Eve’s Wedding Knight

up with Sonny…?” But it took about that long for her natural gregariousness to take over, and she broke it off, laughing softly. “It’s funny, really, the way it happened. See, I’d been in Brazil, on a shoot. We were doing a documentary about this tribe, in the rain forest, that had just been discovered in the last fifty years, and now they’re being threatened with extinction because their habitat is being destroyed for lumber and farmland. Can you believe that?” Her eyes sparked with passion and her voice grew husky. “I mean, we spend billions of dollars trying to protect the habitat of some obscure species of bird or rat or tree frog, and here’s a race of human beings who, if they were animals would be on every endangered species list there is.” She stopped, and he could see her working at reining herself in.

“So, anyway, I was back in L.A. doing postproduction on the project-this was last spring-and I got a call from my boss, that’s the head of the production company I work for, saying she wants me to put the Amazon project on the back burner, because they want me to go to Las Vegas, of all places. They’ve got this big new project in the works, a four-parter for one of the cable networks on The New Las Vegas. Huge amounts of money involved. I pretty much hit the ceiling. I mean, the Brazil project meant a lot to me. Plus, I’d just spent six months sweltering in the Amazon jungle, getting slowly eaten to death, and just when we’re getting started with the actual work-the fun stuff, I mean. See-” And she broke off to hitch herself forward, talking with her whole body now, all traces of reluctance and resentment forgotten, enthusiasm shining in her face in spite of her battered features. “Making a documentary’s not like doing a movie or TV show, where you have a script and a shooting schedule to follow. The camera work is just your raw material. I mean, those cinematographers are amazing, especially when it comes to shooting wildlife, but the actual film is made in postproduction-the editing, music, voice-overs. That’s where the real creativity comes in. That’s where…” Once again she throttled back, letting out a breath of exasperation.

“Anyway, I threw a class-A hissy-fit, but to no avail. Basically, I was not given a choice-the Vegas people had specifically asked for me. They’d seen my work. I was who they wanted, or no deal. All very flattering, I suppose. And like I said, lots of money involved. Which is the bottom line, right? I thought about walking, I was so mad-I really did. But then I’d have had to leave my Brazil project behind, and I wasn’t about to do that. So off I went to Vegas, but I was still fuming, and let me tell you, I made sure everybody knew it!

“Anyway, we get to the hotel, right?-this huge casino, ‘Shangri-La’-Sonny’s casino-and we’re all booked into these luxury suites, like royalty. I walk into my room, and I nearly fainted. I mean, it’s filled with orchids and all sorts of tropical plants and birds in cages, and baskets of fruit, and there’s even a recording of rain forest sounds playing on the stereo. And in the middle of it all, I find a note that says, ‘Let me make it up to you.’ And it’s signed, ‘Sonny Cisneros.”’ She stopped with a small shrug and an off- center smile that said, What was I gonna do?

Jake said dryly, “So naturally you fell in love with him.”

She didn’t answer; she was staring out the window again. After a moment she shifted as if the bed had sand in it. “I’m trying hard to be honest with myself about it, but hindsight doesn’t make it easy.” There was another pause, and when she went on it was as if she were measuring each word before delivering it. “I know he dazzled me. Las Vegas is an easy place to be dazzled in, believe me. Nothing is real-it’s all this great big fantasy. It was just… so easy to buy into the fantasy of falling in love…” She sat silently, her slumped shoulders giving her a forlorn look. “Actually, it probably had more to do with-” She broke it off to slide him a sideways look and a wry smile. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Yeah,” he said evenly, “I do.”

“I mean, you just asked me how I got hooked up with Sonny. You probably don’t want to hear my whole life story.”

“I said I did-this part of it, anyway.” He rather imagined this woman’s life story would take a long time to tell and probably be well worth the time spent, but he didn’t say so. “Go on-it had more to do with…?”

“Timing,” she said on an exhalation, and gave him another of her off-center smiles. “The infamous biological clock. Lately it seems like all I do is go to weddings and christenings-other people’s. First, my sister Mirabella has a baby and gets married-yes, in that order-after we’d all given up hope. Then her best friend, Charly, comes out from California to be her maid of honor, meets the best man and she’s a goner. So off I go to the rain forest where I’m surrounded by burgeoning nature for a solid six months, and when I come out, everybody’s pregnant. And it just occurred to me that I was in my forties, had never even been in love-” her smile broadened and her eyes gleamed, and Jake inexplicably felt that peculiar sensation of thirst at the back of his throat “-although I’ve been in lust a few times. And in love with the idea of being in love, I suppose. But never really in love. And I realized that if it was ever going to happen to me, it had better happen pretty damn soon, or what was the point? I guess I just wanted it badly enough that I convinced myself the fantasy was real.”

He had nothing to say to that, and left unanswered and hanging in the silence, the words took on a greater poignancy than perhaps she’d meant them to have. Jake didn’t know for sure; he couldn’t know, because he couldn’t allow himself to look at her. He didn’t want to see her vulnerability just then. Afraid that if he did, he might let himself start to care.,

He was leaning against the wall at the edge of the window, gazing along his shoulder at the uninspiring view of a welllighted but almost empty parking lot, shrouded now in fog, when she suddenly said, “Hey, Jake.”

He shifted his gaze back to her without changing his stance, and found that she was regarding him with her head slightly tilted and a bright, inquisitive gleam in the eye on the undamaged side of her face. He noticed that her eyes, although blue, were actually quite dark, and that her short, blond hair had gotten caught up in the bandage that was wrapped around her head so that it formed a comical little rooster tail. She made him think of a bird, one of the ones that used to come to the feeder his wife, Sharon, had kept in the backyard of their house in Virginia, way back when he’d still been in training at Quantico. A little gray bird with a yellowish topknot, big black eyes and a cheeky disposition-a titmouse, that was it. She reminded him of a titmouse.

“Yeah?” he prompted. And why was it that whenever he was in her company he kept having to fight an urge to smile?

“What about you? Are you married?”

He jerked his eyes away from her and looked down at his feet, while his arms folded of their own volition into a defensive position across his chest. The question had caught him off guard, but at least it had neatly disposed of the smile impulse. “Nah-” he said with a shrug and what he hoped was finality, “guess I don’t have what it takes.”

“Ever been?”

Cheeky-he should have known she wouldn’t leave it there. What surprised him more than the question was the fact that he found himself answering it. “Yeah, I was married. Once.”

Her head tilted even more, and her eyes regarded him with a directness that was almost hypnotic. “What happened?”

“She woke up one morning and told me she didn’t want to be married to me anymore. That she deserved a chance to be happy. I agreed with her. So we got a divorce.”

“Just like that? One day you were happy and clueless, the next day over, finished, kaput?”

He grunted, half in surprise, half in acknowledgment of the hit she wasn’t even aware of-an unspoken touche-and said sardonically, “Well, I doubt if it was that simple.”

“How long were you married?”

“Fifteen years.” Eve whistled. He glanced at her, but saw only sympathy in her eyes-and that mesmerizing inquisitiveness. He shrugged and added, “We got married right out of college. But I’d known her since high school.”

“Any kids?”

He shook his head. And though she hadn’t asked, he found himself explaining as if she had. “She… couldn’t.”

There was the sound of a softly indrawn breath. “That must have been hard.”

He hated sympathy. He held her eyes for several seconds, waiting for a rush of resentment that never came, and finally said, “It was, for her.”

“Not you?”

He shrugged. “I was pretty wrapped up in my job.”

“And… she had-?”