The ballroom looked exactly as it had during the opening reception, but everything about the way Kim looked at it had changed.
Well, almost everything. She still didn't find the concrete walls especially appealing. And she still didn't like to be here, in this place, when she could have been at home fighting for her brother's life and tucking her children into bed at night.
But she didn't have to wonder, now, what Shane was going to say or do. She didn't have to lie to Shane about Bo. And she didn't have to wrap her mind around spending the rest of her life feeling disdain radiating from every pore of Shane's being every time they were in the same room.
At the opening reception, she had looked for an open chair near the one person she knew in a room full of strangers. Now, she was lucky enough to count a number of the young agents as friends. She waved hello to a few of them as they caught her eye, but instead of making her way to their table, she crossed to the opposite side of the room where the instructors were seated.
Shane smiled and stood, pulling out her chair for her. The small gesture sent a thrill down her spine.
Her reaction didn't go unnoticed; at a table full of spies, of course it did not. Bert gave a tiny smile of approval that Kim was sure she was meant to see; Gabrielle schooled her features into a neutral expression after they flashed with pain that Kim probably wasn't meant to see. Tarrington nodded and welcomed her to the closing reception.
Kim let the conversation flow around her for most of the meal. She didn't have much to contribute to the shop talk, and she was well-skilled at looking interested without saying much. Sometimes that was a chore, but today it was easy. She was sitting next to Shane and that had a way of making the whole world genuinely fascinating.
It wasn't until the plates had been mostly cleared away and the music had begun to grow louder in the background that Kim even noticed who wasn't in the room. Some secret agent I am, she thought ruefully to herself.
"Shane?" she asked. "Where's Drew?"
"He's gone," said Shane simply, and she knew from his tone of voice that this absolutely wasn't something that he was going to discuss in mixed company.
Well, that was fine. Shane didn't have to discuss his feelings for his brother or talk about Drew's latest assignment. (Drew had strongly implied that he wasn't going on a dangerous assignment at all, that he was just going back into hiding and found the whole state of affairs rather boring, but Kim knew better. Drew showing up at the training center had been ancillary, not the main event.)
"He didn't say goodbye to me," Kim said. She knew that that was Drew's way, at least with most people, but she didn't have to like it. She tried to remember when she had last seen him, and realized with horror that it had been the previous morning when he'd choked Shane during the martial arts class. "The last time I saw him, I told him to go as far away as he liked."
Both Shane and Bert laughed at the memory. Kim couldn't help but feel slightly put out by that. Complications aside— and boy, did she know about how complicated families could be— she was almost sure that Drew had somehow helped clarify Shane's troubled thoughts. When she'd first seen Drew a week ago, she'd greeted him fondly because she believed as a matter of principle that everyone deserved a warm welcome. Now, it appeared that she owed him a debt of gratitude and she might never be able to thank him.
"Don't look so sad, Kim," cajoled Bert. "Drew thought it was funny, too. I promise."
"He left because it was time for him to leave, and that's how it works around here," Tarrington added. "We brought him in to do a job, and it was done."
"He couldn't impersonate Shane any longer after Shane punched him in the face," added Bert.
Shane smiled again. "That's almost exactly what he said."
Kim knew well and good that that wasn't all Drew had said to Shane.
Gabrielle flushed slightly. Almost everyone else at the table, as far as Kim knew, had avoided making any significant errors when it came to distinguishing between Shane and Drew. Not for the first time, Kim almost felt sorry for Gabrielle.
Tarrington, too, noticed Gabrielle's reaction and held out his hand to her.
Someone, somewhere, must have had eyes on the Chief, because the music grew even louder.
"Dance with me," said Tarrington to Gabrielle, something between an order and a request.
Bert, in turn, held out his hand to Kim. She wasn't sure what passed nonverbally between Bert and Shane over her head as she accepted, but she relished the feeling. It was normal. It was loving. It was, perhaps, the final moment of calm before she had to return to Salem and direct all of her attention to Lawrence while Shane let Kayla down as gradually and easily as possible.
"You needn't dance with me if it's as bad as all that," said Bert.
"I was just thinking of how pleasant this is," Kim corrected him, and she pulled him closer— not the way she would have pulled Shane closer, of course, but the way she would have danced with Neil Curtis or Paul Stewart or one of the other men she'd been lucky enough to call a good friend.
"You look like you're on your way to an execution."
"Then I'll have to brush up on my acting before Lawrence Alamain sees me again." She sighed. "Are you allowed to tell me how the sick agents are doing?" she murmured in his ear.
"Very little change," he whispered back. "Under normal circumstances we would be asking Agent Peach's daughter whether she wanted her mother removed from life support, but without knowing the nature of the antidote, we have to proceed as if there's hope."
Kim nodded. Proceed as if there's hope. She could do that. She certainly had in the past.
The song ended and she hugged Bert goodbye. She'd liked Bert when she'd met him in passing, and she liked him even more now that she'd spent a week in his presence. "You're my favorite of Shane's ISA friends."
"You're my favorite of Shane's ex-wives."
She rolled her eyes and stepped into the waiting arms of Trevor Conor. Trevor grinned his usual cocky grin.
"You," she warned him. "You take care of yourself out there."
"I always do," he assured her. Hadn't she heard that before from men— boys, really— his age?
"You doubt me," he said, mock-wounded. "You could always agree to marry me. Then you'd be able to keep track of me."
"Hannah would be all right with that?" she asked wryly. Hannah was Trevor's girlfriend of four years. (It was Trevor's friend, the sweet, hesitant Jaren Stroud, who had a different girlfriend every few months.)
Trevor didn't bother to keep up the game once Kim invoked Hannah's name. "I hate being away from her."
"I know she hates you being away, too."
"But I don't want to give this up. I don't know whether I can."
"Has Hannah asked you to give it up?"
"No." Trevor shook his head emphatically. "She says that she knows it takes a certain kind of person to with an ISA agent and she thinks she can get used to it."
"I don't know if anyone ever gets used to it." She remembered, many years ago, Shane's blasé comment that she simply would get used to it. Marlena never did, she'd shot back, and that had shut Shane up for a moment. "But some people do learn to live with it."
"How do you know?" Trevor asked keenly. "How do you know whether someone can or she can't?"
"That's the horrible part," Kim admitted. "It's hard to know where the line is, and everyone's line is different."
"Not what I wanted to hear." Trevor spun her out of his arms, then skillfully drew her back in. "Aren't you supposed to be a font of all wisdom at your age?"
"What exactly do you think my age is?" she asked.
"Fifty? Sixty?"
The song ended and she kissed him on the cheek. "Come visit me if you're ever in Salem."
"Come visit me if you're ever in Clapham. Or if I'm not there, look up Hannah. You'd like each other." Kim didn't doubt it.
She glanced around the room, looking for Shane. Even at the opening reception, when he'd still been so angry with her, he'd danced with her. Surely they would dance tonight, too, before she had to turn her attentions to Lawrence and he had to turn his to Kayla?
"He's dancing with Joan, over that way," said Trevor nonchalantly. "Did you want me to make him jealous?"
"No," said Kim.
"Because I could."
"I don't care."
"He really doesn't like it when I flirt with you."
"Goodbye, Trevor."
"The offer still stands," said Trevor with a wave.
She sought her next partner as quickly as she could; it happened to be Gary Rogers, to whom she hadn't spoken since his triumph at the drinking contest. She congratulated him, and he asked whether it was her brother's name on the trophy a few rows above his, and they spent a pleasant few moments discussing Roman.
After that, she danced with Jaren, which was just as well because she wouldn't have wanted to miss the opportunity to say goodbye to him. But she didn't care whether she danced with Dai Brown or Jax Fields, and she started to wish that the night was over. She'd spent the last two nights in bed with Shane; she would spend tomorrow night in Salem, worrying about Lawrence and Kayla and Bo and Peach. The endless dances seemed like a waste.
Then her entire body tensed with the first chord of the next song even before her brain was able to place it.
"Excuse us, please," said Shane to Jax.
It was an instrumental version, but it wasn't as if Kim needed to hear the words to know them.
What would you think if I told you…
"You had them play this?" Kim asked unnecessarily, gazing up into Shane's eyes. She knew that she looked utterly besotted, and she didn't care.
"Must have been a coincidence." Shane tightened his arms around her, but not the way he'd done on that first night when he'd snarled demands in her ears.
"Must have been."
The strap of her pink dress slid down her shoulder. Shane slid it back into place, his fingers trailing along her bare skin.
At almost any other time, in almost any other place, she would have kissed him. She settled for looking at his lips as he breathed her name.
Funny how a moment before she had wanted the night to end, and now she wanted the night to last forever.
"I have meetings tonight and tomorrow morning," he told her, breaking the spell. "I probably won't see you until we're both on the plane."
"You'll let me on the plane this time?"
"You'll be on time this time?"
She knew that he was teasing her, just as she'd teased him, just as Trevor and Bert had teased her when she'd danced with them. But something made her throat swell up, a ghost of a memory. She'd promised to go to England with Shane, but between Hart's suicide attempt and her own failing vision, she'd missed the flight. It had all been made right eventually, but, oh, the expression on Shane's face when she'd arrived at his front door so much later than they'd planned…
"Hey," said Shane. "I didn't mean—"
"I know you didn't. And if I'm late for that plane, it will be because of circumstances absolutely beyond my control."
His eyes locked on hers. "I'll wait for you."
And as the song reached its final climax— we could be both to each other— he whispered in her ear.
"I love you."
As it happened, Kim was on the plane long before Shane was.
He was, in fact, undeniably late.
"You don't need to say anything," he told her.
"No, I don't," she agreed smugly.
The plane began to move almost before Shane sat down, and certainly before he was able to fasten his seatbelt at Kim's behest. ("Just because there's no flight attendant to force you to do it doesn't mean you shouldn't.")
"With everything else going on, we do need to make sure Andrew doesn't slip through the cracks," Kim declared once they had reached cruising altitude. "It's his summer vacation, and I'd like him to have a few memories of spending time with his parents."
"Agreed," said Shane easily. "He's started to make comments about wanting to move in with your parents permanently because at least they're home."
"I don't like relying on my parents as much as we do. And if this situation with Bo gets worse—"
"And if we make Kayla's life even more difficult," Shane added with a pang of regret. Kayla didn't deserve any of this. She hadn't deserved to lose Steve after everything she'd been through, and she didn't deserve to lose whatever scraps of stability they'd cobbled together when Kim had vanished, too.
"We need to put ourselves in a better position to help out with Shawn-Douglas," Kim decided. "Stephanie, too, assuming Kay lets us. If she's willing to stay in your house—"
"Our house," said Shane. "And she won't be, and it isn't reasonable to expect her to."
"No." Kim sighed. "She won't, and it's not. But she might let us baby-sit Stephanie sometimes so she can focus on her career and the rest of her life. Andrew is so close to Shawn-Douglas, and I want that for Stephanie and Jeannie too. If we've managed to ruin that for Jeannie as well as doing permanent damage to both of our relationships with Kayla…"
"The last thing Kayla wanted to do was hurt you," said Shane, not for the first time. But the words rang hollow. Kayla hadn't wanted to hurt Kim, but she had. Kim didn't want to hurt Kayla now, but she was going to. And Shane had been complicit— encouraging— in it all. "And I don't doubt that she has the same hopes for Stephanie and Jeannie as you do. Not that any of us have any control over whether Stephanie and Jeannie actually like each other when they get older. For all we know, they despise each other now and they just don't have the vocabulary to tell us."
It made Shane happy to see a flicker of amusement in Kim's eyes. "I don't know about sweet Stephanie, but Jeannie is very hard to please. If Stephanie was not up to her standards, we would have heard about it."
"Well, we couldn't have expected Jeannie to be anything but precocious."
"Opinionated," said Kim. "Not necessarily precocious. She's actually slightly delayed in hitting her milestones."
"Delayed?" Shane asked. He hadn't noticed anything amiss when he'd spent time with Jeannie, but then he wasn't a pediatrician. "Is Neil concerned?"
"Not at all. She's doing everything she should, but it's happening a month or two after it should. So he expects her to be all caught up by the time it starts to matter. Remember when Andrew was born? They told us to expect that because he was premature. And we didn't have him with us during that time, but Paul told me that it happened just like that. And Andrew did catch up."
Premature.
The word lit Shane's brain on fire.
They'd been so sure that Jeannie was Cal's child because of the timing of it all. If Jeannie had been Shane's child, she would have been born more than a month too early.
Just as Andrew had been.
There had been other tests to suggest that Jeannie was Cal's daughter, but an abundance of tests had also told them that Andrew was Victor's child. Emma had made certain of that.
And Cal Winters was no less malevolent, no less crazy, than Emma had been.
Shane couldn't possibly have made the same mistake twice.
But Shane had studied enough history to know that patterns tended to repeat.
There was no reason to give Kim false hope, no need to give Kim one more thing to worry about. Shane set his theory aside and, before Kim could ask what he was thinking, unfastened his seatbelt and crossed the plane to take Kim in his arms.
"We won't be able to do this in Salem," he reminded her. "We may as well do it now."
She leaned against him in agreement and commiseration. For the next hour, they allowed themselves to doze and kiss and occasionally admire the view out the window.
But when the plane began its descent, they had to become, once again, the people they had been when they'd left Salem.
Kim called her parents' house the moment that they stepped off of the plane.
From listening to Kim's side of the conversation, Shane gathered that Andrew had gone fishing with Shawn-Douglas, Eric, Sami, and Roman.
"Roman will have his hands full," Shane chuckled as Kim ended the call.
"He's had a lifetime of practice," said Kim fondly. For a moment, she looked happy and relaxed. It warmed Shane pleasantly to see her that way. But the moment passed quickly. "Kayla apparently followed Bo to Memphis. I don't know whether that means Bo was making progress in his investigation or whether he started to feel worse."
That certainly put a damper on any plans to to tell Kayla immediately what had happened between Shane and Kim. She was 500 miles away with her dying brother. And neither Shane nor Kim could speak to anyone else until Shane had spoken to Kayla. He doubted that that needed saying aloud, but he said it anyway and Kim nodded.
"I'm going to go visit Lawrence," she declared. "I was hardly going to tell him anyway."
"Don't you want to see Jeannie first?" he asked, surprised.
Her face hardened. "It's not about what I want. It's about what we can do to save Bo and the others. Visiting hours are almost over at the prison, but I can just barely make it in time. I'm not wasting another day. And if I look like someone who just got off a plane and rushed right over, so much the better for his ego."
She wasn't wrong. He didn't like any of it, but she wasn't wrong.
And as it happened, Kim's plan dovetailed nicely with the plan Shane had been concocting in the back of his own mind. "Is it all right if I collect Jeannie from your parents? We can reconvene when you get back from visiting Lawrence and Andrew gets back from fishing."
Kim agreed to what sounded like a perfectly practical suggestion— what in fact was a perfectly practical suggestion— and headed off to see Lawrence. Shane didn't waste his time glowering after her, furious that she was still throwing herself into Lawrence's path. Instead, he headed straight for the fish market.
Shawn was behind the counter when Shane opened the front door. Shawn's usual wave of anger hit Shane in the face, even if the man's "hello" was polite enough. Shane probably owed the three customers eating fish and chips at the corner table a thank you.
"So you're back," said Shawn. "Just when Kimmy is back. But I'm sure that's a coincidence?"
Shane shrugged. "Work conferences tend to take a week, give or take, whether they're law enforcement conferences or psychiatric conferences." He would be damned if he watched Shawn gloat over the news that Shane had come for Jeannie rather than Stephanie. Caroline would tell Shawn soon enough, but Shane didn't have to subject himself to the follow up questions. He didn't want to hurt Kayla any more than necessary by having her find out what had happened from a third party. He didn't want to put Kimberly in danger by having Lawrence's friends on the outside report that Kim's interest in Lawrence was almost certainly not romantic.
And at the moment, he just didn't like Shawn Brady very much.
"Is Caroline upstairs with the children?"
Shane timed his question perfectly, just as a customer approached to inquire about mussels and clams. Shawn gestured that Shane could go upstairs if he liked.
When Shane let himself into the Brady living room, he found both Jeannie and Stephanie safely ensconced in a playpen beside a baby monitor. Stephanie noticed Shane immediately and squealed with delight, pushing herself to her feet and holding out her arms to be picked up.
Jeannie eyed Shane with interest but no particular expectation. She didn't bother to pull herself to a standing position or even to crawl to the side of the crib.
It turned his stomach. If he was right about Jeannie….
"Hello there," he said to both girls, and he swept Stephanie out of the playpen. She laughed uproariously. "You are such a beautiful little girl," he told her. "Has anyone told you that today?" She gave him a knowing look, as if he ought to have realized that it was impossible that a day had gone by without anyone telling her how beautiful she was.
"I've missed you," he added, and he meant it.
"She's missed you too," said Caroline, as she stepped around the corner from the kitchen, the other half of the baby monitor in her hand. Caroline's smile, unlike Shawn's, was unequivocally pleased. Shane could see her drinking in the sight of Stephanie beaming at him. Steve's death had been tragic, of course, but if Kayla and Stephanie were happy with Shane, then that made Caroline happy as well. "I'm glad you came to visit her. Kimmy said she told you that Andrew—"
"Is off on a great fishing expedition, yes. Kim asked whether I could pick up Jeannie for her."
Caroline didn't make her thoughts on the matter as clear as Shawn would have, but Shane knew that theories were being considered and discarded in the back of her mind. And he knew that as disappointed as Shawn had been when Shane had claimed, again, that he and Kim had not spent the past week together, Caroline would be almost as disappointed to learn that they had. At least Caroline was unlikely to throw herself into the raging, stormy river over it all.
"Jeannie?" Caroline glanced at the little girl, who looked up upon hearing her name before returning her attention to a small stuffed bear.
"So much like Kimberly was," said Caroline fondly. "Always dreaming."
"So much like Andrew was," Shane thought but did not say. "Never wanting to be separated from a toy bear."
He gave Stephanie a kiss and started to put her back in the playpen. Stephanie's face crumbled and her lip quivered. She began to cry in protest.
What an absolute mess. Neither Stephanie nor Jeannie had asked for any of this confusion. It didn't matter that neither one of them would ever remember this time in their lives.
Caroline reached for Stephanie, who determined that her grandmother was an acceptable substitute for Shane and ended her complaints mid-wail. With some trepidation, Shane picked up Jeannie in turn. She was disconcertingly smaller and lighter than Stephanie— seven months made quite a difference at this age, and if Shane's theory was correct, the girls ought to have been nine months apart: half of Stephanie's life, and most of Jeannie's.
One of Jeannie's small hands gripped the tiny bear.
The other hand clutched at Shane's finger.
Jeannie's own fingers were so long, her hands shaped so like her namesake's…
"Shane? Is anything wrong?"
"No," said Shane hastily. "Not at all. Are you all right with Stephanie? Is there anything I can do to help before we go? I know that having so many of your grandchildren here at once has been—"
"A pleasure," Caroline interrupted, as he'd known she would. "Don't forget to take Jeannie's diaper bag. It's in the kitchen."
Shane thanked Caroline again, slung the bag over his shoulder, and made certain to exit the house through the rear door instead of through the fish market. "We're going on a secret mission," he explained to Jeannie. "Don't tell anyone about what happens next."
Jeannie looked at him with wide eyes, as if she were considering the proposition but had by no means agreed to anything.
To be continued.
