Actual Stop (11 page)

By the time we finally finished all our meetings, I was almost able to forget our earlier conversation in the diner. Almost. But things were comfortable between us for the time being, which was all that really mattered.

As we walked out of the field office, Allison bumped my shoulder lightly with her own. “Nice save.” She cast a sidelong glance in my direction, a small smile on her lips.

“What?” I readjusted the shoulder strap of my bag so it didn’t bang into my hip quite so much when I walked.

“That note you scribbled on my note pad about getting the loading dock cleared around the back of the building. I’d completely forgotten about that.”

I shook my head. “No, we talked about it earlier.”

“I know, but I’d forgotten to mention it in the meeting. What if we’d adjourned without bringing it up?”

I shrugged. “No big deal. We still have a few days. We’d have figured it out.”

“Ryan, it’s Saturday night. If we hadn’t told the sanitation department today that we wanted them to remove all those giant dumpsters from the arrival area, they wouldn’t have done it. If the motorcade rolled up on game day and couldn’t park because dumpsters were in the way, I would’ve gotten my ass handed to me.”

“Oh, come on. Stop exaggerating. We would’ve found somebody to take care of it. You can’t tell me no one has emergency home numbers for those guys. I would’ve tied a rope to them and pulled them away myself if I’d had to. Can’t have anyone touching your ass, now can we?”

Allison rolled her eyes and stopped, tugging gently on my arm to get me to break my stride as well. I opened my mouth to protest but was silenced by her fingers pressed lightly to my lips. “Just say ‘You’re welcome,’ would you?” she said softly, looking into my eyes.

A shiver went up my spine. Her feather-light touch on my lips was warm, and I had to fight the urge to give her fingers a soft kiss. I wrapped my own fingers around her wrist and slowly removed her hand. “You’re welcome.”

“That’s better.” Her eyes held mine for a moment longer before she finally broke the contact and resumed her gait. “Give me a lift to my hotel?”

“Sure. Hungry?”

“When am I not?” Allison tossed her bag into the backseat of my car with an almost-euphoric sigh. She rolled her shoulders as if working out some residual tension and opened the front passenger door. “But I’d like to take a shower first, if that’s okay.”

“No problem. Just give me a second to make a phone call.” I stowed my own gear and started the engine.

“No talking and driving.” Allison put her hand over the gear shift, preventing me from shifting out of park without a struggle.

I threw up my hands in a huff. “Fine.” I punched in the numbers with more force than was really necessary and waited for someone to answer on the other end.

“La Traviata. Can I help you?”

“Hey, Kendra, it’s Ryan.”

“Oh, hey, Ryan. How’s it going? Are we still going to see you tonight?”

“No, that’s why I’m calling.” Allison’s fiddling with the programming on my radio distracted me. I slapped at her hand. “We’re not going to be able to make it. I figured you guys would be slammed, so I wanted you to know. I didn’t want you to be waiting on me.”

“Oh, well, we’ll miss you, of course, but we can always use the table,” Kendra said over the roar in the background.

“I’ll stop in soon. Say hi to the guys for me.”

“Will do. Take care, Ryan.”

“Thanks. You, too.” I hung up the phone and rounded on Allison. “I’ll shoot you. Stop messing with my stations.”

“What was that?” Allison stopped playing with the radio and looked at me.

“What?” I was now completely focused on pulling out into Saturday night bridge-and-tunnel traffic. I chanced a peek at her out of the corner of my eye and spied her smiling at me enigmatically.

“The phone call. What was it?”

“Nothing,” I lied.

“You made dinner reservations.” Her voice was soft, and her tone was oddly tender.

“Just for the Italian place down the street. I figured we’d be hungry, but they’re always busy at this time on a Saturday night, so I thought a little insurance wouldn’t hurt.”

“That was very thoughtful, Ryan. We can eat there if you want.”

I shook my head and narrowed my focus to the side-view mirror as I merged onto the Brooklyn Bridge. “Nah. You’re tired, and you want to take a shower. It’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

“I thought we could order room service, a couple of beers, and maybe start hammering out some of our paperwork. Is that okay?”

“You mean, you thought I could start hammering out some of our paperwork?”

“Well, yeah.” She was unrepentant as she picked lint off her sleeve. “We’re a team, aren’t we?”

“Mmm-hmm,” I muttered, amused. She was hopeless when it came to filling out the required forms for visits, and we both knew it. For some reason I had yet to figure out, it took her damn near forever. To say that it would just be faster if I did the whole thing was a gross understatement. If I let her do it, the visit would be over before she had anything that was remotely usable. It was sad, really. And somehow absolutely adorable. “How do you fudge your way through other visits? I mean, you can’t possibly con everyone into doing your work for you?”

“Why not? Besides, I don’t think of it as conning. I consider it the spirit of teamwork.”

“The spirit of teamwork,” I repeated skeptically.

“Of course. They have the pleasure of working with me, and in return, I offer them the chance to gain invaluable experience by doing the paperwork. It’s win-win.”

I laughed and shook my head, knowing when I was beaten. I also knew Allison was just joking. Though she deserved her status as the golden child, she was truly the most modest woman I’d ever met, which made it difficult for anyone—no matter how jealous they might be of her success—to dislike her.

Traffic on the bridge was packed with people looking to go out and have a good time and was crawling. I took advantage of the situation and got out my cell phone to send a quick text message while I had the chance. Once we were on the FDR, I wouldn’t be able to.

“Hey!” Allison made a grab for the phone. “No texting and driving. It’s bad enough you try to talk and drive.”

I had to be quick to maintain possession of the phone. Keeping it out of her reach with one hand while fending her off with the other wasn’t easy. “We’re sitting in completely stopped traffic.” Her flailing arms were now smacking me in the face in their attempt to pry the phone from my grasp, but I continued to text badly with my left hand while elbowing her across the chest with my right. “We haven’t—ouch—moved. Stop it!” I slapped at her hands with my free one and was rewarded with a surprisingly forceful backhand across the nose. “Ow! The message is already sent.”

“Put it away,” she ordered me. “We’re moving now.”

“You’re not the boss of me,” I shot back maturely.

“Away.”

I scowled and touched my nose gingerly before complying with her request. “Has it occurred to you that brawling with me while I’m operating a motor vehicle is slightly more dangerous and apt to get us all killed than my texting?”

“Just leave it in the holster while you’re behind the wheel.” Allison narrowed her eyes and pointed one finger in my direction.

“I love it when you get all domineering,” I told her, allowing my voice to turn low and throaty at the end. I grinned at her and wiggled my eyebrows suggestively, marveling at how easy it was to slip back into playful banter with her. Like not a minute had passed.

Allison was not amused. “How about when I spank you like the spoiled brat you are? Do you love that?”

I made a show of closing my eyes, letting my head loll back, and moaning softly. “Don’t tease me. It isn’t nice.” That earned me a hard punch on the arm and a glare, which made me laugh.

“Uh…Ryan?” Allison said in a small voice.

My insides flipped at her tenor, and I was immediately wary. She did know I was only kidding…right? “What?”

“You’re bleeding.”

“What?”

“Your nose.” Her tone was just this side of apologetic. She pointed, as if I couldn’t be trusted to find my nose on my own. “It’s bleeding.”

I touched my fingers to my upper lip and discovered she was right. “Wonder whose fault that is?”

“Whose?”

“You’re kidding.”

“What?”

“You really don’t see how you might’ve had something to do with this?”

Allison shrugged lightly, but I could see she was struggling not to smile. “I plead the fifth.”

“I’m sure you do.” My tone was wry. I made a faint gesture with my now-bloody hand before returning it to its previous task of trying to catch the crimson flow. “You’ll find some napkins in the glove box.”

With an expression that was an odd mixture of amusement, wistfulness, and contrition, Allison grabbed a couple and handed them to me so I could clean myself up. “How long?” She sounded concerned.

“How long what?” I was busy trying to wipe my nose, assess the damage in the mirror, and drive at the same time.

“Since you were sick? How long?”

Bloody nose momentarily forgotten, I turned my head to gape at her. “Huh?”

“You always get a bloody nose easily right after you’ve had a sinus infection. So I was wondering how long ago you’d been sick.”

I was shocked she even remembered but tried not to show it. “Are you trying to blame this mess on something other than you and your flailing limbs of fury?”

Allison snorted. “Call it shared culpability if you like. I refuse to accept all responsibility for this situation. But if you were recently sick, it wouldn’t take much.”

“Hmm. I only admit it because I want you to know I’m tougher than that, and it’d take more than that pop you gave me to really hurt me.”

Allison smirked. “Of course. You’re a total badass.”

I laughed, and she looked at me expectantly. “What?”

“How. Long.”

“Oh. About three days, I guess.” I was concentrating much harder than necessary on weaving in and out of traffic on the FDR. “Maybe four.” I was oddly touched she recalled something so trivial about me. Especially since I’d been under the impression she’d completely purged everything about me from her memory. A lump began to form in my throat, and I tried to swallow it.

Allison sniffed and glanced in my direction. “You’d better not get me sick,” she said, her tone threatening. She pointed one finger at me as she gave me the command.

“How the hell do you think I’m going to get you sick?”

“You’d just better not.”

“Well, don’t kiss me, then,” I shot back, regretting the words the instant they were out of my mouth.

“I wasn’t planning on it.” Allison fished her BlackBerry out of its holster in response to the vibration that even I could hear in the weighty silence filling the car.

My face immediately warmed, and the slash of regret that sliced through me was agonizing. I hadn’t been expecting her to kiss me, of course, but would it have killed her to want to? Even a little? I inhaled deeply and let out a heavy sigh. I hastily resumed wiping my face with the napkin in an attempt to hide my expression. Fortunately, Allison didn’t appear to notice. She was completely consumed with reading and then answering an email on her BlackBerry, leaving me to wallow in my own unpleasant thoughts.

“How many post-standers do we have for the LZ again?” Allison’s eyes were glued to the device in her hands as her thumbs flew over the keys.

I wracked my brain, trying to remember how many bodies the scheduling guys told us we could have for the landing zone we used for Marine One. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t like the answer. “How many did we ask for, or how many did we get?”

“Those numbers are different?”

I nodded, speeding up in order to pass a slow-moving car in the right lane and then returning to that lane quickly so we didn’t miss our exit. “They always are, out there. But we can use NYPD detectives on the outer-perimeter, nondiscretionary posts. I’ll show you. It isn’t a big deal.”

Allison was pursing her lips and annoyance flickered across her features, but I could tell it wasn’t directed at me, which made me nearly dizzy with relief. I must have hidden my emotions better than I’d thought. Either that or she was more distracted than I’d realized.

Allison let out an irritated sigh and punched the keys on her BlackBerry with a little more force than she’d been using. “What’d they give us?” Her tone was borderline resigned but with a touch of exasperation.

“Fifteen.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Why are you worried about this, again? You have coworkers up here with you getting paid to work out those details. You don’t have to do everything yourself. We have enough to concentrate on without getting involved in things that aren’t our job. Trust your peers to do theirs.”

“I do trust them. But I want to know everything about every single, solitary part of this visit. Right down to the smallest detail.”

I tried hard not to smile because showing any mirth would only irritate her. But it was tough. She was too cute when she was all anal retentive. “Of course. When we get to the room, I’ll go over the diagrams for each site with you one by one. Then you can work it out with the site agents how you want it structured. Don’t worry. It’ll all be fine.”

“You have working copies of the diagrams already?”

I nodded, piloting through the traffic on the surface streets with care, keeping a particularly wary eye on the yellow cabs zipping around. “Yeah. I sketched them while we did the initial walkthroughs.” That made me as much of a control freak as she was.

“Fantastic.” Allison sounded relieved.

“You asked the boss if you could work with me and then expected a half-assed job?”

“Do you really think I’d stake my reputation on anything less than stellar?”

“Then why do you sound so surprised that I made diagrams?”

“I don’t know. I just wasn’t thinking that far ahead. This whole thing sort of took me by surprise. And then there was the shock of actually seeing you.” Her words made me inhale sharply, but I didn’t have time to follow up on them. She held up her BlackBerry and wiggled it at me as she rushed on. “The boss wants to do preliminary walkthroughs tomorrow afternoon. I want to have everything squared away by then.”