Chapter 4

Courtship

Rollin picked her up at the appointed time and place and their courtship began in earnest.  She certainly hoped it was a brief courtship, but she found she was enjoying herself.

Lunch was at a trendy and popular restaurant where people went to be seen.  Rollin knew the waiters by name and they knew him.  They stopped and said hello to several acquaintances on the way to their table.  The service was excellent and they enjoyed a wonderful meal.

Cinnamon and Rollin had been attracted to each other as long as they had worked together, and they had played a number of roles together from adversaries to lovers. They knew about each other’s secret lives, and that gave them an intimacy that they could never share with anyone else. But now they had a chance to get to know each other as themselves, not some other persona.

They chatted through lunch, lingering over a glass of wine and learning about each other’s lives.  Rollin was rehearsing a play that was scheduled to open in another month.  They talked about the theatre in general and he invited her to go to rehearsal with him the next day.  She didn’t have anything scheduled so she agreed.  He also suggested they take in a play the next evening, and have a late dinner afterwards.  She liked that idea too, and he promised to have the details by the time he picked her up for the rehearsal.  She asked if he would like help with his lines, and he accepted.  She had frequently assisted him in similar ways in their secret lives. 

By the time they left the restaurant, they had been seen together by quite a few acquaintances.  Cinnamon took Rollin’s arm as they left, continuing their discussion about the play.

In the privacy of the car, Cinnamon asked, “How long before Jim finds out?”

“By the end of the week, I expect.  What’s your schedule like for Friday?”

“I have an early appointment to look at the proofs for today’s shoot.  Why?”

“I was thinking we should elope that day.”

Cinnamon turned and put her arm on the back of the seat.  She faced him, while he drove.  “Rollin, are you serious about this?”

He glanced at her and smiled that smile.  “This isn’t something I’d joke about.”  He turned and met her eyes for a brief moment.  “Let’s go somewhere and talk.  My place okay?”

She nodded and settled back in the seat.

Rollin’s place was a small bungalow on the beach in Malibu.  Cinnamon had his phone number, and Rollin had been to her place before on business, but Cinnamon had never seen Rollin’s place.

It was small, a one car carport let into a tiny laundry room and then into an equally tiny kitchen.  It was neat and utilitarian.  There were no personal touches on the counters or windowsill, but it was clean and well organized.

They walked through the kitchen to the living room.  A wall of glass let in the light and the view.  A doorway to the left led to a bedroom that also had a view of the ocean.  There was a wooden deck that ran the length of the house looking out over the ocean. 

Rollin walked to the bar and poured two glasses of wine.  Cinnamon settled on the sofa and accepted the glass from him.  He sat beside her, but turned on the sofa to face her.

“Lunch was nice.”  He said with a smile.

“Yes, it was.  There was something very… relaxing about just visiting with each other.”

He nodded.  “Cinnamon, I’m completely serious about this.”

“Rollin, you don’t have to be.  When I get married, I want it to be forever and always.”

He looked down at his glass, then back up at her.  “And you don’t think I would qualify for that?”

She leaned forward and took his hand.  “Oh, I think you’re eminently qualified.”

“But?”

“But, we hardly know each other.  We know the roles we’ve played together…”

“We know we work well together, improvise together in sticky situations.  We know we’re attracted to each other no matter what rolls we play.  We know each other’s weaknesses, we know what each is capable of under fire.”

“Well that’s useful in a marriage.”

“It would be in ours.”

“You planning to do much shooting?”

Rollin had to laugh.  “I hope not.”

“Rollin, we know almost nothing about how we live our lives everyday when we’re not ‘working’, nothing about each other’s families or backgrounds—“

“OK, tell me about your family.  I’ll tell you about mine.”

“Be serious.”

“I am!  Completely!  Look, Cinnamon.  We enjoyed last night, and today, as ourselves.  Let’s spend the week together and elope on Friday.”

He leaned closer and touched his lips to hers.  She moved toward him and the kiss deepened.  He pulled her into his arms and they didn’t think about talking for a while.  After a while they shifted position and Cinnamon settled comfortably into his arms.

“I just want you to know that all I was saying was I didn’t want to be in a haystack.  I wasn’t asking for a wedding ring.”

“I know you weren’t.  And I think I love you all the more for that.”  He kissed the top of her head.  “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.” She laced her fingers with his.

“Why have you waited then?”

She was quiet for a while and he didn’t press the issue.  She had said anything, but he hadn’t been sure she really meant it.

“When I was younger—much younger, I really was waiting for ‘Mr. Right’.  I still thought I’d marry and settle down and have children.  Then the Company recruited me, and I found I liked this life.  I liked the excitement, the risk, and the chance to make a difference.  It’s not something many women get to do.”

She paused again, but he kept quiet.  He knew she wasn’t finished yet.  “I almost thought I had found Mr. Right a couple of times.  One was a photographer and I found out in time that he was a cad.  The other… was someone I met on a mission.  It was before you joined the team.  I was… very tempted.”

“Another team member?”  He wondered briefly if she meant Jim.  The two of them had quite a rapport.  But he didn’t think she had met Jim before he took control of the team.

She shook her head and leaned forward to take her purse from the coffee table.  She searched for a cigarette and he picked up a lighter and lit it for her, then lit one for himself.

She sat back against the sofa and gave a long pull on the cigarette before she continued.  “He was my target.  He was charming and handsome and very much the gentleman.  I had never been so attracted to anyone before, not even that photographer,” she smiled, remembering.  “He was also a gentleman, and we both knew we were involved in the Game.  We talked until the small hours of the morning, then he took the sofa.  I had the choice of betraying him, or betraying my country.  He gave me the chance to choose before we did anything we might regret…”

“Why do I think you still have regrets?”  Rollin asked softly.  He sat shoulder to shoulder with her, his feet propped on the coffee table.

“No, I made the only choice I could.  It wasn’t just my country.  I would have betrayed myself, lost myself to the Game.  I couldn’t do it.”

They were both quiet for a while.

“You’re a strong and special woman, Cinnamon Carter.”

“Sometimes I think I’m a cold hearted bitch with no feelings left whatsoever,” she answered bleakly. 

“No, you’re not,” Rollin put his cigarette in the ashtray and pulled her into his arms.  She moved into his arms and let him hold her.

For a while they enjoyed holding each other close and kissing, but Cinnamon pulled back with a smile.  “I thought I was supposed to help you with your lines.”

“This is much more fun,” he said, leaning toward her again. 

“Go get your script,” she laughed.

“Yes, ma’am.”  He replied and headed to the bedroom.

Cinnamon spent the rest of the evening feeding him lines.  Rollin paced around the room, responding, making his marks as best he could in the small area.  Around ten p.m. he took her home.

The following day, Rollin took her with him to rehearsal and introduced her to the rest of the cast as ‘my girl, Cinnamon.’  One of the cast members recognized her as a model, they welcomed her, and she settled into a seat in the theatre and watched the rehearsal.  After rehearsal they joined some of the other cast members for lunch at a nearby bar.  The cast was relaxed and optimistic about their play and they had an enjoyable lunch.  Rollin had obviously known several of the other actors for a long time and they enjoyed teasing him about his new girlfriend, but it was all in fun. 

After lunch Rollin took her home.  Cinnamon invited him in, but he declined and they made arrangements for him to pick her up in time to be at the theatre. 

Cinnamon spent the afternoon at the hairdresser’s, and looked spectacularly glamorous in a black dress with a wide white satin off the shoulder collar.  She wore diamond pendant earrings and a matching necklace.  Her hair was swept up with two delicate combs.

The play was a black comedy with odd plot twists.  It was the ‘in’ play to see this season, and as with lunch the previous day, they were seen by plenty of people, including the publisher of one of the fashion magazines that Cinnamon frequently worked for and one of the world’s most prominent fashion designers.  She introduced them to Rollin during intermission.

After the play they went to a nearby nightclub where Rollin had made reservations for a late supper.  Their table was in a quiet corner of the room, secluded, but in a spot where you could see everything, and be seen by everyone.  The maitre d’ greeted Rollin by name and settled them at the table.  Cinnamon exchanged a secret smile with Rollin and silently congratulated him on the strategic value of this particular table.

As they settled in with two glasses of wine, Rollin said, “tell me about your family.”

“My family?” she asked, surprised.

“Yes, we’re supposed to be getting to know each other, remember?  And I do want to know all about you. Where you were born, and where you grew up.  Do you have sisters or brothers?  Parents?  Grandparents?  Is there someone we should call this weekend, to tell them about the wedding?”

Cinnamon smiled and pulled her cigarette case out of her evening bag.  Rollin found a lighter.  “My father, I suppose.”

“You’ve never mentioned your parents.  Do they know about your—various career pursuits?”

She looked out at the dance floor, knowing she would have had to tell him this sooner or later.  “My mother died while I was in high school, of cancer.  My father knows everything.”

“A security breech?”  He asked teasingly.

“No,” she said with a smile.  “He has the proper clearance.”

“Oh, really?” Rollin raised an eyebrow as he lit his own cigarette.

“I was born in Paris,” she started at the beginning of his questions.  “My parents were both students there.  My mother was American.  She was studying foreign languages at the Universite de Paris.  My father’s family fled Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution, when he was little, and he was studying political science at the Sorbonne.  They married and intended to make their home in Paris.  But the war came when I was just a few months old.  My father got Mother and I to Nice, and from there to Morocco where she found us passage to the States.  My father remained in France, fighting as a maquis.  Because of his own command of languages, General Koenig assigned him to work with the Allied Intelligence agencies when Paris was liberated.

“My mother was working in D.C. in the war department, teaching foreign languages at Georgetown University.  When the war was over, my father joined us in the States.  Mother stayed on the faculty at Georgetown while my father worked for the War Department, and then the intelligence agencies spawned by them. He now works training agents.”

“Did he recruit you?”

She shook her head.  A waltz was beginning on the dance floor and she looked at Rollin.  He smiled, already knowing what she wanted and took her hand.  They both enjoyed moving together in each other’s arms.  He led her to the floor and they fell into the familiar steps with ease.

At the end of the dance they returned to their table.  Two bowls of soup were immediately served by the attentive waiter and she tasted the vichyssoise cautiously, and then with more eagerness.  The food was excellent.

“After high school, I went to Vassar,” she continued her life story.  “I considered foreign languages, like my mother, but was fluent in French, German and Russian already, and the classes bored me.  Since we had always had a house filled with grad students and teaching assistants, I had picked up a good deal of foreign culture and foreign language just from my surroundings.  With my father’s own interests in political science, I also had a good grounding in the happenings around the world.  So I began studying world history, and moved on to more current matters, political science.  For a while I considered working for some of the political candidates, but the conservative ones were too isolationist for me, I was already a citizen of the world, and the liberal ones were just too unrealistically idealistic.  They seemed to have no sense of the way the world really worked.

“I was considering the Peace Corps, even though I really didn’t feel I had many talents that could be useful.  I’d be better at instigating a revolution than teaching people how to plant enough corn or rice to keep them alive.”

Their main course arrived.  Roast beef with gravy, mashed potatoes and green beans.  She had let Rollin order, and it was a heavier supper than she would have chosen this late at night, but it looked and smelled delicious.

“My father sent me to Europe for the summer while I thought about what I wanted to do.  I was supposed to make a ‘Grand Tour’, but my first stop was Paris, and while I was visiting with one of my mother’s former students, she took me to work with her.  She was working in the fashion industry and one of their models didn’t show up.  I happened to be the same size and she put me in the outfit and pushed me out on the runway.  I spent the entire summer and fall on the runways.  The money was good, the clothes were good, and it was fun, but I wasn’t making a difference.”

“How did you end up with the Company then?”  Rollin asked.  He’d barely spoken through dinner, and had wolfed down his own roast beef, but he was obviously interested in her story.  It felt good to talk about this.  There really was no one in her life who was interested in her this way.  And the list of people she could talk to like this was extremely limited.

“My college roommate had been recruited, and when I went back to the states, I was telling her that I was having fun, but didn’t feel I was contributing, the way we had talked about in college.  She called me a couple of days later and told me she knew of a way I could still model, and contribute too.”  Cinnamon shrugged.  “The rest is history.”

“You said your dad works in... a similar area?”  The waiter refilled their wine glasses.  Rollin asked for coffee for them and the waiter nodded and moved off.

Cinnamon nodded.  “You’ve probably met him.  He conducts briefings at Langley for new agents.  We were both very surprised when I showed up in his class.”

Rollin frowned.  “I had the usual training, but I don’t recall…”

“His name isn’t Carter.  When my mother and I returned to the States when I was little, we used her passport to get here from Morocco.  We just continued using her maiden name.  I guess she was one of the early breed of independent women.”

“Like her daughter.”

“I suppose so,” she said with a shrug.  The coffee arrived while they were on the dance floor.  They sat and sipped the coffee together in companionable silence.

“Rollin?  One thing Dad has always told me, is that our—job—is a young person’s profession.  He has no real concerns about what I do.  After all, he was the one who raised me to want to contribute in some way.  But I know it won’t last forever…”

“Are you asking me about my plans for the future?”  He asked, amused.

“I guess so,” she said, feeling almost shy.  “I need…  Rollin, I told you before, I need a forever kind of relationship.  If you’re not interested, I understand, but I really need to know before we make plans for Friday.” 

He lit a cigarette for her and then one for himself.  “That sounds only fair.  OK, tell me how this sounds.  Short term first:  We fly to Vegas on Friday and get married.  Then I have tickets to fly on to Acapulco for the weekend.  When we come back we can send out public announcements.  I guess I just assumed you’d want to keep your own name because of your profession.  And you are certainly welcome to share my name in any way you wish.  Also, your place is bigger, but mine would make a nice retreat for weekend getaways, so I thought we should move into your place, even though I’m not ready to get rid of my place.  Sound okay?”

Cinnamon nodded with a fond smile.  He did appear to have given this some thought. Acapulco sounded lovely, with or without the trip to Las Vegas first. 

“Long term.  All other professions aside, I’m still an actor.  But I also like the creative side of show business.  I’d like to direct, and write.  Both of which would keep me at home more.  I would be involved in projects for a longer period of time.  I have some ideas that I’ve been cultivating and I’d love to have the time to develop them properly.  Our travels give me plenty of experience and things to write about.  I might even try writing some novels once I have the funds to support myself—and my family—while I take the time to do it right.”  She could see his enthusiasm, something he didn’t let show very often.

“Your family?” she smiled.

“You, and the kids.  You like kids?” he asked.

This made her laugh.  “If I say no, are you going to cancel our date on Friday?”

He was taken aback for a moment before he realized that she was teasing him.  “Well, I—no, of course not.  But I just thought…”

“I like children, Rollin.”  She put a reassuring hand on his knee.  “The subject has just never come up before.”

“Well, no it hasn’t.  Do you want children?  I shouldn’t have assumed that you do.”

“Yes, I would like children, but when that happens, I won’t continue with the Company.  And, how would you feel if I told you I wouldn’t want you to continue either?”

He looked into her eyes.  “That would make sense.  There’s too much danger there.  I’m good, and I know you are too, but I don’t want either of us to have to explain why mommy or daddy isn’t coming home to our children.”

She leaned forward and kissed him.  He moved his hand to her neck, both of them nearly forgetting that they were in a very public place. 

“Cinnamon, I want you so much,” he murmured into her ear.  “I want you forever.  I want to touch you and give you pleasure every day for the rest of our lives.  I want us to grow old together.”

Cinnamon trembled.  Nothing had ever prepared her for the way she felt at this moment.  All the flirtation and romancing and role playing paled in comparison to her emotions right now.  She kissed him again, deeply and hungrily.  “Take me home, Rollin.  Right now.  I want you too.”

“Friday, my love.  Wait until Friday,” he whispered.

“I don’t want to wait!”  She whispered frantically. 

“It’s not long.  Just two more days.  Let’s dance.”  He pulled her to her feet and led her to the dance floor. 

Everything was suddenly different.  She was no longer playing the part of a young model swept off her feet by a dashing young actor.  It was real and she was living it. 

She felt as if she were glowing, alive for the very first time.  Every dance was special.  Every song had new meaning.  Every smile Rollin gave her was like an intimate caress.  She was in love.  She realized it with a great deal of surprise.  The last song of the evening was “Kiss me tonight”.  Rollin held her close and sang softly into her ear.  She shivered from the excitement.

He led her from the dance floor and their car was waiting for them when they left.  She settled next to him in the car as they drove off.  “Stay with me tonight?”

“I have rehearsal early in the morning.  But why don’t you meet me at my place about six tomorrow night?  I’ll cook dinner.”

“You can cook?”

“Well, it’s a limited repertoire, but I get by.  We’ll go for a walk on the beach, then I’ll grill steaks for us.  How does that sound?”

“Very nice.  Want me to bring something?”

“The wine, perhaps?  Whatever you like.”

“Done.  How long are we going to be in Mexico?”

“I wish I could stay for a month, but I’ll need to be back here by Monday afternoon.  I just can’t get away longer right now.  I’ve even told Jim that I can’t take on any missions for the run of the play. I enjoy the thrills of the missions, but need to concentrate on my career right now.”

Cinnamon nodded.  They drove up to her apartment building and parked.  “Come in for a little while?” she asked.

He turned and put his arms around her.  “Don’t tempt me.  It’s hard enough to leave you now.”  He brushed her lips gently then pressed harder, more insistently.  The kiss was long and hot and she wanted more, much more, but she finally pulled back.

She caressed his cheek.  “You taste so good.  It’s never felt like this before.”

“We were meant to be together.  I know we were.”

She was beginning to believe it.  “I’ll see you tomorrow night?”

“I’ll be home around five-thirty.  Do you want me to pick you up?”

“No, I’ll drive over.  What time do we fly out on Friday?”

“That’ll be fine.  I’ll pack and be ready to leave as soon as my meeting is over.”

“I can’t wait.”

“Me either.”  She kissed him again, softly, not trusting herself to go any further.  She slid across the seat and out the door.  She leaned back in and gave her best flirting smile.  “Good night, handsome.”

“Goodnight beautiful.”

He watched until she entered the apartment building and got on the elevator.  Then he drove across the street and waited, watching her balcony.  She hadn’t said anything, but he wasn’t surprised when the light came on and she walked out onto the balcony.  She blew him a kiss and he drove away.

End part 4

<return to conspiracy> <part 5>