When She Was Bad

7

For three years, Irene Cogan had been nursing an unlikely crush on the man who’d risked his own life to save her from Ulysses Maxwell’s hellhole. Or perhaps not so unlikely, despite his unprepossessing (well, okay, downright homely) appearance-she didn’t need her Stanford degrees to understand how a damsel in distress might develop an affinity for the knight in shining armor who’d ridden to her rescue, or to recognize the resemblance between Pender and both her father and her late husband-big, easygoing men in whose strong arms a gal couldn’t help feeling safe and protected.

At the time, though, Irene had been too traumatized by Maxwell to trust her feelings for Pender, never mind acting on them, and any remaining chance of a relationship developing between them seemed to have dissolved entirely when instead of moving out to California following his retirement from the FBI, as he’d once thought of doing, Pender had accepted a law enforcement job on the island of St. Luke, a U.S. protectorate in the eastern Caribbean.

Irene told herself it was just as well, that it would never have worked out for the two of them anyway. Then a few months ago Pender had called Irene out of the blue to tell her his plans had changed, that things hadn’t panned out for him on St. Luke, and that he was thinking about moving to the central coast after all.

So much for just as well. Irene had helped Pender find a cottage to rent only a few blocks from her place in Pacific Grove, and he’d quickly been assimilated into her circle of friends and acquaintances. He’d grown particularly close to the DeVries family-Lily had taken to calling him Uncle Pen, and he’d become golfing buddies with both her real uncle, Rollie DeVries, and her grandfather Lyman.

But when it came to reciprocating Irene’s romantic feelings, nothing had changed-their relationship was platonic, and in dire peril of remaining so. Then, a little over a month ago, Irene and Pender had each been contacted by The People’s Posse, a Portland-based basic cable show on the order of America’s Most Wanted, and asked to appear on an upcoming episode featuring the Maxwell case.

The offer-an all-expense-paid trip to Portland and a modest emolument-wasn’t all that tempting until the two compared notes and discovered they were scheduled to be interviewed on consecutive days. To Irene it had seemed like a perfect opportunity to take one last shot at upgrading the relationship. She’d suggested to Pender that they make a joint vacation out of it; when he agreed, she booked them adjoining rooms at an upscale hotel advertising romantic midweek getaways.

She’d nearly lost her nerve a dozen times since then. As late as the previous Saturday she’d been on the verge of calling the whole thing off; instead the business with Lily had brought them to Portland a full day ahead of schedule.

Luckily there’d been no problem checking into their hotel a day early, Pender told Irene when he picked her up at the Institute in the white Toyota he’d rented at the airport. “Not only that, I talked to Marti Reynolds at TPP, they’re going to move our interviews up a day apiece-mine’s tomorrow now, yours is Wednesday.”

“And the airline tickets?”

“I cancelled the round-trip reservations, got us seats for the last flight to San Jose on Wednesday evening-we can take the shuttle home from there.”

Irene shook her head in admiration. “Pender, if I’d ever had a secretary that good-well, I’d still have a secretary.”

“I always knew I had to be good at something,” he said-receiving compliments, even left-handed ones, was never his strength. “How’d it go with Lily?”

Irene shrugged. “It went.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“Hey, that’s my line,” she told him.

The hotel proved to be a standard chain affair-nothing particularly romantic about it. But the adjoining rooms were large and comfortable, with enormous beds and a handsome view of the Willamette. Upon arriving, Irene took a long hot shower to wash off the hospital vibes. She could feel her nerve starting to fail her again-she’d never seduced a man before, and wasn’t sure she’d be able to manage it.

Fortunately, the restaurant Irene had selected with the help of the hotel concierge was both romantic enough for her purposes and informal enough to accommodate Pender’s tragic wardrobe, which tonight consisted of a madras sport jacket, a boldly striped sport shirt, and rumpled polyester slacks; the only items that didn’t clash were his brown Basque beret and his beige Hush Puppies.

Irene herself wore a green frock that showed off her best feature, her long slender legs. Emboldened by an unaccustomed in-take of alcohol-she’d polished off most of a carafe of house red while Pender stuck to his Jim Beam on the rocks-she contrived to rest her hand on his more than once during the meal. And in the backseat of the cab on the way back to their hotel she edged closer and closer to him, until their thighs were touching-any closer and she’d have been in his lap.

But still he seemed clueless. In the elevator on the way up to their adjoining rooms he kept plenty of space between them. When they reached his door and she turned her face up to his for a good-night kiss, closing her eyes expectantly, all she got for her brazenness was a platonic peck on the cheek.

So what’s a gal to do? Persuading herself she was drunker than she actually was, Irene took another shower, changed into a slinky, nearly transparent black negligee, and knocked on the door that communicated between her room and Pender’s.

“Pen?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I come in for a sec?”

The door opened. Pender, wearing a too-small hotel bathrobe-one size fits almost all-looked down at Irene, standing in the doorway with her arms at her sides. “Oh, shit, oh dear,” he said.

Irene wanted to sink through the floor-or failing that, die on the spot. Instead, feeling stunned and foolish, she began backing away, her arms crossed over her chest. Pender, realizing the enormity of his gaffe, took her by the wrist and drew her back into his room. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No, it’s my fault,” she heard herself say. “I shouldn’t have just…I mean, I had no right to…. “

“Ssshh,” he murmured, wrapping his arms around Irene and pulling her tightly against him. “It’s not your fault-there’s no way you could have known.”

“Known what?” she said, in a tiny voice.

“Long story,” Pender replied gently.

After six months, either the pain was beginning to subside or he was growing inured to it, Pender explained to Irene a few minutes later. The two were sitting side by side on the edge of his bed; he’d fetched her the monogrammed hotel bathrobe from her room, filled an ice bucket, and fixed them each a glass of Jim Beam on the rocks. Rare now were the body blows, he told her, the attacks of grief so visceral the sobbing literally doubled him over.

The trouble was, said Pender, he wasn’t so sure he wanted the pain to subside. Except for his memories and a few trinkets, it was all he had left of his second wife, who’d died from pancreatic cancer only a few months after their wedding. So perhaps it had been a mistake to leave the tropical paradise where the two had met, wed, and lived happily ever after-if three months qualifies as ever after.

But at the time, the reminders had been too plentiful and too painful to bear. Every Caribbean sunset broke Pender’s heart all over again, and with booze duty-free on the island and a bar on virtually every corner, it didn’t take him long to realize that you can’t drown your sorrows in alcohol, you can only pickle them. So he’d opted for the geographical solution instead, resigning his post as St. Luke’s chief of detectives and moving nearly four thousand miles west to the golfing mecca of the Monterey peninsula to take another stab at retirement-and at lowering his handicap, which after twenty years on the links still hovered around the drinking age.

Not that there was any shortage of either booze or bars on the peninsula, he told Irene. But at least there nobody felt sorry for him-largely because he’d told no one of his loss. “So you can see, it’s nothing personal,” he concluded. “You’re an attractive, intelligent woman, Irene-with legs to die for, don’t think I haven’t noticed. And I’m flattered as hell you’d even consider…well, you know. But it’s too soon-I’m just not ready yet.”