Whitehorse (46 page)

"I think it was more the old I-don't-think-I-love-you-anymore-so-I'm-going-to-act-like-a-child-and-make-you-run-not-walk-to-the-nearest-divorce-lawyer." He shrugged. "It was civil. No kids involved, so that helped."

"Regrets?"

"No." He shook his head and finished his wine. "I didn't love her anymore, so how could there be regrets? Ready for food?"

"I'm starved."

Leah smiled and Jake headed for the kitchen.

The doorbell rang.

Jake yelled, "You wanna get that?"

Leah set her wine aside and walked to the door.

Johnny stood in the dark, hands in his jeans pockets. "Hi," he said simply, and stepped into the apartment.

Jake stuck his head around the corner and grinned. "You're just in time for tofu and sprouts. Want wine or beer?"

"Beer." Johnny bent and kissed Leah's mouth. "Hi," he repeated, giving her a wink.

"I've been calling you all day."

"You and fifty thousand other people." Catching her hand, he walked to the sofa and dropped onto it, pulling her down on his lap. "I finally called Jake myself and he told me you were here. We thought it best for you to stay until all the dust settled."

"I was just about to call Shamika."

"You won't get her." He kissed her again. "She and Val are at my place, making themselves at home by now I suspect, being waited on hand and foot. I get the feeling Shamika approves. Val thinks he's at a hotel. He keeps asking if they can get room service."

Jake handed Johnny a beer, then picked up Leah's glass of wine and put it in her hand. "I think this calls for a celebration. To Johnny's good news, and to your impending marriage."

Leah laughed and shook her head. "Why am I getting the feeling that I'm missing some vital information here. What's your good news?"

Johnny drank deeply of his beer before answering. "The DA announced that my blood tests were clean."

"And? What about the negligence issue?"

Jake retreated to the kitchen and Johnny considered his answer a long moment before replying. "There are other aspects of the accident they're looking into, of course." He kissed her hand and looked hard into her eyes. "The only thing that matters to me right now is you and Val, and our spending the rest of our lives together."

TWENTY-ONE

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"
I
know this sounds crazy, and a month ago if somebody had told me I'd be bored enough of being waited on hand and foot to tear out my hair I would have: one, suggested they were on drugs; two, insisted they were out of their minds; and three, told 'em to their face that they were simply jealous and to
get a life."

Her hands on her hips as she watched one of Johnny's many housekeepers haul away Shamika's dirty laundry, Shamika shook her head. "Is that all that woman ever does? Every time I change my underwear she snatches them up and washes them. I'm starting to get a complex."

Shamika looked around at Leah where she lay across Val's massive bed, coloring within the black lines of the crayon book her son had been scribbling in the night before. "If Professor Carlisle could just see you now," Shamika laughed.

Leah tossed aside the red crayon and rolled to her back, sighed heavily, and shook her head. "How did my mother do it? No wonder she couldn't get through the day without drinking. I can't believe I once looked at this indulgence as commonplace, something to be expected in life."

"Val seems to be enjoying it."

Leah smiled. "Val is enjoying Johnny. He thinks it's very awesome—
his
new word, not mine—to be driven to school by a chauffeur."

"Call it what it is, girlfriend.
Bodyguard.
Not a bad-looking one at that. I hear he played for the Broncos for a couple of seasons, until his back was injured. Divorced. Two kids. Thirty-two years old and makes nearly fifty grand a year."

Leah laughed. "So when are the two of you going out?"

"Saturday night. Dinner at seven. I got my eye on a little red number with spaghetti straps and a neckline cut down to here." Shamika sat down beside Leah and stared at the wall. "Seriously…"

"Yes, let's be serious."

"I think it's wonderful what Johnny is doing for you and Val, and me too for that matter. But especially Val. I've never seen him happier. Every day is like Christmas. Johnny's there when Val eats his breakfast. Johnny makes sure he gets off to school on time. Johnny reads to him at night—"

"And you're feeling as if you're not needed anymore."

Shamika shrugged and grinned. "I confess, I'm missing the little guy." She flopped back on the bed and the two of them stared at the ceiling. "I don't know what it is about Johnny, but Val is thriving and that's all that matters. How about you, Leah? How are you doing with all this?"

"I feel like Cinderella."

"So why are you still holding out on the marriage proposal?"

"I married Richard for the wrong reasons: security, money, fear of surviving on my own. Probably all the reasons why most women get married. I don't think I ever really loved him. He was simply a means to an end."

"But you love Johnny."

"Yes." She smiled dreamily.

"So you've got your cake and can eat it too."

"But I can't give up
me
again. I worked hard to get through school, to become the finest vet I'm capable of being. Not simply to survive, but because I love doing it. I don't want to be like my mother, a fixture to take out and show off occasionally. I have to have a purpose."

"Spoken like a true modern woman." Shamika rolled from the bed. "But from one modern woman to another, life is gonna suck real bad when you get to be fifty or sixty and you look up one day and find yourself alone. Think back over the last few years and your regret over having walked out on Johnny the first time—the love you felt like you missed out on."

"I failed once, Shamika."

"Get over it. Get over this fear you've got of having more children. Get over this hang-up you've developed over failure. Get over this absurd need for your father's approval."

"Now
that
is absurd."

"Is it?" Shamika walked to the door. "He's never going to change, Leah. He is what he is. Senator Foster is a machine. Cold, hard steel. So what if he offered you a job? You know as well as I do why he did it. To buy you over to his side. To woo you away from Johnny. To assure your loyalty when the caca hits the fan. Look at it this way, Cinderella. How many people in life actually get a second chance to recapture the greatest love of their life?"

As Shamika left the room, Leah got up and walked to the window. Below, men milled about the manicured grounds, most dressed casually in jeans and tee shirts, the telltale bulges of their hidden guns the only evidence that they were anything more than gardeners. Not that she wasn't accustomed to men lurking around their home with guns tucked under their belts; since her father had won his seat in the Senate, weapon-toting companions had become the norm.

Certainly, that had been a half a lifetime ago; she'd been a teenager who thought it was cool to be driven to school by bodyguards. And this was now. She was an adult with a career; she thrived on fresh air and sunshine, her independence, and her privacy, of which she had become obsessive since Val's birth. How would she learn to deal with living their lives in a fishbowl, unable to curl up under her blanket of denial whenever life threw her a curve she did not want to acknowledge?

But she also thrived on Johnny Whitehorse. Since he'd moved her into his house a week ago she had never felt so alive or happy … or in love. At times she felt positively delirious … so why couldn't she shake this sense of impending doom, as if the sky would open up at any moment and rain catastrophe on her head?

At nine-forty that night Leah said goodnight to Roy Moon, patted the Arabian stallion she had ridden the last hour in the indoor arena, and headed for the house. Hopefully the meeting between Johnny and his staff would be ended. She wanted to talk to him again about her returning to work now that the media had backed off in the attempts to wrangle interviews and photos from them. Not that she was worried that she would lose her job; Johnny was one of the bosses, after all. In fact, the entire board of trustees had given their approval of her taking as much time as she needed for the media storm to subside, as they all knew it eventually would. Until the recent accident with Dolores, Johnny had managed to maintain his privacy in Ruidoso. To most of the locals he was simply Johnny, hometown boy made good. Had it not been for Dolores's death and the frantic scramble to cover it in the media, life would have remained relatively normal at Whitehorse Farm except for the occasional out-of-towners who cruised by in their rent-a-car to snap photos of Johnny's front gate.

Ed, Roger, and Jack filed out of the house and streamed down the front steps, briefcases in hand, faces somber as they marched toward their cars. They barely glanced at Leah, as if intentionally ignoring her existence. Robert Anderson tarried on the porch, the light overhead casting sharp shadows on his face.

"Everyone looks very serious," she commented as she mounted the front steps.

Robert didn't smile. "It wasn't much of a meeting. My client's thoughts appear to be elsewhere."