Sam finally, completely, understood what he was saying . . . and doing. The look she gave him back was every bit as warmly intimate as his had been, and it was just as deliberate. “Good night,” she said softly, biting her bottom lip to hold back her smile. “I’ll let you know when I’ve made up my mind and I’m ready to invite you in, Mack,” she promised sweetly, closing the door.
Holding her cell phone in her hand, Sam pressed the numbers for his cell phone, but not the button that would make the call go through and his phone vibrate. She waited more than a full minute to do that . . . long enough for him to have taken the elevator down to the lobby . . . then she pressed the send button on her phone.
He answered almost instantly with his name, his deep voice clipped and businesslike. “McCord.”
“Mack?”
“Yes?”
“I’ve made up my mind.”
“Open your door.”
Sam turned the knob; then she stepped back in shock. He was standing exactly as he’d been when she opened the door the last time—with his hand braced high on the doorframe, only this time he was holding his own cell phone in his hand. He wasn’t laughing; he was looking at her intently, and Sam felt her voice shake at the enormity of what he was telling her solemnly with his eyes.
“Would you like to come in?” she asked unsteadily.
His arm dropped from the doorframe. He nodded slowly, twice.
Sam stepped back. He stepped forward.
He closed the door. She opened her robe and let it slide to the floor.
His burning gaze followed it down; then he pulled her tightly into his arms. “You just ran out of time, Sam,” he warned, his lips slowly lowering to hers.
“Time for what?” she whispered, sliding her hands over his shoulders and around his neck.
“To change your mind about us.”
“I’ll never change it,” she promised him achingly—a moment before she lost the ability to use her mind at all.
IN THE HOSPITAL WAITING ROOM, Michael stood in front of the television set, his hands shoved into his pants pockets, watching the rerun of McCord’s brief press conference on the late-night news: “I understand the mayor is preparing a statement regarding Mr. Valente, which he will make shortly” McCord said. “In the meantime, I would like to express my gratitude for Mr. Valente’s assistance . . . and my admiration for his unbelievable forbearance.”
Beside him, Leigh slipped her hand through his arm and smilingly said, “I think we should send him and Samantha Littleton tickets to the play next week, and then take them out to dinner, don’t you?”
“In Paris,” Michael agreed with a chuckle.
Chapter 75
* * *
“What a fantastic place!” Courtney exclaimed when O’Hara let her into the living room of Michael’s penthouse apartment on Central Park West. After Jane Sebring’s death three weeks before, Leigh had moved out of her old apartment, and she’d insisted that O’Hara and Hilda come with her so that she could oversee their recuperation. “I phoned Leigh this morning and asked if I could come over. Is she here?”
“She’s in the kitchen, trying to convince Hilda to leave the dust on the top of the doorframes until Hilda feels better,” Joe replied irritably.
“Didn’t Mr. Valente have a housekeeper of his own?”
“Sure, but Hilda ran her off a week ago. That woman can spot dust where there is no dust.”
“How are you feeling?” Courtney asked him.
“Foolish,” O’Hara replied. “I barely got winged with that bullet and I got a heart attack over it.”
“No, you didn’t,” Courtney argued, and with a rare show of affection, she linked her hand through his arm as they strolled toward the dining room. “You got a heart attack because you thought Hilda was dead. I think you’re sweet on her.”
“I am not. She’s the bossiest woman I’ve ever met. But at least she lets me cut the cards when we play gin.”
“You never bothered to cut them when we played, so I stopped asking you.”
“That’s because I was in a hurry to lose all my money to you and get it over with,” he joked. “At least with Hilda, I’ve got a fair chance of winning.”
Courtney nodded, but her mind was on something else, and she sobered. “I got my invitation to Leigh and Michael’s wedding. It’s still three weeks away, but I brought one of their wedding presents with me. They’ll either like it or hate me for the rest of my life.”
Joe stopped short. “What do you mean? What sort of present is it?”
“It’s a newspaper,” Courtney replied vaguely; then she put on a determinedly happy face and walked into the kitchen, where she said to Hilda, “O’Hara told me he’s figured out a way to cheat at gin when he cuts the cards.”
Hilda swung slowly around, her hands on her hips, her brows drawn together into an irate frown that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I’ll keep a close eye on him after this.”
“Good idea,” Courtney replied, sliding onto a chair at the kitchen table, where Leigh was going through the mail. “Where’s Brenna? Why isn’t she handling the mail?”
Leigh enfolded her in a quick hug and shoved the mail aside. “She had a lunch date.”
“How are the wedding plans coming?”
Leigh laughed. “We invited one hundred people and we seem to have one hundred and eight attending. Mayor and Mrs. Edelman and Senator and Mrs. Hollenbeck are going to be there, and the manager at the Plaza is determined to provide special security, which the mayor and the senator don’t want. The banquet director is convinced we should move the event to a larger room, which I don’t want. The chef is tearing his hair out over some of my special requests, and Michael’s aunt is threatening to cater the event herself.” When Courtney didn’t smile or reply, Leigh studied her for a moment and then said, “What’s up?”
“Nothing. Well—something is.” Reaching into her oversize shoulder bag, Courtney pulled out several typewritten sheets of paper and a copy of USA Today. She handed Leigh the typewritten sheets, but kept the newspaper folded on her lap. “Two weeks ago,” she explained, “after I interviewed Lieutenant McCord, I finished my article about Michael for my investigative journalism class. I thought you might like to see it.”
“I’d love to see it,” Leigh said, puzzled by the teenager’s unusual apprehension. Leaning back in her chair, Leigh read the article written by a teenager for a special journalism class for the intellectually gifted:
Among citizens of the United States, there is a widely held, fundamental belief that the criminal justice system exists to protect law-abiding citizens, and that when this system errs, it errs on the side of leniency to the guilty, rather than deliberate persecution of the innocent.
Most of us believe in this premise as surely as we believe that a person must be considered innocent until he has been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; that “double jeopardy” prevents anyone from being tried over and over again for the same crime and that once a debt has been paid to society, the debt is . . . paid in full.
But there are those among us who have reason to doubt all those concepts, and their doubts are based on bitter experience, rather than intellectual self-deception and wistful philosophy. Michael Valente is one of these people.
Michael Valente is not an easy man to know. And until you know him, he is not an easy man to like. But like everyone else who reads the newspapers or watches the news, I thought I knew all about him long before I met him. And so I did not like him.
I like him now.
More than that, I admire and respect him. I wish he were my friend, my brother, or my uncle. I wish I were older or he were younger, because, as I’ve seen for myself, when Michael Valente loves a woman, he does it unselfishly, gallantly, and unconditionally. He does it permanently, forever.
Of course, there is one small drawback to being loved by him: It apparently allows the entire criminal justice system a license to spy, to malign, to misrepresent, and to perse
cute—not only him, but you as well. It allows them to violate every civil right the Constitution promises and that they have sworn to uphold.
From that point on, Courtney’s article was factual, rather than emotional, and it documented several of the cases brought against Michael. By the time Leigh finished reading, Courtney had gotten an apple and was munching it while stealing worried glances at her.
Leigh was so touched by the article that she reached out and laid her hand over Courtney’s.
“What do you think of it?” Courtney asked.
“I think it’s wonderful,” Leigh said softly. “And I think you’re wonderful, too.”
“Hold that thought,” Courtney said obliquely.
“Why?” When Courtney hesitated, Leigh thought the problem must have been that Courtney’s journalism professor hadn’t liked it, so Leigh asked what he’d thought.
Before replying, Courtney took another bite of apple. “Well, he wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as you are. He busted me for displaying a flagrant bias in favor of my subject, and for using a writing style that was ‘so gushingly sentimental that it couldn’t be digested on an empty stomach.’ He said the only connection between investigative journalism and what I wrote was that I used paper to write it on.”
“I don’t think that’s fair—” Leigh exclaimed loyally.
“Why not? He was absolutely right on target. I knew he’d say stuff like that.”