“Blake has it running like a well-oiled machine.” Blake was his younger brother who’d taken over the family winery when Gideon was elected. “Since my term ended, I opened a law office in White Plains, did a little work for the family, taught martial arts at the high school, but…I need something else.”
Alaska. That brought to mind ice and snow, days without sunshine, people bundled up in furs. But Gideon was someone who thought the sun was shining even when it wasn’t. He never remembered a hat or an umbrella. It didn’t seem like the right place for him.
Still. It was his life and she was no longer involved in it.
“Then you should go to Alaska,” she said, trying to sound amiable rather than snide. It didn’t quite come off. “Because I don’t want to hear whatever you have to say, Gideon. Oh, I know you could make it sound good. You have the politician’s gift of gab. You talked me into believing I was going to love the state of New York, that I was going to have no trouble being a senator’s wife. You talked me into waiting to have a baby.” A small tremor broke that last word, and she had to clear her throat to go on, the pretense of amiability slipping away. Instead, all the old grudges were demanding attention. “And as I was busying myself with charity work, living an almost nunlike existence while you claimed to be swamped with work, you were fooling around with Claudia Hackett.”
He hesitated a moment, drew a breath, and in a voice that sounded as though he had difficulty controlling it, he said, “I came specifically to say one more time—I was not fooling around with Claudia Hackett.”
“I saw you with my own two eyes!”
“Your two eyes,” he said quietly, “misinterpreted what they saw.”
“How do you misinterpret,” she demanded, “a woman in nothing but panties?”
A man and a woman who’d just climbed out of a van turned as Prue raised her voice, clearly prepared to listen to them instead of going into the restaurant.
“Will you please sit in the cab with me,” Gideon asked, “so that we don’t make any more of a scene than we already have?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she insisted. “It’s taken me a whole year to get over you and over the—” She stopped and drew a steadying breath. “Over everything.”
He shifted his weight and folded his arms. “Well, I’m not leaving until you listen to what happened.”
“Then I hope you’re happy in the parking lot,” she said, moving past him, “because you’re going to be here for a long time.”
He caught her arm and took the cab keys from her. “Look, Prue,” he said, pulling her with him toward the cab. “You listen to my explanation. That’s all I ask. Believe me. Don’t believe me. I really don’t care. Give me ten minutes, and then I’m out of here.”
“What’s the point, Gideon?” she asked, pulling against him. “We are so out of love, there’s no going back.”
“I’m not trying to get you back.” He sounded convincing. Well, that was a comfort. Sort of. “Why would I want to live with you if you won’t trust me? It’s just become a matter of personal necessity that I tell you what happened, even if you don’t believe it.”
She huffed a noisy breath and stopped struggling. If it meant he’d go away and she could forget, it was worth anything. “All right. Ten minutes. And I’m sitting behind the wheel.”
“Fine.” He unlocked the driver’s-side door of the old station wagon, reached in to hit the button that unlocked the passenger door, then returned the keys to her. He walked around the cab and climbed in.
She tossed the clipboard that held Paris’s daily log onto the dash, and her cell phone with it. She pushed the sun visor out of her way, leaned an elbow on the window and rested her left hand comfortably on the steering wheel.
He studied her posture. “You look comfortable,” he observed.
She straightened, dropping her hand to her lap. “Force of habit. I used to drive a shift for Paris off and on.”
He raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Really. Does she know you sometimes drive on the sidewalk and can fell a parking meter without looking back?”
She glowered at him. “That was an accident and you know it.”
“I would hope so.”
“My heels were too high.” They’d been driving home from a party and quarreling. She’d insisted on driving.
“A lead foot in high heels is not a good thing.”
She turned slightly to give him her most arctic stare. “I thought you wanted to talk about you and Claudia.”
That stare had never intimidated him in the old days, and it didn’t now. “Still the same old Prue. Ignore your own transgressions but remind everyone else of theirs.”
She reached for her door handle, but he caught her arm. “All right, all right. Let’s not waste ten minutes arguing.”
“We wasted a whole marriage arguing,” she countered. “When you were around enough to argue.”
GIDEON WONDERED why he’d come. It wasn’t that he wanted her back; he’d been honest when he told her he didn’t. He’d thought the absolute adoration he’d had for her in the beginning had completely disintegrated, but it hadn’t. One look at her made him forget the bad times, remember the fun.
She was not very tall, but nicely rounded where it counted, and still absolutely beautiful. She had long, golden-blond hair that was piled atop her head today, but if he concentrated, he could remember it running across his face in the throes of lovemaking, silky and cool.
Her blue eyes could be lively with laughter or stormy with petulance, her mouth soft and full in the raspberry shade of lipstick she’d always preferred.
She was also still capable of raising his blood pressure.
But he planned to move his life in a new direction, and it was important that she hear him out. He was probably wasting his breath—he’d be damned if he’d just be quiet and disappear as she wanted him to.
“A lobbyist for industry,” he began without preamble, “was offering bribes to push through his particular agenda, and the attorney general’s office invited me into this scheme to flush out Senator Crawford from Vermont who was suspected of having accepted a boat and a place in the Caymans.”
She rolled her eyes. “I believe good old Crawford was crooked, but you’re telling me Claudia was a lobbyist?”
“No,” he replied patiently. “I’m telling you that I was aware that Crawford had a mistress who was a stripper. Several members of the ethics committee ate together when we worked weekends, and I’d seen him meet her afterward.”
She thought she had him when she asked, “And you saw him with this mysterious woman and knew she was a stripper. How was that?”
“One of the others who frequented the club where she worked told me. And Crawford was such a posturing braggart, I was sure he had to have told her what he was doing.”
“So she got down to her panties and poured her heart out to you, is that what you’re telling me?”
He closed his eyes, hoping to summon patience. “No,” he said. “I’m telling you that she told me she’d tell us everything she knew if we could guarantee her safety. The attorney general suggested we take her someplace quiet and remote to record her story.”
“Ah.” She nodded as though in understanding. Then she asked, “And where were these members of the ethics committee when she was in her panties?”
She’d never believe