Lindsay McKenna - A Proposal for Christmas

“Yes,” he said finally, and with some reluctance. “I know better, but I’ll do it.”

“Seven?” Holly asked with a calmness that amazed her. “We could go on to class afterward.”

David wasn’t looking at her; it seemed that he couldn’t. The telephone jangled but the answering machine picked up instantly. The silence was heavy, pulsing.

“Seven,” he said hoarsely, and then he was leaving, striding away from Holly with determined motions.

After she’d heard the front door close and the engine of his car start up with a fierce, revving sound, she could move again. She locked the house and turned out the few lights that still burned, then made her way upstairs.

Her bed looked as it always had—the same Pennsylvania Dutch quilt covered the practical flannel sheets beneath. The same brass headboard glistened in the light from the lamp on her dresser. The same two pillows waited, neither having ever borne the weight of a man’s head. Not Skyler’s certainly. Not even Ben’s.

The bed was unchanged, but Holly’s feelings about sharing it were vastly different. Tonight it looked lonely and cold rather than spacious.

Shaking her head, she went into the small bathroom adjoining her room, washed her face, brushed her teeth, stripped off the black slacks and red sweater she had worn that night, and finally the wispy panties and bra underneath.

Holly stood naked before the full-length mirror on the back of her bedroom door. She saw a well-proportioned if unremarkable body, curved in some places, hollowed in others.

She permitted herself to remember that long-ago summer, between high school and college, when she and Ben had given in to the dizzying, constant demands of their youthful bodies. She had not soared, as books and movies had led her to believe she would, but she had not been traumatized, either. Ben’s lovemaking had been gentle and pleasant, if not truly fulfilling.

But now, as the result of one brief kiss, Holly knew that, with David Goddard, her body would respond with abandon. It would sing. It would quiver.

The prospect was completely alarming.

With flouncing motions, Holly stormed over to her dresser, wrenched open a drawer and pulled out a long T-shirt-style gown. She quickly put the garment on, as though that would dispel the crazy hungers, the yearnings, that had lain dormant until one particular man had kissed her.

Determinedly, she got into bed and settled into the warmth of the soft flannel sheets. Unable to sleep, she tossed this way and that, plumping her pillows, lying down and sitting back up again.

After almost twenty minutes of this, Holly faced a very disturbing fact. Sure as the sun would rise in the morning, sure as the December snows would fall, David Goddard was going to make love to her. It was inevitable; it was inescapable. The self-control she needed in order to feel strong and safe would desert her.

Tears burned in Holly’s eyes and flowed down her cheeks. She would be changed forever and then she would be left because David was not what he seemed to be, not what he claimed to be.

All her instincts warned that this was true and yet she could feel herself sliding toward him, careening down some steep psychological hill. And there was nothing to grasp, nothing to break her fall.

She rolled over and sniffled, tucking both hands under her face the way she had as a little girl. Skyler. She would think of Skyler and everything would be all right.

What did Skyler look like? She couldn’t remember. After dating the man for months, she couldn’t remember!

“Oh, damn!” Holly cried into the quilt edge that was bunched in her hands. Again she tried to summon Skyler’s face to her mind but it wouldn’t come; instead, she saw David’s dark hair, David’s strong jawline, David’s ferociously blue eyes.

“Who are you, David Goddard?” Holly wailed inwardly, her mind full of shimmering tangles of fear and joy, happiness and dread. Who are you?

Except for the wild, thunderous beating of her own heart, there was no answer.

4

David bent and tapped the side of the glass fishbowl with an impatient index finger. The two goldfish floated, one above the other, just staring at him, their shimmering fan-shaped tails barely moving.

“You guys are really boring, you know that?” he complained in an undertone. “I bought you to give this place some color and flash and what do you do? You just sit there, watching the world go by. Swim, dammit!”

The fish regarded him implacably, still hovering midway between the surface of the water and the bottom, with its blue rocks and shifting plastic fern and dime-store diver.

“No class,” David grumbled, turning away and wrenching the damp sweatband from his forehead in one irritated movement.

Still breathing hard from his customary morning run, he stumbled into the bathroom and took a quick shower. Later, as he dried himself and dressed—in the living room, for God’s sake—he wondered how the hell he was ever going to impress Holly Llewellyn with a place like this.

Draping a towel over his shoulders because his hair was still dripping wet, he took in the goldfish, the unmade sofa bed, the spots on the carpet. No class. Like those seventy-nine-cent goldfish, the place had no class.

The telephone rang and David, who had been indulging in a fanciful nostalgia for his real apartment in faraway Georgetown, was startled. He put images of good art, the hot tub in his bathroom and the ivory fireplace out of his mind as he lunged for the instrument.

“Goddard,” he answered, and the long-distance buzz coming over the wire told him that he’d been right. This was his call from Washington.

“Zigman here,” Walt replied. “The Bureau staked out the address in L.A., Goddard, but they must have muffed it somehow, because Llewellyn didn’t bite.”

David had a headache. He had hoped the FBI would be able to collar Llewellyn immediately; like a child about to have a sliver pulled, he’d wanted the whole thing to be over with. “He was an agent himself once. He probably knows the signs.”

“Yeah.”

“Does this mean I can drop the case and come back to Washington?” Part of David hoped it did, while another part wanted to watch Holly Llewellyn forever.

“Hell, no. The little lady sent him a letter, didn’t she? You saw it with your own eyes, Goddard. That means she’s in fairly regular contact with our boy, doesn’t it?”

David resented the “little lady” reference. Holly was so much more and the phrase seemed to demean her. “Holly is a woman, Walt. With a brain.”

Zigman’s laugh traveled three thousand miles to annoy David as instantly as if he’d been in the same room. “Goddard, you are going soft. Don’t get to liking this broad too much. She’s in line for an indictment herself, you know.”

“For what?” David snapped.

“Christ,” Zigman swore impatiently. “For aiding and abetting a fugitive. Are you going to wake the hell up, Goddard, or do I have to send somebody else out there to handle this thing?”

David bit back all the fury that surged like bile into his throat. He’d never been pulled from a detail in all the time he’d worked for the service, and he wasn’t about to start now. Besides, he couldn’t be sure how another agent would manage the situation. And it was delicate. Holly’s emotional state was delicate. “I can handle it,” he said.

“Wouldn’t have sent you if I didn’t think you could,” Walt replied in smug tones. His cigar stub was probably bobbing up and down in his mouth, and David wished he could be there to squash it into the man’s teeth. “Keep a sharp eye out, Goddard. Llewellyn could turn up there. If he does, I want him busted. On the spot.”

The thought made David half-sick, and he closed his eyes. His wet hair was dripping cold trails down his neck and he began drying it with one end of the towel. He could imagine the look on Holly’s face if he casually wrestled Llewellyn to the floor in her living room. “Yeah.”