Woman Most Wanted
Harper Allen
“I know it sounds weird, Matt, but it’s a vast conspiracy aimed at making me look crazy.
“They were trying to make it look like Jenna Moon never existed,” she finished in a rush of excitement.
“It sounds too incredible to be true,” he said slowly, taking her hands in his. “And that might have been just what they were counting on—whoever ‘they’ are.”
He had a nice voice, she thought inconsequentially. It was such a sexy contrast to his tough exterior that it ignited a string of wildly imaginative paradoxes in her mind, like a chain of Chinese firecrackers exploding—controlled but unleashed….
His thumb began idly stroking the inside of her palm. This time she was quite willing to accept that she was going a little crazy as the world around them seemed to recede into nothingness.
And Jenna was suddenly certain she would never be the same person she’d been half an hour ago.
Happy New Year, Harlequin Intrigue Reader!
Harlequin Intrigue’s New Year’s Resolution is to bring you another twelve months of thrilling romantic suspense. Check out this month’s selections.
Debra Webb continues her ongoing COLBY AGENCY series with The Bodyguard’s Baby (#597). Nick Foster finally finds missing Laura Proctor alive and well—and a mother! Now with her child in the hands of a kidnapper and the baby’s paternity still in question, could Nick protect Laura and save the baby that might very well be his?
We’re happy to have author Laura Gordon back in the saddle again with Royal Protector (#598).When incognito princess Lexie Dale comes to a small Colorado ranch, danger and international intrigue follow her. As sheriff, Lucas Garrett has a duty to protect the princess from all harm for her country. But as a man, he wants Lexie for himself….
Our new ON THE EDGE program explores situations where fear and passion collide. In Woman Most Wanted (#599) by Harper Allen, FBI Agent Matt D’Angelo has a hard time believing Jenna Moon’s story. But under his twenty-four-hour-a-day protection, Matt can’t deny the attraction between them—or the fact that she is truly in danger. But now that he knows the truth, would anyone believe him?
In order to find Brooke Snowden’s identical twin’s attacker, she would have to become her. Living with her false identity gave Brooke new insights into her estranged sister’s life—and the man in it. Officer Jack Chessman vowed to protect Brooke while they sought a potential killer. But was Brooke merely playing a role with him, or was she falling in love with him—as he was with her? Don’t miss Alyssa Again (#600) by Sylvie Kurtz.
Wishing you a prosperous 2001 from all of us at Harlequin Intrigue!
Sincerely,
Denise O’Sullivan
Associate Senior Editor
Harlequin Intrigue
Woman Most Wanted
Harper Allen
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Harper Allen lives in the country in the middle of a hundred acres of maple trees with her husband, Wayne, six cats, four dogs—and a very nervous cockatiel at the bottom of the food chain. For excitement, she and Wayne drive to the nearest village and buy jumbo bags of pet food. She believes in love at first sight because it happened to her.
Books by Harper Allen
HARLEQUIN INTRIGUE
468—THE MAN THAT GOT AWAY
547—TWICE TEMPTED
599—WOMAN MOST WANTED
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Jenna Moon—Gorgeous but flaky, she’s convinced that her identity has been stolen from her.
Matt D’Angelo—Gorgeous but stuffy, he’s convinced he can kiss his career as an FBI agent goodbye once he starts believing Jenna’s zany story.
Zappa—Cross-eyed and a little overweight, he’s the Siamese cat that Jenna insists was stolen from her.
Franklin Moon—Jenna’s late father, he spent his whole life running from the imaginary enemies he thought were out to get him. Like father, like daughter?
Sara Moon—Jenna’s mother, she died when Jenna was just a child—but somehow she’s never really left the daughter she loved so much.
Carmela Tucci—Matt’s sister, she’s a world-renowned physics lecturer. She sees her brother as a hopelessly immovable object who may have met his match in the irresistible force of Jenna.
Mrs. Janeway—The sweet, elderly lady whom Jenna nearly brains with a can of cat food. She uses a walker to get around—but Jenna’s pretty sure she’s a lot sprier than she lets on.
Edna Terwilliger—The vinegary dragon of the law firm where Jenna worked, she says she’s never seen Jenna before in her life.
Charles Parks—The senior partner at the law firm, he may have been involved in some shady deals. Then again, Jenna may be completely offbase about the poor man.
Rupert Carling—The missing tycoon whom Jenna insists she saw skulking around the law firm’s basement—which has got to be another one of her delusions.
With all my love to Joan Mary Foley Hill—
the original adventurous redhead.
You have no idea how much you mean to me.
And a Special Mention To: The real Zappa,
aka Walker Percy Cat, Siamese extraordinaire.
Contents
Chapter One (#ue02dc29b-3601-584b-bc01-c3fd6e390015)
Chapter Two (#u44089cd5-49e3-5f4b-ba1e-480a7aa6f9c7)
Chapter Three (#u9ac21be7-f996-5bd2-a934-a3ff8f71237b)
Chapter Four (#u881a0591-d243-5388-81e8-c8da5f947358)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
The lady was late. Real late.
Somehow Matt D’Angelo wasn’t surprised. On the phone she hadn’t sounded like the type who would wear anything as practical as a watch, he thought in resignation, glancing at his own. He leaned back against the headrest, his gaze flicking warily to the rearview mirror of the Taurus. Then again, he admitted, she hadn’t sounded like the type who would choose a borderline neighborhood of graffiti-sprayed businesses and grim little apartments like this one to live in either. Her voice had evoked completely different images in his mind.
He’d give her another half an hour. Another hour, tops.
He was acutely aware of the fact that he could still just make Fenway Park for the start of the first inning, but even as he tapped the ticket on the rim of the steering wheel, he knew he wasn’t really considering skipping out. Like any red-blooded Boston male, he took his baseball seriously, but he took his job even more seriously. If she showed, he’d be waiting for her.
Sighing, he tossed the ticket on the dash and opened the car door. As he stepped from the government-issue sedan to stretch his legs, his attention was caught by the slim figure heading in his direction, still half a block away.
He’d never seen her before in his life, but as crazy as it seemed, that didn’t matter. Without even thinking about it, he was certain it was her.
So what the hell did she want with him?
Unconsciously raking a renegade strand of thick black hair off his forehead, Matt leaned against the side of the car and narrowed his eyes against the June sun to watch her approach.
On the phone this afternoon her voice had been soft, as if she was afraid of being overheard, but there’d been an incongruous trace of huskiness around the edges that prevented it from sounding too sweet. He definitely wasn’t a fanciful man, but that voice breathing through the receiver into his ear had sounded like…he groped for the right comparison…like honey, he thought lamely. Honey with a dash of cinnamon. Listening to her, he’d felt an uncharacteristic desire to lean back, prop his feet up on his desk and just let that voice wash over him.
He’d resisted the impulse with an effort. Straightening in his chair and conscious of the fact that all calls coming into the Bureau field office were monitored, his own tone had been strictly business as he’d asked her why she needed to meet with an agent.
The softly conspiratorial whisper had taken on a surprising stubbornness. She was calling from a pay phone on her break, she’d said, the huskiness more pronounced. There wasn’t time to go into detail and risk getting fired her second day at a new job for returning late from lunch. Irritatingly unswayable, she’d rattled off the address of her apartment, insisted that he meet her there after five and had been just about to hang up when he’d cut into her monologue.
It would help, he’d said, keeping his words even with an effort, if he knew who he was supposed to be meeting. With a contrite gasp that had instantly made him feel like a heel, Jenna—all she would divulge was her first name—had lowered her voice even further and told him he’d be able to recognize her from her dress. It was green, she’d said with absolute seriousness—the exact color of a leaf against sunlight. He couldn’t miss it. Before he could get in another question, she’d hung up.
Most likely a kook, he’d told himself. The Agency got its fair share of conspiracy nuts, alien abductees and plain old garden-variety paranoids. No one would fault him for writing her off as one of the above and forgetting about her, but he’d check her out just to satisfy his own sense of duty.
The Sox had been on a losing streak lately, anyway.
Actually, her offbeat description had been right, he thought unwillingly as he saw her walking toward the dilapidated sixplex where he was parked. The tie-dyed dress she was wearing was the exact color of a leaf against sunlight. But what she hadn’t thought to mention was the molten red-gold hair that rippled halfway down her back, the luscious legs that went on forever and the tinkling noise like little silver bells that seemed to fill the air as she came closer.
She was carrying a badly dented can of cat food. She looked like a sexy angel.
Matt grabbed his suit jacket out of the car and shrugged into it, tightened the knot in his tie too vigorously and wondered what had gotten into him. Silver bells? He had to stop skipping lunch, he told himself repressively as he approached her, the leather case containing his badge and ID already in his hand. He could still hear that damn tinkling, like glass wind chimes being stirred by a summer breeze. But although he darted a furtive look at the apartment building, he already knew this wasn’t the type of neighborhood where anyone hung out wind chimes.
Just then Jenna looked up and saw him. She stopped, and the sound stopped with her. As he got closer she took a tentative step forward, and a single silver note rang out.
Around one slim ankle she was wearing a fine chain with tiny bells on it. Relief swept through him.
“Agent D’Angelo?”
The voice was the same as he remembered, but combined with wide eyes the color of cornflowers, and spoken through those lush lips, the effect was even more sensual than it had been over the phone. For a moment he just looked at her, his brain refusing to shift into gear. Then he snapped out of it. She was way too much, he thought with sudden illogic. Too much hair, too much leg, too much satiny skin. Generous curves that even the short straight shift she wore—the famous leaf-green dress—couldn’t conceal. The ankle bracelet was like an unnecessary cherry on top of warm caramel sauce and whipped cream.
He realized that he’d been holding his open ID in front of him for the last few seconds, and those amazingly blue eyes were beginning to hold a hint of uncertainty. Snapping the leather case shut and stuffing it back into his jacket pocket, he nodded curtly and held out his hand to shake hers, but even as he did he saw what he should have noticed from the first.
She’d been crying. And as she switched the can of cat food to her other hand and automatically met his grasp, he could see a raw scrape on the side of her arm by her elbow, as if she’d fallen on pavement.
“Matt D’Angelo,” he acknowledged, the formality he’d intended to project falling away as his glance took in the pinpoints of dried blood on that smooth skin. “What happened to your arm?”
“I—I got mugged on my way home, just as I was coming out of the grocery store.” The honeyed tones shook slightly as her hand rested briefly in his and then withdrew. “I had eggs and a jar of low-fat mayonnaise, too, but they broke on the sidewalk.”
The last few words came out in an unsteady rush. When she closed her eyes, for a second Matt thought she was about to faint, but before he could make a move toward her she took a deep, controlled breath. Holding it for a long moment, she let it out slowly, her lashes fanning her cheekbones. She exhaled as softly as if she were blowing a kiss.
For some reason, he couldn’t tear his gaze from that mouth. He was beginning to get annoyed with himself.
For God’s sake, she wasn’t even his type. He liked cool-looking blondes. He liked short hair grazing a woman’s jawline in a blunt cut. He liked women who wore tailored clothes in neutral colors and women whose idea of appropriate jewelry was a pair of classic gold earrings. All of his past girlfriends had more or less fit that pattern.
Unfortunately, for the past five months he hadn’t been seeing anybody on a steady basis. That had to be why this woman’s overwhelming lushness was getting to him.
“This is the first time anything like that’s ever happened to me. Before I knew what was happening, my shoulder bag was gone and I was lying on the ground.” Again she breathed, her breasts rising against the thin cotton of the dress. “Pranayama,” she said, opening her eyes and meeting his carefully blank gaze. “Tantric breathing. It’s a yoga exercise to restore serenity.”
Her serenity, maybe. Matt cleared his throat.
“What was taken?”
Resuming normal breathing and starting up the walkway to the shabby apartment building, for a moment she didn’t answer him. Following her, he saw her shoulders slump a little, and at that he felt a familiar emotion—one that he could deal with—override the inappropriate flicker of attraction he’d just been feeling. It was anger. It was directed at the unknown scumbag who’d done this to her.
He was willing to bet that losing even the ten bucks or so she’d probably been carrying in her purse had been a major financial blow. What the hell was the matter with the world, when a woman couldn’t even walk home safely in the daytime anymore?
“Nothing that really mattered.” They’d reached the front door of the building, and as he held the door open for her, Jenna fished inside the front of her dress, finally pulling out a couple of keys hanging around her neck on a piece of string. She looked up at him and flashed a weak smile. “A hundred and fifty dollars. It was all the money I had till I get my first paycheck Friday, but Franklin always used to say that money’s the least valuable commodity in the world. Anyway, maybe the mugger needed it more than I did.”
Slipping the string over her head, she tried to insert the key in the peeling foyer door but she seemed to be having trouble. Silently Matt reached over to take the awkward can of cat food from her and she bent to her task again, her face hidden by that fabulous cloud of red-gold hair, her voice slightly muffled. “Franklin was my dad. He never trusted banks, but then again, he never really had much need for them.” She dropped the keys and he was sure he heard her muttering a singularly unangelic phrase.
“It’s not working.” She pushed the mass of hair back from her face and turned to him. “Why isn’t the stupid thing working? Can’t anything go right today?”
Those honey-and-cinnamon tones sounded decidedly peevish. Two seconds ago she’d written off her life savings with the calm saintliness of a Mother Superior, he thought, bemused. Now she was getting cranky because her key wouldn’t fit smoothly. He handed her back the can, picked the keys up off the cracked linoleum floor and tried the first one in the lock.
“This one’s obviously the key to your own apartment,” he said. “That’s why it wouldn’t fit.”
Behind him, he heard her taking a deep breath.
His sisters always had problems with keys. Privately he was convinced it was built in with the XX chromosome, although the one time he’d run that theory by his older sister, Carmela, she’d hit him over the head with her physics textbook.
He straightened up in abrupt annoyance. “The stupid thing’s not working. Which apartment does your super live in?”
Jenna took her keys back and pressed a button on the intercom board. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I didn’t have a problem this morning. I forgot my bus pass, and I had to let myself back in to get it.”
She gave the buzzer another halfhearted little tap and turned back to him without waiting for a response. “He’s not home. Let me try the keys again. Men always have trouble with keys.”
“Trust me—they don’t work.” Biting off the words with unnecessary emphasis, Matt jammed his thumb on the buzzer and kept it there. Whatever information she had for the Bureau, he thought wearily, it had better be good. By the time they got into her apartment and she spilled her big secret it would be midnight, at the rate this meeting was going.
He felt a twinge of guilt. It wasn’t her fault she hadn’t shown up on time, he told himself. And if his evening wasn’t turning out exactly the way he’d planned, hers had been a disaster. She’d been mugged, for God’s sake. She’d been left penniless by some creep who’d knocked her down and taken her purse, and she was right—the money was going to be the least of her problems. Replacing credit cards and identification would be a major headache.
No wonder her serenity was beginning to crack a little.
“What do you want, mister?” The man who opened the door was about fifty. He was shorter than Matt’s own six-two by about a foot, but he had the bad-tempered pugnaciousness of a bantam rooster. Under the dirty white T-shirt he was wearing strained the hard potbelly of a serious drinker, and his tattooed biceps, stringy as they were, looked as if they’d served him well in decades of barroom brawls.
He didn’t even glance at Jenna, but instead kept his glare pinned on Matt. “If you’re a goddamn salesman for something, buddy, you’ve got about five seconds to get your butt off—”
“Mr. West, my key’s not working.” Jenna didn’t seem intimidated by his stream of invective. “When I moved in last week you said you’d get a spare set cut for me. Can I use them tonight and have some copies made tomorrow?”
He swung round to her, the scowl on his face deepening. “And who are you, lady? What is this, some kind of freakin’ scam?”
Matt had been watching the super, ready to step in if the man’s hostility crossed the line into action, but this newest tactic caught him by surprise. Flashing a quick look at Jenna’s dumbfounded expression, he realized that she was as taken aback as he was. Her polite smile had faded into confusion, and her cornflower-blue eyes widened.
“I’m Jenna, Mr. West—Jenna Moon, from 2B. Remember, you helped me move in my futon and I dropped it on your foot? And last night I gave you an aloe plant and told you how it could heal burns and cuts?” She gave an uncertain little laugh. “You were going to fix my faucet this weekend.”
“You’re crazy, sweetcheeks.” West looked from her to Matt and grunted. “Get your flaky girlfriend out of here before I call the cops.”
He started to close the foyer door, but Matt had had enough. Swiftly he stepped forward and shoved his shoulder and right arm through the narrowing space between the door and its frame, his ID and badge already open and dangling from his fingers.
“I am the cops,” he said in a flat voice. “And the lady’s a tenant of yours. How about you start showing some cooperation here, buddy?”
He could have sworn he saw a flash of something like fear behind West’s hard stare, but that was a common reaction. Men like him always had something to hide, Matt thought with disgust. Usually their dirty little secrets had nothing to do with the case on hand, but as soon as they realized they were dealing with the authorities they started lying automatically, unwilling to give a straight answer to any question.
West was probably just a mean drunk who’d drawn a temporary blank on his newest tenant. But Jenna—what had she said her last name was?—Jenna Moon didn’t need any more problems tonight. She was doing that deep-breathing thing again, he noted resignedly.
“Just let her into her apartment. I’ll even sign for the key if you want some kind of official receipt.” He forced a civility into his voice that he didn’t feel, at the same time exerting enough pressure on the half-open door to make the surly superintendent step back. Giving Jenna a slight nod, he kept his body between her and West as she nervously slipped past him to the short flight of stairs leading to the second floor.
“Look, mister.” West dropped his voice and darted a look at her, now climbing the stairs. “I’m being straight with you—that little sweetheart don’t live in 2B or any other freakin’ apartment here. If I have to, I’ll prove it to you.”
His attitude had changed from abrasiveness to an unpleasant kind of man-to-man confidentiality. For a second, Matt wondered if there was any way the man was telling the truth. His earlier impression of Jenna resurfaced.
West had called her flaky. During her brief phone call to the Bureau, he’d figured himself that she’d sounded like a kook—secretive, refusing to give him any hint of what her vital information was and hanging up after that unconventional description of the dress she was wearing. Her reaction to losing her life savings hadn’t been normal, and even her appearance was a little offbeat. He frowned. On the other hand, this lowlife superintendent was just the type to run some kind of scam himself, and, with her obvious openness and artlessness, he would have pegged his new tenant as an easy mark. The last thing he would have expected was for her to show up with an FBI agent in tow.
“There’s someone in my apartment!” Jenna’s voice was outraged, and glancing up to the first-floor landing he saw her bent over and peering at the crack under the door. “There’s a light on. I didn’t leave any lights on when I left this morning!”
“Okay, that’s it.” Matt jerked his head grimly at the man in front of him. “You’re going to let the lady into her apartment, and if we find anything missing you better be ready with some real fast explaining. What is this, some sweet little deal you’ve got going with a few light-fingered friends?”
West gave a short bark of humorless laughter, shedding the false bonhomie he’d displayed a few seconds ago as if it had never been. He rubbed his unshaven jaw thoughtfully, a thin smile on his lips. “You’re as crazy as she is. But I don’t want no trouble with the feds.” He shrugged and started for the stairs, reaching around the back of his belt for the collection of keys that hung on a steel ring there. “Come on, let’s see how Miss Looney Tunes explains this.”
They were close enough now to Jenna that she overheard this last remark, and the expression in those wide, guileless eyes made Matt think of a deer, shot without warning. She’d obviously trusted this jerk. He felt a sudden spurt of irritation at her naiveté. Where the hell had she been all her life, that she seemed so ill equipped to deal with the real world? She had to be twenty-three or twenty-four—not a susceptible teenager anymore. It was as if she’d been living in some peaceful utopia up until now, where everyone could be taken at their face value, and the sordid side of life—money, violence, dishonesty—never intruded.
“Use your damn key, West,” he snapped. The man had raised a meaty fist and was knocking on the door. “Let’s get this over with.”
Even as he finished speaking, he heard footsteps coming from inside the apartment and all his senses went on full alert. Jenna had heard them, too, and she turned to him, shocked.
“What’s going on, Matt? Does he have the right to let someone in when I’m not at home?”
“Move away from the door, Jenna.” He ignored her question and gave the command in a low, urgent voice. Standing to one side of the door himself, he reached inside his jacket for the shoulder-holstered Sig Sauer he wore during working hours and narrowed his eyes at West, who hadn’t moved.
“If your pals are armed, you stand a good chance of being the first casualty. And if you’re not the first, you can bet I’ll make damn sure you’re the second.” He gripped the gun in both hands, the barrel pointing at the floor. His words were barely above a whisper, but the threat was unmistakable. “Tell them to open the door slowly, and no sudden moves.”
The man’s shrug of reply was almost insolently unconcerned. One side of his mouth hitched up in a mocking half smile. “This is a real career-breaking move you’re making here, D’Angelo. Maybe you should go home tonight and start packing for Anchorage. The Bureau’s probably going to send you as far out of town as they can after this foul-up.” He tapped with almost ludicrous courtesy on the door as the footsteps shuffled to a halt. “Mrs. Janeway? It’s Pete West. Can I talk to you for a minute?”
Matt’s finger was tight on the trigger, and for one fleeting second he could see himself—Matt D’Angelo, who never rushed into things without carefully considering every angle, standing armed and ready to kick down a door if necessary, all on the word of a woman he’d met only minutes ago. What’s wrong with this picture, D’Angelo? he thought in momentary confusion. This isn’t you, man—step back and think this out, for God’s sake!
Then he stopped trying to reason, and let instinct take over completely as he saw the door swing slowly open.
“FBI—freeze!” Out of the corner of his eye he could see Jenna edging nervously but resolutely up to the other side of the door, the dented can held high above her head like a weapon, and he felt his heart skip a couple of beats. “Step out into the hall with your hands up!”
For a second there was no reply, but then a voice answered him in a hesitant quaver. “I can’t, young man. If I let go of my walker, I’ll fall. If you’ll give me a minute, though, I think I can spread ’em, as you policemen say.”
Even as Matt pivoted swiftly from the side of the door frame to confront the intruder, his brain was scrambling into overdrive, desperately trying to pull in every scrap of information it was receiving and process it into something that made some kind of sense.
Except when he realized that he was holding a gun on a little old lady in an aluminum walker, a little old lady with white hair, orthopedic shoes, and bifocals that glinted in front of curious faded blue eyes, he suddenly got the feeling that there was going to be no way this was ever going to make sense.
God, D’Angelo, you could have blown away Grandma Walton, he thought with numb horror. Well, it hadn’t been that close a call. But he’d be willing to bet that West, standing behind him, would embellish the encounter to the first reporter he could get on the phone.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” Jenna asked the woman.
For a second he’d forgotten about Jenna, but that had been another mistake, he thought, his heart sinking. Hair flying around her shoulders in a burnished copper cloud, breasts heaving in indignation under the thin Indian cotton of her dress, and shaking the can of cat food at Mrs. Jane-way, she looked like an angel, all right. Only this time she looked like an avenging angel, ready to drive the old lady out of the Garden of Eden.
Or at least out of the apartment that Jenna obviously still felt she had a claim on. A sudden thought struck Matt, and he turned with renewed hope to the superintendent behind him, ignoring West’s triumphant grin. “What are you trying to pull? It’s the wrong damn apartment!”
“What do you mean, the wrong apartment?” Jenna whirled on him angrily. “I know where I live, Matt! This woman might look like a sweet little old lady to you, but she’s got no right to be here! Look, I’ll show you!”
Before he could stop her, she’d sidestepped past the aluminum walker with a dancer’s agility, but even as he edged cautiously past the old lady with a muttered apology and reached out to grab Jenna’s arm, she froze.
“What have you done to my apartment?”
Her gaze swung wildly around the comfortably cozy living room as if she was looking upon some terrible desecration. With a trembling finger, she pointed at a row of potted African violets on the radiator by the window.
“They—they’re artificial! Where’s my fern and my spider plant?” She gestured at the colonial-style recliner sitting in front of a small television set. On a low table beside the chair was a half-knitted child’s garment, in an insipid color combination of peach-pink and cream. Her voice rose. “And what’s all this? This isn’t my furniture! I had my rattan set here, and I don’t even own a television! What’s going on?”
It was time to step in, he told himself. She’d made some kind of colossal mistake, and she just wasn’t admitting it to herself. Again, the first impression he’d had of her flashed through his mind, but he shoved it aside. She’d only lived here a week, and tonight she’d gone through a traumatic experience. She wasn’t necessarily crazy—maybe she’d hit her head when she’d fallen and received some kind of mild concussion. That had to be it, he thought compassionately. She was suffering from some kind of short-term memory loss.
It was a convenient theory, but it was full of holes, and he knew it. She’d given him this address over the phone this afternoon—before she’d been accosted by the mugger.
If there had been a mugger.
“You don’t believe me.” She was staring at him, her face pale, her white-knuckled grip still hanging on for dear life to the cat-food can, and Matt found it impossible to say anything. The smart way out would be to lie, to play along with her until he could get her out of here quietly, but suddenly he knew he couldn’t do it. As the silence between them lengthened, she seemed to be searching his expression intently.
“You think I’m crazy.” Her voice was a thready, incredulous whisper. She stared numbly at the fussy flower-sprigged wallpaper, the embroidered pictures of pastoral scenes on the walls and the stack of Agatha Christie mysteries piled on an ornately ugly coffee table in front of the plaid sofa. “You’ve got to believe me, Matt! When I left here this morning that ceiling was painted sky-blue with white clouds I’d sponged on this weekend. The walls were a lighter blue. I was making canvas cushions for my furniture, I had photographs of my parents on the wall, and my plants were growing on the windowsill. Somebody’s made it all different! You have to believe me!”
Her last few words were an urgent entreaty, and though he tried to soften his response, he knew it was the last thing she wanted to hear. “That doesn’t make any sense, Jenna.” He kept his voice quiet, hoping to soothe the raw anguish in her eyes. “What reason would anyone have for doing that?”
Instead of answering him, she held his gaze unwaveringly for a moment as if giving him one last chance to change his mind. Then whatever hope she still had ebbed visibly out of her and she turned slowly away. Walking to a half-open door, she flicked on a light switch. Matt remained where he was, his hands clenched at his sides, watching her as she looked in, switched off the light and turned back to him, her voice toneless. “Everything’s changed. My futon’s gone, the quilt my mother made for me when I was a little girl—it’s all disappeared. And you don’t believe me, do you?”
“Would anybody like a nice cup of tea?” Mrs. Janeway had hobbled back into the room. At the doorway, West surveyed the scene with a tight grin and Matt suddenly felt a violent urge to knock the smile from his face. But Jenna didn’t even spare the man a second glance. Her attention was directed at the old lady, and her head was tipped to one side, quizzically.
“It’s all an act, isn’t it?” She gave Mrs. Janeway a coldly appraising look, and the older woman halted in her slow progress across the room, her faded eyes sharpening as she met Jenna’s glance. “You must be useful for something like this—who’s going to suspect a sweet little old lady of being a crook?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, dear.” Mrs. Janeway smiled sympathetically. “Mr. West says you had some idea that this might have been your apartment once, but that’s just not possible. I’ve been here for over fifteen years now, and as you can see, I have all my little treasures and comforts around me. This has been my home since my husband passed away, God rest his soul.”
The old voice held a wistful tremor, but instead of rousing Jenna to pity, what little composure she had left finally cracked. “You’re lying! This is my home! You’ve stolen the first home I ever really had, you—you criminal!” She shook the can of cat food at West, standing in the doorway. “And you’re in on this with her! You rented me this apartment a week ago, and you know it!”
Suddenly her gaze went blank and she stared frantically around. “Where’s Zappa?” Her voice rose. “What did you do with him?”
“What’s she talking about?” the old lady said in a loudly whispered aside to Matt, as if Jenna was incapable of understanding her. “Who’s this Zeppo person she’s looking for now?”
The wrinkled face held an expression of saccharine pity, but behind the bifocals her eyes twinkled with avid interest, and suddenly Matt realized that he didn’t like Mrs. Janeway either. But whether he liked the woman or not, they’d intruded on her long enough. He turned to Jenna.
“We have to go. I know you’re upset right now, but—”
“Zappa! Not Zeppo—Zappa! My cat! Or do you think this is a delusion, too?” Now the tears that she’d been holding back spilled over, and those thick dark lashes were spiky and wet as she held out the dented can as if it was some kind of clinching proof. “He’s Siamese; he’s a little chunky around the middle, and his tail’s covered with sky-blue paint from when I was sponging the ceiling.” Her voice shook. “And you’ve made him disappear, too!”
From the doorway West’s glance caught Matt’s and he winked. “Like I told you,” he said in a stage whisper. “Miss Looney Tunes.”
Matt’s heart sank.
Chapter Two
“He called me crazy. Miss Looney Tunes.” Jenna sat across from Matt in the nearby coffee shop where he’d hustled her after the fiasco at her apartment. Her gaze looked as if it could start a flash fire on the cracked Formica of the tabletop between them. “And you’re thinking the same thing.”
She never should have let him persuade her to walk away from West and that deceitful old woman who called herself Mrs. Janeway, she thought in angry self-recrimination. She should have refused to leave, at least until she’d found out what they’d done with Zappa. Except that in the middle of her near-hysterical outburst she’d caught a glimpse of the expression, quickly veiled, on Matt’s face and for a moment she’d felt as if she’d actually taken a physical blow.
His expression had frightened her. Suddenly she’d realized that she’d lost her only ally, and that the man she’d thought was on her side wasn’t even able to meet her eyes.
He wasn’t meeting them now.
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said a shade too heartily. There was a container of paper-wrapped toothpicks on the table, and he’d already mangled two of them. Now he stripped the wrapping off a third and snapped it in half. “It’s obvious that you’re a little confused, but that could be the result of a lot of things—stress, for example. It could be an aftereffect of the mugging.” The third toothpick lay in pieces by his coffee cup as he fell silent.
Right from the start he hadn’t known what to make of her, she thought despondently. She’d seen him glancing dubiously at her ankle bracelet and tie-dyed dress, and even on the phone this afternoon she had the sinking feeling she’d come off as a flake. When she’d met him, she’d realized that Agent D’Angelo was just as alien to her as she appeared to him.
It was no wonder he’d felt uneasy with her. It had been almost inevitable that he’d jumped to the conclusion that she was suffering from some kind of delusion.
The phrase “just the facts, ma’am,” could have been coined for him. He was the perfect FBI agent, from his unobtrusive but well-cut suit right down to his gleaming shoes. Maybe he was just a little too good-looking to pass unnoticed in a crowd, but even there he’d done his best to conform. Not a strand of that thick black hair was out of place, and that sensuously full lower lip that seemed so at variance with the rest of the hard angles of his face was usually thinned in a tightly controlled line. It must have taken him years to submerge his own personality so completely, Jenna mused. Now he probably didn’t even have to think about it.
But he’d slipped up once, and for a startling moment she’d seen past the conservative facade to the original Matt D’Angelo. The man she’d glimpsed had looked at her with a sudden flare of heat in those cool golden-brown eyes, and for a heartbeat his gaze had lingered searingly on her, as if he couldn’t stop himself. Then he’d pulled back with a visible effort, and she’d almost been able to see him convincing himself that what he’d experienced hadn’t been real.
Just like he was trying to persuade her now.
“Refill?” The waitress, a tired-looking woman in her late forties with a name tag that said Marg pinned to her uniform, was standing beside them with a full coffeepot in her hand and a mechanical smile on her face, but as she looked at Jenna her expression changed to one of interest.
“Beautiful dress, honey.” Almost reverently she reached out and her fingertips brushed the thin multihued cotton. “I used to know a girl in the ’60s who designed and dyed her own—Tamara, her name was. She used to give them away.”
“Tamara Seagull?” Jenna looked up eagerly. “She still does—this is one of hers. She lives on a commune in Vermont and barters them for produce and firewood. I traded a couple of bushels of tomatoes and a wheelbarrow-full of zucchini for this.” She laughed for the first time that evening, feeling suddenly as if she’d run into a friend.
Matt was looking at them as if he didn’t know what they were talking about. She ignored him.
“When I knew Tamara we were both still in our teens,” Marg the waitress said reminiscently. She set the coffeepot down on the table, forgotten, and her expression was faraway, as if her dingy surroundings had faded into the background. She smiled dreamily, and it was possible to see that she’d once been vibrantly pretty. “Everything seemed so simple then—she’d make her dresses, and I was going to set up a pottery studio. But then I met Dwayne and fell madly in love, and the next thing I knew, I was married and expecting a baby. Dwayne took a job for a few months at a factory, but he hated it, and two weeks after Debbie was born he took off. I never heard from him again.” She stared unseeingly through the steam-fogged window of the coffee shop to the darkness outside, and then blinked. Slowly she picked up the pot and one of the thick, chipped mugs. “I’ll never forget that summer. I still have one of the plates I made back then. But you wouldn’t even have been born in the ’60s—how do you know Tamara?”
“My father and I lived on the Sunflower Commune for a while about three years ago,” Jenna said. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Matt frown uncomprehendingly. He probably thought the lifestyle she’d lived up until recently had died out with sit-ins and peace medallions, she thought impatiently. “It’s a well-respected artists’ colony now, with a self-supporting organic farm attached—their stone-ground bread is famous all over the state. They didn’t have a resident potter when I was there, though,” she added. Beside her, Marg bit her lip thoughtfully.
“It’d take a while before I could turn out anything good again,” she said slowly. “But I’m a hard worker, and a bakery can always use an extra pair of hands. Since Debbie got married and moved away, there’s been nothing to keep me here.”
She poured Matt another cup of coffee almost briskly, and her smile at Jenna as she left their table was nothing like the mechanical one she’d worn earlier. As soon as she was out of earshot, Matt spoke.
“How’d you do that?” His voice was almost accusatory. He looked baffled. “I’ve seen agents with years of experience who can’t draw that much out of someone in hours of interrogation, but she spilled her most secret hopes to you after two seconds. Where’d you learn that?”
Jenna shook her head, momentarily taken aback. “I didn’t learn that. It’s not a technique, Matt—I just thought she looked kind of lonely. And when she noticed my dress, she reminded me of the people I grew up with.”
“Ex-hippies.” He couldn’t keep the skepticism out of his voice. “You really were brought up on communes? I didn’t know they still existed.”
“It’s not that unusual,” she said with a spurt of defensiveness. “A lot of people still choose to opt out of mainstream society and live an alternative lifestyle closer to nature. It’s not as if we painted our bodies blue and sat around contemplating blades of grass all day.”
“Well, it explains the ankle bracelet, anyway,” he muttered, and at that her temper flared.
“And it explains what happened back at my apartment, right? I’m just an off-the-wall flake that lives in a fantasy world half the time, is that it?” She took a deep breath. “I know it must have seemed weird, Matt, but you’ve got to believe me—somebody went into my home today and completely changed everything!”
Put like that, it did sound outrageous, she thought in sudden uncertainty. Why would anyone in the world want to discredit her? What threat was she to anybody?
All of a sudden the answer was right in front of her. Her breath caught painfully in her throat as she considered her theory, examining it for flaws and finding none. Of course, she thought with growing certainty—that had to be it! And once she explained everything to Matt, he’d have to believe her, because with this missing piece in place, the whole thing made sinister sense. Jenna looked around the coffee shop, leaned across the table and lowered her voice to an urgent whisper.
“It’s a vast conspiracy aimed at making me look crazy,” she said in a rush of excitement. “That’s why it’s working so well—because it was planned that way! They wanted you to discount everything I said, so they created the whole setup—changed the locks so my keys wouldn’t work, re-painted and papered my apartment and got rid of all my furniture, and installed that terrible old woman in there with her phony walker. I was watching her, Matt.” She gave an unladylike little snort of derision. “She wasn’t even putting her weight on that thing! Heck, she probably teaches swing dancing when she’s not busy with her criminal career—” She stopped in mid-sentence, taking in the expression in the dark gold eyes across from her.
It was pity. But that was only because he still didn’t know the reason she’d called him today in the first place, Jenna thought, exasperated at herself. She did sound like a kook, spilling it out like that. She took a deep, calming breath to center her thoughts, but Matt’s voice broke into them.
“A vast conspiracy.” His tone was placatingly noncommittal, as if he was taking care not to set her off on another tirade. “Sure, Jenna, that’s probably what’s going on. But right now let’s try and find you a place to stay for the night—since Mrs. Janeway and her cohorts have stolen your apartment.”
He paused, and invested his next words with a casual carelessness, shredding another toothpick to sawdust as he spoke. “And it might be a good idea to take you to the hospital and have that graze on your arm attended to in case it gets infected. In fact, we should do that first. My car’s still outside the apartment, so we’ll walk back. I’ll drive you over to Mass. General straight away.”
He couldn’t have telegraphed his meaning more clearly if he’d been wearing a white coat and chasing after her with a net, she thought in annoyance. She discarded her plan of leading up to the subject logically and dispassionately.
“I saw Rupert Carling today, Matt. That’s what this is all about.”
Across the table from her he let the last remnants of the toothpick fall from his fingers. His features smoothed into a bland mask, revealing nothing of what he was thinking, but the gold glints in his eyes intensified and he flicked a glance around the half-empty room before he spoke. When he did, he sounded as perfunctory as if she’d made a comment about the weather. “Run that one by me again. You saw who?”
“Rupert Carling. You know—the missing tycoon who disappeared two days ago,” she elaborated impatiently. “His photo’s been on the front page of all the papers with the story about how the police think he might have been murdered. You must have seen it!”
“I’ve seen the articles. I know who Rupert Carling is.” He held her gaze with his own. “I still don’t get the connection between his disappearance and what happened tonight at your apartment.”
“It’s obvious! For some reason, no one’s supposed to know where he is or even that he’s still alive, and when they found out I’d seen him at Parks, Parks, and Boyleston today in the basement, they had to totally discredit me before I told the authorities.” Jenna tapped her thumbnail nervously on her bottom lip. “They couldn’t simply kill me. I wonder why?”
“And Parks, Parks, and Boyleston is…?” he inquired politely.
“The law firm where I started work yesterday.” Her hair had fallen forward in her excitement and she pushed it back with a quick gesture. “Don’t you see? This whole thing makes sense now—I’m simply a crazy lady with one crazy story after another.” A thought struck her and her eyes darkened. “The mugger! He wasn’t after my money, he was after my identity! Everything that could help me prove I’m who I say I am was in my wallet….”
Her voice trailed off as the enormity of the plan became clearer. “They couldn’t kill me for some reason, so they did the next best thing. They were trying to make it look as if Jenna Moon never existed, Matt. As if everything about me was a lie or a fantasy.”
Outside it had begun to rain heavily, but she hardly noticed the downpour through the plate-glass window beside them. All her attention was focused on him, and when he finally spoke she realized she’d been holding her breath.
“It sounds too incredible to be true,” he said. At her stricken expression, he continued, voicing his thoughts aloud. “And that might have been just what they were counting on—whoever ‘they’ are.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he sat up straighter and took a pen and a small notepad from the breast pocket of his suit jacket. “Okay, take it from the top and don’t leave anything out, no matter how insignificant it seems. How did you run into this man you thought was Rupert Carling?”
He wasn’t convinced—not yet. But at least he was giving her the benefit of the doubt, instead of writing her off as a flake, Jenna thought shakily. A wave of relief rushed over her and she felt the sharp prickle of tears behind her eyelids, but she blinked them away and tried to keep her voice steady as she answered him.
“Miss Terwilliger is training me as a records clerk, and like I said, today was only my second day on the job,” she began. He interrupted her.
“Miss Terwilliger? What’s her position at Parks, Parks, and Boyleston?”
“We call it Parks, Parks for short,” she said helpfully. “Miss Terwilliger is the head of the office staff, and she’s been there forever. Parks, Parks is her life—I don’t know what she’ll do when she’s forced to retire.” Matt rubbed his temples in an unconscious gesture and she went on hurriedly. “Anyway, she’s a dragon, but today she said she thought I might have the makings of a first-rate records clerk in me, so I think she likes me. She even gave me some files to put away in the archives but the building’s old, and I got lost going down the wrong passageway.”
“And you ran into Rupert Carling in the basement of this law firm?” The note of disbelief was back, not as strong as before but still distinctly audible. “What was he doing, catching rats?”
Her thoughts skidded to an abrupt halt and she stared blankly at him. “If you knew already, why the big pretense with the notebook? Why didn’t you tell me somebody’d already reported it?” She drew away from him in annoyed disappointment, and the bells on her ankle bracelet tinkled sharply.
“I don’t know anything about Rupert Carling being seen except for what you’re telling me now,” Matt said. He lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “Call the rat-catcher thing a lucky guess.”
“Oh.” She looked dubiously at him. “Well, he wasn’t catching rats when I saw him, but he was wearing coveralls with the name of an extermination firm on them.”
“You’re serious? Rupert Carling really was posing as a rat-catcher?” He looked incredulous, but at her nod he scribbled something in his notebook. “Did you notice the name of the firm?”
“It was something unimaginative like Pestex. Oh—and he had one of those weird gas-mask things on.”
“A respirator?” He started to make a notation in his book but then paused and looked up. “Wait a minute. Wouldn’t that have covered his face?”
“If he’d been wearing it, yes, but he had it hanging by the straps around his neck.” She frowned slightly. “I hope you’re getting this down right. I probably should read it over when we’re finished in case you miss something vital.”
“Someday you’ll have to teach me that deep-breathing technique you use.” Matt laid his pen carefully on the table and smiled thinly at her. “The serenity one.”
He sounded touchy. “Sorry. It’s just that this is the first time I’ve ever given a statement, and I want to make sure I remember everything.”
“That’s understandable.” Sighing, he raked his hand through his hair and picked up his pen again. “If you did see Rupert Carling and someone’s trying to cover it up then you’ve obviously stumbled onto something big. Any little detail could be important. What happened next?”
“Nothing.” She shrugged helplessly. “I turned a corner, barreled into the man, apologized and kept going. The next corridor was the right one, and I was almost back at the file room when I realized who he was. All I could think of was to phone the FBI, so when Miss Terwilliger said I could take my lunch break I ran out to a pay phone, got the number from the operator and called you.”
“Hold on a minute.” Tossing his pen down, he narrowed his eyes. “Why waste precious time waiting for your lunch break? In fact, why didn’t you just phone from the office and tell me all this right away?”
Jenna shook her head. “No personal calls at work. Miss Terwilliger says that’s like stealing from the company. I knew you’d want to ask questions and go over my story a few times, but I only had half an hour for lunch and it was obvious Carling had no idea I’d recognized him.” Color rose to her cheeks. “Look, Matt—I wouldn’t have traded my life for anything up until now. But I’m twenty-four years old, and I’ve never had a regular job or stayed in the same place for more than a few months at a time. Franklin wasn’t the type to settle down and since it was just the two of us, I guess I felt I should stay with him until—until he died earlier this year. It was hard enough to find a firm that was willing to hire someone like me in the first place, and I’m not about to do anything to lose this job. I need it. I’ve got rent to pay. For the first time in my life I’ve finally got a place I can call my own—”
She broke off, suddenly remembering. To her chagrin, this time the tears wouldn’t be contained and she felt one sliding down her cheek. She looked up through flooded blue eyes and attempted to pull herself together, but to her surprise, instead of looking uncomfortable and grabbing for another toothpick to destroy, Matt reached over and took one of her hands in both of his. He’d forgotten to thin his mouth into his usual straight line and he looked more approachable than she’d yet seen him.
“Here’s what we’re going to do.”
He had a nice voice, she thought inconsequentially. When it lost its businesslike edge, it was as warm and silky as melted chocolate, and it was low enough so that the person he was speaking to felt compelled to keep quiet, just to catch what he was saying. Big family, she decided promptly. That had to be something he’d learned growing up in a noisy household. She felt ridiculously pleased at having guessed a little of his background.
“I’m going to make a quick call to the Agency before we leave and alert them to what you’ve told me.” He glanced at the public phone on the wall by the exit. “Not the most secure place to give a report, but I want to get this information to the office right away. Then we’re going to head back to the apartment and start searching for your cat. The most likely way they got rid of him was simply by opening the window and letting him out, and if he’s not familiar with the neighborhood, he’s probably still somewhere close by. Siamese, kind of chunky around the middle, right?” He gave her a one-sided and quizzical smile.
She could feel the stupid tears coursing down her cheeks, but this time she didn’t care. “Don’t forget the blue paint on his tail,” she laughed shakily. “Oh, Matt—I knew your aura couldn’t lie! I can’t see them very often but when I can they’re always right, and today when I met you I was pretty sure I saw yours. It was pale pink, like a cloud.”
He looked nonplussed. “Aura? I have an aura around me?” She saw his eyes flick involuntarily to the air above his head.
“Don’t worry, everyone has one.” She laughed again, and then somewhere deep inside her it suddenly felt like a bird had started fluttering around, trying out its wings for the first time. It was an oddly exhilarating sensation. “They’re—they’re a reflection of your inner being. Pale pink is good,” she finished breathily, her gaze locked onto his.
“Even for a man?” He had that melted-chocolate voice thing going again, she thought hazily. It was such a sexy contrast to the tough pragmatism the rest of him projected that it ignited a string of wildly imaginative paradoxes in her mind, like a chain of Chinese firecrackers exploding one after another—controlled but unleashed, lazily casual and then intense, slow and sweet and strong and hot…
His thumb was idly stroking the inside of her palm. This time she was quite willing to accept that she was going a little crazy.
“Especially for a man,” she managed to say. Whatever was going through her mind had to be going through his right now, too, she thought. That lower lip was pure sensuality and his eyes were half-veiled by those thick dark lashes. His breathing had deepened and slowed.
For a long moment the world around them seemed to recede into nothingness. Far in the background of her consciousness Jenna could hear the clink of china as tables were cleared, the faint sound of a radio playing behind the counter and the rushing hiss of a bus coming to a stop outside in the rain. But nothing registered. She felt as if the whole universe had lasered down to a single pinpoint of reality that only included the touch of their hands, the electric awareness flowing between them.
“I—I should make that call.”
Matt’s reluctant words finally broke the silence, but instead of regretting that the moment had come to an end, she almost welcomed it. She felt shaky and disoriented, and as he abruptly pushed back his chair and walked over to the phone in the corner of the coffee shop, it was almost impossible to force herself to stop staring at the way he moved, from letting her gaze linger on the smoothly powerful shift of muscles under that suit jacket…
What had just happened between them? A silvery shiver ran down her spine. One moment they’d been slightly antagonistic near strangers, and the next minute they’d both been indulging in converging fantasies that had almost accelerated into reality. Only the fact that they’d been in a public place had kept them apart, Jenna thought tremulously.
It had been so intense. It was as if those wings she’d felt fluttering inside her had flown straight up to the sun, heedless of the fire that awaited them there and craving only the ever-increasing heat. A minute longer in that dangerously seductive flight and she would have never been able to return to the safety of the mundane world.
Even now she wasn’t sure that she would ever be the same person she’d been half an hour ago.
He wasn’t her type, for heaven’s sakes! She saw him lift the receiver and casually turn his back to the room, but with heightened awareness she noticed that he was facing the broad, black expanse of plate-glass window. He was using it as a mirror, she realized. He knew everything that was going on behind him, and if anyone came close he’d probably start talking about something totally innocuous. Suspicion, caution, deception—they were all part of his job.
He was nothing like the men she’d known in the past. The two serious relationships she’d engaged in had been gentle and loving, and both Colin and Ted had been committed to the same lifestyle that she was used to—neither one of them could be called aggressive, and each relationship had ended with quiet affection when she’d moved on. She smiled faintly. Certainly neither man had come chasing after her, trying to persuade her to stay.
Matt D’Angelo might have a veneer of civilization and conformity about him, but if he ever wanted anything badly enough, he’d fight to get it—and keep it. Those gold-flecked eyes that could change so swiftly from bland opacity to raw desire gave him away every time he looked at her.
Those eyes were looking down at her now. With a slight start, she saw that he’d finished his call and was standing beside her silently…and as she met his shuttered gaze, she suddenly knew that her world was about to be shattered for the second time that day.
Chapter Three
She’d known it was going to be bad. What she hadn’t been able to imagine was just how bad it could be.
Numb with disbelief, Jenna shivered involuntarily. Despite the steamy heat in the coffee shop, she felt as if a cold wind was cutting through her, numbing her to her very bones.
“They had to have made some mistake in identification.” Even to herself, her protest sounded foolishly stubborn, as if she was insisting that the world was flat. “How do they know for sure it was Carling’s body?”
Matt rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand, not meeting her pleading glance. Under the harsh fluorescent lights the lines of weariness around his mouth were thrown into stark relief, and his eyes, when he opened them, were unreadable. He sighed like a man trying to hide his frustration.
“Forensics didn’t make a mistake, Jenna. That’s why they haven’t released the news of his death to the media yet—because they wanted to make damn sure their suspicions were right.”
“But even experts can—”
He cut in on her abruptly, as if he couldn’t allow her to keep hoping any longer. His voice was low and emphatic.
“It’s very important that you understand this. Rupert Carling is dead. He’s been dead for over forty-eight hours—ever since someone turned his Mercedes into a ball of fire with a car bomb the night before last.” His words were vehemently distinct and his gaze held hers with what seemed like desperation. “The man was a financial titan, so when word of his death gets out later tonight, Wall Street’s going to tremble, Jenna—and with that much at stake, nobody could afford to make any creative guesses on what was left of his body. They located a Dr. Borg, Carling’s dentist, and had him working alongside the forensics team to make absolutely certain that the dental records matched up with—” He saw the convulsive swallow that she tried to hide, and changed what he’d been about to say. “With what was found at the crime scene,” he ended quietly.
“So I didn’t see him today at Parks, Parks.” Her voice was barely audible.
“There’s no way you could have.”
“And if I didn’t see Rupert Carling, then there’s no reason for anyone to try to make me look crazy,” she went on. It was as easy as connecting the dots, she thought. One fact led to another, and although she knew she wouldn’t like where this was leading, she had no choice but to follow the logic. “And if no one’s trying to make me look crazy, the only explanation for what’s been happening to me is that I really am crazy. Even Zappa was only part of my fantasy.”
Her face was pale and the strands of hair feathering onto her forehead seemed to have lost their vibrancy and fire. Her eyes were dull. “Paranoid delusions. When I started using phrases like ‘vast conspiracy,’ it should have tipped me off right then. But of course, refusing to believe that they’re delusions is part of the problem, isn’t it?”
“You saw somebody in that corridor at work. It just wasn’t who you thought it was,” Matt said uncomfortably. The coffee shop was nearly empty now, but he lowered his voice. “There’s got to be some other explanation for what happened tonight besides immediately jumping to the conclusion that you’re suffering from paranoia.”
“Another explanation for anyone else, maybe. Not for me!”
The unequivocal reply escaped from her like a cry of pain and her eyes squeezed shut, as if she couldn’t bear to face his carefully phrased questions. Alarmed by her reaction, Matt reached across the table for her hand, but she drew away from his touch. A shudder ran through her and for a moment he tensed, ready to catch her if she fainted; but even as he watched, he saw her quell the trembling with a visible effort.
A few hours ago she’d made him think of caramel sauce and whipped cream, he thought slowly—lush and desirable and frivolously disconcerting. Who would have guessed that that almost confectionery-like exterior hid a will as tough and unyielding as stainless steel? Whatever other problems Jenna Moon had, the woman had an inner strength that was imposing a rigid control on her.
When she spoke again, her words were delivered in a flat, dead whisper that sounded as if it was being wrenched out of her. “Let me tell you about my father. Then you’ll understand.”
She folded her hands carefully in her lap, pressed her lips together tightly for a moment, and then continued, the normally husky edge to her voice harsh with pain. “Franklin Moon was a student radical in the ’60s—passionately committed to making the world a better place through peaceful protests and demonstrations. He was typical of the best of that era, and he should have become one of the most influential people of his generation. But no one’s ever heard of my father—and no one ever will now.”
A car sped by on the rain-slick pavement outside, throwing up a sheet of muddy water against the coffee shop, and she flinched as it slapped loudly against the window beside them. Her shoulders hunched forward. “Sometime during his last year at Berkeley, Franklin Moon became convinced that ‘they’ were out to get him—a sinister enemy or enemies who would stop at nothing to destroy him. He left without completing his degree. My mother, Sara, was his girlfriend back then. She loved him enough to throw away her life and her future—she cut all ties with her family and disappeared with him. They lived like nomads, never staying in one place for more than a few months, sometimes packing up their Volkswagen van and moving on after only a day or two. Franklin would have seen or heard something that convinced him that ‘they’ were on his trail again.”
She couldn’t completely disguise the rawness in her voice, and this time when Matt reached forward he was too fast for her. His hand, strong and warm, encircled her wrist. “You don’t have to go on.”
For a moment she hesitated. Her fingers curled reflexively, resting on the pulse point at the base of his palm as if she needed to reassure herself that he was real. Then she firmly disengaged herself from his clasp.
“For a long time I thought everybody lived that way—starting a new school just as soon as you made a friend at your old one, never owning anything that couldn’t fit in a suitcase, waking up sometimes and forgetting exactly where you were. And then when I was seven, my mother died suddenly and the bottom fell out of my world. A few days later Franklin started loading up the van again and I began screaming and hitting at him, telling him that this time I wasn’t going with him, asking him how he could just leave the place where she was buried when he knew that he’d never come back.”
Her eyes filled with tears. She made no attempt to wipe them away and they fell unheeded from her bowed head to her lap. She continued as if it was vitally important to relate every last painful detail.
“That’s when he told me. He pulled me into his lap and stroked my hair while I cried myself into exhaustion, and he explained that there were people looking for him—people who would never stop looking for him…people who wanted to kill him. The next morning I got in the van and we drove away from the town where my mother had died.”
“How the hell could he have put a child through that?” Matt exploded angrily. “No roots, no stability—what was he thinking?”
“He was trying to protect me,” Jenna interjected. “He really believed that he was in danger, and that whoever was tracking him wouldn’t hesitate to kill his daughter too. In every other aspect Franklin is—” She stopped and her lashes dipped briefly as she closed her eyes and sighed. She corrected herself softly. “Was the gentlest, kindest man I’ll ever know. Most people never guessed there was anything the matter with him, and he tried his best to make my childhood as full of love as possible. That’s one of the reasons we lived on the communes—he hoped that being part of caring communities like that would make up for me not having any family but him.”
She fell silent, and beside her Matt stared unseeingly through the plate-glass window into the wet night. When he spoke, his words were hesitant. “Was there ever anything that made you think he wasn’t fantasizing this mysterious enemy? Anything, however far-fetched, that might have indicated that there really was someone trying to find him and kill him?”
“Forget it, Matt.” She smiled tightly and shook her head, just barely holding on to her composure. “After a lifetime of living with Franklin Moon, maybe I sometimes persuaded myself that I’d seen the same car following us in two different states, or that the casual curiosity of a complete stranger was reason for alarm. But there was never any solid proof. How could there have been? It was all in his mind—all part of the same outlandish delusion.”
His gaze searched her face intently. “And you’re afraid that whatever compulsion drove Franklin to think he had to run for his life has been passed on to you.” It wasn’t a question. One look at her haunted eyes was answer enough.
The smart money at the Agency was on Agent D’Angelo becoming the next area director. The man was tough, pragmatic, and nothing ever threw him. That was the image he seemed to have acquired, Matt thought wryly. But all bets would have been off if any of his co-workers had been around to see the indecision on his features as he searched for something—anything—to soothe away the fear that had taken control of the woman across from him. Dammit, he was supposed to be good at handling people, he told himself in sudden anger. Why was he just sitting here, letting the silence between them lengthen?
He said the first thing that came into his mind, and as soon as he had, he wished he could recall his words. “Even one shred of proof that you’d ever lived there would have given me grounds to investigate further, Jenna. The Carling thing could have been a simple case of misidentification. But coupled with what happened at the apartment and the fact that none of the other tenants in the building would cooperate when I tried to question them before we left—” He broke off, cursing himself for his clumsiness. Jenna had been pale before but now the only color in her face was her eyes, bluer and wider than ever.
“Coupled with the apartment that I insisted was mine, the apartment that obviously belonged to someone else—the apartment where no one knew me—there really isn’t any doubt, is there?” She met his gaze and held it almost challengingly. “Crazy Jenna Moon who sees auras, dead tycoons walking around in exterminator coveralls and whose whole existence is turning out to be a fantasy. And what’s really scary is that I almost had you believing it all, didn’t I?”
“For God’s sake, I’m not the bad guy here.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, acutely aware that Marg the waitress was looking narrowly over in his direction. “I know what you must be going through. I just wish there was some way we could back up part of your story, but there isn’t.”
“You have no idea what I’m going through.” The brief flash of emotion that she’d displayed had subsided, to be replaced once more with a hopeless acceptance of the situation.
The cornflower-blue of her eyes was blinded with a sheen of tears. Even stainless steel snapped under enough pressure, Matt thought worriedly. And although he still thought it was more likely that whatever mental aberration she was suffering from was temporary, she seemed to believe that her condition was permanent—a legacy from a father who’d lived his whole life running from a fantasy enemy. She needed professional help, he thought reluctantly.
A psychiatrist, D’Angelo, he told himself roughly. Face it—it’s possible she needs a shrink. This gorgeous, sexy, warm woman who didn’t look as if there was anything the matter with her at all was going to have to be checked into a hospital. And he had the sinking feeling that she wasn’t going to go along with that plan willingly. He’d been wrong, Matt thought with a twinge of self-condemnation. He was going to have to be the bad guy here.
“We’ve got to find you a place to stay for tonight.” He attempted a reassuring smile, feeling like a Judas. His voice sounded a shade too hearty even to his own ears. “There’s a hotel downtown that the Agency uses sometimes. We’ll put you up there for the night, okay?”
For a moment she didn’t answer him. She stared at him assessingly, the unshed tears glittering at the edge of her lashes, and Matt had the feeling that she knew exactly what he was planning. If she ran, he’d have to go after her. It wasn’t something he wanted to do, but she couldn’t wander around the streets in her condition. Then, with a sense of deep relief, he saw her nod in agreement. Jenna Moon trusted him—which made it a whole lot easier to lie to her. He felt like a heel.
“I guess that’s the best solution. I’ll start looking for another place tomorrow, but if you’re sure it’s okay for me to stay at the hotel tonight, that would solve one problem at least.” She managed a smile. “I owe you, Matt. Just give me a couple of minutes and then we can leave. I’d feel better if I splashed some cold water on my face.”
She got up from the table with that long-legged grace that had caught his eye the first time he’d seen her—had it only been a few hours ago? A gallant spirit, Matt reflected somberly as he watched her approach the waitress standing by the counter. Marg gestured toward the back of the coffee shop. If what Jenna feared was true, she’d need all the courage she had to battle the demons that had beset Franklin Moon throughout his life, and that at his death had seemingly transferred themselves to his daughter. She was going to hate him for deceiving her, but with time maybe she’d realize that he hadn’t really had a choice. The hospital was the only place for her right now. He was doing the right thing, he told himself weakly.
So how come words like betrayal and abandonment kept running through his mind?
Probably because she’d come to him in good faith, asking for his help. She certainly hadn’t expected that he’d end up taking her freedom away, no matter how much he felt his actions were justified. He rubbed the side of his jaw tiredly, hardly noticing the pinprick of stubble against his hand, and as he did he caught the sidelong glance the waitress threw him. Their eyes met, and she switched her attention quickly to her order pad, but not before he saw the guilty flush of color on her cheeks.
For crying out loud, D’Angelo—she’s taken off on you. And that pottery-making waitress helped her escape!
He pushed his chair back swiftly and crossed the distance between them in three strides. Flustered, Marg looked up with an expression of innocence that wouldn’t have fooled a Cub Scout—which was no guarantee that it couldn’t fool him, Matt thought disgustedly. He’d screwed up royally.
“She left by the back exit, didn’t she? Where is it?”
“It’s past the kitchen, mister.” Marg snapped her order book closed defiantly and crammed it into her apron pocket. The only other customer left in the place, a bleary-eyed old man in a security-guard uniform, looked up with interest as the waitress’s voice took on a sharp edge. “And she’s had a good five minutes’ start on you, so you might as well just kiss her goodbye. She’s gone. What the heck did you say to her, anyway?”
Matt didn’t answer. He pushed past her and down the short hall at the back of the room. A slightly overweight boy in a white apron over a stained T-shirt was filling jelly doughnuts with an enormous pastry bag. His boredom was replaced by dull interest as first Matt, then Marg, then the geriatric security guard went by at a fast trot, and he stared hopefully at the hallway as if he was expecting more to the parade. The doughnut he’d forgotten he was filling exploded, sending raspberry jelly and powdered sugar all over the counter.
“You a fed?” The security guard pushed importantly past Marg and wheezed out his question at Matt, watching with avid interest as he unlocked the heavy metal door at the end of the hall with some difficulty. “I switched my hearing aid up full blast when you were on the phone and I heard you talking about that big shot that’s gone missing. That redhead with the great gams was a witness—and you let her get away.”
Ignoring the excited old man’s running commentary, Matt slid the lock back on the door.
Behind the coffee shop was an alleyway that seemed to run parallel with the street in front of the building, but it was hard to see more than a few feet. The rain was a silvery curtain blocking out everything but the basic shapes of the buildings backing onto the alley.
“Calm down, Jimmy,” Marg snorted. “It’s just a lovers’ argument.”
“It wasn’t a lovers’ quarrel.” Even though he was standing in the doorway, already the front of Matt’s suit jacket was beaded with moisture. The rain-haloed glow of a street-light shone fuzzily on the three of them as they huddled there. “And she wasn’t a witness, old-timer. She was just a lady with a problem.”
“It looked to me like the only problem she had was you,” Marg said with a scowl. “One minute the two of you are practically melting the frosting off my Boston cream doughnuts, and two seconds later she looked like she’d just lost the only friend she ever had. She was a basket case when she ran out of here—no sane girl would take off into this downpour.”
“Yeah, well…” Matt turned his suit collar up and looked out into the night. It wasn’t going to stop anytime soon, he thought, and somewhere out there Jenna was getting soaked to the skin. “The question of her sanity was what I was worried about. I was about to take her to a hospital.”
“The redhead was crazy? She looked all there to me.” The guard pushed his cap to the back of his head and whistled in disbelief. “Didn’t seem like there was anything wrong with her, if you catch my drift.”
“There wasn’t anything wrong with her.” Marg’s fists went pugnaciously to her hips and her voice rose in scorn. “You’re the one who’s crazy if you were planning on having her locked up in a padded room somewhere. You were sitting right across from her, mister—didn’t you take a good look at her? She was upset, sure. I guess to you she looked a little offbeat, what with her clothes and all. But that sweet girl was as sane as you and me, and if you’d even thought twice about it instead of jumping to conclusions, you’d have realized that.”
“Hold on, Marg,” the old man said uncomfortably. “He’s a federal agent. He must know what he’s doing.”
“He works for the Establishment, Jimmy.” Anger sparked in her eyes, making her look suddenly younger. “He’s the Man—what does he care about ordinary people like you and me and that beautiful, gentle girl, people who think peace and love and doing your own thing are more important than wearing a suit and tie and toeing the corporate line? He probably thinks we all should be carted off to a padded room!”
Jimmy tugged nervously at his jacket, partially hiding the holstered gun and the handcuffs that hung from his belt. Matt didn’t blame him. He felt as though he’d been dropped into the middle of an early Peter Fonda film. Jenna Moon might be Miss Looney Tunes, as the apartment superintendent had so sensitively phrased it, or she might be the saint that this fiery holdout from the ’60s, with her faded apron and work-roughened hands seemed to think she was, but one thing was definite. She certainly had an effect on anyone she came in contact with—and if proof was needed, all he had to do was examine his own emotions.
He felt a sudden affinity for Marg. She’d only known Jenna for a few minutes, but in that short time the course of her life had taken a drastic turn. She’d been given back her hopes and dreams, all because Jenna had taken the time to care about her. Of course she was going to defend her and blame him for the situation she thought he’d created.
“Okay, I was a jerk,” he said. “I lied to her and she knew I was lying and she ran. But I feel the same way about her as you do, Marg, and whether you agree or not, I feel I’ve got a responsibility to find her and get her some help. Did she say anything about where she was heading?”
“No.” The waitress surveyed him stonily for a second, and then sighed. “Sorry for the outburst. I guess I was having a flashback or something.” She glanced over at the kitchen and shrugged. “You could ask Tom if he saw which way she went—he probably had to open the door for her.”
Jimmy, now that the crisis was over, had regained his swagger. “Nice kid, but no rocket scientist, if you catch my drift,” he confided to Matt. He raised his voice. “Tom, get your butt out here! Man’s got a question for you!”
“He’s a little slow, but he’s not deaf.” Marg shot the security guard a black look. As the younger man lumbered out of the kitchen toward them, she fixed a smile on her face. “Tom, you know the red-haired lady who went out of here a little while ago?”
“The pretty one? Sure.” Tom nodded judiciously. “I had to open the door for her. She couldn’t do it all by herself, so she asked me. Her hair smelled good.”
Marg reached out and touched the boy on the arm. “It’s pretty important, Tom. Did she go to where the alley comes out on the street, or did she turn right and head for the back of those apartments?”
With a start, Matt realized that the apartment building she was talking about was the one where he and Jenna had had that ill-fated encounter with West and Mrs. Janeway earlier—the building where she’d insisted she’d lived. It made sense that she’d head back to what she imagined was familiar territory, and he grabbed Tom’s arm, his voice urgent. “Did she go toward the apartments? Is that the way she went?”
With slow deliberation the pudgy teenager looked down at Matt’s hand. Then, as if he’d come to a momentous decision, he shook his head and pursed his lips. “Not toward the apartments, mister. She ran toward the street and a bus was coming and it stopped for her. She got on it and then she told the driver she wanted to go downtown, and he said okay. Then the bus drove away with her on it.” His voice rose. “But she didn’t go toward the apartments. She never even looked that way! She went toward the street, okay?”
He was lying as best as he knew how, Matt thought with rueful admiration. Jenna had done it again—passed a few moments with a stranger and gained another friend for life.
“He couldn’t have heard a conversation on the bus at this distance,” Jimmy said in a low tone. “Not with this downpour making such a racket. The kid’s lying—she musta headed for the back of those apartments like you figured.”
“She got on the bus and it drove away with her,” Tom said. He folded his arms across his chest, adding a new smear of raspberry jelly to the stains already on his apron. There was a smudge of powdered sugar on his cheek. “She didn’t go anywhere near those apartments, mister.”
“Poor kid, he’s trying to protect her,” Marg murmured to Matt. She patted Tom’s arm. “Thanks, Tom. You’d make a pretty good detective.”
“Okay, Marg. I’m going to start making more lemon doughnuts now.” Pointedly ignoring Matt, he turned away from the open door.
If anything, the rain was heavier now. Down the cracked pavement of the alleyway small streams ran and merged together, sweeping bits of paper and cigarette butts and other flotsam along with them. Jenna was out there, Matt thought. He’d been responsible for making her run. Anything could happen to her, and it would be his fault.
“Thanks, Marg. Jimmy, forget anything you thought you heard me talking about on the phone.” Hunching his shoulders, he sprinted out into the downpour, heading toward the apartment building.
THE KID HAD suckered him in. For the third time in as many minutes, Matt wiped the rain from his eyes in frustration and wondered briefly if it was too late to switch careers. A few feet beyond him was the dead end to the alleyway, beside him was an industrial garbage bin with the refuse from the apartment building spilling out of it, and behind him was the building itself—the building where this doomed nightmare of an evening had begun. Jenna hadn’t come this way at all. He’d been finessed by a donut-making teenager who, if he definitely wasn’t a rocket scientist, as Jimmy the security guard had said, certainly had managed to pull a fast one on one Matt D’Angelo, future area director of the Agency.
Jenna could be anywhere by now. He’d lost her.
He was halfway back down the alley when he heard the sound—an unearthly scream that floated eerily through the night. The hair on the back of his neck lifted in an atavistic reaction and he whirled around, his hand going automatically to his gun before he checked himself.
It had sounded like a baby’s cry—but not like any human baby he’d ever known. A chill that had nothing to do with the rain spread through him. From out of his childhood came, full-blown and as spine-tingling as when he’d first heard it, the memory of a story his great-grandmother had told him and his sister Carmela; the story of the goblin’s child who sobbed and wailed in the forests of her native Calabria to draw soft-hearted maidens to their deaths.
The cry came again, an unearthly, soulless entreaty that turned his blood to ice.
Matt blinked the rain from his eyes, and his mouth thinned to an angry line. He didn’t believe in ghosts or fairy tales or fantasy. He believed in hard facts. He started running, heading blindly toward where the sound had last come from and he felt his foot connect with something.
With a raucous clatter, the lid of a trash can fell to the pavement and rolled a few feet before its noisy progress ended. The next minute he saw a small figure leap from the edge of a nearby garbage bin and felt a searing pain rip its way across his left bicep. Immediately the cold clamminess of his shirt was overlaid with the warmth of blood.
His blood. Dammit, he was bleeding. And he was holding a damn cat!
For the second time that evening he found himself gazing into impossibly blue eyes, but this pair was cross-eyed. They glared myopically out of the triangular, brown-masked face peering from his arms, and even as Matt met that disconcerting gaze, the cat opened its mouth and let out a sobbing wail that gurgled off into an irregular purr.
He’d insisted on proof. He’d refused to believe anything she’d told him, he’d let her run out into the night believing she was what that lying bastard West had called her—Miss Looney Tunes—and now she was on the run, alone and frightened, just because he had to have everything by the book. How could he have been so damn stupid?
The cat in his arms yowled miserably and lashed a rain-drenched tail—which was covered, Matt saw, with a streak of sky-blue paint.
Chapter Four
Jenna was stiff from spending the night on a hard bus terminal bench, her hair looked like the proverbial burning bush, and her dress had wrinkled as only a natural fiber could. Jenna smoothed ineffectually at it with the palms of her hands and realized, for the first time in her life, that there was something to be said for polyester.
The bus station washroom was empty, so when her stomach gurgled the sound echoed hollowly around the tiled room. A skimpy lunch yesterday, no dinner, and she didn’t have any money to buy breakfast.
She shifted slightly, and the muted silvery chime of her ankle bracelet tinkled off into a delicate echo. At the sound, Jenna’s chin lifted and her slumped shoulders straightened.
She hadn’t been able to sleep much last night, and her insomnia hadn’t been because she’d kept slipping off the plastic bench. She’d run a whole gamut of emotions before she’d finally dropped into a fitful doze; from fear and anguish to a sense of betrayal to bewildered confusion. And just as dawn had begun to filter through the grimy terminal windows she’d come to a conclusion that had brought her a faint ray of hope—enough so that she knew she could go on.
Maybe Franklin had passed on the instability that had robbed them both of a normal, settled life. It seemed as if he had, judging from everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. But she was Sara Moon’s daughter, too—Franklin had always said that Jenna took after her mother more than she did him—and Sara Moon had been the sanest person Jenna had ever known.
She didn’t remember much about her mother, but she could recall a voice that was never raised in anger, a calm acceptance of Franklin’s spur-of-the-moment upheavals and a reassuring presence that had managed to turn each new and bewildering town into a comforting home for a lonely little girl. Sara Moon was as much a part of her as her father was, Jenna thought. Her mother’s strength would keep her from veering over the edge as Franklin had.
From now on she would live a dull, uneventful, normal life, Jenna decided. If she saw Elvis walking down the main street wearing blue suede shoes and eating a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich this afternoon, she’d smile politely and walk on. She wouldn’t tell anyone, she wouldn’t phone anyone and she wouldn’t try to convince anyone of her crazy story.
Least of all that snake in the grass Matt D’Angelo.
She walked casually through the bus terminal, drifting by the vending machines and surreptitiously pulling on their handles to see if anything dropped out. Nothing did. There was a line of pay phones flanking the far wall that she’d tried earlier, but just in case, she glided like a hungry shark by them again, flipping open the coin return on each one hopefully. She was walking dispiritedly away from the last one, the bells on her ankle bracelet jingling sadly, when she heard a cascade of coins dropping to the ground behind her.
Jackpot! Jenna stuffed the money into the pocket of her dress and dodged out the nearest exit door as guiltily as if she’d just pulled off a major heist. Half a block away she stopped to count her winnings—four and a half…no, five dollars in quarters. If she was careful, she could get breakfast and lunch out of that.
The tiny corner diner was packed with truck drivers and, for some reason, six or seven young women dressed as if they were going out for an evening’s club-hopping, instead of sitting hunched over cups of coffee and half-eaten pieces of toast at six-thirty in the morning. Just looking at them while she placed her order at the counter, Jenna felt like a wreck, but when a seat at one of the tables became vacant, she slid in with a murmured apology.
At one of the communes she’d lived on a few years ago there’d been a woman who made all-natural herbal cosmetics, but her beeswax lip balm had felt sticky and the buttermilk and orrisroot eyeshadow she’d given Jenna had smelled like—well, like sour buttermilk. She’d never really gotten the knack of makeup after that, Jenna thought.
Out of the corner of her eye she cast an envious glance at the woman sitting beside her. Her lipstick was an iridescent mauve, and her eyelashes were thick and black and the longest Jenna had ever seen. She wore a white denim bomber-type jacket that was so short it showed her navel, and under it was a black lacy bra top. Her skirt was some kind of stretchy fabric that clung to her curves, and under the table five-inch-high stiletto heels lay toppled over on their sides. One of her feet was wrapped around the rungs of her chair. She was massaging the other one when she met Jenna’s interested gaze.
“You a working girl, Ginger?”
It took a moment to realize who she was speaking to, but then Jenna flushed, embarrassed to be caught staring. She tucked a fiery strand of hair behind her ear. “Oh. Yes, I guess I am. I just started a couple of days ago. Sorry I was staring, but I love your lipstick. What’s it called?”
The other woman fished in a tiny purse with a chain-link strap that lay on the table, finally pulling out a black plastic tube. She squinted at it. “Mauve,” she said in a disappointed tone. “What a rip-off name. So who do you work for, Ginger?”
“The Skipper. And the Professor’s her best customer,” another girl said. She flipped open a compact and checked her teeth in its mirror, then snapped it shut and started humming a tune. The other two girls at the table started giggling and humming along with her, and even the woman with the mauve lipstick grinned and joined in. The only words they seemed to know were the last few, and the whole table finished on cue.
“Here on Gilligan’s Isle!”
It had to be a television thing again, Jenna thought in frustration. She smiled weakly. There was so much she’d missed through Franklin’s vow never to own one. People were always using catchphrases that meant nothing to her— “Book ’em, Dano,” or “I’ll buy a vowel, Pat,” or “Lu-u-ucy, I’m home!” For a while it had seemed that every second person was hitting his head and saying, “Doh!” and she’d never figured out what that had been all about. This song had to be something along those lines.
“I work for Parks, Parks,” she said as the laughter subsided. “At the corner of Barton and South Streets.” Just then her breakfast came; scrambled eggs and toast with a side order of home fries and a cup of tea with the tea bag still in it. Jenna stopped talking and started eating.
Nothing had ever tasted so good in her whole life. The eggs were a little greasy and the home fries were a lot greasy and the toast was soggy, but she was so hungry it wasn’t until she was scraping the last blob of grape jam out of the tiny plastic container onto her last triangle of toast that she realized that the table of women had fallen silent.
She looked up in midchew.
“You sure can pack it away.” The woman with the mauve lipstick was staring at her in awe. “You better hope that the johns on the corner of Barton and South like ’em a little chunky, Ginger, ’cause at that rate you’re not going to fit into a size eight much longer.”
Jenna swallowed the last bite of toast and started jiggling the tea bag up and down in her cup. “I don’t usually—”
Johns? She took another look at the table of women, but this time her perceptions weren’t dulled by hunger. Short clingy skirts, full makeup, high heels…not exactly a.m. attire. Not unless a girl had been working all night….
“You’re not one of us, are you?” The question came from the woman who’d started humming the song, and there was an edge of suspicion in her tone. “What are you doing here, slumming?”
“Cool it, Crystal.” The woman with the mauve lipstick stared curiously at Jenna, taking in her wrinkled dress and the faint smudges under her eyes. “She’s right, though—you’re no working girl. You running from some man, honey?”
The rough kindness in her voice was almost Jenna’s undoing. She’d been up half the night, her thoughts chasing each other in ever-tightening circles, and although she’d finally come to a decision about her unanticipated legacy from Franklin, she still hadn’t been able to bring herself to examine the hollow sense of betrayal and loss she’d experienced when she’d realized that Matt was trying to trick her into giving up her freedom.
How could he have done that to her? After that moment of electricity that had passed between them, how could he have reverted so swiftly to being the perfect Agency operative—to that stiffly correct, by-the-book persona that she’d thought was just a mask for the real Matt D’Angelo? He’d been willing to dump her at the nearest hospital and wash his hands of her, just because she’d come off as a little flaky.
Okay, a lot flaky, Jenna admitted to herself. But the man couldn’t have it both ways. Either he should have treated her from the first with an arm’s-length formality or he should have acknowledged that there was some kind of inexplicable bond between them and tried to help her, not have her locked up. He wasn’t allowed to go touching her hand one minute and selling her out the next. That was just confusing, and irritating and…and painful.
“I guess you could say I’m running from a man,” she said slowly. “On top of that, it seems like since I first met him yesterday my whole life’s disappeared—my money’s gone, I don’t have an apartment anymore and even the cat I thought I had doesn’t exist. Not that any of that was Matt’s fault, of course,” she added hastily.
“Honey, you might as well have Welcome written down the middle of your back.” Crystal leaned forward, her earlier antagonism gone. “Don’t be a doormat! Of course it’s his fault. It sounds like he really did a number on you—just like when Tiffany’s man trashed her place and cleaned out her bank account, right, Tiff?”
Mauve-lipsticked lips pursed together disapprovingly. “Stevie was no good, but he never would have had a cat whacked. That’s just plain twisted. Listen, Ginger—if you ever need help or money or anything, here’s the number of this place.”
She rooted around in her purse again and came up with an eyebrow-pencil stub and a pack of matches. Scrawling something on the inside flap of the matchbook, she handed it to Jenna and nodded her head at the unshaven man behind the counter. “Joe takes messages for me, and I’m in here a couple of times a day. You need any money now?”
“No.” Jenna felt a lump rise in her throat, and she gave a hasty cough. “I really am a working girl—just not in the way you meant, I guess.”
“Don’t apologize, Ginger.” Behind the thickly mascaraed lashes Tiffany’s eyes held a hint of wistfulness. “Somehow you didn’t seem the type, anyway. But remember what I said—call if things don’t work out or if this Matt jerk tracks you down and starts hassling you again.”
Jenna nodded, too touched to speak, and rose from the table. She fished out a heavy handful of quarters from her pocket, but before she could start counting out enough for her bill, Crystal’s sardonic voice stopped her.
“We’ll cover the tab, Ginger. Just say hello to the Skipper for us, okay?”
All the way to Parks, Parks the catchy little tune they’d been humming as she left the diner kept running through Jenna’s head. People were pretty nice, once you got to know them, she thought. She’d never need to take Tiffany up on her offer, but the generosity of spirit behind it just bore out what she’d learned growing up on the communes—it didn’t take much to turn a stranger into a friend.
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