CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

She’d looked rumpled and disreputable the first time she bearded Michael O’Malley in his den. Just off the plane from San Pablo, she probably hadn’t had more than a few hours’ sleep, and she’d just found out the man she loved was dead.

This time she was at least clean, well rested, and secure in the knowledge that somewhere in the world Jake Murphy was alive and well and mad as hell at her. Despite Rose’s outsized clothes and the unmistakable signs of grief and despair that marked her face, she felt a degree more human than she had on her last visit. In her current unprepossessing wardrobe she was expecting a lot more trouble getting in to see the senator than she experienced.

There were no delays. The first receptionist, a stranger to Maddy, took one look at her and picked up the phone. A moment later a preppy-looking aide appeared to usher her through the first section of rooms, where he handed her to an elegant young yuppie in Ralph Lauren suit and a coolly professional smile. O’Malley was at the end of this procession, shirt-sleeved, attractive—The perfect candidate, Maddy thought. It was lucky she trusted him; otherwise she would have turned around and walked out, the medallion still safely around her neck.

He said all the right things, expressed all the right emotions. Shock and dismay and outrage and anger. Concern for her and all she had been through, grave doubts about the rebellion in San Pablo. And Maddy couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that it didn’t quite ring true.

“I promise you, Madelyn,” he said with smoothly eloquent outrage, “that this will be dealt with, immediately. I can’t tell you how much your trust means to me.”

Maddy said nothing.

“I’ll have someone drive you to your mother’s house,” he continued. “Or a hotel, if you’d rather.”

“The airport.”

“Surely you can’t be planning to fly back to California right away? I may need to get in touch with you about this. I’m not quite sure what’s the best way to handle it. The situation in San Pablo is very precarious indeed. Word has it that La Mensa is about to fall to the revolutionary front.”

“Is it?” she replied glumly. If that were so, Carlos would miss it in his quest for the map.

“Let me put you up at the Hilton for a few days,” O’Malley suggested smoothly. “That way I’ll be able to call on you if I have any questions. …”

“I’m going to my mother’s house in McLean for exactly fifteen minutes,” Maddy said. “And then I’m going home. You can call me there.”

“But—”

“Call me. But not for several days. I won’t be answering the phone.” She walked out without a backward glance, unable to rid herself of the notion that she’d made a very grave mistake.

The Pakistani taxi driver looked at her askance when she climbed into his cab. She sat back for the long drive into Virginia and went over her plan.

It was time to sever the ties. For too long she’d held on to the notion that parents were supposed to be loving, supportive, caring about their children. Somewhere along the way her parents had gotten sidetracked, if they’d ever felt that way at all. Stephen had paid for it, and still Maddy had clung to the illusion that beneath her mother’s chilly exterior, beneath her father’s causes, some distant strain of feeling remained. It had been a foolish illusion, causing nothing but pain, and it was time to break the last sticky threads of parental attachment.

It was a hot fall day. The windows of the cab were open as they careened across the Potomac and headed toward Virginia, and Maddy leaned back against the frayed seat, letting the wind blow through her hair. She’d have the cab driver wait when they got to her mother’s house. He hadn’t liked the looks of her, but a large-denomination bill would keep him in place while she took care of a little emotional housekeeping. Then she’d have him drive her to Dulles and wait for the next flight. Somehow she’d begin to make some sort of sense out of her life.

The house seemed quiet and deserted when the cab pulled up. Balwinder Singh, her cab driver, seemed content enough to wait once he grasped the fifty, and Maddy’s steps were firm and purposeful as she strode to the front door.

No German maids today, no press conferences, no military hit squads roaming around, and no locked door. She wondered for a moment if she was expected, then dismissed the idea. After all, who could have told Helen she was coming?

Her mother’s voice echoed through the spacious interior of the elegant old house. “I don’t believe you for one moment,” she was saying. “You’re making it all up.”

The response was low, rumbly, but Maddy could recognize those tones, even from a distance. For half a moment she wanted to turn and run, back to the doubtful protection of Balwinder Singh. But she squared her shoulders beneath the oversized flannel shirt and headed in the direction of the voices.

“I don’t know why you’d think she’d bother to show up here, Jake,” Helen was saying in her cool, controlled voice. “You know as well as anyone that we’ve never been close. She’s much more likely to have gone straight back to—” Her sharp brown eyes widened as the rumpled figure of her daughter appeared in the doorway. “Apparently you were right, Jake,” she said. “The prodigal daughter has returned. Where have you been?’

Jake whirled around. He was standing by the french doors that overlooked the pool, and his face was pale and shadowed with exhaustion. “Maddy” was all he said, his voice full of relief and anger and something else she didn’t even want to decipher.

“Yes, Maddy.” Helen was closer to her daughter, and she crossed the distance with a few graceful strides, the long legs that her daughter inherited speeding her along. “What have you done with the map?”

Maddy grimaced, looking from one to the other. “You’ll be pleased, Helen. I’ve given it to Senator O’Malley. I expect it will be on the news by six o’clock tonight.”

She didn’t get the reactions she expected. Jake’s shoulders sagged in sudden relief, and Helen reached out and slapped her across the face. “You fool,” she said, her cold voice at variance with the sudden violence of her slap. “Did you really think that O’Malley wouldn’t cover up something like that? He’s a politician, and politicians never lose face. I would have thought you’d have gained at least an elemental bit of sophistication. You weakminded, stupid—” She raised her hand to hit Maddy again, but Jake was there ahead of her, catching her wrist in one iron fist. Maddy watched her mother’s face whiten with pain, and she slowly backed away from the two of them.

Helen tore out of his grasp, her face livid with fury and suddenly looking very old. “You are no daughter of mine,” she said in a fierce, dead little voice. “Get the hell out of my house. Both of you.”

For an exit it was quite striking. Maddy wanted to applaud her with just the right amount of mockery, but the energy needed failed her. If only it were true. But Maddy knew Helen too well. In another six months she’d be calling on the phone, cool and distant and wanting something, as usual. But this time Maddy wouldn’t give in.

She looked up into Jake’s hazel eyes. “So which side are you on, Jake?” she inquired in her coolest voice. “Ortega’s or Carlos’s?”

“Neither.”

“And what would you have done with the map?”

“Destroyed it. Which is what will happen. O’Malley will hand it over to Carlos, and it will be gone.”

“But people know. …”

“Rumors,” he interrupted. “And there have been enough rumors in this nasty little war that no one is going to be believed without hard evidence. It was all for nothing, Maddy.”

She met his gaze calmly. “I suppose it was.”

“Why did you run?” He made no effort to move any closer, and she could feel the distance between the two of them like a palpable thing.

“I had to,” she said. “I couldn’t let my father do that to me. I had to at least try.”

“Couldn’t you have left me a note?” There was a hint of pain beneath the careful control in his voice. “When we got back I was convinced that Chimichanga had found you. I thought we’d find your body out back, your throat slit—”

“I’m sorry.” It was a useless thing to say.

His face was once more remote and distant, the stranger-lover she could never quite read. He shook his head then, a gesture of dismissal. “I have to go,” he said.

“Where?” But she knew the answer to that as well as he did.

“To San Pablo.”

“I thought you were never going back?” Don’t leave me, she begged silently. Don’t go back there; they’ll kill you.

He shrugged. “I didn’t want to. But the game isn’t finished yet. I have to see it through to the end this time. I have to watch out for Carlos.”

“Carlos?”

“If the revolution is to succeed, if any progress is going to be made, someone has to keep Carlos under control. It could go either way—a bloodbath or a relatively peaceful passage of power. Carlos needs to remember that a bloodbath would only hurt the cause.”

“And you think you can remind him?”

“I’m the only one who can,” Jake said simply, and Maddy believed him. “Go back to L.A., Maddy. Soledad has been worried about you.”

He still hadn’t touched her. Doubts flew through her mind like phantom butterflies, and she dismissed each one in turn. Logic had told her it would never work, self-preservation had warned her to keep away, not to let him break her heart the way her father had. But logic and self-preservation were cold and lonely company, and even a heart-breaking life with Jake was better than any kind of life without him. “When are you coming back to me?” Her voice was soft, low, and very certain.

He did touch her then, his hands reaching out and cradling her tired face, tilting it up to his. “As soon as I can, mi amor,” he whispered. “You’ll wait?”

“I’ll wait,” she said, the last doubt vanishing. Then he was gone.

It had been a long night, Maddy thought, pulling her weary body out of the bed. She couldn’t even remember if she’d slept at all. Her head ached, her eyes were heavy with sleep and unshed tears, and her thoughts drifted and tumbled through her brain like drunken acrobats.

Christmas was coming. It was the first week in December, Jake had been gone for six weeks, lost in the war-torn confusion that was San Pablo, and Maddy was seven weeks’ pregnant.

“I do not know whether I shall enjoy being a grandmother,” Soledad had said with a pout last night, clutching a glass of rum in one slender, jewel-encrusted hand. “A mother to someone as ridiculously tall and pretty as you is one thing, my pet, but not necessarily a grandmother.”

“Cheer up, Soledad,” Maddy replied. “Just think, this might have happened to you.” She patted her still-flat stomach.

Soledad shuddered delicately. “Never. I have better things to do with my life. Do you know what the worst problem with this niño of yours? You can’t get drunk with me.”

“Do you think we should be getting drunk?”

“I do indeed. In memory of Carlos,” Soledad raised her glass. “And in memory of Anastasio Ortega. He was a worthy enemy. And here’s to the fall of La Mensa!”

Maddy sipped at her mineral water. “And to a new democracy.”

“Democracy, schmocracy,” Soledad muttered obscurely. “To the triumph of the oppressed.”

“Now you sound like my father.”

“Not a bad way to sound. In many ways your father was a good man. I heard that they’re talking about renaming La Mensa after him. Cuidad Lambert. What do you think of that?”

“Absurd,” Maddy said, no longer moved by pain at the memory of her father’s betrayal. Let him belong to San Pablo.

“And here’s to the speedy rebuilding of the capital.” Soledad drank deeply.

“What there is left of it,” Maddy said.

“And here’s to the return of the niño’s father,” she added, draining the glass.

“Amen,” Maddy said softly. “Here’s to Jake’s return.” And she finished her mineral water.

Soledad passed out on Maddy’s sofa. The fall of San Pablo to the rebels was an occasion worthy of note, even if that occasion brought the news of Carlos’s death. Maddy accepted it as inevitable, squashing down the sudden feeling of fright. If Carlos could die, so could Jake.

The long night passed. She could hear Soledad snoring gently on the comfortable sofa, and more than once Maddy wished she could have partaken of the soporific effects of the strong Jamaican rum her stepmother favored.

It was just after five when Maddy gave up, pulling on loose-fitting white pants, a heavy cotton sweater, and a jacket and heading out into the early-morning sunlight. There was a brisk wind from the ocean, strong enough to clear away the cobwebs and the headache of a sleepless night. Maddy headed down toward the beach, wrapping her arms around her slender body and taking deep breaths of the fresh salt air.

She walked swiftly, covering a great deal of ground with her long legs, trying to drive out the worry that kept creeping up on her as more and more time passed without word from him. Fate had been unkind enough, it wouldn’t have given her Jake just to take him away again.

The beach was quiet and deserted at that hour. It was too early for joggers and runners and dog-walkers to clog the strand. Maddy sank into the sand, her arms wrapped around her long legs, and stared at the ocean, remembering against her will the months when she thought Jake was dead, when the relentless strength of the ocean had brought her the only comfort she could find.

It was slowly getting lighter. As Maddy stared out into the blue-green waves she could feel the tight band around her heart ease and lift. She didn’t even turn her head when she heard him, felt him moving behind her.

“I thought I might find you here.” His voice was that well-remembered, rusty sound that played across her senses like a silver flute. He sank down in the sand beside her, and she allowed herself a brief, tentative peek at him. He was in one piece, weary, looking older than his forty years, and infinitely dear. His hair was growing again, trailing beyond the collar of the heavy sweater he wore. “Why was Soledad passed out on your sofa?”

“Too much celebrating,” she said.

“Celebrating the fall of San Pablo?”

“Soledad would call it the rise of San Pablo.”

“You heard about Carlos?”

“And Ortega. And Morosa escapes to Miami with most of the country’s treasury.” Maddy lifted her head, still not trusting herself to look at him fully, for fear he’d vanish in the early morning sea mist. “They’re going to have a hard time rebuilding the economy with all the money gone.”

“They can do it,” Jake said. “If anyone could do it, the people of San Pablo can. Your father had reason to love them.”

So it did still have the power to hurt her. She viewed that fact abstractly, poking at it a bit, like prodding a sore tooth. But the pain wasn’t searing, just the remembered ache of an old war wound. She breathed a small sigh of relief. “Reason to love them more than me, apparently,” she said, and saying it only hurt a tiny bit.

Jake was suddenly intense, the distant guise of politeness vanishing. “Maddy, listen to me. Just because your father was incapable of caring about anything more than an abstraction, just because your mother is a cold-hearted bitch, doesn’t mean that you aren’t worth loving,” he said in a rough voice. “God knows, you have every reason in the world to be bitter. You’re entitled to be screwed up, angry, incapable of love or trust. You’re entitled to a cold, miserable life. You have every reason in the world. And you’re entitled to hate me. I wouldn’t blame you for a moment. I lied to you, I left you, again and again and again.”

“Yes,” she said. “You did.”

“But I always loved you. You’re worth loving, Maddy. You’re worth far more than I can ever give you. I haven’t got the faintest idea what I’m going to be doing a year from now, I have no idea how I’ll live, where I’ll live, what kind of person I’ll be. I only know that I don’t want to be without you. I should be noble and leave you alone, let you find someone who can cherish you, someone who can take care of you—”

“I don’t need someone to take care of me,” she broke in ruthlessly, turning to look at him for the first time. It took all her resolve not to throw herself in his arms. “And I think I’ve had enough of nobility to last me a lifetime.”

“Then what do you want?”

She smiled then, a sure, joyous smile. “I want you, Jake Murphy. I always have, and I always will. And even though you left me, again and again and again, you came back. And damn it, next time you go, I’m going with you.” She reached out then, touching his weary face with gentle fingers. “Agreed?”

“Agreed.” He looked down at her, his eyes dark and clear and full of love.

“In the meantime I’ve got something for you,” she added. “Something you need very badly, whether you realize it or not.”

“What?” The wariness was second nature, Maddy thought. She’d teach him not to be wary; together they’d learn how to trust.

She took his hand and placed it gently on her stomach, feeling quite pleased with herself. “You may not know what you’ll be doing a year from now, but I do. You’ll be changing diapers.”

His hand tensed beneath hers. His voice was hoarser than usual when he spoke. “You promise?”

She rose to her knees, cradling his face in her hands. “Oh, Jake, I promise,” she said fervently. “And you damned well better make an honest woman of me, and soon.”

He sat very still, suspicion an old companion. “Is that the only reason you want to marry me?”

Maddy laughed, and the sound of her amusement was liquid sunshine in the cool morning air. “Of course. Normally I can’t stand you, but I’m so conventional I’ll make that sacrifice for the baby’s sake,” she said blithely. She kissed him then, and her mouth trembled against his. “Soledad can give me away.”

He smiled at her slowly, and for the first time the smile reached the weary depths of his eyes. “It might be more accurate if she gave me away.”

“Don’t remind me! Maybe we’ll elope.”

“I haven’t asked you yet,” he pointed out politely.

“Well, hurry up. We only have seven and a half months.”

“That’s more than enough time,” he said, leaning back against the tufts of grass that poked through the fine white sand. “Let me think about it.”

“Jake!” Maddy shrieked, and suddenly found herself sprawled on top of him, held firmly in the warm, strong circle of his arms.

“I’ve thought about it,” he said with a grin. “Will you marry me, mi amor?”

She smiled down at him, at peace for the first time in her life. “With pleasure, Murphy. With pleasure.”

And as the first streaks of sunlight touched the stormy Pacific and the cool sea breeze blew around them, the war was over. And life had just begun.