Overseas (20 page)

“Glass of sherry?” came Julian’s voice, over my shoulder.

“Sherry?”

“Very nice before dinner, I’ve found. Try it.” He handed me a small ornate glass.

“Must be a British thing.” I took a tiny sip, letting the sweet intensity spread luxuriously over my tongue. I dipped down for another.

“I brought you a sweater. It’s getting chilly.” He laid it over my shoulders, light and warm.

“Thanks,” I said. It smelled like him, like the scent of his soap: clean and warm and outdoorsy, like sunshine on grass.

He clambered over the wall to sit next to me. “You’ve discovered my favorite spot already.”

“It’s beautiful. How long have you had this place?”

He shrugged. “A few years.”

“Do you make it up often?”

“Not as often as I like. I enjoy the peace.”

“Doesn’t it get a little lonely?” I took a drink of the sherry to cover my anxiousness for his reply.

He chuckled and bent to kiss my shoulder. “Sweetheart. Yes, it does. Achingly so, at times. I’ve had Geoff and Carla up once or twice, but I expect she found it a bit rustic. One of the boys picked up a tick in the
woods over there.” He nodded in the direction of a copse of birch. “She nearly called nine-one-one.”

I laughed. “That’s why they call it Lyme disease, right?”

“I shall have to check you over very
thoroughly
for the little buggers,” he said solemnly. “Every evening.”

“If you must. And I suppose I’ll have to do the same for you.”

His low laugh rustled the air again; I felt his hand cover mine on the wall. “So tell me what happened today,” he said, “if you can speak rationally yet.”

I stroked my fingers along the tiny diamond-like ridges of the sherry glass. The firing seemed like a distant memory already. “Kind of like a scene from a movie, really. They’d shut out my security pass, so Banner escorted me upstairs like a… like a stormtrooper or something, and there was Alicia, looking smug. The HR woman handled it. Said they had evidence I’d been quote unquote engaged in an illegal information exchange with a—how did they put it?—a counterparty in the financial industry. I have to assume it was Alicia who manufactured it. Motive and opportunity.” I took another drink and stared down at the darkened grass.

“Can’t we find out?”

“Yeah, well, they shut that down pretty quickly. I asked if there was any way to defend myself, and she said they would pursue aggressive legal remedies if I tried. Aggressive, she said. Like she meant it.”

He sprang from the wall and turned to face me. “They bullied you, in other words.”

“You could say that.”

“Kate,” he said, taking my chin in his hand and looking me in the eye, “they haven’t
seen
aggressive legal remedies. You and I are going into the house, and I’m going to call up my lawyer. And by the time I’m through, they’ll be on their knees, begging your pardon. And as for that scheming harpy of yours…”

“Stop. Stop.” I set my glass on the wall and took hold of his forearm
and stared straight back. “That’s exactly what you’re
not
going to do. You’re not going to run up millions of dollars in legal fees to get me back a job I never even liked. You’re not going to expose yourself and your firm to the publicity it would cause. We’re just going to let it drop for now.”

“The
hell
I will,” he began, but I laid my finger on his mouth.

“Please,” I whispered. “Look, there’s no need to get the legal broadsides firing yet. That would only scare them into destroying whatever evidence might be hanging around. I asked Charlie to do a little snooping for me. See what’s going on. Like who this counterparty is supposed to be, and what kind of information I’m supposed to have given them. If I can find out exactly what Alicia was doing, maybe I can nail her.”

“Not you,” he insisted. “We.”

“No. Not a chance.
You
are on the sidelines here, Laurence. You are not going to go all Terminator on me again.”

“Again?”

“In the park. You were
whaling
on that guy. I’m not sure you wouldn’t have killed him if I hadn’t said something. It was seriously spooky.”

“Kate,” he said, “I would never hurt you.”

“I know.” Twilight was falling now, casting his face in blue shadow, stark and beautiful. I placed my hand on his cheek, felt the subtle rasp of his day-old whiskers under my palm. “So I’ve been thinking.”

“Hmm. About what?”

“We’re not here because of the firing, are we?”

He hesitated. “No, not really. Though I think it’s doing you good, being away.”

“I like it here. But don’t change the subject. You said something, on the phone, about some news. Odd news. So is everything okay?”

He sat back down on the stone wall and drew me under his arm. “It’s nothing to be all that worried about. More an excess of caution, really.” He paused, reaching up to finger a lock of my hair. “How shall I put this? There’s a bit of a question about my—and by extension, your—personal safety.”

“What? What do you mean?” I demanded. “Someone wants to hurt you?”

“No. Not exactly. Look, as I said, it’s a little hard to explain.”

“I’m a smart girl.”

“Yes, you are,” he said darkly, almost as though that weren’t a good thing. “All right, here it is: in early January I decided to start winding down the fund.”

“Oh. I think I’d heard that rumor.”

“Yes, well, I wanted to tell you before, but I couldn’t put you in that position, since you were working in an investment bank. Anyway, we recently broke the news in a letter to our investors, with cash-out planned for the end of the summer, and a few of them haven’t reacted well. End of story.”

“End of story? Are you kidding? Who? What’s the threat?”

He shook his head. “I’m not going to tell you. We’re just going to lie a bit low for a little while.”

“But why
we
? Not that I’m not delighted to be here with you, but why would this disgruntled investor hunt
me
down?”

I felt his kiss along my hairline. His voice was endlessly tender. “Because you’re important to me. We’ve been publicly linked, and you never know. I didn’t want to take any chances.”

“A pretty slim chance.”

“The only acceptable chance, with you,” he said, “is none at all. So I’m going to keep you right here until things blow over.”

“Wait a minute. How long is that?”

“I don’t know. A month or two, perhaps.”

I struggled up. “A
month
or two? Are you crazy? I can’t just disappear like that! I mean, I only brought a change of clothes.”

“There’s a shopping mall up the freeway a bit.”

“I’m not going to buy myself a new
wardrobe…
” His mouth began to open. “And neither are you!” I snapped.

“Kate, calm down…”

“You might have told me, you know. I’m going to have to go back in the city…”

“No,” he said sharply. “I’ll pick up whatever you need; just give me your key.”

“What? So
you
get to leave and I don’t? What the hell is going on here? You’ve, like,
kidnapped
me?” I scrambled back over the other side of the wall and began to stomp back to the house.

“Kate, it’s not like that… Oh, bloody
hell
, Kate. You make it so damned difficult to take care of you…”

I spun around into his chest. I hadn’t realized he was following so closely. “That’s because I don’t
need
taking care of. I don’t
need
saving. I’m not, like, your
mistress
. Actually, I don’t even know
what
I am!”

“You’re the woman I love.”

I closed my eyes. “Julian, you know you can’t mean that. It’s wonderful to hear, and it’s all very romantic, and it makes me want to have mind-bending all-night sex with you, but you’ve known me for, like, two weeks, if you subtract the five-month freak-out you treated me to.”

His mouth dropped open, speechless at last.

“So let’s just leave
love
out of it for now, okay? Because I’m already
hooked
. You don’t need to go setting me up for complete and total heartbreak.”

And I turned and marched back into the house.

I
COULDN’T REALLY
stay mad at him for long. In the first place, here we were, alone together in a romantic old house, and unless I wanted to commit grand theft auto in his hundred-thousand-dollar car, I had few options for a self-righteous exit, stage left.

In the second place, well, he was Julian. It was no use trying to nurse resentment when his every touch triggered a primordial flood of oxytocin throughout my starved body.

So I went to the kitchen instead and started making dinner. Julian came
in a moment later, standing hesitantly in the doorway as I banged around the pots and pans like a demented housewife. “Can I help?” he asked.

“That depends. Do you know how to boil water?”

“Very funny,” he told me, and went to fill the pot.

I made chicken and pasta and salad, and we ate it quietly with a bottle of wine at the table in the kitchen. Julian was clearly thinking things over. His brow had compressed into serious lines, as if he were trying to derive some complex quadratic equation. Solve me for x and y.

Eventually, as the wine kicked in, we started exchanging a little conversation. Small talk, mostly. Things began to thaw out. “So, mystery man,” I said, picking over the salad leaves, “do you think you can bear to tell me something about yourself? Maybe some childhood stories? You can change the names and dates to protect the innocent.”

He smiled. “Really, it was a fairly ordinary childhood, at least for my crowd. We lived primarily in London; my father was somewhat active in politics. During recesses we went out to our house in the country. Southfield, you see.”

“How clever of you.”

“Yes, I’m startlingly original. In any case, I suppose you could say my parents raised me in a fairly old-fashioned way.” He slanted me a playful look. “A mischievous child, I’m compelled to admit. The despair of my long-suffering nanny.”

“Really? Mischievous how?”

“Oh, the usual rubbish. Frogs in the cupboards. Scientific experiments gone awry. Pranks on unsuspecting houseguests. It’s just possible I may, at one point, have cost my father the chance of a cabinet position. I’m merely speculating, of course. I was only eight years old at the time.”

I was laughing. “I can’t imagine what…”

“And I shan’t tell you. In any case, boarding school at age ten, then on to university.” He took a sip of wine. “Then I joined the army.”

I nearly choked on my arugula. “The
army
? Seriously? Why?”

He shrugged. “It seemed like the thing to do at the time. Adventure,
excitement. I learned a great deal about leadership. And decision making: you can’t dither on about your options in the middle of a… a training exercise.”

“Wow.” I chewed and swallowed, taking my time. “Were you in Iraq?”

“No, not Iraq. That was after my time.”

“So that Terminator thing in the park. Your warrior instincts at work, I guess. Hmm. It’s all clicking into place now. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“I didn’t
know
to ask. Do you have any good stories? Pinned down under fire or whatever?”

He smiled wryly. “A few, here and there. I’ll try to think of some for you. In any case, I left the army after a bit, moved to New York, and started Southfield.”

“Obviously that’s the short version.”

“The details are rather dull.”

“Why Wall Street?”

“Friend of a friend.”

“And you were wildly successful, just like that.”

“I have good instincts. And I got lucky.”

I shook my head in amazement. “You’re obviously one of those really sick individuals who does everything well. Just my luck.”

“Rubbish. I certainly don’t do everything well. I only pursue what I’m good at.”

“Which is everything.”

He aimed his eyes upward in exasperation. “Must I sit here and enumerate my many shortcomings for you? I can’t cook, as you’ve perhaps noticed. I can’t sing a bloody note. Never get my Christmas cards out in time. I shall probably forget your birthday at least once, unless you’re so good as to remind me. Am subject to hay fever in early spring. Rather uneasy around snakes…”

I grinned. “You’re scared of snakes? You mean like Indiana Jones?”

“I did
not
say I was scared.
Uneasy
, Kate.” He paused and folded his arms. “Not particularly keen on stinging insects, either.”

“So I’ll have to kill my own spiders?”

“No, spiders are quite all right. Just wasps and things. Owing to an unfortunate incident in my childhood. Too inquisitive for my own good.”

“Well,” I said, trying to keep my face straight, “I guess I can live with that.”

We did the dishes together, even laughing as we tried to figure out how to work the garbage disposal. When the kitchen was tidy, and the dishwasher hummed industriously, Julian hung up his towel and turned to me.

“I’m sorry, Kate. I didn’t mean to turn autocratic on you, back in the garden. Another of my faults, and rather more serious, is a tendency to want to order things around me. To a somewhat arrogant belief in my own capacities.” He frowned, and finished, more softly: “I won’t make you stay if you’d rather not.”

I reached out to hook his fingertips with mine. “Julian, don’t be ridiculous. Of course I want to stay. It’s like living out a fantasy, being up here with you. Which is exactly why I can’t just bury myself for the summer. I’ve just lost my job. My whole career, in fact. And if I don’t try to get things back together soon, I’m afraid I’ll just get swallowed up by you. Be sucked completely into your world.”

“I’d never do that.”

“You couldn’t help it. I
have
to have some other life. I can’t just become your dependent out here. I’d turn into one of those complacent little Stepford women, like Geoff’s wife.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” he said. “You’re not like her at all.”

“But maybe I would be. It would be too much like winning the lottery, and they say lottery winners are about the unhappiest people on the planet.”