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“Can I assume MP Ashton wants to meet regarding the ambassador’s Northern Ireland peace initiative?”
“Correct.”
“Right, tell her tomorrow is fine. Anytime. I’ll fit the agenda around her. And Sir Pritchard, tell him Wednesday or Thursday of next week, midafternoon is best.”
“All right.”
Cassidy left the large room, rounded several corners, walked down several long hallways. The sharp heels of her black leather ankle boots clicked authoritatively, a sound she secretly liked.
She greeted the plumber at the main entrance and escorted him up three floors. Standing together in the otherwise empty elevator, he gave her a friendly, appraising glance. She winced as the elevator dinged and wordlessly led him to a small room on the left.
Cassidy maneuvered many locks with keys and codes and eventually let them both into a small nondescript room. She perched on a table and waited as the plumber investigated the leak Cassidy had reported last week. She would have to wait until he was done, as only a small handful of people had the top-secret clearance to even enter this room, which was filled with classified files.
She glanced at her watch. She wanted to call the public affairs department before two o’clock, and there was that meeting at three…
Cassidy crossed her legs at the knee and noticed splotchy raindrop marks on her shoes. She pulled a tissue out of her pocket and swiped at them. At dawn, she’d been out on a Heathrow Airport tarmac with bodyguards to greet an assistant U.S. secretary of state, and although she’d been standing under an umbrella, London’s legendary dreary rain had soaked her feet and dampened the cuffs of her trousers. She’d had to grin and bear the splooshing between her toes as she’d escorted the official in a limo to his breakfast meeting with the ambassador.
At least the sun was out again, but Cassidy was annoyed to be even thinking about the weather. She was so accustomed to constant motion and decision-making that it was maddening to have more than five minutes of downtime.
Downtime led to quiet contemplation, to thinking. Cassidy had trained herself long ago not to sit and think. Keep moving, she told herself, from the minute she woke up every morning to the last moment before she dropped her head on the pillow. Keep moving.
Don’t stop.
She whipped out a small pad of paper and pen from an inside pocket of her fitted black pin-striped jacket and began to scribble a list of things to do in the next hour. Call Winfield House and ask the head housekeeper to fax her tonight’s menu to make sure nothing was forgotten, update the ambassador’s schedule for tomorrow to fit in the meeting with the MP—Cassidy’s stomach rumbled. Oh, yes, get lunch. If time permits.
After the plumber indicated he was finished but would need to get into a rest room one floor above, Cassidy let them both out, secured the room and called Charles to take the worker to the rest room. Then she returned to the front office and resumed running around for several more hours.
At promptly three, Cassidy escorted five men and one woman to a public meeting room. They were representatives from an American lingerie company called Underneath It All. They wanted to open a London branch, and they were set to make a pitch for support from the ambassador.
But Ambassador Cole had not yet returned from his appointments. Cassidy sighed, and as she chatted informally with the businesspeople, her cell phone rang. “Maxwell.”
“Cassidy, it’s me,” Ambassador Cole said, but his voice sounded very far away, and strained through static.
“I can’t hear you well, Ambassador.”
“Bad connection. Listen, I’m running late. We’re sitting here in traffic the likes of which I’ve never seen.”
“Since yesterday?” Cassidy couldn’t help herself.
“I did say that yesterday, didn’t I?” The ambassador chuckled. “Cassidy, you’ll hold down the fort.” It wasn’t a question. It was a confident statement.
“Yes.”
“I shouldn’t be longer than a half hour. Shouldn’t, but who knows for sure. There’s a double-decker bus in front of the car, and we can’t see a bloody thing.”
Cassidy smiled. Like herself, Ambassador Cole hadn’t picked up a British accent, but had managed to adopt several choice phrases. “Don’t worry. We’re good to go here. We’ll get things done.”
“I know you will.”
“I’m fitting MP Ashton in tomorrow.” She decided not to tell him about the averted wine crisis. It would just sound like showing off. “And there are a few documents on your desk that need approval before I send them out.”
“Thank you, Cassidy.”
He clicked off and Cassidy faced the small group. “That was the ambassador. He’s running a bit behind. If you spend more than two days in London, you’ll know that isn’t an unusual scenario.”
The guests chuckled.
“Right,” Cassidy said. “I’ll arrange for tea service, and while we wait for the ambassador, you can ask me anything you like about London. I’ve been working here at the embassy for just about ten years, so I should be able to answer just about any question you might have while we wait.”
One phone call and ten minutes later, Cassidy’s fellow Americans were pouring tea and looking delighted about it. Cassidy remembered when she first arrived in London and how she thought tea was so refined and classy and relaxed. Now she was lucky to gulp down two sips from a takeaway thermos on the way to a meeting.
The businesspeople asked Cassidy many questions about many topics, from London’s shopping areas to the weather to the hot-button political issues. They seemed pleased with Cassidy’s straightforward, knowledgeable answers, and the more information she supplied, the more questions they asked.
Cassidy loved her job, but often felt tired at the end of the day, and not from running around. She often grew weary from all her talking. She’d never talked much, as a child, as a teenager. She’d chosen not to. She supposed she’d always liked to watch life, and listen.
At the embassy, she had to be an effective communicator, and she believed she was, but sometimes she secretly longed for the time when she could say nothing and have her feelings be understood anyway. The person who never failed at that understanding was—
Not in her life now.
Cassidy shook her head with a tiny motion and kept talking so she didn’t have to think about him, about anything. When it came to suppressing unthinkable thoughts, she was a professional with a decade of experience.
“Ms. Maxwell,” said one of the men. She looked at him. He was easily the youngest one in the room, perhaps the most eager to show his bosses that he meant business. He reached into a large portfolio at his feet and pulled out a posterboard featuring a black-and-white photo of a scantily clad couple in a heated embrace. “You’ve been so helpful, that I think we can use your personal opinion. Tell us, how do you think Brits would feel about this poster on a Piccadilly Circus billboard?”
Cassidy looked at the poster, but a flash of movement caught her gaze and coaxed it over the man’s shoulder. She could see through the glass wall of the meeting room, straight to the embassy lobby.
Straight into a pair of eyes.
Cassidy sucked in a breath so hard she almost choked.
Bottomless black eyes.
From here, a stranger might think the distance made those eyes look black. But Cassidy was no stranger, and she knew if she walked out of the meeting room, walked closer and closer until she was an inch away, they would still be an almost-impossible ink-black.
Those eyes—Cassidy remembered how as a smitten child, as a teenager with a crush, as a young woman in love, she would do anything to make those eyes look her way. Then, after her mistakes, she feared she could never look into those eyes again. So she’d run away.
There was nowhere to run now.
Every memory she’d banished to the far corners of her mind now leaped out like monsters in a haunted house. Every single thought she’d outrun now clawed at her back.
The only man she ever loved was standing right in front of her again, and there was no escape.
Eric didn’t smile. He didn’t wave or nod. He just held her gaze, and Cassidy was forced to face the hurt she’d inflicted.
“Ms. Maxwell?” she heard, and snapped her attention back to the poster. “Ms. Maxwell? How do you think people in London will feel about this ad?”
Cassidy parted her lips, intending to give a professional response, but her mind tricked her into honesty. “Stunned,” she mumbled. She looked over the man’s shoulder. Eric hadn’t moved. “Shocked,” she whispered.
The uncomfortable rustling in the room brought her back once again. “Excuse me?” the one woman asked. “I rather thought Europeans were less reserved than Americans.”
“We intended a sexy, suggestive effect, not something offensive,” another man in the business delegation added.
“Oh…” Cassidy said, willing herself to focus on her job. Pretend he’s not there, she told herself. He’s probably not there. You forgot lunch, after all. It’s probably a hallucination brought on by hunger.
“What I meant to, ah, say, was…” Cassidy began.
It’s not him. It can’t be him. It must be someone who looks like him. The world has no shortage of tall, dark and handsome. Just a look-alike, that’s all.
“What I meant to say,” Cassidy repeated firmly, “was that Europeans will be shocked and stunned—that it’s not even more racy.” She pushed out a laugh.
Luckily, the company reps laughed, also, letting Cassidy off the hook.
Off the hook in here, at least, Cassidy thought. But I have to leave this room eventually. And even though she warned herself not to, she peered out the glass one more time.
Eric Barnes still stood, with a patience she knew full well he had.
Cassidy looked away from him again. She would not allow this.
Her cell jingled. “Maxwell,” she answered, willing her voice not to shake. She turned to face the wall behind her.
The voice on the other end sounded very close, because it was—the front desk was only steps from the room. “There’s a man here to see you. Eric Barnes. He says he doesn’t have an appointment but insists he see you. He says he knows you personally. I told him you were very busy, and I’d see what I could do.”
Run, was her first instinct. Run out the back door. Keep running…
Cassidy sighed and rubbed her left temple. She had a roomful of people behind her and one of the most respected politicians in all of Europe counting on her. Running was not an option right now.
“I don’t know when I’ll be finished here,” she said into the phone. “I’m waiting on the ambassador. But tell Mr.—Mr. Barnes that he can wait if he wants.”
She clicked off and suddenly felt like Dead Woman Walking.
She turned to the group and talked some more, laughed a bit, and checked her watch often because every time she did, she forgot. She rolled her chair back a couple of inches, putting a blond man directly between her and her view of the lobby. By the time the ambassador strode in and the group rose in greeting, there were hot, damp patches under her arms and a thin rivulet of perspiration was snaking its way along her hairline.
“I apologize for my delay,” the ambassador said. “But I am sure Cassidy kept you all as busy as she keeps me.”
As the people in the room happily chimed in about Cassidy’s helpfulness, the ambassador smiled at her. She tried to smile back, but felt an ugly grimace distort her cheek muscles instead. Before her boss could catch on, she stepped with great reluctance from the room, took a deep breath and took several heel-clacking strides to the lobby.
Eric had taken a seat, but he glanced up when she walked in and rose to his feet. Cassidy nodded at the reception desk, then walked right up to him and angled her head toward the door. He followed her outside and when she stopped and turned, he was suddenly so close that she had to tilt her head up a few inches to look at him.
A deep crease bisected the space between his thick, dark eyebrows—something that wasn’t there before. His hair was different, and she realized with a start that it was shot through with gray. When had that begun? Gray hair seemed like something reserved for older men, much older men, who’d seen—but then, how could she presume to know what Eric had or hadn’t seen?
He just kept standing there, silent, obligating her to speak first.
Questions began to throb across Cassidy’s mind. Why are you here? Why, after all this time? Why couldn’t you just let go? Why are you making me face you now?
But she finally chose to say only one word, and it came out of her throat in a ragged whisper. “Why?”
Eric recoiled. Not physically, but something in his expression pulled back for a moment. Cassidy was unsettled by it; she’d never surprised him before.
“‘Why?’” he repeated in a voice that was a bit lower, a bit harsher, than she’d ever heard it. “Did you just ask me, ‘Why’? Why in hell are you asking me why? It should be me asking you. Why, Cassidy?”
Hearing her name in his voice again almost made her break down in sobs, but she fought hard against herself.
She wondered if he really thought she would answer him. Didn’t he realize that if she could tell him why, years ago, she wouldn’t have run? Couldn’t he guess the betrayal she was hiding was more than he could bear?
She parted her lips, sticky with the remains of unrefreshed Chanel lipstick.
Maybe she would have said something. Probably not.
But she’d never find out for sure. Because at that moment, Eric reached out one hand, put it on the back of her head, pulled her close and covered her mouth with his.
It was as though he’d been in prison for ten years, for a crime he didn’t realize he’d committed, and was finally tasting the sun again.
Cassidy’s mouth was rigid and her glittering amber eyes were in a wide-open stare. Eric closed his eyes and brought both hands to her face, relaxing the smooth skin beneath his fingers, caressing her small earlobes.
He felt her resolve soften, along with her mouth. He nibbled gently with his teeth, and when her lips opened, he touched just the tip of her tongue with his. Someone made a moaning sound, and he couldn’t tell who.
He leaned her against the wall, pressing his lower body against hers.
Then he felt another pressure. On his shoulders. Two hands. Pushing him roughly away.
He let go of her and stumbled three steps back.
Cassidy’s face blazed as red as the highlights in her long, thick hair. She was breathing hard, her nostrils flaring like a prodded bull.
Another woman would have cried, “What are you doing, kissing me at the main door of the U.S. embassy, for crying out loud! I work here! And who do you think you are, kissing me like that, touching me like that? Get the hell away from me!”
But this was Cassidy, whose wordless emotions were always written all over her face. Eric flinched as if she had actually spoken.
He also flinched from the strength of his memory. Those three memories he never let himself remember?
Well, the first one smashed into him now. Hard.
Cassidy, glowing with new beauty at her Sweet Sixteen party. She coaxed him into the hall, away from her giggly girlfriends and clearly hopeful male friends. “It’s my birthday,” she said. “But I have a present for you. Happy birthday to me.” Then she kissed him. An immature, inexperienced kiss. She looped her arms around his shoulders, touched his neck, and he felt her fingers trembling.
Their first kiss. And their last kiss.
Until now. His mouth still felt hers.
“Cassidy,” Eric said. “I—”
She turned to walk away from him.
“Cassidy, please,” Eric said. “I didn’t come here for that. I didn’t mean for that to happen. It just—I saw you and it just—it did. I’m sorry.”
She looked at her arm where he grasped it. He let go and she looked into his face.
“I didn’t even come here for me,” Eric said.
Cassidy raised one thin, arched brow. He remembered when she learned how to do that in fifth grade. She’d given raised-brow questioning looks to people for three days, thrilled at her new form of expression.
