As You Wish by Jude Deveraux
Prologue
Langley, Virginia 1970
“Get strong. Get tan. Think you’re smart enough to do those two things, kid?”
The man was as tall as Kit, a couple of inches over six feet, but he was very wide. Kit wondered if three of himself, glued side by side, would be as wide as this officer. With his short black hair, he looked like a cartoon bear.
“Yes, sir.” Kit’s back was so straight it was like steel.
“And when we pick you up in the fall, if you pull your pants down, I don’t want to see your shiny white ass. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir. I’m to sunbathe in the nude.” As soon as he said the words he knew they were wrong. They sounded too elitist, too much like who he was, which was not “one of the guys.” His father didn’t lube cars. Dad had stopped a couple of tribal wars in the Middle East, but that wasn’t something Kit could brag about.
When the big man leaned closer, as much as Kit wanted to step away, he didn’t. “Was that a remark? A joke? Are you laughing at me, kid?”
“No, sir!” Kit practically yelled the words. Sweat was running down the back of his neck.
It was 6:00 a.m. and he’d been pulled out of an early training session to go to this man’s office. But he hadn’t minded. At nineteen, he was the youngest of the recruits—some of whom had spent a couple of years in Vietnam—and he’d been hassled the most. “You been weaned yet, kid? Potty trained?”
“Miss your mommie, do you?”
“A few years back I had a one-nighter with a girl named Montgomery. Think I could be your daddy?”
Kit had smiled through it all, but each barb had made him more determined to do a job that he was uniquely qualified for.
The big man took a step back from Kit. “You...bathe—” his tone made fun of the word “—however you want to, but in September I want you and that big nose of yours lookin’ like you’ve always lived in the desert. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir, you do.”
The man took another step back and looked Kit up and down in contempt. Like all his father’s family, Kit was tall and lean, built more like a runner than this guy, who could probably bench-press cars. “I don’t know what they were thinking when they got you,” he muttered. “You’re just a boy, and you’re so skinny you could slide through a keyhole.” He shook his head. “Do I have to remind you that no one—not even your famous daddy—is to know what some idiot picked you out to do?”
“No, sir, you don’t.”
“You think, Montgomery, that you can hang around your kinfolk and not tell them why you are—what did you call it?—sunbathing in the nude?”
“I won’t be with them, sir.” Kit wasn’t looking at the man directly, but staring over his shoulder.
“Oh, that’s right.” The man had a sneer in his voice. “You’re rich. Own lots of houses, do you?”
Kit wasn’t sure if he was supposed to answer that or not. Some time ago he’d realized that he couldn’t spend the summer before he shipped out with his family. They were too perceptive and too nosy. They’d know he was up to something and they’d do whatever was necessary to find out what it was. And knowing them, they just might make sure it didn’t happen.
No one was to know that he was training to go undercover in Libya. A young man named Muammar al-Gaddafi had just taken over the country and Kit was to find out what he planned to do. Thanks to his life with his diplomat father, Kit was fluent in Arabic in all its dialects. From the classic, to the Lebanese that was half French, to the Arabic spoken by the Saudis that came from inside a person’s throat, he knew them all.
And Kit had inherited the hawk nose of his father’s family and the dark eyes of the Italian ancestry of his mother. With a tan and in the right clothes, he could sit in a souk, smoke a bubble pipe, and no one would pay any attention to him.
Months ago, one of his father’s friends, a former American ambassador to Syria, had spent a week at their house in Cairo. Kit had seen the man watching him as he played kickball with Egyptians, ate schwarma from a street vendor, and as he got into a loud argument in Arabic with a cabdriver. Just before the ambassador left, he’d asked to speak to Kit in private. He started by asking if Kit would like to help his country. It had been a dramatic opening that appealed to Kit’s deep patriotism. Without hesitation he’d said yes.
It hadn’t been easy to lie to his family and say he wanted to take a year off from college to bum around the world. Only his father seemed to guess the truth. He’d stared at his son for a while, then said, “What can we do to help you prepare for this...this trip?”
“Get me away from here,” Kit said before he thought, but his father had nodded in understanding.
Two days later, Kit received an invitation to spend the summer at Tattwell, an old plantation owned by relatives of his mother, the Tattingtons.
When Kit was silent at the question, the big man waved his hand. “Go on. Get out of here. Just remember that I’ll be one of them that picks you up and you better be fit and dark. Now go!”
The next night Kit arrived in Summer Hill, Virginia, and the next day he looked into the eyes of the woman he would love for the rest of his life. But Miss Olivia Paget didn’t feel the same way about him. In fact, she felt exactly the opposite. As though his life depended on it, Kit worked to change her mind.
Chapter One
Summer Hill, Virginia
Present day
Regret, Olivia thought as she looked about the little restaurant. On a TV talk show she’d seen that morning, the young, perfect-looking interviewer, her hair unnaturally shiny, asked the old actor if he had any regrets about his long life in show business.
Of course he said no. He’d had a great life and wouldn’t change a thing. What else could he say? That he regretted his marriage to wife number two, who took everything he’d worked for during his forty years in film? That he wished he hadn’t made the three really bad horror movies when he was broke? What about the twelve years he’d wasted when he was in a drugged-out, alcoholic stupor? But then the critics agreed that he was a better actor when he was drunk. After rehab, he became serious and dull. A costar notoriously said that bourbon seemed to be his fuel to joy.
But he said he regretted nothing. I’ll drink to that! Olivia thought.
What would she say if that interviewer, her dress tighter than the skin of a snake and about the same size, asked Olivia what she regretted in her life?
“Sex,” she’d say. “I missed out on those precious years of young sex. Shoved up against a wall, slamming away in the front seat of a car with the gearshift ramming into your back, sweat dripping off your noses, the sun coming up and you’ve been at it all night, and the next day you’re so sore you can hardly walk. That’s what I regret missing in my life. One summer of it was not enough!”
She imagined the interviewer’s face, her HD makeup that made her look plastic, freezing in place. Would she be stern and say, “That’s not what you’re supposed to answer”? Would the network bleep out what Olivia had said? Would Robin Williams smile down from Heaven and say, “You go, girl”?
To Olivia, one of the great mysteries of life was why young people believed that sex wants, needs, thoughts, cravings—any and all of it—disappeared with age. When did a person go from being “hot” to “cute”? “They’re such a cute couple.” That’s what kids automatically said about people past the age of... She wasn’t sure when that was reached. And at what age were you supposed to forget that you’d ever had sex? Forget those days you spent naked by the pond. The smell of the grass crushed under your body. The water so warm and seeping into crevices, then him licking it away. Kids were shocked if a person over fifty mentioned anything sexual. At what age did a person revirginalize?