Ransomed Dreams (8 page)

It was easy to follow in her mother’s footsteps of social activism. Ysabel had loved the Hull House museum and its association’s outreach programs. Founded in the late 1800s as a settlement to serve the needs of immigrants in Chicago, it remained a viable force in the city. As a child, Sheridan accompanied her mother, a model volunteer. As a college student, Sheridan plugged into the House located on the campus where she earned degrees. As a graduate, she taught at the university and created job-training skills programs for women.

She’d taken on her mother’s dream and made it her own.

Then she met Eliot Logan Montgomery III, and suddenly she wanted more. She wanted a partner in every sense of the word.

Eliot was nothing like the men her own age, those self-absorbed, narcissistic thirty-year-old dullards. In two minutes flat, he had tuned into her heartbeat, connecting with her passion to make a difference in the world because it was his own. On their second dinner date, he offered her all of Latin America in which to live out her dream.

Not to mention . . . She smiled to herself and murmured, “He did look good in a tux.”

“Hm?” Luke said.

“Nothing.”

He glanced at her, brows rising above his sunglasses.

She really needed to lose the verbal self-talk. “I was reminiscing about how I got here. It was like I was Fed Ex’d overnight from single in Chicago to married in Latin America.”

“If I remember correctly, you met Eliot in Chicago and married not too long after. Right?”

“Yes. We met at a fund-raiser. He was in town on business; a friend told him about the event. Eliot was all about giving to worthy causes, so he came.”

“Love at first sight, then?”

“Not exactly. Maybe love at about third sight. First sight was more of a gelling. I was a serious thirty-year-old, teaching and trying to save the city single-handedly. Eliot shook my hand and made me laugh. Then we talked poverty and he made me imagine the possibilities. When he proposed, it was as if he’d handed me my dream life on a silver-plated platter. Married to him, I would have the entire world at my fingertips along with endless resources to attack poverty.” She smiled. “Well, almost endless. My friends thought he was haughty because of that uppity East Coast dialect, but I was intrigued with the way he talked. And then there was the tuxedo. He looked really good in it. Really, really good.”

“I assume he owned it.”

“Naturally.
And
, on the third date, I saw him in his very own white tie and tails.”

He chuckled. “When did you first see him in sweats?”

“Still waiting for that occasion.”

“That’s what I figured. So what warranted white tie and tails?”

“Oh, he flew me to New York to attend a gala at the United Nations.”

“Is that all?”

“Yeah. I was sort of impressed, though.”

He smiled. “And how did you end up here exactly? I mean, after all you two have done and the places you’ve been, why move to Topala?”

His questions jarred her back to the present. She glared at him and didn’t bother to subdue her snide tone. “Oh, come on. Surely you have a clue as to why we chose Topala.”

“No, actually I don’t.”

“Which means that ‘they’ don’t have a clue either? Honestly?”

“Okay.” He exhaled an audible breath and held up a hand, Boy Scout style. “I promise from here on out, I will not ask you for information which I believe I already have.”

“That’s a little wormy.”

“Best I can do, Sher.”

“Don’t call me that.”

He looked at her briefly. “I often call you . . . I thought it was your name.”

“It’s a nickname!” Her voice rose into the female range of emotional shrill that she so detested. “And it’s for personal friends only!”

She flounced within the confines of the seat belt, turned her back to him, and pressed her forehead against the window. The streak of browns and greens blurred into a puddle of watercolors.

* * *

Sheridan glanced at her watch, a cheap replacement for the one with the broken crystal, necessary only because Eliot’s medications required she be aware of the hour at any given moment. The second hand did not sweep. It chopped along.

She wished she didn’t know the hour right now. The Mazatlán airport still lay at least thirty minutes away. By factoring in the preboarding wait time, a flight to Los Angeles, a layover, and a red-eye to O’Hare, she totaled up a minimum of eighteen hours spent with Luke Traynor up close and personal.

Did she really have enough energy to maintain an eighteen-hour snit?

On the other hand, if she didn’t keep up a snit, what was she going to do with the other stuff? That stuff that felt like the absence of loneliness? Like the sun had risen after eighteen months of rain and everything looked different? Bright and shiny and new, full of promise, full of hope. Did she bask in it or deny it?

She pressed her sleeve against her damp cheeks and shifted upright in the seat. “You don’t have to escort me the whole way.”

“Sorry. Calissa hired me as tracker, messenger, and bodyguard for the whole way.”

“Oh, good grief.”

“Keep in mind, she remembers you with a cast on your arm. Last time she saw you, you couldn’t move without saying ouch and holding your side. You’ve answered her e-mails, but since you left Houston thirteen months ago, she has had no clue of your whereabouts.”

“I am not a little kid anymore.”

“A big sister is a big sister for life.”

Which explained why Calissa had flown down to stay with her in Houston while Eliot played his game of tag with life and death. It wasn’t like she and her sister were even semiclose.

Luke said, “Did I ever tell you about my mother and my aunt, her older sister? They live in the same nursing home. Aunt Cindi actually punched another resident, some ninety-year-old guy who cheated at Monopoly with Mom.”

Sheridan stared at his profile for a long moment. Not a muscle moved. It was the telltale sign. “You made that up.”

“I do have an Aunt Cindi.”

Sheridan’s quick smile turned upside down. Why fight it? Luke Traynor was watching over her. Again. He would be whatever she needed at the moment, be it comedian, stoic, or bodyguard. He would swallow up the darkness.

Just like before.

For weeks, he was her shadow, day in and day out. At first she didn’t notice him. He was a faceless voice who said, “Sign here; sign there; eat this; drink that.” He was a touch on her elbow, directing her into a car, a hospital, a plane. He was a stabilizing presence that held her when her body would not stop trembling.

Gradually he, the man, came into focus. She saw an inexplicable friend who made the phone calls, asked the doctors pertinent questions beyond her grasp, and produced her luggage fully packed with her clothes, cosmetics, other personal items, and laptop.

Later, as she grew aware of life beyond Eliot’s hospital room, she connected events and drew a straight line from Luke’s arrival in Caracas, to a breakdown in political relationships, to Eliot bleeding to death on a sidewalk.

It tore her apart. She loved the man she believed was responsible for the attack on her husband. How could that be?

At last Eliot woke up and stayed awake for longer periods of time. He was more alert than he had been, which wasn’t much, but it was enough. Sheridan realized she was slipping on a dangerous slope. She told Luke to leave.

He’d said, “Not yet.” He’d said things weren’t finished. She put up an angry front. It seemed safer than telling him how she really felt.

But he knew of course. She saw it in his eyes that smoldered green and in how he avoided physical touch. No longer did he offer a shoulder for her weary head or a hand on her arm to steer her through the maze of corridors.

Calissa arrived and hired a personal assistant for her. Eliot began to discuss the future as if he might have one. Sheridan slept through a night without calling hotel security or Luke.

Things were finished.

In hindsight she saw how Luke had orchestrated their good-bye. She hadn’t known he planned to leave. It was morning when he told her at the hospital’s main entrance, not night at the hotel when she was at her most vulnerable. He promised that, all things being equal, their paths would never cross again.

“What does that mean? What sort of ‘things’?” she had asked.

“Business. Government. Politics. National security.” He flashed a smile. “Impersonal.” As if to emphasize the last word, he put out his hand to shake hers.

Countless times the man had held her close, sometimes through the night, and now he was shaking her hand. She could not recall if she had told him where to get off or thanked him.

So. He had not found her in Topala for his own personal reasons. It must be a doozy of a payoff from her sister to get him to break a promise.

Sheridan wondered, if she drew a straight line from him this time, where would it lead? From Luke, to already on the road to Mazatlán, to a plane going to Chicago, to . . . what? Losing herself in the hope again that he would stay?

She rubbed her forehead. For now it led right to a headache.

Chapter 14

Chicago

Calissa grabbed the ringing cell phone off her desk and, flipping it open, spotted a name beginning with
T
. “Traynor! Where are you?”

“The Mazatlán airport.”

“Sheridan?”

“Yeah, she’s here.”

“Thank goodness!”

“We should be in Chicago early tomorrow morning.”

“Should be?
Should
be? Tell me it’s my hypersensitive mode. Tell me I did not hear
doubt
in your voice.”

One of his insufferable conversational lulls ensued.

She nearly bit through an acrylic nail and winced at the pull on her real fingernail.

Finally Luke said, “She’s afraid. She’s way out of her safety zone here.”

“Safety zone? The world is her playground. She’s traveled carefree as a bird since she was a kid. She made her first missions trip to the Caribbean at fourteen!”

“That was B.C.E., as she refers to it. Before the Caracas Episode. The minute we entered the city, she got that deer-in-headlights expression. It hasn’t gone away yet. She’s white as a sheet and stumbling over her own feet.”

Calissa paced her private office—not all that large, but at least it was bigger than the nurses’ station and no eagle eye watched her hemorrhage anxiety all over the place.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. But you’re familiar to her. She once told me she felt safe with you. Of course, that was in Houston before she came to her senses and told you to get lost.” She halted. “You are with her, right?”

“She’s in the ladies’ room.”

“Is there only one exit?”

“Calissa, I’ve got things under control.”

“Except for that niggling doubt. Don’t you have handcuffs? a rope? something to tie her to yourself?”

He chuckled. “You hired a friend with connections, not a bounty hunter.”

“I’ll pay you more. Name the price.”

“I’m changing the subject. How is your dad?”

She stepped in front of her sixth-floor window and looked down on a crowded, wet Michigan Avenue enveloped in mist. It vied with the ICU for the Most Dismal Scene in Chi-town award. “No change. He seems to be in an inexplicable holding pattern.”

“How are you?”

“I’m about ready to eliminate hairstylist costs. No need to color roots if they’re all yanked out, is there?” She paused. “I’m in a holding pattern too. I can’t move forward without Sheridan. We both need her here. Isn’t she out of the bathroom yet?”

“Maybe you ought to hop a plane and meet us in L.A. Do this yourself.”

Calissa tugged a fistful of short hair. “Sorry. Call me from there?”

“Yeah. If we make it. I mean, maybe she had a wig in her handbag, a change of clothes. Different sunglasses. Just a scarf might fool me. I should have been watching for a tall, nervous woman running toward the car rentals.”

“Shut up.”

He laughed, and the line went dead.

Calissa closed her phone and draped herself over the couch that didn’t quite accommodate her long frame. It was a love seat of worn leather that she’d purchased ages ago when her father gave her the office space and officially promoted her to assistant.

An assistant. One of his assistants.

The esteemed congressman from the state of Illinois had many assistants in Chicago and D.C.

But only one of them was his daughter, who had access to the attic in his house and who uncovered a history of deceit and who shouted it at his seventy-four-year-old face until it was time to call 911.

And Sheridan thought
she
was out of her safety zone.

Chapter 15

Mazatlán airport

Sheridan held her palms under the faucet, catching the trickle of cold water. She splashed it onto her face and moaned quietly. In days past, being sick in a crowded public restroom might have upset her, but at the moment she really didn’t care. Self-consciousness was the least of her problems.

The dike had broken. Back in Topala, she’d been able to hold things in place. Peace and safety leaked out through the holes punctured by Luke and her sister, but she had ignored the seepage. She focused on bolstering Eliot, packing clothes, writing lists for Mercedes, and pretending Luke did not tug a heartstring. She had made a successful exit, emotions intact, dike intact.

But then, with each passing mile in the car, the pressure built. As they neared Mazatlán and the traffic and crowds grew to hordes, the wall gave way. In one gushing flood, all sense of security left her.

The old fear invaded. For some moments she thought she was back in Caracas, in a car speeding crazily away from bloodstained sidewalks and shattered windows. Even her arm ached, and every breath pierced her ribs.

Luke took over. Again. She couldn’t remember saying a word. She couldn’t remember walking inside the airport. She only remembered breakfast moving upward and him steering her toward a restroom door.

She looked in the mirror now, holding a paper towel against her mouth. The eyes that gazed back were scarcely recognizable. Shot through with red, irises dark and blending with pupils, they belonged to a stranger.