One Good Turn (2 page)

The camera cut away but Luke remained where he was, transfixed. Jenny Perrin an attorney? He laughed in disbelief.

“What’s so funny?” Ellie asked as she glided across the room to join him on the rug in front of the television, her glass refilled.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head to clear it.

“That was about rape.”

“I know.” He suppressed the impulse to continue laughing, although every time he thought of Jenny seated in that stern blazer in front of all those law books he felt a strange tickle in his chest. Jenny a lawyer. Jenny a prosecutor. Incredible.

Ellie was giving him a peculiar look, and he hastened to justify his reaction to the news report. “It was the attorney they just interviewed,” he told her. “She was a friend of mine years ago. I never imagined she’d wind up being a lawyer.”

Ellie continued to study him, a knowing smile teasing her lips. “An old girlfriend, hmm?”

“Well...I guess you could say that.” No point trying to explain the mystifying complexities of the summer he’d spent with Jenny Perrin, the intensity of their bond, the neediness that had evolved into profound love.
Girlfriend
didn’t begin to describe what Jenny had been to him.

But it had all been so long ago. Why strive for precise definitions at this point?

A meteorologist appeared on the screen, backed by a map outlining the six New England states. He gesticulated toward various isobars, singled out various highs and lows, discussed a weather system moving south out of Canada. None of it registered on Luke. All he could think of was that Jenny Perrin was a lawyer—somewhere in the Boston area. Jenny Perrin.
Jenny
.

The woman who’d saved his life.

“The steak is done,” Taylor announced from the living room doorway. “Pink in the center, dripping with juices. Grab it now or forever hold your peace.”

“Fifty percent chance of rain for tomorrow,” Ellie informed him as she turned off the television. She lifted her glass and stood. “Come on, Luke,” she said, extending a hand to him.

He was supposed to help her to her feet, wasn’t he? Well, Ellie was apparently a liberated woman, as willing to initiate chivalrous measures as to be the object of them. Attempting a weak smile, Luke took her hand and let her hoist him off the rug.

“What’s with you?” Taylor asked, eyeing his friend. “You look like you got bitten by something.”

“An old girlfriend of his was just interviewed on the news,” Ellie explained.

“Linda?” he guessed, surprised.

Luke shook his head. “Jenny Perrin.”

“Jenny?” Taylor grimaced and made a gagging noise at the back of his throat. He knew better than anyone else how Jenny had demolished Luke. He’d been the one to pick up the pieces and glue Luke back together again. Despite the passage of seven years, Taylor obviously hadn’t forgiven Jenny for breaking his best friend’s heart.

Luke had forgiven her—more or less. Truth was, he had simply forced himself to stop thinking about her. He had embraced the good things she’d taught him, the values she’d imparted to him, but he’d deliberately put thoughts of the woman herself out of his mind.

“She’s a lawyer in the Middlesex County D.A.’s office,” he told Taylor, stepping aside so that Ellie could precede him out onto the deck.

“Jenny Perrin? An assistant D.A.?” Taylor’s snort implied that he found the idea as preposterous as Luke did.

Suzanne was already seated at the table when they reached it. Ellie sat across from her, Luke between them with his back to the house. Taylor tossed the salad with a flourish, ground a liberal amount of fresh pepper onto the greens and then sliced the warm loaf of sourdough bread.

“Who was this woman?” Ellie asked Taylor.

“Luke’s first love.”

“Ahh.”

“Eons ago,” Taylor added, smiling at Suzanne. “A summer romance. You know how these torrid summer romances can be.”

Suzanne returned his cryptic smile. “No, but maybe I’ll find out soon.”

“Maybe you will,” Taylor agreed with a wink.

Luke followed the conversation superficially. He laughed with the others, made a few jokes, passed the butter and the salt. But his gaze kept straying to the beach beyond the deck, the rhythmic roll of the waves breaking on the sand, the pale clouds hovering above the horizon. A breeze danced through the tall dune grass and ruffled the untrimmed locks of his tawny brown hair. To his right the sun was setting.

He recalled a sunset he and Jenny had watched from the Mall. The sky behind the Washington Monument had turned the color of burnished gold, with streaks of coral and sapphire and amethyst, like some jeweler’s stunning confection. He’d been holding Jenny’s hand, her slender fingers woven through his, the hot, humid air fluttering along the hemline of her loose-fitting cotton dress and her long hair pulled up off her neck in a slowly unraveling braid.

“It’s so beautiful,” she’d whispered, watching as the monument darkened into an imposing silhouette in the waning dusk light. “There’s so much beauty in this world, Luke. Don’t ever let it get away from you.”

He remembered thinking that the most beautiful thing in the world was Jenny.

And she’d gotten away.

“RICH AND BLITZED,”
Sybil drawled.

Jenny turned and acknowledged her roommate with a fleeting smile. She had known Sybil only two weeks; they’d met the day they had moved into their summer sublet, a two-bedroom flat on 36th Street NW that housed a quartet of Georgetown students during the school year. Like Sybil and her other two apartment-mates, Jenny had learned about the sublet from an ad in her college newspaper. The luck of the draw had placed her in the same bedroom as Sybil, a theater arts major from Emory University. Sybil was clever, cynical, witty, and extremely Southern—everything Jenny was not. Despite their differences, or perhaps because of them, they’d become friends.

It was thanks to Sybil that Jenny was at this party. Unlike the staid summer interns and G.S.-5 typists Jenny had gotten to know at the State Department, the folks over at H.U.D., where Sybil worked, were always throwing bashes. This party—the third Sybil had brought Jenny to—was being hosted by a group of guys from Dartmouth who were renting a town house from a Dartmouth alumnus who had packed up his family and moved to Maryland’s Eastern Shore for the summer.

Jenny estimated that at least fifty people were at the party. By the looks of it, they were all college kids summering in D.C., accepting whatever temporary employment they could find for the privilege of living in the nation’s capital for a couple of months. Bright, articulate people in their late teens and early twenties circulated through the house, clad in crisp summer cottons and sipping wine coolers. In the elegant first-floor living room with its Chippendale furnishings, its plush Persian rugs, framed oil paintings and ornately carved mantelpiece, Jenny could scarcely hear the strains of the rock music being played at high volume on the stereo downstairs in the finished basement.

From where she stood, just behind the open French doors separating the paneled dining room from the living room, she had a perfect view of the guy Sybil had diagnosed as rich and blitzed. Jenny wasn’t sure she’d concur in that assessment. The guy did appear to be out of it, but she didn’t think the glazed, unfocused condition of his eyes was a result of too much liquor consumption. Nor did she ascribe to inebriation his posture—he was slumped deep into the cushions of a wing-back chair, with his legs stretched before him and a beer bottle dangling from one hand—or the disheveled state of his long, tawny hair.

His hair lent him the appearance of having just arrived from an exhilarating cruise on a sailboat. The side part was crooked and the shiny locks, the color of coffee with lots of cream in it, dropped past the collar of his rumpled oxford shirt in back. A sail on the Potomac, Jenny imagined, with him at the helm, facing the wind, solitary and free... For some reason it was remarkably easy to picture.

Unlikely, though. College kids with summer jobs spent their Tuesdays working, not sailing. In the evenings after work, they burned off their stress at parties like this. The guy in her sights had probably mussed his hair by running his fingers through it too many times.

They were nice fingers, long and graceful. He had rolled the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows, revealing forearms that were long and graceful, too. So were his legs. He appeared lean and lanky, too tall for the chair but not nearly wide enough for it.

It was his face, though, not his fingers or legs or hair, that had caught Jenny’s attention and held it. There was something stark about his features, something that put her in mind of polished marble—hard yet delicate, sensitive yet unforgiving. His eyes, glazed though they were, were the color of honey, and yet they had a coldness about them, an opaque, grainy quality—honey that had crystalized from too much refrigeration. He had a firm, jutting jaw, a sharp nose and thin lips, all of which came together in a singularly attractive way, but she kept going back to his eyes, eyes inhabited by too many emotions, all of them frozen and mute.

“How do you know he’s rich?” she whispered to Sybil, who remained beside her by the dining room doorway, nursing a wine cooler and sizing up the man.

“The shirt’s a Ralph Lauren,” Sybil explained in her savvy southern accent. “Also, he’s wearing deck shoes with no socks. That’s always a giveaway.”

Jenny had noticed the absence of socks; in fact, her gaze had lingered for several long seconds on the naked, bony ankles visible beneath the hems of his cuffed khaki trousers. She’d never have guessed his shirt was a designer label, though. She was amazed that Sybil could identify the brand from twenty feet away.

“As far as his being blitzed,” Sybil continued tartly, “that’s pretty obvious.”

“I don’t think he looks blitzed,” Jenny argued. “I think he looks...troubled.”

“Indeed. Troubled by demon alcohol. There are plenty of gents downstairs, Jenny, and I’d wager at least one of them is better looking than that boy. Come on down with me.”

Jenny grinned and shook her head. Even if the family room in the basement were filled with contestants for the Mr. America pageant, she wouldn’t have wanted to go downstairs, at least not before she’d talked to the man in the wingback chair. If he slurred his words, if he donned a lamp shade or spilled his beer on her skirt, she would concede that he was drunk and dismiss him from her mind. But until she had absolute proof, she was determined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“I’m going to introduce myself to him,” she told Sybil.

“Bring a plastic bag with you,” Sybil warned with a grin. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me.”

Jenny returned her grin, then entered the living room. She didn’t make a habit of accosting strange men; while not shy, she wasn’t overly forward, either. She knew that some men might consider an uninvited overture from a woman an act of aggression; she knew that other men might take one look at her short, girlish physique and her hot-lava hair and tell her to get lost. She was not a raving beauty. Men didn’t gasp for joy when she glanced their way. Usually she exercised caution at social gatherings, attempted to establish eye contact with a man, exchanged a few experimental smiles and then waited for him to approach her.

Tonight was different. The guy in the wingback chair hadn’t once looked in her direction, but for some inexplicable reason she felt no qualms about marching across the room and imposing herself on him. If he rejected her, she wouldn’t be crushed—yet something inside her felt certain that he wouldn’t reject her. Some stubborn, self-confident part of her soul assured her that given a little time, she could thaw the icy crystals in his beautiful amber eyes.

She reached his chair. He didn’t look up at her, didn’t move.

“Hi,” she said.

Slowly, as if he had to order each muscle into action individually, he twisted in his chair and tilted his head up. His eyes met hers and she sensed no overt hostility in them. On the other hand, he hardly seemed thrilled by the sight of her. A muscle twitched in his jaw, but he remained silent.

“My name is Jenny Perrin,” she said.

He stared at her.

“I don’t think you’re drunk.”

One corner of his mouth lifted slightly. “I’m not,” he said, then raised the beer bottle to his lips.

Before he could drink, Jenny added, “You shouldn’t have any more, though.”

Surprised, he lowered the bottle. He appraised her five-foot-two-inch, one-hundred-one-pound body with a sweeping gaze, his expression one of suspicion laced with curiosity and begrudging amusement. “What are you, a bouncer?” he asked.

“No.”

“One of those born-again teetotaler types?”

“No,” she answered, wondering whether he was as irritated by her as his words implied. Wondering why she didn’t care if he was. “I’m just a busybody,” she explained.

His amusement overcame his suspicion and he chuckled. She had hoped to thaw him, but to her surprise she was the one thawing, melting, feeling her innards turn to liquid at the sensuous sound of his soft, gravelly laughter. All of a sudden she felt flushed and feverish and utterly smitten. If she were a teenager, she’d say she was experiencing a powerful, instantaneous crush on this nameless stranger.

She wasn’t a teenager, however. She was twenty one years old, and twenty-one-year-olds didn’t get crushes. What they got, she realized with some discomfort, was turned on.

“I’m sorry,” she said, aware that her composure was on the verge of disintegrating. “I shouldn’t have bothered you.” She spun away, anxious to leave before he figured out why her cheeks had darkened from their usual creamy color to what she was sure was glow-in-the-dark red.

With a swiftness and accuracy that offered definitive evidence of his sobriety, he reached out and grabbed her arm. His fingers met easily around her narrow wrist, and she prayed he wouldn’t detect her accelerated pulse. “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I’m used to busybodies.”

With a gentle tug, he urged her back to him. She was still standing, he was still seated, and she could have escaped from him the moment he released her. But she didn’t. She stayed beside the chair, unconsciously rubbing her wrist where he’d briefly clasped it. His laughter had disarmed her but his touch gave her courage. “Would you like to dance?” she asked.