Judith McNaught - Remember When

He didn't seem aware that she was there until she was right beside him, and then he said in a dead voice, "You shouldn't have come here." He looked at her then, and Diana swallowed in shock at the transformation. His face was completely expressionless; a face made of stone, with a jaw of iron and eyes of cold steel. And now she understood where that hard core had been forged. It had been here. It had given him the strength to break free of this place. "I had to come," she said simply, watching his face begin to relax as he broke free of the grip of this place. "You had to know I had been here and seen it."

"I see," he replied, his heart aching with tenderness. "And now that you've seen it," he added with an attempt to sound indifferent, "what do you think?" He turned to walk away, expecting her to come with him.

What did she think? In response, Diana did the only thing she could think of to vent her wrath and express her opinion. Looking around on the ground, she picked up a heavy rock and with all the force of her raging animosity, she hurled it. Cole turned to look at the exact moment the rock blasted through the front window. In open-mouthed shock, he stared at her beautiful, irate face and then at the broken window of the hellhole he had lived in. "That," she informed him, daintily dusting off her hands after having thrown a pitch that would have done credit to Sandy Koufax, "is what I think of it."

Cole's shout of laughter exploded louder than the window. In a sudden burst of exuberant freedom, he swooped her up into his arms and tossed her over his shoulder like a sack of flour. "Put me down," she laughed, wriggling.

"Not until you promise."

"Promise what?" she giggled, squirming.

"That you will never, ever, get mad enough to throw anything at me."

"I cannot make a promise I may not keep," she advised him solemnly.

He whacked her on the backside and continued down the road. He started to whistle. She started to laugh.

The merry sounds rolled backward to the hovel he had lived in. The only remaining piece of glass left in the window frame in the house crashed to the dirt floor inside it.

The lighthearted days and passionate nights became a routine during the rest of their stay at Cal's.

When the time to leave arrived, Cal drove them out to the airstrip and watched while the plane took off, his hand lifted in a wave. His heart felt heavy in his chest because they were leaving, but it did not feel weak. It felt very strong.

Diana's heart did not feel quite as strong when Cole left her at her apartment so that he could continue on to Washington. "I miss you already," she said. "This two-city living arrangement isn't going to work."

Cole tipped her chin up. "We'll work things out in a couple of days, as soon as I get things settled in Washington. The time in between will pass very quickly."

She furrowed her forehead. "How can you say that?"

"I'm trying to convince both of us."

"It isn't working."

Cole crushed her against his length. "I know."

"Don't forget to call me."

He smiled at that absurdity and held her tighter. "How could I possibly forget to call you, darling?"

Sam Byers was sitting in his car with the engine idling and the windshield wipers running when the Gulfstream streaked out of the sky and touched down on the rainswept runway at Dulles International Airport. He watched the plane taxi to a stop at a junction of the runways, waiting for instructions from the tower, then it finally executed a ninety-degree turn and rolled right past him. When the pilots got off, he pulled his raincoat up around his ears and ran forward through the puddles.

"It's a damn shame we have to meet this way," Byers announced breathlessly as the heavy-set sixty-year-old trudged up the last step and nearly collapsed onto the sofa, "but I wanted to give you this stuff in person, and it's a bad idea for us to be seen together." He reached inside his raincoat and removed a large brown envelope.

Cole took it and handed him a glass with vodka, ice, and a lemon twist— Senator Byers's drink of preference, he knew.

The senator noted the brand of vodka his host had just served as he glanced around at the luxurious, pale gray leather interior with its chrome-and-brass-trimmed lamps and tables. "You've got style and you've got taste, Cole," he said. "Unfortunately," he added as Cole sat down on the sofa across from him, "you've also got yourself a powerful enemy."

"Who is it?" Cole snapped.

He lifted the glass in a parody of a toast and said, "The junior senator from the Great State of Texas—Douglas J. Hayward. He's taken a very personal interest in putting you out of business and into the penitentiary." Without rancor, he added, "That boy has serious presidential aspirations. He'll probably make it, too. He has the look and the charisma of a young Jack Kennedy." Belatedly realizing that his audience seemed to be in a state of angry shock, he said, "Did you do something to aggravate him, or is he just out to get you on principle?"

The only possible explanation Cole could think of involved Jessica Hayward and a long-ago night when her husband, Charles, came home unexpectedly; yet it seemed insane that young Hayward would go to all this trouble after more than a decade to defend his mother's nonexistent honor. "The only reason I can think of is lame as hell," Cole replied curtly.

"That's not likely to concern him," Sam said dryly. "Every presidential hopeful needs a cause, a dragon he can slay for the public good. That's what gets them publicity, and publicity is what gets them elected. Reagan had the Ayatollah, Kennedy had Hoffa—you get my meaning?"

"I get the meaning, but I don't like the analogies," Cole said icily.

"Hear me out before you act on your impulse to beat the shit out of me," Sam said with a chuckle. "I was about to say that when high-reaching politicians can't find a legitimate public enemy to slay, they frequently create their own. For some reason, Senator Hayward has singled you out for that honor."

He paused to sip his drink; then he continued, "Cushman's board of directors is right behind Senator Hayward, urging him on in this quest for 'justice,' and they have some political allies of their own on the team. Between them, they've managed to convince the New York Stock Exchange, the SEC, and themselves that you started those nasty rumors that their microprocessor was faulty so that the value of their stock would drop and you could buy their company for half its worth. You already know most of that. Here's the part you don't know: The Cushman people are going to file a class-action lawsuit. In addition to a few hundred million dollars in damages, Cushman wants the court to grant them the rights to all profits Unified makes on the processor when it's marketed— and—they are also demanding that you hand over all future profits resulting from any other device, design, or formula of theirs that you may eventually use. My sources tell me that Cushman is particularly emphatic about the last part of that."

He took another sip of his drink and studied Cole's unreadable expression; then he shrugged. "I thought that was a little odd, but then

I'm just a country boy. But even a country boy like me can figure out the obvious—If you are found guilty of any of the criminal charges in federal court, then Cushman's class-action suit is as good as won in circuit court."

"What's in the envelope?" Cole said, his mind on solutions and countermeasures.

"Nothing that will enable you to neutralize him, if that's what you're hoping, but it will give you an idea of where you stand. William C. Gonnelli, the administrative judge for the SEC who's going to hear your case, is already so sure you're guilty of something that he's helping the federal prosecutor decide whether the next step should be to haul you up before the grand jury and get an indictment, or take the short route and ask the judge for a warrant for your arrest. There's a copy of an SEC subpoena in there. Your lawyer will be served with it the day after tomorrow. Naturally, it will be leaked to the press. They'll be waving microphones in your face when you walk out your front door from that day on, I'm afraid."