Now and Forever by Danielle Steel Page A

but the decor was Spartan and chill. He rose from behind his desk, a man of medium height with a full head of gray hair. He wore glasses, and he was frowning.
    "Mrs. Clarke?" The secretary had announced her, but he would have known her anyway. She looked the way he had expected her to--wealthy, elegant. But she was younger than he had expected, and more composed than he had dared to hope.
    "Yes. How do you do?" She held out a hand, and he took in her full height. She was a striking young woman. He mentally made a pair of her and the unshaven, tired, but still handsome young man he had seen in the city prison that morning. They must look quite something together. They would also look good in court. Maybe too good--too beautiful, too young. He didn't like the looks of this case.
    "Won't you sit down?" She nodded, slid into a chair across from his desk, and declined his offer of coffee.
    "You've seen Ian?"
    "I have. And Sergeant Houghton. And the assistant district attorney assigned to the case. And I spoke to Philip Wald for over an hour last night. Now I want to talk to you, and then we'll see what kind of a case we really have here." He attempted a smile and shuffled some papers on his desk. "Mrs. Clarke, have you ever been into drugs?"
    "No. And neither has Ian. Nothing more than a few joints once in a while. But I don't think we've smoked any grass in over a year. Neither of us ever liked it much. And we don't drink anything more exotic than wine."
    "Let's not jump ahead of ourselves. I want to get back to drugs. Are any of your friends in that scene?"
    "Not that I know of."
    "Would anything of that nature be likely to turn up in an investigation of you or Mr. Clarke?"
    "No, I'm sure that nothing would."
    "Good." He looked only slightly relieved.
    "What makes you ask?"
    "Oh, some of the angles that I sense Houghton might be working on. He made some disagreeable remarks about your shop. Some girl in there who looks like a belly dancer, apparently, and an 'exotic' Oriental he mentioned. Also the fact that your husband is a writer, and you know the kind of fantasies people have about that. Houghton is a man with a vivid imagination, a typical lower-middle-class mind, and a strong dislike for anything that comes from your part of town."
    "I suspected as much. He came to talk to me at the shop before he arrested Ian. And the 'bellydancer' he's having fantasies about is a young lady who has the misfortune to wear a size 38 bra with a D cup. She happenes to go to church twice a week." Jessica was not smiling. But Martin Schwartz was.
    "She sounds delightful." He forced a smile out of her, with some effort.
    "And if Sergeant Houghton thinks we look like we have too much money, he happens to be mistaken about that too. But what he does see can be explained by the fact that my parents and my brother died several years ago. I inherited what they had. My brother had no wife and children to leave anything to, and there were no other brothers or sisters."
    "I see." And then after a brief pause he looked up at her again. "It must be lonely with no family." She nodded silently and kept her eyes on the view.
    "I have Ian."
    "Any children?" She shook her head, and he began to understand something. The reason she was not angry, why she so desperately wanted her husband home, without a single word of criticism about the charges. The reason for the almost frightening urgency he had sensed in her voice on the phone, and again now in his office. The "I have Ian" said it all. He suddenly knew that as far as Jessica Clarke was concerned, that was all she had.
    "I take it there's no chance they might drop the charges?"
    "None. Politically, they can't. The victim in this case is making such a stink. She wants his ass, if you'll pardon the expression. And I think it's reasonable to expect that they'll be prying fairly heavily into your lives. Can you weather it?" She nodded, and he didn't tell her that Ian was afraid she couldn't stand the pressure.