One Good Turn (3 page)

“I hate dancing.”

What was she supposed to do now? Apparently he didn’t want her to desert him, but she felt ridiculous hovering awkwardly above his chair, gazing down into his haunting eyes and panicking over their profound effect on her.

“Want to go outside?” he suggested.

“Okay.” She was relieved that he’d taken the initiative just as her mind was going terminally blank. A few minutes in the fresh evening air might be just what she needed to clear her head and cool off.

He placed his bottle in a clean ashtray on the table at his side, a gesture that implied he’d grown up in classy surroundings where people knew how to avoid leaving water stains on the furniture. But of course he’d grown up in classy surroundings; he was wearing a Ralph Lauren shirt and no socks.

Still, Jenny found it easier to envision him on a scrappy wood-hulled sailboat than in a mansion. He’d looked decidedly uncomfortable in the majestic wing-back chair.

As soon as he stood she suffered her own keen discomfort. He was nearly a foot taller than her. Ordinarily she didn’t mind her petite size, but now she did.

He gave no indication that the drastic difference in their heights bothered him. With a wave of his hand he invited her to precede him out of the living room.

A cluster of people stood in the front hall, arguing politics. Excusing herself repeatedly, Jenny inched through the crowd to the door and outside. This was something, she thought grimly: she was leaving a party with a gorgeous guy who towered at least ten inches above her and who had drunk some amount of beer, and she didn’t even know his name. One of these days, she concluded with a rueful sigh, her trusting nature was going to get her in trouble.

But she couldn’t bear the possibility that the world had no room in it for trust. Let people like Sybil be cynical. Jenny was an optimist. She was certain she had nothing to fear from this handsome stranger.

She waited until he had joined her on the brick front porch and the door had swung shut, cutting them off from the spirited debate in the front hall. Then she turned to him. “What’s your name?” she asked.

He opened his mouth and then closed it, as if he actually had to mull over whether or not to answer what she considered a very reasonable question. If he decided not to, she would go right back inside, elbow her way through the front-hall debate, head downstairs to the basement and dance herself into a sweat with a nice, uncomplicated man whose eyes weren’t sending out an SOS.

“Lucas Benning,” he said.

Lucas Benning. She rolled his name around in her mind and decided she liked it. He’d won himself a reprieve. “Should we take a walk?” she asked.

He shrugged and stepped off the porch. She joined him on the sidewalk and they began a leisurely stroll toward O Street. The block was picturesque, lined with charming town houses, leafy trees and decorative street lamps that cast pools of golden light onto the cobblestone road. The sky stretched rich and blue overhead, not quite dark enough to reveal the stars. The evening air was like velvet, thick and soft and warm.

Digging her hands into the pockets of her skirt, Jenny glanced up at Lucas and smiled tentatively. “Why don’t you tell me something about yourself?” she asked.

He stumbled to a halt and gaped at her. Then he broke into a laugh, another low, throaty chuckle that had the same unfortunately arousing effect on her as his last laugh. “You really are a busybody, aren’t you.”

She wished there was some way to explain that Lucas himself brought out the busybody in her. She didn’t make a habit of interrogating strangers at parties. But the minute she’d seen the odd, desperate look in his eyes she’d felt an inexplicable compulsion to rescue him.

“Look,” she said self-consciously, “if you want me to leave you alone, just say the word and I’ll disappear.”

He studied her for a several seconds. Behind him a car bumped along the cobblestones; across the street a trio of youths whizzed down the sidewalk on skateboards. “What’s the word?” he asked.

All right. He wanted her to leave. She’d tried and failed. Not everybody wanted to be rescued. “The word is ‘Go,’” she told him.

He scrutinized her for another long moment. “I’ll have to be careful so it doesn’t slip out accidentally,” he said. His lips skewed into a cockeyed smile and Jenny steeled herself against the unnerving surge of warmth it stirred inside her.

He resumed walking, and Jenny fell into step beside him. They turned the corner onto another tree-lined block of preserved historical houses and quaint street lamps. She didn’t dare to look directly at him again, but a quick glimpse informed her that he, too, had buried his hands in his pockets. She recalled his tapered fingers, the way he’d held his beer bottle by the neck, the way his wristbone had protruded. She noticed the masculine hair, a pale brown shade, growing over the sun-bronzed skin of his forearms.

To distract herself, she asked, “Where are you working?”

“On the Hill.”

“The Capitol? How exciting!”

He shrugged nonchalantly.

Eager to spend her last summer before graduation in Washington, she had taken the civil service exam for summer employees and sent in a general application, agreeing to accept a job wherever an opening could be found. The State Department had contacted her, performed a security clearance on her, and hired her as a floating clerk to replace the regularly employed administrative assistants when they took their vacations. Some of the college kids she’d met were in the city on special grants to do research at the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian, and some with financial resources Jenny lacked were involved in volunteer work for political parties and the like.

But to work at the Capitol—that was where the glamor was. “What do you do there?” she asked Lucas.

“I’m a gofer,” he said modestly. “I’m working in Senator Howard Milford’s office.”

“Senator Milford? Wow!”

He eyed her quizzically, and she realized she must be coming across like a hick. She refused to temper her enthusiasm, though. “My father got me the job,” he elaborated, as if that was supposed to make it less thrilling.

“Does you father work in Washington?”

“Not directly.” Lucas reflected for a minute, his gaze losing its focus again—or else focusing on something Jenny couldn’t see. “He’s a lawyer, representing clients who need access. He maintains contacts with a lot of people on the Hill. He does a fair amount of business here in town.”

Lucas’s voice had taken on a quality of—not quite disapproval but distaste, perhaps. It was considered fashionable to frown upon influence peddlers like his father. But most people were secretly jealous of their power.

Jenny wondered if Lucas was. She herself wasn’t. Raw power had never held much appeal to her.

“How about you?” he asked. “Where are you working?”

“State.”

“Yeah?” He smiled. “Do you get to read any juicy communications?”

She smiled back and held up her hand. “I’m sworn to secrecy.”

“Oh, come on—one little leak won’t kill you.”

She shook her head. “I can’t.” Then she relented with a laugh. “To tell the truth, I don’t see much juicy stuff at all. I’m in the Western Europe division, which is about as un-juicy as you can get. It’s all friendly communiques.”

“Not a single dirty little tidbit?” he goaded her.

“You want a dirty little tidbit?” She leaned toward him, as if about to confide an earth-shaking secret. “One of the big policy makers in the Western Europe division—a deputy assistant secretary whose name you’d know if I ever mentioned it—is addicted to M&M peanuts.”

Lucas feigned shock. “No!”

“It’s the truth. He goes through a one-pound bag every couple of days.”

“Is he fat?”

“If I described him to you you might figure out who he was.”

Lucas laughed again. And then she saw it—a tinge of warmth in his eyes, an almost imperceptible change but one Jenny recognized because she’d been searching for it, hoping for it. A flicker of light, a hint of hope, a glimmer of spirit. She saw it and felt as if the universe had all of a sudden become a better place.

It made no sense. Why should this man mean anything special to her? Why should he have such a profound effect on her? Why was she willing to work so hard to find that spark of humor in him, that trace of warmth? Why, when there were plenty of other eligible guys in Washington, D.C., at least a score of them at the party Sybil had brought her to, did Lucas Benning matter?

Jenny didn’t need a reason. She believed that everyone mattered, and that the more people whose lives you could touch, the better a person you yourself would be, and that the people who were hardest to get through to were often the most important to reach.

For at least one precious moment on a quiet street in Georgetown, she’d reached Lucas Benning. Of course it mattered.

They continued around the block at an unhurried pace. “Where do you go to school?” he asked.

“Smith College. You?”

“Princeton. What are you studying?”

“I’m an English major,” she told him. “I’m going to become a teacher.”

“A teacher!” His laughter wasn’t warm this time. It was mocking.

“What’s wrong with being a teacher?” she asked.

His smile waned. “Nothing, really.”

“So why did you laugh when I said it?”

“I don’t know.” He sounded contemplative. “I guess...it’s just that everybody I know plans to make big bucks after graduation. Law school, business school—hustle, hustle. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? That’s what’s out there waiting for us.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

He eyed her speculatively, and took his time before answering. “I... don’t know.” His tentative tone implied that he hadn’t ever given the question much thought before now.

“What are you planning to do after graduation?” she asked.

“Law school,” he muttered, sounding almost embarrassed.

She smiled to reassure him. “That’s okay. I’ll try not to hold it against you.”

They turned the next corner. “A teacher, huh.”

“Maybe it’s an unusual choice in this day and age,” she defended herself. “Especially for a woman. We’re all supposed to be pursuing power careers. But I’ve wanted to be a teacher my whole life.”

“That’s nice,” he said quietly.

“Have you wanted to be a lawyer your whole life?” she asked.

His answer was a snort. Then: “So what are you doing in D.C.?”

The implication underlying his question was that only pre-law and business students would choose to take a summer job in Washington, America’s premiere company town, where the company was government and the product was power. “I’ve only been to Washington once before,” she told him. “It was a family vacation when I was about eight. We spent two hours here, a half-hour there—you know, the tourist thing.” She sighed happily. “This is such a great city, Lucas. I just wanted to immerse myself in it for a summer. I mean—to be able to take in the Pei wing of the National Gallery on my lunch break, or to visit the Lincoln Memorial whenever I feel like it... Or to see the actual Declaration of Independence, or the original Star-Spangled Banner... Or even these lovely old houses in Georgetown. They predate the Revolution, some of them.”

He shot her a bemused look. “You’re really into this, aren’t you,” he murmured.

She grinned, aware that she was once again coming across as insufferably corny. “I’m probably more into it than all the high-power lawyers.”

“Ah, yes,” he said dryly. “We’ll end up with all the money and the power, and you’ll end up teaching idealism to a class full of dewy-eyed children.”

“That’s where the real power is,” she declared. “You lawyers may make all the big bucks, but we teachers will be molding the minds of your kids.”

“We’ll be so busy making big bucks we won’t have time to have kids,” he predicted.

They had reached the block where they’d started. The front-hall crowd had migrated out onto the porch; their voices raised in animated debate. Every now and then someone opened the front door and a babble of voices, underlined by distant strains of rock music, spilled out.

Lucas slowed to a stop and eyed the town house from the corner. “Do you want to go back in?”

“Not if you don’t want to dance,” she said, hoping that he’d admit he’d been exaggerating when he’d told her he hated dancing.

He continued to scrutinize the house. “Do you live around here?”

“Thirty-sixth street. How about you?”

“I’ve got an apartment in Capitol South,” he said, ruminating. “Are you sharing your place?”

She nodded. “There are four of us. It’s a two-bedroom apartment, though, so we aren’t too crowded.” She’d heard of summer sublets with three and four people sharing a single bedroom, sublets so overpopulated that some tenants had to sleep in the living room. “How about you?”

“The place is all mine,” he said. At her wide-eyed look, he clarified, “Actually, it’s my father’s. He maintains an apartment down here for business reasons. He’s letting me stay there for the summer, as long as I’ll put him up when he’s in town.”

“That’s very generous of him,” Jenny said, although she privately thought that it was also rather isolating. Part of the fun of spending the summer in D.C. was meeting new people.

Lucas stared at the house for a minute more, then shrugged and waved toward a silver BMW parked at the curb. “That’s my car,” he said. “Why don’t we go to my place?”

“Your place?” A tiny alarm clanged inside her skull.

“Sure. We’d have it all to ourselves.”

The alarm clanged louder. “What do we need it all to ourselves for?” she asked dubiously.

His smile appeared strained, as if he resented her for requiring him to spell out his intentions. “What do you think?”

“I’m not going to go to bed with you, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

Her bluntness took him aback. His gaze hardened and she noticed the muscle flexing in his jaw again as he mulled over his response. “Don’t blame me for misunderstanding,” he grumbled. “You came on to me, don’t forget.”

“Came on to you?” She cautioned herself not to lose her temper. She’d thought she had broken through to Lucas a little, maybe planted the seeds of a new friendship, maybe introduced a little warmth into his aloof disposition. That he was good looking, that his smile had aroused her, that she could imagine herself pursuing a relationship with him—eventually, if they spent more time together and got to know each other better—it was irrelevant. With one sentence he’d exposed himself as a jerk. “You think I came on to you? All I did was say hello!”