Actual Stop (17 page)

The mere mention of her name threatened to catapult me right back into my earlier despondency. I focused instead on Allison’s oddly crumpled collar and rolled my eyes, motioning her closer. I adjusted it for her and gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder. I didn’t feel even a twinge when I touched her, which spoke volumes about my mental and emotional state at that moment.

“I’m going to go with yes.”

She shot me a quizzical look. “What do you mean you’re ‘going to go with’? Don’t you know?”

I shrugged and tried to ignore the misery gnawing away at my insides and making me faintly nauseous. “She was okay when she left my place last night.”
Well, physically anyway.

“Ah. You guys had a fight.” It wasn’t a question.

I hesitated. A small part of me didn’t want to disclose any details to Allison. She’d already seen me break down once. I didn’t think I’d be able to look her in the eye if I lost it twice in one day. Besides, despite our past, we really weren’t friends. We never had been. Plus, I didn’t need pity from anyone at the moment, least of all her.

Also, a miniscule part of me felt stupid admitting that Lucia had dumped me, as if I were afraid Allison would take it as further proof I just wasn’t good girlfriend material. Not that she needed any more, apparently, or we’d still be together. But I was humiliated and upset enough about the dissolution of the only relationship I’d been interested in pursuing since her without adding that on top of it. And I deliberately avoided any examination as to why that would even bother me. I could only juggle so many balls at once, and it was best to leave that one on the ground.

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“Well, I’m sure you guys will work it out.” Allison was making one last visual sweep of the room. “She really loves you.”

A bitter bark of laughter bubbled up in my throat, and I couldn’t bite it back. The harsh, shrill sound caught Allison’s full attention. “And therein lies the problem because apparently I’m heartless.” I hadn’t meant for that little gem to slip out, either, but there it was. I really needed to get some sleep.

Allison frowned. “What?”

“Yeah, I know. Heartless. That’s what she said. Ironic, isn’t it? Since you seemed to have the exact opposite problem with me.”

I gasped and froze the instant the words were out of my mouth but couldn’t call them back, so they hung leaden in the air between us. A multitude of emotions flowed beneath Allison’s ebony eyes, and then her expression went cool. She turned to the door.

I grabbed her arm, borderline desperate. She and I had somehow managed to reach a fragile truce over the last couple of days. Hell, we’d even found a way to get along and have some fun, overlooking the specter of the past that would always be between us. And I was threatening to fuck that up with my thoughtlessness. What’d happened with Lucia hadn’t been anyone’s fault but my own and was a completely separate issue from my history with Allison. I’d do well to remember that and think before I spoke.

“Hey,” I said, my voice soft. Past conversations flickered through my mind, and I was grateful she hadn’t shaken off my grip, a move she’d been famous for once upon a time. “I’m sorry.”

Allison turned back to face me and looked into my eyes. Frustration marred her features for a fraction of a second, and something akin to panic grated harshly against the back of my throat.

“Look, can we forget I said anything? Please?” My clumsy words were ineloquent, as they always were whenever I spoke to her about anything important.

The silence grew as we stared at one another, and a feeling of dread trickled slowly down my esophagus and dripped icily onto the organs below. Finally, much to my relief, she spoke. “You’re a jerk.”

I nodded, and my insides started to slowly warm again. Whenever she said that, I knew she’d pretty much forgiven me. “I know.” I flashed her a tentative grin. “But you love me anyway.”

Allison didn’t return my smile. Her expression was solemn for the instant she continued to regard me before she turned around. With her back to me I almost missed her quiet reply, which I suspect was the point.

“I know.”

Much like the day before, Allison and I had way too much to do to let something as silly as a few thoughtless words mar the entire day. Before I knew it, it was after nine o’clock, and we were sitting in my office putting together our books for the motorcade, quizzing one another over the details of the visit to make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything.

“The motorcade security guys are all settled?” Allison asked. She looked up at me from her place behind my desk.

“Yup. No worries. They’re set until we pick up the cars in the morning.”

“Cars are going to get gassed and washed?”

“All taken care of.”

“Security sweeps start at what time?”

“Oh-six-thirty for the cars. They start earlier than that for the sites themselves.” I consulted my notes. “Um…It’s looking like oh-four-hundred for the Stock Exchange, oh-five-thirty for the LZ, and I think they said they wanted to start sweeping the airport at oh-four-hundred, as well. I’d have to talk to the site guy to be sure. Drivers are arriving at oh-six-hundred. Wheels down is scheduled for ten-hundred hours.”

“So we should leave at maybe five to go out to the airport. I’d like to be there well before the motorcade sweep.”

“You’re the boss.”

Allison made a face at me, shook her head, and handed me a completed book to add to the pile. I took it without a word and immediately went back to compiling the packets of paperwork each site agent needed to have. I was relieved to be almost finished. I was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. The two days of no sleep had caught up to me, and I wanted nothing more than to go home, cry for a bit, and then crash. I quickly did the math in my head. If we left by ten, I could drop Allison off at her hotel and be in bed and hopefully asleep a little after eleven, which would give me a solid four and a half hours of rest. I sighed longingly.

“What?” Allison wanted to know.

“Nothing. Just ready for bed.”

“Well, the books are done. Jamie and Robert should be stopping by here to pick up the surveys for their respective sites any minute. Don has his already?”

“Yeah, he picked them up when you went downstairs to grab dinner. He has the earliest report time, so he wanted to try to get some sleep.”

“I’m going to run to the bathroom real quick. That way we can get out of here the second they’re gone.”

I nodded absently. “Sure.”

My mind was reeling as I pushed thoughts of Lucia from it for what had to be the hundredth time that day and again ran through the long list of issues I needed to be concerned about for the next fifteen hours. I yawned as I bundled the surveys into piles by their respective sites and read over my notes once more. I always had the lingering feeling I was forgetting something whenever I did an advance. As a result, I had a probably annoying habit of going over my paperwork repeatedly, scouring my notes as I both dreaded and hoped something would jump out at me as a glaring omission.

I was incredibly focused on my task, which was perhaps why I didn’t realize Allison had returned until I felt her cold, wet fingers lift the curtain of my hair and stroke the skin just above my shirt collar.

Startled, I whipped my head around and winced as an electric zing shot up the right side of my neck. Allison was standing almost directly behind me wearing a strange half smile. Her hair was free and tumbling down over her shoulders. Her expression stopped me cold.

“Feel better?” I somehow managed to utter after what felt like an eternity of staring at her.

Allison nodded and took a step closer, which forced me to turn a little more in my chair to maintain eye contact with her. Her smile widened, and she placed her hands on my shoulders, gently turning me so I was once again facing my desk. My eyes fell on the notes I’d been rereading, but I didn’t actually see them. I was too distracted by Allison’s touch, which’d caused my insides to turn somersaults and goose bumps to break out all over my body.

“You just hurt your neck, didn’t you?” Allison asked me. Her voice was low and had a surprisingly borderline-intimate tone that made my head spin with a mixture of desire and confusion. When her strong fingers began gently kneading the area in question, I had to force myself not to whimper.

Instead, I settled on a slight shrug. “It’s fine.” I might’ve felt a twinge in my neck just now, but the feelings she was currently invoking in me completely overshadowed that discomfort. Completely.

Allison hummed and continued running the pads of her thumbs up and down the column of my neck. She was standing as close to me as she could get, her hips pressed against the back of the chair in which I sat.

I let slip a small sigh of contentment, and my eyes fluttered closed as Allison broadened her explorations to include my shoulders. It was a strange experience, having one form of tension being coaxed from me while becoming slave to another. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, so I attempted to think nothing at all. Want to guess how well that worked?

“How’s it coming?” Allison leaned closer, and I could feel the barest brush of her breasts against the back of my head.

I held my breath for a moment as her words slowly penetrated the fog enveloping my brain. Coming? Almost. Wait, what? Oh. She was talking about the surveys. Right. Work. I chastised myself for being so easily distracted, but my efforts were halfhearted. “Uh…Good. I’m done. See?” I held a packet of surveys up where she could see it.

“Good,” Allison murmured, allowing her hands to slip from my shoulders and trail over my upper chest, not quite far enough to be touching my breasts, but close enough that my nipples had contracted almost painfully, and I was definitely having trouble breathing.

My pulse stuttered, and my mouth went dry. Some small part of me screamed at myself to break the spell. Through my stupor I kept trying to remind myself that just because I clearly—and unfortunately—still had feelings for Allison, she didn’t have any for me. Her rubbing my shoulders meant absolutely nothing. I’d hurt my neck. Her offer to help was no cause to get carried away on the fleeting wings of hope. What I’d thought I’d heard in her tone was no doubt wishful thinking, and looking for hidden meaning in any of this was not only counterproductive and bound to end up with me getting hurt, but also just plain stupid.

After an internal struggle, I cleared my throat to speak, but what I’d planned to say would forever remain a mystery because a voice called my name.

“Ryan?”

“Huh?” I snapped my head up and looked at Allison, who was staring at me with a confused, worried expression.

“Are you okay?”

I frowned. She was standing a good two arms’ lengths away from me. How the hell had she gotten all the way over there? Holy shit, had I just fallen asleep? Had I just dreamed that entire thing? Oh, my God! Had I said anything? I groaned and dropped my head into my hands, thoroughly mortified.

I could see through my eyelashes that Allison was still watching me carefully, her expression pensive. She took a step closer, and I tensed. If there were ever a time to wish the earth would literally open up and swallow me, now would be it.

“Allison? Where are you?” a familiar voice called. Even through my considerable embarrassment, I couldn’t suppress my grin as I recognized those tones. The woman always did have impeccable timing. I’d have to remember to reward her for that.

“I’m in here,” Allison called back, shooting me another enigmatic glance.

“Where’s here?” The mild annoyance was apparent in the speaker’s tenor, and I chuckled, imagining the look on her face.

Allison made a noise in the back of her throat and patted my shoulder absently as she withdrew from me, leaving me to hurtle along the swirling rapids of my confused thoughts alone while she went to find our colleagues.

“This place is a fucking maze,” I heard the voice grumble a moment later as Allison returned with two of the detail agents in tow.

The taller one was fairly typical of what one would expect of a Secret Service agent: dark hair, dark eyes, broad shoulders. The shorter one—the one who’d been yelling and cursing—had a wild mane of dirty-blond, shoulder-length curls, arresting gray-blue eyes, and a body that was unmistakably female, despite the suit. They both appeared slightly disheveled and a little tired. I could only imagine how I appeared to them, what with my surely nonexistent makeup and my negative-three hours of sleep. I didn’t even want to know how I looked to Allison.

I stood up to greet the new arrivals, my grin growing wider. I didn’t know the guy, Robert, so he only warranted the slightest nod and a halfhearted handshake. The girl, on the other hand, I knew well.

Jamie Dorchester answered my grin with a cocky one of her own and flew into my open arms, actually picking me up and spinning me around. I let out an uncharacteristically girlish squeak and laughed into the curve of her neck.

When Jamie finally set me down and pulled back, she took one of my hands in hers and my chin in the other. “You look exhausted.”

I rolled my eyes as I squeezed the fingers that held my own. “I look better than you.”

“Please. No one looks better than me.”

“I bet Joanna looks better than you.” I was teasing her, not feeling even remotely guilty about going for the low blow and trotting out the girlfriend. I grinned slyly at her and squeezed her hand again.

Jamie ducked her head, but I still caught the way her smile softened and her eyes danced. Robert, probably wisely, decided he needed to make a phone call and stepped out into the hall.

I’d known Jamie for a long time. We’d met a few years prior to her going to the detail during UNGA, and then we’d gone to rescue swimmer training together. We’d originally bonded over knowing what it was like to date someone on the job and then be unceremoniously dumped by them—although I’d carefully concealed the fact that Allison was the one who’d broken my heart—and since then, we’d become pretty good friends.

The two of us might’ve fallen into bed a couple of times, but that’d just been friendly, pass-the-time sex, simple and fun because we got along great, and we both knew it didn’t mean anything more than that. That had also been before Lucia and before Jamie had fallen in love with a hotshot ER doctor she’d met while at a party she’d attended with me. Now we had an easy, completely platonic friendship, and I was thrilled I’d gotten to see her, even if it was only for a couple of minutes.