Everything but the Baby
Kathleen O'Brien
“You’re confused, and you’re hurt, and you’re lonely. You’re looking for someone to put all those broken dreams back together again.”
“Maybe,” Allison said slowly. “But is that so wrong?”
“It’s not wrong at all. It’s just that…I’m not that guy.” Mark’s voice had hardened. “I’m just one more selfish bastard who wants something from you.”
She felt her heart tripping against the palm she held to her chest. “What do you want?”
“To touch you. To make love to you. But that’s all. You need to understand that. The only difference between me and Lincoln Gray is that I’m willing to admit it. And that’s not enough for you, is it? You want more than that.”
She could hardly think clearly, standing here with her dress unzipped and a desire like nothing she’d ever experienced pulsing through every vein. But she had to think clearly. This unnamed emptiness, this hunger to connect with another human being, had already made her do one very stupid thing. Somehow she had to master it.
“Yes,” she said finally, though she knew it meant this sizzling, thrilling interlude was over. “I’m sorry, Mark. I want a whole lot more than that.”
Dear Reader,
Growing up, I believed there was something magical about being Irish. Irish tenors, poets, humor, legends…my father made sure we revered them all. The old joke “If you’re lucky enough to be Irish, you’re lucky enough” was solemn truth in our house.
Even annoying things could be made acceptable, by association. When I complained that I had dark shadows under my eyes, my father smiled and said, “Of course you do. God put in Irish eyes with sooty fingers.” He may have made that line up, but it contented me…though when I reached my teens, it didn’t stop me from buying concealer by the bucket!
I later came to understand that all families cherish their heritage just as much as we did ours. But thanks to my father, I’ll always appreciate the Irish in a special way—and I’ll always feel “lucky enough.”
So when it came time to create a family that could laugh, sing, warm and charm Allison Cabot, the heroine of Everything but the Baby, out of her loneliness, I knew what she needed. Enter the O’Haras—a big, emotional Irish clan who, like ours, chases sorrow away with rousing, off-key renditions of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”
With the O’Haras by her side, Allison can finally learn to take risks, to live and love without fear. And that’s the wish I wish for all of you.
I hope you enjoy her story.
Warmly,
Kathleen
Everything but the Baby
Kathleen O’Brien
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Four-time finalist for the Romance Writers of America’s RITA
Award, Kathleen is the author of more than twenty novels for Harlequin Books. After a short career as a television critic and feature writer, Kathleen traded in journalism for fiction—and the chance to be a stay-at-home mother. A native Floridian, she lives with her husband just outside Orlando, only a few miles from their grown children.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
AT FIRST, when Allison Cabot realized that her bridegroom wasn’t just late, stuck in Boston’s rush-hour traffic or locked in battle with a recalcitrant tuxedo, it felt like a dream. One of those ridiculous over-the-top nightmares, the kind you recognize as fiction even while you’re sleeping, because nothing that bad ever happens to you in real life.
Oddly, she felt no anger, certainly no pain, though someone shoved a tissue into her hand as if they expected her to dissolve into a puddle of tears. Instead, she felt numb. She floated about an inch above the floor, bathed in the sweet scent of altar roses, watching the drama play out while she waited to wake up.
Maybe, she thought, she had finally absorbed a little of her father’s elegant WASP restraint. Public displays of emotion were unacceptable for the Cabots. Play through, play through, that had been Ripley Cabot’s motto, whether Allison was coping with her mother’s death or a broken toe at soccer practice.
Or getting jilted at the altar.
While she was floating peacefully—the lobotomized bride—someone else sent the two hundred wedding guests home. Probably Bitsy Bohannon, her best friend and wedding planner. Bitsy looked like a golden fairy but had the field instincts of a five-star general.
It was Bitsy who had come back into the dressing room afterward and asked Allison what she wanted to do next.
“Actually,” Allison had said, after considering the matter for a minute, “I’m hungry. I’d been looking forward to that filet mignon at the reception.”
Bitsy’s blond, angel-wing eyebrows had risen slightly, but she didn’t seem to find the comment cold-blooded.
“Me, too,” she’d said. “Let’s feast.”
That had been an hour ago. Since then, they’d sat together at one of the ten blue-silk-draped tables in the Freedom Ballroom of the prestigious Revere Hotel and shared a tender nine-ounce steak, a bowl of creamy herbed asparagus and two bottles of Bollinger Grand Année.
They weren’t drunk, but Allison was definitely feeling less straitlaced than usual. And less peaceful. Anger was starting to bubble to the surface. There might be other emotions, too, deeper down in the mix, but she hoped she could, for once, be as strong as her father would have wanted. A high-strung child, she’d disappointed her dignified father so often: when she cried for days over her dead gerbil; when she asked for a night-light to banish the monsters she imagined hid in her shoes; when their housekeeper resigned and Allie tearfully chased the woman down the street, begging her to come back.
He’d even tried to break Allison of her habit of wishing on stars, a piece of nonsense he believed she’d inherited from her superstitious Irish mother.
Eileen O’Hara Cabot had died when Allison was only three, so if she was was responsible for her daughter’s emotional lapses, it must have been by way of DNA.
Today’s fiasco would have been the ultimate disappointment for him.
Poor Allison, never quite a beauty, now a shade past her prime, falling for such an obvious cad. So foolish. Though her father had been dead only five months and she missed him every minute, she was almost glad he hadn’t lived to see this humiliation.
Of course, that also meant he hadn’t lived to see his grandchildren.
Assuming she ever got around to providing any. After today, that looked more unlikely than ever.
Twisting one of the blue ribbons from the centerpiece around her finger, she surveyed the sumptuous hotel ballroom. Each chair was covered in blue silk, tied at the back with a knot of white roses. Allison could almost catch the sickly sweet smell of petals wilting, fading. She glanced down at her own hand, as if she might be able to see it aging, too.
“You know what?” She looked at Bitsy. “I think I’ve wasted my life.”
Bitsy had been concentrating on making an effigy of Lincoln Gray out of the fruit from the tables’ centerpieces—Bitsy’s answer to any emotional dilemma was to create something. They hadn’t discussed it, but Allison knew it was Lincoln by the white-grape hair, which did look strangely like Lincoln’s shiny blond curls.
Bitsy frowned, a cluster of grapes dangling from her fingers.
“That’s ridiculous, Allie. Wasted your life? I know you’re hurting right now, but—”
“No.” Allison waved her freshly manicured hand with the pink-diamond polish that exactly matched her brand-new silk bra and panties. It was hard to remember how seriously she had taken all these details about four hours ago. She felt as if she’d been punked.
“Not because I’m hurting. I’m not hurting.”
Bitsy nodded, though she didn’t quite meet Allison’s gaze.
“I’m not,” Allison insisted. “I’m…okay. I’m embarrassed, of course. But mostly I’m mad.”
Suddenly, after an hour of numb near-silence, Allison needed to talk. And anger seemed safe. Anger, the one emotion even her father had indulged in.
“Look at this dress! You know what a Vera Wang costs. And four million roses.”
She scowled toward the music platform, where a graceful gold harp stood silently waiting for the show that would never go on. The string quartet would have to be paid, too.
“Heck, I spent a thousand dollars on that stupid ice sculpture alone. I figure every drip of that swan’s beak costs me about a buck-fifty. If Lincoln didn’t want to marry me, couldn’t he have said so before I blew a fortune on the wedding?”
Bitsy laughed and glanced over at the swan, who did appear to be drooling. She seemed about to say something, but then closed her mouth around a cluster of fancy toothpicks, which she was using to hold fruit-Lincoln together.
Allison knew what Bitsy’s unspoken thought was. Lincoln had wanted to marry her, all the way up until last night, when, succumbing to her lawyer’s pressure, Allison had asked him to sign a prenup. He’d signed it without blinking and he’d even kissed her afterward. That was how good he was.
She’d never guessed that he was also signing the death warrant for their marriage.
Bitsy hitched up her sky-blue gown so that she could kneel and adjust the angle of the watermelon she’d propped on one of the chairs. “Still, even though you may have wasted a small fortune…. Why on earth would you say you’ve wasted your life?”
Allison drummed her fingers on the edge of the table. She gave Bitsy a small smile. “Because, although a situation like this calls for a little justifiable homicide, I don’t know a single hit man. I don’t have one recipe for undetectable poison.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t even know a good voodoo curse.”
“Ahh.” Bitsy chuckled, looking relieved. “That’s the spirit.”
Yes, Allison thought, that was the spirit. To hell with “playing through.” Maybe it was the champagne, but she was ready for a supremely unacceptable public display of emotion.
She slid her chair back noisily and stalked toward the tables set up along the south wall, under the revolutionary war mural for which the Revere was famous. The wedding presents were displayed there, two hundred expensive geegaws and doohickeys that someone was going to have to package up and send back.
“Luckily, though,” she said with a smile, “I do happen to have a great set of Wüsthof hollow-edge German-crafted triple-riveted steak knives.” She held one up, admiring how it gleamed under the crystal chandelier. “With four-point-five-inch blades.”
Bitsy frowned. Then, awareness dawning, she gazed at her effigy. “Oh,” she said. “Poor Lincoln.” She arranged the grapes and stood back. “Very well, captain. The prisoner is ready. Fire away.”
Allison took one last good look at the figure propped on the satin chair. “I almost hate to ruin it,” she said. “He’s prettier than Lincoln.”
That wasn’t true, of course. The man she would have married today, if he’d bothered to show up, was blond, blue-eyed, bronzed and…
And that was just the Bs.
But this effigy of Lincoln was bizarre, voluptuous and oddly beautiful. Honeydew head, watermelon body, white-grape hair and blackberry lips. His face was a sickly green and his kumquat eyes were slightly crossed.
Appropriate for a man who was about to get stabbed in the heart.
Allison squinted, her hand on her hip, the knife’s lethal blade carefully pointed out, so that she wouldn’t rip the lace overlay that draped across the tulle skirt of her gown. This sucker was going to fetch a fortune on eBay.
“Okay, I’ve got only six knives, so let’s decide where the bull’s-eye is,” she said. “Right between the kumquats? Or should I split the strawberry heart?”
Bitsy nudged Lincoln’s body so that he sat up straighter. “Let’s say two points for the kumquats. Four points for the strawberry.” She smiled, her blue eyes catlike and evil as her gaze slid to the very bottom of the watermelon. “Ten points for the banana.”
Allison hadn’t noticed the small banana and the sight of its puny yellow curve made her laugh for the first time today. She was still laughing as she tossed the first knife so, unfortunately, it hit the back of the chair, handle first, and clattered to the ground.
She grimaced toward Bitsy.
“It’s that repressed WASP upbringing,” Bitsy said. “Not a shred of killer instinct left.”
“I told you I’d wasted my life,” Allison agreed sadly.
She took more time with the next tosses.
“You are—” the knife grazed a lump of grape hair, then slid to the floor “—a sleazy bastard—” she missed the effigy entirely “—Lincoln Gray.” That one embedded itself deeply in the chair’s gold satin upholstery.
Oh, heck. Repairing that was going to cost a pretty penny. And she only had two knives left.
“Mind if I try?”
Allison looked up, startled to hear a man’s voice in the big, empty room. She hated to admit it, but for a split second she thought it might be Lincoln, come to explain everything, to apologize for scaring her.
The knife itched in her hand.
But in her heart, she knew that her missing fiancé wouldn’t have the courage to face her now. If he ever apologized, it would be by e-mail.
The man in front of her was a complete stranger. He wasn’t Lincoln and he wasn’t the fretful hotel manager, either, arriving to save the rest of his chairs.
But he was definitely Somebody and he knew it, from the topmost wave of his healthy brown hair to the glossy tip of his expensive loafers.
“May I try?” His fingers came an inch closer, tickling the blade of the knife.
She hesitated. Was it really a smart idea to hand a sharp Wüsthof to a total stranger? She glanced at Bitsy, but that was no help, because Bitsy was staring at the man as if he were a big glass of Nectar of Paradise and she had just crossed the Mojave.
The man’s hand closed around hers. Allison held on to the knife. “Who are you?”
He smiled. “I’m someone who would take just as much pleasure from skewering Lincoln Gray as you would.” He nodded toward the pile of fruit on the satin chair. “That is Lincoln, I assume?”
“It’s the closest thing to Lincoln we’ve seen today, anyhow.” She eyed him curiously. He wanted to knife Lincoln, too? What could his quarrel with her fiancé be? Was Lincoln secretly an escaped convict or something?
But this guy didn’t look like a policeman, either.
“Okay.” She let go of the knife. “He’s all yours.”
While the man was gauging his aim, Allison had a few seconds to study him unobserved. He wasn’t as pretty as Lincoln. He wasn’t, in fact, pretty at all. His face had none of Lincoln’s smooth choirboy charm. This man was all angles and power, from his hawk-straight nose—if he’d ever had been in a fight, he’d won it—to his square jaw, which extended just one power millimeter beyond his cheek.
He was broad shouldered and tall, with milk-chocolate eyes, dark-chocolate hair and a caramel tan that said he liked to be outdoors. He reminded her of a comic book she’d read as a child in which the hero had been drawn in bold, black lines and intense shadings of extra ink.
Next to this guy, Lincoln would look about as sexy as Little Lord Fauntleroy.
Suddenly, the stranger flicked his wrist and let the knife fly. It zipped through the air and buried itself with a thunk into Lincoln’s ripe watermelon body, just above the cute raisin belly button. A drizzle of pale pink juice seeped out around the blade.
“Got him!” Bitsy applauded. “Well done!”
He bowed sardonically. “Thanks, but I was actually aiming for the heart. Guess I’d better not quit my day job.”
Allison tilted her head and felt her pearl tiara slip sideways. Though she’d taken off her veil an hour ago, the silly crown was embedded under an inch of teased hair, so she’d left it on.
She reached up to straighten it, aware that she looked ridiculous. A wannabe princess who couldn’t find anyone to play happily-ever-after with. “And what exactly is your day job? There can’t be enough money in hating Lincoln Gray to make it a full-time career.”
“Probably not.” He smiled, and the sharply carved bow of his upper lip softened, hinting that he might have interesting layers beneath the comic-hero facade. “There are too many people who’d be willing to hate Lincoln Gray for free.”
“There are? Who?”
Bitsy, who was rocking the knife blade out of the watermelon, smiled over her shoulder and raised her hand. “Me!”
“Other than my best friends,” Allison said. “Look, maybe you’d better get straight to the point Mr….? I don’t think you told us your name. Why are you here? Did you know this was going to happen?” A horrible thought presented itself. “Are you trying to tell me that Lincoln has done this before?”
“I’m Mark Travers. I’m here because my private detective told me that Lincoln Gray would be here. I did not know this was going to happen. But, yes, he’s done this before. Sort of.”
She felt a little woozy. She put her hand on one of the empty tables and tried to focus on Mark Travers’s face, which seemed to be fading in and out. “Sort of?”
“Yeah. He’s done the disappearing thing. But the last time he vanished, it was after the wedding. One month after, to be exact.”
She sank onto one of the chairs. “Lincoln has been married before?”
“Not has been,” Mark Travers corrected. “Is.”
“Is…”
“Is. Present tense. Is currently, legally married. To my sister.”
CHAPTER TWO
FOUR HOURS LATER, Mark Travers entered the downtown Boston Lullabies with a grim lack of enthusiasm, cursing the chivalrous impulse that had made him agree to any rendezvous poor, jilted Allison Cabot suggested.
He understood completely her need to get out of that fairy-tale wedding dress before she discussed the details of her fiancé’s treachery. It even made sense that she’d wanted to meet here, at the flagship store of her successful string of baby boutiques, because this was obviously where she felt most powerful.
However, Lullabies was every bit the estrogen explosion he’d expected. Hundreds of ornate, overpriced cribs, tinkling mobiles and sickeningly cute booties being stroked moronically by pregnant women. Even the walls frothed with sweetness, as if the floor had thrown off stuffed ducks and bunnies the way a cotton-candy machine throws off pink sugar.
He turned sideways to avoid a woman who was so pregnant she definitely needed a wider aisle and just might, if he bumped her too hard, need an ambulance. Unfortunately, that caused him to knock into a three-foot-high plush lamb that immediately began to make weird whooshing noises. Emits Womblike Sounds, the tag on the lamb’s tail said. Mark dug around for the off button, but apparently the damn thing was motion activated.
Hell. He set his jaw and strode toward the staircase that led to the second-floor loft, where Allison had said her offices were located. The stairs were carpeted in pink frogs; butterflies dangled from the banister rails. The public-relations professional in him admired the imaginative decor, but he’d still rather have met her at the city dump.
He didn’t do babies and he didn’t do women who wanted to do babies.
He saw Allison even before he reached the top. The front wall of her office was all glass, so that she could survey her sugarplum kingdom and monitor her subjects, the sweet-faced salesgirls who hovered around the pregnant women like handmaidens.
She was watching him now as he ascended. She wore a severely tailored suit and her hair no longer floated in an auburn cloud around her shoulders. He couldn’t read her expression—the glass was mottled with reflections of rainbows with happy hands and moons wearing nightcaps. He was struck, though, by how completely still her stance was, rigid and cold, the antithesis of the warm fuzzy chaos below her. She looked like a mannequin that had wandered away from the Armani store across the street.
When he hit the last step, she met him at the door.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. She extended her hand and when he took it he could tell it was stiff, too. He glanced at her left hand and saw that she’d substituted a small ruby ring for the diamonds that should have been there.
“I needed to be at the office,” she went on, clearly just talking to fill the space. “I had a lot of things to catch up on. Preparations for the wedding ate up a lot of my time for the past several weeks.”
Thank goodness the pink frothing had stopped at the door of the office, replaced by calming beige and brown with blue accents. He felt his guts relax.
“No problem.”
She made her way to the chair behind her desk while he took the seat she offered him, its back to the window. He crossed his legs and waited for her to begin the questions she must be burning to ask.
He decided not to mention how absurd her opening statement had been. A lot to catch up on? If Lincoln Gray had shown up today, she would still have been over at the Revere, dancing and eating cake. And then, according to his P.I., she would have spent the next two weeks in Dublin making love and buying extravagant presents for her insatiable new husband.
But why rub it in? Let her save a little face.
“You were going to tell me about your sister.” She put a hand up to her hair, checking the braid that dove straight as an arrow down her back. It was so tight he wondered if it made her temples ache.
“Yes. My sister, Tracy. Well, the story is sad but simple. She’s five years older than I am. Last year, while I was out of the country, she met Lincoln Gray at a local fund-raiser. Apparently he swept her off her feet, because she married him two weeks later, without a prenup. A month after that, he disappeared. So did a lot of her money.”
Her lips parted and her brows tightened. She met his gaze for a few seconds, but as she took in the full implications of his speech, her eyes darkened.
She squared off some papers on her desk. Finally, she looked up, and her eyes were less revealing.
“Look, Mr. Travers. It’s not that I think you’re lying—”
“Call me Mark. After all, we were nearly in-laws.” He smiled. “Or something.”
She clearly didn’t like the joke. But too bad. This whole thing was a classic bedroom farce, and she now had a leading role. So did he. And Tracy. They all just had to get used to it.
“Mark,” she amended politely but without warmth. “I do have to tell you that I find it…difficult to believe that Lincoln—that he would really—”
“I thought you might.” He opened his jacket and pulled a sheaf of legal papers from his breast pocket. “I brought these, to help make it more concrete.”
She took the papers and read them carefully, her lips pursed as if she needed to double-check every word for some kind of trick. She kept her back ramrod straight and he could see under the desk that her knees were locked, her brown pumps lined up, toes and heels touching in military precision.
This tailored look didn’t suit her. She wasn’t the Armani type, however much she might wish she were. Her features were too rounded and girlish, and she needed her clouds of hair to keep from looking like a lost kitten. The brown suit washed out her cheeks and dimmed her green eyes to an uninteresting hazel.
Though she was pretty, she wasn’t beautiful. His sister, Tracy, wasn’t, either. That was apparently how Lincoln Gray liked it. He picked nice-enough-looking women so that it wasn’t a chore to bed them. But not true glamour queens, who might forget to be awed by his own golden charms.
Still, Allison Cabot had looked far more sexy and alive this afternoon, wearing her tilting pearl tiara and creamy wedding gown. Not beautiful, even then, but quite nice. Intensely female. Vulnerable. And strangely enticing, considering Mark was almost as allergic to brides as he was to babies.
She set the papers down on the desk. “The existence of a marriage certificate does not necessarily prove anything. There might be a divorce decree somewhere, as well.”
“There might be,” he agreed. “But there isn’t.”
“Mr. Travers—I mean, Mark.” She took a deep breath. “Are you seriously trying to tell me that I was about to—” She stopped and cleared her throat. “That if the wedding had gone as planned today, I would be married to a bigamist?”
“Yes.” A little blunt, perhaps, but he didn’t think it would help to sugarcoat the truth. Still, he did hope she wouldn’t start crying. He’d dried a million of Tracy’s tears in the past months and he’d run out of patience. And clean handkerchiefs.
To her credit, the Armani and the tight braid seemed to be doing the trick. Her eyes were bright, but she had no intention of falling apart.
“It’s—” Again she had to regroup and start over. “I just find it so impossible to—”
She bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry. I’m practically incoherent here. I must sound like a fool.” That made her flush, which brought out a few freckles she’d tried very hard to hide with makeup. “On the other hand, if what you say is true, I guess I am a fool.”
“It’s not that simple. My sister is an intelligent woman, but she fell for Lincoln Gray, too. She married him. She put his name on all her bank accounts and safety-deposit boxes.” He shook his head. “Apparently, the man is quite good at what he does.”
She looked down again. “Yes,” she said. “He is.”
“He picks his targets shrewdly, too. My sister is thirty-eight. She’s already been through one divorce and suffered two miscarriages. Her most recent relationship had ended badly, just weeks before Lincoln arrived on the scene, and I was out of the country. A lonely time for her. I also think her biological clock is ticking pretty loudly.”
He smiled. “Any of that sound familiar?”
Allison shrugged, but the pink hadn’t left her cheeks. “I’m afraid it does, a bit. My father died a few months ago. He was my only family.” She lifted one hand, palm up. “And, of course, we all have biological clocks.”
That interested Mark. Allison was at least ten years younger than Tracy. Was it possible that a woman in her twenties was already so desperate for a baby that she’d marry a jerk like Lincoln Gray just for the pretty blond genes?
He laughed inwardly at his own naïveté. Of course it was possible. He knew firsthand how baby-lust could trump common sense, self-preservation and even love.
“Did you love him?”
He could tell the question shocked her. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. With effort, she arranged her features as close to classic hauteur as her upturned pixie nose and freckles would allow.
“I’m sorry,” she said crisply, “but I’m not sure that’s any of your business.”
He smiled again. That tone might intimidate the handmaidens downstairs, but she still looked like a freckle-faced kid to him. He hadn’t forgotten the cockeyed tiara or her desire to slice off poor Lincoln’s puny banana penis.
“Which means,” he said, “that you didn’t.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Again, I fail to see why that angle concerns you.”
“It concerns me because I am going to continue looking for Lincoln. For me, this is just a setback, not the end. And I’m hoping you’ll help me in any way you can. But if you really were in love with him, you might not be as eager to see him get caught.”
She had picked up a pencil and was tapping the eraser absently against the polished-mahogany desktop. A fidgeter. Earlier, she’d been twisting her ruby ring so much he’d been surprised she hadn’t unscrewed her finger.
In PR you had to learn to read people quickly and he knew what that meant. In his experience, fidgeters were impulsive people, given to emotional decisions. Occupying their hands helped to slow them down, to sort things through in a more orderly fashion.
She brought the eraser to her lips and nipped it thoughtfully with her teeth. An oral fixation, too. He took a minute to admire her mouth, which was her sexiest feature. Full lips with a lot of rich natural color, a broad span and the beginning of a laugh line. Those lips were a neon sign, labeling her accessible, innocent and generous.
Lincoln Gray probably trolled the upscale resorts, searching for women with mouths just like that.
“I’m not sure I understand,” she said finally. “Caught for what? If your sister put his name on her accounts, that means the money was legally his, doesn’t it? Ethically it’s mean and rotten, but people don’t get tossed in jail for being morally bankrupt.”
“I don’t intend to toss him in jail. I just want to—” He hesitated. “Talk to him.”
To his surprise, she laughed. It was a decidedly non-Armani laugh—light, unaffected, hitting several musical notes that were easy on the ears.
He wasn’t sure exactly what had struck her as so funny, but he was glad she could laugh at anything today. Tracy hadn’t so much as smiled for weeks after Lincoln left and she still sometimes cried herself to sleep. Either Allison Cabot was stronger than she looked or her heart really hadn’t been bunged up much by her fiancé’s defection.
“Sorry,” she said, putting her pencil down so that she could wipe her eyes. “It’s just that men are so predictable. My father would have said exactly the same thing if he were alive today. I assume your talking will be done with your fists?”
He smiled. “I can’t imagine it would come to that. I never met the guy, but I’ve seen pictures. I don’t think he’d want to risk messing up his handsome face.”
She nodded. “Yeah. Little Lord Fauntleroy meets Batman. Not much of a match.”
It was his turn to laugh. No one had ever compared him to Batman before, though he assumed it had something to do with his coloring. But the vision of Lincoln Gray dressed up in black velvet knee pants, lace collar and ringlets was just too perfect.
And she was right about the rest of it, too. The primitive part of him would dearly love to kick Little Lord Fauntleroy’s ass.
“How much money did he take from your sister? Has he left her in serious financial trouble?”
“Not really. Luckily most of her assets aren’t liquid. It’s not easy to abscond with real estate and trust funds. But he cleaned out their joint account—a few hundred thousand—and her secondary safety deposit box, which had a lot of fancy jewelry. Not bad for less than two months’ work.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Were they heirlooms? I have a ring of my mother’s—” She frowned, touching the ruby ring again. “I might have hired a private detective and tracked him down myself, if he’d gotten his hands on this.”
“Yes, some of them were family pieces. One in particular is an irreplaceable loss. A large gold brooch, shaped like a peacock, with emeralds and sapphires in its tail. It’s tacky as hell. I’ve seen jewelry out of a gumball machine that was more restrained. But it’s a valuable piece with a long history.”
Mark tried to mask the fury that boiled in his veins every time he thought of that asinine Gray standing in the bank vault, stuffing the Travers peacock into his pocket like a kid stealing gum at the drugstore. That scum wasn’t capable of recognizing real worth—in women or in gemstones.
“It’s been in the family for almost four hundred years,” he finished. “I intend to get it back.”
“But it sounds quite valuable. What if he’s already sold it?”
He shrugged. “Then we’ll have a problem.”
The buzzer on her desk sounded. With an apologetic grimace, she turned and answered it. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry to bother you, Ms. Cabot, but the man from Cuddles is here and the order is all wrong. Mrs. Blakeley’s crib didn’t come and you know the baby is due in—”
“It’s all right, Sylvia. I’ll be right down.”
Allison clicked off the speaker and turned to Mark.
“I’m going to have to deal with this,” she said.
“That’s all right. I’ll wait.”
“No.” She wiped her hand over her eyes. “Honestly, I think I’ve talked about this all I can today. I’m feeling a little muddled. It has been—” Her voice trembled slightly and she coughed to hide it. “It’s been a strange day. I’m sorry for everything your sister has lost, but I’m not sure how I can help you. Lincoln didn’t leave me a forwarding address.”
“But he might have said something—some detail that could give us a place to start.” He tried to read behind those sad green eyes. She looked incredibly tired, as if all the fiery indignation of the knife-throwing episode had died away.
Maybe he could fan the flame.
“He made a fool of you, Allison. Even if he didn’t break your heart, he wasted months of your life. He left you alone again, with the biological clock ticking louder than ever. Wouldn’t you like to see him get what’s coming to him?”
She hesitated just long enough. Damn it—Mark had his answer. Just like Tracy, this woman was still soft in the head where Lincoln Gray was concerned. Was the guy really that good in the sack? If not, he must have been putting stupid-drops in their bottled water.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “I have to think.”
He made a small, harsh gesture with his left hand. Women didn’t think. They emoted and they dithered and they let bastards like Lincoln Gray get away and start this madness all over again with some other weak-minded female.
“Try to understand…” She sighed. “Just this morning, I woke up believing that this man would be my husband—my lover, for life. The father of my children. It’s a little difficult, a few hours later, to send the bloodhounds after him.”
He stood. He’d wasted enough time already. “I understand. But the bloodhounds are already after him. I’m not giving up. I just hope I find him before he insinuates his way into some other woman’s bank account—and her bed.”
She made a sound, but it wasn’t a word. It certainly wasn’t a denial.
He extracted a business card and lay it on the table. “If you think of anything that might help, call me.”
WHEN ALLISON GOT HOME that night, the brownstone was dark and cold and so empty it felt as if even the molecules of air had stopped moving.
She had come back here to change out of the wedding dress, but it had been about three o’clock. Her housekeeper, Loretta, had been bustling around making comforting noise with a vacuum and the June sun had been shining in through the tall foyer windows.
Tonight it was like a tomb.
In a way, she thought as she thumbed through the mail, not really seeing any of it, the house was exactly that. So many ghosts lived here already. Her mother’s was the palest, most insubstantial one because Allison had so few real memories of her. Mostly she was a wide, warm smile and a halo of red curls.
Her father’s ghost was disturbingly robust, his edicts echoing down the halls announcing what was acceptable and what was beyond the pale. Even now, when Allison dared to flout those edicts, she caught herself looking over her shoulder.
And now the ghost of Mrs. Lincoln Gray would float here, too, in her transparent Vera Wang gown. That contented young bride who had believed she’d never feel alone again. The happy wife who had planned to be pregnant within the year and had already picked out baby names from a book hidden in her nightstand drawer.
Amanda Anne and Michael Joseph Gray. They had become so real to Allison. In her mind, she’d already redecorated the study upstairs with all her favorite baby furniture from Lullabies. She wondered whether she’d ever be able to work in that study again without feeling haunted.
Allison, for pity’s sake, don’t become one of those superstitious Irish peasant women. She could hear her father now, wearily disdainful. It isn’t possible for the mere idea of babies to turn into ghosts.
She put her hand to her chest, where her heart seemed to be having trouble finding a steady rhythm. Big, painful squeezes alternated with fast, frightened trips.
She had to do something. Anything. She was going to fall apart. She was going to let her father down again, render futile his years of training. She couldn’t do that. He was, in the end, the only one who had stayed with her, who had loved her without leaving her. If she couldn’t be what he wanted, then she was nothing at all.
He believed in work. Emotions were just illusions, he’d said. Illusions that could be chased away by some nice, practical action.
She knew he was right. It had helped to be at Lullabies today, sitting in her office tallying columns of figures. The numbers had added up so cooperatively, so neatly. Her associates had glanced at her oddly, but so what? She had been clinging to the one firm log in a sea of confusion and self-doubt.
Work. Process inventory.
She bent down and opened a box that had come with today’s shipment from Cuddles, one of her favorite vendors. They had mixed up Jenny Blakeley’s order today, but ordinarily they were as reliable as—
The box opened. Her thoughts froze. The words disappeared.
Inside the box, nested on tufts of white popcorn packaging, were a dozen pairs of designer baby shoes. Miniature white Mary Janes, blue-striped sneakers, soft-pink leather ballet slippers…
She picked up the slippers, which fit in the palm of her hand. They were so little. What kind of magical being could wear such tiny shoes? How helpless, how fragile the creature would be, with toes the size of diamonds, whole feet not much bigger than her thumb.
So small…too small, really, to carry a big name like Amanda Anne or Michael Joseph…
And yet.
And yet…
She must be her mother’s child, after all. Because as she pressed the tiny pink slippers to her heart, she thought she heard a baby crying.
It wasn’t until the hot tears hit her knuckles that she realized they were her own.
CHAPTER THREE
THROUGHOUT HER SIX-HOUR FLIGHT from Boston to San Francisco, Allison shut her eyes to avoid chatting with the passengers on either side of her cramped last-minute coach seat and masochistically second-guessed herself.
Was she doing the right thing? Was she crazy? Could this plan even work? What would Mark Travers think when he saw her on his doorstep?
She hadn’t called him in advance to let him know she was coming. He probably would have told her to save them both the time, and stay in Boston.
She knew she hadn’t made a very good impression on him when they met the day of the wedding fiasco. She had been in shock, and she’d probably appeared irrational, inarticulate and not very bright. By the time he left her office, his disdain had been written all over his rugged face.
So he wouldn’t exactly be thrilled to see her, just one week later. She wondered if he’d even give her the time to explain her idea. And, if he did, what were the chances he’d trust her to successfully carry off a plan as bold as this one?
A million to one.
That’s why this couldn’t be done over the phone. She needed to show him, face-to-face, that she wasn’t being hysterical or vindictive or just plain dumb.
Somehow, she needed to convince him that she really did have the perfect strategy for dealing with Lincoln Gray once and for all—and the guts to make it work.
Surely Mark would be receptive. After all, she wasn’t asking for his help—or his permission. The only thing she wanted him to do was stay out of the way long enough to let her get the job done.
His house was easy to find, an impressive mission-style mansion high on a hill. His street was near enough to the bay that he could probably see his own sloop in the marina. Though he hadn’t mentioned it, she didn’t doubt for a minute that he did indeed have a sloop, along with fifth-generation memberships at the yacht, tennis and golf clubs. He probably had a basement full of scuba gear and water skis, a kayak on the wall.
She knew the physique of a sports fiend when she saw one. Mark Travers was the kind of guy who would be late for his own funeral because his pickup-football game went into overtime.
She dismissed the cab, though she took the driver’s number for the ride back to the airport. Then she climbed up the zigzagging front walk with its elegant mounds of boxwood, trails of deep green ivy and shooting plumes of cobalt-blue irises.
Obviously, Lincoln hadn’t made off with all the Travers money.
She rang the bell discreetly set into the stucco wall beside the carved wooden front door. She didn’t hear anything, but it must have emitted a sound only French maids could hear, because in about ten seconds a gorgeous brunette in an amply filled white apron opened the door and smiled.
The smile showed perfect white teeth set off by bright pink lipstick and a small wad of blue gum.
“Hello,” Allison said politely, though what she really wanted to say was, is this guy for real? Allison had a housekeeper, too, but Loretta was about sixty and cranky, and had a face like day-old oatmeal. “Is Mr. Travers in?”
The maid shook her head and enjoyed a quick chomp of gum. “Nope. He’s doing the Get Happy run. You know, for his client. He’ll be home in half an hour. if you’d like to wait.”
“That would be great,” Allison said eagerly.
She’d love to get an advance look at his house. You could tell a lot from the books people read and the knickknacks they collected. Take, for instance, her secret copy of Baby Names or the little plastic leprechaun whose joints jiggled and collapsed when she pressed on the base, which she’d kept all these years because it was the only toy her mother had given her that her father hadn’t thrown away. Anyone who saw those would certainly know that she wasn’t the hardheaded businesswoman she pretended to be.
“Okay, then,” the maid said, nodding and chewing. And then she shut the door in Allison’s face.
Allison stared a minute at the beautiful grapevines carved into the wood. Apparently Mark hadn’t bothered to check this lady’s references. Her last job had probably been at Naked-a-Go-Go, where you had to whisper the password at the cellar door or the bouncer would toss you out.
She wondered if slipping the woman a twenty might help. But it wasn’t worth it. It was only half an hour, and besides, it was beautiful out here. The San Francisco summer was crisp, with none of the suffocating humidity that blanketed Boston right now.
She perched on one of the terraced border stones in the shade of a spreading Japanese maple and waited.
She didn’t have to sit there long. Within fifteen minutes, a red vintage MGB hummed up to the curb, top down. Mark Travers, his dark hair tousled by the wind, unfolded his long legs, climbed out and began to take the front steps in twos.
Halfway up, he noticed her. He stopped, tilted his head and pulled off his sunglasses for a better view.
“Allison?” He looked surprised, but not stunned.
He also looked great. His T-shirt, on which a smiley face was surrounded by big yellow letters ordering her to Get Happy, was sweaty and molded to his torso. She had to admit it—that torso had probably made plenty of women happy this morning.
“What are you doing here?”
She stood up, brushing cedar-mulch shavings from her skirt. “I needed to talk to you. Do you have a few minutes?”
“Of course.” He hooked his sunglasses over the neck of his T-shirt and held out a hand. “Come on in. You should have rung the bell. Gigi would have let you in.”
Of course the housekeeper’s name was Gigi. It really was either that or Bambi. “I did ring. She told me you weren’t here and then pretty much slammed the door in my face.”
Mark leaned his head back and groaned. “God, I’m going to strangle my sister.”
Allison gasped. “Gigi is your sister?”
“No, no.” He seemed to shudder. “God, no. It’s just that Tracy thinks I should get married again and so she keeps sending women over. The last so-called housekeeper was a Yale graduate fishing for a rich husband.”
Okay, that answered one question. He wasn’t married.
Actually, it answered two questions. He’d said married again. If he’d been married before and it hadn’t worked out, that might account for that subtle hint of women-are-nuts in his attitude.
Allison wasn’t sure why his marital status mattered to her. Wasn’t she supposed to be in mourning right now? Nursing her broken, jilted heart?
Besides, even when it was seemly to think about such things again, she had no intention of getting involved with a slightly arrogant, Batman-esque super-jock who lived on the other side of the country.
If she ever got another man, he was going to be a quiet computer geek who had his own copy of Baby Names squirreled away in his nightstand drawer.
Mark motioned for her to follow him toward the door. “Come on in. Let’s get something to drink. I think I just sweat out about ninety percent of my bodily fluids.” He tugged at his shirt. “And then, before we do any serious talking, I’d better wash off some of this grime.”
In the end, she hardly had any time to explore the house. Amazingly, it took him only about fifteen minutes to do it all—toss back a full bottle of Gatorade, send Gigi home for the day, settle Allison in the library, shower and throw on a pair of old jeans and a crisp white shirt.
She was only on her third bookshelf when he walked back in, still slightly damp and steamy and smelling of expensive soap.
He buttoned his last button as he entered but didn’t tuck in the shirttail. His hair was wet and darker than ever.
“So,” he said as he leaned over and extracted two bottled waters from a small refrigerator built into the bottom bookcase that she hadn’t even seen. “I have to admit I’m curious. What’s important enough to bring you all the way across the country? I assume it has something to do with Lincoln Gray.”
She accepted one of the bottles, nodding. He was taking her arrival quite calmly. It was as if he’d never really doubted that she’d show up, sooner or later.
“It does,” she said. “I’ve found him.”
She had surprised Mark. It felt good. He was a very polite and civilized man, but all that confidence could get on your nerves.
“You did? How?” He frowned over the water, then took a long drink. “My P.I. hasn’t turned up a single lead.”
“Well…” She hesitated. “I had an idea about where to look.”
His dramatic black brows went up slightly. She’d known this was the tricky part. If she had a lead, why hadn’t she shared it with him a week ago?
And she had known, even back then, exactly where she’d start the hunt for Lincoln Gray. She decided to return to the spot where she’d met him in the first place—Sole Grande, the South Florida beach resort that catered to the rich and idle. He had a friend who wintered there, an older woman who occasionally loaned Lincoln her mansion during the summer.
It seemed like a long time ago—though really it had been only about two months. The day she met Lincoln, Allison had been sitting in the airport lounge, waiting for an overdue plane to take her back to Boston.
It was only about three months after her father’s death and she’d been feeling pretty low. Her mission in Sole Grande—to contact her mother’s family, from whom she’d been estranged for twenty-five years—had been a disappointing failure.
The O’Haras owned a luxurious beachside hotel called O’Hara’s Hideaway. Allison had made it all the way to the front door and then lost her nerve. How could she go in, announce her connection and expect the fatted calf? She hadn’t reached out to the O’Haras in the past twenty-five years. They’d be insulted if she did so now, as a last resort.
However, they had been her last resort. An only child, now an orphan, she was absolutely alone. She didn’t even own a dog. Her business was booming, but as the pundits always said, you couldn’t cuddle up next to your bank account on a cold winter night.
She’d been easy pickings for Lincoln, who had sat next to her in the lounge that day. When she’d tried to discreetly blow her nose, he’d noticed and asked her what was wrong.
A month later, he’d asked her to marry him. And she’d said yes.
It had been so simple for him. She thought it just barely possible that he’d go back to Sole Grande now to find another lonely, foolish heiress who would drop into his hands like an overripe plum.
Still, when her detective called, it had surprised her, just a little, to be right. Lincoln wasn’t exactly hiding under a rock, was he? He obviously believed Allison would be too proud to come looking for him.
“I didn’t really think my idea would pan out,” she said, as if Mark had posed the question with words instead of with his eyes. “And you may remember, when you asked me if I had any clues, I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to help you find him.”
“I remember. So we seem to be back to the original question. If you don’t want me to find him, why are you here?”
She took a deep breath. “I’m here to ask you to stop looking for him.”
He frowned, as if he hoped he hadn’t heard her correctly. His face hardened. “Then I’m afraid you’ve made the trip for nothing.”
“No, please. Hear me out. I have a plan.”
His dark eyes scanned her quickly, from her head to her toes. Probably doing a wacko inspection. She was glad she’d tamed her hair into a smooth chignon, even though it had taken nearly the whole bottle of mousse. When it was flying around, she always looked slightly mad.
She must have passed, because he set his water down, leaned an elbow on the fireplace mantel and nodded.
“Okay. Tell me about your plan.”
She’d rehearsed this on the plane, and she’d decided then that it was best to start out with the punch line. Mark Travers didn’t seem like a guy who would appreciate a cowardly, meandering preamble.
“I’m going to get Lincoln to marry me again.”
There was a momentary silence. Then Mark’s mouth tilted up at one side. “You’re joking, right?”
“Not at all. It’s the best way to catch him, don’t you see? In fact, it’s the only way. As things stand, he hasn’t done anything illegal. But I’ve looked into it, and bigamy is definitely not just creepy and cruel—it’s against the law.”
“Indeed it is. I looked into it, as well.”
“Good, then you know what I mean. The minute he actually takes the vows and signs the marriage certificate, the police can arrest him. He won’t do a lot of time—two years max, probably less. Not much justice, but a little is better than none, don’t you think?”
“That’s the usual theory,” he agreed, though it was clear he still thought she might be pulling his leg.
He scratched his cheek. “Look, Allison. I don’t mean to be rude, but you couldn’t quite get Lincoln to the altar the first time. What makes you think you’d be more successful the second time?”
She felt herself flushing. “For starters, I know what I did wrong the first time,” she said. “I asked him to sign a prenup. The night before the wedding. That must have spooked him, which makes it pretty obvious he was in love with my money, not me.”
“So?”
“So this time I’ll make it clear there are no strings attached. I’ll promise him anything—unlimited access to my bank accounts, safety-deposit boxes, whatever he wants.”
“And you think that will do it?”
“Yes.” She put on her most confident voice, the one she’d always used when arguing with her father, who hated weakness. “If it doesn’t, what have we lost? A couple of weeks, at most. If I can’t land him, you are free to swoop in and beat him black-and-blue, or whatever it is you are secretly dying to do.”
He really was the most physically controlled person she’d ever met—except, of course, for her father. Though Mark smiled at her comment, he didn’t fidget or twitch. He stood there leaning gracefully against the mantel and didn’t move a muscle. He might have been an oil painting.
The Travers Heir, at Leisure.
She knew the power position at this point was silence, but she couldn’t help herself. She wanted a response.
“Surely you can see that it is our best course?”
“No,” he answered mildly. “I’m not sure that I do. My instincts tell me it’s risky. I think I’d prefer to approach him myself.”
She straightened her back. “You don’t know where he is.”
“True.” Mark’s smile deepened. “But I know where you are.”
She was embarrassingly slow—it took her several seconds to process that, but when she did she saw he was right. He could have her followed and that would lead him to Lincoln. The easy way.
All right. Checkmate. But she’d been prepared for his resistance. She knew that a certain kind of man was accustomed to control and would dislike handing over the reins, even for a couple of weeks. She picked her purse up from the floor and pulled out the photographs her investigator had delivered this morning.
“I’m sure you’d find it personally satisfying to rush in and take Lincoln by the throat,” she said. “But that’s a little shortsighted. And, frankly, a little selfish. Remember how you told me you wanted to keep him out of some other woman’s bank accounts—and her bed?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I’ve just found out that the ‘other woman’ has a face. And a name.” She extended the photo. “Meet Janelle Greenwood. Apparently Lincoln calls her Janie.”
Mark accepted the picture and studied it carefully. Allison knew what he would see there. Janelle Greenwood was young, even younger than Allison—midtwenties at most. She wasn’t plain, but she wasn’t beautiful—Lincoln’s favorite type. She had chin-length brown hair, a wide, honest face with almost no makeup, a snub nose and ears that stuck out just a bit. She was dressed in tennis clothes and sitting next to Lincoln, leaning toward him the way a plant leans toward the sun.
The sparkle in her cute brown eyes said it all. Janelle Greenwood was already hooked.
“Damn it,” Mark said. It was the first real emotion Allison had seen from him since she arrived. He turned the picture over, as if he hoped to find proof that it was a fake. It wasn’t. Looking at Janelle one more time, he ran his hand through his wet hair. “Damn it.”
“Exactly. So here’s how I see it. We can race down there and you can beat him up while I warn her. That would mean we could save this one woman, just this one. But then Lincoln would disappear, maybe change his name or his looks. We might never find him again. We can see Janelle’s face, Mark. But what about the next one, the one we can’t save? How young will she be? How much will he steal from her?”
He drummed his fingers along the mantel, still staring at the picture.
She waited.
Finally he looked up, looking more Batman than ever.
“I’ll give you two weeks. On one condition.”
She frowned. “What condition?”
“I’m coming with you.”
CHAPTER FOUR
MARK HAD NEVER BEEN to Sole Grande before. As a lifelong Californian, he’d wasted many a teenage weekend surfing and snorkeling and checking out the bikinis, but he’d always been satisfied with the Pacific beaches.
He’d done his homework, though, so he knew what to expect from this tiny barrier island in the Atlantic. Sole Grande was a short bridge ride across the intra-coastal from Fort Lauderdale, just far enough away to leave all the bustle behind.
The mansions and hotels on the island were too expensive for the noisy riffraff to infiltrate. Sole Grande didn’t allow putt-putt golf or Dairy Queens, video arcades or tattoo parlors. Nothing that might mar the idyll of sleek sailboats, penthouse restaurants, Given-chy boutiques and day spas.
The island was about twenty miles from tip to tip and shaped like an hourglass. The narrow center formed two bays: East Nook, which looked out onto the ocean and was, therefore, the more exclusive, and West Nook, which faced the intra-coastal and had lowered prices to match the diminished view.
O’Hara’s Hideaway was in East Nook. Since Allison was determined to stay there, Mark had checked out their Web site and, in spite of its down-home name, it seemed up to East Nook standards.
Mark and Allison shared a cab from the airport—rental cars would be delivered to the hotel later that afternoon.
For the first twenty minutes they chatted easily enough about the differences between the two coasts. But as soon as they hit the bridge, she fell silent. She stared out the window, watching the stately rows of royal palms as if she were getting paid to count them. Her hands were clasped in her lap, every knuckle white. Her simple ruby ring looked like a drop of blood against that pale finger.
He watched her a minute, then spoke. “Thinking about Lincoln?”
She shook her head. “No. I was actually thinking about my grandfather. I’m not sure I’ll even recognize him after all these years.”
She’d explained the whole story to him on the plane—how she’d come to Sole Grande two months ago hoping to reconcile with her mother’s family, who owned the Hideaway. How she’d chickened out at the last minute. And how that had left her vulnerable to Lincoln’s smarmy charm.
She was clearly still nervous about meeting them, though Mark wasn’t sure why. Even if the O’Haras were rotten relatives who couldn’t let go of an old feud, they were obviously good businessmen. They wouldn’t turn away a couple of paying customers.
“It’ll be fine,” he said, resisting the urge to put his hand over hers and chafe some warmth into it. “The quarrel was with your father, right? Why would they hold that against you?”
She shrugged. “I could have contacted them. He told me he’d rather I didn’t, but he didn’t exactly have a gun to my head.”
Mark wasn’t sure about that. Not a bullet-shooting gun, perhaps, but there were plenty of emotional weapons that could be just as effective. The subtle hint that, if a person went against your wishes, love might be withdrawn was a powerful threat. It had worked on his sister, when she was married to her first son-of-a-bitch husband. That guy had left her so uncertain of her own worth that she’d willingly signed it over to the second SOB—Lincoln Gray.
“What exactly was the fight about? Did you father ever give you the details?”
She glanced at him, which he considered a good sign. She looked wan, but at least she wasn’t counting palm trees.
“He never told me the whole thing, from start to finish. But I got the general idea. Mostly I think it was a culture clash. My father was very dignified, very restrained. I guess the O’Haras are more—uninhibited.”
“That’s it?”
“Oh, no. That was just the beginning. Then my grandfather, Stephen, hit my father up for a loan. He already owned the land on Sole Grande, but he needed money to build the Hideaway. My father refused, of course.”
“Why of course? Their hotel seems to be quite a success.”
“My father didn’t believe in loaning money to relatives. He’d earned his, and he thought everyone else should do the same, including me.”
Which she’d done. Mark had looked up Lullabies, too, while he was surfing the net and discovered that she already had nine franchises on the East Coast.
“The real problem, though,” she went on, “the one that led to this total estrangement, was that my father blamed my uncle Roddy for my mother’s death.”
“Why? How did she die?”
“She took a bad fall from a horse. I think she was a good rider—I remember lots of ribbons from competitions she won as a child. But apparently this horse wasn’t fully broken yet. My father always said she wouldn’t have been foolish enough to ride it if Uncle Roddy hadn’t egged her on.”
“So her death was completely unexpected. That must have been hard. How old were you?”
Though her voice was composed, reciting the story as if it were a history lesson she’d learned in school, she had gone back to twisting the ruby ring.
“I was only three, so I really didn’t understand much. Reading between the lines now, though, I get the impression that my mother—her name was Eileen—must have had a wild side, which my father was trying to correct. He said Roddy was criminally immature and a dangerous influence.”
Mark wondered if she could hear how oppressive her father sounded. The idea of “correcting” a spouse was not only domineering, it was dumb. In his experience, people didn’t change unless they wanted to. They might pretend to change, either to please or appease, but what good did that do?
Lauren, Mark’s ex-wife, had pretended not to want children, but the truth came out eventually.
Eileen O’Hara Cabot had defied her husband and sneaked into the stables for one last, fatal ride on the back of a wild horse.
But he wasn’t going to point that out. It wasn’t, in the end, his business.
“Families are complicated, aren’t they?”
She merely nodded at this platitude and went back to looking out the window.
Mark thought maybe it was time for a distraction.
He reached down to the duffel he’d placed on the floor between them and pulled a little box out of the side pocket. “Here. I want to show you something.”
She glanced over with polite attention but no genuine curiosity.
He wasn’t worried. He’d never opened this box in front of anyone without capturing their full attention.
He thumbed it open now, watching her face.
Her eyes widened. “Oh my God.” She started to reach out, but pulled her hand back just in time. She looked up at him. “Is that… Is that the Travers Peacock? I thought you said Lincoln stole it from your sister’s safety-deposit box.”
“He did.”
She was clearly torn between wanting to know more and wanting to just look at the brooch. Though most Travers women in the past century had decided it was just too showy to wear, it was definitely impressive. A small gold peacock stared at you with emerald eyes, its tail spread wide open, almost as big as the palm of a woman’s hand. And what a fantastic tail…a full fan of graceful gold feathers, each studded with emeralds and sapphires, which were in turn circled with onyx and gold.
Allison was still speechless. Still staring.
“The legend is that the Travers Peacock was given to one of my ancestors, back in the sixteen-hundreds, a gift from King Charles II of England. Her name was Elizabeth Travers and apparently she was very beautiful.” He smiled. “If not altogether virtuous.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “If Lincoln took it, then what—”
“More than a hundred years ago, some sensible Travers husband had a copy made, so that his wife could wear it without fear of losing it. It’s exact, right down to the last millimeter. The gold is genuine, because that’s hard to fake. But the stones are paste.”
She shook her head. “I can hardly believe it’s not real.”
“It’s not.” He took it out and handed it to her. “It’s a very good, very expensive fake. I can’t imagine that anyone, short of a jeweler with a loupe, could tell it from the real thing.”
She looked up, her eyes intent. She wasn’t stupid, was she? He had the feeling she already knew where he was going with this.
“Why did you bring it down here?” She frowned slightly. “What are you going to do with it?”
“I’m hoping we’ll get lucky. I’m hoping you might be able to find out where Lincoln keeps it. If you can, I’m going to make a switch. This brooch is very important to my sister. It’s part of our heritage. I do not intend to let Lincoln Gray pawn it for a hundred bucks if I can help it.”
She stroked one of the tail feathers with a fingertip, very gently, as if she didn’t dare risk damaging it. She seemed to have forgotten that it had already survived for more than a hundred years.
She shook her head. “That’s a lot of luck you’re talking about.”
“I know.”
“What are the odds that he’d carry a thing like this around with him?”
“A thousand to one. But if there’s even that one chance, I’d like to take it. I agreed to your plan, Allison. Will you help me with mine?”
She gazed at him for several seconds. And then, holding out the peacock, she nodded. “For what it’s worth, I’ll try.”
He settled the brooch back into its velvet nest and slid the box back into his duffel. When he looked up again, he realized the cab was slowing down.
“We’re here,” she said. So much for his distraction. Her tension had returned.
From the street, O’Hara’s Hideaway looked unassuming—with none of the Irish “old sod” kitsch of its name. It had, instead, a strong Spanish-Mediterranean influence. The stucco walls were pale salmon, with clean white trim and glossy black wrought-iron balconies. The deep orange tile roof rose cleanly into the cloudless turquoise sky.
Thick green palmettos and red bougainvillea spread over everything, giving the small entrance a shadowy, cloistered feel—just what a visitor craved after taking a few soggy breaths of this hundred-degree Florida sunshine.
A red-haired teenage boy opened the front door the minute the cab came to a complete stop. He would have been good-looking if he hadn’t had a typical adolescent glower, announcing that nothing had pleased him since he was about ten and nothing ever would again until he had his own apartment and regular sex.
He wasn’t wearing a uniform, but he was dressed better than any teenager would voluntarily, so obviously he was on the payroll. Mark eyed that wavy auburn hair. Family, maybe?
The boy opened Allison’s door. “Welcome to the Hideaway,” he said with rote courtesy but no change of expression.
Oh, yeah, he was an O’Hara, Mark concluded as he found his own way out of the cab. Only a family member could get away with that attitude.
Emerging, Allison smiled at the boy. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Allison Cabot. This is Matt Travis. We were on the same plane, and when we realized we were both headed here, we decided to share a cab.”
She wasn’t a great liar—here she was, spilling the whole thing to the first person she met—but Mark had seen worse. She’d get better with practice and she had an innocent smile that just might pull it off.
Obviously, Mark had to use an alias. Though Lincoln had never met Mark and wouldn’t recognize his face, he would recognize the name. Mark had chosen a pseudonym as close to his own name as possible, so that if Allison slipped it might pass unnoticed.
They’d also decided on this strangers-on-a-plane story, agreeing that it would be foolish to reveal too much. Island communities tended to be close-knit—it was impossible for a newcomer to guess exactly how all the residents might be connected. For all they knew, the O’Haras might go fishing with Lincoln Gray every Sunday afternoon.
“Allison Cab—” The kid looked oddly troubled. “You’re—” He frowned. “You’re Allison…Allison who?”
“Cabot.” She smiled again. “I’m checking in. I’m here for two weeks.” She shifted her purse to her other arm, clearly wondering if something had gone wrong with her reservation. “From Boston?”
“Yes. Yes.” The boy looked right, then left, as if he needed backup. “Umm…excuse me just a minute.”
Allison shot a worried glance toward Mark.
No room at the inn? Mark knew from the Web site that the hotel had only twelve suites, six in each wing, with the family quarters in the center of the U-shape building that enclosed an old-world courtyard. They’d been lucky to get reservations on such short notice.
He nodded, assuring her that everything would be fine. If the paperwork had gone awry, she could always take his room and he’d find somewhere else to stay.
But within a few seconds, a storm of people poured through the arched entryway, all redheads with beaming grins and outstretched arms.
“Allison Cabot! Could it really be you?”
Allison turned, looking half startled, half embarrassed. “I—”
If she finished the sentence, Mark couldn’t hear it. The oldest of the group, a man with a leonine shock of wavy white hair, got to Allison first and, without waiting for permission, enveloped her in a robust embrace.
“Sure and I’m not believing my eyes,” he said. “It’s our own little Allie, come home at last!”
“You must have thought we were terrible people,” a woman with matching white hair added, cupping Allison’s cheek with the palm of her hand. “Taking your reservation like that, as if you were a stranger.”
“I thought she said Talbot, Gram.” The boy who had opened the door was flushing. “It sounded like Talbot.”
“Then we’d better be buying you new ears, Daniel O’Hara, because those are clearly failing you.”
A pair of little girls, identical twins of about eight or ten, giggled at the joke. They had the fine red curls and pale skin of expensive porcelain dolls, but right now they were dressed in blue jeans and flamingo-pink T-shirts that fought hideously with their tangled masses of hair. One of them carried a scruffy backpack patterned with stars.
The old man, who Mark deduced must be Stephen, kept his hands on Allison’s shoulders, but moved her a few inches out, so that he could feast his eyes on the prodigal granddaughter. Mark couldn’t think of another way to describe the wistful, half-starved expression the old man turned on her.
“You’re so beautiful, child,” he said, his voice husky. “And so like your mother. You might be our Eileen, come back to us after all these years!”
“Do I really look like her?” Allison’s voice sounded stiff, an odd contrast to her eyes, which were wide and shining. “I—I would like that.”
“You’re the spitting image.” He grinned, the movement folding deep, comfortable creases into his cheeks. He probably smiled as much as he cried, which was obviously a great deal. The whole lot of them needed pockets sewn onto their shirtsleeves for holding their hearts.
“Yes, you’ve got her sweetness,” her grandfather continued. “And not a whit of your father’s arrogance, thank God.”
“Stephen!” The old woman batted his shoulder.
“It’s true, Kate, and weren’t we all thinking it?” Stephen was gleefully unrepentant. “I’m sorry for your loss, Allie darling, and I know you loved your father with a good heart. But the man never liked me and I never liked him and there’s no use pretending any different just because he’s dead.”
“No,” Allison said, no doubt overwhelmed. “I understand. I’m sorry I haven’t come sooner, but—”
“None of that, now, none of that!” He hugged her again. “Aren’t you here now? And isn’t that all that matters? Let’s get you settled. We’ll have to call your uncle in and Moira, too. They’ll be wanting to hear all about you.”
“Grampa.” The twin with the backpack tugged at Stephen’s sleeve, pointing at Mark and whispering. “Grampa, what about him?”
“Who?”
Mark realized wryly that he might as well have been invisible. “I think she means me,” he said with a smile. “I’m Matt Travis. I have a reservation, as well.”
The second little girl, apparently the more confident of the two, stared at Mark while chewing the nail of her pinky finger as if it were her afternoon snack. “Are you Allison’s boyfriend?”
Allison shook her head quickly, flushing again as she had to trot out her rehearsed lie. “No, no! Matt and I…we just happened to be on the same plane. We just shared a cab from the airport.”
“Well, come on in, son,” Stephen said, waving his hand expansively. “We’ll get your room eventually, but you may have to wait. You’ve stumbled into a family reunion, as you see, and family comes first.”
“Of course,” Mark agreed.
“And our poor Allie, she’s like a miracle, showing up here,” Kate O’Hara said as if she owed Mark a better explanation. “She’s lost her dad, you know, so we’re her only family now.”
The nail-chewing little girl stared up at Allison, frowning. “Your father’s dead? What happened to him?”
Kate hushed her granddaughter with a soft hand. “You remember, now, don’t you, Fannie? We talked about it. Her father had a heart attack, poor man.”
The little girl nodded slowly. “That’s right. I do remember, because Grampa said it was ironic, and I asked him what ironic meant, and he said it was when someone who didn’t have a heart in the first place—”
“Flannery Teresa O’Hara, that is enough!” Stephen’s creased cheeks were pink. “Get your cousin’s suitcases and bring them inside.”
“I’ll get my own,” Mark said unnecessarily, as once again no one seemed aware of him, except Allison, who looked over her shoulder, her green eyes staring helplessly at him as she was swept into the hotel lobby on a wave of laughter and eager questions.
She looked terrified—and cute as hell.
He smiled as he hoisted his garment bag over his shoulder and paid the patient cabbie.
This might, he thought, be more fun than he’d expected.
BY THE TIME Allison got a minute alone she was exhausted. She had answered a million questions, received a thousand hugs and kisses, and listened to more stories about her mother than she’d heard in her entire lifetime.
Her father’s prohibition against public displays of emotion would have made no sense to this family, who seemed to recognize zero distinction between “public” and “private” behavior. They laughed until the sound bounced off the walls. They interrupted each other without apology. They broke spontaneously into song, then stopped when tears choked off the tune. Tempers flared like matches and died as quickly.
When they finally remembered that she’d been traveling all day and might need to freshen up, en masse they took her to her room, introducing her to other guests they passed in the halls, as if she were the queen.
The room was large and lovely, done in shades of blue, but Allison didn’t take time to appreciate its elegant details. She didn’t even unpack. As soon as the last kiss was blown, she closed the door, kicked off her pumps, lay down on the bed and promptly fell asleep.
She woke much later to a dim room and the sound of someone rapping on her door. Her heart pounded, and, lifting up on one elbow, she tried to remember where she was. In the semidarkness, everything looked alien.
The rapping sounded again. She stared at the door, hoping it wasn’t the twins. Though Fiona was quiet and spent most of her time clutching the straps of her backpack and watching with wide, green eyes, Flannery was a real pistol who possessed an amazing talent for asking the most embarrassing questions. “Why aren’t you married?” “Don’t you think Mom is getting fat?” “Do you think Daniel’s girlfriend broke up with him because he’s gross?”
On the other hand, if it was the twins at the door they wouldn’t give up, so she might as well answer it. She pressed down on her curls with both hands and, hoping for the best, made her way barefooted to the door.
“Hi.” It was Mark. He leaned his head into the room, scanning the gloom. “Have you been sleeping this whole time?” He smiled. “Did the lovefest wear you out?”
She nodded. “It was a bit much for me.” She flicked on the overhead light, squinted and waved him into the room. “Compared to this, I’ve lived a pretty quiet life.”
That was an understatement, of course. She and her father had never talked much. He’d disapproved of chatter about people, which he deemed vulgar and simpleminded. He’d preferred ideas, he said, and he particularly liked politics. But to a teenage girl, the diplomatic crisis of how boy A was going to break up with girl B was the only political issue that counted. By the time Allison was old enough to have anything to say, the pattern of silence had been set.
She offered Mark the only chair, then sat on the edge of the bed, glad she hadn’t removed more than her shoes before falling asleep. Her hair was a mess, she knew, and probably she’d rubbed her lipstick off on the pillow, but at least she was marginally presentable.
“I think I could have slept for a week. I’m not used to being the center of so much attention. And all that hugging and kissing.” She rubbed sleepy dust from the corners of her eyes. “I’m not used to—”
She broke off, realizing what that sounded like. But it was true. She wasn’t used to being touched that much.
“I can imagine,” Mark filled in smoothly. “I, on the other hand, am not used to getting so little attention. I bet not a single thing got done in this hotel today. The minute you showed up, it officially became Celebrate Allison Cabot day.”
She groaned. “I know. It was sweet but so embarrassing. It makes me feel like such a fraud.”
He laughed. “Why? You’re not the one here under an assumed name. That’s me.”
“It’s almost as bad. They’re automatically assuming I’m one of them, but I’m not. I’m not comfortable with all that emotional abandon. It feels as if I’ve landed on another planet. I don’t know what to say or what to do.”
“I didn’t hear anyone complaining. They couldn’t stop singing your praises. When they weren’t singing ‘The Rose of Tralee,’ that is.”
“Yes, well, today they are probably willing to write off my stiffness as temporary shyness. Wait until they discover it’s not temporary anything. It’s just who I am.”
She felt hollow. She touched her mother’s ruby ring, which she’d put on to cover the untanned band of skin where her engagement ring used to be. The ring didn’t quite fit. Her mother’s fingers must have been smaller than hers.
“Wait until they see how much Cabot blood is in me after all.”
His gaze flicked from her face to her hand, then back again. “Time will tell, I suppose,” he said mildly. “Meanwhile, if you’re up to it, we should probably formulate our game plan.”
“Yes, we should,” she agreed, ordering herself to shake off the ridiculous self-pity. Just that morning she’d feared that the family would reject her and had only dared to hope for a civil reconciliation that might make her feel a little less alone in the world. Now that wasn’t enough? She needed to be one of them?
Ridiculous. She should be satisfied to know that the O’Haras were loyal and forgiving, and glad to be back on speaking terms. She was in Florida primarily to take care of Lincoln Gray and it was time she turned her attention to that mission.
“I spent the afternoon doing some reconnaissance,” Mark said. “The rental cars showed up about three, so I drove around a little. I found Lincoln’s house—or, more accurately, the house he’s borrowing from his friend. It’s quite a place.”
Allison knew about the mansion. Her investigator had supplied pictures that showed a sprawling oceanfront villa complete with tennis courts, swimming pool and a BMW in the circular drive.
“Was he there?”
“I couldn’t tell. It’s landscaped for privacy. You can probably see more from the beach, but I wasn’t curious enough to get out my Inspector Gadget binoculars and stalk around in the heat.” He leaned back comfortably. “I did see Janelle Greenwood, though.”
“You did? At Lincoln’s house?”
“No. She’s at The Mangrove, the resort down at the southern tip of the island. Luxe to the max, but not particularly well run. The staff has loose lips. I got Janelle’s room number and Lincoln Gray’s tee time in about ten minutes.”
Allison didn’t find that terribly surprising. Mark had an air about him—without even trying, he would blend into luxurious surroundings organically, as if he’d been born there.
It wasn’t a superior, down-the-nose air. She knew that one. Her father had it in spades. Mark’s panache was subtler. It was a mix of easy confidence, intelligence and a general satisfaction with life, as if there wasn’t much he’d ever wanted that he hadn’t gotten, including answers.
Besides, if the staff members he’d approached were female, it would have been almost too easy. The man had sex appeal like Hercules had biceps.
She tucked her bare feet under her and leaned against the pillow. Finally she felt herself truly relaxing. Funny how comfortable she felt around Mark, considering how short a time she’d known him. More comfortable than she had with her own relatives.
But they did have a lot in common. They hated the same person. Apparently it was true—the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
“So…what did you think of Janelle in the flesh? Does the picture do her justice?”
“Not really. She’s just as naïve as she looked in the photo, but it didn’t show everything. She’s actually quite a knockout.”
Allison thought back to the sweet-faced young woman. She was attractive enough, but a knockout? “She is?”
“Yes.” Mark got comfortable in the chair, tilted his head back and grinned. “From the neck down, especially.”
Allison rolled her eyes. “Oh brother.”
He didn’t look ashamed. “Just stating the facts. Facts that haven’t escaped Lincoln’s notice, I’m sure.”
She wondered if he was right. Lincoln had always acted as if he found Allison the most attractive woman in the universe—even though her figure would never snag her a job as a Playboy bunny. Of course, acting was the important word. Lincoln had merely been playing the role of adoring suitor. For all she knew he’d been secretly drooling over every double-D that sashayed by.
Or maybe Mark was just projecting. Maybe Janelle’s voluptuous body was exactly his type, so he assumed it must appeal to all men.
She fought the urge to adjust her rumpled T-shirt to a more flattering fit. Instead, she climbed off the bed, hoisted up her garment bag and began unzipping it.
“If she’s that amazing,” she said, pulling out a handful of hangers, “maybe we should do this rescue as a team. I’ll distract Lincoln while you romance Janelle away from him.”
Mark chuckled. “It had occurred to me. But what’s the point? Would it really be any better to get her heart broken by me instead of Lincoln?”
“What makes you so sure you’d break her heart?” She arranged some of her dresses in the closet, shaking out the wrinkles. “Maybe you’d fall deeply in love and end up living happily ever after with two-point-five kids and a picket fence.”
He grimaced. “Not in this lifetime.”
She pulled out the last of her clothes, a light blue cotton sundress. This was what she’d planned to wear when she met Lincoln, but when she held it up against her chest and looked at it in the closet mirror, it suddenly looked too tame.
“Why not? If you work quickly, we could have a double wedding. I could be godmother to your firstborn daughter, and I’d give you a great discount at Lullabies.”
“Sorry. You’re trying to sell that fantasy to the wrong guy.”
She could see him in the mirror. He was still smiling, but his voice sounded edgy, and she wondered if she might somehow have offended him.
“And maybe we should talk reality anyhow,” he said, sounding more normal. “When do you plan to make contact with Lincoln? Have you decided what you’re going to say?”
She leaned against the closet door, letting the dress drape over her arm.
“I’ve been thinking about that a lot,” she said. “I’ve decided that the only way is to be very straightforward. I’ll go to his house, probably tomorrow, and talk to him. I’ll have to tell him I still love him, and I understand why he didn’t show up at the church.”
“Which is?”
“Because I hurt him when I insisted on the prenup. I made him feel that I didn’t trust him. I’ll tell him that I’m going to prove that I do trust him. I even brought the prenup with me. I’m going to start by tearing it up.”
“Nice touch.”
“I thought so. I’m bringing a present, too. You gave me the idea when you told me how he stole your sister’s brooch.”
Mark smiled. “You have a tacky peacock in your family, too?”
“No, but it’s a rather nice gold signet ring. Expensive as hell. I’m going to tell him it’s a family piece, though actually I picked it up at Tiffany’s last week. And then I’ll tell him how much I love him, how empty my life is without him.”
Mark whistled softly. “That’s a pretty big piece of humble pie. You sure you’re going to be able to choke it down?”
She nodded. “Without blinking.”
He rested his temple against his knuckles and gazed at her appraisingly. “Well, you sound ready. And the jewelry is a nice touch—it might even provide a chance to see where he puts it for safekeeping. Maybe it’ll turn out to be the same place he keeps the peacock.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But remember, it’s a long shot.”
“This whole thing is a long shot,” he said. “Have you decided exactly how far you’re actually willing to go to pull it off?”
“All the way.” She lifted the blue dress and started to hang it back in the closet. It would have to do for that first meeting with Lincoln. She wasn’t going to try to compete with a knockout on looks alone. She had her own knockout punch—her checkbook.
Mark was still watching her. “You’re sure about that?”
“Absolutely sure. I’ll kneel at his feet. I’ll tell him he is the Sun God and the Moon King rolled into one. I’ll produce my bank balance and open up a credit line for him at Saks. I mean it. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
“Will you go to bed with him?”
She stopped, the hanger frozen an inch above the rod.
She stared over her shoulder at Mark, who looked genuinely curious.
Damn it.
She was an idiot.
She really hadn’t thought of that.
CHAPTER FIVE
DANIEL O’HARA HATED the rain. Whenever one of those typical Florida afternoon thunderstorms broke loose, the pro shop at The Mangrove filled up with wet, irritable tourists who seemed outraged to discover that their vacation package hadn’t come with a sunshine guarantee.
Daniel ordinarily liked this part-time job okay—it was laid-back and it was fun to see all the new equipment first. Besides, he’d do anything to get a few hours away from the Hideaway and from his parents. Ever since the trouble last winter, they watched him like a hawk.
But he didn’t like it when it rained. The guests needed someone to take their frustrations out on, and the seventeen-year-old nobody behind the register made the perfect target.
And, of course, he had to treat them like royalty, even though they smelled rank and they dripped all over the merchandise, because, of course, they’d stayed out on the golf course too long, as if ignoring the rain would make it go away. They pawed the clothes, swung the clubs and tried on cap after cap. They bitched about everything and never bought squat.
He was trying to explain to Mr. Inkerfino that they didn’t carry these microfiber, herringbone golf shorts in a four-X—without implying that people who wore four-X probably shouldn’t even be on a golf course and definitely shouldn’t be wearing herringbone—when he caught a whiff of jasmine and sandalwood above the sweat.
His heart did a pole-vault jump. That was Janelle Greenwood’s perfume. It was probably the only perfume he’d recognize with his eyes closed.
“Hi, Danny,” she said from behind him.
He handed the three-X shorts to Mr. Inkerfino, then turned, smiling. “Hi, Ms. Greenwood.”
She tilted her head, giving him a mock stern look. “Ms. Greenwood?”
He shrugged, hoping the flush he felt around his chest didn’t make its way to his face. He had a zit right near his hairline and his freckles would probably light up like a Christmas tree. His stupid sensitive skin was one of the eight million reasons he hated being a redhead.
For the freckles, his grandfather said he should swab them with the blood of a hare or distilled water of walnuts. When he was a kid, he had begged his mom to make some kind of rabbit dinner, in the hopes that he could get hold of some blood. The walnut thing just didn’t make any sense to a ten-year-old at all.
She’d refused, so he had the damn things still. The sign of a true Irishman, his father assured him proudly. Yeah, right. Freckles and blushes and acne. Real sexy.
“Ms. Greenwood?” Janelle said again, softly.
Last time she was in the shop, she’d asked him to call her Janelle. Anything else was silly, she’d said, considering that she was probably only a few years older than he was. But his manager, Mr. Beaner, was a real stickler and he would have fired Daniel if he heard him getting chummy with a customer.
“Umm…well… Hey, that’s your new tennis dress, isn’t it?” Daniel hoped she’d be willing to change the subject. He’d helped her pick the dress out yesterday and it looked really hot on her. “Did you get rained out?”
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