From the Heart

London, it would be up to him to keep close to the president—watch for reactions, wait for a quote. The desire to be in the field and report his own stories had been the major element in his refusal of the anchor job in New York.
    Thorpe would take what tidbits he could glean from the press secretary and use his own talents for observation and assimilation not only to give his own report, but to feed information to his colleagues.
    Though the assignment was a plum, he almost wished it had been handed to Carlyle or Dickson, correspondents from the competing networks. He was on Air Force One. Liv was on the press plane.
    She had kept her distance from him during the past few days, and Thorpe had given her room. He’d had little choice with the pressures of a top news story taking up his time. Yet the same story had brought them both, with frustrating consistency, to the same locations.
    She’d been cool, he recalled, each time they had run into each other—at the White House gates, at the Capitol, at the British embassy. There had been no hint of the woman he had seen eating hot dogs and cheering over a home run. The ease with which she distanced him was more frustrating than he liked to admit. Even to himself. Impatience was dangerous, he knew. But his was growing.
    She wasn’t indifferent to him, he thought, as he scowled out of the window. A bit of turbulence made the plane tremble slightly as he pulled out a cigarette. No matter what she said, or how she acted, she couldn’t erase the way she responded to him. There was hunger, and no matter how she struggled against it, the hunger won whenever he held her in his arms. Thorpe was willing to settle for that. For now.
    “Three kings!” Thorpe heard the muttered expletive from the seat behind him. “Hey, T.C., let me deal you in before this guy cleans us all out.”
    As he started to agree, Thorpe saw the president slip inside his office with his secretary and speech writer.
    “Later,” he said absently, and rose.
     
    When was the last time I went to England? Liv wondered. As she thought back, she remembered the summer she had been sixteen. She had traveled with her parents and her sister in first class. She had been allowed to nibble caviar and Melinda had been given champagne. The trip had been Melinda’s eighteenth birthday present.
    Liv remembered how her sister had chattered endlessly about the parties she would go to, the balls, the teas, the theaters. Clothes had been discussed unceasingly until her father had buried himself behind a copy of the Wall Street Journal. Too young for balls, ambivalent about dresses, Liv had been bored to distraction. The caviar, an unwise sampling of her sister’s champagne and air turbulence had proven an unfortunate combination. She’d been ill—to her sister’s disgust, her mother’s surprise and her father’s impatience. For the rest of the journey she had been looked after by a flight attendant.
    Twelve years ago, Liv thought with a sigh. Things had certainly changed. No champagne and caviar on this trip. Unlike Air Force One, the press plane was both crowded and noisy. The card games here were less restrained. Reporters and crew from Washington stations roamed up and down the aisles, gambled, argued, slept—finding ways to ease the tedium of a long plane flight. Still there was an air of anticipation, of energy. The Big Story.
    Liv busied herself with working on notes while two correspondents across the aisle speculated on the political ramifications of Summerfield’s death. He’d been a reserved, almost bookish member of Britain’s Conservative party. Yet underneath, Liv mused as she scribbled down her thoughts, there’d been a fine edge of steel. He hadn’t been a man to be tampered with, or intimidated by tricky diplomatic maneuvers. She made notations on three potentially volatile situations he had handled during his term as prime minister, and other legislative triumphs, small and large, during his government career.
    Liv had done quite a bit of research during the past two days, boning up on parliamentary procedure and Summerfield in particular. She had needed a firm handle on British politics in order to convince Carl to send her on the story. His argument that Washington politics were her forte had been only the first stumbling block. Thorpe, as usual, had been a larger one. Pressing down hard on her pencil with this thought, Liv snapped off the point.
    Thorpe was going to England. Thorpe had