Then her heart seized. Her father’s name leapt out from a list tacked on the board. “What’s this?”
He followed her gaze, but his expression didn’t change. “It’s nothing.”
“Nonsense. You have this list of men tacked up here for a reason. Who are they?”
“They’re men who are blocking a bill I am interested in,” he said. He remained sitting on the worktable, his arms casually balanced on his knees, but his mood had gone serious. He watched her like a cat stalking its prey.
“What sort of bill?” she asked.
“Let’s not talk about politics,” he said. “The reason I have those names up there is only about a bill. It’s not a personal vendetta.”
She prepared her camera and took a few photographs, but that list nagged at the edges of her mind the entire time. It was surely no coincidence that Luke had taken interest in something her father was involved in, and it probably didn’t bode well. What a shame that when she finally met a man who captured her imagination, he turned out to be a Delacroix.
“I wish you weren’t a Delacroix and I wasn’t a Magruder,” she finally said. “I wonder what things could be like between us if our names were Smith and Jones.”
A poignant smile flashed across his face. “I think it would mean afternoons basking in the sunlight together. Maybe a few moonlit strolls along the Potomac.”
“Having someone to help me in the darkroom.”
“Having a best friend,” Luke said. “A port in a storm. A person to laugh and flirt with. To hold and kiss and comfort.”
He’d said exactly what she was feeling. She wanted those things so badly it ached.
She wandered over to stand beside him at the table, laying a hand on his arm. “But our names are not Smith and Jones.”
“They could be.” He shifted to clasp both her hands. “We could run away to San Francisco and start our lives over. No past, no future, only the present.”
Now he was being silly, but it was a fun sort of silliness, and she wasn’t ready to return to reality yet. She balanced her hip on the table beside him. “What would we do in San Francisco?”
“We could start our own newspaper, and you could take the photographs. We could watch the sun set over the Pacific, eat the fish we caught ourselves, dance in the moonlight. We could live in a little garret apartment.”
“A garret?”
He grinned. “That’s where all the starving artists and lovestruck poets live. It’s an essential part of the fantasy.”
“All right, we’ve found ourselves the perfect garret,” she said. “What then?”
“We would have complete freedom to live life as we choose.”
How she would love to step into his fantasy, but it could never be. “We could live that way until you started feeling guilty about abandoningModern Century. And I would torture myself, worrying about my mother and if she was holding her own against my father.”
He cupped the side of her face with his hand, and she leaned into it. She ought to be offended by the intimacy, but she savoredit for a moment longer, since this was likely as close as they would ever be.
“Come to church with me tomorrow morning,” he said.
She pulled away from his hand in surprise. “You’re a church-goer?” If he’d told her he was a polka dancer, she could not have been more surprised.
“Every Sunday, plus prayers on my knees each evening before bed.” His eyes danced as he said it, but she sensed he was telling the truth.
“Have you always been this devout?” she asked curiously.
He shook his head. “I didn’t see the light until I was locked up in a Cuban jail. There was a Bible in my cell, and I read it cover to cover half a dozen times. There wasn’t much else to do. That time was brutal, but I thank God for it now. It forced me to take a good look at my life, and I didn’t like what I saw. I wanted to become a better man.”
“All from reading the Bible?” She didn’t want to be disrespectful, but the Bible had always seemed a weighty, convoluted book. She couldn’t imagine a daredevil like Luke becoming sucked in to it.
The humor drained from him, replaced by a serious, inscrutable look. “The Bible helped, but it was more than that,” he finally said. “It took a while for the words to sink in, but when they did, I felt the enveloping love of God, even in that stinking jail cell. I accepted that even a miserable rat like me was unconditionally forgiven if only I would open my heart to salvation. For the first time in my life, I experienced the love of God, but I also felt the fist of God, the crushing sense that I had squandered so much of my life. I needed to tame the wildness inside and turn it toward the good. And then there was a third feeling, a powerful mystic force surrounding me even in the darkest nights when I felt alone and abandoned. I knew there was a God, and I wanted to escape back out into the world where I could shout the good news from the mountaintops.So how about it, Marianne? Would you like to come to church with me tomorrow?”
She pulled away. With each new facet of his personality, Luke grew in complexity and fascination. He was like a lodestone drawing her into dangerous territory, and this was moving too fast. For one thing, she couldn’t trust him.
