Never Trust A Lady

He nodded. She’s good, he thought; really good. She could dig the life story out of a stone. “Their house backed up to ours. She was…I guess you could say she was my best friend.”

My best friend. How odd it was to hear the words, not like anything that might have come from him, but like the vibrations of chords played by some unseen musician and left hanging in the cool, winy air. He paused for a moment to listen, thinking that if he only listened hard enough…

“It’s good that you had someone,” Jane said gently. So much pain, she thought, watching his averted profile, the strange, almost expectant tilt of his head. So much grief…but not all, I think, for his father.

She said nothing more, but settled onto a vacant bench with a little sigh and pulled her tote bag into her lap, leaving it to him whether to tell her about the friend whose name he couldn’t bring himself to utter.

But he swore suddenly and threw her a hard, fierce look, the one men use to mask extreme emotions. “Ah, hell, what am I telling you all this stuff for?” Only he didn’t say “stuff,” and he didn’t apologize for the word he did use.

Jane just smiled; she used the word herself, on occasion. She said comfortably, “I expect because I’m a good listener.”

Watching him take cigarettes from a pocket inside his jacket with jerky, impatient motions, tap one out and light it, she found herself noticing the way his throat moved, the way his lips shaped themselves around the filter, the hard, brown look of his hands. Only when he’d tucked the pack away again and was blowing a thin stream of smoke into the morning’s brilliance did she realize that her mouth had gone dry.

She swallowed with an effort and asked, “Was this one of your appointments?”

“What?”

“Last night, you said-”

“Oh. Yeah, sort of.” The smile flicked briefly at one corner of his mouth but never made it as far as his eyes. He made a restless gesture with the hand that held the cigarette, then sat rather abruptly on the bench beside her, tucking his briefcase carefully between his feet. Also taking care, she noticed, to hold the cigarette between his knees so the smoke wouldn’t drift her way.

Her heart gave a skip when he did that. It’s the little things, she thought. That’s what makes it so hard to explain when somebody asks, “Why? What is it about him?”

“I should be asking about you,” he said after a moment, turning toward her so that once again she couldn’t see anything of his eyes except the dark lenses of his sunglasses. “How are you this morning?” She shrugged and tried a smile, which he didn’t return. “Sleep okay?”

She shook her head, but of course she couldn’t tell him why she hadn’t been able to steep. And as she tried to efface it by adding, “I never do, really, in hotels,” she looked away, reluctant to have him see the doubt that must be in her eyes.

I wish, I really do wish I could trust him, she thought. This morning, seeing him there at The Wall like that, it was hard to remember why she couldn’t. Surely the grief had been genuine.

But, she reminded herself, villains have fathers, too.

“No more dizziness?”

“What?” She jerked her head around to look at him again, heart thumping. His arm lay across the back of the bench behind her shoulders; it was the feathery touch of his fingers. on her neck that had startled her so. “Oh-no.” Her swallow made a stickery sound. She laughed and made a dismissive gesture toward her own throat. “No, I’m perfectly fine. It didn’t even leave a mark, whatever he did. I’d have thought being almost strangled would have more of an effect, you know?”

“You weren’t strangled.” His hand dropped casually, almost negligently, to her nape; his thumb traced up and down the side of her throat.

“No?” Jane whispered. His hand was heavy and warm; she had to resist an urge to lean her head back against it. What is he doing? What does this mean?

He shook his head. Without the influence of his eyes, his smile had an almost unbearable sweetness. “It wasn’t your air supply that was cut off.”

She tried desperately to look intelligent. “It wasn’t?”

Another head shake. “See, if you press right here…” He did so, gently, and instantly she felt that awful, remembered pressure. “What you do is, you cut off the blood supply to the brain.”

Jane gasped and pulled away from him, heart thumping. “But that’s…” She could hardly get the words out; she felt cold. But of course, she thought, being a policeman, he’d know about things like that. “So I could have…he really could have killed me.”

“Could have. But didn’t.”

He took his arm away from the back of the bench, leaving her feeling unsettled, as though someone had picked her up, shaken her vigorously and then set her down again slightly askew.

Gesturing at the tote bag in her lap, he casually asked, “Had it appraised yet?”

She gave her head a quick, hard shake, more in an effort to set herself to rights than as a response to the question, and shifted the tote bag unnecessarily as she considered how she should reply.

It wasn’t that she feared Tom Hawkins; she didn’t, not anymore. No matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t make him out to be a villain. And not only because he’d said he was a policeman, either. Because neither did the fact that he was a policeman mean she trusted him. Cop or villain, she was quite certain he wasn’t being honest with her. She could just feel it. He had some sort of agenda he wasn’t telling her about, which struck her as being particularly unfair of him since she seemed to be involved in whatever was going on, at least indirectly.

For goodness’ sake, she thought in exasperation, if he was some kind of law enforcement officer, why didn’t he just show her his ID and tell her what was going on? Why all this cloak-and-dagger, cat-and-mouse stuff? It was all beginning to seem like some sort of elaborate game, and she was quite frankly fed up with being the only one who didn’t know the rules!

On the other hand, someone had broken into her hotel room last night and attacked her. That was no game.

She took a deep breath and released it. “I was going to. But then I saw that man again-Aaron Campbell-the one from the auction? He was on the Metro, on the next car. And he got off when I did. I’m almost sure he was following me. At least…” She let her words trail off into uncertainty, exasperated with herself now. She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of anything, that was the problem.

Tom took a final drag on his cigarette. “Campbell again, huh?” he said on a soft hiss of expelled smoke.

Jane shot him a look and said flatly, “You think it was him last night, don’t you? In my hotel room.”

He shrugged and dropped the cigarette onto the packed, moist earth at his feet. “I told you, he had on-”

“-a ski mask. I know, I know.” Furious with the evasion, she lapsed into silence.

“Look, just to be on the safe side, would you like me to go with you? I could take you…”

Why do I have a feeling you’re going to anyway, whether I say yes or not? Jane thought resentfully. She said with a slight smile, “Take me…to your friend at the Smithsonian?” and was more satisfied than surprised when he looked momentarily nonplussed. So he had been lying about that, too.

“Uh, I guess we could still do that,” he hedged as he tugged back the sleeve of the brown leather jacket and frowned at his watch. “I don’t know if he’d be in or not, but we could give it a try.”

“I’m sure I’ll be fine,” Jane said gently, “but thank you for the offer.” After a quick look around, she added briskly, “In any case, I seem to have ditched Mr. Campbell-if he was following me at all. Maybe it was just my imagination.”

Except for the faint sigh of an exhalation, there was no reply. But her awareness of Tom’s silence seemed to grow with each of her heartbeats, like the ticking of a clock in the wee hours of the morning. His presence seemed to swell, too, taking up more than his share of the bench, filling up all the space between them. She could feel his body’s heat, the sleeve of the old bomber jacket like melted butter against her arm. She could feel the warmth spreading to her face and throat, and down into her chest…her breasts.

And then…

“You don’t trust me, do you, Mrs. Carlysle?” It was spoken quietly for so blunt and unexpected a question, almost in a murmur.

She shook her head, not smiling at all now, nor looking at him, either, focusing instead on the knuckles of her