You've Got Male (17 page)

“Then Garbo is perfect for me,” she said. Suddenly, though, she didn’t like the name nearly as much as she had when she proposed it.

He growled something unintelligible under his breath, then, “Let’s talk about something else, okay?” he said.

“Fine,” she replied tersely. “What do you want to talk about?”

He met her gaze levelly. “Tell me about your time in prison.”

This time Avery was the one to reply swiftly, quietly and with utter conviction. “No.”

“Oh, come on,” he said.

“No,” she said again.

“Please?”

“Why would you care?” she asked point-blank.

In response he echoed her reply to his similar question. “I don’t know. I just…”

There was no way his reasons could mirror her own, she told herself. No way could he care about her, even in the vaguely interested, not-really kind of way she cared about him. Still, they were both bored and needed something to pass the time….

“All right, here’s the deal,” she said. “Until Adrian comes online, I’ll answer one of your questions about my life in prison for every one of my questions you answer about your job. Fair?”

“Fine. But I get to go first.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

“Was it horrible?” he asked, going right for the main event.

She knew her answer would surprise him, but she told him truthfully, “No. My turn.”

“Wait a minute!” he interjected. “It’s not your turn yet.”

“Sure it is. You asked a question, I answered it. Now it’s my turn to ask you one.”

He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. Then he grinned smugly. “You asked me a question earlier that I answered,” he reminded her. “About why I wanted to be a spy. So now it’s my turn again.”

“Uh-uh,” she protested. “We’re still one for one. It’s my turn.” And then, before he could get in another word, she asked, “Where did you grow up?”

He narrowed his eyes at her again. “What’s that got to do with being a spy?”

“I told you it’s not your turn to ask a question,” she said.

“Tough. Neither of us seems to want to play by the rules.”

He had a point. Not that she was surprised by it. “Earlier tonight you mentioned having grown up with a cook,” she said. “To me, that indicates you come from a moneyed background. True?”

“Is that your question?” he asked. “Or is the other question the one you want me to answer?”

“Do you know any other punctuation marks besides a question mark?” she asked.

“Do you?” he countered.

Evidently not,
she thought. But then, that thought had ended with a period. When she was talking to herself, she did just fine. It was only Dixon who made her feel questionable.

“Okay, no more games. Let’s just chat, shall we?”

He curled his lip back in distaste. “I hate chatting.”

“I hate being bored. We’re even.”

He expelled a sound of resignation. “I grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia,” he said. “My parents raised Thoroughbreds. Satisfied?”

Not by a long shot, she thought. She couldn’t imagine Dixon having grown up in such a pastoral, genteel setting. What had led the Virginia farm boy into a life of intrigue and espionage?

“My mother sold the farm after my father died,” he added when she didn’t reply, “and she moved into a condo in D.C.—Georgetown.”

“I’ve never been to Virginia,” Avery said, wanting to skirt the subject of his father’s death as much as she could, “but I knew at girl at Wellesley who was from Richmond. I hear it’s a beautiful state.”

“It is that,” he agreed, his voice still sounding a bit flat.

“So do you have brothers or sisters still living there?”

“One sister,” he said. “Younger. She and her family live in D.C., too, not far from my mother. She works for the State Department.”

“Sounds like you’re a political family,” Avery said.

“Runs in the blood,” he confirmed. “My mother was an attaché at the Norwegian embassy when she met my father. And before and for a little while after they married, my father was in the same line of work I’m in now.”

She could tell he immediately regretted the revelation, because he twisted his mouth into a tight line.

“Your dad was a spy, too?”

“Yeah.”

She understood then why Dixon didn’t want to talk about his father’s death. “He died in the line of duty, didn’t he?”

Dixon nodded. “But he was called out of retirement for it. He shouldn’t have been working. But OPUS insisted he was the only one who could do the job.”

“And was he?”

“I could have done it,” Dixon said with complete confidence. “But I was fresh out of training and I’d never been in the field. They wouldn’t hear of it. They lured my father back instead.”

“And somehow you feel responsible for his death,” she guessed.

He shook his head. “No, I know who’s responsible.”

And suddenly Avery did, too. “Adrian Padgett,” she said softly.

He nodded. “Yeah. Adrian Padgett.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“No.”

She knew better than to push him. In an effort to change the subject, she told him, “Prison really wasn’t as bad as you might think.”

She wasn’t sure, but when he looked at her this time, he seemed to be grateful. “How so?” he asked.

It was only fair, Avery thought. He’d shared a little of himself when he talked about his father, however vaguely. The least she could do was share something of herself, too.

“Growing up here,” she said, driving her gaze around her still-luxurious room, “I never felt comfortable.”

“Hey, no offense, Peaches, but sleeping under a Ralph Nader poster would put me off my lunch, too.”

“I’m not talking about the room,” she said wearily, striving for patience. And also tamping down the urge to smack him.

“Yeah, well, having met your family, it still doesn’t surprise me.”

She smiled at that, albeit a bit sadly. “Actually that wasn’t the worst of it, either. For the first part of my life I got along fine with all of them. I figured everyone lived the way we did. In a huge, beautiful house with two swimming pools and horses in the stable and servants to take care of all the menial tasks. Everyone I knew lived like that, so that must be the way of the world, you know? Even when we traveled, we visited people or places that were like home. I never had any reason to believe there was another way to live.”

“Then when did it become uncomfortable?” he asked.

“I can’t really give you an exact time, but as I got older and learned more about the world outside my own reality, I gradually started to realize that very few people lived the way I did. We’d go into the city and I’d see homeless people and run-down neighborhoods. Or I’d watch the news and read the paper and see that most people lived lives entirely different from my own. Little chinks of ugliness started to open up in the great white wall around my life. And I started wondering what made me so special that I got to live the way I did when other people had to live the way they did.”

“And what did make you so special?” Dixon asked.

“Nothing,” she said with a small shrug. “A happy accident of birth, that was all.”

“You should have felt relieved,” he told her.

“I felt something else instead,” she said.

“What?”

“Guilt.”

He studied her a moment in silence. “You know, a good therapist could help you work through that. And luckily for you, you could afford a good therapist.”

She smiled. “Listen, I saw some of the best of them when I was a teenager. My parents insisted. They couldn’t figure out why I was so unhappy and rebellious when I was living the sort of life anyone else would have envied.”

“And it didn’t help?”

Avery lifted her shoulders again and let them drop. “Not really. I just couldn’t accept it, Dixon, that I had so much…
so much…
and others had so little. For no good reason.”

“Maybe God just decided to smile on you.”

“God doesn’t pick favorites.”

“Maybe you did something good in a previous life that you’re being rewarded for in this one.”

“Nobody’s that good.”

“Maybe it’s your karma. You radiate goodness, so goodness returns to you.”

She only rolled her eyes at that one.

“Yeah, okay, that was pushing it,” he said. “So maybe it was just a happy accident of birth. So what?”

Avery said nothing in response to that. Mostly because she still wasn’t okay with it. These days, she still lived a privileged life. She still had a lot more than most people did. And yes, she still felt guilty about it. But she also knew she could give away every penny she had and there would still be millions of people who went without. Until the day came when
every
one who was in a position to do so gave away much of their wealth, the fortunes of people would stay unfairly disproportionate. Avery’s generosity could only go so far.

“So it was another happy accident,” she said, “that made me realize what was really important. That was the one that sent me to the Rupert Halloran Correctional Facility.”

“You think that was luck?” he said.

“Yeah, I do,” she told him. “Good luck, at that.”

“How do you figure?”

“Prison was totally egalitarian,” she said. “Nobody had any more than anyone else. We all had to work. We were all expected to follow the same rules and the same schedule.”

“Hey, you’re talkin’ like a commie now, Peaches. You can get in trouble for that.”

She smiled. “I guess it was kind of Communistic. In a good way.”

“No good can come of Communism, missy.”

His silliness soothed some of her tension and made it a little easier for her to talk about that two-year period of her life. Not that remembering prison had ever caused her any grief. But she didn’t usually like to talk about it with other people because they never understood why she hadn’t been miserable there.

“I felt like I had a purpose in prison, Dixon. Does that make sense?” she asked.

“Not really,” he told her. “I mean, you worked as a seamstress, right? Sewing pillowcases for a mail-order linen company.”

“Yeah, but it was honest work,” she pointed out. “I earned my own way. No one gave me anything just because I was Avery Nesbitt, of the Hampton Nesbitts.”

“And that’s important to you?”

“Hell, yes, it’s important to me,” she said. “Aren’t you proud of what you do for a living?”

“Damn right.”

“Your family was wealthy, right?”

He nodded.

“You probably have a trust fund or some kind of inheritance?”

“Both, actually,” he told her.

“Yet you don’t rely on them for your income. You have a job. A dangerous job, at that. And one I doubt is making you a rich man.”

“Yeah, but those government benefits are killer,” he said.

“So are some of the people you deal with on a regular basis,” she reminded him. “But you do this because it gives you a sense of purpose and makes you feel worthwhile. Like you’re an important part of the world, right?”

He seemed uncomfortable with her assessment. “I guess…”

“That’s what I always wanted, too,” she told him. “To feel important. Or at least worthwhile. I never got that growing up here. I never felt valued or valuable. But when I was at Rupert Halloran, I did.”

He expelled an incredulous sound. “Yeah, people went to bed at night feeling more comfortable because of the pillowcases you made.”

“Hey, when you’ve had a long, crappy day at work, it’s a pretty major thing to be able to go to sleep with a smile on your face,” she told him indignantly. “The pillowcases I stitched together gave people pleasure. Made them smile. Made them feel better. How often have you done that for anyone?”

He dipped his head forward. “Okay, I guess you have a point.”

“I just wanted to be important to someone, Dixon,” she said, hating the pleading tone in her voice but having no idea how to mask it. “In whatever small way I could.”

“And putting together pillowcases for total strangers while being locked up made you feel that?”

She nodded, fighting back tears that came out of nowhere. What the hell was that all about? “Yeah,” she said. “It did.”

Dixon studied Avery from his seat on the floor and marveled at what she had just revealed. She’d felt more significant locked up behind bars and performing meaningless manual labor than she’d felt living in a palatial home as a member of one of the wealthiest families in America.

No wonder she’d been in therapy.

Now she was looking at him as though she was going to start crying, and if she did that, he was going to feel like a complete heel, not to mention he’d have no idea what to say or do next, and please, for God’s sake, don’t let her throw herself into his arms and start sobbing uncontrollably, because then he’d really lose it, and dammit, why couldn’t he have just kept his mouth shut for once in his life?