Читать книгу The Bridal Chase - Darcy Maguire - Страница 6

CADE glanced back towards the bar, a dull ache sliding into his chest.

Given different circumstances, like a few months earlier, and it would have taken a hurricane to tear him away from a unique and tantalising woman like her. Now all it took was Heather.

He’d had no other choice. Heather had arrived right on time. He’d wanted to say goodbye to the tall, curvaceous beauty with the pick-up line and amazing smile, but it was wise not to have. Heather would not have understood.

Heather may be beautiful, successful and classy, but tolerant she was not. Meeting her at a gallery opening just after deciding it was time to settle down and get married had seemed like fate. She’d seemed perfect.

He steered Heather towards the car park, focusing on the footpath and his fiancée beside him and not the woman he’d just left.

He should have said something to her. It didn’t have to be a lot. Just to let her know that he appreciated her wit, her attention and her smile. The thought of putting her off being so confident and charming…

The guilt sat heavy in his gut.

He swung to Heather. ‘So how was your day?’ he blurted, opening the door on his black Lexus.

‘Oh, just the usual, honey. What about yours?’ she lilted, shooting him one of her dazzling smiles.

‘Fine.’

She swung and faced him, stabbing him with a piercing gaze, her eyes glittering dangerously. ‘Did I see you talking to a pretty woman back there?’

The question was loaded, like a double-barrelled shotgun aimed at his chest. He knew she’d already come to her own conclusion, her tone said it all.

He shrugged as innocently as he could manage.

Damage control was all he could offer. ‘The one that wanted to know the time?’ he offered diplomatically, striding around the car.

The woman had wanted to pick him up but Heather didn’t have to know that. It would just upset her, and there was no way in the world he wanted to do that.

Besides, nothing had happened.

‘So where are we going tonight?’ she said more cheerily as though she’d already dropped the matter.

He was thankful. He didn’t want to go there… He wasn’t sure he should be feeling like this, about anyone except Heather.

He just didn’t seem as close to his fiancée as he first had been. There was no doubt that she had heaps to do, what with her busy career, her obligations to family and friends and planning their wedding.

The wedding seemed to take all the spare time she had, despite having a wedding planner and both his and her mothers’ help. But then the wedding was only two weeks away now.

He took a deep breath. It would all be fine after the wedding. Like it used to be. Besides, everyone loved her. He loved her. There wasn’t anything more to it.

Cade just wished their approaching nuptials didn’t occupy all her time. He’d wanted to spend a lot of time with her, get to know her even more.

He sighed. He guessed they had the rest of their lives for that.

‘Does dinner at The Palace sound okay to you?’ he asked, slipping behind the wheel.

Heather liked to be wined and dined at the finest of places and surprised with treats and gifts, and he loved seeing her happy. Which reminded him. He reached into the back seat and pulled out a small wrapped package. ‘For you.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ she lilted, fluttering her eyelashes at him as he started the car. ‘You know I love surprises, darling.’

He nodded, starting the car, quelling the image of being with that tall, mysterious beauty. He had everything and there was no way he’d risk that for anything.

He glanced at the woman who would soon be his wife, the tension easing from his shoulders. She was impeccably dressed, as she always was. Groomed and preened to perfection; even after a day’s work at the fashion house that she managed she looked like a million dollars. Not the same sort of perfection as the stranger in the bar…hers was more a natural beauty, something she had without effort.

He could almost smell the stranger’s sweet vanilla scent on the edge of his memory.

He caught himself. It didn’t matter. Heather loved her top-shelf perfume, her designer wardrobe, his family and him…that was all that mattered.

They were going to have the perfect life together. She was everything he’d always wanted.

Roxanne dropped her head on to the desk, lifting and dropping it again for good measure. Why?

What was wrong with her?

Why had she even tried to pick the guy up with only minutes before his fiancée turned up? As if he was going to do anything then anyway…he wouldn’t have even been considering her. There would be no way even the most daring man would risk it.

She couldn’t stop thinking about it.

She rubbed the sore spot on her forehead. Maybe his impending date wouldn’t have mattered to him if her dress had been shorter, sexier, red?

She sighed, dropping her head again on to the desk and staying there, covering her face. She was hopeless.

What sort of professional was she? She hadn’t even looked at her watch to check out how much time she had…hadn’t even thought about it after he had walked in that door, towering above the mortals, looking like a god in that tailored suit.

She would have thought it would have been easier, especially after all those detective novels she’d read and the shows she’d watched on TV.

She stared around the small office in the two-storey walk-up that her sister, Nadine, had found to run her business. It wasn’t exactly typical of an investigator’s office.

It was small, the size of a small apartment, with enough room for two desks, a couple of wastepaper baskets and three walls of filing cabinets that Nadine’s daughter, Rory, had decorated with crayon.

A small pile of toys sat in the corner on a miniature desk where Rory came to help out when pre-school was out and the holidays were on.

One window looked out on the neighbouring office block’s western wall and had floral curtains and the other faced the street with pink blinds that wouldn’t go down.

The outer office was painted a soft peach with the paint that her sister had left over from painting her daughter’s bedroom, with a sofa that had seen better days and a pile of magazines from the Dark Ages.

Despite appearances, Nadine said the business was going quite well…if you didn’t count today’s disaster or the fact that Roxanne had been left to hold the fort—and she had no experience in this type of fort at all.

What she was going to do now with the Cade case she had no idea. Half of her wanted to shove the thing into the filing cabinet and forget about it, the other half hankered to go and see the guy again, to try again.

Could she?

No. It would be too obvious and far too awkward for her, and the fact that her track record with men was a disaster had to be taken into account.

The door burst open.

Nadine rushed into the room, carrying an armload of files. ‘What are you still doing here?’ She glanced at her watch. ‘It’s late.’

Roxanne looked at the clock on the wall. ‘Yes.’ But she hadn’t wanted to go home and face her sister until she’d worked out what to do.

‘Don’t think you can weasel overtime out of me.’ Her sister shot her a smile that looked a lot like her own, like her hair and her eyes—if there hadn’t been three years between them they could have been twins.

Nadine flicked back the wisps of her auburn-tinted brown hair. ‘How’s it going anyway? Are you finding everything okay? Taking notes for every call? Being polite?’ She dumped the files on to the desk. ‘Can you file these while you’re hanging round?’

Roxanne rubbed her forehead to ease the pain and sat up straighter. ‘Sure, but shouldn’t you be at home with Rory? I’ve got this all covered.’

Her sister scooped up the papers from a tray on her desk. ‘I’ve got a sitter with her for an hour so I haven’t got much time…I just wanted to catch up on paperwork… Are you sure you’re all right with this? I know I sort of dropped this on you, but you were jobless…’

Roxanne stood up. ‘I’m fine. Everything’s fine. I’m handling everything. I’ve had plenty of experience in office management.’

Nadine nodded, heading for the door. ‘Not this kind of office, I’ll bet.’

Roxanne’s mind shot to the scene earlier in the bar. That was for sure.

‘And I forgot to tell you, if there’s anyone who can’t wait until next week just pass them on to the private investigators that I wrote there in the appointment book.’

Roxanne’s gaze wandered over to the number scrawled on the top of the book. Just great. She could have told her that earlier.

The elegant woman had come in first thing this morning, insisting on getting the job done at the soonest possible time, threatening to take her business elsewhere if Roxanne couldn’t guarantee an immediate start.

‘And ring me if there’s a problem at all; I can track down a sitter for Rory for an hour or so while she’s sleeping. I can be a mother and troubleshoot messes at the same time.’

Roxanne froze. Her messes. She could hear Nadine’s accusation as clearly in her tone as every other time that her sister had come and saved the day for her, whether she wanted saving or not.

Since their mother had passed away Nadine had taken over the role with a vengeance. Well, she wasn’t a teenager any more and Nadine didn’t need to know she’d gone and tried to do a job herself and made a mess of it.

So, she had messed up the first time. She wasn’t going to run to Nadine at the first sign of trouble, she wasn’t going to pass the buck and she certainly wasn’t going to show that she wasn’t prepared to go out there in the real world again and put herself on the market.

She could face Cade Taylor Watson again.

Roxanne was up to the task, just not today, not without some more preparation and planning. She’d blundered in earlier, but not again.

She straightened the papers on the desk with quick, jerky movements, avoiding her sister’s gaze. Saying no to that client wouldn’t have been good for Nadine’s business anyway and the business was all her sister had after her jerk of a husband ran off with his secretary.

Nadine had taken up where her ex’s investigating business had left off. She didn’t just do the general private investigating work that her husband had done with a few marital jobs thrown in. Marital was her speciality.

Roxanne was behind the idea of testing a man’s fidelity one hundred and fifty per cent. She wished she’d known about it years ago—her life would have been so different if she had.

Nadine yanked open the door. ‘So, call me if you have any problems. In the meantime, just make appointments and take messages.’

Roxanne nodded, clamping down on the urge to confess her foray earlier. ‘I’m here to help,’ she blurted, plastering a smile on her face.

She would have come to help her sister earlier, but she had been committed elsewhere, in another state, with her own life, job, apartment and lover…

Now, she wasn’t.

She should have come as soon as she heard Nadine was starting up her own business and saved herself a lot of distress instead of staying in Melbourne.

‘How’s Rory?’ Roxanne blurted. If her daughter hadn’t been sick Nadine would have been here when the client had come in. She would have known exactly what to do and how to pull it off without a hitch, first time round. ‘Better?’

‘Not really.’ Her sister glanced behind her, frowning. ‘I’ve got to get back just in case she wakes up and needs me.’

Roxanne nodded.

‘And don’t hide here all night. You have to have a life too. You’ve got to put your chin up and get on with it, you know.’

She held her tongue as her sister swept out, closing the door firmly behind her. There was nothing wrong with staying late at work. It didn’t mean anything. She was so over Aaron.

Her belly twisted at the thought of him, of what he could be doing—whether he thought of her at all, or not.

She lifted her chin. She had a problem to solve and she had a duty to not distract Nadine from her daughter. They needed time together and her niece needed her mother more than her mother needed to worry about work.

That was her job, for now, and she was going to manage the office and keep the place ticking over until Nadine got back, and she was going to do it no matter what it took, even baiting handsome men.

If, in the process, she managed to prove to her sister that she wasn’t the total cock-up that she thought she was, it would be a bonus. Sure, she was useless in keeping a relationship with a guy, keeping a house tidy and keeping a fridge sanitary, but she could do this.

If someone wanted to prove that Cade Taylor Watson was a womaniser, a man likely to roam, a man who was going to betray his girlfriend, then she was the woman for the job.

She wasn’t a quitter.

She was going to nail the guy.

She couldn’t help but smile, the vision of Cade Taylor Watson’s handsome face coming to mind.

Her body warmed. Who could call it work?

All she had to do was get him to show his true colours… How hard could it be? He was a man.

The job was as good as done.