Last Chance at Love Read online

  He ran his fingers through the thick, silky black hair that belied his African heritage and told of his Seneca ancestors—traits that had once enhanced his value as an undercover agent; one couldn’t be certain of his racial identity.

  “All right,” he said and grimaced, “but if it doesn’t work, we’ll have to drop it. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to leave.” At the bottom of the hill, he asked, “Are you driving, or should I help you get a cab? They seldom cruise on this part of Georgia Avenue at night.”

  “I’m driving.”

  “Then you can give me a lift?”

  * * *

  She stopped the car in front of his town house in an upscale section of Georgetown and turned toward him. “This is a lovely neighborhood,” she said, reluctant to voice the words that rested uneasily in her thoughts. He nodded and reached for the door handle. “Mind if I ask...” He stiffened, and she decided not to coat it. “You have a habit...I mean... Why do you wink at me?”

  “What? Oh! I didn’t realize I’d done that. It isn’t something I control; it’s involuntary. I... It does whatever it pleases. Thanks for the lift. Good night.” Puzzled at his sudden diffidence, the man filled her with wonder as she drove across the Williams Bridge and took the Shirley Memorial Highway to Alexandria and her small, two-story frame house near Bren Mar Park.

  * * *

  Jake thought he’d been around so many indescribably beautiful women that one long-legged black woman with big eyes the color of pinecones and the shape of almonds and a come-to-me expression couldn’t knock him off balance. But like a freight train charging through the night, Allison Wakefield had done exactly that. For what other reason would he have given her permission to follow him around and record his every gesture? And why else would the damned wink have returned? That alone was positive proof that she’d gotten to him. The wink hadn’t bothered him since he overcame a short, feverish attachment to Henrietta Beech. He distrusted reporters and for good reason; the eagerness of one to expose his former State Department activities had nearly cost him his life. Covering up the incident and guaranteeing his protection for some months afterward had cost the government a bundle. And The Journal! Did he dare risk it? He secured the front door and leaned against it for a full twenty minutes, musing on the evening’s surprises. Suddenly, he strode into his office and lifted the phone receiver. He stopped. Why did he want to telephone Allison Wakefield? Nonplussed, he pressed the fingers of his left hand first to his right cheek, then to his temples, and closed his eyes. What the devil was going on?

  Annoyed with himself for letting Allison get to him, Jake paced around in his bedroom, stopped, and swore; he needed a haircut. Nobody and nothing could have persuaded him to get one in that bastion of intrigue he’d just left, with a terrorist lurking in every other house, every store, and around any corner. In that environment, he wouldn’t be fool enough to sit in a barber’s chair and expose his throat to a razor. The ring of the phone jarred him. Wondering who would call him at half past eleven at night, he answered it.

  “Covington.”

  “Come in early tomorrow. I’ve got something for you. Can you make it in by eight o’clock?”

  Jake held the receiver at arm’s length and glared at it. “You couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning to tell me? Did you forget I’m on a year’s leave of absence, chief, and that I just got back from a mission this morning?”

  “No, I didn’t forget. I need your savvy. I want you to check these plans because if anything goes wrong on this job, Congress will have my head.”

  “Eight o’clock,” Jake said and hung up. Right then, he hardly cared whose head came off. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in ten days, and who knew when he’d get another one if he had to worry about keeping Allison Wakefield out of his business?

  * * *

  Three days later, his job for the chief completed, he prepared for his first book-signing tour.

  Rested, after a sound night’s sleep, Jake pulled himself out of bed, got a cup of black coffee, and tried to think. Considering the way he had responded to Allison Wakefield, all the way to the pit of his gut, he’d probably relax with her, slip up, and reveal more than he should. And she was bound to get suspicious if he periodically interrupted his book tour and disappeared for days at a time, as he would if the chief called on him. Any good journalist would want to know why he disappeared and where he went. He promised himself he’d get out of that commitment.

  “I’ve rethought it,” he told Allison when he called her at her office later that morning, “and I’d prefer not to be encumbered on this tour. It’ll be tiring enough without having a reporter around to record every breath I take.”

  He’d disappointed her, and he couldn’t help it, but when he’d looked down at the audience and had seen her there with her right hand at her throat and her lips a little apart, he hadn’t known what hit him. In his thirty-five years, he didn’t remember having had such a powerful reaction to a woman. He’d gotten through that lecture, though he didn’t remember how. Then she’d walked up to him and held out her hand, and for a moment he’d thought he’d conjured up a vision.

  The extent of her frustration came through when she spoke. “If I can’t tour with you,” she bargained in a voice that lacked her previous toughness, “could you give me a list of people to interview who you’d trust to tell me the truth?”

  “Your generosity astonishes me,” he said, clearly baffled. “I don’t get it.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” she replied, her tone more confident. “I won’t have any trouble finding people who’ll do you in. If I put an ad in the paper, they’ll come running.”

  “That’s blackmail, woman.”

  “Tut-tut. Don’t be so harsh. There’s more than one way to ride a horse; you know that. So what do you say? Do I tour with you, or don’t I?”

  She sounded tough, and she might be, but something about her reached him, and he didn’t want to hurt her. She inspired in him exactly the opposite response. But he had to protect himself from damage, too. And he didn’t doubt that, if she dug into his private life, she could twist what she found sufficiently to torpedo his dreams of becoming scholar-in-residence at his alma mater.

  “Are you equating me with a horse?” he chided. “Your choice of metaphors intrigues me.”

  “I didn’t mean... Well, n-no.”

  He couldn’t resist a dig. “Don’t apologize, Allison. When you ride, be considerate enough to make it enjoyable.” Oh, if phone lines had mirrors! From her long silence, he knew she’d gone slightly out of joint. Still, he couldn’t help needling her. “It isn’t always what we hear that causes trouble, but how we interpret it. You get my point, I hope.”

  “If you’re trying to convince me that six weeks of your company will be unpleasant, don’t squander your energy,” she replied. “And off-color innuendos are wasted on me.”

  “Off-color innuendos? I didn’t insinuate anything; I meant what I said. Plain and simple.”

  “Like your wink?”

  “Like your handshake, lady. Meaningful.” She could hold her own, he saw, as he waited for her reply.

  “When do we leave?”

  If he hadn’t spent the last thirty minutes talking with her, his answer probably would have been, “We don’t.” But he suspected she’d be good company. And face it, he told himself, you want to know whether that clap of thunder you heard and the lightning fire that roared through you when you first saw her signaled the real thing.

  “All right. I’ll give it a shot,” he told her, “but please do your homework. I don’t mind telling you that I’ve had enough of fledgling reporters and their inept questions.”

  “This is your first book, but I’ve worked as a reporter for six years. Which one of us is a fledgling?”

  A warm flush spread through him, and he couldn
’t help laughing; a woman who could hold her own with him was to be prized. And encouraged. “Touché. My publicist will give you my schedule for the next six weeks.” He hung up, and his smile faded. He’d have to make certain that she didn’t tail him on Friday and Saturday nights.

  * * *

  Jake couldn’t decide whether to rent a car, drive out to Rock Creek Park and spend a couple of hours horseback riding, or call a buddy for a game of tennis. He hadn’t had any useful exercise in ten days. He needed a good workout. “Dunc was always good for an early morning set or two,” he said to himself and telephoned his friend, a freelance journalist who worked at home.

  “Jake here. How’s it going, buddy?” he asked Duncan Banks when his friend answered the phone.

  “How am I? Man, I need a vacation. I just finished a piece on undertaker scams, and damned near wound up the victim of one of ’em myself. Don’t tell me you want a game. I just told my wife I needed some exercise.”

  “I can be ready for a couple of sets in half an hour. How are Justine and Tonya?”

  “Still spicing my life. I’ll pick you up in forty-five minutes.”

  * * *

  “You look as if you’ve been hanging out on a beach,” Duncan told Jake when he opened the door.

  “Hardly,” Jake said. He didn’t discuss his work for the department, and especially not his trips, and Duncan never asked him where he’d been. However, Jake didn’t doubt that a news reporter of Duncan Banks’s stature had done his research, knew the answers, and kept his thoughts to himself.

  “I hope you’re paid up with your club dues,” Jake told him, “because I forgot to pay mine.” He didn’t mention that the notice arrived while he was on a department mission.

  “I forget sometimes, too,” Duncan said, “but they won’t throw us out.”

  They practiced hitting the ball for several minutes, tossed a coin, and Duncan served first.

  “Brother, that was one wicked lob you sent over here,” Duncan called to Jake after returning it for a point. After winning a set each during nearly two hours of play, they sat on a bench and helped themselves to the lemonade that Justine had made and sent in a cooler.

  “You’ve been married to Justine how long now?”

  “Two years. The happiest and the most productive of my life. I hardly remember who I was before I met Justine. Looking back—and I often do—I realize my first marriage was a sham.”

  Jake stretched out his legs and leaned back against the bench. “Marriage is a risk any way you slice it.”

  A frown slid over Duncan’s face. “Sure. And so is taking a shower. It’s simple, Jake; if you don’t gamble—I mean, take a chance—you can’t win. From the first time I looked at Justine, I was a changed man.”

  Jake sat forward, remembering his reaction to Allison Wakefield. “You mean as soon as you laid eyes on her?”

  “That’s just what I mean. Man, I did everything, told myself all kind of lies about how she wasn’t for me, even left my own house to stay at the lodge so I wouldn’t see her...trying to avoid the inevitable. I didn’t stand a chance.”

  “Damn!” Jake sat back, put his hands in the pockets of his tennis shorts, and shook his head. “Man, I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “Whoa! Wait a minute,” Duncan said, coloring his words with barely restrained laughter. “What’s her name?”

  Jake shook his head again as if perplexed. “There isn’t any her. I am not even going to repeat her name. It’s too ridiculous. I am definitely not going there!” He spoke forcibly.

  “Go ahead and convince yourself.” Jake didn’t like the laughter that spilled out of Duncan like water cascading from a mountaintop. “That’s just what I said,” Duncan told him. “I’d be honored to be your best man.”

  With that, Jake stood, ready to leave. “You’re off your rocker.”

  Duncan permitted himself a long laugh. “Whatever you say. In the thirteen years we’ve known each other, you’ve intimated a serious interest in one woman. One. And for that particular one, your youth was ample excuse.” He stood and looked Jake in the eye. “Getting a jolt at the age of twenty-two is nothing compared to being poleaxed at this age.”

  A look of fond remembrance claimed Duncan’s face. “I’ll never forget the day and the minute I gave in to it; oceans roared.”

  “That was you. This is me. Tell Justine I want some of Mattie’s stuffed roast loin of pork and lemon-roast potatoes. That woman can really cook.”

  “That, she can. When are you leaving on your book tour?”

  “Monday, but I’ll probably be back home on weekends.”

  “I thought most book signings were held on weekends.”

  “Or at lunchtime, like mine. Thanks for the workout, Dunc.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “The guy’s a lucky man,” Jake said to himself later as he stood beside his kitchen sink, eating a ham sandwich. “One long year of trouble, and then his ship came in. I should be so fortunate.”

  * * *

  “Covington goes on national tour pretty soon, and he’s agreed to let me accompany him,” Allison told her boss.

  “Atta girl.”

  Without commenting, she turned to her computer and began to sketch the questions that would guide her interviews with Jacob Covington. She worked on them until two o’clock, packed her briefcase, and headed for her home on Monroe Avenue in the outskirts of Alexandria, Virginia, en route to her other life. Her boss and her peers thought her tough, and she had developed a crust of self-protection against their slurs and slights, had hardened herself. But not even for the sake of her ambitions would she step on anyone for personal gain. Let them think whatever they like. She had their respect, and that was what she wanted.

  Allison changed into casual clothes and prepared to enjoy the happiest two hours of her week. She parked in front of the two-story redbrick structure whose colonial front gave it the appearance of a gracious private home. Mother’s Rest was a temporary haven for eleven children under the age of two who were awaiting foster homes. A child rarely remained there more than six months.

  Zena Carter, the head nurse, greeted Allison as she entered the house. “I’ve got a brand-new one for you today,” she said. “Cute little tyke, too. She’s in a fit of temper, and I sure hope you can calm her down.”

  Allison followed Zena down the hall. “Is she sick?”

  “Doctor said she wasn’t. Just hates yet another environment and more strangers, I guess. Your things are in there.”

  Allison stepped into the little cubicle, washed her face and hands, put on a white gown, and covered her mouth with a small mask. She took the baby, and her little charge stared up at her with big brown eyes that beautified her dark face. How could anybody... Quickly, she put a stop to that train of thought. Hadn’t the social worker warned her not to judge the mothers or to become attached to any of the children? It was one thing to give that advice; as far as she was concerned, the ability to follow it required superhuman command of one’s emotions.

  For two hours, she coddled, stroked, and chatted with the seven-month-old baby girl who, like the other babies there, was awaiting a foster home or an adoption. The child’s bubbly personality tore at her heart, and when she sang, the baby clapped her hands and tried to join her. The time passed too quickly. To avoid bonding, the volunteer mothers, as they were called, were not allowed to stay for more than two hours, nor could they visit with the same baby twice in one month. Her coworkers wouldn’t believe her capable of those gentle, tender moments with the children, and she didn’t want them to know. But the hours spent there nourished her for the rest of the week.

  She walked out into the warm summer drizzle and raced half a block to her car, shielding her hair as the moisture rid it of its elegance, dampening her and shrinking her rayon shirt. At Matty’s Gou
rmet Shop, she bought her dinner and two boxes of Arlington Fair Blue Ribbon gingersnaps and went home with the intention of preparing for her interview with Jacob Covington. She answered the phone with reluctance.

  “Yes?”

  “Hi, Allison. Want to go to Blues Alley tonight?”

  Of course she did. Connie knew she never got enough of good jazz. “I’m all set to work because I didn’t have other plans. But it’ll be a while before I can get back there, so why not? Who’s there?”

  “Buddy Dee, and Mac Connelly is with him tonight.”

  “No kidding? I’ll meet you there at quarter to eight.”

  “I thought that would get your juices flowing. First one there takes a table. Say, I ran into Carly Thompson this morning. She’s here sealing a deal with Woodie’s to carry a full line of her Scarlet Woman Cosmetics. Can you beat that? The girl is gone.”

  “She sure is. Last time we spoke, she said she had some hot irons in the fire, but I thought she was talking about a man.”

  “She’s headed for Martha’s Vineyard,” Connie said, releasing a sigh of longing. “Wish I could go with her.”

  “Me too, but I’ll settle for my new assignment. See you later.”

  * * *

  Jake dressed in the style associated with jazzmen of the thirties and forties, picked up his guitar, and headed for Blues Alley. Half a block from the club, he put on dark glasses to hide his telltale hazel eyes, conceal his wink, and complete his masquerade.

  When that curtain rose, he was Mac Connelly. He wasn’t ashamed of what he did, but he couldn’t afford to have his name associated with the jazz subculture. If his association with the musicians was known, the reputation could deny him his coveted goal of an appointment as scholar-in-residence at his alma mater. Furthermore, his boss at the department had warned him that, on a nightclub bandstand, he was a sitting duck for the enemies he had incurred in his former work, and the bullet wound in his left shoulder was a testimonial to his boss’s wisdom. He’d taken that bullet three blocks from the department, proof at that time—if he needed any—that his enemies knew where to find him.