Trust Me on This - Jennifer Crusie [65]
“I don’t know,” Dennie said. “Six months. A year. As long as it takes for me to know that I don’t need you to save me. Then I can come back to you and just need you to love me.”
He looked so unhappy that she almost relented, but just as she was about to give in, he stepped back. “Okay. How soon do you have to start?”
“Now,” Dennie said, and he sighed and said, “I figured that. Janice Meredith?”
Dennie nodded. “She and the police are waiting for me in the manager’s office. And you have to go downtown for the Bond thing anyway, and then you have a plane to catch. I heard Harry tell you so.”
He said, “I can change the flight,” and she shook her head.
“I need to get moving on this,” she told him. “I’ll call you when I get settled. I just need the time first.”
“Right.” Alec sighed and took a business card and a pen from his breast pocket. “This is my home phone,” he said as he wrote, “and the business phone, fax, and e-mail are on the card. Call collect. And call often.”
He sounded unhappy but resigned, and she took the card from him and said, “I’ll call a lot.” She stretched up and kissed him, and he caught her to him and changed the kiss from a good-bye into a promise, and she didn’t ever want it to stop. “I have to go,” she said when she finally pulled away, and he let her go, but then he called her name when she was halfway across the lobby.
“Button up,” he said when she turned. “I don’t think Janice Meredith is going to appreciate the effect of those three buttons the way I do.”
Dennie laughed and buttoned up, and then she watched him walk toward the lobby doors and out of her life. Just for a while, she told herself, but there were no guarantees. Life was what you went after.
Armed with that thought, she walked into the manager’s office and found Janice Meredith sitting there alone.
“I sent the police away,” Janice said, still looking at Dennie as if she were roadkill. “But I’m still not giving you the interview.”
Dennie put her hands on her hips. “I have a lot of excellent reasons why you should.” And I just put an excellent man on hold so I could tell you them, she added silently. So you’re going to listen, lady.
Janice relaxed a millimeter into her chair. “I thought you might. You have five minutes.”
Dennie closed the door behind her and sat down, putting everything she could into her next sentence. “Do you know the story about Margaret Mead? Somebody asked her why her marriages had failed and she said …”
Chapter 10
Four months later, Alec Prentice sifted through the last box of documents from the Bond case as the August sun streamed through his office window. His office now, not Harry’s. He was glad about that and not glad. He missed Harry snarling at him. He missed Harry ignoring him while pounding the computer. But mostly he missed Dennie.
She’d called every day—or he’d called her when she’d stayed in one place long enough to have a number—until last week when the calls had trickled down to three. Then this week, there hadn’t been any at all. She was on the road again, no number for him to call, and the worst part was, this was the week she was deciding which job in New York she was going to take. She’d gotten three offers after the Meredith article had been published, two not-so-good ones and one very good one, which had seemed like a no-brainer to Alec but not to Dennie. There must have been something else.
Maybe she’d been trying to tell him they were finished. They’d spent only four weekends together. He hadn’t even met Walter yet. You couldn’t build a relationship on that. Well, Alec could, but evidently Dennie couldn’t.
He checked the last of the documents and was beginning to unload everything from his desk back into the box when he noticed one more paper, stuck half under the folded bottom of the carton.
It was the fax Aunt Vic had sent him. “Four Fabulous Days! Three Glorious Nights!” Oh, hell, Alec thought. If he’d only known the damn thing was a prediction instead of a come-on, he wouldn’t have …
The hell he wouldn’t have.