Kiss and Run

“We need cigars,” he told Cecily. “We’ll stop on the way.”

She did another one of those little whooshy sounds, like the one she’d done when he’d still been trying to get the blood running back to his head. “Do you happen to know where GOCC is?” she said, sounding like patience sitting on a pressure cooker.

“Yes.”

“Would you consider sharing it with me?”

Uh-oh, a little steam was starting to show. She’d found the parking lot exit at last, and sat there poised, waiting for him to answer.

He saw a way to put off visiting Muffy indefinitely. “Left,” he instructed her and punched the number two on his phone to direct his next call to his parents.

“Now what?” Cecily had reached an intersection.

“Take the LBJ.”

“Okay.” The car didn’t move. “Where is it?”

“Take a right and follow the signs. I need to make these calls.” When his mother answered, he said “Hi. You have a granddaughter.” Interrupting the shrieks of excitement, the string of questions, he said, “Details later. She’s at GOCC. Right. See you there.”

Now he’d done everything anyone could have expected. Gator was about to take off from Meacham Field in Fort Worth. He’d be at Love Field in Dallas in the time it took a small plane to go straight up, then straight down. The proud Murchison grandparents, who lived in Highland Park, would beat Gator to the hospital. Muffy would soon be surrounded by people who actually liked her.

What he wanted to do now was renew his acquaintance with Cecily. What she wanted to do was take him straight to the hospital to see Muffy. Why was she so determined to make him visit the twin sister who, from the second he’d entered the world, had made his life a living hell?

CECILY HAD TO ADMIT THAT SHE was a little disappointed in the kind of man Will had apparently grown up to be. And she didn’t mean a married man. If he had to be a married man, she wanted him to be a good married man. It was upsetting that he’d seemed so reluctant to follow his wife and baby to the hospital. Maybe he’d been in shock, because now, making his phone calls to family or friends, he sounded pleased and excited.

Driving Will’s luxurious car made her intensely nervous. She was out of her element. Three years in the country and she’d already forgotten that in a city, even a parking lot could be hard to negotiate without a map. In Vermont, even the freeway was a gentle, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing experience. The LBJ, she feared, would be a jungle.

Seeing the first sign pointing toward it, she went into panic mode. She’d never had a sense of direction, and she’d lost her freeway fighting skills. Those two things combined with the inappropriate feelings she had toward the man she was driving were a foolproof recipe for disaster. Still, getting Will to the hospital was a job she had to do, and she always did her job.

Uh-oh, she had to make a choice—head north and east or south and west. “Will,” she said, “which direction do I go on the LBJ? Tell me quick, because northeast is the left lane and southwest is the right lane, and I don’t know how the hell I’m going to change lanes.”

Will sat back, folded his arms over his chest and said, “You’re fine where you are.”

What a relief. The traffic swarmed around her, cars cutting in front of her, sliding in behind her, but all she had to do was cling to her spot in this lane. It led her up the entrance ramp. She’d arrived. She was on the freeway. Standing still.

“Lots of traffic,” she said.

“It’s always like this,” Will said.

“But we need to hurry!” She raised her hand to slam the heel onto the horn in the center of the steering wheel.

He grabbed her wrist. “Honking won’t help.”

The touch of his fingertips sent her into total meltdown. Will had turned her on to a degree she couldn’t ignore. It was her own fault that she’d let it happen. If she’d only read on after she’d sighted Will’s name, if she’d only noticed that a Muffy Murchison was also in the wedding party, she would have assumed the worst and accepted it with spartan stoicism. But she hadn’t read on, and one look at him had her drooling on his shoes. Now she had to redirect her raging lust.

This frivolous trip to Dallas for Sally’s wedding had become a landmark in her life. She’d buried herself so completely in her work that she’d forgotten the realities of life. She needed sex just as any normal woman did.

And she needed it now. She’d find somebody else to spend a hot, steamy twenty-four hours with, and Will could help her do it.

She’d delivered Will’s baby. Now he, by golly, could deliver her into the arms of an unmarried man.

WILL WAS AFRAID HE’D MISSED his calling. He should have been a military strategist. While Cecily was hardly the enemy, his diversionary tactics had gotten her onto the LBJ going in the wrong direction, and the freeway was packed. Now that they were on it, they’d be here a while.

Which suited Will just fine because he’d be sitting beside Cecily, charming the pants off her, he hoped. It had been a long time since anybody had called him dull. In fact, from the time he’d left home for Exeter, he’d been amazed at the number of girls—now women—who wanted to go out with him. In those years away from Muffy he’d discovered he could be himself, not Muffy’s stuffy twin brother, Will.

Cecily didn’t know he’d ever been Muffy’s stuffy brother. So why, when he’d tried to kiss her, had she run like a bunny out into a violent electrical storm?

It hadn’t boosted his ego any. He’d eventually gotten over the ego part, so why hadn’t he completely gotten over Cecily?

“We should be looking for the Glen Oaks exit.” Which was actually where they’d gotten on the freeway. A full loop of Dallas in heavy traffic ought to give him time to have her eating out of his hand. Figuring it was time to set the scene for intimate conversation, he punched up a CD, turned the surround sound down low and searched for a conversation starter. “So, you came back for the wedding.” Brilliant, Will, just brilliant.

“Under duress.” The fine line of cheekbone and jaw tightened.

“You and Sally were friends somewhere along the way? I mean, obviously you were.”

“When we were too young to know better.”

“So, you lived in Dallas and then you moved away?” It was as if cracking a crab getting anything out of her. But that explained why he didn’t know her. By junior high their group had been pretty tight, a clique that grew out of sharing a neighborhood, school and country club. Some of them didn’t even like each other, but those things and family ties—their parents’ friendships or business relationships—bound them together. Sally and Muffy, for example, were always at each other’s throats, and yet Sally had asked Muffy to be her matron of honor.

To his surprise, Cecily suddenly got chatty. “My father’s a professor of economics. I was born here while he was at SMU. We’ve moved numerous times. He’s at New York University now. But my mother keeps up with Elaine Shipley. We lived next door to the Shipleys in Dallas. I don’t know why Sally asked me to be maid of honor. Will, this traffic is impossible,” she wailed. “We’ll never make it to the hospital.”

“Muffy’ll understand. She knows what the freeway is like.” Get back to you and me. Cecily had fallen silent. It was up to him again. “This is going to be a really big wedding.” That was a good one. “As far as I can tell, everybody in Dallas will be there.”

“That’s what my mother told me,” Cecily said. “Except she said ‘the most important people in Dallas.’”

“Yep, everybody from the mayor to the Dallas Grand Opera director. Oh, and Congressman Galloway and both senators. You keep up with local politics?”

“No.”

So there was no point in pursuing that tack any further. Will cleared his throat. “Where’s your practice?”

It was a simple question, but it seemed to jar her a little. “Blue Hill, Vermont.”

“Why Vermont?”

This time she hesitated even longer. Maybe it was just because the traffic had started to move. “It’s where the big bucks are in my field.”

“Yeah, you have to think about things like that.” In spite of himself, he was getting interested. “You have a specialty?”

“I’m in general medicine, but…but I’ve gotten pretty good at high-risk deliveries.”

“No kidding? What a coincidence for you to be right there in Sally’s wedding party just when Muffy needed you.” He considered what she’d said. “I’m surprised, though. I would have thought the big bucks would be in New York, Chicago—a big city full of career women who don’t have kids until they’re getting close to forty.”

“Yes, but Vermont’s such a beautiful place,” she said, “and the pace is slower. No place is perfect, of course.”

“What’s the downside?”

“It gets lonely sometimes.” The traffic really was moving now, not quickly but steadily, and she seemed to be concentrating on it.