Читать книгу Kiss and Run - Barbara Daly, Barbara Daly - Страница 9

WILL SETTLED INTO THE LEATHER upholstery of his new car, wondering what the hell was going on. Cecily had miraculously dropped into his life again after many, many years, and all she seemed able to think about was his and Muffy’s relationship.

Maybe Sally had told her about Muffy. He’d never mentioned her at the stables, and for good reason. When they were growing up, he and Muffy had gotten along about as well as a Maine coon cat and a Yorkshire terrier, he being the terrier. It was one of the reasons their parents had sent him to Exeter. They’d thought it was time to get Will out from under her thumb.

It had worked, too. They were doing much better as adults. They hadn’t sunk to physical violence since they were twenty-seven or so, although Muffy had been telling the truth when she’d said he’d tried to smother her once. When they were kindergarten age, he’d put a plastic bag over her head and attempted to tie it around her throat while she was sleeping. He’d done it because she’d sneered at him and said he’d never be popular in the neighborhood because he was about as exciting as phonics. He’d felt like killing her.

Not really. A thinking man, even at that early age, he’d poked holes in the bag before he shoved it over her head. He’d just wanted to send the message, Make fun of me again and you’re toast.

Muffy hadn’t seen it that way.

When they were seven, their parents had taken them on a short car trip to the mountains of the Big Bend—a trial run, their mother had called it, to test whether or not the family could survive a major trip west the following year to see the Grand Canyon and Yosemite Park. Will still hadn’t seen the Grand Canyon or Yosemite.

Years later, they’d made a pact to get through the holidays at their parents’ house by not speaking to each other at all. Marrying Gator had softened Muffy some—at least toward Will, now that she had Gator to pick on—but they still didn’t get together socially or as a family except under duress.

It was a miracle he didn’t hate women.

He’d been a prince, a virtual prince, to pick her up in Waco and drive her to Dallas when Gator had to fly up to Fort Worth earlier in the week for a sports-equipment trade show. A less princely man would have chosen slow death by torture over being in a confined space with Muffy for a couple of hours.

He was doing it for Sally. Sally was their cousin and they’d lived through every second of her disastrous first marriage. Sure, she’d been a wild thing, a seriously dedicated playgirl, until she’d met Gus, fallen madly in love and sworn to change her ways. But she had a good heart. Which reminded Will that he had a family responsibility to make sure Gus was a man who would give Sally the happiness she deserved. And Will had reasons to feel concerned.

About the time Sally met Gus, he’d been looking for a new tax man and Sally had recommended Will. As was customary at his accounting firm, Helpern and Ridley in Houston, since Will did the taxes for Gus’s security business, he also filed Gus’s personal returns. In March, looking at the numbers Gus had sent him, Will saw some discrepancies in Gus’s reported income and his lifestyle. Will had put many hours of his own time into tracking down what Gus might have left out of his documentation and hadn’t come up with a thing. Since Gus had done him the honor of asking him to be a groomsman, Will felt guilty as all hell accepting, knowing he’d be doing his best to pump Gus and his friends for information. But tax was his profession, damn it, and he had a professional obligation to make sure a tax return was honest and accurate before he signed his name to it.

He couldn’t let Sally marry somebody engaged in something shady. He had twenty-four hours to satisfy himself about those discrepancies or he’d have to stop the wedding.

With no time to waste, Cecily was a distraction he didn’t need. She was the girl from his past he’d never forgotten, the girl who wouldn’t let him kiss her, a girl who still, after all these years had passed, didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in him. Seeing her wouldn’t have come as such a shock if he’d bothered to read the itinerary of events Sally and Gus had sent him. He might have prepared for it, thought up a few cool moves, a sophisticated line.

Sheltered behind his sunglasses, he gazed at her, at her straight little nose, her perfect skin, but pale now, no tan. No makeup, either. With the sun shining through her lashes, he could see they were long and light and slanted down instead of curling up. Her mouth was wide, a mouth made to smile, although she hadn’t smiled much in the few minutes since she’d sprung so unexpectedly back into his life.

She still had the thick blond hair he remembered, a little darker now, more the color of honey. When she used to come down from Boston to work at the stables, it had been in a neat bob. Now it was long and sloppily tied at the nape of her neck, as if all she wanted was to get it out of the way. At the stables, her jodhpurs had been perfect, her shirts impeccable. She’d looked like the girls who attended the private schools near Exeter. But today she was wearing a shapeless flowered sundress. He liked the look. It was natural, unlike the look of most women who wandered in and out of his life these days. Cecily’s dress left him wondering about the curves beneath it, let his imagination loose, and his imagination didn’t fit the profile of an accountant’s.

One thing hadn’t changed. Her eyes were as wide and blue as they’d always been, that monitor-screen blue of a midday sky. From the first moment she’d handed him the reins of a horse, pinning him with those eyes, she’d appealed to him in some way he couldn’t quite get a handle on. And she still did. So why the hell couldn’t he get her to feel the same way about him?

Muffy, Muffy, Muffy. All she seemed to be able to think about. He had nothing to feel guilty about where Muffy was concerned. He’d been wallowing in his own self-righteousness until Cecily, who’d apparently become a doctor, had decided that delivering his niece, a simple act of professional mercy, gave her the right to tell him he still hadn’t done enough for Muffy.

In fact, he hadn’t. Not quite. “Which hospital are they taking her to?” he asked.

“Glen Oaks Care Center. Have you heard of it?”

“Sure,” he said, already dialing Gator’s cell, where he left a terse message, then dialed the number for Gator’s plane. As he listened to the phone ring, he observed that while the doctor looked capable at the wheel—strong armed and steady—they still hadn’t made it out of the church parking lot. “It’s a small, private—Hey,” he said when Gator answered, “she’s at GOCC. Okay. Okay. O-kay, I’ll do it. Yeah, see you.”

“We need cigars,” he told Cecily. “We’ll stop on the way.”

She did another one of those little whooshy sounds, like the one she’d done when he’d still been trying to get the blood running back to his head. “Do you happen to know where GOCC is?” she said, sounding like patience sitting on a pressure cooker.

“Yes.”

“Would you consider sharing it with me?”

Uh-oh, a little steam was starting to show. She’d found the parking lot exit at last, and sat there poised, waiting for him to answer.

He saw a way to put off visiting Muffy indefinitely. “Left,” he instructed her and punched the number two on his phone to direct his next call to his parents.

“Now what?” Cecily had reached an intersection.

“Take the LBJ.”

“Okay.” The car didn’t move. “Where is it?”

“Take a right and follow the signs. I need to make these calls.” When his mother answered, he said “Hi. You have a granddaughter.” Interrupting the shrieks of excitement, the string of questions, he said, “Details later. She’s at GOCC. Right. See you there.”

Now he’d done everything anyone could have expected. Gator was about to take off from Meacham Field in Fort Worth. He’d be at Love Field in Dallas in the time it took a small plane to go straight up, then straight down. The proud Murchison grandparents, who lived in Highland Park, would beat Gator to the hospital. Muffy would soon be surrounded by people who actually liked her.

What he wanted to do now was renew his acquaintance with Cecily. What she wanted to do was take him straight to the hospital to see Muffy. Why was she so determined to make him visit the twin sister who, from the second he’d entered the world, had made his life a living hell?

CECILY HAD TO ADMIT THAT SHE was a little disappointed in the kind of man Will had apparently grown up to be. And she didn’t mean a married man. If he had to be a married man, she wanted him to be a good married man. It was upsetting that he’d seemed so reluctant to follow his wife and baby to the hospital. Maybe he’d been in shock, because now, making his phone calls to family or friends, he sounded pleased and excited.

Driving Will’s luxurious car made her intensely nervous. She was out of her element. Three years in the country and she’d already forgotten that in a city, even a parking lot could be hard to negotiate without a map. In Vermont, even the freeway was a gentle, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing experience. The LBJ, she feared, would be a jungle.

Seeing the first sign pointing toward it, she went into panic mode. She’d never had a sense of direction, and she’d lost her freeway fighting skills. Those two things combined with the inappropriate feelings she had toward the man she was driving were a foolproof recipe for disaster. Still, getting Will to the hospital was a job she had to do, and she always did her job.

Uh-oh, she had to make a choice—head north and east or south and west. “Will,” she said, “which direction do I go on the LBJ? Tell me quick, because northeast is the left lane and southwest is the right lane, and I don’t know how the hell I’m going to change lanes.”

Will sat back, folded his arms over his chest and said, “You’re fine where you are.”

What a relief. The traffic swarmed around her, cars cutting in front of her, sliding in behind her, but all she had to do was cling to her spot in this lane. It led her up the entrance ramp. She’d arrived. She was on the freeway. Standing still.

“Lots of traffic,” she said.

“It’s always like this,” Will said.

“But we need to hurry!” She raised her hand to slam the heel onto the horn in the center of the steering wheel.

He grabbed her wrist. “Honking won’t help.”

The touch of his fingertips sent her into total meltdown. Will had turned her on to a degree she couldn’t ignore. It was her own fault that she’d let it happen. If she’d only read on after she’d sighted Will’s name, if she’d only noticed that a Muffy Murchison was also in the wedding party, she would have assumed the worst and accepted it with spartan stoicism. But she hadn’t read on, and one look at him had her drooling on his shoes. Now she had to redirect her raging lust.

This frivolous trip to Dallas for Sally’s wedding had become a landmark in her life. She’d buried herself so completely in her work that she’d forgotten the realities of life. She needed sex just as any normal woman did.

And she needed it now. She’d find somebody else to spend a hot, steamy twenty-four hours with, and Will could help her do it.

She’d delivered Will’s baby. Now he, by golly, could deliver her into the arms of an unmarried man.

WILL WAS AFRAID HE’D MISSED his calling. He should have been a military strategist. While Cecily was hardly the enemy, his diversionary tactics had gotten her onto the LBJ going in the wrong direction, and the freeway was packed. Now that they were on it, they’d be here a while.

Which suited Will just fine because he’d be sitting beside Cecily, charming the pants off her, he hoped. It had been a long time since anybody had called him dull. In fact, from the time he’d left home for Exeter, he’d been amazed at the number of girls—now women—who wanted to go out with him. In those years away from Muffy he’d discovered he could be himself, not Muffy’s stuffy twin brother, Will.

Cecily didn’t know he’d ever been Muffy’s stuffy brother. So why, when he’d tried to kiss her, had she run like a bunny out into a violent electrical storm?

It hadn’t boosted his ego any. He’d eventually gotten over the ego part, so why hadn’t he completely gotten over Cecily?

“We should be looking for the Glen Oaks exit.” Which was actually where they’d gotten on the freeway. A full loop of Dallas in heavy traffic ought to give him time to have her eating out of his hand. Figuring it was time to set the scene for intimate conversation, he punched up a CD, turned the surround sound down low and searched for a conversation starter. “So, you came back for the wedding.” Brilliant, Will, just brilliant.

“Under duress.” The fine line of cheekbone and jaw tightened.

“You and Sally were friends somewhere along the way? I mean, obviously you were.”

“When we were too young to know better.”

“So, you lived in Dallas and then you moved away?” It was as if cracking a crab getting anything out of her. But that explained why he didn’t know her. By junior high their group had been pretty tight, a clique that grew out of sharing a neighborhood, school and country club. Some of them didn’t even like each other, but those things and family ties—their parents’ friendships or business relationships—bound them together. Sally and Muffy, for example, were always at each other’s throats, and yet Sally had asked Muffy to be her matron of honor.

To his surprise, Cecily suddenly got chatty. “My father’s a professor of economics. I was born here while he was at SMU. We’ve moved numerous times. He’s at New York University now. But my mother keeps up with Elaine Shipley. We lived next door to the Shipleys in Dallas. I don’t know why Sally asked me to be maid of honor. Will, this traffic is impossible,” she wailed. “We’ll never make it to the hospital.”

“Muffy’ll understand. She knows what the freeway is like.” Get back to you and me. Cecily had fallen silent. It was up to him again. “This is going to be a really big wedding.” That was a good one. “As far as I can tell, everybody in Dallas will be there.”

“That’s what my mother told me,” Cecily said. “Except she said ‘the most important people in Dallas.’”

“Yep, everybody from the mayor to the Dallas Grand Opera director. Oh, and Congressman Galloway and both senators. You keep up with local politics?”

“No.”

So there was no point in pursuing that tack any further. Will cleared his throat. “Where’s your practice?”

It was a simple question, but it seemed to jar her a little. “Blue Hill, Vermont.”

“Why Vermont?”

This time she hesitated even longer. Maybe it was just because the traffic had started to move. “It’s where the big bucks are in my field.”

“Yeah, you have to think about things like that.” In spite of himself, he was getting interested. “You have a specialty?”

“I’m in general medicine, but…but I’ve gotten pretty good at high-risk deliveries.”

“No kidding? What a coincidence for you to be right there in Sally’s wedding party just when Muffy needed you.” He considered what she’d said. “I’m surprised, though. I would have thought the big bucks would be in New York, Chicago—a big city full of career women who don’t have kids until they’re getting close to forty.”

“Yes, but Vermont’s such a beautiful place,” she said, “and the pace is slower. No place is perfect, of course.”

“What’s the downside?”

“It gets lonely sometimes.” The traffic really was moving now, not quickly but steadily, and she seemed to be concentrating on it.

“You have your patients.” He gazed at her, increasingly curious about how she lived her life.

“Yes, but…”

“You don’t like socializing with them?”

A corner of her mouth quirked. A tic, probably, brought on by the car that had cut so sharply in front of them it made even him nervous. “I’m very fond of my patients,” she said, “but I have to admit they have certain limitations. Not big readers. Not particularly exciting to talk to. Very little interest in theater or movies or concerts. Unsophisticated tastes in food.”

Damn. She was a snob. Didn’t mind treating the mountain men or delivering their women’s babies but looked down on them socially and intellectually. Too bad. Just looking at her, he wouldn’t have thought she’d feel that way.

“What about you? What did you grow up to be?”

“A CPA. But I’m good to my mother.”

She gave him an odd look. Most people, when he told them what he did, immediately told him their favorite accountant joke, which tended to illustrate the cold humorless nature of people who chose the profession. When she didn’t say anything at all, he added immodestly, “I have a law degree, too. I’m with Helpern and Ridley in Houston. I’m Gus’s tax man.”

“Ah. But you know Sally, too?”

“Sally’s my cousin.”

“All in the family.” She actually took her eyes off the road and gave him a smile. If she hadn’t, he might have gone back to worrying about Gus’s reported income.

“You can trust family,” he said, hoping it was true.

“You like your work?”

He loved his work. “It’s a living.” He patted the dashboard of the Audi. “Buys the toys. How about you? You like being a doctor?”

She hesitated briefly, then said, “Too much, apparently.”

“Meaning?”

She sighed, then took a deep breath and seemed to be gearing up to say something important. “With no social life to speak of, I’ve really let myself go. Just look at my dress. And my hair. I’m a mess. I didn’t realize it until I walked on to the rehearsal scene. This wedding is a fashion show!”

He didn’t think she was a mess at all. She looked fresh and wholesome, and he liked it. “You look just fine to me, and I don’t think patients notice what the doctor is wearing.”

“Mine are more undiscriminating than most.” It came out like a groan. “It doesn’t bother me there, but here, with Sally and all her gorgeous bridesmaids…I mean, who’d choose me unless I…” She came to a halt. “Will,” she said, “may I ask you an extremely personal question?”

He sat up a little straighter. He hoped the “extremely personal” question would turn out to be really personal. “Whose person?” he said. “Mine or yours?”

“Mine.”

“Sure.”

Her head swiveled. “What can I do to myself in the next couple of hours to make a man want to have sex with me?”

He jolted upright. His sunglasses flew off his head. The car swerved. Cecily shrieked. Will grabbed the steering wheel. He put one foot down hard on the floor of the car to keep his balance. The crunch told him that’s where his sunglasses had fallen.

It was his signal to get new sunglasses.

After he’d taken this woman to bed.

NOW THAT THE CAR WAS GOING straight again and Cecily’s were the only hands on the steering wheel, she had time to realize the enormity of the mistake she’d made. Earlier, when she’d had her epiphany while driving the endless highway toward the peculiarly distant hospital, she’d realized she needed help if she were to find a man to release the pressure inside her. Seeing Will again had caused the problem, but Will was married. He couldn’t provide the solution.

Still, for a moment she’d let herself imagine Will as The Man, imagine him looking at her. Her clothes—limp, frumpy, with no logos anywhere. Her hair—just the way God made it, somewhere between blond and brown and tied back so she wouldn’t have to look at it.

Even if he—not Will, of course, because it couldn’t be Will—were undiscriminating enough, horny enough, to get to the undressing stage with her, how would he react to her severe cotton bra, her enormous white cotton panties? They weren’t even snowy white. The water in Blue Hill was very hard and tended to turn white things gray.

He’d said she looked fine, but what would you expect a man to say? Truth was, she was clean—or had been that morning, which seemed like a lifetime ago—with the possible exception of her toenails and allowing for the grayness of her lingerie. It was the only positive thing she could say about herself. As for metamorphosing into the kind of woman one of the other men—not Will—would be interested in, she didn’t have a clue. Eyelash batting, even with mascara added, was not enough.

It required the proper external trappings, the area in which she was most clueless, always had been. While she’d lived at home, her mother had functioned as her personal dresser, bringing home trendy outfits appropriate for every occasion, dragging her to beauty salons. She’d been thrilled to be out on her own, away from all that fussing. And look what had happened to her.

But Will fit in with these friends of Sally’s, looked like them, dressed like them. He’d know. And since he was married and they weren’t total strangers, she’d decided she wouldn’t feel too embarrassed about consulting him. If she couldn’t have him, she could pick his brains, because she wanted to look like the kind of woman Will would fall hard for—if he weren’t married with a new baby. But she’d said it all wrong and she’d scared the dickens out of him.

Her face went hot with mortification. He’d thought she was asking him to have sex with her. He’d settled back into his seat, panting—from fear, undoubtedly—simply tossing the shards of his sunglasses from one hand to the other. Most men would have yelled at her for swerving like that. She thought he was probably too unnerved to yell.

“Sorry I jumped,” he said suddenly. “You surprised me, that’s all.”

“I’m the one who’s sorry,” she said, feeling miserable. “That’s another downside to being…” She’d come close to saying, “being with cows.” She’d have to tell him eventually that she was a vet. When the time was right. “…being so isolated. You forget how to express yourself. I said what I said very badly.”

“You didn’t say it badly. It was just that—”

“You’re being polite. In fact, I made you think I was asking you to have sex with me, when nothing could have been further from my mind.”

She was puzzled by his long silence, until he said, “Really.”

She forged ahead. “Of course not. That would be terrible of me. What I meant was…Well, let me start at the beginning.”

“Okay.”

Her skin prickled when she felt his fixed gaze on her cheek. “It’s just that I haven’t had sex in a while. Not by choice,” she added hastily. She still wasn’t saying it right. She didn’t want to sound sad and deprived. She wanted to sound bright and brassy, lusty and lascivious, to keep her tone breezy and confident. Most of all, she wanted to sound as if she’d planned all along to turn the wedding weekend into a sexual marathon. “What matters to me is my career. Sex is something I decided to handle with one-night stands now and then. You know, nothing serious. No strings.”

“Just casual sex.”

“That’s me, your typical slut-puppy.” Sure I am. “But I’ve hit this little snag. There aren’t a lot of men available for casual sex in Blue Hill.” Like none, and if I did find someone, the whole town would be talking about it the next morning. “So I thought this weekend would be a good time to catch up, but now that I see my competition, I can tell I don’t have the—”

“The steelo to tap anybody?” He’d grown very still.

“Have the what?”

“Never mind. Go ahead.”

“Anyway, I need to do an instant makeover, head to toe, inside and out. And since you were an old friend and married with a new baby and all that, I felt comfortable asking you where to start.” She gave him a sidelong glance.

Will froze with his mouth hanging open. She thought he and Muffy were married? That he was the father of Muffy’s baby? It was such a chilling thought that every atom in his body wanted to shout, No! It’s not true!

Except for that one atom that whispered, Maybe it’s the only reason having sex with you is the furthest thing from her mind. Because he’d felt a connection, felt a spark between them. So if he told her he wasn’t married to Muffy, wasn’t the father of the baby…

He couldn’t tell her now. He didn’t want to end this up-close-and-personal conversation. But when the right time came, he definitely wanted Cecily to know he was single. Then he’d find out if that was her only reason for rejecting him—again. Now he wanted to get to the hospital as fast as possible. As bad as her sense of direction seemed to be, she’d never figure out she was making a U-turn and going right back in the direction they’d come from. The hospital was in fact about six blocks from the church. “Start moving to the right,” he said abruptly. “There’s the Preston Road exit. I know a shortcut to the hospital.”

“What?” Cecily yelled, then sped up and began demonically shifting lanes. Will closed his eyes, seeing his life pass before him as she shot in front of a sixteen-wheeler going eighty, honking furiously and flashing its lights. And then she had them flying down the exit ramp and coasting onto the access road without looking to see if anyone was coming.

His eyes were still closed when the car came to a stop. “Left or right on Preston Road?” Cecily said in a voice as calm as an angel’s. “Will, I said left or right? Which way to the hospital? Oh, for God’s sake, Will, have you fainted again?”