The Switch (6 page)

She pulled into a vacant parking space. They alighted, and as they moved toward the door, she remarked, "I've got nothing to hide, but we're a little overdressed. I'm sure we'll be gawked at."

"Safety in numbers."

With that he slid his arm around her waist and drew her up against him, so that they were walking hip to hip. Lord, it felt good! Never one to simper and play coy and helpless around men, she now delighted in feeling small, delicate, and intensely feminine. From the instant he stepped through the door of the hotel, she'd been wondering how it would feel to be this close to him. It surpassed her expectations. He was so wonderfully masculine.

Extending the joke, he nuzzled her hair. "I dare anybody to mess with the two of us."

By now they had almost reached the door. At the same time, a man approached it from inside, a take-out order in his free hand. He reached the door first and politely pulled it open for them and stood aside. Chief was still nuzzling her and playfully making aggressive growling noises. Absently, he thanked the man for holding the door.

They had almost moved past when the man suddenly blurted out, "Ms. Lloyd? Gillian Lloyd?" She stopped and turned toward him.

He was dressed in baggy khakis, a sad T-shirt, and rubber flip-flops. His thinning hair was fair and stringy. He pushed a slipping pair of eyeglasses higher onto the bridge of his nose.

He said, "I thought it was you."

Chief looked from her to the stranger and, responding in a territorial male fashion, hugged her even closer against his side.

Smiling helplessly, she stammered, "I-I'm sorry, I don't..."

Suddenly embarrassed by her failure to recognize him, the man swallowed hard, making his knobby Adam's apple appear even more prominent. "Dale Gordon. I work at Waters." "Oh, yes, of course. Hi."

He looked from her to Chief. His myopic gaze took notice of Chief's hand at her waist and stayed fixed there for several seconds. Then he looked back at her with something akin to wounded puzzlement.

The situation was fast becoming awkward, and she had no idea why. Brightly, she said, "It appears everyone's hungry for tacos tonight."

"Huh?" Dale Gordon seemed to have forgotten where he was. She indicated the sack he was carrying out. He looked at it in confusion for a moment, then stammered, "Uh, oh, yeah. I wanted a, uh, snack."

"Well, enjoy."

"You, too."

Chief gave her a slight nudge forward. They continued into the restaurant and joined the queue of people waiting to place their order at the counter. "Friend of yours?" he asked. "And what was that he called you?"

"He obviously mistook me for my sister, Gillian. It happens all the time. In this instance, it was easier to pretend that I knew him than to explain that I wasn't her."

"You look that much alike?"

"Identical twins."

His expression went deadpan. "You're kidding." "No. I'm an identical twin."

He conducted, a visual survey of her hair, her face, settling momentarily on her mouth. Her face grew warm under his frank appraisal. When his eyes came back to hers, he murmured, "How could there possibly be two women with eyes that shade of gray?"

Smiling up at him, she asked, "Is there a compliment somewhere in there?"

"Oh, yeah. And just so there's no misunderstanding of my meaning, let me make it clearer, Ms. Lloyd. You're a very attractive woman."

"Thank you, Colonel Hart."

"I find it hard to believe that... Gillian?" She nodded.

"That she's as attractive as you."

His eyes held hers, and together they sank into a long and
evocative stare, which wasn't interrupted until the woman taking orders greeted them. "Hi, folks. What're y'all having tonight?"

Chief seemed to shake off his daze. He cleared his throat.

"What would you like, Melina?" "I'm invited to supper?"

"It was implied."

"Then whatever. I like it all."

While he was placing their order, she glanced back at the
door through which they'd entered. The man who'd introduced himself as Dale Gordon was no longer there. But he had left her with a creepy feeling—like she'd walked through a cobweb, like someone with fetid breath was blowing on the

back of her neck.

However, by the time Chief unlocked the door to his suite at The Mansion and motioned her to go in ahead of him, she had forgotten the incident. "I'm glad you suggested this because I just realized that I'm famished, too. I didn't eat much of my dinner, either." Making herself right at home, she stepped out of her heels, then went around the suite's sitting room switching on table lamps. "It smells delicious."

They decided to picnic on the coffee table. While she unwrapped the food and divided it, he poured each of them a drink at the bar, which had been stocked with his brand of bourbon in advance of his visit. "Branch water?"

"And ice, please."

He came to the table with a drink in each hand. He passed
one of the drinks down to her, then lowered himself to the floor across the low table from her. He raised his glass. "To fat grams and high cholesterol."

She clinked her glass with his and sipped. "Hmm. Add to that good sipping whiskey."

They dug in and were soon laughing over the ravenous way they were consuming the food. The crunchy taco shells fell apart, so they were reduced to scooping up cheese, lettuce, and spicy meat with their fingers.

"You'd think I hadn't eaten in a month," he remarked. "Or that I'd just completed a mission. Soon as I can after leaving the shuttle, I mow some real food."

"Space cuisine isn't that tasty?"

"It's okay, but... it... you know..."

She'd been involved in what he was saying, so until his voice dwindled to nothing she wasn't even aware that she had been sucking hard on the side of her index finger and licking it with her tongue. That's where his focus was. It was that he was concentrating on, not the food the astronauts ate on the space shuttle.

Flushed and self-conscious, she lowered her hand to her lap. "Paper cut," she said gruffly. "From the sack. I think... salt... or something got..."

Then she stopped talking, too, because he wasn't listening. He was watching her lips move, but he wasn't paying attention to the words, and frankly neither was she. She was watching him watching her mouth, and it made her tummy feel weightless despite the amount of food she had gobbled.

Finally his eyes reconnected with hers. "What were we talking about?"

On his way to his car, Dale Gordon tossed his unopened takeout sack of food into a trash receptacle because he was far too upset to eat.

Verging on nausea, he got into his car and slumped in the driver's seat. Folding his hands over the steering wheel, he rested his clammy forehead against them and gulped in air through his mouth to stave off his gag reflex. Tears trickled from his eyes onto the backs of his clenched hands.

He broke a cold sweat. It was a mild night, but not so warm as to warrant his profuse sweating. His T-shirt was soaked through with perspiration by the time Gillian Lloyd and the tall, handsome man came out of the restaurant with their order. They were chatting and laughing as they climbed into a Lexus, which she drove away.

Dale Gordon fumbled his ignition key in his haste to start his car and follow them. It was a short drive to the fancy schmancy hotel. He'd heard of it, but he'd never been there. The tree trunks in the entry courtyard were covered with lights, even though it wasn't Christmas. The water in the tiered fountain sparkled and splashed.

The Lexus glided into the circular driveway. Dale Gordon cruised past. He drove to the end of the block, executed a three-point turn, and doubled back. He could see them getting out of the car with the assistance of a parking valet and heading for the discreet entrance beneath the white canopy.

Gillian Lloyd was going into a hotel with a man. A man who'd been publicly groping her as though she were his property. She had permitted his manhandling. No, she had seemed to welcome it.

This shattered Dale Gordon's world.

"What's it like?" Chief had finished eating and was leaning back against the sofa, one knee raised, one hand draped over it holding his highball glass.

She was looking at his hand, at the casual way his strong fingers held the glass by the rim. Great hands. Rousing herself, she addressed his question. "What's what like?"

"Having an identical twin."

She gathered up the last of the paper wrappers and napkins and stuffed them into the empty sack. "You know how you feel when you're asked what it's like in space?"

"Impossible to answer and you get tired of trying?" She smiled. "Something like that."

"Sorry."

"It's a common question. I forgive you."

"Good. Because I would forgive you just about anything when you look at me like that."

She lowered her voice to match the intimate pitch of his. "How am I looking at you?"

"The same way you were looking at me during my speech." "I was being politely attentive."

"You were being pointedly suggestive."

"I wasn't looking at you in any special way."

"Oh, yes, you were."

"Not that I'm conceding the argument, Colonel, but how did you imagine that I was looking at you?"

"Like you knew damn well that I could barely keep my mind on my speech for looking at your legs."

"I was assigned that particular seat at that particular table," she retorted. "I didn't select it because it placed me in your direct line of sight."

"But you took full advantage of it."

She gave a noncommittal shrug. "I always sit with my legs crossed."

"In high heels?"

"Usually."

"In a short black skirt?"

"It's not that short."

"Short enough to carry my imagination up to its favorite vacation spot."

She pretended to take umbrage. "I'm a lady, Colonel Hart." "Every inch of you."

"Your look doesn't make me feel much like a lady." "Oh, so it's my look now."

"Turnabout is only fair."

"Okay. How am I looking at you? How does my look make you feel?"

"Like it's a hot evening in the summertime and I'm an ice-cream cone."

Several seconds laden with sexual undercurrents ticked by before he leaned forward to set his glass on the coffee table. "Melina?"

"Are we going to sleep together?"

A dart of excitement found its target and caused her to catch her breath. "I have a reputation to uphold."

"So do I."

She laughed softly. "But your reputation is that of a lady-killer."

"And yours is of fending us off."

Hesitating only a heartbeat, she answered, "No." Then slowly she stood up and stepped around the table to stand directly in front of him. "Ask anybody about Melina Lloyd, and they'll tell you that she's impulsive. She does whatever seems right at the time."

He remained seated on the floor, but his eyes had followed her up, taking their time to track the terrain of her figure. Huskily he asked, "What seems right?"

Dale Gordon's apartment was only slightly warmer than the temperature outside, but tonight when he let himself in, the single room seemed especially musty and close.

The single-car detached garage had been converted into living quarters a decade before Pearl Harbor, and few improvements had been made since that original renovation. Its one nod toward modernity was an air-conditioning window unit that belched humid cool air in summer and humid warm air in winter. Unfortunately, it fit into the dwelling's single window, which was not only a gross violation of the fire code, but created a ventilation problem. Consequently, the air that Dale Gordon now sucked into his thin body with a high, whistling sound, was stale, dense, and insufficient.

He peeled off his T-shirt and tossed it onto the narrow, unmade bed. He swiped his hands over his bony, almost concave chest, skimming off the sweat that had beaded on his pale skin and prominent ribs. His nipples were erect with a sudden chill. They were very red and sparsely ringed with long, straight blond hairs.

With almost frantic haste, he moved around the cluttered room, lighting candles. His hands shook as he held kitchen matches to wicks that had been relit so many times they were thick with char. Habitually he burned his candles down until there was no more wax to burn.

The heat and smoke from so many candles increased the room's stuffiness, but Dale Gordon didn't notice that as he kicked off his rubber thongs and peeled off his khakis and underwear.

Naked, he dropped to his knees before a crude altar. His kneecaps sounded like cracking walnuts as they struck the bare concrete floor. Dale Gordon was unaware of the sound and unmindful of the pain that accompanied it. His pain was emotional, spiritual, but it was real. To him it felt as though all the demons of hell were inside him trying to claw their way out through his vital organs.

He had waited in his car until the Lexus pulled out of The Mansion's driveway. Gillian Lloyd was alone in the car. She was going home. After hours of fornicating with the tall, dark man who looked Indian except for his brilliant blue eyes.