Change of Heart (17 page)

Chelsea was eating her cake and listening in wide-eyed astonishment. Maybe she’d mixed this up. The sheriff said Eli was “the pretty one” and Jeff was the “skinny one.” But compared to the bulk of the sheriff, this man was thin. “Was he looking forward to seeing me?”

“Are you kidding? You are his obsession. It was so bad I was tempted to call you and tell you not to come. Do you know that he’s thought of you incessantly since he was a kid?”

“I guessed that,” Chelsea said as she put her empty plate down and picked up her glass of milk. “Does he talk about me often?”

“I never heard of you for the first six and a half years I worked for him, but in the last few months you’re all he’s talked about. I told him that if you had any sense, you’d not show up. How did your parents threaten you?”

Chelsea felt a little guilty for that lie. “It was more implied than really said. My parents always liked Eli a lot.”

“He said he liked them too.”

“My dad used to talk to Eli about the stock market. Actually, he made a fortune from Eli’s advice. If he ever needs money my dad will gladly give him some.”

“He has his own income. How about some more cake?”

“I couldn’t possibly do that,” she said as Eli handed her another slice. She was beginning to relax. She hadn’t realized it, but she’d spent two days in the car with her body tense and tight from dread of what was coming.

“So what are your plans?” he asked. “You want to stay in Edilean or leave as soon as possible?”

“I hadn’t thought past saying hello and good-bye. I figured I’d show up, endure Eli’s lecture, snap a photo of the two of us together so I could show my parents that I tried, then drive away at about a hundred miles an hour. I’d be very sad when I told them we weren’t going to get together.” She shrugged.

“I won’t let him do anything you have to work to survive,” Eli said.

“He’s your boss. You can’t stop him from anything.”

“He knows he needs me. Before me, no assistant lasted longer than a few months. But then, he expects people to anticipate what he wants before he thinks of wanting it.”

Chelsea laughed. “He hasn’t changed at all! When we were kids he’d call me in the middle of the night. I don’t think he paid any attention to the time. And he couldn’t have cared less about a social life. I used to try to get him to go with me to parties and dances, but he always said no. He wasn’t like a regular teenager wanting to drink and make out. Eli wanted to save the world.”

He was doing his best not to let her words hurt him. He’d thought that back then they’d been in agreement about everything. “You must have been dying to get away from him.”

“Oh, no! Not at all. When I was with Eli, I felt that I was part of the whole world. It was all very exciting. Did he ever tell you of the things we did?”

“Dental care?” Eli’s voice was contemptuous. “That couldn’t beat a drive in the moonlight or skinny-dipping on a dark night.”

“But it did,” Chelsea said. “I remember looking down my nose at the other kids and feeling superior to them. Eli and I were working on saving the world, while all they thought about was how to get beer for Saturday night.”

Eli smiled. “Beer can be a lot of fun.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Beer and wine and fast cars and beautiful men—they’ve all been glorious.”

“And men who love polo ponies,” Eli said.

“Maybe not
him
,” Chelsea said. She put her plate down. “I better go.” But she didn’t move. She sat there, her long legs stretched out, and looked at the garden. “It’s very nice here, isn’t it?”

“I like it. I haven’t lived in a house for years.”

“Me neither,” she said. “It’s been apartments and hotel rooms, and . . .” Her voice began to trail off. “It’s very warm here and I haven’t been sleeping well.”

As he watched, she fell asleep.

Eli took the empty glass out of her hand and put it on the table. Quietly, he left the porch and went inside to his bedroom, shut the door, and called Jeff.

When Jeff heard his phone, he grimaced. Why oh why couldn’t the man manage his own life for even a minute?

Jeff was sitting on a bench under a gigantic oak tree in a little park in the middle of the cute little town of Edilean. Beside him was a young woman named Melissa, and he’d asked her about the tree. She’d told him that it came from a seed brought over from Scotland by the original Edilean.

“So the town was given the name of a woman?” Jeff asked, his eyes wide with interest as she told him the history of the town. She was pretty, with freckles on her nose, and she was a deputy sheriff.

“In your job, don’t you risk getting shot at?” Jeff asked.

“There’s not much of that in Edilean.” She turned to look at him. “You’re easy to talk to.”

“And you’re easy to listen to,” he’d answered. “Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”

“I’d—”

She didn’t finish because Jeff’s phone rang and it was the theme from
Jaws
. Eli. Jeff gritted his teeth. Now what? Eli wanted him to buy polish for Chelsea’s wings? He touched the phone on.

“You have to be me,” Eli said, without a greeting. “If she figures out I’m me I think she’ll leave. She
needs
me to be you.”

They’d worked together for so long that Jeff almost understood what his boss was saying. “She thinks you’re me?”

“Yes!” Eli said. “And if she figures out the truth she’ll leave.”

It wasn’t the first time someone from the past had thought Jeff was Eli. After seeing the photos, Jeff had understood the mix-up. But Eli’d had years of being what Jeff called Taggertized. Early on, his new relatives by marriage had pulled Eli into a gym and told him of the benefits of eating protein by the pound. By the time Eli was twenty, he looked completely different.

When the Taggert family had first met Jeff, they’d tried to do the same thing to him, but he’d just laughed at them.

“I think you should tell her the truth,” Jeff said and knew he was saying this mainly to impress the young woman next to him. She was unabashedly listening to his conversation. Was snooping part of her law enforcement job? “Just tell her the truth!”

“No,” Eli said. “I don’t want to be me. I don’t want to be someone she has to endure.”

Jeff got up from the bench and walked to the far side of the park. “Take her out somewhere nice, have a good time, then surprise her with the good news of who you really are.”

Eli sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. That’s what I should do. I’ll tell her who I am, then of course she’ll leave, and you and I can go back to Langley. Pilar says DC wants me to fly to some station in Iceland and see what’s going on there. You can go with me.”

He saw Melissa get up, and he watched her cross the street, her uniform clinging to her. She waved to him, then he saw her hurry after some guy who looked like he should be on the cover of
GQ
. There was a stethoscope around his neck. Jeff was sick of Iceland and deserts and places with bugs bigger than his face. It had been exciting for a while, but lately he’d been wanting something more ordinary.

Jeff went back to the phone. “I’ll be there in a few minutes and I’ll pretend to be you. But what then?”

“I have no idea,” Eli said. “I’m playing this by the minute. I have no long-term plan.”

That sentence silenced Jeff. Eli was a master at planning. He had one-year, five-year, and ten-year goals. Eli often astonished people at meetings by quickly outlining a plan of action that would take many years to complete.

“Interesting,” Jeff said. “Where is she now?”

“Asleep on the front porch. I think she’s in a sugar coma.”

“You were alone with a beautiful girl and you put her to sleep?”

“At least I kept her
here
,” Eli said. “She’s going to wake up soon and I don’t know what to do to make her stay.”

Jeff heard the panic in Eli’s voice and thought, If I ever fall in love, I hope someone shoots me.

But then he looked across the street. Pretty little Melissa was talking to a woman with a baby in a stroller. A bit of wind ran through the oak tree and a couple of leaves fell down. No, he didn’t want to go to Iceland—or for that matter, to Paris or London. He didn’t want to sit at a table full of men in uniforms as they made decisions about the future of the universe.

Right now all he wanted was to take a pretty girl out to dinner and know that he could ask her out on a second date. “I’ll fix it. She won’t leave,” he said, then clicked off his phone.

When Chelsea awoke, she lay still. She’d been dreaming about her last fight with Rodrigo. For weeks she’d suspected that there was someone else in his life, but he hadn’t had the courage to say so. But then, she’d thought she’d found something more in her life.

It took her a moment to come back to the present, then she looked around. The big deep porch was lovely and she wondered where . . . “he” was. Based on their talk, she was no longer sure who the man was.

But she liked him. He had a quiet sense of humor and he’d made her feel so good that she’d fallen asleep. Some date you are! she thought, laughing at herself.

She got up and opened the screen door. “Jeff? Are you in here?” When there was no answer, she looked around. Everything in the house was old and faded and worn—and cozy, she thought. It was very different from the places she’d lived in for the last few years. Everything had been new and modern, all of it painted white. In her crowd, to be truly sophisticated meant no color was allowed anywhere.

Chelsea went through the house, looking about, then returned to the living room—and there was Eli. Or was it Jeff? Whoever he was, he was just as she remembered him. Thin, serious, without humor.

In the grocery store he’d been wearing a smile, but he wasn’t now. He was shorter than she was and as thin as a jockey. And he was scowling with such anger that Chelsea took a step back.

“Why did you stop writing me?” he asked in a low voice that was mostly a growl. “We were friends but you walked away from that. Do you have any idea how much you hurt me?”

He took a step toward her. “Did you think that having a brain makes me incapable of feelings?”

“I didn’t mean . . .” Chelsea began, but tears were coming to her.

“You didn’t
mean
to tear my heart from me? Do you know what you’ve done to my life? Because of you, I work all the time. The way you treated me made me feel that I’m not good enough for any woman. I—”

Neither of them saw Eli enter the room. He stood there in shock for a moment, then crossed the room in three strides. With a twist of his body, he pulled back his right arm and let it fly. His fist connected so hard with Jeff’s head that the smaller man flew backward and landed on the floor. Like some gladiator of old, Eli stood over him, straddling his body. “You don’t talk to her like that.”

Jeff put his hand to the side of his face and tried to flex his jaw. Pain was shooting up through his face. “You’re fired,” he managed to say. “Get out.”

“Good, because I quit.”

Eli grabbed Chelsea’s hand and went to the front door. He pushed it open so hard that it slammed against the exterior wall. He went down the stairs, still holding on to Chelsea, and stalked to her car.

Dropping her hand, he opened the car door but then leaned against the vehicle. His face was flushed from anger and she could see that he was trying to calm himself.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve never hit anyone outside a ring.” He pushed away from the car. “I have to see if he’s all right. I have to apologize.”

“Like hell you will,” Chelsea said, then pushed on Eli until he was in the seat. She slammed the door and hurried around to the driver’s side and put the key in the ignition.

“I have to—” Eli began but broke off when Chelsea sped away so fast he fell back against the seat.

She drove out of Edilean and stopped at a roadside tavern. It was still early and there were only a few cars there. “How about some tequila?”

“Actually, I could use something to drink.” He was rubbing the knuckles of his hand, and he looked very upset.

Turning away, she smiled. She liked that he’d come to her defense, but she also liked that he felt bad about hitting someone. Sort of hero meets your best girlfriend.