The Defiant Hero (18 page)
“I’m American,” she said. “I get thoroughly disapproving looks from Englishwomen as soon as I open my mouth and speak.”
“I apologize for that.” He took several steps back toward her. “Of course, I must add that I doubt your generalized statement is entirely accurate—surely there are one or two Englishwomen out there who don’t automatically disapprove of beautiful young Americans, but nevertheless, I do apologize.”
“The way I figure it, if most of you English are going to disapprove of me—and it’s not just the women, it’s the men, too—I might as well wear whatever I damn well want, right?”
“Now, there’s a good American attitude. Your ancestors must’ve been those fellows who threw all the tea into Boston Harbor,” he told her. “And by the way, have I mentioned how completely, utterly, entirely I approve of both what you’re wearing and the fact that you’re an American? If you like, I’ll even sing a few bars of your ‘Star Spangled Banner’ while I salute you.”
Eve laughed. She couldn’t help it.
“Don’t you dare change your clothes,” he ordered her. “Drive me into town just like that—I’ll be the envy of every man within a hundred mile radius. And we’ll stick our tongues out and recite your Pledge of Allegiance to anyone who disapproves. How’s that?”
He was serious.
Well, half serious, anyway.
And Eve knew she’d been right in keeping her distance from Ralph Grayson. She liked him. Much too much. She liked the idea of him here for the entire summer. But he’d already started trying to teach Nick to read, and even though he hadn’t called her brother stupid, Ralph’s lesson had made him feel stupid.
It wasn’t going to work.
Make him go away.
Eve still had the power to do just that.
She’d let them be seen in public together. She’d hang on his arm and flirt with him mercilessly. She’d lean close and gaze into his eyes so that anyone who saw them would assume they were romantically involved.
And then she’d tell him how old she really was.
“I’ll meet you by the garage in a few minutes,” she told Ralph.
His smile was warm and immediate.
And Eve felt like a snake.
“It wasn’t until we were in the car,” she told Amy and the Bear, who was definitely listening, “and I was about to make the turn to go into Ramsgate, that he told me to take a different road entirely. And I realized then that when he’d said he’d wanted a ride into town, he’d meant Town with a capital T. He wanted to go to London. Of course, I was terrified—I’d never driven into the city before.
“I pulled over to the side of the road, ready to cop to the truth, about to have a panic attack. I was about to confess that I didn’t have a driver’s license, sure that he would realize I wasn’t really twenty years old, but he didn’t even blink when I told him he was going to have to drive. He thought I was nervous about driving in the city—didn’t give my reasons a second thought. We just switched seats, and he took over the wheel.
“And while I was catching my breath,” Eve told them, “he told me that we were going to London to do some research at one of the larger libraries there.”
She could see him as clearly as if it were yesterday. The window was open and he rested his arm on the door. The wind tousled his hair as he turned to her and smiled and said, “Have you ever heard of something called word blindness?”
Mystified, she’d shaken her head no.
“Ralph believed that Nick was dyslexic,” she told Amy and the Bear. “But this was back in 1939, remember, and it wasn’t called dyslexia at the time. And it was pure luck—no, I take that back. It was conscientiousness and a desire to be informed about everything under the sun that made Ralph read an article about the innovative work several doctors were doing with people who couldn’t read. People for whom their inability to read seemed due to physical limitations rather than lack of intelligence. Apparently they’d discovered some new techniques that helped these people. But Ralph had read only one small article, and we were going into London to find out as much about this as we possibly could.
“He told me that he hadn’t mentioned anything at all about this to Nick—he didn’t want to get his hopes up. Ralph wasn’t sure how this new teaching method worked, if it even would work with Nick, or if Nick truly was afflicted with this word blindness.”
“The only thing I know for certain,” he’d told her in the car that afternoon, with the wind blowing through his hair, looking like the poster boy for all of England, “is that your brother is not stupid.”
They talked about Nick, nonstop, all the way to London. Ralph had been impressed, just from talking to the boy, at how well-read he was for someone who couldn’t get through a baby’s primer. Nick had told him that Eve read to him. At least an hour, sometimes more, usually two, every day. But in the weeks since he returned from that awful boarding school, he’d avoided their nightly sessions. It seemed to make him angry—as if having his sister read to him was proof that he was stupid.
Eve admitted to Ralph that she had also written for Nicky in the past. He had a vivid imagination and he would dictate long, complicated, fascinating stories while Eve wrote it all down, longhand, as fast as she possibly could.
“Maybe he’s not merely not stupid,” Ralph speculated. “Maybe he’s some kind of genius.”
And if that weren’t enough to win her heart forever, when they were on their way back home, after many exhausting hours finding far too little information, Ralph broke the silence in the car by turning to Eve again.
The sun had long gone down, and she knew he must’ve been tired, but he didn’t look it in the darkness.
“I’ve been thinking and it seems to me that the first thing we need to do is restore Nick’s self-confidence,” he told her. “We need to figure out a way to renew his spark, to make him want to learn again—to learn about everything—not just to read. Even if he never does read, Eve, he has to realize that doesn’t make him stupid. And there are other ways for him to gain the knowledge he needs to be a well-rounded man. We’ll just have to be a little creative—and make him understand that there’s nothing wrong with listening while someone reads aloud. I’d be in heaven,” he admitted with a smile, “to have you following me around, reading to me all day.”
“He pulled up the drive,” Eve remembered, “and stopped the car outside of the garage. We both got out of the car, and he started getting ready to ride his bike back into town. It was very late—the Johnsons had already gone to bed and we were alone, and I was unable to stop myself. I thanked Ralph for all he was doing, all he’d already done, and I found myself sort of launching through the air, toward him. It was strange. I knew it was the last thing I should do, but there I went. Right into his arms. And I hugged him, and thanked him again, and even cried a little bit—I was so overwhelmed at the thought that he might actually be able to help Nicky, that we might have found someone who was on our side.
“He was surprised, I think mostly because I was suddenly so emotional. It’s one thing to have a girl in your arms when you’re standing out under the moon, but it’s another thing entirely when she’s all weepy. But he was very kind, and he held me close—although he was still very much the gentleman.
“I told him that I had been trying to think of ways to make him leave, but now I hoped he’d stay forever.”
Ralph had laughed at that, but when he’d pulled back to look at her, his eyes were very serious. “Forever’s a long time,” he whispered.
His arms were still around her, and he was holding her so tightly she could feel the taut muscles in his shoulders and chest. He wasn’t much taller than she was, but he was solid.
On the passenger ship from New York, a boy named Horace Wilkins had asked her to dance. He was seventeen and skinny and he’d held her much too close. She’d been afraid if she leaned too hard on Horace, he’d snap in half.
That wasn’t so with Ralph. Ralph made her feel almost small and delicate.
And instead of smelling like the gin Horace had guzzled—showing off, no doubt—Ralph smelled like the butterscotch candy he’d bought for her in London and they’d shared in the car on the way home.
Would he taste sweet as well, she wondered wildly, if he kissed her?
His eyes were dreamy as he gazed down at her, and she realized he was touching her, running his fingers through her hair.
“I want to kiss you,” he murmured. “All day long, I’ve been dying to kiss you.”
Eve’s heart was already hammering in her chest, and now it got so loud, it seemed impossible he didn’t hear it, too.
She stood there, frozen, just staring up at him.
And yet he didn’t move either. He just looked at her. “I think I’m waiting for permission,” he finally said breathlessly.
How could she give him permission to do something that would get him into such trouble?
Eve shifted back slightly, and he released her instantly. She put even more space between them, determined not to repay his kindness this way. “I . . . have to go inside.”
He was uncertain and embarrassed. He tried to hide it behind a smile, but she could see it in his eyes, clearly illuminated by the full moon.
“I’m sorry,” he started to say. “That was stupid of me. I’m a complete idiot and . . .”
He thought she didn’t like him.
With her hand on the knob of the door leading into the house, Eve knew she should tell him the truth—that she was only fifteen—but she also knew that if she did, he’d never tell her that he wanted to kiss her again. Instead, she blurted out a different truth.
“I want to kiss you, too,” she told him, needing him to understand, wanting his uncertainty to be banished.
The fire that leapt in his eyes was immediately hot. “Then why are you over there when I’m over here?” He started toward her.
She opened the door, about to bolt inside and slam it behind her. “Because you scare me.”
As she watched, wary, Ralph forced himself to stop, to take a step back, away from her. “I do? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“Not that way,” she tried to explain, but she was just making this worse. “It’s not your fault. It’s nothing you do. It’s me. It’s . . . this way you make me feel. As if when I’m with you nothing is bad, nothing could go wrong.”
“But, Eve, that’s wonderful.”
“No, it’s not,” she told him, wanting to stamp her foot and cry. Wanting to throw herself into his arms and tell him the truth, wanting him to kiss her anyway to reassure her that it didn’t matter, nothing mattered except for the fact that he’d fallen madly in love with her, too. “It’s complicated and . . . and . . . You don’t understand. There’s no way it could work between us.”
That was one of her mother’s lines. There’s no way it could work between us. She’d usually said it to appease some ardent young man who was convinced their week of passion should be immortalized by marriage—or at least another week of passion.
When her mother said it, she always added a tragic sounding sigh and an expression of desperate resignation.
Eve had to add nothing. The quaver in her voice was completely real. So was the sudden rush of tears to her eyes.
“Good night,” she said with as much dignity as she could muster, going inside and shutting the door on both Ralph and the moonlight.
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Nine
NILS SAT IN the hotel room that had been Meg’s for just a few hours before she left the premises with side arm in hand and a notorious Kazbekistani terrorist in tow.
He’d been turning this over and over in his head, and he couldn’t believe that Meg was motivated by anything but fear for her daughter.
Someone had kidnapped Amy.
That much had to be true.
They were probably K-stani Extremists, just as Meg had said. She had been contacted by a man who was IDed as having ties to the Extremists. The videotape from her condo’s parking garage confirmed at least that.
Yet she’d definitely lied when she’d told Nils that the Extremists had targeted the new ambassador for death.
In retrospect, it hadn’t made much sense—why should they want to get rid of the ambassador? But Nils hadn’t thought twice about it at the time. K-stani Extremists’ motives didn’t necessarily follow any rules of order or logic. Still, he should have wondered.
But targeting Osman Razeen . . .
Now that made sense.
Razeen was a longtime leader of the Islamic Kazbekistani Guard—called the GIK—a former political party outlawed by the K-stani government a decade ago. A few years back, Razeen had attempted to unite the GIK with the more radical Extremists.
Needless to say, he hadn’t succeeded.
In the Extremists’ somewhat volatile opinion, Osman Razeen had betrayed them, betrayed Islam, and therefore needed to die.
The Extremists and the GIK were all terrorists in the eyes of the K-stani government, and in the eyes of the U.S. as well—particularly after the GIK claimed responsibility for a bomb that killed over two hundred U.S. military personnel.
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