Читать книгу The Maverick: The Maverick / Magnate’s Make-Believe Mistress - Diana Palmer, Bronwyn Jameson - Страница 12

The restaurant Harley took Alice to was a very nice one, with uniformed waiters and chandeliers.

“Oh, Harley, this wasn’t necessary,” she said quickly, flushing. “A hamburger would have been fine!”

He smiled. “We all got a Christmas bonus from Mr. Parks,” he explained. “I don’t drink or smoke or gamble, so I can afford a few luxuries from time to time.”

“You don’t have any vices? Wow. Now I really think we should set the date.” She glanced at him under her lashes. “I don’t drink, smoke or gamble, either,” she added hopefully.

He nodded. “We’ll be known as the most prudish couple in Jacobsville.”

“Kilraven’s prudish, too,” she pointed out.

“Yes, but he won’t be living in Jacobsville much longer. He’s been reassigned, we’re hearing. After all, he’s really a fed.”

She studied the menu. “I’ll bet he could be a heart-breaker with a little practice.”

“He’s breaking Winnie Sinclair’s heart, anyway, by leaving,” Harley said, repeating the latest gossip. “She’s really got a case on him. But he thinks she’s too young.”

“He’s only in his thirties,” she pointed out.

“Yes, but Winnie’s the same age as her brother’s new wife,” he replied. “Boone Sinclair thought Keely Welsh was too young for him, too.”

“But he gave in, in the end. You know, the Ballenger brothers in Jacobsville both married younger women. They’ve been happy together, all these years.”

“Yes, they have.”

The waiter came and took their orders. Alice had a shrimp cocktail and a large salad with coffee. Harley gave her a curious look.

“Aren’t you hungry?” he asked.

She laughed. “I told you in Jacobsville, I love salads,” she confessed. “I mostly eat them at every meal.” She indicated her slender body. “I guess that’s how I keep the weight off.”

“I can eat as much as I like. I run it all off,” he replied. “Working cattle is not for the faint of heart or the out-of-condition rancher.”

She grinned. “I believe it.” She smiled at the waiter as he deposited coffee in their china cups and left. “Why did you want to be a cowboy?” she asked him.

“I loved old Western movies on satellite,” he said simply. “Gary Cooper and John Wayne and Randolph Scott. I dreamed of living on a cattle ranch and having animals around. I don’t even mind washing Bob when she gets dirty, or Puppy Dog.”

“What’s Puppy Dog’s name?” she asked.

“Puppy Dog.”

She gave him an odd look. “Who’s on first, what’s on second, I don’t know’s on third?”

“I don’t give a damn’s our shortstop?” he finished the old Abbott and Costello comedy routine. He laughed. “No, it’s not like that. His name really is Puppy Dog. We have a guy in town, Tom Walker. He had an outlandish dog named Moose that saved his daughter from a rattlesnake. Moose sired a litter of puppies. Moose is dead now, but Puppy Dog, who was one of his offspring, went to live with Lisa Monroe, before she married my boss. She called him Puppy Dog and figured it was as good a name as any. With a girl dog named Bob, my boss could hardly disagree,” he added on a chuckle.

“I see.”

“Do you like animals?”

“I love them,” she said. “But I can’t have animals in the apartment building where I live. I had cats and dogs and even a parrot when I lived at home.”

“Do you have family?”

She shook her head. “My dad was the only one left. He died a few months ago. I have uncles, but we’re not close.”

“Did you love your parents?”

She smiled warmly. “Very much. My dad was a banker. We went fishing together on weekends. My mother was a housewife who never wanted to run a corporation or be a professional. She just wanted a houseful of kids, but I was the only child she was able to have. She spoiled me rotten. Dad tried to counterbalance her.” She sipped coffee. “I miss them both. I wish I’d had brothers or sisters.” She looked at him. “Do you have siblings?”

“I had a sister,” he said quietly.

“Had?”

He nodded. He fingered his coffee cup. “She died when she was seven years old.”

She hesitated. He looked as if this was a really bad memory. “How?”

He smiled sadly. “My father backed over her on his way down the driveway, in a hurry to get to a meeting.”

She grimaced. “Poor man.”

He cocked his head and studied her. “Why do you say that?”

“We had a little girl in for autopsy, about two years ago,” she began. “Her dad was hysterical. Said the television fell over on her.” She lifted her eyes. “You know, we don’t just take someone’s word for how an accident happens, even if we believe it. We run tests to check out the explanation and make sure it’s feasible. Well, we pushed over a television of the same size as the one in the dad’s apartment. Sure enough, it did catastrophic damage to a dummy.” She shook her head. “Poor man went crazy. I mean, he really lost the will to live. His wife had died. The child was all he had left. He locked himself in the bathroom with a shotgun one night and pulled the trigger with his toe.” She made a harsh sound. “Not the sort of autopsy you want to try to sleep after.”

He was frowning.

“Sorry,” she said, wincing. “I tend to talk shop. I know it’s sickening, and here we are in a nice restaurant and all, and I did pour a glass of tea on a guy this week for doing the same thing to me…”

“I was thinking about the father,” he said, smiling to relieve her tension. “I was sixteen when it happened. I grieved for her, of course, but my life was baseball and girls and video games and hamburgers. I never considered how my father might have felt. He seemed to just get on with his life afterward. So did my mother.”

“Lots of people may seem to get over their grief. They don’t.”

He was more thoughtful than ever. “My mother had been a…lawyer,” he said after a slight hesitation that Alice didn’t notice. “She was very correct and proper. After my sister died, she changed. Cocktail parties, the right friends, the best house, the fanciest furniture…she went right off the deep end.”

“You didn’t connect it?”

He grimaced. “That was when I ran away from home and went to live with the mechanic and his wife,” he confessed. “It was my senior year of high school. I graduated soon after, went into the Army and served for two years. When I got out, I went home. But I only stayed for a couple of weeks. My parents were total strangers. I didn’t even know them anymore.”

“That’s sad. Do you have any contact with them?”

He shook his head. “I just left. They never even looked for me.”

She slid her hand impulsively over his. His fingers turned and enveloped hers. His light blue eyes searched her darker ones curiously. “I never thought of crime scene investigators as having feelings,” he said. “I thought you had to be pretty cold-blooded to do that sort of thing.”

She smiled. “I’m the last hope of the doomed,” she said. “The conscience of the murdered. The flickering candle of the soul of the deceased. I do my job so that murderers don’t flourish, so that killers don’t escape justice. I think of my job as a holy grail,” she said solemnly. “I hide my feelings. But I still have them. It hurts to see a life extinguished. Any life. But especially a child’s.”

His eyes began to twinkle with affection. “Alice, you’re one of a kind.”

“Oh, I do hope so,” she said after a minute. “Because if there was another one of me, I might lose my job. Not many people would give twenty-four hours a day to the work.” She hesitated and grinned. “Well, not all the time, obviously. Just occasionally, I get taken out by handsome, dashing men.”

He laughed. “Thanks.”

“Actually I mean it. I’m not shrewd enough to lie well.”

The waiter came and poured more coffee and took their orders for dessert. When they were eating it, Alice frowned thoughtfully.

“It bothers me.”

“What does?” he asked.

“The car. Why would a man steal a car from an upstanding, religious woman and then get killed?”

“He didn’t know he was going to get killed.”

She forked a piece of cheesecake and looked at it. “What if he had a criminal record? What if he got involved with her and wanted to change, to start over? What if he had something on his conscience and he wanted to spill the beans?” She looked up. “And somebody involved knew it and had to stop him?”

“That’s a lot of if’s,” he pointed out.

She nodded. “Yes, it is. We still don’t know who the car was driven by, and the woman’s story that it was stolen is just a little thin.” She put the fork down. “I want to talk to her. But I don’t know how to go about it. She works for a dangerous politician, I’m told. The feds have backed off. I won’t do myself any favors if I charge in and start interrogating the senator’s employee.”

He studied her. “Let me see if I can find a way. I used to know my way around political circles. Maybe I can help.”

She laughed. “You know a U.S. senator?” she teased.

He pursed his lips. “Maybe I know somebody who’s related to one,” he corrected.

“It would really help me a lot, if I could get to her before the feds do. I think she might tell me more than she’d tell a no-nonsense man.”

“Give me until tomorrow. I’ll think of something.”

She smiled. “You’re a doll.”

He chuckled. “So are you.”

She flushed. “Thanks.”

They exchanged a long, soulful glance, only interrupted by the arrival of the waiter to ask if they wanted anything else and present the check. Alice’s heart was doing double-time on the way out of the restaurant.

Harley walked her to the door of the motel. “I had a good time,” he told her. “The best I’ve had in years.”

She looked up, smiling. “Me, too. I turn off most men. The job, you know. I do work with people who aren’t breathing.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

She felt the same tension that was visible in his tall, muscular body. He moved a step closer. She met him halfway.

He bent and drew his mouth softly over hers. When she didn’t object, his arms went around her and pulled her close. He smiled as he increased the gentle pressure of his lips and felt hers tremble just a little before they relaxed and answered the pressure.

His body was already taut with desire, but it was too soon for a heated interlude. He didn’t want to rush her. She was the most fascinating woman he’d ever known. He had to go slow.

He drew back after a minute and his hands tightened on her arms. “Suppose we take in another movie next week?” he asked.

She brightened. “A whole movie?”

He laughed softly. “At least.”

“I’d like that.”

“We’ll try another restaurant. Just to sample the ones that are available until we find one we approve of,” he teased.

“What a lovely idea! We can write reviews and put them online, too.”

He pursed his lips. “What an entertaining thought.”

“Nice reviews,” she said, divining his mischievous thoughts.

“Spoilsport.”

He winked at her, and she blushed.

“Don’t forget,” she said. “About finding me a way to interview that woman, okay?”

“Okay,” he said. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

She stood, sighing, as he walked back to his truck. But when he got inside and started it, he didn’t drive away. She realized belatedly that he was waiting until she went inside and locked the door. She laughed and waved. She liked that streak of protectiveness in him. It might not be modern, but it certainly made her feel cherished. She slept like a charm.

The next morning, he called her on his cell phone before she left the motel. “I’ve got us invited to a cocktail party tonight,” he told her. “A fundraiser for the senator.”

“Us? But we can’t contribute to that sort of thing! Can we?” she added.

“We don’t have to. We’re representing a contributor who’s out of the country,” he added with a chuckle. “Do you have a nice cocktail dress?”

“I do, but it’s in San Antonio, in my apartment.”

“No worries. You can go up and get it and I’ll pick you up there at six.”

“Fantastic! I’ll wear something nice and I won’t burp the theme songs to any television shows,” she promised.

“Oh, that’s good to know,” he teased. “Got to get back to work. I told Mr. Parks I had to go to San Antonio this afternoon, so he’s giving me a half day off. I didn’t tell him why I needed the vacation time, but I think he suspects something.”

“Don’t mention this to anybody else, okay?” she asked. “If Jon Blackhawk or Kilraven find out, my goose will be cooked.”

“I won’t tell a soul.”

“See you later. I owe you one, Harley.”

“Yes,” he drawled softly. “You do, don’t you? I’ll phone you later and get directions to your apartment.”

“Okay.”

She laughed and hung up.

The senator lived in a mansion. It was two stories high, with columns, and it had a front porch bigger than Alice’s whole apartment. Lights burned in every room, and in the gloomy, rainy night, it looked welcoming and beautiful.

Luxury sedans were parked up and down the driveway. Harley’s pickup truck wasn’t in the same class, but he didn’t seem to feel intimidated. He parked on the street and helped Alice out of the truck. He was wearing evening clothes, with a black bow tie and highly polished black wingtip shoes. He looked elegant. Alice was wearing a simple black cocktail dress with her best winter coat, the one she wore to work, a black one with a fur collar. She carried her best black evening bag and she wore black pumps that she’d polished, hoping to cover the scuff marks. On her salary, although it was a good one, she could hardly afford haute couture.

They were met at the door by a butler in uniform. Harley handed him an invitation and the man hesitated and did a double take, but he didn’t say anything.

Once they were inside, Alice looked worriedly at Harley.

“It’s okay,” he assured her, smiling as he cradled her hand in his protectively. “No problem.”

“Gosh,” she said, awestruck as she looked around her at the company she was in. “There’s a movie star over there,” she said under her breath. “I recognize at least two models and a Country-Western singing star, and there’s the guy who won the golf tournament…!”

“They’re just people, Alice,” he said gently.

She gaped at him. “Just people? You’re joking, right?” She turned too fast and bumped into somebody. She looked up to apologize and her eyes almost popped. “S-sorry,” she stammered.

A movie star with a martial arts background grinned at her. “No problem. It’s easy to get knocked down in here. What a crowd, huh?”

“Y-yes,” she agreed, nodding.

He laughed, smiled at Harley, and drew his date, a gorgeous blonde, along with him toward the buffet table.

Harley curled his fingers into Alice’s. “Rube,” he teased softly. “You’re starstruck.”

“I am, I am,” she agreed at once. “I’ve never been in such a place in my life. I don’t hang out with the upper echelons of society in my job. You seem very much at home,” she added, “for a man who spends his time with horses and cattle.”

“Not a bad analogy, actually,” he said under his breath. “Wouldn’t a cattle prod come in handy around here, though?”

“Harley!” She laughed.

“Just kidding.” He was looking around the room. After a minute, he spotted someone. “Let’s go ask that woman if they know your employee.”

“Okay.”

“What’s her name?” he whispered.

She dug for it. “Dolores.”

He slid his arm around her shoulders and led her forward. She felt the warmth of his jacketed arm around her with real pleasure. She felt chilled at this party, with all this elegance. Her father had been a banker, and he hadn’t been poor, but this was beyond the dreams of most people. Crystal chandeliers, Persian carpets, original oil paintings—was that a Renoir?!

“Hi,” Harley said to one of the women pouring more punch into the Waterford crystal bowl. “Does Dolores still work here?”

The woman stared at him for a minute, but without recognition. “Dolores? Yes. She’s in the kitchen, making canapés. You look familiar. Do I know you?”

“I’ve got that kind of face,” he said easily, smiling. “My wife and I know Dolores, we belong to her church. I promised the minister we’d give her a message from him if we came tonight,” he added.

“One of that church crowd,” the woman groaned, rolling her eyes. “Honestly, it’s all she talks about, like there’s nothing else in the world but church.”

“Religion dies, so does civilization,” Alice said quietly. She remembered that from her Western Civilization course in college.

“Whatever,” the woman replied, bored.

“In the kitchen, huh? Thanks,” Harley told the woman.

“Don’t get her fired,” came the quick reply. “She’s a pain, sometimes, but she works hard enough doing dishes. If the senator or his wife see you keeping her from her job, he’ll fire her.”

“We won’t do that,” Harley promised. His lips made a thin line as he led Alice away.

“Surely the senator wouldn’t fire her just for talking to us?” Alice wondered aloud.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Harley said. “We’ll have to be circumspect.”

Alice followed his lead. She wondered why he was so irritated. Perhaps the woman’s remark offended his sense of justice.

The kitchen was crowded. It didn’t occur to Alice to ask how Harley knew his way there. Women were bent over tables, preparing platters, sorting food, making canapés. Two women were at the huge double sink, washing dishes.

“Don’t they have a dishwasher?” Alice wondered as they entered the room.