older, nearly as lovely, version of Nadia.
“Your mother?” He asked it softly.
“My mother,” she whispered back. She sounded as if he was talking about algae and fungi again. Dry.
Her mother waved them aboard. In moments, he was being introduced to an aunt and two cousins of Nadia. He’d told her all about his family and their small law firm in nearby Alexandria. It wasn’t until this moment that he realized that he knew nothing about hers. Nadia must have done it on purpose? He wondered why. Then he wondered how much trouble he was in for having led her to her own family.
“Here, you two sit here.” She escorted them to the driver and front passenger seats. “Tonight, I will serve you the best. The goat biryani is incredibly good. And the chicken tikka masala. Yes, that will be good. Here. Here.” She served them each a tall iced tea.
Nadia looked as if she’d been frozen. Her face was expressionless. It wasn’t a look he was used to seeing on her. The cautious runner—carefree only when she wasn’t aware of being watched. The fierce Secret Service agent who had showed up that first evening. And the shy woman who kissed like he didn’t know what, but he never wanted her to stop.
“Are you okay?” Herman kept his voice low.
“Of course, she’s okay. Aren’t you, my little Bebo?” Her sharp-eared mother delivered a paper plate of samosas. “Bay shrimp.” And she was gone again.
“Bebo?” Herman tried not to laugh. If ever there was a name that didn’t fit this woman, her mother had found it.
“Death!” Nadia’s eyes made it clear what would happen if he ever used it again.
“Beer.” He bit into the samosa and the flavor exploded in his mouth.
“Food trucks can’t serve alcohol in DC.”
“No, Beer is my embarrassing nickname. My little sister started it. Herman was too much for her as a kid. My middle name is Lieber. The L was tough as well, so she hit me with Beer and it stuck. Most of my family call me that.”
“Well, Bebo is off the table.” Nadia’s tone left no doubt, but she relaxed enough to offer him a smile.
“How is that?” Nadia’s mother delivered a plate of tofu tikka skewers. “I’m Reena, since my daughter is too rude to introduce us.”
“I’m Herman. Finegold.”
“Herman? What sort of name is Herman?”
“Jewish.”
“Ah,” and she was gone again. He could see her back at the order-taking station at this end of the truck, but she was clearly listening hard to them and barely paying attention to the customers.
“Should I make up a fantastic story when she—”
Reena swept back in and handed a plate of plain chicken stripped from the bone to Nadia. Nadia, in turn, set it in front of Toni where she’d curled up in the footwell—on his feet. His feet were far too hot and also going to sleep from the dog pressure. But it was hard to complain about the vote of confidence. He wanted to move their—his and Nadia’s, not so much his and Toni’s—relationship to the next level, but wasn’t sure how to go about that.
He’d never met a woman like her. Or ever been as comfortable or fascinated by a woman. But how could she possibly think the same of him? He was a basement botanist archivist librarian with a particular penchant for cataloging historical expeditions that no one else ever cared about or—
“So, what do you do, Herman?”
He was impressed that he hadn’t leapt right out of the seat. Maybe Nadia was rubbing off on him.
“Mum…” Nadia made it sound as if it was a good thing she didn’t have her weapons with her. Though his hand had brushed over something at the small of her back when they’d embraced among the bonsai. Perhaps her mother should be careful.
“I—” And then he had a slightly wicked thought. Normally he always responded with a full description of what he did—boring his audience to death by the second question, after his name. But in this case, “Your daughter has been tempting me to make a career change. The Secret Service sounds amazing, but I don’t think I’d ever be brave enough for that. She’s incredible.”
Reena merely looked at him a little wildly before sweeping up their empty samosa plate and disappeared again.
Nadia looked at him sharply.
He shrugged. It was the best he had.
Nadia twisted around to watch her mother.
Herman glanced over his shoulder.
Reena was standing frozen in the middle of the busy cookline. Almost as frozen as her daughter had been when he’d accidentally dragged her to the wrong food truck.
8
“What did you do to her?” Nadia whispered.
“I lied. I feel kind of bad about that but I—”
She shushed him.
Mum turned, caught them watching, then hurried to help the next customer. There was quite a throng outside now. She didn’t even say anything when she delivered the biryani and tikka masala.
“Oh, these are so good,” Herman moaned. “No one cooks these like Food Truck India.”
“Tell Mum that. Compliments about her food always make ground with her.”
“Your Mum runs this truck?”
Nadia sighed. “Mum’s the head chef. Mum and Dad own the rapidly expanding Food Truck India ‘empire.’ I’m the family failure.”
“But—” Herman protested so suddenly that he choked on his goat. Once he’d sipped some iced tea and wiped a napkin over Toni’s fur where he’d dribbled some sauce, he cleared his throat and tried again. “But you’re a United States Secret Service officer. That’s an amazing thing to be.”
“So, you do want to join the Secret Service?” She tried to make it a joke but was too busy considering her own motivations. Nadia hadn’t actually pursued the Service. They’d recruited her from university, and she’d liked the sound of it. Ended up really respecting the people they’d introduced her to, and she’d never looked back.
“Well, I would,” he kept his tone light. “But it seems a coward’s move just to avoid giving that speech for donors on Monday. Otherwise, a chance to meet women like you, I’m there in a heartbeat.”
“Good thing you already met one.” Nadia was feeling a little possessive about Herman Finegold at the mom
ent.
“Sounds like a threat.” Herman had a good ear. “But yes, I’d say it’s a particularly good thing. Right up there with landing my job at the Herbarium.”
“You’re making my head spin, Beer.”
“How about we go to my place and I try to make that really happen…Bebo?”
Nadia looked up to see Mum frozen in place between them, a plate of kaju barfi sweets. They were the most expensive dessert in the truck. Cut into diamonds, each cashew sweet bar was coated with a gloss of silver foil. In the last five minutes, Mum had apparently shifted from wanting Nadia to have an Indian husband to wanting her to have any husband.
Her mother was never slow to take advantage of a new situation. But apparently Herman’s question was enough to really throw her for a loop.
Now it didn’t matter if she did or didn’t—she’d never hear the end of this.
9
She did.
And felt wonderful!
Their taste in lovemaking had definitely matched. It was a quiet affair with gentle touches and soft whispers. And a great deal of simply holding each other because it just felt that wonderful.
Toni had slept right through it just past the foot of the bed. Nadia wasn’t sure about trusting her own emotions at this point, so she appreciated Toni’s tacit approval.
Her phone rang halfway through her morning run.
She’d left Herman asleep in his bed with a smile on his face. Which was fine, there was a smile on hers making her cheeks hurt. She’d left a note thanking him kindly and wishing him luck on his talk today and…then crumpled it up and threw it away.
She’d left another, much simpler: Again. How soon?
She yanked out the phone without slowing her pace.
“How soon?” Only as she spoke did she realize it could be her mother.
Toni twisted to see why she’d broken her stride.
“Where are you?” Captain Baxter.
Nadia almost plunged into a high hedge of boxwood in the world’s largest boxwood collection (according to Herman).
Regrettably, her misstep slammed her into Toni. The two of them tumbled to the grass between two boxwood hedges. She managed to keep the phone to her ear.
Toni barked sharply as she leapt to her feet. She scanned the area, relaxed, then lay across Nadia’s legs.
“I was running in the National Arboretum, Captain.” One didn’t waste Captain Baxter’s time by hesitating or asking why he wanted to know. If she’d still been in bed with Herman, habit probably would have had her answering, “In bed with Herman Finegold, Captain.” She was glad to not have to explain that one to the Captain.
If ever there was a singular alpha dog, it was Baxter. He ran the dog handlers of the Secret Service from his tiny office in the West Wing’s basement with iron control and a decent amount of fairness.
“Good. Thought you might be. I hear Toni is with you. We have a threat.” The captain had probably known exactly where she was based on a predictable average of her last hundred laps of the arboretum. He was scary that way.
“Where do you need me, sir?”
“According to the chatter intercepted by the intel guys, right where you are. Why would anyone threaten an attack on the National Arboretum?”
Nadia had no idea, so she kept her mouth shut.
“Find out what and where, Sergeant Bhatti.”
She opened her mouth and closed it again when she couldn’t find anything useful to say.
“What’s your question?” He somehow heard what she hadn’t asked.
Nadia tried again. “Sir. Did intel have any further information? The park has numerous buildings and is fairly large. I—”
“Four hundred and forty-six acres. I know. I’ll try to send you some help, but they’ll probably just be regular DC Metros, not the Service. It’s Memorial Day. I’m spread from Arlington cemetery to the World War II Memorial. Sidekick has five events outside the White House.” President Zachary Thomas was also a former Air Force captain and had a long record of refusing to hide merely because danger was a possibility.
“I’ll just—”
Baxter’s silence could stop a freight train.
“I’m on it, sir.”
“Don’t let me down.” And he was gone.
10
Herman couldn’t believe he’d slept through Nadia’s departure.
He also couldn’t believe that she hadn’t woken him up before going. Except she had, so he’d better start believing it.
The note had been a relief, stopping his self-doubt before it could truly take hold.
When he reached for his phone to call her and suggest that How soon? should be Very soon!, he was reminded that it was Monday.
Speech day.
Then he noticed the time, cursed, and dove for the shower.
He set speed records from his bed to his office that even The Flash would have envied.
Still, he was behind schedule.
He’d planned on an hour to review his notes and rehearse his talk one more time. Instead he had seven minutes. It was just long enough to realize that he hadn’t charged his tablet computer, which was nearly dead.
By the time he’d transferred his notes to a charged tablet he’d found in someone’s desk—he couldn’t even remember whose it was in his current state—nine of his seven minutes were used up.
Again, standing in for The Flash, he raced upstairs and headed across the gardens. He’d never been a runner. Watching Nadia run, he understood that he never would be. She moved with a fluid grace even her dog couldn’t match. Just thinking about that, and that she’d brought that same fluid grace to his bed, was more than sufficient distraction as he jogged across the grounds.
His plans for a leisurely walk gone, so was his time alone with the Capitol columns. The incongruity of the setting had always pleased his sense of aesthetics.
Twenty-four columns had supported the original East Portico of the Capitol Building. But when the Capitol had been expanded to accommodate a growing nation in 1863, and a far larger iron dome had replaced the lower wood and copper one, the portico had appeared overwhelmed. The unbalanced look had been resolved in 1960, but it had meant the removal of the massive columns. In 1984 they had finally found their place in the National Arboretum.
He’d always loved the setting.
Two columns had been broken, but the remaining twenty-two had been placed on a broad stone terrace atop a knoll at the garden’s center. A fountain trickled down to a reflecting pool above the sweeping meadow. It was a pity that it was Memorial Day; in April, it had the best view of cherry blossoms outside the Tidal Basin.
Today Herman didn’t like the setting so much. Because, as he hustled up Ellipse Road, the broad meadow allowed him a clear view of the people already gathering there.
He’d anticipated a dozen people…without really thinking about the National Arboretum’s general popularity. His was also the first event of the day in all of DC, which meant that anyone who wanted to make a full day of the celebrations would start here.
There weren’t a dozen. It looked as if there was a hundred or more.
“Oh no!”
Nadia had thrown him off schedule.
He’d scheduled (and graphed) his pre-talk, full-blown panic for Sunday night. Last night. Instead, he’d spent it with Nadia in his bed and had thought of nothing else except what a lucky bastard he was.
So now, rather than the scheduled utter resignation, the panic slammed into him hard enough to make him stumble on the wide curving border trail around the Ellipse. The Ellipse itself covered the east side of the columns’ knoll. Nadia had insisted that he needed to appear calm—no matter how much he wasn’t. Bluestar, Amsonia hubrichtii. Downy flox, Phlox pilosa. Little bluestem, Schizachyrium scoparium. Aster…but he was so rattled he couldn’t even recall the Latin.
Just as he reached the top of the Ellipse, and could see the true scale of the crowd, a trio of black SUVs rolled up Ellipse Road and parked in the midd
le of the lane.
Secret Service men and women poured out of two of the vehicles. No dogs. None of them were Nadia.
Out of the third…
This just kept getting worse.
11
Nadia and Toni had scouted the outside of every building in the whole arboretum. After all, mining a tree with explosives, even one of the major trees in the park, wouldn’t make much of an impression. On Memorial Day, it might not even make the news.
But all of the buildings were closed and sealed for the holiday.
Despite working far longer that she should ever have to in a single stretch, Toni had found nothing unwarranted.
She stopped and sat on a stone bench outside the Visitor’s Center, popped out a bowl for Toni and filled it with water.
Toni drank, then flopped to the pavement. Not a good sign. They’d been pushing hard for two straight hours, and that was a long time for a dog to be on alert.
They might as well rest, because she couldn’t think of where else to look for a bomb.
She glanced at her phone. Two messages from Mum, no time for that now, no matter how angry the delay would make her. And none from Herman.
He should have called by now if he wanted to see her again. Maybe he didn’t. One and done? Gods she hoped not. Last night, the whole last week had been simply amazing.
Maybe she should have woken him. She’d have still been in his bed when the Captain called, but it would have been worth it.
Herman had gone a long way toward convincing her that he was the best thing to happen to her in an awfully long time. But now her phone’s silence was convincing her she’d managed to screw that up as well.
And she absolutely knew why. She’d hadn’t even scrawled a “Good luck!” or a cheery “I’ll be thinking of you!” across her note. It seemed that her mother was right and she’d never get married.
Flower of Destiny Page 3
