“This…the water…it feels weird.”

Jake growled, “I thought you liked hot tubs.” And he couldn’t look at her a moment longer, lying there spread out before him like a banquet, and he the beggar standing outside the hall with his face pressed up against the window.

Turning one shoulder to her, he leaned his backside against the tub and buried his face in the towel he’d thrown around his neck after his workout. But it did no good. He could still see her-almost more vivid in his mind’s eye than the lush reality-the outlines of her body undulating beneath the swirling water, moisture beading on her chest and throat, face dewy and pink from the heat, lips parted, breath suspended… as if, he thought, in the very next moment she expected to be kissed…

“I’m curious.” He cleared his throat. “How in the hell did you manage to bug a Jacuzzi?”

She laughed-a blood-stirring chuckle. “That was easy, actually. I put it in the boom box. Had it sitting there on the deck beside me. I played your tape.”

“I heard. Heard you singing, too.” He said it harshly, and she looked momentarily startled. Then her face hardened almost imperceptibly, as if she’d donned a transparent mask.

“Heard about your Thanksgiving plans,” he said, and she shifted as if the water had suddenly become uncomfortable to her. “So, you’re going to your sister’s?”

She shrugged and said without expression, “I tried to get out of it, but…Sonny wants to go.”

For a moment Jake didn’t trust himself to speak. Then, very quietly, he said, “What the hell were you thinking?”

Her head snapped toward him, too quickly for muscles that had been immobilized for most of the past several weeks. He saw her wince and grab at the back of her neck, then gingerly rotate her head as she flashed at him, “Look, I don’t want him anywhere near Summer and her kids, okay? Not after what he tried to do to them. I don’t want him anywhere near any of my family.”

A dozen angry replies to that zapped through his mind. He squelched them, and instead found himself moving around to the head of the tub, slipping his hands under her head. He began to massage the muscles of her neck with his fingertips, and heard her give a gasp, then a sigh…saw her lashes settle onto sweat-spangled cheeks…felt her head grow heavy in his hands.

He found that there was something relaxing about it for him, too. Something about the touching…as if her warmth and weight and textures measured on the nerve endings of his fingers had opened doors and allowed those messages of pleasure and contentment to pour into the corners of his body, soul and mind.

After a while, without altering the rhythm and pressure of his fingers, he said quietly, “You know it’s what has to happen. We have to allow Cisneros to play his hand. It’s the only way we’re ever going to end this. The only way.”

Her voice was soft and slurred. “I thought-if I can get something on him, or if you get something from the bugs-”

“Never happen. The man’s too careful-and too smart. Lady, we’ve got state-of-the art equipment at our disposal-hell, some of it sounds like science fiction even to me. If it was possible to nail Cisneros with electronic surveillance, we’d have had him put away years ago.”

Her lashes flew upward. He felt her neck muscles tighten in his hands, but instead of pulling away from him she tilted her head back in order to look at him. “Then why did you have me do this? The…collar. The bugs. What’s the point, if it’s not-”

Jake was shaking his head. “Unless you wanted to reveal the fact of what you heard, which would make your life not worth…doo-doo, you had no choice but to go back to him. That being the case, we figured we’d keep an eye on him through you, he’d eventually make his play to go after those records Hal Robey stole from him, and that’s when we’d be there to nail him.” He let out a breath. “You know what the collar’s for.”

“And the bugs?” Her upside-down gaze was unflinching. Her pulse hammered against the pads of his fingers.

He cleared his throat, but the words came in a growl anyway. “We couldn’t let you go in there unprotected. Had to have some way to keep an eye on you-or ear, rather.”

“All this time I’ve been bugging myself?” She jerked in his hands, and he braced himself. Then he realized she was laughing. “Oh, man. And I was really getting into it, too. Little Miss Espionage.” She sighed.

Her eyes had started to close when he rasped, “Don’t sell yourself short, Waskowitz.” And they flew open again, and her head jerked back and he found that instead of massaging her neck muscles, his fingers were stroking the taut arch of her throat, the wet-velvet undercurve of her chin. “For this to work, we need you there, and we need you safe. You’ve got to quit doing things to arouse his suspicions. Capish?” Her head moved slowly in the cradle of his hands. Her lips parted.

And suddenly he couldn’t feel his own feet. He felt like one gigantic throbbing pulse. “If he doesn’t want you to go to a health club, if he wants to set you up with a private therapist, don’t worry about it.” His voice seemed to come from a great, echoing distance. His jaws felt rigid as wire. “We’re flexible, we’ll find another way to contact you. Let us do our job. Yours is to go along with him. Play his game. Keep him happy.”

Her rueful laughter bumped against his fingers. Electric charges ran up his arms and into his chest. “I don’t think he’s very happy right now. I just wish…” The laughter ended, and then she whispered, “I just want it to be over.”

He held her still, her face framed upside down in his hands, and stared down…down into her eyes. She gazed steadily back at him for a long, unmeasurable time…just time enough, it seemed, for him to play back over all the moments of his life from the very first until this one…the very moment when it seemed almost inevitable that he would kiss her.

Time enough to relive all the missteps and wrong turns he’d taken, all the blind alleys and deep waters he’d stumbled into. Time to review his failures and broken dreams and the reasons for them. To remember who he was, and why for him, some things, no matter how much he wanted them, simply were not possible.

“You’re a civilian. You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” he said in that cracked and gravelly voice he was learning to accept as his own. “If you want to call it off-”

“No! No…” Her lashes drifted down as if she felt utterly exhausted, and she said in a soft, dead voice, “This is the only way. I know that. I want to finish it.”

“All right then.” Exhaling through his nose, Jake pulled his hands away from her neck and straightened slowly. He felt stiff and achy in every joint. “You’ll go to your sister’s for Thanksgiving?” He waited for her nod. “Okay. Unless something comes up in the meantime, that’ll be our next meeting.”

She lifted her head and her eyes followed him as he came around to the front of the tub. “You’ll be there?”

He almost smiled, but in the end just snorted again instead. “Do you seriously think we’re gonna let Cisneros anywhere near your sister unless we’re within shouting distance? Of course we’ll be there.”

“But bow-it’s clear out in the country, there’s going to be people all over the place-”

“Waskowitz-” he squinted up his eyes in an exasperated grimace “-let us worry about that, okay? That’s our job.” He walked to the door and paused with his hand on the knob. ‘“We’ll think of something. Or you will. If you do, just…talk into a bug. We’ll hear you. And if we come up with a plan, we’ll give you the signal. Which is…?”

She bobbed her head impatiently. “The appointment’s been changed. I know, I know.” She suddenly looked overheated and cross. “Okay, so…I guess I’ll see you on Thanksgiving.

“Oh-do me a favor, will you?” She stopped him as he was going out the door. “If you see Marcie out there, ask her to come get me out of this…blinkin’ tub? I’m starting to prune.”

“Will do,” said Jake solemnly. He closed the door and leaned against it for a moment, eyes closed, breathing hard. If he hadn’t been in so much pain, he probably would have laughed.


Somehow the weeks passed. Not that there was any lack of things for Eve to do-as Sonny had pointed out to her more than once, and with exasperation, Hilton Head was a veritable playground, at least for the privileged. But golf and tennis, two of the island’s principal attractions, were obviously not available to her, and if the truth were told, wouldn’t have appealed to her even if she hadn’t been wearing a neck brace.

It was also true that the recent surge of development had produced a plethora of shopping and dining pleasures, ranging from touristy T-shirt and souvenir shops and every kind of fast food known to mankind, to the finest champagne, candlelight and caviar restaurants and upscale malls anchored by the likes of Saks Fifth Avenue. Plus, just across the bridge on the mainland were the new factory outlet malls-small cities of stores that could swallow up shopping enthusiasts for days at a time. But Eve had never considered either food or shopping to be forms of recreation; she shopped when she needed something and ate when she was hungry. These days, thanks to Sonny’s attentiveness to her every need, she seldom fell into either of those categories, and as a result, was losing weight at a rate that would have alarmed her, had she not been too miserable to notice.

She spent her days walking the beaches in search of shells and sand dollars, strolling the miles of equestrian and bicycle trails through resorts and golf courses, staking out man-made ponds and lagoons in hopes of spotting one of the alligators that gave a whole new meaning to the term “water hazard.” Sometimes she wandered into one of the few remaining pockets of undeveloped land, where modest and ramshackle frame houses squatted stubbornly beneath century-old live oaks on real estate grown valuable almost beyond the comprehension of the people who lived there-for these were people who did not measure the worth of their land in money.