Conquistador (17 page)

“. . . cuz . . . condors! . . . need to know . . . plenty, and ASAP. Hand-carry . . . the Old Man . . . Nostradamus . . . I said hand-carry and I meant it, Filmer! Just do it!”

Evidently the Pacific Open Landscapes League ran a tight ship; the tone in her voice took him back to his time in the Rangers, especially the last snap. She was scowling slightly as she walked toward him.

“The good thing about a family business is that it's full of people you've known all your life,” she said, a waspish note in her voice. “And the
bad
thing about a family business is that it's full of people you've known all your life.”

Tom chuckled.
I'd find that command voice fairly persuasive even if you
were
a kid sister,
he thought silently. Aloud he went on: “Well, if we're going to get something to eat, I need to get home and shower first. Otherwise I'm afraid I'd put everyone else off their feed, unless it's a restaurant for plow-mules.”

“Hmmm,” she said, and came closer, looking up into his face and sliding an arm around his neck. “You wouldn't happen to have a change in your car, would you?”

This time he managed to avoid flushing. In fact, he grinned; and a kiss seemed quite natural. It
did
emphasize their mutual stickiness.

“As a matter of fact . . .” he said, looking down into the leaf-green eyes, “I do.”

“Well, there's self-confidence. And this
is
a town where you can get good take-out pizza, so . . .”

The outside of Amber House was pleasant, a big white-painted home built back in the expansive years just before 1914, linked to two others like it. That was on Twenty-second Street, only eight blocks from the Capitol, but in a neighborhood of quiet streets overshadowed with huge trees. Adrienne went ahead of him, opening the door of the suite. He followed, the pizza box in one hand, his bag in the other, and looked around. It was elegant, in a carefully old-fashioned way: big iron-framed four-poster bed, king-sized and draped in sheer curtains; sofa, dressing table, lots of burgundy and gold—and with a name of its own.

The Renoir Room, if you please,
Tom thought.
I suppose one could get used to this.

He could see through into a marble-tiled bathroom with a separate shower stall and two-person Jacuzzi. There was a slight scent of wax polish and an herbal sachet. It wasn't exactly what he'd have picked, even if he could afford to drop two c-notes a day for bed-and-breakfast and the fresh chocolate-chip cookie on a little plate by the turned-down sheets of the bed.

But it'll certainly do,
he thought. “Not bad,” he went on aloud, conscious of a slight tightness in his throat.
Hell, you're not a teenager on his first heavy date, for God's sake!
he told himself sternly.

A bottle of wine was resting in a silver cooler on the table by the sofa, with two glasses. He looked at her and quirked a brow slightly as he set the pizza box down beside it.

“You're not the only one capable of foresight,” Adrienne said gaily, tossing her key on an antique armoire and walking toward the bathroom, peeling off her T-shirt as she went. “And now, desmellification. I‘ll go first, since you'll be quicker.”

He fought down an impulse to suggest that taking a shower together was even more economical of time; that would be a bit premature and presumptuous.
Do
not
spoil things now!
he told the part of himself that was still governed exclusively by hormones and instinct. It was a slightly smaller part of his psyche overall than when he was twenty-six, or sixteen, but not all
that
much smaller; and it had been quite a while.

And you've never, not even as an impossibly horny teenager, had a woman hit you this way. So you
will
remain in control. I don't think there's much doubt about where this evening's going to end up, either.

Besides, he was enjoying himself hugely, more than he could remember doing for years.
Roy was right; I've been hit hard and bad.
Raw physical attraction was there in plenty, but he genuinely enjoyed her company. . . .
And her sense of humor, and her attitudes, and her taste in books, and even the weird stuff about her relatives,
he thought.
I can compromise on the music.
She was evidently a classics-and-folk enthusiast, sixties revival stuff, to his old-time country and alternative rock. They had some overlap; she loved the Dixie Chicks too, particularly “Goodbye Earl,” and the Poyns, and Enya, and WaterBird, and Pint & Dale.

The water hissed on; his imagination filled in pictures. For that matter, since she'd left the door open, he didn't have to rely completely on that. He poured glasses of the wine; if he remembered correctly, it was supposed to “breathe” awhile before you drank it. Tom himself had been brought up a beer man, when he drank; years in California had taught him to enjoy wine, but he didn't pretend to be a connoisseur or an expert. In fact, he found the more pretentious type of wine enthusiast a bore—

“Penny for them,” Adrienne said.

She was wearing a cloth bathrobe, and drying her hair as she spoke. The robe stuck to her in interesting parts, and when she lowered the towel the loose-curled bronze hair fanned out around her face like an umber cloud, slightly darkened by its dampness.

“Woof,” Tom said. “Woof, woof,
woof.
Thoughts? You need to
ask?
” Then he grinned. “I was thinking about the wine breathing. But isn't red supposed to be at room temperature?”

“
European
room temperature: fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit,” she said, taking a glass from his hand and sipping. “That rule was made by Frenchmen—and northern Frenchmen at that, who lived in stone barns where you had to stand in the fireplace to get over sixty degrees. Provençals and Italians always put the bottle in a bucket of water to cool a little. Speaking of water . . .”

He went into the bathroom and under the rush of hot water. It felt good to get the stickiness off his skin. Looking down as he soaped himself, he thought seriously for a second of turning the water on cold.

But then, it probably wouldn't do any good, anyway,
he thought.
Let's go, boy!

One of the advantages of a Ranger-style crop haircut was that it dried easily.

When he sat down beside her on the couch, Adrienne fed him a bite of the slice of pizza she was holding in one hand. He scooped up one himself and returned the favor; it was an extremely good thin-crust, done in a brick oven, and he was hungry. That was a pity, since he hardly tasted it at all, or the wine. They smiled into each other's eyes, and then hers took on a hint of sadness for an instant.

“There's only one problem,” she said. His eyes flickered toward his carrying bag, and she laughed a little. “No, that's all taken care of. The problem is I really like you. As a person.”

“That's a problem?” he said.

“It could be, later,” she said somberly.

“To hell with later, then,” he replied, and gathered her to him.

“Rosy-fingered dawn calls,” a voice breathed in his ear.

“Hnnnn!” he grunted, and sat upright.

For a long moment he didn't know where he was. Then memory rushed in. A long slow smile lit his face, and he ran a hand up under Adrienne's chin. Evidently she'd been up for a while, since her hair had been washed and dried, and she was already dressed in an expensively conservative jacket-and-skirt outfit with a cream silk shirt. She took his hand, kissed the palm, and slid down toward him.

“Breakfast,” she said, a few breathless moments later.

He grinned, and continued. She made a wordless sound, half passion and half exasperation. “Dammit, I have to run! They want me back in Berkeley by nine-thirty.”

“Duty calls in its shrill unpleasant voice,” he agreed, looking at the clock; six A.M., and dawn
was
just stealing through the east-facing windows with rosy fingers. “You must move like a cat, Adri. I'm usually not a light sleeper.”

“Cat yourself,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows. “Tom the tomcat.”

“That makes you my queen,” he said, standing and sweeping a bow, then striking a pose and flexing when she ran her eyes up and down him again.

“I'd say you were boasting, but it's all true,” she said, as he picked a robe up off the floor and donned it. Then: “God, but I wish we could stay together all day.”

They looked at each other, the laughter dying.

“Me too,” he said, and then forced his voice back to lightness. “Breakfast.”

It went far too quickly, even while they made arrangements to meet again on the weekend. When she left, the electricity that had been keeping him running went too, and he realized that he'd had only three hours' sleep that night. He poured another cup of coffee and took it into the bathroom, looking at himself in the tall mirror. There were circles under his eyes, and he probably smelled disgusting. His teeth could stand brushing, too, and she'd still kissed him good-bye. . . .

“This,” he said to his image, “has all been absolutely incredible. And you want to see her again, very badly. Very, very badly.”

Which meant that Roy probably had it right: He'd been hit hard and bad. When you'd just gone to bed with a woman and she seemed
more
interesting, there was definitely a lot more involved than the libido. When you couldn't think of anything else but her . . .

He grinned whitely at his reflection and gave a double thumbs-up. A shower shocked him back toward normal wakefulness, although it did sting slightly on the scratches on his shoulder blades. That prompted a memory of her fingers there, and her heels stroking down from the small of his back. . . .

“And it's not often that guys my size get a murmured ‘you're so sweet,' ” he told himself aloud. “Pure discrimination, but we don't. Only this time I did.”

He was still whistling when he came out of the elevator at headquarters. Roy Tully was there, with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in each hand—not likely to be anything as good as the fresh-brewed in the carafe at the Amber House, though.

Tom extended a finger that looked as if it could punch through sheet metal. “Don't ask, Roy. Not a word. Or I turn your head around until you're looking at the part of your anatomy you keep your brains and morals in.
Capisce?
”

“Capisce, amigo,”
Tully said, with a lewd grin and a wink that left Tom torn between carrying out his threat and laughing. “The bossman wants to see us.”

Their supervisor occupied one of the corner offices. Henry Yasujiru was in his late fifties, blocky and impassive, with gray streaks on the sides of his raven-black hair; a neat man, formal and precise. Tom disliked him, without being entirely sure why. The office was as spare and unadorned as its occupant, with only three pictures: one of Yasujiru's father in Italy, wearing the badge of the 442nd—a Japanese-American outfit that had collected more medals per man than any other Allied unit; one of Yosemite; and one of his mother as a young woman in front of a big Carpenter Gothic house somewhere in the Bay Area.

He began abruptly. “The affair in Los Angeles was less than satisfactory.”

Tully nodded. “Yessir, no doubt about that. Except for the condor Tom managed to get out.”

Tom nodded gravely himself, carefully not smiling. Roy wasn't brown-nosing, but the carefully calculated razor edge of sarcasm in his voice would sail past Yasujiru like a beam of invisible energy.

“The condor is irregular,” Yasujiru said. “Most irregular. I do not see that we have achieved anything by becoming involved, Warden Christiansen. The source of the material remains elusive.”

The supervisor was holding a transcript of the San Diego Zoo's report, as well as the one he'd turned in himself after he got back to Sacramento; Tom could see that the odd digital fantasy photograph from the warehouse was there as well.