Читать книгу Escapade - Diana Palmer - Страница 13
ОглавлениеBRAD CLOSED THE deal in Montego Bay, but he took his time getting back to Opal Cay. He had real problems. He had to find a way to cover his bets before he lost something more precious than money. He needed cash, fast. His only hope was to persuade Josh to pull his irons out of the fire one more time. But that wasn’t really likely. Josh didn’t understand weaknesses, because he didn’t have any. He wasn’t vulnerable. Calculated business decisions were his life. He was one of the world’s strongest people, who never leaned or needed to lean on others. How could he possibly understand a passion for gambling? Not, Brad reflected, that he couldn’t quit whenever he wanted to. It’s just that until now, he hadn’t wanted to. Next time, for sure.
He felt something cold suddenly splash against his suit sleeve.
“OhmigodI’msorry!” tumbled out of the waitress’s pretty mouth. She was wearing a spandex skirt that barely covered the top of her thighs, with a clinging white body shirt open over the taut swell of brown breasts. She was blonde, blue-eyed, and incredibly sexy. So sexy that he didn’t notice the brown stain on his spotless gray suit sleeve or feel the wetness.
“Hello,” he murmured sensually.
“Hello!” she replied, grinning. Her hair was full of colorful, lacy bows. “I’m Barbara, your waitress.”
“Brad Lawson,” he replied, letting his eyes run down her. The five-star restaurant wasn’t crowded this evening. Except for himself and about five couples, it was practically empty. There was this walking dessert here, of course.
Her eyes grew big. “Really?” she asked. “Are you Joshua Lawson’s brother?”
Big brother was known everywhere. He wondered if Josh had sampled this delight and decided that he probably hadn’t. Josh’s taste ran to brunettes. In that way, if no other, he was predictable.
“That’s who I am,” he agreed.
“Your brother had lunch here once,” she said, explaining how she knew him. “I was crying because my mother had gone to the hospital with a heart attack. Mr. Lawson squared it with my boss so that I could have time off to sit with her. He’s very nice.”
He smiled, relaxing. “Yes, he is. So am I, of course. I’m intelligent, handsome, rich, and incredibly modest.”
She laughed. “Are you?”
He put his hand over his heart, momentarily taken out of his woes. “Modest to a fault. Bring me a vat of fried oysters and I’ll make all your dreams come true.”
She blushed, but she giggled, too. “Could you?”
“Can sharks swim? Away with you! Get those oysters. Hurry, we don’t have a second to lose!”
She laughed. “All right. Would you like something to drink?”
“A glass of champagne. Champagne and oysters are the secret of Casanova’s success, I’m sure of it.”
“Well,” she murmured with subtle coquetry, “we’ll see, won’t we?”
His body tautened at the look in her eyes. He smiled slowly. He wouldn’t make it back to the cay tonight. He hoped Josh wouldn’t scream too loudly.
* * *
AMANDA WENT UP to her room early, bored with her own company. She heard Josh go out, but she was fast asleep when he came home. And Brad still hadn’t shown up by morning.
It was going on nine in the morning when Amanda phoned Mirri in San Antonio, before she went down to breakfast. She hadn’t spoken to her best friend since the funeral, and she was feeling fragile. Josh was driving her mad.
“Are you okay?” Mirri asked her immediately.
“I suppose, except for having to fight Josh at every turn,” she replied.
“Really?!” Mirri enthused. “How exciting!”
She was glad Mirri couldn’t see her telltale blush. “For a foothold at the newspaper, you idiot,” Amanda murmured with forced humor. She lay back on the green-and-white-patterned bedspread with a sigh, her long black hair radiating out from her face in soft waves. “I mean, it’s not going to be an easy road to upper-level management. My credentials don’t impress him.”
“All that brainwork wasted.” The other woman sighed. “Well, if at first you don’t succeed...”
“I didn’t really expect him to turn the whole enterprise over to me. He said that I don’t have the experience, and he’s right. But I can get it,” she added stubbornly. “I was at least hoping for partial control.”
“Don’t step on any toes,” she cautioned. “The reigning editor has chopped off more educated and talented employees than you know. He’s underhanded and unscrupulous when it comes to keeping his cozy nest. The only reason he keeps Joshua in the dark is because your new partner hardly ever has time to get a look in.”
“You’ve been working for the FBI too long,” Amanda pointed out. “You’re beginning to sound like an agent.”
“Don’t I wish.” Again she sighed. “I’m just a paralegal with big dreams and bad eyes. Do you know what Nelson Stuart told me? He actually said my red hair was too blatant for a government agent!”
“I didn’t think you were speaking to Mr. Stuart.”
“He’s the senior agent,” she muttered. “I have to speak to him. I thought I might try law school. He had something to say about that idea, too.”
“Well?”
“He said you needed a brain for that.”
“Maybe they’ll transfer him to someplace cold.”
“I volunteered him for Yuma, Arizona. I thought he’d feel more at home someplace hot.”
Amanda laughed. She’d seen the steely Mr. Stuart once. He was as dark as Joshua was fair, lean and cold-eyed and very much the lawman. He and the vivacious Mirri had been enemies from her first day at the San Antonio FBI office. The situation hadn’t improved much in two years. Mirri threatened to quit more often these days, of course. Mr. Stuart had asked that she be transferred. Neither one of them had had much luck. Or perhaps it was more a case of not wanting to have much luck. They were a very volatile couple, and Amanda often thought that it was as much due to a flaming attraction as it was to the hostility they camouflaged it with.
“When are you coming back?” Mirri asked. “You don’t have anybody to talk to over there, and I know Joshua can be hard on your nerves. Not that I don’t think a lot of him for taking such good care of you.”
“That’s for old times’ sake, I think,” Amanda said quietly. “I owe him a lot. He deserves so much more than a life of mergers and takeovers. It’s a pity that he never married and had children.”
“Joshua Lawson?!” Mirri exclaimed. “Married? Ha! That’ll be the day.” There was a pause. “On second thought, there was that South American heiress he was squiring around in New York last month. I forget her name, but they made the color insert in one of the grocery store tabloids. Josh is very handsome, isn’t he?”
Amanda didn’t want to think about Josh’s women. She knew he had them, all too well, but it was much more comfortable to keep her head in the sand and not confront the reasons it bothered her.
“I suppose,” she replied noncommittally. “Listen, I’ll be home at the end of the week,” she continued, changing the subject. “We can go shopping. Now that I work every day, I find I don’t have enough clothes to cover the whole week. When I was in school I could wear jeans and T-shirts.”
“Okay. I’ll go shopping with you, if Josh lets you come home so quickly. He may think you need more of a break, and I’d have to agree,” she added solemnly. “Taking care of your dad and working every day took its toll on you.”
“I figure that if you agree to take a job, it’s your responsibility,” she reminded her friend. “I like working. Dad had private nurses, thanks to Josh. He never paid much attention to me, even when he was so sick.”
“He never paid much attention to you, period,” Mirri said coldly. “Just like my father. If I’d had somebody to take care of me when I was in my teens, maybe I wouldn’t be the emotional wreck I am now. He turned me loose. He never cared that I went out at night alone, and I was too stupid to know the danger.” She paused, her voice thin with memories as they came back to haunt her. “Sweet Jesus,” she whispered reverently, gripping the telephone cord, “what I’d have been spared if my mother hadn’t died. My life changed when your father sent you to my grammar school instead of a private school.”
“We had each other, Mirri,” Amanda said with a smile. “Even after I had to transfer to that private high school. Even when your worst nightmare came true.”
“If it hadn’t been for you, I’d have killed myself that night,” Mirri said soberly. She was silent for a minute, remembering the details of that horrible night. Too often they played through her mind. But Amanda was the only one she dared tell. “You took me home with you because Dad was out of town. I cried all night long after we got back from the hospital, and you sat up with me.”
“You should have accepted the counseling they offered,” Amanda ventured.
“Talk about...that...to a bunch of strangers?” Mirri asked, incredulous. “It’s bad enough to have Nelson Stuart looking at me as if he thinks I stepped out of a brothel. He thinks I’m one bad lady.”
“You might tell him that vivacious persona is a mask.”
“Are you nuts?!” Mirri burst out. “Anyway, Mr. Stuart’s opinion of me and fifty cents might buy me a cup of coffee.”
“You’re hopeless.”
“And getting worse. Look, I’ve got to run. You take care of yourself.”
“You, too. See you soon.”
As Mirri hung up, she became aware of dark eyes staring at her, glaring at her. She was wearing a colorful skirt with a red peasant blouse—wild colors that suited her and disguised the shamed severity of her soul. Her long red hair fell in natural waves to her shoulders, and her blue eyes were big and thick-lashed in a face dominated by pale skin and freckles.
“Using the company phone on company time, Miss Walsh?” he asked without smiling.
“It’s my coffee break, and I got called. I didn’t call anyone.” She propped her chin on her hands, supported by her elbows on the desk, and gave him a big-eyed stare. “May I ask you something, Mr. Stuart?”
One dark eye narrowed. “What?”
“Is that your real face, or one you glue on every morning?”
The glare got worse.
“It’s just that you never smile, sir,” she said with an irrepressible grin. “I only wondered if your face would crack if you tried.”
“Proper use of the telephone goes with your responsibilities,” he told her stiffly. “No personal calls on company time, whether or not you initiate them.”
“I still have—” she checked her watch “—two more minutes on my coffee break. And if you aren’t certain that I didn’t initiate the call, you can always check,” she offered. “After all, you whiz-bang FBI guys can get access to telephone company records, right?”
He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “In addition, I would appreciate it if you could dress in an appropriate manner around this predominantly masculine office.”
She looked at herself, from her huge dangly gold circle earrings to her jangly gold bracelets. “You mean, you’d like me to go naked?! Mr. Stuart!”
She raised her voice just as two of the younger agents came in the door and quickly averted their faces. They disappeared into another office with muffled hysteria while Mr. Stuart’s bruised dignity healed itself.
“On the contrary, Miss Walsh,” he said through his teeth, “having you naked in the office would be much less of a distraction than having you dress like a kaleidoscope!”
He turned and walked into his office, closing the door with a subdued thump.
Mirri watched the door for a minute. Then she licked the point of her index finger and, with a grin, made a mark in the air.
“One for my side,” she murmured dryly.
* * *
JOSHUA WAS PREOCCUPIED as he made his way out of the Lincoln he’d just driven around to the village on the other side of the island. He maintained a small cottage industry there so that the local people could better their standard of living.
The islanders on Opal Cay, like many of the Bahamian people, were skilled craftspersons. They wove palm fronds into intricately designed baskets and purses and hats and wall hangings. On New Providence, where Nassau was located, a huge warehouse had long since been converted at St. George Wharf into individual stalls where crafts could be sold by Bahamian merchants to tourists on incoming ocean liners that docked at the bay. But this was a notoriously low-paying procedure, especially as tourists felt obliged to bargain the friendly merchants down so low that they were making the equivalent of one US dollar for a purse or hat that had taken all day to make.
This sort of thing had irritated Josh, who knew full well that people who could afford the trip to the Bahamas could afford to pay five dollars for a handmade straw hat or purse. So he’d worked out a deal with a friend in Kansas who ran an import shop. Crafts made by his employees were marketed in a place far from the ocean, where such exotic goods were rare indeed and brought a fair price.
Joshua furnished the raw materials from which the crafts were made by people on Opal Cay and arranged for their transport and sale. The islanders paid no rent. After all, he reasoned when some of them protested, wasn’t it their land to begin with? A piece of paper was no claim on land that generations had loved and nurtured. There was a resident nurse and a small clinic where a French physician called twice a week. Joshua made available modern amenities like electricity and running water, but only for those who wanted them. He forced change and acculturation on no one. Studying the Native American experience had convinced him that trying to absorb a culture and change it completely was nothing more than slow genocide. What he was doing on Opal Cay was meant only to give the people the means to do as they pleased with their own culture. They had requested that he appoint a manager for their profits, which he had. With investments and securities, they were amassing a sizable nest egg. If something ever happened to him, or his empire, they would not be at the mercy of some newcomer who might buy the island and value profit over native population.
He felt at an ebb. The death of Amanda’s father had put more strain on him, and he was feeling the burden of endless rounds of talks and bargaining that he now had to shoulder alone. Brad was essentially a contact man, a public relations whiz who could charm just about anyone. But, if pushed hard enough, his brother would give in to deal-breaking points. Josh would crack wide open before he yielded an inch.
He paused in the study long enough to pour himself a small brandy. He’d planned to go into Nassau again to talk to the minister of education about upgrading the computers in the school system, but the gentleman was out of town, and he couldn’t get an appointment until next week.
He really was tired. Brad hadn’t come back from Montego Bay or telephoned, and he knew that meant one of two things: his baby brother had stumbled onto either a willing girl or a high-stakes poker game. He didn’t honestly know which would be worse. Brad was careful, but it was a dangerous world for a womanizer. His own reputation was more myth than fact, to keep women at bay. But Brad’s reputation was earned.
While he was glaring into his brandy snifter, Amanda came into the room, in jeans and a white tank top with her long black hair in a braid down her back.
She stopped at the door. “I didn’t hear you drive up.”
He studied her figure, liking its slender, elegant lines. “Imagine keeping a Lincoln just to drive around a tiny island. Extravagant, isn’t it, but visitors are impressed by it.”
“No doubt.” He liked the way she looked, young and fresh and unpretentious. His heart ached at the sight of her.
Almost involuntarily, he moved forward and touched his brandy snifter gently to her full lower lip, which was devoid of lipstick. “Taste.”
“I don’t like brandy,” she began.
“It’s an acquired taste. Acquire it.”
He smiled slowly, and she couldn’t resist him. She tasted it and made a face as it stung her tongue.
“You’re the one indulging in it. Why force me?” she asked, watching him reach out to place the snifter on the bar.
“Because.”
She smiled back at him, delighted at his playfulness, then stunned when he casually draped his arm around her. Amanda’s heart ran wild at the closeness, at the feel of all that warm strength and power so near. He looked tall and intimidating at this range. Far too handsome for comfort with the overhead light making metallic patterns in his blond hair, with his dark eyes narrow and sensuous looking into hers.
Her breath caught as his fingers stroked down the side of her neck. His voice was deep and soft in the stillness. His eyes searched hers. She could feel his breath on her parted lips. “Being near you makes me hungry.”
Amanda quivered and drew in her breath at the suggestion of such intimacy.
He cocked an eyebrow at the betraying gasp and let his gaze fall deliberately to her mouth. He dragged his thumb over it. She wanted him. He wanted her. He kept fighting the temptation to give in to it, but it got worse by the day.
He moved away from her abruptly and picked up his drink.
“I must be more exhausted than I realized,” he said dryly as he bent his head to light a cigar. “Where do you fancy eating tonight?” he asked.
Amanda was still trembling inside, but if he could shake off that kind of sensual temptation, so could she.
“I still like seafood.”
He turned, with frank admiration in his eyes. He didn’t like most women, but Amanda was unique: an independent woman with a mind of her own who could still be very, very feminine when she wanted to. “So do I. Go change and we’ll go.”
“Okay,” she added, and hesitated. She looked worried.
He sighed. “You can trust me. I don’t have plans to seduce you on the table.”
She sighed. “Pity,” she murmured, tongue-in-cheek.
She could learn to play his game if she had to, she thought to herself.
He cocked an eyebrow. “I told you. I’m not that kind of man. I want some assurances, or I’m not leaving the island with you.”
She laughed delightedly. She could manage her turbulent emotions with humor. Right now it was the only safety valve she had. “Oh, all right, then,” she laughed. His gaze slid over her without expression, although there was an unfamiliar glitter in it. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said quietly.
He made it sound like a statement of intent. “When I’m ready?”
“Are you going to dress?” he asked with polite interest. He flicked his wrist and checked the time. “Because I’ve got a long-distance call coming in three hours that I have to be back here for.”
“Oh. Sorry. I’ll hurry.”
He was, she thought as she rushed upstairs to dress, the most exasperating man she’d ever met. He wasn’t like Josh lately. He was intense and watchful. He’d wanted to kiss her, but he seemed always to catch himself in time. She wanted to push him off balance and see what happened. Something was bothering him, something deeply personal. She wished she could ask what it was.
* * *
BACK IN MONTEGO BAY, a frustrated Brad had spent a fruitless evening and morning trying to seduce one saucy little blonde waitress. He hadn’t had any success, and his own woes were playing on his mind.
The call he’d just received was from Las Vegas, from a flunky who worked for the casino owner to whom he owed a fortune. Perhaps, he thought, if he could speak to the owner himself, he could buy enough time to tell Josh how much trouble he was in. He hadn’t managed that much nerve just yet.
He picked up the phone in the suite he’d rented and dialed a stateside number, waiting impatiently for it to ring.
“Desert Paradise Casino,” came the reply eventually, in a soft, seductive voice.
“Let me speak to Marc Donner,” he said shortly.
“One moment. I’ll see if Mr. Donner is in. May I tell him who’s calling, please?”
“Tell him it’s Brad Lawson.”
There was a very long pause before the telephone was answered.
“Donner.” The voice was deep, unaccented, and without compromise. It reminded Brad vaguely of his older brother.
“I’m working on the money I owe you,” he told the man. “I’m staying on Opal Cay. One way or the other, I’ll have it in a few weeks, a month at the outside.”
“Do you think your brother will give it to you?” came the amused reply. “Josh Lawson isn’t known for a life of frivolity.”
“No, but he’s known for other reasons,” Brad said defensively.
“Sure. His money and his cutthroat approach to business. But he won’t save you if you try to duck out of paying me,” the silky voice purred. “And just between us, I don’t think he’ll try. He doesn’t like gamblers. Even ones he’s related to.”
“Blood is thicker than water.”
“Strange that you should mention blood,” Donner said carelessly. “Don’t let me down, Lawson. Don’t even think about it.”
“I told you. I’m working on it.” The man chilled Brad’s blood. Donner had been connected with a couple of murders though he’d never gone to court for any of them. Brad was worried, but he had nobody to blame except himself. He didn’t really expect Josh to bail him out of this one. No, he’d have to get himself out of this mess. “I’ll get back to you next week.”
“You’d better. I know where to find you.”
“Don’t I know it.” He sighed and put down the receiver.
He needed to get his hands on a substantial amount of cash at once. He’d tried his luck at the tables, but that hadn’t worked. He knew Donner was too intelligent to leave him bleeding in a ditch even if he did look more like a wrestler than a casino owner. He would probably show up at a board meeting, cause a scene, and blow the whistle on him. Josh would then have no choice but to pay the debt and kick Brad out. Brad winced at the thought of it. He had to find a way out—any way out.
