CLOSE TO YOU: Enhanced (Lost Hearts) (4 page)

             
"Kate." His voice was deep, pleasant, without a trace of a Texas accent, and Kate guessed he'd taken the same kind of voice training reporters used. "How good to meet you." He shook her hand, and his touch lingered a second too long.

             
Oh. He was one of those. One of the guys who imagined his position made him attractive to women. Carefully she removed her fingers from his, and concentrated on the cool intellect he so skillfully displayed and the deference with which he was treated.

             
"I want you to have the chance to meet one of the most important people at the capitol." He extended his hand outside of the circle. "Mr. Duarte, come and meet our newest reporter."

             
Mr. Duarte hobbled forward. A name badge on his uniform identified him as JANITOR. He looked frail, but he wasn't nearly as old as she first thought; pain, she suspected, caused the aging. He offered a warped, arthritic hand.

             
She took it carefully.

             
"Mr. Duarte is from Louisiana," Senator Oberlin said.

             
"I'm a Cajun," Mr. Duarte added proudly, his thick accent verifying his claim.

             
"And a Korean War veteran," Senator Oberlin continued. "Anything you want to know about the capitol and the politics, he can tell you."

             
"I'm pleased to meet you, Mr. Duarte. My dad was a Vietnam War vet."

             
His shrewd, blue eyes surveyed her. "You've lost him?"

             
"Five years ago, he died overseas." Her smile twisted. "He was an oilman." She heard a few people take a breath. They remembered, and she was sorry she'd let her empathy with Mr. Duarte lead to her confession.

             
"Your dad was the Stephen Montgomery who was captured and killed by terrorists?" Linda looked stunned—and dismayed.

             
"Yeah." Kate kept her gaze on Mr. Duarte. "But my mom lives here in Austin."

             
"That's good." Mr. Duarte's eyes warmed. "You stay close to your mama." He glanced around. "Guess I'd better get back to work. How about the rest of you all?"

             
A round of laughter followed his pointed comment, and the crowd drifted away.

             
Kate watched Mr. Duarte hobble off, then turned to Senator Oberlin. "Thank you for introducing me to him."

             
"He'll help you find your way around." Carefully, Senator Oberlin said, "I'm open to having you do a piece on me, too. Of course, any politician here would like to have a piece done on him or her. We're all publicity hounds."

             
"I'll remember that." He really was very handsome, very smooth. He might be interested in her, or he might just be the kind of man who easily created intimacy with people without seeking anything other than a vote.

             
"The committee meeting is starting on the hour." He glanced at his watch, then at Linda. "I'd love to see you in there. I'd really like public support for this measure."

             
"That's exactly where we're going," Linda assured him with a smile. "Come on, Kate." Her smile disappeared as they walked down the corridor. In an undertone, she said, "Okay, now you know Senator Oberlin. He's fifty-four , from Hobart, a little town of five thousand about a hundred miles west of here. He's been a senator for over twenty-two years. He keeps it quiet, but he has a lot of power. He married money, too." She glanced sideways at Kate. "He always swoops in and makes good with the reporters."

             
"Lovely," Kate said sincerely. So she had imagined his interest.

             
"There's been maneuvering to get him nominated to the U.S. Senate, but he keeps saying he wants to stay in Texas."

             
"Hm." The wisdom about state politicians asserted that they stayed local only if they were hiding a scandal big enough to keep them out of a federal position.

             
Linda read her mind. "No scandals. I think he's got plans to make an announcement at the appropriate moment.

             
"All right." Kate glanced back to see him, trim and fit in an Armani suit.

             
He stood still, his hands on his hips under the elegant cut of his suit coat, and watched them walk away.

             
And again she dismissed the stirring of unease. "I'll remember him."

THREE

             
It was Wednesday. Kate had been on the job three days.

             
During the daylight hours, she smiled so much her lips felt frozen. At night, she studied everything about the special session: school funding, who was voting for what, what the teachers were saying, what the governor was saying. She discovered Linda wasn't particularly well liked at the capitol, not because she got the facts wrong, but because she got them right and gave them to the public without resorting to high-flown rhetoric.

             
Kate felt as if she'd stepped into a different world; she also felt as if she'd come home.

             
In the early afternoon she called for a cameraman, and Brad sent her Cathy Stone, a tall, broad-shouldered woman who wore a baseball cap and handled the camera with a careful efficiency. In Zen-like silence, she watched Kate line up her interviews in the capitol rotunda.

             
"What do you think you're doing?" Linda hurried toward them wearing the highest heels and the tightest skirt Kate had ever seen. "Where are you going with my cameraman? Why?"

             
"Legislator Howell says the Republicans had a secret meeting about changing the school district structure for the state." Kate directed Legislator Howell on where to stand while she asked him questions.

             
"It's a lie," Linda said automatically. With a glance at Legislator Howell, she corrected herself. "It's an exaggeration."

             
"Mr. Duarte sneaked me into the meeting. I've got photos. Now if you'll excuse me." Kate produced an insincere smile for Linda, then turned back to her task.

             
During each interview, she could feel the heat of Linda's glare between her shoulder blades until at last, when she had drawn every bit of information from her sources, she turned to glare back at Linda.

             
But Linda wasn't there. Instead, the inevitable crowd of people hoping to get on camera had gathered. There was a wide-eyed child and its mother, two Japanese gentlemen carrying briefcases, a thin young woman in a mechanical wheelchair, and slouching in the background was a tall man, Hispanic, about twenty-five years old. He wore dirty jeans that clung low on his lean hips. His black T-shirt had cutoff sleeves that displayed tanned skin, heavily muscled arms, and broad shoulders. He'd tied a gaudy purple-and-red silk jacket around his waist. His dark hair hung around his neck. He had a white scar that slashed across his brown cheek and a mustache, and his eyes . . . he had the most beautiful rich golden-brown eyes Kate had ever seen in her life. Beautiful—and cold. Cruel. They were narrowed on her now.

             
Twenty-five years old? No. She changed her estimate. Thirty, perhaps older, and tough. Frightening. Too old to be a gang leader. Drug dealer? No, that jacket was too bright for someone who wanted to remain in the shadows.

             
Then he smiled, a sharp slice of danger.

             
Her breath caught.

             
Without saying a word, he offered her sex. Without pretty words, without
any
words, he offered their two naked bodies intertwined in steamy passion.

             
And without words, she knew that sex with this— this brute would be a blast of heat, swiftly done, swiftly over. Satisfying. And when they were done, they would do it again. Something about the way he stood, the shape of his broad torso, the mocking lift of his smile, told her that he would be insatiable.

             
With him, she would be insatiable, too.

             
Her face flooded with heat. She wasn't that kind of woman. Strange men didn't appeal to her. She didn't understand raw sexuality. She was untouched by grand passion. Modest, disciplined . . . normal. So very, very normal.

             
She turned her shoulder to him and thanked everyone who had talked to her.               When she glanced back in his direction, he was gone.

             
But as she and Cathy walked toward the station truck to edit the tape, Cathy said, "Not that there weren't the usual quota of vidiots there, but that one guy—he starqd at you. I'd keep an eye out over the next few days, and if he shows up again, I'd talk to the police."

             
"So it wasn't my imagination?" Kate knew it wasn't.

             
"Shit, no, and he looked like he can hold his own in a knife fight." Cathy looked down at Kate. "He scared the crap out of
me
, and you're a lot smaller."

             
"Then he officially scares me, too," Kate declared.

             
Linda was already in the station truck editing her piece, and Kate had to wait until it was almost too late to get hers done. But she did, and sent it to the station. Brad approved it so quickly Linda almost audibly gnashed her teeth, and Kate caught Cathy grinning. Then Kate went back inside the capitol, gave the live report, and went back to the station to watch as the e-mails flooded in.

             
Who's the new girl?

             
She looks stupid.

             
She looks smart.

             
She needs a makeover. May I suggest Luella's House of Beauty on the corner of Pine and Third?

             
Kate's first real day of reporting for the Austin station had been a success. She smiled at the tight-lipped crew at the station, then drifted home, knowing that she'd done a good job.

             
The next day, to celebrate, she watched everything go to hell in a handbasket.

             
In the morning, Senator Richardson started a filibuster that ran thirteen hours. Linda, who obviously saw the handwriting on the wall, went home sick. The other reporters for the other stations drifted away as the day wore on, but then they had nothing to prove. Kate covered the whole, dreadful pile of stinking rhetoric, hoping for a breakthrough that no one else was there to catch, and when she finished she had not one viable moment of tape.

             
She staggered out of the capitol building at nine. Twilight was fading, the streetlights were on, and all she wanted was to go home and soak in a hot tub until her poor feet no longer resembled Barbie's feet in heels. She walked alone, but she wasn't fearful. She had lived in so many countries, gone to so many different schools, and made so many different friends, she was confident in almost every situation.

             
But when she got to her car, it was sitting crooked. It took a minute before she realized—she had a flat. And another minute before she realized—someone had slashed her tire.

             
She stood staring in disbelief at the rubbery shreds, and her mind, numbed by hours of oratory, leaped and twisted in sudden fear.

             
She was alone in the parking lot.

             
A man had watched her the day before, a Hispanic man with eyes so cold she had flinched from their cruelty and their sexuality. Kate was startled by the clarity with which she remembered him—the height, the sensuality, the menace.

             
Maybe he hadn't slit her tire with the express purpose of finding and raping her, or murdering her, but she wasn't taking any chances. In the gathering darkness, she pulled her cell phone from the inner pocket of her jacket.

             
While she dialed, she dug through her purse for her Mace. She was going to call the police, and if anyone tried to hurt her, she was going to spray the bastard right between the eyes.

             
"Miss Montgomery? Is something wrong?"

             
She turned too quickly, the Mace clutched in her upraised fingers.

             
"Whoa!" Senator Oberlin stopped five feet away, his hands upraised. "I didn't mean to startle you."

             
"No. You didn't. That is . . ." It wasn't the man with the cold eyes, yet in the twilight and the loneliness, the shape of him seemed menacing and overbearing.