The Hostage (Presidential Agent 2)

She walked to the table and poured wine into a glass.

"I'm not sure this is a very good idea," he said.

She walked to him and handed him the glass and smiled.

"There stands the legendary Charley Castillo, in his underwear with a gun in one hand and a glass of wine in the other," she said, and shook her head, and then went back to the table and poured another glass of wine.

With her back to him, she said, "I thought of you all the way down here on the airplane. I thought of you at other times, of course, but I thought of you all the goddamned time I was on the airplane."

Castillo saw her take a healthy swallow of the cabernet.

"One of the things I thought about," she went on, speaking softly, "was how I was going to handle the pass the man whose Secret Service code name is Don Juan was certainly going to make at me."

"I wouldn't dare make a pass at you," Castillo said, jocularly. "Not only would your brother break both my legs-"

"Let me finish, please, Charley," she interrupted firmly.

"Sorry."

"I had to be very careful, so as not to hurt your feelings-which I didn't want to do-or to piss you off, because you might get your masculine ego in an uproar and do something crappy and screw me up with the Secret Service. From what I've seen so far, I like the Secret Service, and when I took the appointment, I burned my bridges with the department in Philadelphia."

"Christ, I wouldn't-"

"Goddamn you, Charley, let me finish."

She turned to glare at him. He nodded, and she turned her back to him again.

She took another swallow of the cabernet, shook her head, and went on: "So then what happened was that you didn't make a pass at me, and my initial reaction to that was, 'Thank God!' and then I realized that you were being responsible, you were being the upstanding guy who would never make a pass at somebody who worked for him.

"And my reaction to that was, what the hell is the difference? He's not going to make a pass at you, so that's it. Relax.

"And then when I left here and I saw you sitting at the table, I thought that's the loneliest guy in the world. And then I got in bed and faced the facts. The truth."

"Which is?" he asked softly.

"That what I really wanted to do was come back," she said, and turned her head to look at him, and then quickly looked away.

He didn't move or say anything.

"Which, obviously, was a pretty dumb thing," she said. "Sorry."

She turned and walked quickly toward the door.

He caught her arm and she tried to break loose, but he held on.

"What?" she asked.

"I don't think you've been out of my mind for more than thirty consecutive minutes since the last time I saw you in Philadelphia."

She turned to face him and looked up into his eyes.

"Oh, Jesus, Charley!" "Oh, Jesus!" Presidential Agent Castillo said to Special Agent Schneider.

He had just rolled onto his back, breathing heavily, and put his arm over his eyes.

"Yeah," Betty said. After a moment, she shifted around on the bed so that she could rest her head on his chest.

He put his arm around her and ran the balls of his fingers gently up and down her spine.